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.

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.

DPP11

THE DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK ELEVEN

Here are the poems to vote for in week eleven of my Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, June 4, to Sunday, June 10):

71. There Is A Bird We Cannot See, by Molly Lou Freeman (only the first poem)
72. Paradise, by Arthur Smith
73. Hey You, by Adrian Blevins
74. 2:09 a.m. IM , by Janet Holmes
75. Bright World, by Carl Phillips
76. The Dark-Light of Spring, by Eric Leigh
77. After Persephone, by Tracy K. Smith

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). In any case, I will not post the comments until after the final vote is in (secret ballot). You may vote by the title, the author's name, or the number of the poem in the list above. Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem (although it is always interesting to see people's lists).

Please VOTE BY THURSDAY, JUNE 14! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results, which might only be on June 15 or 16.

If you want to receive an email announcing the results, send me your email address with your vote (if you have a public blogger profile, I can usually find it).

Abstaining: If you read the poems but decide that there is no poem that you want to vote for, I would be interested to know that you decided to abstain.

Week 10 results are here. A summary of the results of the first nine weeks is at the end of the week 9 results.

Daily Poem Project, Week 6

This week's vote for the Daily Poem Project took place this morning (Tuesday, May 16). The poems in question were those on Poetry Daily from Tuesday, May 9, to Monday, May 15.

In another close vote, the winner was Ioanna Carlsen's "Forgiveness," with five votes. Janet Sylvester's "Barometric" received four votes, while three poems received three votes each: Victoria Chang's "Proof," Kathryn Starbuck's "Thinking of John Clare," and Stephen Yenser's "Tidepools: La Jolla."

This week, then, the two most "prestigious" poets of the week received the least votes: Carl Phillips with two for his "Riding Westward" and Frank Bidart with no votes at all for his "Tu Fu Watches the Spring Festival Across Serpentine Lake." This contradicted an effect that I had noticed in last year's Daily Poem Project, in which poets with good reputations tended to get votes (only a poem by Gerald Stern got shut out among poems by poets whose reputations I thought relatively "substantial" in my own subjective way).

Still, I was quite surprised by the winner, as I found Carlsen's poem dry and abstract; even though I read it twice, I did not consider it a serious contender at all. It has some humor, but that's all I found in it. Here's part III of the poem:

THE TRICK

You would
if you could,
but what if you can't —

the trick is to believe
your own story,

accident is needed for some kinds of change.

I like that "[y]ou would / if you could, / but what if you can't," but surely there is more to do with this dissection of a cliché than Carlsen does here.

The second-place poem, Sylvester's "Barometric," was on my short list of two poems, but I gave my vote to Yenser's "Tidepools: La Jolla"—perhaps I am just a sucker for rhymed poems about daughters, especially one that contains a lovely rhyme on the name of my favorite 19th-century American poet:

Quick, mystic — this is the world's profoundest mirror.
The girl in any of us leans a little nearer.

You lean to it this evening, Helen Emily,
Holding my hand, to glimpse us both, though dreamily ...

Week 5
Week 4
Week 3
Week 2
Week 1 (with explanation of project)