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The 3 A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises That Transform Your Fiction
Over 200 inventive exercises to help you break out of old patterns and discover new things about your characters. Kiteley uses word limits rather than time limits to provide discipline and focus. The prompts are grouped according to the technique they are designed to develop (timing, narrative voice, and so forth) and include brief discussions of why they work.
Poetry Previews
Reviews important contemporary poets and makes it easy to order their books.
How to Make a Living as a Poet
Successful slam poet offers creative ways to support a career as a full-time writer. Also includes advice about how to give good readings, write effective press releases, and other practical skills.
Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations
These magnificent, lavishly-printed works show the power and subtlety of wise use of design, color, typography, layouts, pictures and illustrations. Don't just make a book, make a treasure.
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
A witty look at the secret pleasures of writing, with wise advice for a writer's hardest tasks.
Art and Fear
A small book full of wisdom about overcoming the psychological barriers that can prevent us from taking our own work seriously.
Writer’s Market 100th Edition
From Writer's Digest, with "...thousands of publishing opportunities for writers, listings for book publishers, consumer and trade magazines, contests and awards, and literary agents—as well as new playwriting and screenwriting sections, along with contact and submission information.
"Beyond the listings, you'll find articles devoted to the business and promotion of writing. Discover 20 literary agents actively seeking writers and their writing, how to develop an author brand, and overlooked funds for writers. This 100th edition also includes the ever-popular pay-rate chart and book publisher subject index."
Poet’s Market 34th Edition
Published by Writer's Digest, this is a leading directory of journals, magazines, book publishers, chapbook publishers, websites, grants, and contests. "These listings include contact information, submission preferences, insider tips on what specific editors want, and—when offered—payment information." Helps you find publishers who are looking for your kind of work.
Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market 40th Edition
From Writer's Digest, "the 40th edition of NSSWM features hundreds of updated listings for book publishers, literary agents, fiction publications, contests, and more." Includes interviews with bestselling authors and tips for fiction writers.
For Love of a Soldier
Heartfelt collection of interviews with military families who have become activists against the Iraq war. These brave parents, spouses and relatives of Iraq war veterans must contend with their loved ones' PTSD, injuries or death, while also facing accusations of being "unpatriotic" for speaking out against what they see as a senseless waste of life. Among those interviewed are the founders of Military Families Speak Out.
This Gardener’s Impossible Dream
Light verse from the Georgia Poetry Society's former vice president, featuring both original works and translations of French poems by La Fontaine, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud.
The Poetry of Derrick Brown
Juxtaposed concepts are startling yet so right. ("I feel like a cloud she says/ and i know this is true/ for i know the terrible things that go on inside of clouds.") Even if you have too many books, buy his.
Little Demi-God
You wanted saving, so I tried,
Plug my strange world back in place, you said,
Make me whole with flesh and fire
In the image of your God.
A stranger to your spirit-house,
You opened up and welcomed me,
But inside I found your house was bare,
No spirit, no identity.
Yet then I saw a ghoulish thing
Wand'ring up your creaky stair,
And when I tried the door to leave,
I found it locked, the key not there.
And so, imprisoned, I became your God
While you fingered bones like rosaries
And whispered 'Love and Spirit for my Flesh'
In frantic prayer on bloody knees.
But you read me wrong, I am no God,
No three-in-one, no deity,
I could not save you from yourself,
Or me from you, or you from me.
So it was with blistered eyes I watched
My dreams aborted by your belief
And when you died, your final sacrifice,
I cried, not in mourning, but in relief.
This happened now so long ago
Yet memories still drop by on lonely nights
Like clumsy drunks they lurch through doors,
Slurring words, without invites.
From other lands, from underground,
You clutch and clutch and clutch at me,
There is no God, no after life,
You're dead and gone, so set me free.
Copyright 2003 by Natasha Sutherland
Critique by Jendi Reiter
"Little Demi-God" makes good use of Gothic and Christian imagery to tell a tale of psychological vampirism. While the metaphors are not novel, the emotional immediacy behind them saves the poem from cliché. The reader feels that the author is personally invested in this story. Some beginning writers will use archaic words and images to make a poem seem more lofty and "poetic" at the expense of sounding natural. By contrast, one gets the sense from "Little Demi-God" that these images came naturally to Sutherland, as the lens through which she saw this relationship.
The strength of this poem is its consistent narrative thread. The author advances a thesis—"you wanted me to be your savior, but instead you sacrificed us both for nothing"—and develops it steadily throughout the poem, using the notion of a Christian sacrifice gone awry.
Part of writing an effective poem is to match form and subject matter. Here, Sutherland made a smart choice to use a formal structure (rhyme and meter) rather than free verse. This style gives the poem a more old-fashioned feel that fits well with the haunted-house imagery we associate with 19th-century horror novels.
With some deviations, the lines are generally four iambs long. (An iamb is a pair of syllables, the first unstressed, the second stressed.) This regular rhythm resembles a hymn or ritual incantation, which is appropriate for a poem about distorted spiritual yearnings. As the speaker of the poem becomes more trapped in her friend's dark mental world, her fruitless struggle is echoed by the relentless, unchanging beat of the lines.
How much to deviate from the meter in a formal poem is a tricky question. Many poems by beginners display lines of irregular lengths and rhythms, where the tacked-on final rhymes are insufficient to impose a poetic structure. On the other hand, too much regularity and the poem becomes sing-song. You can become so absorbed in building the structure that you forget to invest the words with real passion and vividness.
That being said, there are a few lines in "Little Demi-God" that could benefit from being made to fit the meter more accurately. In the next-to-last stanza, I loved the metaphor of recurring memories lurching against the door like unwelcome drunks. However, the line "Yet memories still drop by on lonely nights" is one iamb too long. "Still memories drop by on lonely nights" is a subtle change that returns the line to four stressed beats, if you say it right: "Still mem'ries drop by on lonely nights." Perhaps a better option is to rewrite the first two lines of the stanza: "Though this happened now so long ago/Mem'ries drop by on lonely nights." (I've contracted "memories" to "mem'ries" to show how it would be spoken, but it should be written out as "memories" so as not to look pretentiously archaic.)
Another line to tinker with is "Plug my strange world back in place, you said." I've selected this one because it's not one of the strongest, thus the poem would not be damaged too much by altering it. "Plug" seems more futuristic and electronic than the rest of the poem. Other too-long lines, like "And whispered 'Love and Spirit for my flesh,'" are important enough to the poem that they can probably be allowed to stand.
Sutherland would benefit from reading Emily Dickinson (wouldn't we all!) Many of Dickinson's poems play off of a hymn-like rhythm (quatrains of four-beat lines) but depart from that meter in creative, visionary ways.
Where could this poem be submitted? Formal verse, especially when paired with images reminiscent of 19th-century Romantic poetry, is hard to place in today's literary journals. I recommend The Lyric (P.O. Box 110, Jericho Corners, VT 05465, 802-899-3993) and Tucumcari Literary Review (3108 West Bellevue Avenue, Los Angeles, CA). Both are good small US journals devoted to formal poetry, where poems like "Little Demi-God" might find a home. Also consider magazines that specialize in dark fantasy and Gothic themes.
This poem and critique appeared in the August 2003 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Set Free
Sparks a volley of abuse, and lights the shortened fuse,
From prisoners soft and hard.
Our prison van moves off, It's human cargo seated
With toughened hides, we sway and slide,
On seats of steel—butt heated.
Some sit silent, some converse, some talk of sentences far worse.
While I am frightened, others scorn, some make fun, some look forlorn.
Each one is tagged: "Society's curse."
We dwell upon our morbid fate, our future home ahead:
Our enemies, and mental state, the prison staff, the bars, the gates—
...A place of living dead.
Then huge steel gates, like giant Jaws, swing open at our sight
Then swiftly they enclose their prey, before the darkness swamps the day,
And some give thought to flight.
Heads down we shuffle from the van, in single line we go.
Names are called, numbers given, no offence is deemed forgiven,
and then the nudist show!
Naked and bent over, our rear ends are displayed,
and inspected for the drugs they bring, and many an unlawful thing,
inserted in that way.
They march us off in single line, to yellow-lighted cells,
Where sweat & odours fill the air, and peep-holed doors have eyes that stare,
And mouths that yell & yell.
A talking door with puckered mouth, whispers for a smoke,
And sneakily I offer one: the guard explodes and spoils my fun,
... The Con thinks it’s a joke.
Then comes the clash of steel on steel, as my cell is unlocked.
I see a bed but little more: a toilet pan, a stony floor.
The walls close in and mock.
