Concerts I've attended

So there have been some lists being posted in various places about concerts you've attended. Here's my contribution to this bit of self-exposure.

1. The Grateful Dead (80+ shows)
2. Jerry Garcia Band (dozens more, including the acoustic band and the acoustic duo with John Kahn)
3. Linda Ronstadt (my first concert)
4. Livingston Taylor (opened for Linda)
5. James Taylor (years after Livingston)
6. Kansas
7. Boston
8. Billy Joel
9. Sammy Hager (opening for Boston; 3-9 are still in the 70s)
10. The Police (now we're in the 80s)
11. Laurie Anderson
12. The Who
13. The Clash (opened for The Who and blew them away)
14. T-Bone Burnett (opened for The Who)
15. Santana (five or six times)
16. The Fabulous Thunderbirds (opened for Santana once)
17. Stevie Ray Vaughan (four or five times)
18. Talking Heads (twice)
19. B-52s
20. English Beat
21. The Blasters
22. The Bangles
23. Los Lobos
24. Asleep at the Wheel
25. John Hartford
26. The Seldom Scene
27. Sweet Honey in the Rock
28. David Lindley (opened for Santana and the Grateful Dead at Angel's Camp)
29. The Neville Bros. (opening for the Grateful Dead a few times)
30. Penelope Houston (a few times in Germany)
31. Lou Reed (in Berlin, but not performing Berlin)
32. Bonnie Raitt (opening for Lou and once for Jerry Garcia)
33. Violent Femmes (opening for Lou; Gordon Gano and Bonnie did the "colored girls" bit on "Walk on the Wild Side")
34. Lyle Lovett (also opening for Lou)
35. 17 Hippies
36. Oingo Boingo
37. The Vapors
38. Bob Dylan (eight or nine times)
39. Neil Young (about the same)
40. The Minutemen
41. The Meat Puppets
42. Van Morrison
43. Joni Mitchell
44. Leonard Cohen
45. Tom Waits (just before Big Time was filmed in LA)
46. Elvis Costello
47. Michelle Shocked
48. Billy Bragg (with Michelle opening for him)
49. Richard Thompson ("Pump It Up" on solo acoustic, rocking as hard as the Attractions)
50. Greg Brown (sadly, only twice)
51. Chris Smither
52. Alison Brown
53. David-Jacobs Strain
54. Northern Lights (the last four all at a festival where I went to see Greg Brown)
55. Arlo Guthrie
56. Wenzel
57. Al Stewart
58. Doc Watson
59. The Dinosaurs (not Dinosaur, Jr., but a band with Barry Melton, John Cipollina, and Robert Hunter)
60. Black Uhuru
61. King Sunny Adé (with Black Uhuru opening)
62. Bob Weir and Rob Wasserman
63. Tuck and Patti
64. Michael Hedges
65. Eric Clapton
66. Joe Cocker
67. Jimmy Page and Paul Rodgers
68. Ronnie Lane (these last four at the Cow Palace)
69. Pink Floyd (in Hannover in the post-Roger Waters era)
70. Phish (sadly, only twice, in Paris and Strasbourg)
71. Henry Kaiser
72. Peter Gabriel
73. Glass Eye
74. John Wesley Harding (opening for somebody, but I don't remember who it was)
75. Varmint (Wayne Horvitz's cover band)
76. Jefferson Starship
77. Kaki King
78. Dream Syndicate
79. Dave Matthews (opening for Dylan once)

Then I'll add in local bands in places I have lived (and post a separate list of jazz artists I have heard):

80. Union Soul
81. The Verre Perdu
82. The Druids
83. Phil Dolby
84. Zsa Zsa House
85. The Heptiles
86. Missy and the Boogiemen
87. Walking Down Brenton Road
88. Natterjack and the Lost Passengers
89. Fucking Beautiful
90. Pseudo Boys
91. Robert Rich
92. Eliana Burki
93. Markus Bachmann
94. Basement Bros.
95. Blues Nettwork
96. Debonair
97. Handsome Hank and His Lonesome Boys
98. Seraina
99. Leonti
100. Arf
101. Cloudride
102. Mañana
103. Crop Circles

Idleness, defiance

Somewhere (where? I don't remember, and my internet searches have not been successful; perhaps in his diaries?), Franz Kafka wrote that it is only our moments of idleness that count.

