Murray on Peacocks

Here's today's poem from Poetry Daily, by one of my other poetry favorites (along with Ko Un, for example) for the Nobel Prize, Les Murray:

The Hanging Gardens

High on the Gloucester road
just before it wriggles its hips
level with eagles down the gorge
into the coastal hills

there were five beige pea-chickens
sloping under the farm fence
in a nervous unison of head-tufts
up to the garden where they lived

then along the gutter and bank
adult birds, grazing in full serpent.
Their colours are too saturate and cool
to see at first with dryland eyes

trained to drab and ginger. No one here
believes in green deeply enough. In greens
so blue, so malachite. Animal cobalt too
and arrow bustles, those are unparalleled.

The wail lingers, and their cane
surrection of iridium plaques. Great spirits,
Hindoostan in the palette of New Zealand!
They don't succeed at feral.

Things rush them from dry grass.
Haggard teeth climb to them. World birds,
human birds, flown by their own volition
they led us to palaces.

Les Murray
The Biplane Houses
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Daily Poem final update: 35 votes have now been cast, and one poem is sustaining its lead, but it is not so far ahead that your vote might not make a difference. The most recent vote was cast for the last remaining poem that had not received any votes, so now all 12 poems have at least one vote (and only three have received only one).

DPP history

One person I contacted to see if he wanted to participate in the Daily Poem Project final vote expressed skepticism about the idea of voting on poems, which should not be subject to such competition. Here's what I wrote in response:

A bit of history: the DPP game first started in a course called "Quality" two summers ago. The game fit well in the course, because it made the student and the teachers (a colleague and I) really think, in a practical way, about what literary quality is.

I did it again last summer when I was teaching a poetry seminar. It was a nice supplement to the course, and it made sure the students were reading LOTS of poetry and not just the poems assigned for the course. Some students even ended up writing about the PD poems!

This summer, it's a complement to a poetry and songwriting workshop. In that context, it's good to make sure the writers are reading a lot, and also looking at the work with a critical eye. And I thought it was fun to run a parallel vote on my blog.

So the larger purpose is not the end result, the "Poetry Idol" side of it, but the context in which it takes place, and the purpose it serves in that context.

That said, on my blog it is just a game, a way to approach poetry playfully.

*

I would add one further point now: when I submit my work for publication in magazines,
my poems are competing against the poems of other poets. The whole publication game is one big competition, since editors are deciding which poems are best, in two senses: the ones they think are the best, and the ones they like best.

In fact, all the poems under consideration for the Daily Poem Project are already at least triple winners of competitions: the poets decided to submit them for publication, editors (of journals or books) decided to publish them, and the folks at Poetry Daily chose them for the website. By the time we get to considering them for DPP, they have already beaten out vast number of other poems and shown that they can stand up to such a competition.

So at first, I defended the DPP against my friend's criticism by arguing that the pedagogical context justified the game. But now I would also defend it by saying that it is a minor extension of a vast "Poem Project" that sifts out the good from the bad. The DPP as a metaphor for ... canonization? :-)

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Daily Poem final update: 20 votes have now been cast, and suddenly one poem is threatening to run away with the vote. But I won't say which one yet! And don't let that keep you from voting!

N. Crosses the Alps

My translation of Dieter M. Gräf's poem "N. CROSSES THE ALPS, TAIPEI" is now up at lyrikline.org, along with a number of other poems by Dieter. You can hear him read the German, and you can read the English.

I cannot recommend lyrikline highly enough. A superb archive of recordings of poets in a wide variety of languages.

*

Daily Poem final update: 13 votes have been cast, and no poem has received more than two (and only three poems out of twelve have not received votes). So your vote counts!

DPP FINAL ROUND

THE DAILY POEM PROJECT, FINAL ROUND

Here are the poems to vote for in the final round of my Daily Poem Project (the winning poems for each week from Monday, March 26, to Sunday, June 17):

1. Christian Wiman, "The River"
2. Tom Sleigh, "Blueprint"
3. Jessica Fisher, "The Promise of Nostos"
4. Allen Grossman, "A Gust of Wind"
5. Laure-Anne Bosselaar, "Friends"
6. Robin Ekiss, "Vanitas Mundi"
7. Maurice Manning, "Where Sadness Comes From"
8. Reginald Shepherd, "Eve's Awakening"
9. C. Dale Young, "33rd & Kirkham"
10. Hadara Bar-Nadav, "Inside the Maze (II, III, and IV)"
11. Adrian Blevins, "Hey You"
12. Maurice Manning, "Bucolics III"

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).

THE VOTE WILL BE OPEN UNTIL SUNDAY, JULY 1!

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).

DPP12 results

Here are the results of week 12 of the Daily Poem Project. Once again, the bloggers and the class have agreed on a winner, though again with extremely close votes in both cases.

In the class, 14 votes were cast, and every poem received at least one vote. The winner, with 4 votes, was Bucolics III, by Maurice Manning, with What Knits, by Paul Celan, trans. Ian Fairley, in second place with 3 votes.

10 votes were cast in the blog vote, and again every poem received at least one vote—with the same results: Bucolics III, by Maurice Manning, won with 3 votes, and What Knits, by Paul Celan, trans. Ian Fairley, was in second place with 2 votes.

I found most of the poems this week compelling in one way or another. Ordinarily, I would rank any poem by Paul Celan ahead of just about any other poem. Further, I wanted to judge this translation on its own terms as an English poem. But on those terms, I found it wanting, and several infelicities of phrasing led me to look at the German original, where I noticed a few choices that I found ... well, wrong, if I may put it that way. "Was näht" does not mean "what knits" but "what sews," for example.

As I read through the other poems, I kept coming back to Manning's "Bucolics" because of the rhythm, so I ended up deciding to vote for it. (Manning thus becomes the first poet to ever win two weeks in the same Daily Poem Project; he won back in week 7.)

Here are some of the comments from the call for votes:

Bruce Loebrich said...

