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1. Letter from the Editors

Dear Readers,

Our prose series continues this week with the essay, "Lunching with Ginsberg," from Sallies, Romps, Portraits and Send-Offs: Selected Prose, 2000-2006, by August Kleinzahler (Farrar, Straus and Giroux):

"I remember immediately liking Allen, somewhat to my surprise. He was nothing at all like his cartoonish public persona. In fact, he reminded me of no one so much as my old pediatrician and family friend, Sam Prince. The two didn't resemble each other physically, nor was there anything particular in manner. I suppose he was just very familiar to me: Jewish, north Jersey; both of us provincials out of a very particular psychosocial milieu; ten miles and twenty-three years apart, growing up in the same light, the same benzene fumes. The same oil refinery fire-eaters flaming the night along the Jersey Turnpike. The same speech patterns, body language, and the rest. I was immediately comfortable around him. I could read him easily."

Look for it here...

Enjoy this week's poems!

Warmest regards,

Don Selby & Diane Boller

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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/

 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.

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

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3. Poetry News Links

News and reviews from around the web, updated daily:

• Ted Kooser presents Patricia Hooper's "Sunday Flying." (American Life in Poetry)
• Rebecca Foust presents "The Nurse Tree," by Molly Peacock. (Women's Voices for Change)
• David Roderick introduces an excerpt from "Nature Poem" by Tommy Pico. (San Francisco Chronicle)
• Anne Kniggendorf reviews Patricia Lockwood's Priestdaddy. (The Kansas City Star)
• Michael O'Loughlin reviews The Deep Heart’s Core, by Eugene O'Connell and Pat Boran. (The Irish Times)
• Alex Dimitrov's Together and by Ourselves reviewed by Aaron Goldsman. (Los Angeles Review of Books)
• David Biespiel continues his series with Robinson Jeffers's "Shine, Perishing Republic." (The Rumpus)
• Eimear McBride on Osip Mandelstam and the perils of writing poetry under Stalin. (New Statesman)
• And more...

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4. Selected New Arrivals

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

• Tough Luck, Todd Boss (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.)
• Goethe: Life as a Work of Art, Rüdiger Safranski, tr. David Dollenmayer (Liveright Publishing Corporation)
• Clownery, Paul Hunter (Davila Arts & Books)
• Lena, Cassie Pruyn (Texas Tech University Press)
• En Carne Propia - Memoria Poética / Flesh Wounds - A Poetric Memoir, Jorge Argueta (Arte Publico Press)
• Weary Kingdom, DéLana R. A. Dameron (The University of South Carolina Press)
• Small Fires, José Angel Araguz (FutureCycle Press)
• Draft Board Blues, Robert Cooperman (FutureCycle 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 - Alison C. Rollins
Tuesday - Deborah Bogen
Wednesday - Jason Sommer
Thursday - Jay Hopler
Friday - Jack Marshall
Saturday - R. T. Smith
Sunday - Molly Tenenbaum

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6. Featured Poets May 8, 2017 - May 14, 2017

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

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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7. Last Year’s Featured Poets

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

Kara van de Graaf, "The Doubles"
Ann Townsend, "The Mind Is Its Own Place"
Amit Majmudar, "The Interrogation"
Janine Joseph, "Shift"
Joan Bargowski, "Field Guide to the Bears of New Jersey"
Peter Richardson, "Buddleia"
Darnell Arnoult, "Seamstress"

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8. Poem From Last Year

Buddleia

 Go ahead, send purple flowers sideways 
from Georgian brickwork. Cantilever yourself 
into my peripheral vision while I wait 
for wife and daughter to exit a dress boutique.

Con me into straining my neck again 
to see you soften the drab façade of this street. 
Be the apotheosis of nuisance plants 
blaring inaudible tunes from floral speakers.

Fill the saddlebags of passing bees 
while I shake off jetlag in southwest Dublin, 
taken by your complicated pedigree 
that finds itself at home in dumps and villas

facing the Irish Sea. Grow frowsier 
each season. Run amuck on watery sunlight. 
Ravish the eye headed into October 
on a pennywhistle's-worth of windborne grit.

 

Peter Richardson
Vallum
13:1

Copyright ©2015 by Peter Richardson
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission