The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Final Round Results

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, FINAL ROUND RESULTS

The winner of the final round of my sixth Daily Poem Project is Winter's Tale, by Maxine Kumin, which received 9 votes out of 44 cast.

Adjectives of Order, by Alexandra Teague, came in second with 8 votes, while Trick, by Sam Willetts, and Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa, tied for third with 6 votes each. All 12 poems received at least one vote.

I would like to thank everyone who participated, especially those of you who took the time to vote almost every week!

The winners of the first five Daily Poem Projects:

1DPP: "The Shout," by Simon Armitage
2DPP: "Fragment," by A. E. Stallings.
3DPP: "Inside the Maze (II, III, and IV)", by Hadara Bar-Nadav (blog vote)
3DPP: "Friends", by Laure-Anne Bosselaar (class vote)
4DPP: "Come to Me, His Blood," by Martha Rhodes
5DPP: "Cataract op," by Edward Field

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Final Round call for votes

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, FINAL ROUND

Here are the poems to vote for in the final round of the sixth Daily Poem Project. They are the winners of the twelve rounds from Monday, March 1, to Sunday, May 23 (each week's poems being those that appeared on Poetry Daily that week).

1. Trick, by Sam Willetts.
2. Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa.
3. To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage, by Eduardo C. Corral.
4. In the Men's Room at the Café Provence, by F. D. Reeve.
5. The Bus Driver, by Hédi Kaddour, tr. Marilyn Hacker.
6. Winter's Tale, by Maxine Kumin.
7. H1N1, by Robyn Schiff.
8. Montana Sky, by Don Welch.
9. Arcadian, by Dan Beachy-Quick.
10. War Stories, by Charles Bernstein.
11. With God in the Morning, by Aliki Barnstone.
12. Adjectives of Order, by Alexandra Teague

HOW TO VOTE: You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog (or as a comment to my Facebook link to this call for votes). 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). If you want to vote anonymously, that's okay, but please choose some sort of pseudonym so I can keep track of different votes by anonymous voters. 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 SATURDAY, JUNE 5! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results.

Feel free to pass on this call for votes to anyone who might be interested!

Trick

Interpreting poems is not a matter of having a set of pre-existing tools that you can choose among to find the right one. Instead, the poems themselves offer you tools for their interpretation, or, in a sense, you have to fashion your own interpretive tools from the raw materials that the poem itself offers you. But how can you fashion such a tool?

The "trick" is to find something in the poem that can be used to interpret other parts of the poem, as in the opening lines of Sam Willetts's "Trick":

The unexceptional mystery takes place:
around eleven, love turns to matter, Dad

dead.

The mystery of a moment of transformation (love to matter, Dad to dead) can then be a tool to interpret the poem further; here, as "Spring" is seen "breaking promises," or in the "opacity" of the alchemy with which the poem ends:

.... Dad

dead; ends of the opaque trick
that turns our gold to lead

"Dad" to "dead": an additional letter changes a vowel sound, and everything is changed. Poetry can act out this transformation, these "unexpected mysteries," but it cannot do anything about them, even when its own "opaque tricks" are made less mysterious by being made into tools.

Here's the whole poem, from Poetry Daily:

TRICK

The unexceptional mystery takes place:
around eleven, love turns to matter, Dad

dead. The ward grows and shrinks, early Spring
breaking promises through the glass.

Dad’s untoothed mouth gawps, and its last
O holds one darkness; dark of a worked-out

abandoned mine. His absence is brute
absurdity, his hand soft as vellum.

His new state exposes the stark child of him,
and un-sons me. No answers now to a son’s

questions, about this, about the sense,
for all his slightness, of a long life’s mass

coming to rest, a settling that churns up
grief in a rounding cloud. Dad

dead; ends of the opaque trick
that turns our gold to lead

Sam Willetts
Granta, Summer 2009

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week One Results

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK ONE RESULTS

The winner of the first week of my sixth Daily Poem Project is "Trick," by Sam Willetts, which received 10 votes out of 32 cast.

In second place was "Landscape with Ignatz," by Monica Youn, with six votes, while "More Precisely," by Ander Monson, came in third with five votes. Every poem received at least two votes.

We discussed Youn's poem for a half an hour or so in my Intensive Composition class on Thursday, and I began to see a lot more in it than I had at first. I suspect that it is probably even more convincing in the context of Youn's book (which is called Ignatz).

My thanks to everyone who voted. I'll be posting the call for votes for week two on Sunday morning.

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week One

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK ONE

The Daily Poem Project (or "Poetry Idol," as C. Dale Young likes to call it) involves reading the poem on Poetry Daily every day for a week, then voting for the poem you like best. We do this for twelve weeks, and at the end there is a final vote among the twelve winners to determine an overall winner. (For a list of previous winners, see below.)

I'm running the project with two classes this term, and I will tally all the votes from the classes and the blog to determine the winner.

So here are the poems to vote for in week one, the first week of the sixth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, March 1, to Sunday, March 7):

March 1: The Olive Stump, by Sherod Santos (vote only on the first poem)
March 2: Landscape with Ignatz, by Monica Youn (vote only on the first poem)
March 3: Haunt, by Maureen N. McLane
March 4: Trick, by Sam Willetts
March 5: Resort, by Kate Potts
March 6: The School of the Arts, by Adrian Blevins
March 7: More Precisely, by Ander Monson

The project will run for twelve weeks, and then the twelve weekly winners will be put together for a final vote.

HOW TO VOTE: You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog (or as a comment to my Facebook link to this call for votes). 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). If you want to vote anonymously, that's okay, but please choose some sort of pseudonym so I can keep track of different votes by anonymous voters. 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 12! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results. (March 14 at the latest.)

Feel free to pass on this call for votes to anyone who might be interested!

The winners of the previous projects:

1DPP: "The Shout," by Simon Armitage
2DPP: "Fragment," by A. E. Stallings.
3DPP: "Inside the Maze (II, III, and IV)", by Hadara Bar-Nadav (blog vote)
3DPP: "Friends", by Laure-Anne Bosselaar (class vote)
4DPP: "Come to Me, His Blood," by Martha Rhodes
5DPP: "Cataract op," by Edward Field