That crossed my mind when I started re-reading Mark Rowlands's The Philosopher and the Wolf and noticed the clear statement of the book's thesis that appears at the end of the acknowledgments: "... it is only our defiance that redeems us."

When I first read the book, I even read the acknowledgments, but the thesis did not jump out at me—perhaps because it is only the whole book that makes it seem like a general statement, and not Rowlands's own peculiar take on things.

But which is it that redeems us: idleness or defiance?

It says here you're 27

Here's the song going through my head today (my 45th birthday):



Dig David Lindley's finger-picked violin solo!

It says here you're 27, but that's impossible.

1952 Vincent Black Lightning

A wonderful view of Richard Thompson's fingers as he plays one of his most brilliant songs:

The Philosopher and the Wolf

I'm reading The Philosopher and the Wolf, by Mark Rowlands. A truly exhilarating book, sort of a cross between J. M. Coetzee on animals and Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. I'll probably say something more explicit about it later, but right now I am reading it with the Cartesian approach: read it first like a novel, then read it again and start really thinking about it. (For the full description of his reading method, see the end of my post from February about Descartes.)

Sugar Snow

It's amazing how vivid a 30-plus-year-old memory of something I read can be:

"It's a sugar snow," he said.

Laura put her tongue quickly to a little bit of the white snow that lay in a fold of his sleeve. It was nothing but wet on her tongue, like any snow. She was glad that nobody had seen her taste it.

What was even more remarkable about my memory of this passage from Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods, which I have been reading to Miles and (mostly) to Luisa bit by bit over the past few weeks, is that I felt it coming: as the passage came closer, I knew that something was about to be described that I had been fascinated by as a child, even though I had never thought of it in the meantime.

Subway Moon

I saw Roy Nathanson's book Subway Moon in the "new arrivals" list on Poetry Daily, and as I am a fan of his music, I thought I'd check out his poetry. It's a beautifully done book (apart from the sans serif font), with lots of photos, and the poems are worth a look, especially if you're into a more relaxed, "improvisational" free verse. But the prose piece at the end is what really moved me, a recollection of Roy's father in the nursing home, still (or again) playing his sax, all the old beautiful tunes he used to play in all-white bands in the 20s and 30s. (It hit close to home, as my father recently moved into assisted living.)

What I did not know until I just did a search for Subway Moon is that it is also a CD.

I know of a few rock and pop and folk musicians who also publish poetry, but Nathanson is the first jazz musician I've come across who does. Or have I missed someone?

Origin of Species

The absolutely spectacular Chris Smither. A very funny song with utterly brilliant guitar playing!

Miles on his favorite bands

While we were on vacation in the U.S., Miles told someone about his favorite bands: The Who for something violent, XTC for something cool, and Phish for something beautiful.

Voices

Why should poets try to find a "voice" when there are so many voices in our heads? And mostly it is the welter of other people's voices that speaks to us most truly. (Insert Borges reference here.) Something overheard in a bar, something murmured and misunderstood, something someone didn't mean to say. — Just a few thoughts after re-reading this poem, "Voices," (the first of the two at the link). It's from Rob A. Mackenzie's The Opposite of Cabbage.

(And once you've read it, too, get yourself a copy of Rob's book here!)

Six Fragments from Johannes Kepler's Last Letter to Galileo

The last of George Keithley's "Six Fragments from Johannes Kepler's Last Letter to Galileo" begins as follows:

Like all men who think, I struggle
against my nature.

The enjambment gives this an extra twist, allowing for two readings of Kepler's struggle, one general, the second a more specific "struggle / against my nature."

But I disagree with the more specific reading: for me, thinking can be a struggle, but not one "against my nature"!

Keithley does not leave it at that, of course. Here's the whole sixth "fragment":

Like all men who think, I struggle
against my nature. Wherein
I acknowledge what I hear
or dream is but the ghost
of those heavenly harmonics
that move the mind to dance:
Why not, then, call it music
and admit our souls are lost?

