The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week Ten Call for Votes

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK TEN

Here are the poems to vote for in the tenth week of the fifth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, April 20, to Sunday, April 26):

April 26: Andrew Hudgins, The Cow (vote only on the first poem)
April 25: Robert Dana, After the Storm
April 24: Ishai Barnoy, Twelve Movies
April 23: T. Zachary Cotler, Beautiful without Money
April 22: Ron Slate, Under the Pergola (vote only on the first poem)
April 21: Jim Powell, An Oracle Madrone (vote only on the first poem)
April 20: Arda Collins, Low

HOW TO VOTE: You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog. If you want to vote by commenting but do not want your vote to appear on the blog, you just have to say so in your comment (I moderate all comments on my blog). I will post comments as they come in. (If you want to vote anonymously on the blog, please sign your vote with some sort of pseudonym, so that I can keep track of the various anonymous voters more clearly.)

Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem (although it is always interesting to see people's lists).

Please VOTE BY SUNDAY, MAY 3! (Not Friday because I am late posting this call.)

But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results.

The winner of week one was Sherod Santos, Film Noir.
The winner of week two was Edward Field, Cataract op.
The winner of week three was David Bottoms, A Chat with My Father.
The winner of week four was David Schloss, The Myth.
The co-winners of week five were Jason Gray, Letter to the Unconverted, and David Huerta, Before Saying Any of the Great Words (tr. Mark Schafer).
The winner of week six was Stacey Lynn Brown, Cradle Song II.
The winner of week seven was Jack Gilbert, Not Easily.
The winner of week eight was Hester Knibbe, Lava and Sand (tr. Jacquelyn Pope).
A winner for week nine will be announced on Friday, May 1.

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week 8 results

After much delay due to computer problems (old one died, new one took a while to get fully up and running), here we go:

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK EIGHT RESULTS

The winner of the eighth week of my fifth Daily Poem Project is Hester Knibbe, Lava and Sand (tr. Jacquelyn Pope), which received 6 votes out of 25 cast.

As the small number of total votes for Knibbe's poem suggests, this vote was extremely close: Carl Phillips, The Moonflowers, received five votes, and two others received four: Jody Gladding, Softwoods, and Charles Wright, In Praise of What Is Missing.

My thanks to everyone who voted, and my apologies for the delay in the results. The call for votes for week nine is already up, and I'll be posting the call for votes for week ten shortly.

The winner of week one was Sherod Santos, Film Noir.
The winner of week two was Edward Field, Cataract op.
The winner of week three was David Bottoms, A Chat with My Father.
The winner of week four was David Schloss, The Myth.
The co-winners of week five were Jason Gray, Letter to the Unconverted, and David Huerta, Before Saying Any of the Great Words (tr. Mark Schafer).
The winner of week six was Stacey Lynn Brown, Cradle Song II.
The winner of week seven was Jack Gilbert, Not Easily.

Roddy Lumsden and George Szirtes in Basel, May 11

[Click on the image to see the full-size poster.]

ESP and Bergli Books present:
Roddy Lumsden and George Szirtes
A free poetry reading
6:30 p.m., Monday, May 11,Bergli Books, Rümelinsplatz 19, Basel
Sponsored by Bergli Books and the English Seminar at the University of Basel

Eloquent Thinking about Torture

Here are some elqouent things I just read about torture:

My friend Don Brown, in response to his reading of J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year.

Two posts (first and second) by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo.

Mark Danner's second article in the New York Review of Books. (Here's the first one.)

As for me, my line remains the same: put the guys on trial (guys = people you arrest for terrorist crimes AND the people who ordered that they be tortured).

[Still waiting to get my new computer fully operational. Once I do, I'll get the Daily Poem Project back up to date!]

"We do not fucking torture!"

Shepard Smith (about whom, being an expat, I know nothing) sums it all up for me here:

"We are America! I don't give a rat's ass if it helps. We are AMERICA! We do not fucking torture!!"

If you are an American and you want to know what your government was doing in your name, read Michael Danner in the New York Review, among other things. It doesn't get more explicit than this.

What absolutely enrages me is that the Bush administration took people who should have been tried on dozens of criminal charges and, by torturing them, made it impossible for them to be given proper trials. And then they turn around and say, "See, we need military tribunals to try these guys!" That's so circular it makes my head spin.

