2015 Best of Poetry Lists

More end-of-year best book lists are being announced. There are the known and "official" best of lists, like the National Book Awards and there are plenty of lesser known ones.

Still time to grab an end-of-year poetry gift for a friend or for yourself.

The GoodReads website has its list of readers' choice book awards, including 20 books of poetry. There are a few titles or poets that I know, but the majority are ones I don't know. There is Felicity by Mary Oliver, but also the winning title, The Dogs I Have Kissed, by Trista Mateer who is "Known for her eponymous blog and her confessional style of writing, this is Trista Mateer's second collection of poetry."



Assuming that the list is simply based on votes by readers of the site, you can either see it as a real list of books readers enjoyed or a chance for lesser-known poets to have their friends vote them up. I'd like to believe it is the former, a kind of crowdsourced what-I-read-and-liked list. Either way, it brought to my attention some books I would not have seen otherwise.

Another list of 8 comes via the Flavorwire website.  

I occasionally look at Amazon's list of best-selling poetry books because it does mean something to know what people are buying. That list always has titles that seem like they were purchased by students for a class (lots of anthologies) and also a bunch of current titles. I'm not a big buyer of anthologies, but I can see someone buying 100 Best-Loved Poems in the way that I once bought the Miles Davis "Greatest Hits" album (knowing he never had any "hits") in the hope of getting the best in one place.

A Blessing

James Wright and Robert Bly began a friendship through letters. Eventually, Wright would visit Bly's farm in western Minnesota and fall in love with it. �I think your farm is the first such place I have ever really liked � it is beautifully mysterious and very much its own secret place.�

He began taking the train out there every Friday after classes, and staying for the weekend, sleeping in an old converted chicken coop, which was heated by an oil stove.

On Saturday mornings, he would come into the farmhouse for breakfast, go back out, and return at lunch with a poem. He said of the Blys: �They loved me and they saved my life. I don�t mean the life of my poetry, either.�

One day Bly and Wright were driving home from another friend�s farm when they passed two horses in a pasture. They stopped and got out to see the horses, and in the car Wright began writing a poem in a spiral notebook. That became one of his most beloved poems, �A Blessing.�

A Blessing

by James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl�s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

from Collected Poems

And I know now what I didn't know then by the Tuesday Poets

So
now you are privy to
a thousand thousand things. Jennifer Compton

The geology of the region, the path rain takes under
the earth, the black areas of nitrate. Sarah Jane Barnett

There are places yet to find
where the teeth of ancestors
still speak to us from the forest floor � Kathleen Jones

please do not dance
with the statues. Helen Lowe

I wonder what times I

Prompt: Poetry as Food

I read an article about how the Galway University Hospitals Arts Trust works with a poet who is appearing at C�irt International Festival of Literature to select poetry suitable for display in waiting areas of their hospitals. These "Poems for Patience" is a collection that hopefully will give people pause for reflection and space for hope in both those joyful celebratory moments as well as the all too often times of pain or worry. This year the poems were selected and introduced by Naomi Shihab Nye.

On Poetry Day (7 May) a Menu of Poems called �Flow� was distributed throughout Irish hospital wards, waiting rooms and other healthcare settings for patients, visitors and staff to enjoy. You can see the menu at www.poetryireland.ie

This got me thinking about serving poetry as food. Poetry as something you take in on a daily basis and that sustains you. Some of it good and solid and healthy, and sometimes some that is light and sweet, or heavy and probably not the best thing to have at that time.

There are a good number of poems about food, but that is not what we are dealing with in this prompt. There are also some well known poems about eating poetry.

One that is often anthologized and used in schools is "How To Eat a Poem" by Eve Merriam.

Don't be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that
may run down your chin.
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.
You do not need a knife or fork or spoon
or plate or napkin or tablecloth.
For there is no core
or stem
or rind
or pit
or seed
or skin
to throw away.

Also well known is "Eating Poetry" by Mark Strand, which appeared on this year's National Poetry Month poster and begins:    
     

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry...

But what I am more interested in for this month's prompt is what Galway Kinnell does in his poem "Blackberry Eating."

