Best of the Net? It looks like North America 20 Rest of the World 0 to me.
That said, the idea of bringing good writers and webzines to the attention of the USA print poetry world is good. But as a neutral outsider, I've got to say that of the 8 poems I've read so far, none of them struck me as particularly worthy of note. They were OK, the kind of poetry I'd expect to read on opening an average-quality magazine at random.
Hi Rob, sorry for the confusion. I thought there was one winning poem, but I was wrong. The poem I enjoyed is David Graham's "Against God," the first poem on the list.
Yes, that one is better than any of the others I read. But generally I'm unimpressed and I think the Pulitzer judges etc. will have their prejudices against the net confirmed rather than challenged if the ones I've read are representative.
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code. Example...
Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is...
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic...
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That said, the idea of bringing good writers and webzines to the attention of the USA print poetry world is good. But as a neutral outsider, I've got to say that of the 8 poems I've read so far, none of them struck me as particularly worthy of note. They were OK, the kind of poetry I'd expect to read on opening an average-quality magazine at random.
yes, the compilation is very American-centric. I have not read the other poems, but the winning poem I enjoyed.
Jee
sorry for the confusion. I thought there was one winning poem, but I was wrong. The poem I enjoyed is David Graham's "Against God," the first poem on the list.
Jee Leong