by Julie Peters & C.R. Gilpin It’s that time again when we look back at past year and gather together the ten poems that have stood out to us as the most remarkable. All we require for a poem to be eligible for consideration is that it made its public … Continued
This year we were interested in how poets engage with their mediums. How is the message different when it’s presented visually or aurally? How is the experience of reading changed when we take in poetry in the same spaces where we follow Marnie the Dog or news about Kim Kardashian? In a time when our connections and communications with each other are increasingly disembodied, how can we read our bodies into these texts again?
While there have been many lists made of 2014’s notable poetry books, what has been most notable is a lack of focus on the poems themselves. If you set aside the reputations and the awards, which poems threaten to become unforgettable?
This list is one answer to that question, roaming through many kinds of poetry from lyric to conceptual, literary to spoken word, structured metre to sound poetry. It is, however, by no means definitive nor comprehensive. It’s simply the poems that – in our utterly subjective judgment – are the most likely to be discussed for years to come.
