Spring arrives this month like a lamb or like a lion.  The saying about March goes "In like a lamb, out like a lion; in like a lion, out like a lamb," but I have had enough winter this year.  I prefer March to be "In like a lamb, out like a lamb."  Speaking of lambs, we recall that William Blake (1757-1827) saw his lifetime of poetry in terms of lambs and tigers.  The poet divided many of his poems into Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), with the poem "The Lamb" representing the Romantic concept that children are innocent as well as representing Blake's strong New Testament beliefs in Jesus Christ.  This poem and its counterpart "The Tiger" are found here.  Spring is usually regarded as a time of creative fervor for artists.  Those of us who have been "stove up" throughout the winter feel the juices rising in us to produce poetry.  So whether you are still in the innocent or the experienced part of your life, my challenge to you is to write a poem to capture it.  I read in one of the reviews below in "Poetry in the News" that poets are basically rememberers, choosing what to remember in hope that readers will remember something from their own lives that the poem evoked.  It is time to e-mail your page of poetry to the Grist editor for our 2008 MSPS anthology.  Every member should send a page of 37 or fewer lines to send to Dawn Harmon at  myshoesaretootight@hotmail.com. Include with the poem, your name, your city of address, and your local chapter name: Thirty-Seven Cents.  Send your poem to her well before the May 1 deadline so that she can work on the anthology over a period of time, not all at the last moment.  You may send something new or previously published just as long as it was not published before in Grist.                           -- 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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