Maybe the Galway Hospital triggered the Kinnell connection, but in his poem we have him first being quite literal in his eating -

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making;

- and then something else happens. The blackberries, with their "black art" become words, if not poems.

and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.

The prompt this month is poetry as food - poems that explore how we consume poetry, what it gives us, and may or may not contain references to actual foods.

With holidays and such at year's end, I'm sure you will have more than enough foods prompting you.

The submission deadline for this prompt is January 10, 2016.

Morte D�Arthur (Partial) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

.

So all day long the noise of battle roll�d

Among the mountains by the winter sea;

Until King Arthur�s table, man by man,

Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord,

King Arthur: then, because his wound was deep,

The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,

Sir Bedivere, the last of all his knights,

And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,

A broken chancel with a broken cross,

That stood on a

National Book Awards for Poetry

As the year ends, many list are published of "the best" books in all categories. Though no list is definitive or fits all tastes, one list to look at for good titles published during the year is the National Book Awards.

Here are the 2015 poetry titles selected.


WINNER



Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus: and Other Poems (Alfred A. Knopf)


FINALISTS

Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Terrance Hayes, How to Be Drawn (Penguin/Penguin Random House)

Ada Lim�n, Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions)

Patrick Phillips, Elegy for a Broken Machine (Alfred A. Knopf)



ON THE AWARD LONG LIST

Scattered at Sea by Amy Gerstler

A Stranger's Mirror by Marilyn Hacker

The Beauty by Jane Hirshfield

Heaven by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts by Lawrence Raab

Ring of Fire by Mary Eliza Crane

At the wane of a long season
of heat filled yellow sky,
fire consumes mountain forests
infested, decimated by bark beetles
feasting in their own changing world.
I swim deliciously in a warmer river
without current, cringing at banks
so barren I could walk across.
The water is too hot for salmon
to return upstream and spawn.

Earth degrades to dirt, crumbles in my hand.

Early spring bloomed in a

Ngawhatu by Maggie Rainey-Smith

On
the Richmond bus to Nelson passing Polstead Road


you
only had to say it, and everyone knew, unspoken

we
almost dared not look, it stirred such potent thoughts

caused
laughter, mocking, and a deeply seated superstition

innuendo
out the window, the road that leads to there

To
where? You ask? But
we all knew, we knew for sure



that�s
where the loonies go and you�ll go there for sure

"Sunday Morning" at 100

"Wallace Stevens�s �Sunday Morning� (1915) is a lofty poetic meditation�almost a philosophical discourse�rooted in a few basic questions: what happens to us when we die? Can we believe seriously in an afterlife? If we can�t, what comfort can we take in the only life we get? As World War I intensified and Stevens neared middle age, he broached these subjects with quiet urgency in a poem as beautiful as it is difficult. 

Although �Sunday Morning� is considered Stevens�s breakthrough poem, it wasn�t published until he was 36. It debuted in Poetry magazine during a year that brought several other Modernist milestones, including T.S. Eliot�s �The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,� Marianne Moore�s first professionally published poems, and a major Imagist anthology coedited by the poets Richard Aldington and H.D. Compared with these experiments by younger writers�and with many of the poems later collected in Stevens�s first book,  Harmonium (1923)��Sunday Morning� innovates in a mellower and statelier mode. "

read the full article

read "Sunday Morning" 

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

Abdullah, The Servant of God � by Wade Bishop

He was not a handsome man
not even in possession of a face that was easy to look into
it was journey twisted and wrinkled like a baby at birth
........

That girl, by Heidi North-Bailey

She rides side-saddle
into her own clich�
her heart is pumping smoke
boots heavy with things unsaid
sunset flecked with mud

she�s breathing fire
flames curl from her lips
slow-dancing lovers
with cigarette smiles

slink and hips
turn on the clock

and still

after all this time
after so many battered
leather jackets
crumpled sleeps
on strangers� couches

cups of tea
from chipped mugs

Like a Reed Boat by William S. Rea

Like a reed boat
that slipped its mooring

Set drifting on
the current

Or the heaping up
of ripened grain

In the time of
harvest

He was farewelled


Gone, in the
fullness of his time

But that final
slipping away

Still came like
something unexpected

Like an empty
pier or a barren field

Which once
brimmed with purpose

Bustled with life
and vigour

Now there was
silence

Except

Prompt: The Ode and the Body

For National Poetry Month last year, poets who serve on the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors participated in Poet-to-Poet, a multimedia educational project. Through videos, they invited young people in grades three to twelve to write poems in response to those shared by the poets.  Here is one of those poems.