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week Nine Call for Votes

[Update, April 29: I have extended the deadline for votes for week 9 until May 1.]

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK NINE

Here are the poems to vote for in the ninth week of the fifth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, April 13, to Sunday, April 19):

April 19: Mary Baron, Summer mornings
April 18: Devin Johnston, Expecting
April 17: Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Garden
April 16: R. T. Smith, Storm Warning
April 15: Louis Simpson, Ishi (vote only on the first poem)
April 14: Rita Dove, Prologue of the Rambling Sort (vote only on the first poem)
April 13: Lucia Perillo, A Pedantry (vote only on the first poem)

HOW TO VOTE: You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog. If you want to vote by commenting but do not want your vote to appear on the blog, you just have to say so in your comment (I moderate all comments on my blog). I will post comments as they come in. (If you want to vote anonymously on the blog, please sign your vote with some sort of pseudonym, so that I can keep track of the various anonymous voters more clearly.)

Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem (although it is always interesting to see people's lists).

Please VOTE BY FRIDAY, APRIL 24! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results. (April 26 at the latest.)

The winner of week one was Sherod Santos, Film Noir.
The winner of week two was Edward Field, Cataract op.
The winner of week three was David Bottoms, A Chat with My Father.
The winner of week four was David Schloss, The Myth.
The co-winners of week five were Jason Gray, Letter to the Unconverted, and David Huerta, Before Saying Any of the Great Words (tr. Mark Schafer).
The winner of week six was Stacey Lynn Brown, Cradle Song II.
The winner of week seven was Jack Gilbert, Not Easily.
No winner has yet been announced for week eight (due to my problems with my home computer).

DPP week 8 results delayed

On Friday evening, I went to my computer to finalize the results of week eight of the Fifth Daily Poem Project, and my computer crashed. My tally of votes for the week (both those on the blog and those by email) has thus become inaccessible. My computer is going to be repaired soon (or I am going to have replace it), so I cannot post the results of week eight of the vote until such time as I have access to that tally again!

I will start the week 9 vote, though, as I can administer it from webmail in my office (where I am typing this post).

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week Eight Call for Votes

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK EIGHT

Here are the poems to vote for in the eighth week of the fifth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, April 6, to Sunday, April 12):

April 12: Jody Gladding, Softwoods
April 11: Robert Polito, Shooting Star
April 10: Caroline Knox, Flemish
April 9: John Updike, Evening Concert, Sainte-Chapelle
April 8: Carl Phillips, The Moonflowers
April 7: Hester Knibbe, Lava and Sand (tr. Jacquelyn Pope)
April 6: Charles Wright, In Praise of What Is Missing (vote only on the first poem)

HOW TO VOTE: You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog. If you want to vote by commenting but do not want your vote to appear on the blog, you just have to say so in your comment (I moderate all comments on my blog). I will post comments as they come in.

Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem (although it is always interesting to see people's lists).

Please VOTE BY FRIDAY, APRIL 17! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results. (April 19 at the latest.)

The winner of week one was Sherod Santos, Film Noir.
The winner of week two was Edward Field, Cataract op.
The winner of week three was David Bottoms, A Chat with My Father.
The winner of week four was David Schloss, The Myth.
The co-winners of week five were Jason Gray, Letter to the Unconverted, and David Huerta, Before Saying Any of the Great Words (tr. Mark Schafer).
The winner of week six was Stacey Lynn Brown, Cradle Song II.
The winner of week seven was Jack Gilbert, Not Easily.

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week 7 Results

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK SEVEN RESULTS

The winner of the seventh week of my fifth Daily Poem Project is Jack Gilbert, Not Easily, which received 8 votes out of 26 cast.

Three poems received 20 of those 26 votes: Ghassan Zaqtan, A Picture of the House at Beit Jala (tr. Fady Joudah), and Edward Nobles, Blue Fire, each received six votes. The other six votes were spread out among the other four poems.

My thanks to everyone who voted, and my special thanks to those of you who posted the call for votes on your blogs. I'll be posting the call for votes for week eight shortly.