I struggle to think about those lines, about how to comment on them—but I don't struggle to feel them.

(Still, "just because you feel it doesn't mean it's there," as the Radiohead song goes ...)

What the Mind's Eye Sees

In Der fliegende Berg, Christoph Ransmayr juxtaposes two different ways of looking at the things of this world:

Was bedeute eine Gestalt denn schon?
Es könne doch auch eine Nebelkrähe
bloß als kluger Vogel erscheinen
und zugleich ein Bote des Himmels sein—

ebenso wie das über einen Grat ins Tal einfallende
Morgenlicht zugleich den Sonnenstand und
den Lidschlag eines Gottes anzeigen könne,

und erst recht erscheine etwa ein Firnfeld,
das hoch oben unter den Gletschern den Mondschein spiegele,
einem schlaflosen Hirten als ein silbernes Tor in den Felsen
oder als ein Stück offenen Himmels!
und sei in Wahrheit? eben doch nur Schnee,
Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr. (198)

A crow can be just a clever bird as well as a messenger from heaven; the morning light on a ridge can tell you where the sun is and also be the blinking of a God; a field of snow in the moonlight can be a silver gate in the cliffs or, "in truth?", just snow from last year. (See here for a discussion of this passage in German.)

For the narrator's brother Liam, only one of these perspectives is valid, while Ransmayr's Tibetan nomads are able to accept both of them at the same time.

George Keithley's The Starry Messenger, his sequence of poems about Galileo Galilei, makes clear, in the poem "What the Mind's Eye Sees," that Liam's perspective can be called "scientific." Keithley's Galileo determines what the Milky Way is (a huge swathe of invididual stars) to the exclusion of other understandings of it:

He reports the Milky Way is not a vaporous river.
Nor is it a stream of milk from Hera's breast.

Nor is it the spine of the sky—the pale backbone
of the black beast whose belly is our home.

Nor is it the ancient route of a raven's flight
through a night of snow.

Nor is it the path of souls descending from heaven to earth.
Nor the spirits of the dead departing to the other world.

The poet in me is inclined to accept the double perspective of Ransmayr's nomads and to defend the images that Keithley's Galileo refutes. But the materialist in me protests that metaphors and symbolism do not describe the world. Then the poet in me asks, "What do metaphors and symbols do to the world then?"

Chimes (Adam Fieled)

The relationship between words and music is something I ponder often, as someone who writes both poems and songs. John Gallaher wrote sometime on his blog that "poetry is as good as music," and of course I agree. Here's the beginning of #26 in Adam Fieled's prose-poem sequence Chimes, capturing beautifully how the words associated with music can provide motivation for hearing words on their own as an art form:

Through music, words emerged in my consciousness as another thing. There were musicians who used words and they showed me. I saw that combinations of words could be molten and that the fires they ignited could be contagious. They could be a door that one could break through into another reality: a place hyper-real, full of things that had the palpable reality of what is called real, but were nonetheless better than real: voices channeled from ether, expounding heroic worlds of oceanic expansive experience.

Songs that did that for me when I was in my early teens: Bob Seger, "Turn the Page" (though I never owned it); Aerosmith, "Dream On"; Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody"; Dire Straits, "In the Gallery" (starting to move away from singles here!); Steely Dan, "Home at Last." I'd say it's when I started getting more into the last two that I began to move from pop to poetry.

The Toe of Human Understanding

A trait I admire in poets (and other writers) is the ability to hear the poetry in the speech of people who would probably reach for their guns (metaphorical or literal) if you said they sound poetic. As in this poem by Dilys Rose, from Twinset, her collaboration with Karen Knight, published by Knucker Press (there's a telling illustration by Polly Thelwall, but you'll have to buy the book in order to see that!):