"My Skeleton" by Jane Hirshfield

After reading the poem, Jane talks in the video about the poem and tells us it is an ode. �Ode� is from the Greek aeidein, meaning to sing or chant. It is an old form of lyric poetry which would have originally been accompanied by music and dance.

The Romantic poets used it as a way to formally address an event, a person, or a thing not present.
There are three typical types of odes: the Pindaric, Horatian, and Irregular. You can check into the more formal aspects of each, but we're being more general in our approach this month.

William Wordsworth's poem �Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood� is an example of an English language Pindaric ode.

The Horatian ode (named for the Roman poet Horace) is more contemplative, less formal, less ceremonious, and less theatrical. Look at the Allen Tate poem �Ode to the Confederate Dead.
 
The Irregular ode is just that. �Ode on a Grecian Urn� by John Keats was actually written based on his experiments with the sonnet.

Others: Shelley�s �Ode to the West Wind," Robert Creeley�s �America," Bernadette Mayer�s �Ode on Periods," and Robert Lowell�s �Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.�

For this month, we ask you to write an ode that focuses on the body. Jane Hirshfield's poem opens with her direct address to the skeleton.

My skeleton,
you who once ached
with your own growing larger

She follows chronologically, following the skeleton as it ages.

each year
imperceptibly smaller,
lighter,
absorbed by your own
concentration.

Generally, the aging of the body is not a kind thing.

Angular wristbone's arthritis,
cracked harp of ribcage

And finally, she concludes with this beautiful image of its life work.

You who held me all my life
inside your hands
as a new mother holds
her own unblanketed child,
not thinking at all.

Our November prompt is an ode about a part of the body.  I suppose the skeleton is a part of the body, although it is made up of many smaller parts. That is true of the ear, the hand and the brain, so you might want to choose a specific part. You might choose the nose, a breast, the mouth, lips, tongue or a thumb. So many options. You don't need to get down to an anatomical level (although that might be interesting) and you could easily be like those Romantic poets in your approach.

One ode I heard read aloud by the poet several times is "Homage to My Hips" by Lucille Clifton. It is a short poem that probably would not count as an ode by Horatio's standards, but I'm fine with it as an ode.

Homage To My Hips

these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top

            

Excerpt from 'Glaciers' by Sarah Jane Barnett

She notes down the time, opens the aquifer sample

taken from a farm west of Hastings, a saturated and fertile zone

of nested multilevel wells. She pours



it into the debubbler. The team used a direct push

drill, the cleanest way to sample intensive farming regions.

The water shines as it shunts through the tubes.



She builds a model on her computer, maps

the geology of the

Wild Daisies by Bub Bridger

If you love me
Bring me flowers
Wild daisies
Clutched in your fist
Like a torch
No orchids or roses
Or carnations
No florist's bow
Just daisies
Steal them
Risk your life for them
Up the sharp hills
In the teeth of the wind
If you love me
Bring me daisies
That I will cram
In a bright vase
And marvel at

by Bub Bridger (Ngati Kahungunu), "Up Here on the Hill", Mallinson Rendel, Wellington, 1989

Yawn by Sarah Rice

Funny how a yawn travels through a room

a pied piper gathering all the rats

In that instant we all draw from the
same source
a great swallowed gasp shoved into our lungs



like socks stuffed in a bag
and the
long outward sigh



That we try to hide it up our
sleeves
makes us culprits in common


like playing truant

with a friend



It�s mostly like this
our bodies
that bind us together

Before by Janette Pieloor

.......................� J Pieloor
.......................Published by Walleah Press

.......................Reproduced
on The Tuesday Poem with permission




.......................Editor: P. S. Cottier

.
Janette Pieloor had her first collection, Ripples Under the Skin, published earlier this year by Walleah Press, who are producing attractive and compelling books. The cover,

The Great Dying by Kathleen Jones