The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week Eleven Call for Votes

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK ELEVEN

Here are the poems to vote for in the eleventh week of the fifth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, April 27, to Sunday, May 3):

May 3: Du Fu, Mr. Song's Deserted Villa (tr. David Young: vote only on the first poem)
May 2: Randall Mann, The End of Landscape
May 1: Patrick Warner, The Lost Years
April 30: Richard Jackson, Cause and Effect
April 29:Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Geisblatt
April 28: Jim Harrison, Age Sixty-Nine (vote only on the first poem)
April 27: Christian Wiman, Sitting Down to Breakfast Alone

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, MAY 8! But you can still vote as long as I have not posted the results, which I will due by Sunday, May 10, 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 winner of week eight was Hester Knibbe, Lava and Sand (tr. Jacquelyn Pope).
The winner of week nine was Louis Simpson, Ishi
The winner of week ten Andrew Hudgins, The Cow.

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week Ten Results

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK TEN RESULTS

The winner of the tenth week of my fifth Daily Poem Project is Andrew Hudgins, The Cow, which received 8 votes out of 19 cast.

Robert Dana, After the Storm, was a distant second with 3 votes!

My thanks to everyone who voted. The call for votes for week eleven will be up 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 winner of week eight was Hester Knibbe, Lava and Sand (tr. Jacquelyn Pope).
The winner of week nine was Louis Simpson, Ishi.

Doin' That Rag

Here's a bit of The Dead from Charlottesville, April 14 (check out Warren's jamming at the end; first-rate stuff!):

Ciaran Carson's Dante

Ciaran Carson's translation of Dante's Inferno was such a rush to read that I was still buzzing from it a day after finishing it. It's chock full of quotable passages, but I was particularly pleased to find a fantastic bit of trash talking between two sinners in Canto XXX:

"Though I'm kept back,"
he quipped, from moving by my watery weight,
I have this arm that's well-prepared to smack."

The other said: "You weren't so free with it
the time they put you to the fire; the alloy
that you'd coined with it had sealed your fate."

The dropsied one: "You speak the truth, old boy;
but not so truthful were you, truth to tell,
when you were asked to tell the truth at Troy."

"If I spoke false, your coin spoke false as well,"
said Sinon. "I'm here for a single falsehood;
you, for more than any fiend in hell."

"Remember, perjurer, the horse of wood,"
replied the Paunch, "and may it torture you
to know the whole world knows that you're no good!"

"With thirsty tongue may you be tortured, too,"
the Greek shot back, "and with the dropsied piss
that swells your gut to keep the world from view!"

The forger then: "Your filthy orifice
spews out the usual ravings of your brain;
and if my thirst has bloated me, your sickness

makes you burn, and gives your head a pain;
and were Narcissus' mirror conjured here
for you to lick, I don't think you'd abstain."

Virgil threatens to chew Dante out for lingering too long—and as I noted when I read the Aeneid last year, Virgil was just as good at representing trash talking as Dante himself!

*

And this passage from Canto VII seems like a nice comment on our contemporary financial crisis (Virgil is commenting on the avaricious):

My son, see how the wheel of fortune whirls!
Observe them, as they dance to money's tune,
in money wars eternally ensnarled!

Not all the gold that lies beneath the mon,
or ever did, could buy a moment's rest
for even one of these misguided fools.

*

The other verse Inferno I have read is Robert Pinsky's, which I read with delight back in 1998. But while that delight was made possible by Pinsky's translation (I don't know Italian), its source was, I now realize, Dante's magnificent work itself. In contrast, Carson's translation crackles with a ferocious energy that had me gasping at times, I was so impressed, and often had me laughing out loud (as with the trash talking). For comparison, here's Pinsky's version of the same passage from Canto VII:

"Now you can see, my son, how ludicrous
And brief are all the goods in Fortune's ken,
Which humankind contend for: you see from this

How all the gold there is beneath the moon,
Or that there ever was, could not relieve
One of these weary souls."