THE TOE OF HUMAN UNDERSTANDING

Here's me, out by the courthouse for a fag,
in the wedding suit, tattoos mostly under the cuffs
of the jacket. It's pissing down. Nobody's about. Not even
a piper to nip the heid with Wha Haes and dirges.
My legal rep's off round the corner for a latte
with the Filth. Just me and Maister Enlightenment
up on his plinth, a traffic cone on the brainy conk,
pigeon on the neb, rain dripping from his chin
onto the Spartan—no the neo-Classical gear.
What would any self-respecting empirical philosopher
be thinking, posing in some eighteenth century
town house studio, barefoot, near enough bare-arsed,
kitted out in a low-slung toga? No central heating then:
even in the height of summer, it could have been Baltic.
Psshht. No joy in soggy tobacco. If only the boy
had been here in the flesh to gen me up on how to frame
a foolproof argument, plead my case for the fallibility
of human understanding. But no. Only his likeness
for company, gazing into the middle distance.
I rub his toe, his big green toe—verdigris—and hope
some wisdom will rub off on me. And on my legal rep.
(If he hasn't a clue it follows that I haven't a chance in hell.)
Read about this nonsense in The News. Folk say the toe
of David Hume is wearing thin from all the rubbing.
What would he think about his countryfolk resortimg—still—
to such irrational carry on? Right. Time for the verdict.

Andrew Philip's Virtual Tour

An interview with Andrew Philip as part of his virtual book tour on the publication of his collection The Ambulance Box.

*

AS: Nobody would fail to notice the presence of Scots words in your poems. But as an English-language poet living in a German-speaking city (Basel), I was also quite struck by the presence of German words and phrases in several poems.

AP: I spent a very formative 20 months living in Berlin before I went to university in Edinburgh, during which my German became quite fluent. That was 15 plus years ago and those skills have undoubtedly atrophied to an extent, but the experience still exerts an influence on me.

The German words and phrases are there for different reasons in different poems, but I suppose they all function to give the work a more international — or at least a more European — context. They also serve one of the functions that using Scots and Gaelic serves: as a playful resistance to the international weight of English.

AS: German and Scots intersect in "Berlin / Berlin / Berlin," but also in your Scots versions of Rilke poems.

AP: I first encountered Rilke when I was in Berlin. The tutor of the German class I went to gave me a gorgeous Insel Verlag edition of his collected poems, so my first experience of a Rilke poem has almost always been in the original, not in translation.

My first attempt at translating Rilke was a Scots translation of "Der Panther" when I was a student. However, I was kicked into translating him more seriously when a couple of friends set about a version of "Herbsttag". Their first draft rendered "Der Sommer war sehr gross" as "Summer was opulent." It just made me think no, no, no! Too high.

I began by translating into English but soon thought that it might be more effective putting Rilke into Scots because the sound of the language is generally closer to German than English is. I soon came to feel that I'd be doing my fellow Scots a service if I could provide them with strong Scots translations of Rilke and am very pleased that even non-Scots seem to enjoy the pieces in the book hugely.

Another great German poet I came across in Berlin is Celan. I translated some of his poems into Scots when I was a student, but those versions have stayed in a virtual drawer for a long time. I might return to him at some point, but David Kinloch has some good Scots versions in his collection In My Father's House.

*

AS: "Not everything / is as simple as it might seem." Is it safe to read the last sentence of "Wilderness with Two Figures" as a summary of Andrew Philip's poetics?

AP: It is, though you should probably wear a hard hat. I'm certainly not interested in writing poetry in which everything is on the surface and straightforward. I'm not terribly interested in reading that kind of poetry either. I hope that the reader enjoys my poems enough and/or is intrigued enough to revisit them.

AS: Given that, what about these lines from "To Bake the Bread"?

Perhaps you call us 'simple' for our ways—
I have heard it said the educated do.
Why wish for a life more complicated
When each day here is difficult enough?

AP: I did say to wear a hard hat! "Not everything" is not the same as "nothing", of course, but I think there's an emotional complexity to that poem that belies the surface simplicity. Those lines are about investing the speaker with a dignity we can ignore all too easily in our seemingly more sophisticated culture. For that character, there's a lot going on under the surface, some of which comes out in the dream he recounts in the poem.

*

AS: "In Answer to the Question" provides a numbered list of sentences and sentence fragments. I enjoy the oblique connections between the parts, but am I supposed to be able to make the same connections you intended?