Here's my ranked list (my favorite is at the top):

82. Lightfall, by Pamela Alexander
78. Two Poems, by Tessa Rumsey (vote for both poems as a unit)
80. What Knits, by Paul Celan, trans. Ian Fairley
79. Don't Write History as Poetry, by Mahmoud Darwish, trans. Fady Joudah
83. Ars Poetica, by Henrietta Goodman
84. Tobacco, by Peg Boyers
81. Bucolics III, by Maurice Manning (only the first poem)

Felix said...

My vote goes to Ian Fairley's translation of "Was näht". 36 years after its publication, Celan's posthumous volume of poems, _Schneepart_, certainly one of the major works of twentieth century poetry, has finally been translated into English. Of course, no translation can ever be definitive; but every translation adds a reading--a voice--to the poem.

Donald Brown said...

I can't say I'm partial to any of the selections this week. The winner is no doubt Celan in German, but then I can't read the poem in Arabic, so...no fair. In fact, though being a translator you might not like it, I can't really rank the translations with the others. The poem from Arabic reads in English like lines lifted from someone's notebook. And Celan in English is dull, not at all charming and not nearly so winningly enigmatic. So I don't really want to include either of those poems in my vote. That leaves those written in English, and I'll pick Manning again. I like some, not all, of his "Bucolics" I've heard or read -- the first one here is a pretty good one. There are better ones than any of these three. So, #81 wins, for me. The Rumsey poem (#78) mostly annoys me -- it has some good moments but I think it plays around too much in the early going. Boyers (#84) seems to me a "stop and start" poem. Little narrative bits with little lyrical throwaways; the apostrophe to the uncle at the end breaks into a new tone in what seems a gauche way to me. #82, Alexander's, "stops and starts" too, but I like it better (rank it 2nd), especially the part "I longed to be among trees." And the last two lines bring a nice close to it. Goodman (#83) lets me into a little claustrophobic moment but that's about it. It's a bit of the dark Lowellian confessional mode that can be pretty effective, but for some reason I don't believe its pathos, don't find it affecting.

Week 11 results are here. Week 10 results are here. A summary of the results of the first nine weeks is at the end of the week 9 results.

I'll be posting a call for votes for the final vote shortly.

David Yezzi, "The Good News"

This is my favorite poem from the June 2007 issue of Poetry. (The first and last lines of each stanza are supposed to be indented a bit, but I can't be bothered to learn how to override HTML's efforts to standardize all formatting.) It makes me want to have a whisky—always a good sign in a poem or novel, if it makes you want to drink what the characters are drinking. But I'm on antibiotics, so no Laphroaig for me. (And I can hear that latch clicking at the end.)

THE GOOD NEWS

A friend calls, so I ask him to stop by.
We sip old Scotch, the good stuff, order in,
some Indian—no frills too fine for him
or me, particularly since it's been
ages since we made the time.

Two drinks in, we've caught up on our plans.
I've sleepwalked through the past few years by rote;
he's had a nasty rough patch, quote unquote,
on the home front. So, we commiserate,
cupping our lowballs in our hands.

It's great to see him, good to have a friend
who feels the same as you about his lot—
that, while some grass is greener, your small plot
is crudely arable, and though you're not
so young, it's still not quite the end.

As if remembering then, he spills his news.
Though I was pretty lit, I swear it's true,
it was as if a gold glow filled the room
and shone on him, a sun-shaft piercing through
dense clouds, behind which swept long views.

In that rich light, he looked not like my friend
but some acquaintance brushed by on the train.
Had his good fortune kept me from the same,
I had to wonder, a zero-sum game
that gave the night its early end?

Nothing strange. Our drinks were done, that's all.
We haven't spoken since. By morning, I
couldn't remember half of what the guy
had said, just his good news, my slurred goodbye,
the click of the latch, the quiet hall.

DPP12

THE DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK TWELVE

Here are the poems to vote for in week twelve, the final week of my Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, June 11, to Sunday, June 17):

78. Two Poems, by Tessa Rumsey (vote for both poems as a unit)
79. Don't Write History as Poetry, by Mahmoud Darwish, trans. Fady Joudah
80. What Knits, by Paul Celan, trans. Ian Fairley
81. Bucolics III, by Maurice Manning (only the first poem)
82. Lightfall, by Pamela Alexander
83. Ars Poetica, by Henrietta Goodman
84. Tobacco, by Peg Boyers

This is the last week of the Project. When I post the results of this week, I will also post a call for votes to pick the final winner. That post will, of course, include a linked list of all the finalists.

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 21! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results, which might only be on June 22 or 23.

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).

Week 11 results are here. Week 10 results are here. A summary of the results of the first nine weeks is at the end of the week 9 results.

DPP11 results

Here, finally, after much delay, are the results of the voting in week 11 of the Daily Poem Project. This time, I was not waiting to see a tie get broken (or simply more votes be cast) in the blogger side of the vote; the problem was with the class vote.

In class on Friday, 14 votes were cast, with three poems receiving three each and two receiving two each. Not wanting to have yet another week in which the class vote did not result in one winner, I wrote to the two students who had not voted in class, as well as to the two students who had been absent, to ask them to help break the tie.

One of the absentees said he did not have time to vote, and one of the students who had not voted even though he had been in class sent me a vote — but it made the vote a four-way tie!

This morning, though, thankfully, I received a vote from the other absentee, who broke the tie and made After Persephone, by Tracy K. Smith, the winner of the class vote for this week.

But the bloggers disagreed: 12 votes were cast, with Hey You, by Adrian Blevins, receiving four votes as the winner. In second place with 3 votes came The Dark-Light of Spring, by Eric Leigh.

For me, many of these poems slip up for one moment, and that leaves them wanting. "Hinge of loss" is the line that slips up for me in Leigh. This may be unfair, because it is a longer poem, but that just means he has to maintain the right tone and diction and phrasing for longer, not that he's allowed to slip up.

