Vandal Poem of the Day (VPOD) is a public poetry project, which brings relevant contemporary poetry to the University of Idaho and the broader Idaho community. A new poem is published on this website every weekday during the academic year (and sometimes during the summer!).
Going forward, we will be operating on a calendar year schedule, featuring one to two presses each year. In 2022, we are featuring Alice James Books. Based in Farmington, ME, Alice James Books was founded as a feminist press and has been supporting poets and literary artists for almost 50 years. This year, we will feature about 150 poems from Alice James Books.
Past Featured Presses and Journals
VPOD has had the pleasure of featuring some outstanding presses and journals over its six years.
During the 2020/21 year, we featured poems by Four Way Books, which has been publishing contemporary poetry from their home in New York City for over 25 years. We featured close to 200 poems from Four Way over the year.
During the 2019/20 year, VPOD featured poets from two of the more innovative presses in America. In the fall, we will be featuring poems from Canarium Books. Canarium is run from Marfa, TX. They have been publishing excellent poetry since 2008. In the Spring, we will be featuring books from Flood Editions. Flood is based out of Chicago, IL and has been publishing fine poets and poems since 2001.
During the 2018-2019 academic year, we featured poems from Poetry Northwest. This was the only year we’ve featured poems from a journal during our run, and we found the variety quite intriguing. Founded in 1959 by Errol Pritchard, with Carolyn Kizer, Richard Hugo, Nelson Bentley, and Edith Shiffert, Poetry Northwest is one of the Pacific Northwest’s longest-running poetry-only journals.
2017/18 featured poets from Persea Books, an independent, literary publishing house founded in 1975 by Michael Braziller and Karen Braziller. 2016/17 featured poets from BOA Editions LTD, a not-for-profit publisher based in Rochester, NY. Our first year, 2015/16, introduced readers to poets published by Copper Canyon Press, a highly acclaimed, not-for-profit press located in Port Townsend, WA.
VPOD encourages people waiting for buses, eating lunch, or otherwise going about their lives, to read a new poem each day on the VPOD website. Further, we hope the poems featured on this site will encourages public conversations about contemporary and enduring topics since the poems are quickly readable, but resonant enough for readers to re-read, think about, and comment on or share using the links at the bottom of each poem.
We operate with these famous lines in mind:
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
-from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”
by William Carlos Williams
Credits and Acknowledgments
The Vandal Poem of the Day project is maintained and supported by the the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning.
This program began with grant support from the Idaho Humanities Council, a State-based program of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this website do not necessarily represent those of the Idaho Humanities Council or the National Endowment for the Humanities. Devin Becker and poet Alexandra Teague initiated the project at the University of Idaho in 2015.
VPOD is based on the successful Aubie’s Poem of the Day project, which Auburn University initiated in 2014 and continues to maintain.Thank you to poet Keetje Kuipers and librarian Jaena Alabi for inviting us to create a new instance of the project, and to Copper Canyon Press, BOA Editions, and Persea Books for permission to use the poems.
Please direct any questions about the site or the project here.