AP: There is a question to which all those lines are oblique answers, very oblique in some cases. It was part of a writing exercise on an Arvon course I attended back in 2003. However, I think the poem has grown away from that initial impulse to an extent. Every reader brings to the poem — any poem — their own experiences and understanding, so they might well make connections other than the ones I initially intended. I'm comfortable with that, especially in relation to a somewhat cryptic list poem such as that one.

AS: "In Question to the Answers?" is more immediately coherent, because of the many repetitions of phrases. But that also makes me think about the individual questions less than I thought about the individual statements in "In Answer to the Question."

AP: Yes, I can see why that would be so. To my mind, "In Question to the Answers?" is, in a sense, less coherent in that the play with language, rather than a programme imposed from outside, is the driving force. It may not be programmatic in the way that "In Answer to the Question" is, but I certainly feel it to be trying to express something — ettling at something, as we say in Scots — something about unease and fear, primarily. Perhaps the underlying inchoateness of what it's saying also enacts the nature of that unease and fear.

Luisa's shopping list

Luisa (5) wrote this shopping list the other day. It's in lovely phonetic German and English:

Brot
Bota
Gus
Bläzle

That's Brot = bread; Bota = butter; Gus = juice; Bläzle = Plätzle (cookies)!

Sara on English

Luisa, Sara, and I were in the pool at my sister Sara's house in Massachusetts, and we'd all been chattering away in English for a while (which does not go without saying in my daughters' cases, as they both are quite happy to talk German to me when I talk English to them), and Sara suddenly said:

"Ich alles English say."

Hysterical laughter on her father and her sister's parts!

Box of Rain

Maybe you're tired and broken
Your tongue is twisted
with words half spoken
and thoughts unclear

The lines that made me think of my Dad today, while driving to the supermarket.

On the video below, the song starts about two minutes in.

Radiohead, Phish, Wilco

Three bands that many people may not associate with each other, but I love 'em all, because they all write great songs.

Signs

At the Discovery Museum in Acton, MA, today:

How Learning Occurs: "Building a robot that works involves building a robot that doesn't work and then figuring out what is wrong with it." (Benjamin Erwin)

[As I like to do, I googled to find out who Erwin is. He has something to do with LEGO!]

On the road on the way there and back:

Thickly settled.

Hidden driveway.

Whistles not blown. [Before a train crossing.]

*

Not a sign, but what Andrea said as we were trying to get the kids organized to leave the museum:

"We never get anywhere, and when we are somewhere, we never get back from there."

Paul Muldoon on Colbert

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Paul Muldoon
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Stephen Colbert in Iraq

So did Muldoon make it to number one on Amazon?

Against Naturism; If I Had Known

Roddy Lumsden's "Against Naturism" (from his collection The Book of Love) presents the case against nudism—more precisely, the case for clothes:

For me, I have to see the clothes come off:
the way a button’s thumbed through cotton cloth —
a winning move in some exotic game

with no set rules but countless permutations —
or how a summer dress falls to the floor
with momentary mass and with a plash
that stirs us briefly as we ply our passion;

For me, that summer dress's whispering fall quietly echoes Greg Brown's "If I Had Known" (from his CD "Down in There"; covered by Human Shields last Friday):

She was older than me I guess;
summer was invented for her to wear that dress.

I'd never pictured the taking off of that dress quite so explicitly until I read about it in Lumsden's poem. (Another lovely feature of the poem is the striking word "amidkiss"—as in undoing a clasp "amidkiss.")

Animated Poem

Here's an animated poem by my friend Geoff Brock.

Human Shields, Birsfelden, June 19, 2009

Here's the setlist for the Human Shields concert last night at Sissy's Place in Birsfelden (demos of the songs with an asterisk can be heard on the Human Shields MySpace page):

The Morning After the Night Before*
The Captain
Friend of the Devil (Jerry Garcia / Robert Hunter)
Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther (words by A. E. Stallings)
Land without Nightingales*
Long Enough
Alisa's Bridge
Tambourine*
Penny a Point
Rumpus*
Gingerbread Blues
Turned in Time* (Markus Bachmann / Andrew Shields)
Judas Kiss*
Pale Horse
If I Had Known (Greg Brown)
Better Never Than Late*

You Know I Know
You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (Bob Dylan)

Many thanks to all the people who came to the concert! It was great to have such an attentive and friendly audience.