Pinsky's Virgil: majestic, sonorous, oratorical. Carson's Virgil: temperamental, impatient, aggressive. At least in this reader's experience, that stands for the difference between the two, and it explains why Pinsky's book is a good read, while Carson's is a great one.

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week 9 results

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK NINE RESULTS

The winner of the ninth week of my fifth Daily Poem Project is Louis Simpson, Ishi, which received 6 votes out of 21 cast.

Two poems tied for second with 4 votes each: R. T. Smith, Storm Warning, and Rita Dove, Prologue of the Rambling Sort.

My thanks to everyone who voted. The call for votes for week ten is already up (with results due tomorrow), and I'll be posting the call for votes for week eleven tomorrow as well.

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).

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.

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week Four Results

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK FOUR RESULTS

The winner of the fourth week of my fifth Daily Poem Project is David Schloss, The Myth, which received 9 votes out of 26 cast.

All the other poems received two to four votes, and two voters explicitly abstained. Though the winner was clear, then, it seemed to have been an uninspiring week, as several people mentioned. Second place went to Harry Clifton, Rakestreet.

My thanks to everyone who voted. I'll be posting the call for votes for week four on Sunday morning, March 22.

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.

Poetry or Tags

Rob Mackenzie neatly summarizes and tellingly quotes from a Cleanth Brooks essay here. You need to read Rob's post for the full contextualization of the telling quotation, but here it is anyway (the poem in question is Robert Herrick’s Corinna’s Going a-Maying):

What does this poem communicate? If we are content with the answer that the poem says that we should enjoy youth before youth fades, and if we are willing to write off everything else in the poem as ‘decoration,’ then we can properly censure [modern poets such as] Eliot or Auden or Tate for not making poems so easily tagged. But in that case we are not interested in poetry; we are interested in tags.

This implies that what "modern" poets do is write poetry without such "tags," such simple messages that one can glean from a poem. And note that the three poets Brooks lists as "modern" could not be more different from each other.

What comes to mind for me is something I read sometime last year in which a non-reader of poetry responded to Carol Ann Duffy's poems by calling them "difficult." For readers of contemporary poetry, this is a bit of a shock: one may or may not like Duffy's poems, but they are not difficult (at least not compared to those written by the vast majority of contemporary poets with several books to their names).

But perhaps the difficulty in question is the absence of such "tags."

I speak German because of Michael Jordan?

Robert Archambeau's entertaining and enlightening post about "The Michael Jordans of Philosophy" indirectly explains why I speak German ...

Anne Blonstein at the Imprimerie, Basel, March 23

[Click on the image for a larger version.]

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week Four Call for Votes

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK FOUR

Here are the poems to vote for in the fourth week of the fifth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, March 9, to Sunday, March 15):

March 15: Joel Brouwer, The Fork
March 14: Zach Savich, On a Pose of Virgil's
March 13: Frannie Lindsay, Old Man Swimming
March 12: David Schloss, The Myth
March 11: John Casteen, Chain Song
March 10: B. H. Fairchild, On the Waterfront
March 9: Harry Clifton, Rakestreet

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 20! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results. (March 22 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.

Neil Young and Poetry

I highly recommend Adam Fieled's thoughts on Neil Young as a role model for poets (and artistic, creative people in general)!

And to all Neil Young fans who read German: if you have not read it already, get yourself a copy of Navid Kermani's brilliant Das Buch der von Neil Young Getöteten.

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week Three Results

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK THREE RESULTS

The winner of the third week of my fifth Daily Poem Project is David Bottoms, A Chat with My Father, which received 11 votes out of 31 cast.

That makes "A Chat With My Father" the clearest winner yet in the fifth DPP, as second place went to D. A. Powell, corydon & alexis, with 7 votes. In third was Rae Armantrout, Dark Matter, with five votes. Three other poems had eight votes between them, and for the first time in this DPP, a poem received no votes.

My thanks to everyone who voted. I'll be posting the call for votes for week four on Sunday morning, March 15.

The winner of week one was Sherod Santos, Film Noir.
The winner of week two was Edward Field, Cataract op.

