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Dear Readers,
This week, in our prose series, we present the Preface to The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early Life, by Karin Roffman:
"John Ashbery and I met at Bard College in the spring of 2005, when he visited a class I was teaching on modernist poetry and painting. Not long after, he and his partner, David Kermani, invited me to their nearby home. I was expecting a midcentury-modern glass cube and found instead a large, gloomy-looking nineteenth-century Victorian manse. One gray afternoon, I stood on their portico and rang the bell for the first time. Inside, tiny slits of natural light illuminated corners and crevices, but the large center hallway was otherwise very dark. As my eyes adjusted, I could see small and curious objects, many with unusual shapes and textures, covering mantels and tabletops. At some point, as I was feeling both enveloped by darkness and overstimulated by my new surroundings, Ashbery appeared."
Look for it here.
A note about our iPhone app: We are in the process of arranging for the app to be updated for use on the new iPhone operating system. We're sorry for any inconvenience you may encounter in the meantime.
Enjoy this week's poems!
Warmest regards,
Don Selby & Diane Boller
2. Sponsor Messages
SHENANDOAH Seeking New Editor
Shenandoah Editor and Visiting Assistant Professor of English
The Department of English at Washington and Lee University invites applications for a three-year position beginning Fall 2018, with a possibility of renewal.
Closes: Oct 11, 2017
http://shenandoahliterary.org/blog/2017/08/shenandoah-seeking-new-editor/
ellipsis...literature and art
Accepting submissions until November 1. Honoraria and a prize judged by Srikanth Reddy. https://ellipsis.submittable.com/submit
Palm Beach Poetry Festival
January 15-20, 2018, Delray Beach, Florida
Deadline to apply for workshops: November 10
Workshops, readings, interview, gala and performance events with Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Chard deNiord, Beth Ann Fennelly, Ross Gay, Rodney Jones, Phillis Levin, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Tim Seibles. Admission is by application. For more information, visit www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org or email srw@palmbeachpoetryfestival.org
Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins
Write the next chapter of an epic.
Talented faculty. Visiting writers. Writer-in-Residence.
Graduate Assistantships, Teaching Fellowships,
Travel Funding, and Full Scholarships.
Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing
More than fifty years of achievement in poetry,
Fiction, and nonfiction.
Bachelor of Arts with concentration or Minor in creative writing
Where students mature into authors.
Most of all, a vibrant, supportive community.
https://hollinsmfa.wordpress.com/first-child/
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.
Vermont College of Fine Arts MFAs in Writing
Vermont College of Fine Arts offers a traditinal low-residency MFA in Writing programÂnow celebrating its 35th yearÂalong with a residential MFA in Writing & Publishing program.
Wake Forest University Press proudly announces our fall titles.
David Wheatley’s The President of Planet Earth brings an experimental sensibility to bear on questions of land and territory, channeling the messianic ambitions of modernism into rich and subversive comedy. Frank Ormsby, in The Darkness of Snow, covers vast territory in five parts, from meditations on art to insightful poems on life with disease. And in his eleventh collection, Angel Hill, Michael Longley explores familiar Irish landscapes as well as vignettes from the Western Scottish Highlands. http://wfupress.wfu.edu/
3. Poetry News Links
News and reviews from around the web, updated daily: Erica Wagner reviews The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume I: 1940-56, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil. (New Statesman) Susan Cohen presents Tina Kelley's "The Kids Play at the Shelter, Two Friday Nights After Little G Shot Himself Under the Boardwalk." (Women's Voices for Change) Aarik Danielsen reviews Jennifer Maritza McCauley's Scar On/Scar Off. (Columbia Daily Tribune) Layli Long Soldier talks about her book Whereas. (San Francisco Chronicle) National Book Award Finalists are announced. (NPR) Hester Lacey talks to Ian Patterson. (The Financial Times) Hannah Gregory reviews Your Silence Will Not Protect You, by Audre Lorde. (The Financial Times) And more...4. New Arrivals
These new arrivals are available for purchase via Poetry Daily/Amazon.com.