Photos and video and audio to follow eventually.

Human Shields in the Basler Zeitung

If you can read German, you can read this article promoting my band's first full concert tomorrow night. (Click on the image to enlarge.)

Krugman on right-wing terror

Paul Krugman's op-ed is worth taking seriously:

Yes, the worst terrorist attack in our history was perpetrated by a foreign conspiracy. But the second worst, the Oklahoma City bombing, was perpetrated by an all-American lunatic. Politicians and media organizations wind up such people at their, and our, peril.

If we're going to have laws that define certain crimes as terrorism and hence worthy of more serious punishment, then we should apply them to American terrorists of the right. As Lindsay Beyerstein suggests, Operation Rescue might well be a terrorist organization according to the terms of the Patriot Act and other recent laws:

The feds will probably stop short of investigating Tiller's murder as a terrorist attack. That designation would unleash vast federal powers to investigate large swathes of the radical anti-choice movement and hold accountable anyone who gives them the slightest aid and comfort. The feds are simply not prepared for the political fallout that would ensue if, say, Operation Rescue were officially designated as a terrorist organization.

Privilege

Brian Spears on Incertus:

The thing about privilege is that if you have it, you might not even realize it. It's not something you have to actively seek in order to benefit from--most of the time it just happens. There might not even be any conscious intent on the part of the person extending the privilege--it's just an after-effect of a society where white-maleness has been privileged for so long that it feels natural to both extend and receive it.

Celan's Mandelstam through Joris and Shields

Pierre Joris posted his translation of Paul Celan's translation of a Mandelstam poem. I added my version of the same poem as a comment to his post. A great poem refracted through three languages!

Leonti in Basel, June 10, 2009

Nadia Leonti and Stefan Strittmatter
Kuppel, Basel, June 10, 2009

Leonti played a brilliant concert last night at the Kuppel in Basel, celebrating the release of "Everyone/I". Get yourself a copy of this brilliant recording! (Full disclosure: I wrote two of the lyrics.)

Lyrikline

New poets on lyrikline recently include the American poet Christian Hawkey. And there are, as usual, many new translations into English for your reading pleasure: Karol Chmel (Slovakia), Mária Ridzoňová Ferenčuhová (Slovakia), Michal Habaj (Slovakia), Katarína Kucbelová (Slovakia), Branko Maleš (Croatia), Sonja Manojlović (Croatia), Sibila Petlevski (Croatia), Adam Pluszka (Poland), Peter Šulej (Slovakia), Gonçalo M. Tavares (Portugal), Torild Wardenær (Norway).

Psycho Killer 1978

At first, it struck me how young they all look here, even in comparison to the Stop Making Sense movie a few years later. But then I checked their dates on Wikipedia, and they were all in their late twenties even when this was recorded.

Talking Heads: still one of the best bands I have ever seen live!

Lord Tolstoy of Realistica

My friend Don Brown on War and Peace: "What makes Tolstoy the lord of realist fiction is that he knows that what 'everyone' feels is what convention dictates they feel, but that what each individual feels is what their own natures dictate."

I've been looking at War and Peace as my epic for this summer (after the Aeneid last summer), and Don happens to be reading it, too, which definitely makes me much more likely to choose it!

Urs Engeler Editor can still be saved

If you're interested in German poetry, please order a book from Urs Engeler Editor, and pass the idea on to anyone you know who is also interested in German poetry. See the announcement on the webpage.

I ordered three books!

Federer-Haas

After Rafael Nadal lost at the French Open yesterday, I talked with several people who dismissed Tommy Haas as a potential threat to Roger Federer in their match today. In third set, though, the score was 6-7, 5-7, 3-4, 30-40 on Federer's serve, Haas had a break point to serve for the match, and I was thinking, "See, Haas is a dangerous, canny veteran!"