The lonely cell exudes, a heightened sense of woe.
Barred windows cast their shadows in, reminding me that crime can't win,
And youth is my real foe.
Dazed, I sit and contemplate, my thoughts escape the bars.
I dream of things that could have been, of sights and sounds that are unseen,
of women and fast cars.
As darkness falls, I hear the steps of guards that walk on by,
The jangle of their keys resound, and echo through the prison ground,
And slap against their thighs.
The clang and squeak of opened cells, announce the morning's noise.
My eyes are jolted wide awake...I give my head a final shake...
Breathe deep to regain poise.
Tier upon tier of human flesh, like ants descend on down,
My feet clang on the catwalk, my ears feed on the small talk,
The violent wear the crown.
In shower blocks the weak look scared, afraid of being groped.
My soap brings forth a crimson flood, that looks suspiciously like blood,
…A blade is in my soap!
Then someone grabs and mauls me, you can't believe the fear.
I scream, I punch, and then I kick, I feel so helpless and so sick.
No one to help me here
In fear I grab an offered knife; though weak and short of breath,
I strike until I make a kill, then dazed they march me to a cell,
And charge me with the death.
It was cold and awful damp when my body hit the floor,
And I felt the hot tears drop, and I wept and couldn't stop,
Though I'd never cried before.
Then blood-guilt came in horror waves, condemning all I'd done,
Hell flashed before my sleepless eyes; I agonised with sobs and sighs,
And cried out to God’s Son.
"I don't deserve your mercy, Lord, do with me what You will."
The anguish almost crushed my heart, I felt like someone torn apart,
How could I maim and kill?
A voice inside said: "Peace, be still. My blood was shed for you.
I died the death that you deserve, and I forgive without reserve,
My peace I leave with you."
Next morning when they saw me; they marveled at the sight:
For there I was, down on my knees, cleansed of sins that tortured me,
My face was bathed with light.
Yes, even though I'm still in jail, the jail is not in me,
My chains have all been snapped, Jesus Christ has borne my rap,
And I have been "Set Free"
Copyright 2003 by Barry Goode
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Barry Goode's "Set Free" is a compelling prison ballad that reminds me of the songs of Johnny Cash. The swift-moving rhythm and rhyme propel the story along. I especially like the interior rhymes within the second line of each stanza, and the fact that each stanza ends on a shorter, punchy line. These choices add variety to the sound of the poem. However, Goode should revise the third stanza to bring it into line with the pattern he has chosen. The first and third lines are too long. For instance, consider changing the last line to "Each tagged: Society's curse" to eliminate extra syllables.
The poet Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) was a master of this type of melodramatic story-poem, a genre that nowadays has taken a back seat to the modernist free-verse lyric. Read Robinson's poems at Bartleby.
The strong point of "Set Free" is its detailed evocation of prison life. Goode takes the reader through the gamut of emotions experienced by these imprisoned men: sullenness, humiliation, escapist fantasy, the violence of caged animals turning against one another, and finally contrition. The stanza beginning "Tier upon tier" is especially powerful, in terms of both imagery and sound.
The poem brings to life the prison's nightmarish daily routine, showing how the prisoners' cruelty to one another and the dehumanizing constraints of captivity are mutually reinforcing. While the poem clearly has a moral, Goode allows the message to arise implicitly from the facts he relates— at least until the conversion scene, which I think is weaker to the extent that it follows a formulaic script.
Goode makes effective use of metaphor to show how the protagonist of "Set Free" moves from passivity to moral agency, and from a hellish state to a heavenly one. The prisoners at first are undifferentiated "human cargo," tagged and numbered, shuffling like zombies. In a rape-like scenario, they are strip-searched for contraband. Then a first-person voice emerges. At the outset, the narrator is trapped within himself, escaping into fantasy as a way to avoid the solitude of his own thoughts.
He is galvanized into action by the blade in his soap, but the action is still unreflective, an animal lashing out in self-defense. The people around him are impersonal forces, not other selves. "I strike until I make a kill," he says, identifying neither his victim/attacker nor the person who hands him the knife. Finally, when he is able to confront and feel remorse for his act of violence, he breaks the cycle and is "set free" from the dehumanizing effects of his surroundings.
Images such as "a place of living dead" and "huge steel gates, like giant jaws" create a picture of damned souls filing through the gates to Hell. This sets up a contrast with the protagonist's vision of Christ later on.
While the conversion scene provides dramatic resolution, making this more than just a depressing snapshot of prison life, it doesn't ring as true as the earlier scenes of the poem. I'm not really concerned about the storyline's lack of originality. Ballads are all about retelling some archetypal human story (a tragic love affair, a criminal's repentance) in a catchy, melodic way. There's just something formulaic about the last two stanzas that comes as a letdown after the gritty realistic detail of the preceding verses. Perhaps the shift from natural to supernatural is too unexpected.
It's hard to quarrel with the stanza beginning "A voice inside," which elegantly translates a familiar Biblical text into the poem's rhyme-scheme. My biggest problem is with the penultimate stanza. "My face was bathed with light" is a cliche from sentimental "inspirational" literature. And who are "they" who "marveled at the sight"? It's hard to believe that the rough guards and prisoners we met in the beginning of the poem would have the sensitivity to notice the narrator's change of heart. It no longer feels like we're in the same setting, but rather in a much tamer and more generic one. I also find "Jesus Christ has borne my rap" in the last stanza a little too glib.
Overall, to be more believable, the protagonist's spiritual change of heart needs to be slower-paced and display more of the psychological complexity that makes the first part of the poem so dramatic. We move too quickly from Christ's reassurance to "my face was bathed with light." We don't know what the narrator was in jail for originally, but by the end of the poem, he's killed a man, albeit in self-defense. He's a mass of conflicting emotions, fear and rage contending with pangs of conscience. Wouldn't the miracle of divine forgiveness be harder for him to comprehend all at once? Perhaps, for one more stanza, he should wrestle with feelings of unworthiness or disbelief that things can change for him.
We don't hear anything about the narrator's spiritual beliefs until suddenly, when he's thrown in solitary for killing the other prisoner, he "crie[s] out to God's Son." The poem leaves us unprepared for this moment. What was his spiritual state before this? If raised a Christian, why did he fall away from it? Why, at this moment, does he turn to Jesus, when he seemed to be without a spiritual compass during the first part of the poem? A few clues to this aspect of his personality would make this poem stronger.
Where could this poem be submitted? Most mainstream literary journals would find it too sentimental. It's more likely to find a home in a Christian-themed magazine (pick up the latest volume of the Poet's Market from Writer's Digest for a list of these).
I imagine that "Set Free" would make an effective performance piece at open mike nights, storytelling contests and poetry slams, if the author has any inclinations in that direction.
This poem and critique appeared in the September 2003 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Crows
Mary knows all the names of the plants,
The tiny buds, the bird calls through the brush,
What will come next season.
Maxine knows the animal spoors, the dog's love life,
How to keep hay from rotting, what she wants.
Donald knows about old wood, forest smells, grass stains
On the carpet, living with the dead.
I know that this sweet world
Slips soundlessly under my skin,
Curls around my ribs, carries me
To when the crow burst from my breast bone,
Rose and swept across the sky
Gathering his tribe, calling and calling
So I would never forget his tongue,
The night I was born.
Tonight the crows speak again
As they do whenever I arrive, as they do
When I am not here
Each morning across these worlds,
Always within the sound of memory,
My longest dream.
Copyright 2003 by Becky Dennison Sakellariou
Critique by Jendi Reiter
I chose "Crows" for critique because of its delicacy of feeling and its pleasing rhythm. Sakellariou has a good ear for the music of speech, which is essential for writing free verse that is lyrical and not prosy.
A well-crafted poem does not declare its theme, but rather allows it to emerge organically from the concrete details of the poem. Through the author's choice of images, "Crows" speaks of kinship with the natural world, accepting one's place in a larger cycle of birth, death and rebirth.
The wisdom of Mary, Maxine and Donald encompasses both signs of decay—"the rotting hay," "grass stains/On the carpet, living with the dead"—and signs of renewal—"what will come next season," the fertility of budding plants and mating animals. This litany of humble, earthy knowledge conveys a sense of peace, like a forest that embodies both stillness and constant change.
The narrator does not enter the scene until the second stanza, conceding the central role to the natural world of which she is only a part. In the final stanza, she hints at her own disappearance: "Tonight the crows speak again/As they do whenever I arrive, as they do/When I am not here." This is a deft reversal of the self-centered Romantic convention that treats natural phenomena as only the poet's emotions writ large.