Several other poems had similar moments, too. I was left with "Hey You": a deeply strange poem, but phrased just right, and with mysteries and puzzles that feel productive, implying that if I pursued them I would find something worthwhile.

The comments on the call for votes:

Bruce Loebrich's ranked list (my favorite is at the top):

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

Felix wrote: "There Is A Bird We Cannot See" by M. L. Freeman is my favourite this week. It's a dark, yet powerful reflection on life and the intensities of living. The bird is, perhaps, a late echo of Keats's nightingale (also with respect to the sophisticated sound patterns of the poem).

Meanwhile, Thom Satterlee sent me an email that was so beautiful I asked him if I could post it and he gave me permission to do so:

'I vote for Paradise, by Arthur Smith. When I first read this poem, the day it appeared on PD, I knew it would be the one I'd vote for. I love what the poet is doing in this poem, making an impossible proposition ("I used to live there [in paradise]") believable through specific, surprising, musical detail. The way the first line speaks back to the title, I knew what Smith proposed to do in this poem--so I was never confused by it--and watched him put on his verbal show, a very nice one, I think. It's the sort of poem where the poet has worked hard to get everything right (the images, the lines, the tone of the speakers voice) so that the reader can relax and enjoy. I re-read the poem not to better understand it, but to enjoy it, the way you would re-watch a scene in a movie or enjoy an instant replay of a fine moment in a sport match.'

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

A Roethke recommendation

Here is a fascinating and thought-provoking piece by Edward Byrne on alternative readings of Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" and, by extension, on reading poems from the past from one's own perspective and from the perspectives of the age when they were written.

Here's the poem, copied from Byrne's post:

MY PAPA’S WALTZ

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

Warning labels

Stephen Colbert: Homosexuals should come with a warning label

"I'm disappointed by how little progress we've made on the gay marriage issue. The gays continue to threaten my happy marriage by threatening to have their own happy marriages."

Ko Un bibliography

Coda to my post about Ko Un and his book "Ten Thousand Lives":

There's a bibliography of Ko Un's work in translation available at his website. It's nice to see that he is making it into a number of languages, especially German, as that means my German-speaking friends can read him in their own native language. I hope the translations read as well as those in the English "Ten Thousand Lives" do.

Poetry Bestsellers

C. Dale Young linked to this list of current bestsellers in poetry. I thought it would be interesting to edit the list as follows:

a) take out any dead poets (Bukowski, Plath, Larkin).

b) take out any poets who appear more than once (Collins, Oliver, Bukowski again, Berry).

The first bit of editing seems to go without saying. The second is less clear, but perhaps it's like taking Rowling off the bestseller lists so you can see what else is doing well. This is the list I ended up with after editing:

1. Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey (Houghton Mifflin)
2. Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser (Copper Canyon Press)
3. Averno by Louise Glück (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
4. The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems by David Kirby (Louisiana State University Press)
5. District and Circle by Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
6. The Human Line by Ellen Bass (Copper Canyon Press)
7. Present Company by W. S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press)
8. Queen of a Rainy Country: Poems by Linda Pastan (W. W. Norton)
9. Sleeping Upside Down by Kate Lynn Hibbard (Silverfish Review Press)
10. After by Jane Hirshfield (Harper Perennial)

A few remarks:

a) Copper Canyon is doing well. I am delighted to hear it!

b) Five books published by relatively large publishing houses, three by Copper Canyon, one by a university press, and one by a very small poetry press.

c) It's not a bad list, is it? Sure, one can argue about one or two of the poets on it according to one's taste, and some people might see all these writers as being more or less the same (card-carrying members of the "School of Quietude"), but really, the poets I know from this list are quite distinct: Kirby, for example, is not at all like Heaney, who is not at all like Merwin, who bears a slight but superficial resemblance to Hirshfield—and none of those are at all like Kooser or Glück.

In honor of the day

And she saw a long Roman candle going up over the trees up, up, and they were all breathless with excitement as it went higher and higher and she had to lean back more and more to look up after it, high, high, almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with a divine, an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, four and eleven, on account of being white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back that he could see high up above her knee where no-one ever and she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn’t resist the sight like those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking. She would fain have cried to him chokingly, held out her snowy slender arms to him to come, to feel his lips laid on her white brow, the cry of a young girl’s love, a little strangled cry, wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages. And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft!

(Ulysses)

Ko Un, "Ten Thousand Lives"

Ko Un, Ten Thousand Lives, trans. Brother Anthony of Taizé, Young-moo Kim, and Gary Gach, Green Integer 2005

every tale was a tale beginning long long ago
...
When she died, it seemed she was eager to go on telling tales,
because she died with her mouth wide open,
and no matter how hard they tried to close it, it kept falling open again.

("Sam-man's Grandmother")

Ko Un deserves a Nobel Prize in Literature. This is a truly remarkable book, compulsively written and compulsively readable. BRIEF REVIEW: Buy it now. You won't regret it.

Ko Un's project, which this book presents a selection from, is to write one poem each about every person he has ever met, plus a few more about historical and mythological figures. This would be impossibly insane if he were not able to combine such vastness with the wonderful details of the individual people and the individual poems:

"Dad, Dad! Ma's dead! She died and she won't shut her eyes!"

("Sa-haeng")

our great-aunt takes up all the room.
...
What we call sorrow is not the least bit sad, really.
It's like a stream hidden in a valley, gone like the tune of a song
once you're over the crest of the next hill.
When a woman like that enters a house of mourning,
the wine and food in the offerings find their proper flavor,
don't they?

("Our Great-Aunt at Taegi")

As in these lines, many of the poems derive some of their energy from the specifics of Korean mores—here the rites of mourning. Many of them make use of the emotional Korean interjection "Aigu":

When it rained,
he would hold out both hands to the rain
and exclaim in delight: "Aigu, Aigu! How good to see you!"