Dark Alley

I know very literate people who see poetry as a dark alley in a deserted neighborhood that they may have glanced into a few times. (Jonathan Mayhew)

Now I understand why some of the voracious readers of novels I know look at me funny when I try to get them to read some: they think I am trying to get them to go down a dark alley with me, where I might try to offer them something that involves needles that may have been places they don't want them to have gone ...

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week Three Call for Votes

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK THREE

Here are the poems to vote for in the third week of the fifth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, March 2, to Sunday, March 8):

March 2: Emma Neale, Farewell Do
March 3: Sarah Barber, To a Ring I Lost Planting Bulbs
March 4: D. A. Powell, corydon & alexis (vote only on the first poem)
March 5: Rae Armantrout, Dark Matter
March 6: David Bottoms, A Chat with My Father
March 7: Keith Ratzlaff, The Struggle between Plenty and Thankfulness
March 8: Greg Wrenn, Pontiff

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 13! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results. (March 15 at the latest.)

The winner of week one was Sherod Santos, Film Noir.
The winner of week two was Edward Field, Cataract op.

(And one other thing to add: feel free to pass the call for votes on to anyone you know who might be interested!)

Trying and failing vs. trying to fail

The sentence—as opposed to the fragment ...—the sentence tries and fails. (Joseph Duemer)

When I was in graduate school, I was fully absorbed in literary theory—which is not a surprise, since the program I was in was called "Comparative Literature and Literary Theory." I had a period in which I was quite fascinated by Jacques Derrida—especially by his studies of those writers whose work is especially susceptible to deconstruction because their ambitions for completeness are so especially extreme: Stéphane Mallarmé and Claude Lévi-Strauss, for example, or Edgar Allan Poe (at least as Jacques Lacan read him).

Even then, I was struck by something odd about those postmodernists who held up Derrida as a reason to write fragmentary, incomplete texts. Such writers thought that the lesson of deconstruction was that one should not try to construct anything complete. Even then, that seemed like nonsense to me, even at a simple logical level: works which do not aim at wholeness are not interesting enough to deconstruct. A "fragment" that is intended as a fragment does not "try and fail," as Joseph Duemer puts it; instead, it tries to fail. The fact that attempts at wholeness or completeness will fail in ways that are inevitably invisible to the author but can be spotted by alert analysis is not grounds for fragmentary, incomplete work, be it anthropology, linguistics, fiction, or poetry. (There are, of course, many other putative reasons to be "postmodern," to which this critique does not apply!)

[Cross-posted at The Plumbline School, too.]

Sitting at Home Minding My Own Business

In his "Manifesto of the Flying Mallet" in the Feb. 2009 issue of Poetry, Michael Hofmann writes:

[Poetry's] only cavalry is the reader, and there’s only one of him or her, sitting at home minding his or her own business, without a horse to hand, or a thought of you.

Which reminds me of the end of Kafka's "A Message from the Emperor," as Hofmann calls the story in his translation:

No one can make his way through there, much less with a message from a dead man. — But you, you will sit at your window and dream of it, as evening falls.

[And as I type in this little note I wrote the other day, this comes to mind.]

*

In the "Eight Manifestos" in that issue of Poetry (of which Hofmann's is one), I also particularly enjoyed those by Charles Bernstein, A. E. Stallings, and D. A. Powell. Here are two good bits from Powell's:

But most of what makes a school truly interesting is what others say about it; not what it says about itself.

They [artists] want to belong to the outside, and yet to be recognized by the inside.

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week Two Results

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK TWO RESULTS

The winner of the second week of my fifth Daily Poem Project is Edward Field's "Cataract op," which received 8 votes out of 29 cast.

In second place was John Kinsella's A Meeting of the Birds," with seven votes, while Michael Dickman's "Seeing Whales" came in third with six votes. Those three poems received 21 of the 29 votes; the other four poems split the remaining eight among them (with each poem receiving at least one vote).

My thanks to everyone who voted. I'll be posting the call for votes for week two on Sunday mornin, March 8.

The winner of week one was Sherod Santos, Film Noir.

