The Nation is proud to announce the 30th Anniversary Reading of Discovery/The Nation. The annual contest, for poets whose work has not been published in book form, was founded by Nation poetry editor Grace Schulman as a fusion of The Nation‘s Poetry Prize and the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center’s Discovery Award. The winners for 2004 are James Arthur, Hailey Leithauser, Mitch Roberson and Anne Pierson Wiese. This year’s judges are Richard Kenney, Brad Leithauser and Rachel Wetzsteon. As in the past, manuscripts are judged anonymously. Distinguished former winners of Discovery/The Nation include Susan Mitchell, Katha Pollitt, Mary Jo Salter, Sherod Santos, Arthur Smith, Emily Heistand, Debora Greger, Roseanna Warren and David St. John. Past judges include Yehuda Amichai, James Merrill, Anthony Hecht, Mark Strand, Louise Glück, Michael Harper and Audre Lorde. This year’s Discovery/The Nation event, featuring readings by the four winners, is scheduled for 8:15 on Monday, May 10, The Unterberg Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue.

Blindness and Transparency

I can’t say. Is it better to close your eyes, or to go unseen?

Better to live unlit and ostrich-like (a beached, unlikely survivor, the burier of an unhatched head), or

as a ctenophore, invisible in the ocean’s indifferent embrace, as a glassy swimmer never seen by the sun? as a glassy swimmer never seen by tHot heart, transparent body,

done or undone, we’ll grow in each other’s eyes–

James Arthur

The Return of Ozymandias

By Honor, what mess they made of me! Sand

and scorch, ruin and wind. Man is an ass

we know, but know this also: That which stands

a day in sun stands forever. What use

is there in ageless glory? What command

speaks beyond our end? I triumphed. No less

now my splendor pass, did I once ascend.

Hailey Leithauser

D’Agostino

No clouds, but over the graduated hillsides of produce, thunder and lightning warn that automatic rain is about to fall on peppers, on mealy, out-of-season tomatoes,

tumescent cucumbers, rain-hatted heads of iceberg lettuce. Perhaps the thunder and lightning are as mythic to the vegetables as they are to us, reminding the asparagus and snap-peas, the organic

and inorganic broccoli, of the California fields they sprouted in, awakening them from the nightmare of being harvested and hauled cross-country, into the dawn of fluorescent

day. Neither are we deprived of the effects of false weather. Outside there is grass painted green to make it appear more grass-like, car-capsules with individual climate control for each passenger,

malls that are little towns that replace little towns. But how can any weather be false? The humidity of the Muzak isn’t false, nor is the fog that vanishes when you close the frozen doors

to the chopped spinach’s temple of ice. In these aisles that are the bushes from which we pick nuts and berries to bring back to our young, the air conditioning compels us to buy more and more. Isn’t weather

no matter how conditioned, still weather? Nature still nature? See–there’s a bird flying from one rafter to the next, alighting as if on a limb, confused by how low the sky is today, how ripe the pickings.

Mitch Roberson

The Century Plant

The century plant’s flowered spear appears only once, twenty feet tall, shortly before its death. Given the proper conditions, all plants bloom on schedule. We are less sure of ourselves, the conditions we make for presenting what’s inside us to the world less specific; we are haunted by unplantlike doubts about the worth of what we have to offer. The Botanic Garden had advertised the event. I don’t remember how old I was, maybe ten. There was a once-in-a-lifetime line in the conservatory, a familiar smell of growth and decay, the choice to look or look away.

Anne Pierson Wiese