("Father")

And of course there are complete poems that touch on specifically Korean things:

NEW YEAR'S FULL MOON

Bitter cold day, the new year's first full moon,
a special day.
One housewife, busy from early morning,
knowing that beggars will be coming by,
puts out a pot of five-grain rice in anticipation
on the stone mortar
that stands beside her brush-wood gate,
with a single side-dish of plantain-shoots.
Soon, an ancient beggar comes breezing up,
makes ready to spin a yarn but finally
just pockets the rice and goes on his way.
If only we had 360 more days like today in a year!
His bag is soon bulging.
His round complte, as he's leaving the village
he runs into another beggar:
glad encounter!
You've no call to go there, I've done 'em all!
Let's us celebrate a Fool Moon too!
Snapping dried twigs, they make a fire
to thaw themselves by, then
producing hunks of rice from this house and that,
the two beggars set to,
choking, laughing with mouths full.
Soon bands of magpies hear the news
and flock flapping around.

I especially love the "bands of magpies" here.

As Ko Un lived through the Japanese occupation of Korea, many of the poems contain traces of that experience (or, of course, are explicitly about it):

THE WIFE FROM SUREGI

At Frog Embankment,
there are only frogs, all the rest of the world is dead.
The wife from Suregi is weeping there,
but the croaking of frogs drowns out her weeping.
This evening is the tenth anniversary of her husband's death.
She's managed to get some barley to cook, digs spoon and chopsticks
into the bowl in ritual offering, and weeps.
Her metal spoon and chopsticks are gone, taken by the Japs.
Digging a wooden spoon and chopsticks into the bowl, she weeps.
At Frog Embankment,
she weeps, but the croaking of frogs drowns out her weeping.
It's no use to her dead husband's ears.

Still, it does not take the "exotic" element of Korean customs or specifics of Korean history to make the lines or the poems work:

At the age of a flower he died like a flower.

("Chõng Yong-gi of the Righteous Army")

See that migrant lapwing perching on a branch!

("Old Foster Father")

IL-MAN'S FATHER

The sea off the west coast isn't quite a real sea.
It's more like some nearby neighbor
clearing his throat, like a neighbor's house,
like the yard of a neighbor's house
on a sultry day
where the smell of smoke lingers even after the fire's out.

Surely no one could ever return from such a sea.

It's been five years since Il-man's father from Paekdang-mei
went off as a seaman thanks to people he knew.
He spent five years on boats catching shrimp and whitebait
out near Kaeya Island.

Il-man's father used to spit on his hands
and handle rope so deftly,
a ribbon bound tightly round his head.
Now Il-man's grown up.
he's the spitting image of his father.
Il-man is Il-man's father.

As in the characterization of his Great-Aunt as someone who "takes up all the room," Ko Un has a way with quickly sketching in a personality. The deft handling of rope in the above poem, or this: "Someone like watered wine" ("Uncle Maeng-sik").

Robert Haas featured a slightly different version of "The Women from Sonjei-ri" in his Poet's Choice in 1998, from an earlier edition of Ko Un's poems. Haas also wrote the introduction to the edition I have, in which apparently Gary Gach has joined the other two translators and reworked some of their earlier translations.

Sometimes, Ko Un even slips into what seems like magic realism:

A DEAD DOG

On digging up the heating flue under the floor,
when it refused to draw properly,
we found a dog that had disappeared from the house.
It was dead, of course.
Cautiously, Father took it up into the hill behind the house and buried it.
The next day it rained. As the rain made the leaves
green again, they barked.

Since Ko Un grew up in a country village, the poems often arrive at arresting images of rural poverty:

If a kid dies there's no tomb, no offerings:
there'll be another one born by-and-by.

("Pyong-ok")

Or even an image of relative rural wealth:

You from a rich house
had really nice clothes
your five buttons always shining bright and
every day a boiled egg snuggled
bright in your lunch-box, where the white rice
contained very little barley

("Pong-t'ae")

At this point, I have provided some examples from the first 96 pages of this book of over 350 pages. I could go on and on. To come back to my first point: BUY IT.

Things

Listening to Tom Waits's Swordfishtrombones and listening closely to this one again:

SOLDIER'S THINGS

Davenports and kettle drums and swallow-tail coats
Table cloths and patent leather shoes
Bathing suits and bowling balls and clarinets and rings
All this radio really needs is a fuse

A tinker, a tailor, a soldier's things
His rifle, his boots full of rocks
Oh, and this one is for bravery
Oh, and this one is for me
And everything's a dollar in this box

Cufflinks and hubcaps and trophies and paperbacks
It's good transportation, but the brakes aren't so hot
Neckties and boxing gloves, this jackknife is rusted
You can pound that dent out on the hood

A tinker, a tailor, a soldier's things
His rifle, his boots full of rocks
Oh, and this one is for bravery
Oh, and this one is for me
And everything's a dollar in this box


*

And thinking of this one, by Günter Eich:

INVENTORY

This is my cap,
this is my coat,
here is my shaving set
in a linen bag.

A tin can:
my plate, my cup,
in the metal
I have scratched my name.

Scratched it with this
precious nail,
which I hide
from greedy eyes.

In my haversack are
a pair of woolen socks
and some things I don't
tell anyone about,

it serves as a pillow
at night for my head.
The cardboard lies here
between me and the earth.

The pencil lead
I love the most:
by day it writes verses for me
that I have thought up by night.

This is my notebook,
this is my canvas,
this is my towel,
this is my thread.

(trans. Charlotte Melin)

DPP11 voting still open

Nine votes have been cast in week 11 of the Daily Poem Project, with two poems tied for the lead with three votes each. I won't say which ones, but do vote if you have time! It would be nice to break that tie. I won't be closing the voting until Friday evening (June 15) at the earliest.

You can vote by commenting here or on the original post above, or by email.

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

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

"'None of us could've guessed Snape would ... you know,' said Ron."