Belgian Beers

In a post about the alcohol problem in Scotland (which, as a nurse, he sees vividly from the inside), Swiss writes that "retailers can afford to sell alcohol for less than the price of water."

I spent the summer of 1991 in Leuven, Belgium, at a three-week conference on Translation Studies (that still runs every summer, see here). Every day at lunch, I would have a sandwich, and it struck me that it was cheaper to buy beer (even the delicious Trappist beers, like Leffe) than to drink water or juice—and the beers were twice the size of the non-alcoholic beverages! So, as I was on a budget, I had a beer with my lunch every day, and then a coffee. The afternoon sessions went from two to four, and I was often quite groggy, despite the coffee ...

My presentation on Walter Benjamin was terrible, but later I cracked the tough nut of his essay "The Task of the Translator" and wrote a pretty good study of it. I know I wrote more than one poem while I was there, but this is the only I'm sure I wrote there (AJS at 26):

MARKS OF SUCCESS

André Dumont stands in the square
with a bird on his head. His white beard
and collar, distinguished marks
of worldly success, of achievement—
about them no one seems to care.

Except for the birds.
He is another tree, another lamppost
or flagpole on which they sit
and shit. When one flies away,
another comes to sit and shit
on André Dumont, who keeps standing,
with his beard, collar, and other marks
of success, in the middle of the square.

Felonies of Illusion

Mark Wallace's Felonies of Illusion reads like a battle between two kinds of poetry. The first section, "The Long Republican Winter," is, as the title suggests, the work of a poet imposed upon by the world. He's aware of what this entails:

it would be wise to want
nothing from the human world

let my wisdom fail me

In the same section of the sequence (the twelfth of fourteen parts), this "failure of wisdom" leads to some brilliant, uncannily direct writing:

work here long enough
you'd start trading poems for jobs

money doesn't ask
how you'd like to have it

the poet who doesn't need a job
meets a worker who doesn't need poetry

they stare at each other and neither can say
what it takes to live in the world

The impasse of the poet's confrontation with a world of people who "don't need poetry" concludes the section:

show the world's complex
the audience says they don't get it
make it simple
no one hears it that way either
tell people they have eyes
they'll say they can't see you
then one moment deep at night
a body flies awake and stares

*

The second part of Felonies of Illusion is called "Felonies of Illusion," and the poems in it are completely different. These poems resist a common mode of reading that is possible with "The Long Republican Winter": they cannot be attributed to "speakers" whose personae and perspectives the poems develop. There's just enough first-person singular in them to make such readings tempting, but there's so much else going on that they are very hard to realize:

RESURRECTION AT THE CREDIT UNION

Like two idiots in love
coherence and contradiction forgive
the silence everything else has become

when we choose what moves away
because it can't stand to be in the room
with other losses it's invoked

like friends we know we never had. If I promise
never again to see tonight
as part of work as its own reward,

will I be allowed to leave the drama
during the telethon conversion
through telephones that eat me up

when decisions are to be made?
Ask again later? Earn a better place
in the central obfuscation debate?

Put the blank streak on the main
reasons to be poor once more
in the quest of insubstantial poems

raining on a check. I could never
forget to seek forever in a moment
that kills the chance to speak together.

"Coherence and contradiction" are "like two idiots in love": the poems in "Felonies of Illusion" contain many such aphoristic moments; sometimes it seems like the arrival at such lines is the point of the sequence, while at other times they seem all too coherent for the contradictory, absurdist (and often quite funny) waywardness they emerge from. Perhaps such lines are the moments when "a body flies awake and stares," sifting something from dreams and their "felonies of illusion."

So here are some of those wide-awake moments:

I object / that our objections are not the object. ("A Question of Semantics")

Are you talking / to your hand yet? ("Spray Day")

As long as we're having fun, / let's wonder why it's fun we're having.
("Thanks for Having Me Out")

Who's it time to impersonate now? ("Who's There")

Stop looking / through the door to the door on the other side. ("Or That One")

When looking at the problem there's always
a problem to the side of it
("Management Theory")

..... So many lines
to learn so fast, remember the next
one forgetting morning, taking a walk.
("Feeling in Touch with My Gettings") [Love that title!]

