Poems Collected by Popular Vote

Somewhere, somehow I ran across Leaf Books in Wales. How they described themselves grabbed me (by the funny bone)

Each book we produce has a colourful, simple design and can be made into hats for animals if you’re mean enough to ruin them. Each one can be easily read in one sitting. Or one bathing. Or standing at the bus-stop if you want to be sensible about it.

Their chapbook titles cluster interestingly as well. The romance bundle, or the anti-romance bundle, love poems or out-of-love poems. (Not that they only do those.) The collections are the results of competitions exclusively. In the last one 35 poems were chosen from 525 entries judged by Sheenagh Pugh of Cardiff. She’s been publishing titles for 15 years and has poems on the curriculum in the U.K.
In the explore other countries vein, at the library I came across Good Poems Selected by Garrison Keillor. His is a name I know from a kurfuffle of offense of humor gone wrong or sensibilities shocked. He does The Writer’s Almanac on American public radio Program sponsors include, The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry Magazine. He’s big in some parts of the U.S. but Keillor has many lives, as a radio host of decades and is a fundamentalist of (and critical of) the religious right in the U.S. Still, this not being my bias I was a little hesitant to try what he would choose. I expect not high literary or high excitement, perhaps the easy listening of the poetry world, narrative, close-with-a-click, entertaining storytelling.
My prediction wasn’t far off but it’s hard to generalize. For sure it isn’t predominantly representing clever language play or politics or confessional therapeutic pain. There are a lot of stories of one’s own family and love of long ago. And rhyme. A lot of rhyme by moonlight.
It’s 4 CDs worth of selections that he says in a world of radio when a host accepts his role as a background hum, the best he hopes for is for someone listening to occasionally perk up and turn up the volume. These are poems he found that made listeners do that heads-up.
So far getting into CD 2, it’s got a lot that are gentle, rural and pastoral and prayerful, but there’s a bit of variety. For example, Ginsberg reading a bit of Song of Myself and I’ve Known A Heaven, Like A Tent by Emily Dickinson.
Another poem choice was Soaking Up Sun of midwest poet Tom Hennen reminiscing of a sunshine soak with his granddad when he was small. There’s a lot of introduction to new voices, and not all of them long-gone people, for instance, BBC commentator, Dana Gioia’s Summer Storm reflecting on the moment fallen into and out of. CK Williams’ The Dance was similar in tone of pausing. Sharon Olds’ Topography was rather interesting and lively in concepts that gave a bit of pleasure of surprise. And likewise Stephen Dunn’s After the Argument.
There’s enough good in it to keep listening, especially interspersed with refreshers bites of something sharper, all the better to taste with.