That's the beauty of Rowling: we can toss ideas around about what will happen in Book 7; some people have even read all six published volumes with fine-toothed combs looking for hints and clues; many theories have been developed (some of which might be right in parts)—but when it comes to down to it, we can pretty much count on one thing from JKR: she will surprise us.

I have now finished rereading all six volumes, and I am ready for July 21. Perhaps chapter one will be about Bill and Fleur's wedding ... on July 21? :-)

Hejira

I went to Staten Island, Sharon,
to buy myself a mandolin.

(Joni Mitchell, "Song for Sharon," Hejira)

I have not listened to this album for ages; in fact, it's the only Joni CD I own. So brilliant to hear it again, one that I listened to all the time in the eighties. I don't think it is entirely to everyone's taste, as it is quite melancholy, but it's right up my own alley (where a cheerful person who has melancholy tastes lives).

I'll jam with Joni on mandolins any time she likes!

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.

Anne Duden in Mantis

Mantis 6 contains two of my translations of Anne Duden, "Otherland" and "Responsorium."

I have not had time to read the rest of the issue yet, but it looks promising, with many translations, including two I really look forward to reading:

1. Mark Terrill's translation of part of a long poem by Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, along with an essay on Brinkmann's work by Martin Kagel.

2. Four poems by Ko Un, whose Ten Thousand Lives I am currently reading, and which I will blog enthusiastically about soon.

Here's one of the Duden poems:

RESPONSORIUM

I

Christ's foreskin
from the relic jar, crystal egg, or glass bowels
in words
almost lost
balanced past the park
the one full of poultry and leftovers
by Vondel
GEVOGELTE & WILD
like dog shit
and violets
and the blue suns
of anemones
already weak-sphinctered from the first warmth
and the moon's silver rocker
on the diamond plumb
frozen.

II

Or vice versa
Christ's forerank
in the garden
— Good Lord on Good Friday —
and those goblet gutturals and redthroats
and stabs
up to under the ribbed vault
heart and brain
where the one long rests, recovered
cradling and being cradled
in the mother hollow
in the double womb of bin and boat
ON SWAYING SKIFF
high above the lit-up tiles
bridges, carpets
laid silently by the shine
slanting through the windows
onto stone slabs of the lower and other dead
over and over.

III

All around
pushed, piled and massed
at small intervals
rut detectors, runners and outrunners
curly lambs
cull sheep
and the moisture mosaic
pools, puddles and channels
of vomit
master and mastiff urine
and under the bushes
for free
the ground completely slippery
with blind insemination
beside the head yoke
the joggers' sudarium.

IV

Resurrection unseals no lips.
But beauty lies here
in the bed of clouds.
On the Ij, on the Ijssel
on the ice ocean
in the horizon bird's eye
not to be caught
in the wind clock's iris
storm hub at the station
in the feather beat's breeze
in the heron's flight
from water to water
sky to sky
and fish to fish.

Michael Hamburger

"All the same, I was born; and what is more, with alacrity—so I am told—in the small hours; at the crack of spring, and impatient for it. Impatience, Kafka said, is the primal sin. I was guilty of it, in early years at least. It was the month of the year when Kafka left Berlin to die. It was the day, March 22nd, of Goethe's death and his cry for more light."

Michael Hamburger (1924-2007), String of Beginnings

The two swallows seen shivering
After the feat of migration
Have moved on or starved,
Unmended their mud nests gape.

(from Late)

Arabic translators

From Language Log:

Stephen Benjamin ... He volunteered for the Navy, went to the Defense Language Institute to learn Arabic, and was ready and willing to go to Iraq. He never got there. Why? Because military snooping on IM exchanges between Benjamin and his roommate revealed that they are gay, as a result of which he was discharged from the Navy.

Now you know it: keeping gays out of the military is more important than talking to Iraqis.

DPP10 results

After several weeks in which the bloggers and the students in the Daily Poem Project voted for the same poems (see the summary of the results for the whole project at the end of the week 9 results), the two groups produced different results again this week.

The class voted this morning, and Ditchdigger, by Liane Strauss, received the most votes (4 out of 13), with no other poem receiving more than two.

The bloggers, however, gave one poem a clear majority of the vote: Inside the Maze (II, III, and IV), by Hadara Bar-Nadav, ran away with it with 7 votes (out of 12 cast), with only Strauss's "Ditchdigger" also receiving more than one (and it only got two).

One of the votes for "Ditchdigger" was from yours truly: it was an easy choice for me, as that was the only poem I really liked on a first reading. Too easy, perhaps—all the votes for Bar-Nadav's poem made me look at it quite closely, and what I discovered is that the form becomes much less intrusive if I read the poem out loud. I'm still not entirely convinced by the form, but at least it is no longer obstructing my response to the content.

Frequent DPP voter Don Brown is on vacation, so I have to do without his detailed comments this week, but several voters contributed comments to the call-for-votes post:

Nic Sebastian said...

I'm voting for the Maze, with the Fewer Disappointments next and the Poplars third. 68, 69 and 70 failed to pull me in for various reasons (many sonics-related) and although I found 64 interesting, I couldn't pull it together into any kind of an organic whole in the time allotted. I think it deserves a re-visit at some point. My thoughts on the Maze and the Disappointments at A Bundle of Biases.

Felix said...

I vote for Hadara Bar-Nadav's meditation on the Minotaur. I'm intrigued by animal speakers, or figures that are part animal, part human.--The poem is a bit of a formal experiment, which, I suppose, may have something to do with the maze, and the liminal or fragmented state the Minotaur is in.

Bruce Loebrich said...

Here's my ranked list (my favorite is at the top):

67. Inside the Maze (II, III, and IV), by Hadara Bar-Nadav
65. Poplars, by Donald Revell
66. In Another Year of Fewer Disappointments, by Eliza Griswold
64. from: The Book of the Dead Man, by Marvin Bell
68. Auroras, by Joanna Klink
70. Aftermath, by Forrest Hamer
69. Ditchdigger, by Liane Strauss

Thanks to everyone who voted! I hope to hear from you, earlier voters who were unable to vote this week, and new voters soon—I'll be posting the call for votes for week 11 on Sunday, June 10.