We could count the number of flaws
or go on again in the morning.
("You're Around the World, I'm Right Here")

Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting

I love the last quatrain of "Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting," by Kevin C. Powers (from the Feb. 2009 issue of Poetry):

I tell her how Pvt. Bartle says, offhand,
that war is just us
making little pieces of metal
pass through each other.

A more deadpan version of Brian Turner's address to the bullet that might kill him, "Here, Bullet."

Just Do It

People will play golf, even if they aren’t Tiger Woods, but longevity isn’t sustained in poetry. Poets won’t write for a lifetime if they can’t see themselves as the next Ashbery? Except, poets certainly do write for lifetimes, with or without Orr’s knowledge, and they do so without worrying about winning the gold cup or whatever prize golfers aim for. There is no set goal in the “game” of poetry, though Orr’s comparison sets the terms as such (i.e. John Ashbery’s Library of America collection). How do sports metaphors of the competitive masculine variety so often wiggle their way into measuring poetry and her cultural cache? What team am I playing for again? Where’s the goal line? Who do I have to smear to get there? Are my subjects suitably dainty as I take up the stick?

(Amy King, "On Greatness & Them That Do It")

Back in about 1997, I participated in the Tempolabor, a weekend event organized by the curator and editor Clementine Deliss, with talks, presentations, and discussions attended by a multitude of artists, curators, and art critics (I was there because I had translated for art catalogs, including for Clementine's magazine Metronome).

For me, the most memorable event of that lively weekend came during a discussion after a talk. I don't remember whose talk it was, or what it was about, but it led Nebojsa Vilic, a Macedonian art historian and curator from Skopje, to give an impassioned, extemporaneous comment on the theme of "Just Do It!"

In the international art world in the nineties (which I grazed a bit in my role as a translator for catalogs), a common issue was whether "anything goes." The boundaries of what could be considered art had been pushed back so far that it seemed like there were no longer any boundaries to push back, as if it were really true that anything could be art.

Vilic's comment was an attempt to downplay the sense of crisis that many of the Tempolabor participants associated with this theme. His analogy was the "Just Do It" commercials that Nike was running at the time. Artists (and curators and critics) should stop worrying and "just do it." The issue was not whether "anything goes" but whether each particular work worked. That's the gist of what he said (at least as I remember it).

Vilic's speech was vigorous and passionate, and I might have remembered it just as well even if it had not triggered a further comment by the Basel artist Eric Hattan. Eric liked the simile, but he pointed out an important difference between Michael Jordan and an artist. No matter what route Jordan took in doing what he did, the goals of "just doing it" were always the same: to score baskets; to win games; to win championships. In contrast, the artist who "just does it" must figure out the rules of each new work from scratch; whether the work is process or product, or some combination of the two, the goals are not known from the start, but only realized through the making of the work.

... for even as golfers are folowing their game’s rules, poets are making their own ways, similarly and separately, differently and communally, as multitudes and as individuals, sans a set standard of formulas and rules. Golf goes after stroke counts and a finish line. Poetry goes after life and everything the concept entails. Greatness certainly is not the little box declaring a winner vis a vis book publication or any golden laurel leaf. Poetry is not merely words on a screen/page or how dramaticaly the poet lived her life. (Amy King from the same post)

Or, to quote two of my touchstones:

Nicht um anzukommen, sondern um aufzubrechen, nicht um Erzählung, Roman oder Buch zu werden, sondern um in Bewegung zu sein und möglichst auch zu bewegen.

Not to arrive, but to set out, not to become a story, a novel, or a book, but to be in motion and, if possible, to move. (Anne Duden, my translation)

Das Schreiben ist notwendig, nicht die Literatur.

Writing is necessary, not literature. (W. G. Sebald, my translation)

Between them, Duden and Sebald articulate why one writes: to write. Not to arrive at a goal, not to publish, not to become "literature"—not to be "great."