On that break point, Federer ran around a backhand and drilled a crosscourt forehand, a shot he'd been missing all day—but this one went in, and Federer proceeded to win the next nine games, and then the match in the fifth set: 6-7, 5-7, 6-4, 6-0, 6-2.

All I can say is, "Roger, don't do that to me again in the next three rounds!" :-)

Per Say

While searching for something else, I came across this great eggcorn that I had never seen before: per say. 419,000 hits on Google, so it's a pretty common one. See the Eggcorn Database entry.

(If you haven't come across the expression "eggcorn" before, see the Wiki page.)

What if they could vote ...

Urs Engeler Editor

Bad news for German-language poetry: the Basel-based publisher Urs Engeler Editor is closing its doors (hat tip to Matthias Kehle). Perhaps Urs should have tried something like what Chris Hamilton-Emery is doing with Salt, starting a campaign of "ein Buch kaufen."

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Final Round Results

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, FINAL ROUND RESULTS

The winner of the final round of my fifth Daily Poem Project (see the call for votes here) is Cataract op, by Edward Field, which received 6 votes out of 29 cast.

David Bottoms, A Chat with My Father, came in second with 5 votes, with Jack Gilbert, Not Easily, in third place with 4 votes. Three poems (by Jason Gray, Hester Knibbe, and Andrew Hudgins) received 3 votes each.

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

The winners of the first four Daily Poem Projects:

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

Leonti, "Everyone / I"

"Everyone / I" is (Nadia) Leonti's first solo CD, and it's available now from Faze Records, featuring "Tundral Glories" and "He Who Hesitates," with lyrics by yours truly. Plus the astonishingly beautiful "Poor Souls," with lyrics by Eric Facon. And the brilliant Stefan Strittmatter is on bass.

Get yourself a copy! [By buying one, that is! :-)]

Sebald

As Terry at the Vertigo blog pointed out here, today would have been W. G. Sebald's 65th birthday.

Das Schreiben ist notwendig, nicht die Literatur. (W.G.S.)

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Final Round Call for Votes

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, FINAL ROUND

Here are the poems to vote for in the final round of my fifth Daily Poem Project. They are the winners of the twelve rounds from Monday, February 16, to Sunday, May 10 (each week's poems being those that appeared on Poetry Daily that week; week 5 ended in a tie, hence the two poems from that week):

1: Sherod Santos, Film Noir.
2: Edward Field, Cataract op.
3: David Bottoms, A Chat with My Father.
4: David Schloss, The Myth.
5a: Jason Gray, Letter to the Unconverted
5b: David Huerta, Before Saying Any of the Great Words (tr. Mark Schafer).
6: Stacey Lynn Brown, Cradle Song II.
7: Jack Gilbert, Not Easily.
8: Hester Knibbe, Lava and Sand (tr. Jacquelyn Pope).
9: Louis Simpson, Ishi
10: Andrew Hudgins, The Cow.
11: Christian Wiman, Sitting Down to Breakfast Alone.
12: Jennifer Grotz, Landscape with Arson.

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 24! But you can still vote as long as I have not posted the results.

FEEL FREE TO POST THIS CALL FOR VOTES ON OTHER BLOGS WITH A LINK TO MINE (or on Facebook, or wherever). The more, the ... well, more work for me, but more fun, too! :-)

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week 12 results

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK TWELVE RESULTS

The winner of the twelfth week of my fifth Daily Poem Project is Jennifer Grotz, Landscape with Arson, which received 8 votes out of 27 cast.

Three poems tied for second with four votes each: Malcolm de Chazal, Translations from Poèmes (tr. Karina Borowicz and Ben Admussen), Cleopatra Mathis, Survival: A Guide, and Michael Hofmann, Family Holidays.

My thanks to everyone who voted. I will be posting the call for votes for the final round (the winners of the twelve weeks against each other) in few minutes.

Human Shields and Phil Dolby, Sissy's Place, Birsfelden, June 19, 2009

Human Shields (Dany Demuth, Christoph Meneghetti, and Andrew Shields) will be playing at Sissy's Place in Birsfelden (Muttenzerstrasse 17) on June 19, 2009. Phil Dolby will be opening.