I would hate to spoil the concision of this poem, but I wish Sakellariou had added more details to help us figure out who Mary, Maxine and Donald are. We meet them without any preface except the title "Crows." I first began reading this stanza as a list of the things that crows know—an idea not without whimsical appeal—but realized that crows probably wouldn't know about carpets or the names of plants. Without any other information, I ended up picturing them as wise older members of the "tribe" mentioned in the second stanza, a community from which the narrator came and to which she periodically returns. [See November critique for more on this.]
This is a poem that invites you to fill in the blanks. Shapes shift as in a myth, people into crows, old wood into new buds. This impression is especially strong in the last stanza, with its suggestion of multiple "worlds," and its concluding phrase, "memory,/My longest dream."
Compared to the understatement of the previous lines, this phrase struck me as a little too sentimental. "Memory" and "dream" are words that many poets, including myself, are tempted to overuse. Some beginning poets will throw in romantic words to pretty up the poem and make it sound more important. By contrast, in "Crows," though it departs somewhat from the tone that I found so appealing in the earlier lines, the final phrase does help to add a new shade of meaning. Suggesting that the memories of her life are merely her "longest dream," the narrator further blurs the boundaries between the natural and mythical worlds. The language of the crows and the language of scientific plant names are aspects of the same reality.
Where could this poem be published? "Crows" would be a good fit for many mainstream literary journals. These come to mind:
32 Poems (edited by Deborah Ager)
A new arrival on the literary scene, this well-crafted little magazine publishes 32 poems in each issue, each no more than 32 lines.
Zone 3 (Austin Peay State University)
Respected literary journal. We recommend their annual "Rainmaker" awards for unpublished poems.
New Millennium Writings (edited by Don Williams)
Handsomely produced journal that regularly publishes work with mythic or magical-realist influences. Check website for contest deadlines (officially June 17 and November 17, but often extended) and rules.
This poem and critique appeared in the October 2003 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Postscript: Our well-read subscriber Lucinda Lawson cleared up a question I raised above. She writes, "You mentioned in the critique wishing that you knew who Mary, Maxine, and Donald were, assuming they were older and wiser members of the 'tribe'. I read poetry for pleasure, and before I reached the end of the piece, I recognized Mary Oliver, Maxine Kumin and Donald Hall (all very influential poets) by the things the writer said they knew, as well as by their first names, the short list of items for each poet being reflective of that poet's repeated themes throughout the lifetime of his/her work. Kind of a neat touch, I thought."
Becky has confirmed that this is what she had in mind. It's great to have such astute readers. I learn something every day!
Blackened
Dress the child in black all his life
feed him licorice
sew him black, stitch, stitch.
Run the child in fields wild over
stumps and streams
train him to climb.
No one will follow.
Cry softly under Baby's cries
when he reaches for a stronger arm
and clutches only a withered breast.
When the milk runs dry, feed him
licorice and chase him, racing
the river.
Mirrored between lilies
he'll see a deep fish.
He will ask for sugar, but you'll have
only a black spiral
strangely sweet.
He'll learn to like it.
irises dawn misted, listless in
crooked paths
before the toweling sun rises.
Work your work, your life;
wear a dress, bare your breasts,
he'll call you mama—
cover them, hide
the scent of milk
wear jeans and heavy shoes
play ball, build a treehouse
he'll call you daddy.
And when the other men strip
their shirts from the sweat of mowing,
run away to the house where window breezes
cool your blasphemy.
Speak softly when he finds
you in the mourning, cotton wet
against your cheeks, breasts buried
in the cool touch of the sheet.
Sit up, take him to you.
He is an only child
and you are his mother.
Die, dressed in his black birthrobe.
He will turn white with your name
watch you raised higher than tips of roots.
He will know he is your only man.
Copyright 2003 by Laurie J. Ward
Critique by Jendi Reiter
I chose Laurie Ward's deeply affecting poem "Blackened" for this month's critique because of its subtlety of thought and expression.
I knew I was in good hands from the very first lines: "Dress the child in black all his life/feed him licorice/sew him black, stitch, stitch." What a complex relationship is revealed in those few words: tender care inextricably entwined with mourning, even ambivalence about the child, as the mother binds him tight, feeds him with her own sadness. Is she immunizing him against a harsh world, or forcing him to lose his illusions too soon? Ward is unafraid to acknowledge the dark side of intimacy.
The title, "Blackened", suggests that both characters in the poem are scarred but still standing, like a lightning-struck tree. No matter how much the single mother and her son love each other, their relationship is overshadowed by the burden of having to be everything to one another. He is her "only man", while she must be both mother and father to him.
In passages such as the stanza beginning "Speak softly when he finds/you in the mourning," Ward frankly portrays the Oedipal tension that their closeness generates, without degenerating into prurience. The recurring image of the mother's breasts takes on multiple meanings, from breastfeeding to the "blasphemy" of her suppressed sexuality and her inability to fill the father's role. It's almost as if, by concealing her breasts, she is holding back some love from the growing child for his own good.
One feels secure, because of the strength of the mother's love and her clear insight into her own feelings, that this is a fundamentally healthy relationship despite the sensual undercurrent. This impression is confirmed by the last stanza, in which she imagines her own death (real or symbolic) and thereby faces the fact that he will grow away from her. He is her only man, but she is not meant to be his only woman.
What makes "Blackened" so successful is that it does not lay out this storyline in a literal way. T.S. Eliot wrote that poetry best conveys emotion by means of "objective correlatives", namely objects and events that, when described, will naturally produce a certain emotion in the reader, without the need to spell out what she should feel.
Unconstrained by realism, poetry can compress a whole relationship into a few strange but apt phrases. "Die, dressed in his black birthrobe," could not be literally true (babies are rarely dressed in black, and it wouldn't fit her anyway) but conveys a wealth of psychological information in a more immediate way than any prose paragraph: one generation making way for the next, the sadness attendant on his birth, the centrality of motherhood to her identity even when he is grown, etcetera. You can see how the poetic version delivers more impact with fewer words.
Another interesting difference between poetry and prose is that images can have emotional resonance in poetry even if their "meaning" (in the sense of something you could paraphrase) is unclear. I had trouble visualizing what Ward meant by "He will turn white with your name/watch you raised higher than tips of roots." In the context, I felt some kind of liberation was at work here, but not sure how the pieces fit together. The son has been freed from the blackness at last, but how does "with your name" come into it? "Higher than tips of roots" is also puzzling, since roots point down, while "higher" in this context suggests ascension into heaven. Tips of trees would make more sense, though it would also be less original. But on another level I still like the images, perhaps for their refreshing oddness, as well as the stately sound of the lines. Both "name" and "roots" suggest the continuity of generations, a fitting way to end the poem.
Where could "Blackened" be submitted? The poem's free-verse narrative style and intimate subject matter would probably be a good fit for many journals. Based on what I've seen of their recently published authors, I recommend submitting to the following:
Main Street Rag (submit to magazine, also see their chapbook and full-length book contests)
The Marlboro Review
Postmark Deadline: March 31 (changed to April 30 as of 2006)
This poem and critique appeared in the November 2003 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Guiding Light
The sun appeared
a shadow of itself today
I could see
dark thunderous clouds
circling as a pack of vultures
close around
as if vying for the right
deciding
who would be the first
to snuff out
its bright light
Alone
in the open fields
There is no haven in sight
and I am afraid now
of heaven's tear drops
on my own dimming light
like a fresh sprig of water
flicked
at a candle's open flame
that I should be put out
a soaked useless wick
as it begins to rain
Copyright 2003 by Sherry Eubank
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Sherry Eubank's poem "Guiding Light" addresses humankind's most basic fears: What if the light of this world, the world that is all I know, should go out? What if I disappear utterly when I die, as if I had never existed? Since human history began, our arts and religions have made the connection between our mortality and the disappearance of the sun.
On the surface, the poem describes an event so ordinary as hardly to be worth recording. Storm clouds begin to obscure the sun, while the speaker is caught in an open field without shelter from the rain. But the extended metaphor of the vultures quickly creates a powerful feeling of menace, showing that much more is at stake than the weather: namely, the speaker's (and perhaps the world's) vulnerability and mortality. The speaker's "own dimming light" is like that of the sun, emerging tentatively like an invalid from his sickroom, "a shadow of itself". Because both the "I" of the poem and the source of her fear are left undeveloped, the effect is more universal and more terrifying.
I perceive the weather in this poem as more than just a metaphor for the speaker's psychological state. There is a spiritual drama going on overhead, a shadowy, elemental struggle between the forces of light and darkness. And these cosmic forces have intentionality; they are not just a scientist's impersonal principles.