(Credit for stimulating this memory goes not only to Amy King but also to Adam Fieled and Joseph Hutchison.)

New versions of The Aeneid

The Feb. 2009 issue of Poetry begins with a selection from Book Two of the Aeneid, in David Ferry's translation. The passage (Aeneas's escape from Troy, as told to Dido) includes one of my favorite moments in the book, as Aeneas tries to embrace his wife Creüsa's ghost:

Three times I tried to embrace her and to hold her;
Three times the image, clasped in vain, escaped
As if it were a breeze or on the wings
Of a vanishing dream.

The selection implies that Ferry is translating the epic, which is something to look forward to. But there's also a new translation available now (even more recent than the Robert Fagles translation I read last summer): Sarah Ruden's new translation, published by Yale University Press. Garry Wills raves about it in the March 12, 2009, issue of the New York Review of Books (unfortunately, the article is not on-line):

The wonder of [Vergil's] poem is that it has a melancholy melodiousness while retaining a tight aphoristic ring. Fagles often achieved the former, but rarely the latter. Ruden gets both.

(By the way, why do Ferry and Fagles write "Virgil" while Wills and Ruden write "Vergil"?)

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week Two Call for Votes

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK TWO

Here are the poems to vote for in the second week of the fifth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, February 23, to Sunday, March 1):

February 23: Judith Hall, The Crowded Tree
February 24: John Kinsella, A Meeting of the Birds
February 25: Barbara Hamby, Who Do Mambo
February 26: Michael Dickman, Seeing Whales
February 27: Edward Field, Cataract op
February 28: Jennifer Atkinson, Landscape with Mud Turtle
March 1: Kathleen Jesme, Small sphere (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, MARCH 6! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results. (March 8 at the latest.)

The winner of week one was Sherod Santos, Film Noir.

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week One Results

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK ONE RESULTS

The winner of the first week of my fifth Daily Poem Project is Sherod Santos's "Film Noir," which received 9 votes out of 36 cast.

In second place was Tomasz Rózycki's "Coral Bay" (tr. Mira Rosenthal), with eight votes, while Andrew Hudgins's "Walking a True Line" and T. Alan Broughton's "A Midnight Clear" tied for third with five votes.

Every poem received at least three votes!

For a while, I thought I would be the only person to vote for Hudgins's poem, but then suddenly it got several more votes.

We discussed Rózycki's poem in great detail in my Intensive Composition class on Wednesday, and I came to admire it more and more. One student reads Polish (her mother is from Poland), so she's trying to find the original Polish to see if this sonnet is rhymed in the original.

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

Info Dump

And here's another nice piece gleaned from my blog reading: Jonathan Mayhew on the "info dump" in scholarly writing.

The undergraduate version of the "info dump" in essays about narrative literature: a detailed plot summary of the short story, narrative poem, novel, or play in question, full of tidbits from the plot that might be interesting to know but are utterly irrelevant to what the paper is actually about.

Prolific

Here's something from Caleb Crain that reflects on one characteristic of great writers: they tend to be prolific. Quantity and quality go hand in hand. (No, I am not feeling prolific these days ...)

There's a kind of an implicit challenge here: name a truly great artist who lived past the age of thirty but who produced very little work. I don't have any ideas off the top of my head, but maybe you do.

Some thoughts after reading Zadie Smith on "Speaking in Tongues"

I was deeply moved by Zadie Smith's article "Speaking in Tongues" in the February 26, 2009, issue of the New York Review of Books. She covers a lot of ground as she discusses her own shifting accent (from working-class London to Cambridge), as well as Pygmalion, Barack Obama, and a dose of Shakespeare, among other things.

Her main focus is on ways in which people find themselves between "voices," as she did in her move from London to Cambridge, for example, or as Obama describes of himself in his books. It made me wonder about what ways I might be between different voices. Although I am a child of a university professor and a librarian who has pretty much been in the middle to upper-middle class my whole life, I have experienced some doubling of my voice at various points in my life.