Brief review of my book

Colin Will has posted a brief review of my chapbook Cabinet d'Amateur here.

Colloquial style II

Jonathan continues from what I linked to on my previous post with this title:

"There are two equal and opposite fallacies. One is that the colloquial direct style is and should be the ideal for all poetic writing. That you should never write anything that couldn't be said. The other fallacy is that poetic language needs to mark its distance, be its own separate language."

Highly recommended!

Call for submissions, No Man's Land

Call for Submissions - no man's land # 2
Contemporary German-language fiction and poetry in English translation.
Deadline: August 30, 2007.

After its launch in December 2006 with English translations from the 10th anniversary issue of the alternative Berlin literary magazine lauter niemand, no man's land will continue as an annual online magazine at www.no-mans-land.org. It is now open for submissions of contemporary German-language fiction and poetry in English translation. We are especially interested in work by interesting, important yet under- (or never!) translated writers.

For prose, send up to 3 submissions by one or different writers: a submission is considered as one story or self-contained novel excerpt, max. 4,000 words. For poetry, send translations of work by up to 3 poets, each to a maximum of 5 poems.

The deadline is August 30, 2007 (postmark date), and we will inform contributors by early October 2007; the issue will go online in December. If funding permits, we will offer translators a small honorarium.

Please include your contact information, biographical and publication information (on both translator and author) and a copy of the original, and let us know who holds the rights to the piece; in the event of publication, proof of permission will be required.

Submissions should be sent to
no man's land
PO Box 02 13 04
10125 Berlin
Germany

If you are able to include the original text in file format (PDF or other), submissions can be sent electronically to this e-mail adress

We look forward to reading your work!

Isabel Cole and Alistair Noon
Editors, no man's land

Songs and Poems

A comment on a post by Rob MacKenzie (and the comment on that post by Ben Wilkinson):

I'm teaching a course on poetry and songwriting right now, and many of the students are in bands (and though they are Swiss, they sing in English). Reading their texts, I am very conscious of the distinction between songs and poems: songs, as Ben put it so well, "lack the singularity that the good poem possesses."

This is a matter of phrasing: writing that can work well in songs often falls flat if read without music, because the presence of the music allows the songwriter to prop up phrases that are unable to stand on their own (too cliched, for example).

That said, I'll defend Dylan (and Tom Waits) as contemporary songwriters who have written many texts that stand up on the page, without the music.

Aimee Mann on Sgt. Pepper's

I enjoyed Aimee Mann's article on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Just typing in the title is fun: what a great phrase.)

As I live with a seven-year-old Beatlemaniac (Miles), I've been listening to lots of the Fab Four for the past few years (he first turned Beatlemaniac when he was two, I think, with "Here Comes the Sun"). And one thing I agree with Mann (and others) about: SPLHCB is deservedly influential, but it also has some surprising weaknesses. The hit songs on it are brilliant, but the other tunes are only very good, even though many songwriters would kill to write even one as good. "She's Leaving Home" has been singled out in some of the commentaries I have read as a weak song, but all you need to do to hear how brilliant the music is is here Brad Mehldau play it on jazz piano.

I was surprised to learn elsewhere that "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" were supposed to be on the album, but were not put on it because they had been released as a single already.

Colin Will, "Sushi & Chips"

I recently read Colin Will's Sushi & Chips. Here are a few good lines from the book:

seabirds sound their evening calls,
muted, sad, because we think it so.

("Hedderwick")

... the tide's lapping advance,
a twice-daily fish delivery system.

("Heron")

Childhood's a passive thing:
memories are of happenings,
not doings.

("A Windfall")

a blue splash—
a silver fish
flies up to the branch

("More Haiku")

The first two of these struck me with how they mixed natural description with something that disrupts the description: the human interpretation of the scene in the first case, the metaphor derived from human technology in the second. Technological metaphors in nature poetry:

SOUNDS OF SPRING

It's been quieter here
since the trained Tornados left
for the whirlwind of war—
until today.

The noise at first felt
rather than heard,
a road-drill in the sky, then
that flickering bass thump
got louder.

The Chinook starred
in a small blue gap,
twin rotors birling above
the fat body sycamored
from Lakenheath to Leuchars.

Special delivery, I'd guess,
something to shock the seagulls
and an old man painting his fence red.

In Ohio, where I grew up, tornadoes come in the summer. But here, the planes are signs of spring as sure as seagulls or any other natural image.

The relationship between technology and nature is also nicely highlighted by this wonderfully titled poem:

KIDNEY DONOR WEATHER

Summer shine, warm air, dry roads,
and the leathers come out.
Wintered bikes are serviced,
commuter car garaged for the weekend.

Time to zip past slow lines
of the drab, looking good,
feeling better, weightless on the crests,
forks telescoped heavy in the dips,
on the bends and bays beside Loch Lubnaig.

The line of today is endless and easy;
hands, feet, body, eyes, machine,
all one system for going forward,
for changing time into now,
mountains and water into scenery.

Twin lights are on, to be seen, to be sure,
and all other drivers are stupid, certain
to do the crazy, to miss the obvious,
to turn without signals, brake
from confusion, cross your line.

Helmet turns head into a bug’s eye,
but you remember how it sounded
scraping the road, how your elbow hit,
snapping clavicle. It won’t happen again,
not to you, not ever to you, not this sunny day.

As a vehement wearer of a helmet when bicycling, I can really relate to this poem. :-)

But Sushi & Chips also contains some more straightforward nature poetry:

SPARROWFALL

I held the little bird,
palm of one hand, still,
no need to form a kist
with the other.

Eyes were shut,
beak open and,
I saw, cracked
and blood-beaded.