I read the poem this way because the speaker's biggest fear seems to be, not that mortal life is meaningless, but that a higher power has weighed her in the balance and found her wanting. How quickly we move from the tender, perhaps too sentimental image of "heaven's tear drops" to the unseen finger that casually flicks water at her life's little candle flame, extinguishing it—a gesture reminiscent of the fearsome, alien God of Puritan sermons.
This spare, conceptually focused poem made an impact on me despite some unevenness in its technical quality. Though I liked the vulture image, I wasn't hooked by the first stanza, which took too long to build momentum. In poetry, every line has to count. When the author ends the line before saying something interesting, the line can fall flat. "The sun appeared" isn't a strong enough opening. It's like saying "The sky was blue". It's not news. Once I read the poem to the end, I no longer took the sun's appearance for granted, but the opener initially led me to expect a more banal series of observations.
I had the same reaction to the line "I could see". There's no rhythmic reason for a break there, and the phrase "I could see" (in this context) isn't strong enough on its own to warrant being set apart that way. A line break calls attention to the phrase, so it had better be able to handle the spotlight.
The pace picks up, and my interest with it, in the second stanza of "Guiding Light". Why does this stanza feel so much more alive than the one before it? Much credit is due to the tighter rhythm and the use of rhymes (right/bright/light) and similar sounds (vying/deciding) to ratchet up the intensity. "As if vying for the right" sets up a strong beat that each subsequent line hammers home. The stanza elaborates on the vulture image, involving us more in the drama.
The third stanza is an example of using line breaks for maximum effectiveness. "Alone" stands alone. After setting the scene ("in the open fields") each line introduces a new aspect of her predicament, allowing the impact of one thought ("There is no haven in sight") to sink in before moving on to the next ("And I am afraid").
As I mentioned above, the phrase "heaven's tear drops" didn't ring true for me, though I liked the assonance of "heaven/haven". It's too familiar and sentimental an image.
The last stanza is very powerful, with a strong rhythm and a chilling final image that dispels any saccharine thoughts of heaven. The line "flicked" is purposely short, as if the unseen deity could only spare an instant of time to think about the poor flame. The rhymes "flicked/wick" and "flame/rain" and the proliferation of edgy consonants ("a sprig of water flicked" at the "soaked useless wick") create a lot of intensity in a small space.
I liked the poet's unusual word choice—a "sprig" of water, rather than the more predictable "drop" or "spray". The sound matches the action, and the unexpected word prevents us from passing over the image too quickly.
Where could this poem be submitted? Before sending it out, the author should probably revise the first stanza so that it has the same tautness and passion as the ending. Because of its accessibility and universal message, "Guiding Light" might be a good fit for some of the contests sponsored by state poetry societies. Check these websites for deadlines and themes:
Pennsylvania Poetry Society
Postmark Deadline: January 15
Poetry Society of Virginia
Postmark Deadline: January 19
National Federation of State Poetry Societies
Postmark Deadline: March 15
These other contests may also be appropriate:
Tom Howard Poetry Competition
Postmark Deadline: September 30
FirstWriter.com International Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 1
A spiritually themed but not preachy poem such as "Guiding Light" could also be submitted to magazines such as U.S. Catholic and The Christian Century.
This poem and critique appeared in the December 2003 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Vietnamese Reds
A string of red paper lanterns cast harsh shadows
upon a pagoda of silken Bodhisattvas, snapping
pleats of paper like peacock tails for American GI's.
Their celadon features light opium pipes, pouring
flowery rice wines; while pregnancies out of wedlock
are punished by lying in the street as elephants trod
on stomachs until garments are the color of cay-cay.
Still, born of this night are offenses more colorful
as the essence of jackfruit and pungent curries
stain winds. A river bleeds like a long cut, split open
by the evils of Reds and Capitalists alike. Junks
carry small explosions of orange as black clouds lift
from woks and grenades. Nearby a curious red rain
falls on banana leaves, where a child has followed
a scuttling blue crab over a landmine. Beyond
Saigon, a field of casualties lay splayed in the wake
of "conflict" resembling war. Their vampire smiles
appear to be stained with betel nut, but not.
Burlap bags swollen with shrapnel, bleed rice.
Jasmine and napalm float upon the moist dark:
marriage of dove and vulture. A people governed
by fate question virtues, as Confucius scratches
his head. A staccato beat sounds for the dead
from a drum said to be stretched with human skin.
Cay cay: a fruit similar to a persimmon that produces a dark pink juice that is used as a cosmetic and a paint and sealer for paper fans.
Copyright 2004 by S.K. Duff
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Vietnamese Reds" by S.K. Duff, surrounds us with a world of brutal illusions, where beauty and cruelty intertwine like the blossoms and dragons on a Chinese urn. The finely observed details create an atmosphere that is almost oppressively real, a feat that helps compensate for the lack of narrative development.
This is a poem of disguises and shape-shifting, where grains of rice can be mistaken for shrapnel, and woks and grenades give off identical smoke. The clash between the ancient Vietnamese civilization and modern American warfare adds yet another layer of disharmony between appearance and reality. Duff subtly suggests that the war itself is enabled by deception, as when politicians refuse to call things by their real names: "[A] field of casualties lay splayed in the wake/of 'conflict' resembling war."
The poem demands close attention in order to comprehend what is being described. It's easy to be dazzled by the sensory profusion and fail to spot the deadly reality beneath. It would be nice to deceive ourselves that the bodies' lips are red with betel nut, a sensory indulgence, "but not." Duff is a master of restraint. My favorite example of chilling understatement:
...Nearby a curious red rain
falls on banana leaves, where a child has followed
a scuttling blue crab over a landmine.
Death is everywhere in this poem, but rarely named outright. Even the execution of pregnant girls is masked with the pleasing, impersonal image of decorative dyes.
Poets who aspire to tackle emotionally charged topics could learn subtlety from "Vietnamese Reds". The author refrains from unnecessary editorializing and trusts his readers to have the appropriate response to the scenes laid out before them.
Yet one drawback of the poem's journalistic detachment, in my view, is a certain emotional coolness. The very title suggests an abstract composition, rather than a human drama. While I'm glad Duff refrained from telling us how to feel, as so many poems about atrocities do, I wasn't sure what the details added up to. The poem is structured as a realistic narrative, but it didn't seem to move forward toward a dramatic resolution. The final image of a drum "stretched with human skin" is one more addition to a catalogue of horrors, rather than a clue to making sense of the whole picture. The poem stops, but doesn't really end.
The closest we come to closure is "A people governed/by fate question virtues, as Confucius scratches/his head." This intriguing yet enigmatic statement left me wanting to know more about how it applied to the specific scenes of the poem.
Is the oppressive fate in question the traditional Vietnamese culture, with its harsh punishment of sexual misconduct, or the modern-day "evils of Reds and Capitalists"? Or is the point that modernity has just substituted one inhuman system for another, rather than bringing individual freedom?
Since there are no characters in the poem—the human figures are either inferred from the physical objects they create, or dead and reduced to objects themselves—the notion of a choice between virtuous and amoral action is hard to read back into the preceding stanzas. Perhaps the author is saying that we commit atrocities when we allow ourselves to depersonalize our actions, to act as if "fate" and not human choices ordered those women to be trampled and those soldiers to be shot.
I also found the first two stanzas to lack a strong poetic rhythm, which made them feel overly wordy. The following is a powerful image, but it seems to be struggling to stand out from a jumble of sounds:
...while pregnancies out of wedlock
are punished by lying in the street as elephants trod
on stomachs until garments are the color of cay-cay.
However, by the third stanza, the rhythm tightens up. The line breaks feel more inevitable, matching the flow of the concepts. This image in particular had all the elegant economy of an Asian brushstroke painting:
Jasmine and napalm float upon the moist dark:
marriage of dove and vulture.
The latter line reminded me of the cryptic, metaphorical names given to martial arts poses, or sections of the I Ching.
Where could a poem like "Vietnamese Reds" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Columbia Journal Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: March 1
A prestigious magazine published by New York's Columbia University.
Foley Poetry Contest
Entries must be received by April 16
Sponsored by America, a Jesuit magazine, yet this contest favors works with a more subtle philosophical/spiritual component, rather than explicitly religious verse.
Pablo Neruda Prize
Postmark Deadline: April 30
Sponsored by Nimrod International Journal, this is one of the most prestigious contests for individual poems. Intense, image-filled work may find a home here.
This poem and critique appeared in the January 2004 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Letter from Dhahran
January 15, 1990
You learn to live on the back of a snake
that's always shedding its skin.
