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1. Letter from the Editors

Dear Readers,

It's April, and in celebration of Poetry Month, and Poetry Daily's twenty-first year online, we are beginning our annual spring fundraising drive for 2018! We hope that you will support us in our mission to bring you a daily poem, as well as poetry news, reviews, and critical commentary.

We invite you to spread the word about Poets' Picks, the email series that we send to newsletter subscribers every weekday in April. If you are receiving this newsletter, you are already signed up, but tell your friends!

Our prose series continues this week with "Poet of the Incommensurate," a review by Tomas Unger of Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016, by Frank Bidart, from the Spring issue of The Threepenny Review:

"Frank Bidart is a poet of terrible, overmastering pity. Half-light, which collects a half-century of his poetry, presents us with the extraordinary record of his effort to make something commensurate with the complexity of the human psyche as it struggles to know itself over time. He has evoked Frost in describing his ambition to "fasten the voice to the page," and from his first book onward, Bidart's radically precise typography—which makes use of spacing, block letters, italics—hazards everything to try to make language adequate to the task of dramatizing both the speaking voice and the brooding consciousness."

Look for it here.

Enjoy this week's poems!

Warmest regards,

Don Selby & Diane Boller

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2. Sponsor Messages

 New Letters Literary Awards
Deadline: May 18, 2018.  New Letters invites submissions to the New Letters Literary Awards. Winners in poetry and fiction receive $1,500 + publication. Essay winner receives $2,500 + publication.  For guidelines, visit http://newletters.org/writers-wanted/writing-contests or send an S.A.S.E. to New Letters, 5101 Rockhill Road, Kansas City, MO 64110.

 The MacGuffin’s 23rd Poet Hunt Contest
The Hunt is on! The MacGuffin’s 23rd Poet Hunt Contest is now open! One first place winner will get $500 and publication. This year, we’ve brought in Alberto Álvaro Ríos to act as guest judge. There are two ways to enter: submit 3 poems, an index card with your name, poem titles, and contact info, and a $15 check/cash entry fee via post; or submit online by visiting www.schoolcraftbooks.com and selecting “MacGuffin” from the SHOP tab. Full info can be found at www.schoolcraft.edu/macguffin/.

 Sixteen Rivers Press
Sixteen Rivers Press, a Northern California publishing collective, announces the publication of The Language of Forgetting by Lynne Knight and The Cloud Museum by Beth Spencer. Of The Language of Forgetting, Al Young writes: “Lynne Knight’s mindful, lyrical book . . . thrills and intrigues, warns and shares, always in language that catches.” Of The Cloud Museum, Pamela Uschuk writes: “Beth Spencer leads us on a physical and spiritual journey into two worlds. . . . Rich in imagist language, [her] poems transcend simple explanation as they transform us at many levels.”

 2018 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry
The Beloit Poetry Journal invites submissions for the 2018 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry to be judged by Naomi Shihab Nye. A prize of $1,500 will be awarded for a single poem, which will appear in the journal. The editors will consider all entries for publication. Submissions open March 1 and close April 30. See www.bpj.org for more details.

 Passager Poetry Contest: Writers Over 50
Deadline: April 15, 2018
Reading fee: $20, check or money order payable to Passager/UB includes a one-year subscription (2 issues). Winner receives $500 and publication. Honorable mentions will be published. Submit 5 poems, 40 lines max. per poem. Cover letter, bio, SASE for results. No previously published work.
Send hard copy or use Submittable. No email submissions. Send to:
Passager Poetry Contest
1420 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21201

Questions? [email protected]
www.passagerbooks.com

 Instant Messages
Instant Messages is a new kind of writing, a mash-up of straightforward and accessible poetry, koan-like brain teasers, the delicate observations of Haiku, surprise one-liners, daily mumbling, text-based art, and aphorisms of penetrating insight. All wrapped together in a common theme: things and experience are “messages,” where meaning awaits. Follow on Instagram!

“Bite-sized wisdom on an invisible stick” —Billy Collins

"Wonderful, surprising, often profound—made me daydream.” —XJ Kennedy

 Vermont College of Fine Arts MFAs in Writing
Vermont College of Fine Arts offers a traditinal low-residency MFA in Writing program—now celebrating its 35th year—along with a residential MFA in Writing & Publishing program.