Click on the poster to see a large version. (There's a Facebook event for this here.)

George Szirtes in Basel

George Szirtes has posted a few lines about his visit to Basel, with a lovely photograph of the ferry across the Rhine. My thanks to him and to Roddy Lumsden for their excellent joint reading last night at Bergli Books!

The Painting in Elizabeth Bishop's "Poem"

If you, like me, are a reader of Elizabeth Bishop who has wondered about the painting described in her "Poem," then you do not need to wonder any longer: John Felstiner has published it in his new book, Can Poetry Save the Earth? There's an article about the book here.

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week Twelve Call for Votes

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK TWELVE

Here are the poems to vote for in the twelfth and final week of the fifth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, May 4, to Sunday, May 10):

May 10: Esther Jansma, The Word for Lion (tr. Francis R. Jones)
May 9: Malcolm de Chazal, Translations from Poèmes (tr. Karina Borowicz and Ben Admussen)
May 8: Cleopatra Mathis, Survival: A Guide
May 7: Kim Addonizio, Storm Catechism
May 6: Jennifer Grotz, Landscape with Arson
May 5: Carl Dennis, Disgust
May 4: Michael Hofmann, Family Holidays

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 15! But you can still vote as long as I have not posted the results, which I will do by Sunday, May 17, at the latest. When I post the results of week 12, I will also post the call for votes for the final round, with all the winners (and co-winners) of the twelve weeks.

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 was Andrew Hudgins, The Cow.
The winner of week eleven was Christian Wiman, Sitting Down to Breakfast Alone.

Branford Marsalis with the Dead

A must for all Deadheads! Fire up "Fire on the Mountain" with Branford!

The Fifth Daily Poem Project, Week Eleven Results

THE FIFTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK ELEVEN RESULTS

The winner of the eleventh week of my fifth Daily Poem Project is Christian Wiman, Sitting Down to Breakfast Alone, which received 5 votes out of 17 cast.

Jim Harrison, Age Sixty-Nine, came in second with 3 votes, and the other nine votes were almost evenly distributed among the other five poems (four receiving two, one receiving one).

My thanks to everyone who voted. The call for votes for week twelve (the last week before the final round) will be up tomorrow morning (Sunday, May 10).

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 was Andrew Hudgins, The Cow.

Nadia Leonti

Two songs that I wrote lyrics for, "Tundral Glories" and "He Who Hesitates," are on Nadia Leonti's forthcoming CD, and you can hear them, along with other tunes from the CD, on Nadia's MySpace page.

Human Shields links

I've now put links for the sites of my band Human Shields up on the right-hand side of the page.

New Human Shields songs

I just realized that I forgot to post an announcement about this: I've put five new recordings on the MySpace page of my band Human Shields. Check 'em out!

A Purposeless Universe

Sometimes other people say things just perfectly. Here's something from Incertus:

I don't think there is a grand, over-arching meaning to the universe. I think it just is, and that we're damned lucky to have developed at all, that this life is all we've got and that we'd better make the most of it.

And I think this is the ultimate disconnect between religious people who rail against atheism and atheists who refuse to be quiet about it--people like Fish and Eagleton just can't seem to grasp the concept that there are humans who are willing to accept a purposeless universe. I am. The universe is transcendent, it's awe-inspiring, and it seems, to me at least, to be completely unconscious of me and the rest of humanity. It doesn't have plans for me; things don't necessarily happen for a reason. We just are--we struggle through each and every day, trying to make the best lives we can for ourselves and those close to us, and in some cases, for the rest of the human family, and for those animals we have chosen to take into our care. Some of us dedicate our lives to nothing more than that; some take on the creation of beauty through art; some seek after scientific knowledge; some seek a purpose for a universe which baffles or even terrifies them; some try to make the world a better place for everyone; some try to make the world better for only themselves.

As I said in my comment on that post, it reminds me of an old Bloom County, in which Opus said that we should all be in a state of non-stop astonishment at our very existence.

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).