When you hike out, you can't
navigate by distance or by dunes.
Sand walks through tent walls.
The grains dance on wires. Wind
is a visible darkness. You don't recognize
duffle bags crumpled on your jeep.
You look as grey and as flat
as a plastic tarp.
* * *
You move with the two-beat undulation
of hands entrenching shovels.
When it feels like you're staying on
at a campsite you don't like anymore,
you argue over the size of city blocks
pace off remembered lots and back yards,
recall the green penetration of oleander,
how you worked to make hedges civilized.
In uniform, it's the same push and pull,
the same heartbeat of sweat.
Like following a lawnmower,
blades shearing down grass, the world
through a haze of clippings, the slashed
green scent in your nostrils, the whir
inside you. Like the time you mowed clean
into the garden and butchered the spinach.
* * *
Only when you stop to eat, do you slow
enough to start seeing behind the wind.
You pop open a can of pudding and lick off
the lid, making trails in the vanilla.
Ever notice how sugar sears
your mouth when it dissolves?
How your jaw aches? Almost wounded.
As if tears bled from your tongue.
Copyright 2004 by Heather McGehee
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Letter From Dhahran" by Heather McGehee, depicts the cognitive dislocation of a soldier beginning a tour of duty in the Saudi Arabian desert. Dhahran is the site of a US military base where troops were stationed during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The poem captures the obstacles that the soldier must surmount before even seeing battle: homesickness, fatigue, and a punishing environment that adds risk to the simplest tasks.
The ever-shifting desert sands contribute to the dissolution and re-formation of the soldier's identity, as he struggles to integrate his old self, with a home and personal memories, and his new role as a more impersonal unit of military force. (In order to avoid repeating "he or she" throughout the critique, I am assuming the soldier to be male, but the poem could just as well be about a female soldier.) To adapt, he must become as mutable as the landscape, "a snake/that's always shedding its skin."
The personal and the impersonal change places in McGehee's imagery, creating a sense that the soldier is fighting to maintain his psychic boundaries against a landscape filled with invisible enemies. Sand "walks through tent walls" like a sinister spirit, while the soldier feels like he has turned into an object, "as gray and as flat/as a plastic tarp."
One way that the soldier stays centered is to map memories from his old life onto his new one, sometimes in an absurdly literal way, as he plots out familiar streets and backyards on the grounds of his base camp. Digging ditches, he remembers happier exertions, "how you worked to make hedges civilized."
This last word, "civilized," is the closest the poem gets to noticing the ironic contrast between the two types of work, cultivating a garden and digging trenches in preparation for killing other people. His ultimate mission seems absent from the soldier's mind, not even as a repressed source of tension. Is it because he's sure that his work here is also on the side of "civilization"? Or is he just so preoccupied with his daily physical and mental hardships that he cannot look that far ahead? "Like the time you mowed clean/into the garden and butchered the spinach." The poem here hints at the dangers of focusing too narrowly.
The last section, indeed, shows the soldier beginning to reach for a fuller emotional perspective. "Only when you stop to eat, do you slow/enough to start seeing behind the wind." Nurturing himself with food, he discovers the sadness concealed in the sweetness, as the poem returns to its opening themes of hidden perils and complex identities. Still, one senses that the sadness is primarily for himself, not for the larger conflict in which he plays a part. Does he realize that he is like the sugar, able to wound as well as nourish? Paradoxically, the poem raises this question most effectively by leaving it unsaid.
Where could a poem like "Letter from Dhahran" be submitted? The following contests, sponsored by journals that favor narrative free verse, may be of interest:
Arts & Letters Prize in Poetry
Postmark Deadline: April 15
Florida Review Editors' Awards
Postmark Deadline: April 2
Marlboro Review Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: April 30
Greensboro Review Literary Awards
Postmark Deadline: September 15
This poem and critique appeared in the February 2004 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Shark Bait
Sharks close their eyes
the moment before they strike.
They sense the electrical signal
of the heart, they know where to bite,
they can find it blind. The heart
will betray you every time.
It's been a year I've chosen
to be alone. My life is full
of work and talk and the occasional fling
where no one falls for anyone—it's best
to become heartless. No one holds me
back; I don't get that attached.
I say heartless but this is a lie. It beats
red and bloody underneath it all, I am ripe
for slaughter. It keeps getting harder
to hide the signal: the heart wants
to be discovered. Or devoured,
if that's what it takes.
The sharks' own hearts must
crackle with charge as they glide
silently through the leaden water—
do they sense each other's presence
as they sense prey? Do their hearts
call out to each other
in the darkness
beneath the waves? I want someone
to draw my passion like a magnet,
a target, I long for it. So the heart
sends out its signal; I'm a beacon.
Nothing will protect me
from the danger.
I'm just waiting to feel
the teeth sink in.
Copyright 2004 by Ellia Bisker
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Shark Bait" by Ellia Bisker, spins an arresting bit of scientific trivia into an extended metaphor for how our instinctual need for connection may prove more powerful than our "higher" functions of judgment and willpower.
The poem takes a single idea and consistently develops it with skill, using repetition of certain key concepts (heart, signal, sense, electricity) to maintain the narrative focus. Bisker is economical with language, which helps the poem avoid sentimentality for the most part. Short, sharp rhythms and the use of internal rhymes and alliteration create a relentless momentum as the speaker's illusions are stripped away.
The theme of blind fate is evident from the first line, "Sharks close their eyes". The poem suggests that humans no less than other animals are hard-wired to make connections, be it with lovers, predators or prey. While the conscious mind tries to resist a destructive coupling, something more basic and sub-rational in us prefers any interaction, even a fatal one, over solitude. I'm reminded of numerous crime stories (e.g. Ray Bradbury's classic "The Ravine") about women who are drawn to stalkers and serial killers, perversely fascinated by the possibility of a desire so strong that it obliterates its object.
Bisker gives the theme of love and death a clever twist when she imagines sharks finding their mates by the same signals that they use to find prey. It's all the same hunger: "the heart wants/to be discovered. Or devoured,/if that's what it takes." The juxtaposition of similar-sounding words (devoured/discovered) is an effective technique that emphasizes the message of the lines while also creating a pleasing pattern of sounds.
Throughout the poem, Bisker has a good ear for the rhythms of speech, wisely choosing to end many sentences on a powerful downbeat while varying the placement of these end-stops within the line. Some examples that stand out: "It's been a year I've chosen/to be alone" and "I say heartless but this is a lie. It beats/red and bloody underneath it all, I am ripe/for slaughter."
Enjambment—the continuation of a phrase beyond the end of a line of verse—is another technique that "Shark Bait" employs to good effect. In the second stanza, line breaks allow the poet to suggest multiple meanings that are in tension with one another, reflecting the speaker's inner conflict about her solitude. The second line of this stanza asserts that "My life is full", but following the thought onto the next line, we see what it is really filled with. "[W]ork and talk and the occasional fling/where no one falls for anyone"—full of emptiness, in other words. Further down, she asserts that "No one holds me/back", a positive statement of liberation concealing the lonely cry that "No one holds me".
Something about the last stanza left me a little unsatisfied. Though it logically followed from the rest of the poem, it felt slightly less interesting and original. Perhaps it was because the speaker slipped into the passive role of "victim of love" at the end, when previously the poem had been alive with the electrical charge of her passion. In the previous stanzas, she was exercising agency; even though her mind chose one thing and her heart another, they were both trying to take control of her fate, whereas at the end she is "just waiting". I would have been interested to see the speaker try on the predator's or shark's role, realizing that maybe she can take charge of satisfying her heart's craving instead of merely capitulating to it.
Where could a poem like "Shark Bait" be submitted? The following contest may be of interest:
Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award
Postmark Deadline: July 1
Prizes up to $1,000, publication in The Comstock Review; no simultaneous submissions
This poem and critique appeared in the March 2004 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Three Declarations
1.
How we position ourselves
for our inner audience:
you the reconciler, I the fighter
who besets you and is embraced
finally, all I've ever wanted
from anger. You see honesty
in me—after water, it alone
saves us. I will always be
the rattlesnake sidewinding
your desert, the wash flooded,
then dry, the acid pool that burns
you down to life's essentials.
Come closer, I say. Wash your hands.
2.
Our story truly began when you plucked me
too young to bloom from a dry bed—tequila spines
drawing your blood. You anchored a desert
garden with me: evening primrose, the invader,
ice plant with its jelly bean leaves, pink pussytoes
for gossip—even yucca, that loner, as a sentinel.