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3. Poetry News Links

News and reviews from around the web, updated daily:

• Rebecca Foust introduces four poems from Less Like a Dove, by Agi Mishol. (Women's Voices for Change)
• Tracy K. Smith talks with Michel Martin on the eve of Poetry Month. (NPR)
• Poetry publishing finds support from university affiliation. (Publishers Weekly)
• Terrance Hayes introduces a poem by Kayo Chingonyi. (The New York Times Magazine)
• Inside the Wave, by Helen Dunmore, and The Divining Pool, by Amanda Merritt, reviewed by Rowland Bagnall. (Los Angeles Review of Books)
• Tom Sleigh's House of Fact, House of Ruin and The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing in an Age of Refugees, reviewed by Tess Taylor. (The New York Times)
• Mark Eisner reflects on "one of the most important... resistance poets of the past century." (The Paris Review Daily)
• Tess Davidson introduces "Olive Schreiner," by Leontia Flynn. (The Times Literary Supplement)
• And more...

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4. New Arrivals

These new arrivals are available for purchase via Poetry Daily/Amazon.com.

• Midnights in My Mending Room, Martha Deborah Hall (Word Poetry)
• The Undertows of Anger, Martha Deborah Hall (Word Poetry)
• The White Tree Quartet, Mary Pacifico Curtis (Turning Point)
• Nightfall, Full of Light, Jeff Bernstein (Turning Point)
• Percussive, Chuck Joy (Turning Point)
• The Eyes Have It, Anne Harding Woodworth (Turning Point)
• Post & Rail, Erica Funkhouser (Lost Horse Press)
• Songs by Heart, Diana Cole (Iris Chapbook Series)
• The White Birch Underwater, Nellie Goodwin (Iris Chapbook Series)
• The Nature of Things: Poems of Flora and Protest, Helen Matthews Lewis (Iris Chapbook Series)
• What Once Burst With Brilliance, Robert Lee Kendrick (Iris Press)
• Darwin's Breath, Connie Jordan Green (Iris Press)
• Ya Te Veo, P. Scott Cunningham (The University of Arkansas Press)
• The Infinite Doctrine of Water, Michael T. Young (Terrapin Books)
• Icon, David Mutschlecner (Ahsahta Press)
• Wild Geese Sorrow: The Chinese Wall Inscriptions at Angel Island, Jeffrey Thomas Leong (Calypso Editions)
• What My Father Taught Me, Maria Giura (Bordighera Press)
• Dark Woods, Richard Sanger (Biblioasis)
• Eating Sardines at Midnight, Linda C. Levitz (Fithian Press)

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5. This Week’s Featured Poets

The work of the following poets will appear as Today's Poem on the days indicated:

Monday - Ellen Bass
Tuesday - Leontia Flynn
Wednesday -Carol Muske-Dukes
Thursday - Major Jackson
Friday - Michael Waters
Saturday - Henry Wei Leung
Sunday - Felicia Zamora

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6. Featured Poets March 26, 2018 - March 31, 2018

These and other past featured poets may be found in our archive:

Monday - W. S. Di Piero
Tuesday - Emily Van Kley
Wednesday - Michael Chitwood
Thursday - John Koethe
Friday - Elizabeth Spires
Saturday - Lynne Knight
Sunday - Marilyn Hacker

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7. Last Year’s Featured Poets

These poems will be retired from our archive during the coming week.

Stephen Kampa, "Dodo"
Bessie Golding, "Afternoon in a Claude Glass"
Linda Pastan, "Plunder"
Gerald Stern, "Hiphole" and "Blue Jay"
Vera Pavlova / tr. by Steven Seymour, "[I am]"
Ange Mlinko, "Borrowed Bio"
Sophie Klahr, "Diagnosis"

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8. Poem From Last Year

Plunder

On a day of windy transition, one season to the next, 
you spoke of helping your mother close her house, 
of the choices you had to make—what to discard, 
what to keep—as if it were your childhood itself 
waiting to be plundered. You kept a Persian rug, 
all reds and golds, to walk on every day, 
keeping the past alive under your feet; 
those nested Russian dolls you played with 
as a girl: grandmother, mother, daughter; 
four bentwood chairs wrenched now from their table.

I listened, thinking I'd be next to try 
to crowd a lifetime of things 
into a shrinking universe of boxes. 
I've started to dismantle my life already, throwing 
out letters from people I remember loving, 
choosing among books—this one to stay, 
that one to go—as if I were a judge 
sentencing some to death, the rest 
to the purgatory of the emptying shelf.
Perhaps I should simply burn it all.

But don't we live on in what we've left behind? 
In the fading twilight of Kodak? In our silver 
knives and spoons tarnishing on a grandchild's 
casual table? Don't these become 
a kind of museum of the afterlife? 
The pharaohs had it right. They took 
their whole world with them—vases and chests, 
gilded statues, jewels—plundered perhaps, 
but not for a thousand years. 
Nefertiti's tomb has never been found.

 

Linda Pastan
The Paris Review
Spring 2017

Copyright © 2017 by Linda Pastan
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission