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Dear Readers,
We are deeply grateful for your enthusiastic support during our 20th Anniversary fund drive! Although we have not completely tallied the numbers, we are at about the halfway mark towards our annual goal of $60,000 from individual contributors. Thank all of you whose generous donations will support another year of Poetry Daily!
We hope that you enjoyed our Poets’ Picks feature from years gone by. If you missed any of them, they are available in our archive.
This week's prose feature "Ink Stain on My Fingers" by Leah Falk, is a review of Lee Sharkey's Walking Backwards, from the Spring issue of FIELD:
"In this universe of truncated memory and painful history, the speaker who wishes to remember is asked to begin again as if without antecedent, and yet with awareness of the enormity of what precedes her. It's into this fragile territory, where absence and silence are tangible fabrics, that Sharkey welcomes us."
Look for it here...
Enjoy this week's poems!
Warmest regards,
Don Selby & Diane Boller
2. Sponsor Messages
The MacGuffin is on the hunt for a poem to win our 22nd National Poet Hunt Contest!
One first place winner will get $500 and publication in the Fall 2017 issue. This year, we’ve brought in Naomi Shihab Nye to act as guest judge. Please submit no more than 3 poems, an index card with your name, poem titles, and contact info, and a $15 check/cash entry fee (make checks payable to Schoolcraft College). For full info, check the Contest Rules page at www.schoolcraft.edu/macguffin/
New Letters Literary Awards
Deadline: May 18, 2017. New Letters magazine invites you to submit fiction, essays, or poetry to the 2017 New Letters Literary Awards. Winners receive $1,500 for best essay, $1,500 for best poetry, and $1,500 for best fiction, and publication in a special 2018 awards issue of New Letters. For guidelines, visit http://www.newletters.org, or send and S.A.S.E. to New Letters Awards for Writers, 5101 Rockhill Road, Kansas City, MO 64110
Sixteen Rivers Press
Sixteen Rivers Press, a Northern California poetry collective, announces the publication of their 2017 books: Body, in Good Light by Erin Rodoni and This Sweet Haphazard by Gillian Wegener. Ilya Kaminsky writes that Rodoni’s book “journeys out into the world, but also inward—into the mysteries of private life” and calls it “a marvelous debut,” while Jane Mead tells us that Wegener “sees the beauty and melancholy all around her” and refers to her collection as “a beautiful book of powerful poems.” Sixteen Rivers Press is now celebrating its eighteenth year of publishing fine poetry.
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.
“…Bite-sized wisdom on an invisible stick” —Billy Collins
“… wonderful, surprising, often profound…made me daydream.” —XJ Kennedy
3. Poetry News Links
News and reviews from around the web, updated daily: David Roderick presents Nan Cohen's "Bee 1." (San Francisco Chronicle) Rebecca Foust introduces Allison Joseph's "Little Epiphanies." (Women's Voices for Change) David Biespiel continues his series with Patricia Smith's "Skinhead." (The Rumpus) Elizabeth Flock talks with Adrian Matejka about Map to the Stars and introduces his reading of "Stardate 8809.22." (PBS NewsHour) Lee Sharkey's "Letter to Al," an account of her experience with her husband’s memory loss, brings them both to Dublin for Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize ceremony. (Portland Press Herald) New collections by Emily Berry, Jacob Polley, and Luke Kennard reviewed by Paul Batchelor. (New Statesman) And more...4. Selected New Arrivals
These and other new arrivals are available for purchase via Poetry Daily/Amazon.com.
40 Sonnets, Don Paterson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Before Dawn on Bluff Road: Selected New Jersey Poems / Hollyhocks in the Fog: Selected San Francisco Poems, August Kleinzahler (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-offs: Selected Prose 2000-2016, August Kleinzahler (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Ghost on 3rd, Jim Reese (NYQ Bookx) Really Happy, Jim Reese (NYQ Books) Mytheria, Molly Tenenbaum (Two Sylvias Press) Arab in Newsland, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha (Two Sylvias Press) Real Is the Word They Use to Contain Us, Noah Wareness (Biblioasis) Common Ancestor, Jenny Irish (Black Lawrence Press) The Trumpiad, Cody Walker (The Waywiser Press) Thousand Star Hotel, Bao Phi (Coffee House Press) Indiana Noble Sad Man of the Year, Steve Henn (Wolfson Press)5. This Week’s Featured Poets
The work of the following poets will appear as Today's Poem on the days indicated:
Monday - Jacob Polley
Tuesday - Don Paterson
Wednesday - Sandra Simonds
Thursday - Molly McCully Brown
Friday - Carol Potter
Saturday - Fred Marchant
Sunday - Josephine Yu
6. Featured Poets April 24, 2017 - April 30, 2017
These and other past featured poets may be found in our archive:
Monday - Colette Bryce
Tuesday - Camille T. Dungy
Wednesday - Wayne Miller
Thursday - Adrienne Su
Friday - Christopher Howell
Saturday - John Foy
Sunday - Tom Wayman
7. Last Year’s Featured Poets
These poems will be retired from our archive during the coming week.
Eve Grubin, "Unfinished"
Heather Sellers, "Witness"
Kevin Stein, "Taxonomy"
Grace Schulman, "Orchid"
Jenny Xie, "Hard-Wired"
Karen Volkman, "Genova Superba"
Hadara Bar-Nadav, "Swan"
8. Poem From Last Year
Taxonomy
I'll admit I drove to the nursery for lobelia
because it sounds like a woman's intimate landscape,
giddily blending ecological borders in our age
of gender fluidity, one thing spilled into another.
Let's don't judge. Instead I bought pachysandra
whose name includes a woman's, sweetly elephantine.
You see how it works. In this my garden aspires
to echo and approximate, artful imprecision,
one bloom spilled into another like libertine vowels,
the way drunk on sound sounds better when read aloud.
Like that. So I've that much going for me,
here beside men shoveling mulch laced with cigs
and fungus, each fingering a fresh if sweaty one
plucked from his red flannel shirt pocket.
One thing's spilling into another makes for
smokers' palm-pounding the pack as prep
for lighting up's patient undertaker, eyes
half-masted to Marlboro's goodnight kiss,
lights-out's last cold shoulder. One body's spilling
into another makes for illusion of the infinite,
a dress sailing off her shoulders' flushed oceans
and me her star-crossed, lost Magellan, sextant
the right wrong-word for coxswaining the swells
of private seas' brassiere and paisley boxers.
You know how it works. Paisley's so sixties,
all the rage in those altitude days, one buzz buzzing
another like pollen-drunk bees cruising the fireweed.
The Who's Keith Moon got his wish to die
before he got old. Who says irony's harmless?
If lovely pachysandra and I get our wish,
irony will contradict itself to death.
No pachyderms poached for ivory artists carve
little elephants of. No neon blink-blinking us out
the Nev_r Say Die nursery's puddled lot.
Kevin Stein
The Gettysburg Review
Summer 2016
Copyright © 2016 by Kevin Stein
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved.
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