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1. Letter from the Editors

Dear Readers,

And again: thank you so much for your generous support during our 20th Anniversary fund drive! As of Thursday, May 4, we have received $32,000 toward our 2017 goal of $60,000 from individual contributors! If April got away from you this year, don't let the calendar hold you back — you can still join our Poetry Month stalwarts in support of PD's 20th anniversary year with a contribution to help keep us in daily service to you and to poetry!

This week our prose series continues with Willard Spiegelman's review of Collected Poems, 1950-2012, by Adrienne Rich, from the April issue of The Yale Review:

"Rich’s formidable presence on our national literary and larger cultural/public scene reflected and, in turn, produced changes in the zeitgeist. She not only was affected by every major political crusade of the past half century – the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women’s movement, gay liberation – but she also became, as few poets ever do, the living embodiment of the causes she fiercely fought for. Her poetry, like her prose, is the living testimony to her life.."

Look for it here...

Enjoy this week's poems!

Warmest regards,

Don Selby & Diane Boller

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2. Sponsor Messages

North Street Book Prize for Self-Published Books
3rd year. $6,000 in cash prizes. Three categories: General Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction & Memoir. The winner of each category will receive $1,500, a credit towards the high-quality publishing services at BookBaby, free advertising in our email newsletter, and expert marketing advice from Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of The Frugal Book Promoter. Gift for everyone who enters. Deadline: June 30. Judges: Jendi Reiter and Ellen LaFleche. Entry fee: $60. Winning Writers is one of "101 Best Websites for Writers" (Writer's Digest). Entries accepted by mail and via Submittable. See guidelines and past winners at winningwriters.com/north

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

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/

 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

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.

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3. Poetry News Links

News and reviews from around the web, updated daily:

• Rebecca Foust introduces Diana Goetsch's "Swimming to New Zealand." (Women's Voices for Change)
• David Roderick presents C. Dale Young's "The Halo." (San Francisco Chronicle)
• Benjamin Markovits looks into Walt Whitman's Guide to Manly Health and Training. (The Spectator)
• John Freeman reviews Layli Long Soldier's debut collection, Whereas. (Los Angeles Times)
• The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966-2016, by Tony Harrison, reviewed by Robert Crawford. (The Guardian)
• The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, by Allen Ginsberg, edited by Bill Morgan, reviewed by Steve Silberman. (San Francisco Chronicle)
• John McAuliffe reviews Colette Bryce's Selected Poems. (The Irish Times)
• Anthony Madrid's "H.D. Notebook: Part I." (Paris Review Daily)
• And more...

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4. Selected New Arrivals

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

• Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015, Bruce Bond (Louisiana State University Press)
• Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now, Amit Majmudar, ed. (Alfred A. Knopf)
• The Next Place, Al Maginnes (Iris Press)
• Before There Was Before, Wendy Drexler (Iris Press)
• Socorro: Poems of New Mexico, Tony Reevy (Iris Press)
• Injury Time, Clive James (Picador Poetry)
• Landings, Andrena Zawinski (Kelsay Books)
• Surgical Wing, Kristin Robertson (Alice James Books)
• Revolutions We'd Hoped We'd Outgrown, Jill McCabe Johnson (Finishing Line Press)
• Beneath the Bamboo Sky: Poems & Pieces on Loss and Consolation, Irene Blair Honeycutt (Main Street Rag Publishing Company)

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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 - Bob Hicok
Tuesday - Cortney Lamar Charleston
Wednesday - Susannah Nevison
Thursday - Niall Campbell
Friday - Stephen Yenser
Saturday - Bruce Bond
Sunday - Richard Osmond

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6. Featured Poets May 1, 2017 - May 7, 2017

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

Monday - Jacob Polley
Tuesday - Don Paterson
Wednesday - Sandra Simonds
Thursday - Molly McCully Brown
Friday - Carol Potter
Saturday - Fred Marchant
Sunday - Josephine Yu

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7. Last Year’s Featured Poets

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

Eleanor Chai, "Thick Description"
HeidiLynn Nilsson, "The Trespass Fetches Herself for Sacrifice"
Adrian Matejka, "Famous Negro Athletes"
Laura Kasischke, "The Names of the Trees"
Claudia Emerson, "Weather"
Davis McCombs, "Road Trip"
David Wojahn, "Briefe Historie of the Noose in the Colonie of Virginia"

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8. Poem From Last Year

Weather

       for Kent

They said they had no category for it,
a hybrid thing they christened

and numbered anyway. The meteorologists
couldn't help but be

delirious; its center massive and slow,
its ocean-born body

coming inland then as bodies, one winter,
one tropical, a conjoined

thing no one had ever seen; how healthy
it was, they marveled, how

determined—part cyclone, blizzard, part hurricane,
tornado, all of it,

all of it applied. They pointed to maps,
measurements and charts;

they struggled to track it, predict what it
might do. Already numberless

outages, closures. Here—you had catalogued,
stored up what we might need—

batteries, candles, canned fruit, bottled water,
matches, the transistor

radio. We listened to the wind;
we waited. You were more

restless than I was, going out again
and again onto the porch,

to see for yourself, leaning into it,
almost as though to dare it,

test it, touch the hem of it, or let it
touch you; before you knew,

you knew it would spare us.

 

Claudia Emerson
Impossible Bottle
Louisiana State University Press

Copyright ©2015 by Claudia Emerson
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission