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Calling poets! Comment‘s second-annual “Making the most of college” poetry contest runs now till July 1st, 2010:

How does a 21st-century education lead you to respond to a 19th-century visionary? Write a sonnet which interacts in some way with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias“—a refutation? an update? a round of applause? Imagine the poem afresh for university students 2010-11.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Email your submissions to dpostma@cardus.ca by July 1st. First-place winner takes $100 CDN and the p. 1 poem in our Fall 2010 print issue. Second- and third-place runners-up also get published later in the Fall issue. Enter today!

. . . And, The Atlantic published this week “The Great Grocery Smackdown: Will Walmart, not Whole Foods, save the small farm and make America healthy?” This poses a royal challenge to today’s Walmart ruminations by David Greusel. David’s response? “Corby Kummer’s instructive Atlantic article is hopeful, if a bit premature. My Walmart Supercenter is still a United Nations of exotic produce from California, Mexico, Guatemala, and Ecuador. The closest thing I could find to the article’s Heritage Produce was “locally grown” apples-from Michigan—a mere 500 miles away.” What do you think?