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Dear Readers,
This week we continue our prose series with "Mad John's Walk,"by John Gallas, from PN Review:
"One hundred and seventy-five years ago, John Clare, residing at Matthew Allen's High Beach Private Asylum in Epping Forest, decided to go home. 'Felt very melancholy', he wrote, two days before. 'Fell in with some gypsies, one of whom offered to assist in my escape from the madhouse'. Two days later, he was off.
"His route, via the Great North Road, was around eighty miles. I thought this doable. First I Googled walking directions from each place he had remembered to the next. Then I bought a pair of Skechers, with Memory Foam feet. I took a spare T-shirt, a spare pair of socks, a rollable raincoat, a hat, the Penguin Clare, a notebook and pen, and my iPod Fitness app, to measure each damned step along the way. John C had old boots, and nothing else. I also had a bank account."
Look for it here.
Enjoy this week's poems!
Warmest regards,
Don Selby & Diane Boller
2. Sponsor Messages
Beloit Poetry Journal: First Annual Adrienne Rich Award
The Beloit Poetry Journal invites submissions for the first annual Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry to be judged by Carolyn Forché. 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.
Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest
25th year. $4,000 in cash prizes, including $1,500 for the best story and $1,500 for the best essay. Submit short stories, essays, and other works of prose on any subject, up to 6,000 words each. All entries that win cash prizes will be published on WinningWriters.com. Both published and unpublished work accepted. Fee per entry is $18. Submit by April 30. New final judge: Judy Juanita. Winning Writers is one of "101 Best Websites for Writers" (Writer's Digest). See guidelines, past winners, and enter online via Submittable at winningwriters.com/tomstory
2017 UNT Rilke Prize
Wayne Miller's Post-, published by Milkweed Editions, has won the 2017 UNT Rilke Prize. The $10,000 prize recognizes a book written by a mid-career poet and published in the preceding year that demonstrates exceptional artistry and vision.
The judges also selected three finalists for this year's Rilke Prize: Christopher Bakken's Eternity & Oranges (University of Pittsburgh Press), Ruth Ellen Kocher's Third Voice (Tupelo Press), and Dana Levin's Banana Palace (Copper Canyon Press).
3. Poetry News Links
News and reviews from around the web, updated daily: Dana Gioia reviews Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall. (The American Scholar) Rebecca Foust introduces Nikki Finney's "Instruction, Final: To Brown Poets from Black Girl with Silver Leica." (Women's Voices for Change) Tihu Lujan talks with Craig Santos Perez, recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. (The Guam Daily Post) Ellen Piligian talks with Carolyn Forché, winner of the $165,000 Windham-Campbell Prize, given through Yale University. (Detroit Free Press) "Ovid of Finglas" - Michael O'Loughlin's Poems 1980-2015 reviewed by James McCabe. (The Irish Times) Aida Edemariam talks with TS Eliot prize winner Jacob Polley. (The Guardian) Nicholas Lezard on Seamus Heaney's translation of Aeneid Book VI. (The Guardian) The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound, by Daniel Swift, reviewed by Mark Ford. (The Guardian) Miranda Popkey on Mary and George Oppen's decison in 1935 to abandon creative pursuits to join the Communist Party and the Workers Alliance. (The New Yorker) And more...4. Selected New Arrivals
These and other new arrivals are available for purchase via Poetry Daily/Amazon.com.
The Essential Poet's Glossary (new in paperback), Edward Hirsch (Mariner Books) Pandemonium, Thomas McCarthy (Carcanet Press) Stressed, Unstressed: Classic Poems to Ease the Mind, Jonathan Bate, Paula Byrne, Sophie Ratcliffe, Andrew Schuman, ed.s (William Collins) Deep Well, Dan Bellm (Lavender Ink) After, Robert Gibb (Marsh Hawk Press) Post-Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry, Jefferson Holdridge, Brian Ó Conchubhair, ed.s (Wake Forest University Press) Still Pilgrim, Angela Alaimo O'Donnell (Paraclete Press) Looking for Ireland: An Irish-Appalachian Pilgrimage, Laura Treacy Bentley (Mountain State Press) Together and By Ourselves, Alex Dimitrov (Copper Canyon Press) Patient Zero, Tomás Q. Morín (Copper Canyon Press) MEAN/TIME, Grace Bauer (University of New Mexico Press) The Bard & Scheherazade Keep Company, Jan D. Hodge (Able Muse Press) Mr. Stevens' Secretary, Frances Schenkkan (University of Arkansas Press) Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror, Stephen Gibson (University of Arkansas Press) A Filament Burns in Blue Degrees, Kendra Tanacea (Lost Horse Press) Selected Poems of Angela de Hoyos, Angela de Hoyos, ed. Gabriela Baeza Ventura (Arte Público Press) The Blue Man, Diane Furtney (FutureCycle Press) Bird Flying through the Banquet, Judy Kronenfeld (FutureCycle Press) This History That Just Happened, Hannah Craig (Parlor Press) Go On, Ethel Rackin (Parlor Press) They Who Saw the Deep, Geraldine Monk (Parlor Press) Pilgrimage Suites, Derek Gromadzki (Parlor Press) Fifteen Seconds without Sorrow, Shim Bo-Seon (Parlor Press) Overyellow, Nicholas Pesquès, tr. Cole Swensen (Parlor Press)5. This Week’s Featured Poets
The work of the following poets will appear as Today's Poem on the days indicated:
Monday - Andrew Motion
Tuesday - Miguel M. Morales
Wednesday - Mary Durkin
Thursday - LS Klatt
Friday - Thomas McCarthy
Saturday - Len Krisak
Sunday - Dan Bellm
6. Featured Poets March 6, 2017 - March 12, 2017
These and other past featured poets may be found in our archive:
Monday - Carolina Ebeid
Tuesday - Bill Knott
Wednesday - Jennifer Givhan
Thursday - Wendy Xu
Friday - Owen McLeod
Saturday - Julianna Baggott
Sunday - Bruce Bond
7. Last Year’s Featured Poets
These poems will be retired from our archive during the coming week.