The winner of week one was Sherod Santos, Film Noir.
The winner of week two was Edward Field, Cataract op.
The winner of week three was David Bottoms, A Chat with My Father.
The winner of week four was David Schloss, The Myth.
The co-winners of week five were Jason Gray, Letter to the Unconverted, and David Huerta, Before Saying Any of the Great Words (tr. Mark Schafer).
The winner of week six was Stacey Lynn Brown, Cradle Song II.

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week Seven Call for Votes

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK SEVEN

Here are the poems to vote for in the seventh week of the fifth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, March 30, to Sunday, April 5):

April 5: David R. Slavitt, Fog (vote only on the first poem)
April 4: Jack Gilbert, Not Easily
April 3: Susan Wheeler, Air Map
April 2: Ghassan Zaqtan, A Picture of the House at Beit Jala (tr. Fady Joudah)
April 1: Edward Nobles, Blue Fire
March 31: Wisława Szymborska, A Moment (tr. Joanna Trzeciak)
March 30: Hannah Louise Poston, Words Sonnet

HOW TO VOTE: You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog. If you want to vote by commenting but do not want your vote to appear on the blog, you just have to say so in your comment (I moderate all comments on my blog). I will post comments as they come in.

Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem (although it is always interesting to see people's lists).

As I will be out of town for Easter, I will not post the results of the week-seven vote until Monday, April 13. So you may vote until then. I will post the results and the call for votes for week 8 by that evening. As usual, I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results. (April 13 at the latest.)

The winner of week one was Sherod Santos, Film Noir.
The winner of week two was Edward Field, Cataract op.
The winner of week three was David Bottoms, A Chat with My Father.
The winner of week four was David Schloss, The Myth.
The co-winners of week five were Jason Gray, Letter to the Unconverted, and David Huerta, Before Saying Any of the Great Words (tr. Mark Schafer).
The winner of week six was Stacey Lynn Brown, Cradle Song II.

The Daily Poem Project, Week Six Results

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK SIX RESULTS

The winner of the sixth week of my fifth Daily Poem Project is Stacey Lynn Brown, Cradle Song II, which received 12 votes out of 31 cast.

Jesse Lee Kercheval's Italy, October came in second with 7 votes, and the other five poems all received one to four votes.

My thanks to everyone who voted, and my special thanks to those of you who posted the call for votes on your blogs. I'll be posting the call for votes for week seven on Sunday morning, April 5.

The winner of week one was Sherod Santos, Film Noir.
The winner of week two was Edward Field, Cataract op.
The winner of week three was David Bottoms, A Chat with My Father.
The winner of week four was David Schloss, The Myth.
The co-winners of week five were Jason Gray, Letter to the Unconverted, and David Huerta, Before Saying Any of the Great Words (tr. Mark Schafer).

Seventh Street

Kit Robinson's "Seventh Street" (from The Messianic Trees) begins with description:

Over and above
old captains' houses
now fallen into
funk, the train

passes. Further, trucks
docked to load
manifest ramps, then
darkness of tunnel

and the passengers reflect
on each other.
Light nicks the
surface of the

globe, even under
water.

On a train, someone describes what he sees (houses, trucks, a tunnel, passengers), then takes a first interpretive step in the third sentence, though still in a very descriptive mode.

But the diction changes in the next sentence, from a description to the word "description":

.... This lazy
description of the
way things are

tells more than
it knows.

A "lazy" description might contrast with a "hard-working" or "serious" description, in which case the descriptive mode of the first 13 1/2 lines of the poem is being criticized. But "lazy" can also mean "relaxed," the opposite of "tense" or "stressed out," in which case the previous mode is not being criticized.

The phrase "tells more than / it knows" is also ambiguous: it might mean the description is more a matter of telling than of knowing (more mimesis than epistemology?). If this is combined with the critical reading of "lazy," then the poem would be arguing against that descriptive mode because description does not generate knowledge.

But "tells more than / it knows" might mean something like "says more than it realizes it is saying," in which case the "lazy description" is being given a positive value because of its suggestiveness.

Further, I also hear a play on "tells more than / it [shows]" here. In many discussions of poetry, "description of the / way things are" is privileged because it shows rather than tells, so this moment in "Seventh Street" could be understood as a counterargument: this "showing" mode "tells" as much as it shows; it "tells more than / it knows [it does]" not in the sense of being suggestive but in the sense of "telling" more than it is intended to, and more than it is aware of in its emphasis on "showing."