And always, the romance of the yucca moth.
Dizzy with love, you would divide me, sink me
in pots for others to plant, in all 200 countries.
But I say, don't return me to any bed but yours,
keep me where light is a scar. Sun-lover,
I need to burn in summer. Your hands
make my home, my rebirth. Come now. Dig.
3.
You, the bight of refuge
at the base of a canyon,
scatter of pebbles in front
the seep chill on my back
and then it comes: rills
sinuous down a pommel
of sunset stone
I climb up your black lip
slip into the cut wall that holds
me as rain lathers down
sandstone my bed and water
my lit curtain I open
my mouth to you
Copyright 2004 by Beth Partin
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, Beth Partin's "Three Declarations", traces the many facets of a romantic relationship by recasting them as features of the southwestern desert landscape. The three sections represent a journey from tension and mistrust to openness and sensual communion, where images of water serve as signs of the relationship's renewal. This emotional movement is paralleled by a change in diction from one section to the next. The abstract language of the opening lines yields to a more physical narrative about a garden, which in turn dissolves into the run-on lines depicting the couple's passion at the end.
The relationship described by the poem is complex and not always easy to characterize. In what sense is the speaker like a rattlesnake, a wash both flooded and dry, an acid pool? These natural phenomena seem to have little in common. All three, however, disrupt the calm sameness of the desert with their mutability and their dangerous potential, just as the narrator wants to provoke her lover into a passionate response. Like flood waters, anger is not solely to be feared, as it is also a source of regeneration. The pitch-perfect last line of the first stanza works as both a tender invitation and a threat. Wash your hands, dear...in "the acid pool that burns/you down to life's essentials."
In the second stanza, the tables are turned, as the speaker's lover now tries to change her. She describes herself as a plant in a garden that he planned, a place of beauty and diversity that nonetheless chafes her with its limits. "Our story truly began when you plucked me/too young to bloom from a dry bed—tequila spines/drawing your blood." These lines reveal a wealth of mixed feelings: the spiny plant fights back against the gardener's act of mastery, yet the plant has been rescued from a "dry bed" (double entendre surely intended) where it could not bloom.
This stanza is filled with far more affection and fruitfulness than the previous one. Replacing the antagonism is understanding of the other person's motives: "Dizzy with love, you would divide me, sink me/in pots for others to plant, all 200 countries./But I say, don't return me to any bed but yours". What is going on in this stanza? I'm guessing that the narrator is upset by how her lover objectifies her, perhaps shows her off to other men, like his prize flower. Though she knows he's acting out of love and pride in her, she'd rather be treated like a person.
The last lines of the stanza move the couple toward reconciliation. "Come now. Dig." echoes the distancing, challenging "Come closer." of the first stanza, but now the speaker is open to being molded and changed herself, as well as changing the other person.
The first two stanzas could be seen as a back-and-forth struggle for control of the relationship, with the parties swapping the active and passive roles, whereas in the third stanza they have moved beyond the boundary fights. The couple's separate identities wash away in an ecstasy of rain that refreshes and perhaps reshapes the canyon stones. The musical third stanza is full of "S" and "L" sounds and other soft consonants that mimic the sounds of the rushing water and falling pebbles ("rills/sinuous down a pommel/of sunset stone").
"Three Declarations" is a well-crafted and lyrical poem that could be submitted to prestigious literary journals. It might work better with a different title, though. What are the three declarations? The first stanza's "Come closer." and the second's "Come now. Dig." are likely candidates, except that there is no parallel ending for the third stanza (nor should there be—the current ending is just right). Calling the stanzas themselves "declarations" doesn't give us much useful information about them. The restrained, unsentimental tone of the title "Three Declarations" is preferable to one that gives away too much about the poem (e.g. "Our Marriage"), but I would prefer something with a little more personality.
Where could a poem like "Three Declarations" be submitted? The following journals and contests may be of interest:
Texas Review
This journal favors conversational narrative free verse; see website for submission guidelines
Atlanta Review 2004 International Poetry Competition
Postmark Deadline: May 10
See sample work on the website of this acclaimed journal
Alligator Juniper's National Writing Contest
Postmark Deadline: October 1
Handsomely produced journal from Prescott College in Arizona offers $1,000 awards for poetry, fiction and essays
This poem and critique appeared in the April 2004 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Whiteout
This snow is a set of wings
come undone.
Or is it my heart
feathered and flaked
in suspended descent?
It's been coming down all day.
A restless sparrow,
wintering in my breast,
beats within this hollow—
the span of your love,
the size of your hand.
Take heart! (You did.)
Take flight, burdened wings
wet with this affliction
of want.
My world is disappearing
from the ground up.
White gone
white upon relentless
white covering my tracks.
Covering this and that—
the definition of our days,
your rake and my spade.
Our garden lost its shape.
The lamb's ears, first to go.
And now the earth itself
gone cold, cold, cold.
I'm sickened
with the gentle slope.
This vanishing.
This wind that wings
your absence. The drift
against my fence—
a row of sharpened pickets
with barely a point left.
Copyright 2004 by Laura Van Prooyen
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Laura Van Prooyen's "Whiteout" stood out among this month's critique submissions for its haunting imagery and deftly economical use of language. Much of the poem's emotional force resides in what is not said, just as you may realize a person's impact on your life only after he is suddenly absent. The poem's clean, short lines are like the snow that creates a smooth surface over the rocky terrain beneath.
Nature and the seasons are among the oldest subjects of poetry. We return to these topics because they make up a basic language of human experience; winter is an instantly recognizable symbol for death and loss, for example. Yet for that very reason, it is particularly challenging to say something original about them.
A good nature poem avoids the extremes of banal description (a landscape with no personal "hook" to make us care) and sentimental projection (a landscape that holds no interest for the speaker save as the reflection of his feelings). "Whiteout" elegantly weaves back and forth between the speaker's interior and exterior landscapes without drawing obvious comparisons between them.
Both the inner and outer worlds in this poem are fully individualized through the use of surprising images, beginning with the opening lines, which caught my attention right away: "This snow is a set of wings/come undone." For me, the payoff in this sentence, the thing that made me interested to read further, is the phrase "set of wings." By choosing "set" over the more common "pair," Van Prooyen startles the reader into taking a closer look, and also suggests something mechanical and disconnected about the wings. A living bird's wings would more likely be called a "pair," whereas a "set" is like a costume, something severable and put on for the occasion. This unsettling picture presages the poem's overall theme of identities being whited out and taken apart: "My world is disappearing/from the ground up."
Another effective technique in this poem is the placement of key words with multiple meanings that add depth to the seemingly simple language. In line 6, for instance, "It's been coming down all day," the word "It" could refer to the snow or to the "descent" that the speaker feels in her heart. The ambiguity requires the reader to hold both possibilities in his mind at once, reinforcing the simile that the preceding lines set up.
In a similar way, the line "Take heart! (You did.)" adds a new, sadder shade of meaning to a familiar exhortation, when read in context with the other images. The line introduces a joyful note of freedom after the frustration of the confined, wintering bird. However, addressed to an absent beloved, the line could also mean "you took my heart away with you" and/or "you took your heart away from me."
The speaker releases the other person with the exquisite lines, "Take flight, burdened wings/wet with this affliction/of want." (Note the assonance of repeated "T" and "W" sounds that add musicality to the lines.) Yet the one left behind now sees her world disintegrate; the snow covers the tracks that their shared lives made, as if it had never been.
This dilemma is summed up in the closing image of the fence "with barely a point left." Again a word ("point") with a double meaning, perhaps posing the question whether the boundaries that were erected by both parties, "this and that,/the definition of our days," were really worthwhile. Did they part because they insisted too much on their own different tools, "your rake and my spade," an argument that seems trivial now that the garden has "lost its shape" entirely?
"Whiteout" combines precision of feeling with a fruitful ambiguity as to plot. I've chosen to read this as a breakup poem, but it could also be a poem about death, or about a parent who feels her identity shaken when her child grows up and becomes more independent. The fundamental themes are the same: loss, renunciation, yet underneath these, a hope that perhaps the speaker too will someday soar above the "affliction/of want." We know that winter ends, but at the time, it often feels eternal.
Where could a poem like "Whiteout" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: May 18
Highly competitive prize for a group of 1-6 poems
Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: May 31
Sponsored by Calyx, a journal of women's poetry; no simultaneous submissions
Mudfish Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: June 29
Well-regarded literary journal; 2004 judge is Best American Poetry series editor David Lehman
Baltimore Review Poetry Competition
Postmark Deadline: July 1
New contest for 2004 from a reputable magazine
This poem and critique appeared in the May 2004 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Bluebeard’s Closet
I went to Bluebeard's closet
Because he left the key
And there were five little doll heads
Staring dead at me.