Christian Wiman, Two Poems
Christopher Bakken, "A Poem Not Written by Yannis Ritsos on the Day of My Birth"
John Koethe, "The Swimmer"
Eleanor Stanford, "Long-billed Curlew (Numenius longirostris)"
Cally Conan-Davies, "Eos"
Mark Turpin, "The Carpenters"
David Hernandez, "Dear Death"
Carolyn Guinzio, "Here's How It's Going To Work"
8. Poem From Last Year
The Swimmer
It was one of those midsummer Sundays ...
JOHN CHEEVER
Photo: sitting by the cabin on Lake Au Train
We rented every summer, reading John Cheever,
Then rowing out in a boat after dinner to fish.
The light would turn golden, then start to fade
As I headed home, past a new log dream house
I could see from our porch, and wished I could own.
I was married then and lived in my imagination,
Writing the poems I was sure would make my name
Eventually, and meanwhile waiting out the afternoons
Within the limits of a world that never changed,
The world of stories. I was almost thirty-eight,
With the compulsion to immortalize myself
That comes with middle age and disappointment.
I knew what I imagined and desired, yet didn't know,
For even though desire can delineate the contours
Of a life, its true substance is beyond desire
And imagination, unrecognizable until it's happened.
In seven years the substance of my future changed:
Instead of summers on the lake, I found myself alone
And free, not wanting what I'd wanted anymore,
And happy. Happiness, unhappy people say,
Comes in degrees, and yet it isn't true. The same
Ambitions and desires, the same attachments
And designs can constitute two different worlds—
A world I'd lived in and a world I never knew
Until I entered it, and made it mine. I wrote a long,
Meandering poem on marriage and its aftermath
That argued (if a poem can argue) that it never ends,
But stays suspended in time, like an afternoon
In August in our small cabin, with the television on
And the lake still visible beyond the door.
It's all still there, in that decade out of mind
I never think about anymore, until some moment
In a movie, or in a story I thought I'd read
And hadn't, or read and can't remember
Brings it back, and then I'm thirty-eight again,
The future still uncertain and there for the taking,
Which is what I did, though I didn't know it—
Which doesn't matter now, for though those wishes
Did come true, it wasn't as I'd dreamed them.
"The Monkey's Paw" is a story about three wishes—
The first one a disaster, the second one an unintended
Horror it takes the last wish to dissolve—that ends
On an empty street. My story is not so dramatic,
Yet the ending feels the same: I have the life
I wanted, people know my name, music fills the rooms
Each evening and each day renews the miracle,
And yet it's not the same. The real world can never
Realize a fantasy lived in the imagination,
That only felt like heaven while it wasn't there.
I thought I'd read "The Swimmer" sitting by the lake
Those thirty-something years ago, but when I looked at it
Last week I couldn't remember reading it at all. It's a story
Devastating on its face—an allegory of the dissolution
Of its hero, who on a beautiful suburban afternoon
Sets out for home by way of swimming pools and alcohol.
His quest begins in confidence and gladness, but as its course
Unfolds its tenor starts to change, as the watercolor
Light begins to fade, the air turns colder and he ages visibly,
Until it ends in autumn, darkness and an empty house.
The moral of the allegory is implicit, but it seems to me
More moving read another way—as a reimagining
Of a life from the perspective of disillusionment and age.
It still starts on a summer afternoon, but a remembered one.
Instead of youth and confidence and hope dissolving,
They're already gone, and instead of a deteriorating world,
It's an indifferent one. I feel at home in this amended parable:
It fits the way a story ought to fit, and it even feels true.
Sitting in my house in the country, there isn't much to do
But stare at the trees through the patio doors open to the deck.
It's not the dream house I remember, but at least it's mine,
And at least I'm happy, though I've lately come to recognize
That happiness is not what it's cracked up to be. As for poetry,
Poetry turned out fine, though nobody actually cares about it
In the old sense anymore. That's the trouble with stories—
They need to come to a conclusion and to have a point,
Whereas the point of growing old is that it doesn't have one:
Someone sets out on an afternoon, following his predetermined
And finally arrives at home, and finds there's nothing there.
John Koethe
The Swimmer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright ©2016 by John Koethe
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved.
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