adamhardin
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Posts: 167
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« on: February 21, 2007, 05:26:34 PM » |
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These are the winners from 2003-2006. When I read them, I get the same sort of lazy line feeling that puts me to sleep. I noticed the three men especially share that same sort of aesthetic. But judge for yourself. Interestingly, I do not find the aesthetic in Gluck.
Sometimes I wonder if Poets unconsciously choose mediocrity just to make sure they don't have anymore competition? Is this the best they can do? Jessica won in 2006, and soon published the following poem in the New Yorker. Evidently, The New Yorker does what it is told.
Jessica Fisher The Right to Pleasure
You would think that I go mad with grief
when the white sails fill and the keel cuts
the waters like a knife honed on a whetstone:
that's the way you're taught to interpret these signs --
matted hair, the salt-dirt lines where sweat has run,
hands that feed the mouth but will not wipe it.
But when my love decides to go and then is gone,
I can still taste him, bitter in the throat; I still
feel the weight of his body as he fights sleep.
I do not fight it: on the contrary, I live there,
and what you see in me that you think grief
is the refusal to wake, that is to say, is pleasure:
qui donne du plaisir en a*, and so if
when he couldn't sleep in that long still night
you sensed it and woke to show him how
to unfasten each and every button, then it is
promised you, even when he goes --
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Jay Hopler Excerpt
Being born is a shame-
But its not so bad, as journeys go. Its not the worst one
We will ever have to make. Its almost noon
And the light now clouded in the Courtyard is
Like the light one finds in baby pictures; old
And pale and hurt-
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Richard Siken Excerpt
Tell me the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
And dress them in warm clothes again
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
Until they forget that they were horses
Its not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
Its more like a song on a policeman’s radio
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Peter Steckfus Excerpt
In the beginning of the period known as the T’ang, Hsuan-tsang
quietly joined
a body of itinerant bicycle merchants and set off on that pilgrimage
to learn for certain whether all or part of humanity can attain
Buddhahood
At customs, they pose as a nongovernmental organization, (NGO)
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