Can you imagine a world without flowers that sing in spring?  Walt Disney changed our world so that when I say the two little flowers above are singing their hearts out, the figurative language seems quite literal.  We see their tongues and lips articulating some treble-clef melody like "It's a Small World," which we hear in Disneyland (California) or Walt Disney World (Florida) but surely not at the Disney park in Paris.  I would hate to think you spent a day in France at an American theme park instead of at the Louvre, Notre Dame, Napoleon's tomb, the Eiffel Tower, or just walking the avenues and boulevards of Paris.  I once had a student with our group in London who missed out on the superb theatre that season because he spent his money on American movies playing in London, some of which he had even seen here before our European trip began. However, I really want to talk about singing in spring instead of not making the most of a trip to Europe.  Each spring the Missouri State Poetry Society publishes an anthology of poems by members of all its local chapters and members-at-large.  We call it Grist and feature on its cover a Missouri grist mill.  As a member of Thirty-Seven Cents you have a page for one of your poems (or two short poems) of a total of 37 or fewer lines.  Our only stipulation is that the poems must not have been published in Grist before.  They may, on the other hand, have been published here in Thirty-Seven Cents or somewhere else, or they may be previously unpublished.  The deadline for submissions is May 1, but send your poem/s in early to help the editor.  Dawn Harmon of the Crawford County Bombadils is editing this issue.  E-mail her your work at  myshoesaretootight@hotmail.com.  Include with your poem your name, your local chapter/s, and your home city.  Additional information about how you can purchase a copy of the anthology is available on our MSPS web site at www.nfsps.com/mo/anth .  But you do not have to purchase a copy to be published in it.  Join the choir and sing this spring like the two little fellows above. -- Tom Padgett

CONTENTS:

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Poems by Members
         
Workshop

Missouri State Poetry Society

Summer Contest

Spare Mule Online

National Federation of State Poetry Societies
 
Strophes Online
 

Joel Brouwer in his review of Robert Pinsky's new collection, Gulf Music, derides the readers who state contemporary poetry is "about as approachable as an alligator with mommy."  Brouwer sets out in this review, "The Civic Poet," New  York Times Book Review, 3 February 2008. pp. 14-15, to prove Pinsky is one of  "a number of skilled American contemporaries [who] write books of general appeal that sell thousands of copies."  According to Brouwer, Pinsky, three-term poet laureate, also has this unique distinction: "No other living American poet . . . has done so much to put poetry in the public eye."  His seventh collection, Gulf Music, may be "his most valuable contribution yet."  The poet "decides to remember and what to remember," Pinsky has written.  The gulf is the distance between one poet's memories and those of other persons.  The music is the physical sounds a poet makes in common with the physical sounds of other persons to overcome that distance.  A poem is both an idea and its sounds.  Pinsky chooses free verse but regular sound patterns to communicate his ideas to readers, states Brouwer.

The first volume of a two-volume biography of Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound: Poet I: The Young Genius 1885-1920, was published in England in November and in the U.S. in December by Oxford University Press.  The author, A. David Moody, is generally accepted as one of the most highly regarded authorities on Pound and his friend T. S. Eliot, founders of modernism in poetry in English.   For the most part, the book has garnered praise, sometimes even when the subject does not, which reminds me of a letter to the editor in the February 2008 issue of Poetry by James Matthew Wilson commenting on Pound: "The poet and critic was simply not as good as he pretended to be. . . . But even the name 'Pound' still captures my imagination; with many others, I perpetuate his centrality to modern poetry despite knowing full well it is mostly an empty center" (p. 443).

The five books of poetry contending for the National Book Award in Poetry for 2007 were The House on Boulevard Street by David Kirby, Magnetic Fields by Linda Gregerson, Old Heart: Poems by Stanley Plumly, Messenger: Selected and New Poems 1976-2005 by Ellen Bryant Voight, and Time and Materials by Robert Hass.  The winner named November 14 was Robert Hass.  The prize was $10,000 and a crystal sculpture.  See more on Hass, our Poet of the Month for December (click here).

Lucille Clifton of Columbia, Maryland, recently received the Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize of $100,000.  The annual prize established in 1986 is given to a U.S. poet in recognition of lifetime achievement.  The judges were Linda Bierds, W. S. Di Piero, and Christian Wiman.  For more information about Clifton, see Poet of the Month in November issue (click here).

Charles Simic is our nation's new poet laureate to succeed Donald Hall.   Simic's work is problematical since much of it is surrealism.  However, he has some poems everyone can appreciate.  The Week magazine for August 17, 2007, reprinted his short poem "Watermelons."  Here is the complete poem: "Green Buddhas / On the Fruitstand / We eat the smile / And spit out the teeth." 

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