Five nameless, sparkless ladies
Cracked face and broken limb
All meanly slashed to pieces
Washed sick with pea green skin.
Now I know it was a ruse,
and he will be back soon.
So I closed shut Bluebeard's closet
Stuffed full of tattered dolls
Cold, cruel, cramped and ugly
Splashed blood-brown on the walls.
And crouched among the women
My face bleached white as chalk
Waiting for the terminus:
Keys turning in a lock.
Copyright 2004 by Monica Jenny Sharma
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Bluebeard's Closet" by Monica Jenny Sharma, is a descendant of the 19th-century Romantic tradition. Both the Gothic subject matter and the tight formal structure, broken only by a misfit central couplet, echo the haunting poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and George Gordon, Lord Byron. In its creepy melange of murder, sexuality, and lost innocence, one can hear the voices of Victorian writers who used the horror genre for coded exposés of their culture's repressed emotions and unacknowledged injustices. (For an example, read the classic 1899 feminist horror story "The Yellow Wallpaper".)
The pattern of rhyme and meter that Sharma has chosen for this poem would have been familiar to Byron and Emily Dickinson. The regular marching beat, reminiscent of hymn tunes, takes on a sinister urgency in "Bluebeard's Closet", like footsteps that rush forward, hesitate, then scurry ahead again. This is accomplished by having the first and third lines of each stanza end on an unstressed syllable, while the second and fourth end on a stressed syllable.
The middle stanza's departure from this pattern feels like a jarring intrusion. While the author may have intended an unsettling mood shift for plot reasons, the effect is not successful because the lines themselves lack a compelling rhythm or interesting images. Their everyday sound breaks the illusion of the finely crafted verses that preceded them. It's like hearing, in the middle of a gripping horror movie, a director's shouted instructions that someone forgot to edit out. Since the information in the stanza is necessary as a plot transition, Sharma should not simply cut it, but replace it with a four-line stanza in the same pattern as the others.
Though the Bluebeard story is familiar, this retelling is powerful because it never wavers from the perspective of the victim-protagonist. We are trapped with her in the closet, making the dreadful discoveries as she witnesses them. Sharma resists the temptation to embellish the tale by making its complex psychological meanings explicit; far better to let the reader experience them firsthand.
I felt a chill as soon as I read the words "five little doll heads/staring dead at me." Sharma accomplishes several things with the little phrase "staring dead": the double meaning of literal death and "dead ahead" (the woman is transfixed by the dolls' direct gaze), plus a jolt to the reader who was expecting "staring back."
The author also makes good use of alliteration and assonance to add texture to the poem. Examples include the recurring hard "K" and hissing "S" sounds in the second stanza, the "L" sounds in the fourth stanza, and the similar sounds of "terminus" and "turning" in the final stanza. "Sparkless" is a wonderful word, suggesting "sparkles" to the careless eye while meaning its opposite.
Where could a poem like "Bluebeard's Closet" be submitted? Most mainstream US literary journals, unfortunately, would probably consider its theme and style too old-school for their modernist sensibilities. Such is literary fashion! Here are some journals and contests that might appreciate it:
Keats-Shelley Prize
Entries must be received by June 15
For a poem in the Romantic tradition; see website for annual themes
New England Poetry Club Contests
Postmark Deadline: June 30
See website for categories and eligibility
Society of Classical Poets Contest
Entries must be received by December 31 (don't enter before September 1)
For a poem in meter and rhyme
This poem and critique appeared in the June 2004 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Saving Grace
There's a pretty little girl
up in Michigan
living under snowy skies...
I haven't seen her, but I know
snow
snow
snowy blanket pulled over her head
tucked into her icy ladle
over her
pour
baby poor
baby
pour out your soul
each night (to stay whole)
drink in the finger of light
from the southern skies
when their eyes are heavy closed
waxen your skies with crayola color blues
rainbows for your eyes
white-light blessed blinders 'round your sight
look straight ahead
baby more
baby more
than blinding snow
you haven't seen it
but you'll know
If your daddy falls too hard
dreams on ice behind the bar
granddaddy puts your soul on tap
drip drip
baby
pour and pour more
baby...
he'll sell it to the devil, sweet baby E
he'll drain your love, like he drained me
pay no mind to what he's undone
three women's souls they breathe as one
close your eyes and dream
you'll see me, I'm the one
in the finger of light from the southern sun
brush the grit from your heart
each night before bed
fill your head with shades of red
and blue
and green
bloodline flows between
blessed with His Grace
even stronger unseen
sweet, sweet baby E
There's a pretty little girl living under dreary skies
I haven't seen her but I know
the weatherman predicted snow
heavy
heavy snow
Copyright 2004 by Laurie J. Ward
Critique by Jendi Reiter
We welcome back Laurie J. Ward to the critique corner this month with "Saving Grace". We critiqued her poem "Blackened" in our November 2003 issue.
Ward here lends her compassionate voice to a child in danger of becoming a lost soul, in a ballad whose bluesy rhythm spirals upward like cigarette smoke in a late-night bar. The skillful syncopation of "poor/baby pour/baby" conveys a whole world in four words. We've been here before, this archetypal jazz club where a lonely little girl seeks consolation and escape in a drink. The line plays off the two meanings of "baby," a child and a sexy woman, and suggests how easily the distance between them is erased. This may not be what Ward intended, but the repeated phrase "baby E" also made me think of the drug Ecstasy, an ironic counterpart to the spiritual transcendence that the narrator holds out to the child.
Water imagery both benign and sinister—flowing, pouring, or falling as snow—gives this poem thematic continuity. Lines such as "If your daddy falls too hard/dreams on ice behind the bar/granddaddy puts your soul on tap" and "he'll drain your love like he drained me" warn of a life force dripping away, because the girl's family is exploitative or indifferent. But Ward juxtaposes other flowing imagery that refreshes, like light pouring from heaven: "drink in the finger of light/from the southern skies," and later in the poem, "fill your head with shades of red/and blue/and green/bloodline flows between/blessed with His Grace/even stronger unseen".
Between these opposing moods falls the snow, more ambiguous in its effects. The "heavy snow" at the beginning and end of the poem seems to represent the inertia that weighs on the child, as she tries to see beyond the hopeless and loveless life of her family. She risks being smothered by the weight of those dysfunctional traditions.
Yet the snow, like a childhood home, is also cozy and familiar: "snowy blanket pulled over her head/tucked into her icy ladle". The unusual image of a girl tucked into a ladle segues into the phrase "ladle/over her/pour", as if to say that the warmth of family security is inseparable from the icy shock of poured liquor that taints the scene. The odd structure of the sentence replicates the impossibility of integrating these aspects of her loved ones into a comprehensible whole.
The snow also resembles the "cloud of unknowing" that the mystic must penetrate to see God. The narrator asks the child to have faith in what lies beyond the curtain of white, just as the narrator herself tries to have faith that the child can sense her prayers and kinship: "I haven't seen her but I know". The poem effectively employs paradoxes of seeing/not-seeing to suggest that by closing her eyes to the sterile life around her, the girl can see the love and hope that are truly real: "white-light blessed blinders 'round your sight". She is the one who sees the light from the sky "when their eyes are heavy closed".
Where could a poem like "Saving Grace" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Ruskin Art Club Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: September 30
Sponsored by well-regarded publisher Red Hen Press; formerly known as the Red Hen Press Poetry Award
James Hearst Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: October 31
Sponsored by North American Review, the oldest literary journal in America; "Saving Grace" fits their style and subject matter
Soul-Making Literary Competition
Postmark Deadline: November 30
Poetry and prose contest for "personal writings that illumine the search for the sacred and the spirit"
This poem and critique appeared in the August 2004 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
It Wasn’t Poetry
it wasn't poetry, those years
(summer toothsome as a ripe fruit,
juice dripping down our wrists)
it was trees and shadows
pieces of wind blown in from the sea
boats and waves and bodies
it was the passion moon
yellow as a smoker's tooth,
palms pressed red against the sky
it was voices climbing atop each other
like crazed people in a locked room,
a child's wail pulled from a private place
it was moonlight pooling on the concrete,
long oars of light,
the silver odor of blood
it was sentinels falling, dregs of desperation,
ceasefire seizing the streets,
and the future, lifetimes away,
dreaming us safe
Copyright 2004 by Lisa Suhair Majaj
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "It Wasn't Poetry" by Lisa Suhair Majaj, is a haunting evocation of a lost paradise that is sure to resonate with anyone whose beloved homeland has been torn apart by war. The half-glimpsed hope at the poem's end is a scrap of nourishment for us in these violent times.