Wing-shaped feather dust
on the kitchen window
a visual echo
of the sudden thump.

Back arched up slightly.
I still felt fast heart beats
flutter, then the moment
everything stopped.

— Or perhaps that is not as straightforward, after all.

The book also contains some striking poems about relationships, especially "Circumstantial Evidence" and "Foundations," but I'll let you get your own copy in order to read them.

Colloquial style

Jonathan Mayhew makes a point I have long wanted to make, but with such precision that I will just tip my hat to him without further comment:

"We think of a colloquial, direct style as easy to achieve, but if that were true then anybody could write as well as Eileen Myles. But this is obviously not the case. Not even Eileen Myles can write like this--all the time and at will. The directness of WCW and some modernist prose writers too is an achievement. It isn't even that easy to imitate."

Curse poems

David Lehman's "Curse" reminded me that I have been meaning to ask people to send me curse poems (titles, links, whole poems).

I first thought of this because of Martin Espada's "For the Jim Crow Mexican Restaurant" (which is on-line here, but you have to go to the end of the page to find it). I also like Glyn Maxwell's "Curse on a Child," and my friend Geoff Brock pointed me to Cynthia Huntington's "Curse One" and "Curse Two: The Naming," while Espada himself mentioned Pablo Neruda's "General Franco in Hell."

Others?

*

Whatever your father says you'll oppose
and believe you're acting on principle.

(David Lehman, "Curse")

DPP10

THE DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK TEN

Here are the poems to vote for in week ten of my Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, May 28, to Sunday, June 3):

64. from: The Book of the Dead Man, by Marvin Bell
65. Poplars, by Donald Revell
66. In Another Year of Fewer Disappointments, by Eliza Griswold
67. Inside the Maze (II, III, and IV), by Hadara Bar-Nadav
68. Auroras, by Joanna Klink
69. Ditchdigger, by Liane Strauss
70. Aftermath, by Forrest Hamer

The Rules:

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 7! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results, which might only be on June 8 or 9.

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.

Wolfgang Hilbig

bahnhof

grau grau graues durcheinander
von wo kein zug abfährt wo ein riesiger rabe
sich schwarz zwischen die schienen setzt
bahnhof das ist aller orte kältester nachts
schläft niemand

seht unsre gesichter vom laster zerfetzt und
wenn der bahnhof abfährt seht uns trinken
gefangenschaft trinken aus schmutzigem glas
trinken bis der teufel kommt sprechen
zu keinem und alternd noch immer uns wundern
über die gedanken des zerrauften haars

sommer winter jahrhunderte kommen vorüber
uns berühren sie nicht seht uns verweilen
im rauch der rasenden wartesäle einmal
weinen ein paar mal lachen und lauschen
wenn vor dem fenster ein betrunkner
wie verrückt einen namen schreit.

Wolfgang Hilbig (1941-2007), abwesenheit

DPP9 results

At one point, I was a bit concerned about the blog vote in this week's Daily Poem Project, because there had been only 9 votes, and 6 poems had received votes, with no poem getting more than two.

By now there have been 17 votes, and all 7 poems have received votes (only the second time in nine weeks that no poem has been shut out). The winner is 33rd & Kirkham, by C. Dale Young, with 4 votes, with two poems tied for second with 3 votes: A Stone Should Mark the Place, by Regan Good and Dialing While Intoxicated, by John Hennessy.

The class vote was also very close, with Young and Hennessy tying for first with four votes each, and The Well at the Broch of Gurness, by Kathleen Jamie receiving 3 votes (out of 14 votes cast).

Although I am a devoted admirer of C. Dale Young, I was a bit disappointed by Poetry Daily's choice of "33rd & Kirkham" to represent his new book The Second Person. I would have gone for "Proximity" or "Prognosis" instead; the latter, especially, would have easily received my vote. (Buy Young's briliant book to check it out.)

As it is, I chose between Jamie and Hennessy, and I went for Hennessy, because of the simultaneous economy and excess of the poem's language.

The comments to the blog included the following:

Donald Brown said...

I can't be dismissive like last week. This is all good stuff. All that careful, even, finely tuned verse that poetry in our time is best at. Which is a way of saying I'm not bowled over by great lyrical moments. The best for that is perhaps #60 by Regan Good, but lifting from Shakespeare (Lady M to her hubby: 'what's done cannot be undone") is a little suspect, to me. "The natural law is wearing winter's face" appeals to me though, and the poem is spooky. It's also suggestive where others are too deliberate, so it almost got my vote. Of the others: #57 Baker, my initial impression is that it's too long and doesn't fully orchestrate all its parts, so that I'm not convinced by all of it. Don't like the Keats part much, for instance. #59, Rose indicates to me the limits of the Poetry Daily enterprise: it's so concentrated I want to read it on paper. It seems unsuited to online poetry, for me. A very good narrative poem. #61, Hennessey, fun, but he's Irish and so of course his diction is interesting, but the subject matter doesn't seem all that striking; #62, Young, very nice, elegant, but seems already too familiar. My vote goes to #58, "The Well at the Broch of Gurness" by Kathleen Jamie which is evocative and elusive and lyrical in a way that appeals to me, mostly.

Bruce Loebrich said...

Here's my ranked list (my favorite is at the top):

60. A Stone Should Mark the Place, by Regan Good
57. Posthumous Man, by David Baker
62. 33rd & Kirkham, by C. Dale Young
59. Ablution, by Rachel Rose
63. This Morning, by Sarah Sawyer
61. Dialing While Intoxicated, by John Hennessy
58. The Well at the Broch of Gurness, by Kathleen Jamie

SarahJane said...

I thought this was a particularly good week. Couple of strong contenders here, but without wavering I vote for Regan Good. cheers

Felix said...

My vote goes to C. Dale Young. "33rd & Kirkham" is, I suppose, an Alba poem. Alba is the dawn which unfaithful lovers dread. But the lovers in Young's poem are not necessarily unfaithful; they may simply not find room for the love, except at night, and in poetry itself.

dhsh said...