The Odyssey, Homer / tr. Emily Wilson (W. W. Norton & Co. Inc.) James Wright: A Life in Poetry, Jonathan Blunk (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Earthling, James Longenbach (W. W. Norton & Co., Inc.) Decoherence, Nate Pritts (42 Miles Press) Church of the Exquisite Panic: The Ophelia Poems, Carole Glasser Langille (Pedlar Press) Stay, Andrew Johnson (The Gallery Press) Speaking in Song, Pura López Colomé / tr. Dan Bellm (Shearsman Books) Studied Days Poems Early & Late in Appalachi, Richard Hague (Dos Madres Press) Palindrome, Pauletta Hansel (Dos Madres Press) Shatter the Bell in My Ear, Christine Lavant (Bitter Oleander Press)5. This Week’s Featured Poets
The work of the following poets will appear as Today's Poem on the days indicated:
Monday - Mark Waldron
Tuesday - William Logan
Wednesday - John Freeman
Thursday - Ted Kooser
Friday - Declan Ryan
Saturday - Harry Bauld
Sunday - Fadwa Soleiman
6. Featured Poets October 2,, 2017 - October 8, 2017
These and other past featured poets may be found in our archive:
Monday - Donna Stonecipher
Tuesday - Kaveh Akbar
Wednesday - Jeffrey Harrison
Thursday - Craig Santos Perez
Friday - Sarah Gridley
Saturday - Michael Bazzett
Sunday - Marcus Wicker
7. Last Year’s Featured Poets
These poems will be retired from our archive during the coming week.
Justin Boening, "To Be a God"
Jessica Greenbaum, "Days I Delighted in Everything"
Steven Schreiner, "Near Election, Missouri"
Ricardo Pau-Llosa, "Allegory of Art"
Karl Kirchwey, "Roman Fountain"
David Brendan Hopes, "Certain Things"
Susan Okie, "Metamorphosis"
8. Poem From Last Year
Days I Delighted in Everything
I was listening to a book on tape while driving
and when the author said, “Those days I delighted in everything,”
I pulled over and found a pencil and a parking ticket stub
because surely there was a passage of life where I thought
“These days I delight in everything,” right there in the
present, because they almost all feel like that now,
memory having markered only the outline while evaporating
the inner anxieties of earlier times. Did I not disparage
my body for years on end, for instance, although, in contrast
that younger one now strikes me as near-Olympian?
And the crushing preoccupations of that same younger self
might seem magically diluted, as though a dictator
in hindsight, had only been an overboard character Â
but not so. Where went the fear, dense as the sudden
dark in the woods, of being alone, or the bruise of 3:30 pm
in a silent apartment, when the disenfranchised live
only with the sunlight through the blinds, just prey
caught betwixt and between, and also heartbreak, and
again, heartbreak. I didn’t have whatever that time of life
then demanded  a book, a wedding band, a baby Â
but the present, like the lie of “fair and balanced” news reporting
where creationists are granted air time with the scientists,
the present might have me believe that “in those days
I delighted in everything.” But to be ... fair and balanced ...
I do trust the strict part of memory, the only archivist
to have savored a passage of time and have preserved it
with the translucent green hinges licked by stamp collectors,
attaching it without hurting it, so I wanted the quote
exactly, and go back to hunt and tag those months where I
delighted in everything  then I couldn’t find the ticket stub.
I rummaged through the recycling but no luck, and I
couldn’t go back to find the passage on tape, and then I realized
I had bought the book for my husband, so I started leafing through it,
not wanting to start too far back, and not wanting
my eyes to fall on a passage in the future, the one where
she realizes that “Those days I delighted in everything,”
but it was never to happen again, just the present, from here on in.
Jessica Greenbaum
Poetry
October 2016
Copyright © 2016 by Jessica Greenbaum
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved.
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