For example, I lived in an England for almost a year when I was nine years old. Coming from California, I was confronted by people who spoke an entirely different English than mine (and I have the anecdotes to prove it). But by the end of nine months in Leamington Spa, I had a thick Midlands accent, as did my sisters, and when we went back to the U.S. (summer of '74), our voices seemed as striking to the Americans we met as our American voices had seemed to the English kids when we had arrived in England. For at least a decade, I could still slip into my Midlands accent pretty much at will. (For some reason, the word I could use to help me get the accent right was "leisure.")

After England, we moved to Ohio. Despite a year in Leamington, I was still basically a California hippy kid, and that was not a good type of person to be in Ottawa Hills, Ohio, in the mid-1970s. (It probably still isn't!) Being almost completely rejected by your peers can generate a bit of double-voicedness as well, as you start to talk to the people around you with a much different voice than you use to talk to yourself. Throughout my life since then, I have gone through phases of having long hair and phases of having short hair, and as I said to a friend recently, I wish people would notice the long-haired side of my personality even when I have short hair (and—or perhaps especially—vice versa).

But there's one important sense of "speaking in tongues" that I am completely aware of that Zadie Smith does not discuss in her article: bi- and multilingualism. I am a native speaker of English, but I live in a German-speaking city, and I speak German on a daily basis. I also speak French (though nowhere near as regularly). My children speak English (which they mostly get from me), German (which they mostly get from their mother), and Basel German (which they learn at day care, then use in kindergarten and school). The multiple voices of such an environment make the shifts that Smith discusses as potentially something everyone could experience to some degree into something that everyone in the community experiences on a daily basis. (Even those who speak Basel German most of the time also speak some High German pretty regularly, and they experience it as a significant, even irritating shift, as many Baslers have told me over the years.)

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week One

THE FIFTH 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, but unlike in the third project, where I ran separate votes for the blog and for the class, I will tally all votes together this time (from the classes and from the blog).

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

February 16: Charles Simic, Trees in the Yard
February 17: Tomasz Rózycki, Coral Bay, tr. Mira Rosenthal
February 18: Jacques Réda, Lament of the Old Pole , tr. by Andrew Shields
February 19: Andrew Hudgins, Walking a True Line
February 20: Chard DeNiord, The Woe That Is in Friendship
February 21: Sherod Santos, Film Noir
February 22: T. Alan Broughton, A Midnight Clear

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. 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, FEBRUARY 27! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results. (March 1 at the latest.)

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

Post on Anne Carson

I've just posted "Being / A Self in a Song" on the Verse Novels blog, a couple of initial ideas about Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red.

Google Books Search Settlement

If you have published any books or parts of books that might be in academic libraries in the United States that are working with Google on their book-scanning project, you owe it to yourself to read this piece by Caleb Crain and then sign up at Google Books Settlement to find out what books of yours might be getting scanned. Please note the deadline to opt out of having your books scanned: May 5, 2009.

And you might be surprised what you find. For example, my unpublished doctoral dissertation, plus at least half a dozen of my translations for art catalogues.

Verse Novels / Versromane

I've started a blog for my course on "Contemporary Verse Novels / Zeitgenössiche Versromane". The students and I will all write posts for it. Feel free to drop by and comment if you like!

The books in question:

Ciaran Carson, For All We Know
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Durs Grünbein, Vom Schnee, oder Descartes in Deutschland
Christoph Ransmayr, Der fliegende Berg

This is a bilingual blog. The first post is already in German (my first set of notes on Ransmayr).

Evolution is to biology as ...

From an article by Massimo Pigliucci on the Secular Philosophy blog:

... evolution is to biology what relativity or quantum mechanics are to physics, what the big bang is to cosmology, or what the atomic theory is to chemistry. Evolution is a scientific fact as solid as they come, and a scientific theory as well established as any other scientific theory is. Creationism and its cousin intelligent design are primitive ideas that were reasonable enough in a pre-scientific society, but do not have a respectable place at the table of intellectual discourse anymore. It’s time to get used to it.

Lament of the Old Pole

Poetry Daily's poem for today is "Lament of the Old Pole," by Jacques Réda, in my translation.