Now, the shift in the poem's diction (from "concrete" to "abstract") does suggest, at least at first, that the poem privileges its critique of "lazy / description" and of the mode of "show, don't tell." If that was all it did (without a possible counter-reading), it would be a matter of "lazy abstraction" arguing with "lazy description," and it would hardly be worth talking about at this length.

However, the next sentence begins to make clear that things are not that simple:

.... Say
something about conditions
and you have

that to look
at too.

The diction remains "abstract" while also becoming self-referential: "something about conditions" is what the previous sentence brought into the poem. Such abstraction, this sentence concludes, is also something "to look at," just as the scene described earlier was something to look at. The poem makes "you" "look at" these modes and see them not as a hierarchy but as an interwoven pair that poems have to work with. "Telling" is not being privileged over "showing," in a critique of those who would privilege "showing" over "telling"; rather, the inevitable interaction of the two modes is being acted out, through both modes at the same time.

This interaction becomes completely clear in the poem's final sentence:

.... Your
station stop is
this writing's end.

The "lazy / description" and the mode of saying "something about conditions" have been kept in separate sentences until now (hence my emphasis on sentences), but they meet here in the conclusion, as the train ride stops and the poem ends. The two modes are not opposed; they interact. And they are, the poem argues, both necessary to the making of a poem, and to its interpretation.

(I am enormously grateful to Ron Silliman for his review of The Messianic Trees a few weeks ago, which inspired me to buy Robinson's book.)

[Cross-posted at The Plumbline School.]

Beyond Here Lies Nothin'

There's a free download of "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'" from Bob Dylan's forthcoming CD Together Through Life available at bobdylan.com—today only (Monday, March 30). Check it out: sounds like the recent stuff, but with horns!

Mediocre

A post at Language Log about "private meanings": how individuals may have their own understandings of the meanings of particular words. In my case, the one I can think of offhand is "mediocre," which I long believed to mean "of the lowest possible quality," because of how my father uses the word, with such contempt for something that is "of moderate or low quality."

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week 6 call for votes

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK SIX

Here are the poems to vote for in the sixth week of the fifth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, March 23, to Sunday, March 29):

March 29: Stacey Lynn Brown, Cradle Song II (Vote only on the first poem)
March 28: Barbara Maloutas, Saline
March 27: Debra Nystrom, Outer Banks
March 26: Lisa Martin-DeMoor, Durum wheat
March 25: Jesse Lee Kercheval, Italy, October
March 24: Lori Wilson, What Blows Ahead
March 23: Peter Campion, Sparrow

HOW TO VOTE: You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog. If you want to vote by commenting but do not want your vote to appear on the blog, you just have to say so in your comment (I moderate all comments on my blog). I will post comments as they come in.

Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem (although it is always interesting to see people's lists).

Please VOTE BY FRIDAY, APRIL 3! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results. (April 5 at the latest.)

The winner of week one was Sherod Santos, Film Noir.
The winner of week two was Edward Field, Cataract op.
The winner of week three was David Bottoms, A Chat with My Father.
The winner of week four was David Schloss, The Myth.
The co-winners of week five were Jason Gray, Letter to the Unconverted, and David Huerta, Before Saying Any of the Great Words (tr. Mark Schafer).

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week Five Results

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK FIVE RESULTS

The fifth week of my fifth Daily Poem Project has ended in a tie: Jason Gray, Letter to the Unconverted, and David Huerta, Before Saying Any of the Great Words (tr. Mark Schafer), each received 10 votes out of 34 cast.

I could have broken the tie with my vote (which I'd kept in my pocket just for such an eventuality), but I really wanted to vote for the third-place poem, Deborah Warren's Dream with Flowers and Bowl of Fruit, so I did. Warren's poem received five votes, and the other four poems all had two or three votes.

My thanks to everyone who voted, and my special thanks to those of you who posted the call for votes on your blogs. I'll be posting the call for votes for week five on Sunday morning, March 29.

The winner of week one was Sherod Santos, Film Noir.
The winner of week two was Edward Field, Cataract op.
The winner of week three was David Bottoms, A Chat with My Father.
The winner of week four was David Schloss, The Myth.