Top 3 are in an almost dead heat (to my ear).

#1: 33rd & Kirkham .... by C. Dale Young

#2: Ablution .... by Rachel Rose

#3: A Stone Should Mark the Place
.... by Regan Good

Next 2 are also almost-a-tie.

#4: The Well at the Broch of Gurness
.... by Kathleen Jamie

#5: Dialing While Intoxicated
.... by John Hennessy

Last 2 "lost" me in one or more ways.

#6: This Morning .... by Sarah Sawyer

#7: Posthumous Man .... by David Baker

We're nine weeks into the project, with three weeks to go. Here are the nine winners of the blog votes:

1. Christian Wiman, "The River"
2. Tom Sleigh, "Blueprint"
3. Jessica Fisher, "The Promise of Nostos"
4. Allen Grossman, "A Gust of Wind"
5. Laure-Anne Bosselaar, "Friends"
6. Robin Ekiss, "Vanitas Mundi"
7. Maurice Manning, "Where Sadness Comes From"
8. Reginald Shepherd, "Eve's Awakening"
9. C. Dale Young, "33rd & Kirkham"

Week 12 will be from June 11 to June 17; I will post a call for votes for the above list of finalists (plus the three remaining winners) on June 24, with at least a week to allow people to choose among them.

For comparison, here are the winners of the first nine weeks of voting by the class (poems that tied for first are given letters along with the week numbers):

1. Derek Walcott, "The Castaway"
2a. C. D. Wright, "Dear night dear shade dear executioner"
2b. Elizabeth Bradfield, "Industry"
2c. Paul Zimmer, "Suck It Up"
3. Josephine Dickinson, "The Bargain"
4a. Mike Dockins, "Poem of Low Latitudes"
4b. Janice N. Harrington, "Shaking the Grass"
5. Laure-Anne Bosselaar, "Friends"
6. Kevin McFadden, "The Ides of Amer-I-Can"
7. Maurice Manning, "Where Sadness Comes From"
8. Reginald Shepherd, "Eve's Awakening"
9a. C. Dale Young, "33rd & Kirkham"
9b. John Hennessy, "Dialing While Intoxicated"

Henrik Nordbrandt

A few lines from Henrik Nordbrandt, The Hangman's Lament, trans. from the Danish by Thom Satterlee (Green Integer, 2003):

I asked for a shadow and you gave me a nail / long, rusty, and bent
("Near Levkas")

when the storm carries everything else away
including the memory of a freckled girlfriend
out over the bluing lake hidden behind the bare hills
("The Glass Door": page down at the link for the whole poem)

For every nightingale silenced
a gray straw burns in the grass.
("May Morning")

Nordbrandt has an exceptional feel for physical objects:

PRAGMATIC

The things that were here before you died
and the things that have come after:

To the former belong, first of all,
your clothes, the jewelry and the photographs
and the name of the woman you were named after
and who also died young...
But also a couple receipts, the arrangement
of a certain corner in the living room,
a shirt you ironed for me
and which I keep carefully
under my pile of shirts,
certain pieces of music, and the mangy
dog that still stands around
smiling stupidly, as though you were here.

To the latter belong my new fountain pen,
a well-known perfume
on the skin of a woman I hardly even know
and the new light bulbs I put in the bedroom lamp
by whose light I read about you
in every book I try to read.

The former remind me that you were,
the latter that you no longer are.

It is the near indistinguishableness
I find hardest to bear.

LATE SUMMER, 1991

Rain on a white table top
still reflects the drifting clouds
hours after the rain has stopped.
I dry the table with an old rag
a fragment
from one of your blouses, I think.
The ground is ready.
The leaves can let go of their grip
it is late
and gray enough for it.
A summer rushed like a landslide
down to the ground.
And there is dirt on the scrap
of flowered material you wore
one fine day in Algeciras.

Light Quarterly 55

The Winter 2006-2007 issue of Light Quarterly features Max Gutmann. His poems are quite funny, but the interview with him is even funnier:

"Every poem should have something to teach us. The capital of Venezuela for instance."

"I write poetry because poems are like children—only you don't have to deal with soiled diapers or spend an arm and a leg sending them to college."

"In times of great social upheaval, people will continue to turn to poetry in their search for answers. ... That or alcohol."

L.Q. asked, "How is writing for children different than writing for adults?" M.G. answered, "You mean other than the obvious, going light on the obscenities, that sort of thing?"

*

Melissa Balmain's "Your Rejection Slip, Annotated" deserves special mention, as does Amit Majmudar's "Phone Tree." I was also delighted to read that Richard Wakefield's East of Early Winters won the Richard Wilbur Award for 2006 and has been published by the University of Evansville Press (following in the footsteps of another Light contributor, A. E. Stallings).

And Gutmann's There Was a Young Girl from Verona: A Limerick Cycle Based on the Complete Dramatic Works of Shakespeare is available from Doggerel Daze.

My home

My home is a white dome
under me.
It is very quiet.
My home is a bright dome
over me.
It is very quiet.
I rest
in my domed home
in the middle of a small sea.
Me.
I am very quiet
sleeping.
The dome cracks.
The sea leaves.
I wake
cheeping.

Karla Kuskin, Moon, Have You Met My Mother?

DPP9 voting still open

I'll still accept votes for week 9 of the Daily Poem Project today (Friday, June 1), as the voting is very close and I'd love to see things shuffled up a bit still. Here are the poems to choose from:

57. Posthumous Man, by David Baker
58. The Well at the Broch of Gurness, by Kathleen Jamie
59. Ablution, by Rachel Rose
60. A Stone Should Mark the Place, by Regan Good
61. Dialing While Intoxicated, by John Hennessy
62. 33rd & Kirkham, by C. Dale Young
63. This Morning, by Sarah Sawyer

You can vote by email or by a comment here or on the original post linked above. Vote for only ONE poem!