The Daily Poem Project (which I am running as part of my course "Songs and Poems Were All We Needed" this semester) involves reading the poem on Poetry Daily every day for a week. Then the students in the course vote, as I do, for the best poem of the week.

The course is on Friday, but the weeks will run from Monday to Sunday, starting last Monday, March 26, After we have done this for twelve weeks, we will have a final vote in the last week of the term on the best of the winners. Two summers ago, the winning poem in the end was "The Shout," by Simon Armitage. Last summer, the winning poem was "Fragment," by A. E. Stallings.

This term, I will be running a blog vote parallel to the class vote. If you want to participate, you can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog. If you want to vote by commenting but do not want your vote to appear on the blog, you just have to say so in your comment (I moderate all comments). In any case, I will not post the comments until after the final vote is in (secret ballot). Please vote by the number of the poem in the list below! Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem!

Oh, and a deadline: please send your week-one vote by Thursday, April 5.

One other rule: if PD has more than one poem on a given day, we will consider only on the first poem.

Think of it as Poetry Idol. :-)

The poets and poems for the past week:

1. Monday, March 26 - Christian Wiman, "The River"
2. Tuesday, March 27 - Derek Walcott, "The Castaway"
3. Wednesday, March 28 - Linda Gregerson, "Spring Snow"
4. Thursday, March 29 - Susan Tichy, "Couplet"
5. Friday, March 30 - Robert Kelly, "Rembrandt's Raising of Lazarus, 1642"
6. Saturday, March 31 - Lee Slonimsky, "Burial of the Sun"
7. Sunday, April 1 - Hailey Leithauser, "Coo"

It's worth noting that the blog finalist list could end up being quite different than the finalist list in the class.