Waumandee

I can be somewhat finicky about poems that depend on some form of the conceit "Suddenly, I saw ..." (though I'm sure I've used the conceit myself—it is quite seductive, after all). The workshopper in me often just crosses stuff like that out mentally and goes on!

Yet I liked this variant form of the conceit in the first stanza of Mark Wunderlich's "Waumandee" in the March 2009 issue of Poetry:

A man with binoculars
fixed a shape in the field
and we stopped and saw

What the "I suddenly saw" conceit needs is something more to make it more than just a generative moment that need not be present in the final version of a poem. Wunderlich's "more" is that what "we saw" was someone else seeing something, which creates a triangle of gazes: we see him seeing something, so then we see the thing he sees (in this case, an "albino buck").

But maybe it's just that I'm a sucker for geometry.

Jack Gilbert and Leonard Cohen

Two good poems in the March 2, 2009, issue of The New Yorker. Jack Gilbert's "Waiting and Finding" waits patiently in a childhood memory and finds out what to make of it. How what one does becomes what one is.

Then there's Leonard Cohen's "A Street." This poem is proof that a lyric with a chorus can make a beautiful poem—and it also supports my claim that lyrics have little or no enjambment. There is not a single line break in Cohen's poem/lyric where a syntactical unit is split across two lines. (If you want to argue about the expression "syntactical unit," I can analyze every single line break to show exactly what I mean.)

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week Five

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK FIVE

Here are the poems to vote for in the fifth week of the fifth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, March 16, to Sunday, March 22):

March 22: Jason Gray, Letter to the Unconverted
March 21: Paul Otremba, Haute Cuisine
March 20: Peter Porter, The Little Fish Have Gone
March 19: David Huerta, Before Saying Any of the Great Words (tr. Mark Schafer)
March 18: H. L. Hix, [If the Lena River courses north...]
March 17: Robert VanderMolen, Sand
March 16: Deborah Warren, Dream with Flowers and Bowl of Fruit

HOW TO VOTE: You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog. If you want to vote by commenting but do not want your vote to appear on the blog, you just have to say so in your comment (I moderate all comments on my blog). I will post comments as they come in.

Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem (although it is always interesting to see people's lists).

Please VOTE BY FRIDAY, MARCH 27! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results. (March 29 at the latest.)

The winner of week one was Sherod Santos, Film Noir.
The winner of week two was Edward Field, Cataract op.
The winner of week three was David Bottoms, A Chat with My Father.
The winner of week four was David Schloss, The Myth.

Houses of Games (Con men, forgers, artists)

I was delighted when I came across a reference to one of my favorite movies in James Surowiecki's column on Bernard Madoff in the January 12, 2009, issue of The New Yorker:

In David Mamet’s movie “House of Games,” the grifter played by Joe Mantegna explains to a former mark, “It’s called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine.”

This description of the scene is not quite right, but that's not a problem. I've always liked the overtones of "House of Games" that have to do with the relationship between artists and audiences: there's a great deal of trust and confidence involved on both sides.

Compare Peter Schjeldahl on art forgers (specifically, on the Dutch forger Han van Meegeren; the article is a review of two biographies of the forger) in The New Yorker from October 27, 2008 (this is the last paragraph; it is on page four of the on-line version):

Art forgery is among the least despised of crimes, except by its victims—the identity of those victims being more than exculpatory, for many people. Art is unique among universally esteemed creative fields in its aloofness from a public audience. Its economic base is a club of the wealthy, who share power to impose or repress value with professional and academic élites. Lopez’s muckraking of van Meegeren scants a fact that Dolnick merrily exploits: the forger gratifies class resentment precisely because he is a pariah. Unlike the subversive gestures of a Marcel Duchamp, say, his outrages will not become educational boilerplate in museums and universities. They are impeccably destructive, tarring not only pretensions to taste but the credibility of taste in general. The spectre of forgery chills the receptiveness—the will to believe—without which the experience of art cannot occur. Faith in authorship matters. We read the qualities of a work as the forthright decisions of a particular mind, wanting to let it commandeer our own minds, and we are disappointed when it doesn’t. If we are disappointed enough, when the named artist is familiar, we get suspicious. But we can never be certain in every case that someone—a veiled mind—isn’t playing us for suckers. Art lovers are people who brave that possible chagrin.