The first three stanzas seduce the reader into thinking this is going to be a benign pastoral or nostalgic poem. The disruption comes without warning, as disorienting as war's sudden invasion of normal life. We are thrown from a realm of sultry pleasures into a Holocaust-like scene of "voices climbing atop one another/like crazed people in a locked room". This phrase immediately reminded me of the Nazi gas chambers.
Again we shift dizzily back and forth between beauty and horror, as "moonlight pooling on the concrete" turns into blood. By the poem's end, chaos has taken over, and the inhabitants of this landscape cannot tell what the future holds. The "sentinels falling" suggests that the war persists, but on the other hand there is mention of a ceasefire.
"Ceasefire seizing the streets" is a powerful line, growing in intensity with the repetition of "E" and "S" sounds. The unusual word choice "seizing" tells us so much about the people's distance from true peace. The ceasefire is experienced here as paralysis, an uncertain lull rather than a reliable end to the conflict.
Set against this strife, the remembered summer of pleasure seems even more precious than it did at the time. Why does Majaj say, "It wasn't poetry"? Perhaps because it was too fleeting, only a moment separating the fruits of Eden from the autumnal decadence of "the passion moon/yellow as a smoker's tooth". These joys were taken for granted, never subjected to the process of reflection and preservation that produces poetry, and thus they were easily lost.
Alternatively, Majaj may be saying that our ordinary lives are sublime enough to deserve this elegy. Even if the people in the poem didn't produce high culture and poetry, they had something worth saving that the war destroyed.
A third interpretation, in tension with the other two, would be to read "It wasn't poetry" as a warning against idealizing the past. On this reading, the idyll already contained the flaws that would undo it, thoughtless pleasures and harmful overindulgence (the interchangeable "bodies," the stained hands and teeth). I'm less enamored of this negative reading because the first two stanzas feel predominantly life-affirming to me. Still, it is another possible layer of meaning, and one that fits well with the poem's ending.
The last two lines imply that salvation will come, if at all, from looking to the future and not the past. Peace is still only a dream that may be "lifetimes away," but the fragile hope must be preserved along with the memory of the good life that was lost. It wasn't poetry, but turning it into poetry may be a step toward its restoration.
Where could a poem like "It Wasn't Poetry" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
James Wright Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: October 1
Sponsored by Mid-American Review; read work by 2004 final judge Michelle Boisseau here
National Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 31
Major British prize sponsored by the Poetry Society
New Millennium Writings Awards
Postmark Deadline: November 19
We promote this magazine so often because, well, it deserves it. Recent winning poems have explored war and peace, cross-cultural encounters with suffering and grace.
Poetry Society of America Awards
Postmark Deadline: December 23
Several high-profile contests on various themes, some for members only (we recommend joining); see especially the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award for poems on a humanitarian theme
This poem and critique appeared in the September 2004 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
The Unraveling
Eight thousand sunsets ago
you left for the wars of Ilium
I imagined you there Odysseus
taking courage from a song
the thrust of a staff
from a fierce verge of self
one expects kingdoms from.
Since then a flotsam of ill-omens
have washed these shores.
Out of desire and spite
I wove them darkly
into a shroud by daylight
ripped them skein by skein
in the bedding night of Ithaca.
When at last you found your way home,
my mistrusting heart refused you
so bitter it was
from a decade of waiting.
But the melting moment came—
you paused to touch the bedpost
you once carved
from the olive tree thrusting through the floor
a secret foundation
sustaining us where we loved.
Together we wept
offered gifts to the gods.
and you planted an oar
celebrating the passage
and the sorrow.
In a bronze twilight
we each told our story
holding back the night.
Now the shadow of a sundial
crosses your face
now your eyes are restive.
Like boundaries of a dream
they have no home address.
Tell me, dear wanderer
did you come all this long way
to revisit old terrain
inspect your own heart?
Copyright 2004 by Lou Barrett
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Characters in literary classics can become so much a part of our collective psyche that they seem like real people, whose lives continue outside the boundaries of the story. This month's critique poem, "The Unraveling" by Lou Barrett, imagines what happened after Odysseus came home to his wife Penelope. According to Homer's Odyssey, while she waited for Odysseus to return from the Trojan Wars, Penelope kept her suitors at bay by saying she would not remarry until she had finished weaving the shroud of her late father-in-law, Laertes. However, she secretly unraveled the shroud again each night so that the work was never completed. (Read more about Penelope.) In Barrett's poem, a different kind of unraveling is in store when her husband finally comes home.
The opening line, "Eight thousand sunsets ago," measures the beloved's absence in nights rather than years, the enormous number immediately showing us how vast and monotonous the time seems to the one left behind. Why "sunsets" instead of days or mornings? The "bedding night of Ithaca" is when she feels her husband's absence most keenly, and also when she unravels the day's work and perhaps broods on the futility of her actions.
The first two stanzas suggest that darkness has crept into every aspect of her routine. The morbid task of weaving "a shroud by daylight" alternates with the unraveling "out of desire and spite". The objects of these emotions are left nameless. Spite toward the suitors, surely, but her desire for Odysseus is probably also mixed with resentment toward him and the male world of war that lured him away. The emotions themselves may have become their own rationale, divorced as she is from meaningful connection with any man.
Yet Penelope still draws hope from the memory of her husband as a larger-than-life figure, who stands on "a fierce verge of self/one expects kingdoms from." (Fantastic line.) When he returns, the ritual-like gesture that finally melts her mistrust—touching the bedpost—establishes their love as similarly mythic, able to compete with the grandeur Odysseus sought in his voyages. Her realm and her achievement are momentarily equal to his. "The olive tree thrusting through the floor/a secret foundation" parallels the "thrust of a staff" in the first stanza, and the planting of the oar to symbolize that he now belongs to the land, not the sea.
Not long thereafter, though, Odysseus is restless again. "The shadow of a sundial/crosses your face." Do the days weigh as heavily on him as the sunsets did on her? Penelope begins to fear that his dreams "have no home address." Ever the patient one, her tone at the end is gentle and compassionate, not bitter and disappointed: "Tell me, dear wanderer...." It's as if she realizes that she has traveled further in terms of emotional maturity; after all his voyaging, he still doesn't know what he wants. "Did you come all this way/to revisit old terrain/inspect your own heart?"
This final question, like many of the lines in "The Unraveling," is fruitful with multiple meanings. One interpretation: The most important discovery resulting from the voyage was nothing "out there," but rather a deeper understanding of himself and the place he started from. Another, less cheerful interpretation: After everything we've been through, are you really going to reopen the question of whether you belong here? Was your course of action, like mine, circular and pointless?
This poem works so well because it is tightly structured around pairs of opposites: day and night, male and female, patience versus ambitious questing, land and sea. Each member of the pair vies for dominance and in so doing, reveals new aspects of its counterpart.
Where could a poem like "The Unraveling" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
National Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 31
Traditional themes welcome at this competition sponsored by one of Britain's leading poetry organizations; top prize 5,000 pounds
Briar Cliff Review Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: November 1
Style and content are a good match based on past winners
Third Coast Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: November 15
$1,000 prize from well-known literary journal, judged this year by Pulitzer finalist Sydney Lea
In addition, these journals would welcome poems on classical themes (note that both are highly competitive):
The New Criterion
Conservative, high-modernist review of the arts and culture
First Things
Catholic intellectual review of religion, politics and literature
This poem and critique appeared in the October 2004 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Dusty Pearl
I wrestle with the shadows,
Wearing faces of those
Born before me,
Wielding the sword
Of repetitious sorrows.
And in the gamble
Of blind ambition,
I search wisdom
To understand,
How a grain of sand
Holds a sea of pearls.
I hunger for a love
That shines...
A child of captivity,
I hold the hem
Of a garment,
Passed through the ages.
I wear the dusty coat
Of choices made,
Tired and gray
Because it fit.
I seize the floating bits
That tease the light,
As dust returns to dust.
The kiss of Judas clothes me
In golden robes of fools
And crowns of tarnished silver,
Holding ransom
My simmering unrest,
Where blood runs on empty
Just under the skin.
In my search
To fill the depths,
I am blinded by the sand
In my eyes,
To the pearls
Lying in the expanse,
Of Him Who sees,
One in the other
It is His Will
To free the spirit,
And fill the void,
Building up
My sand foundation
Layer by layer,
Luster to luster,
Reflecting His vision
For me
In His eyes.
Copyright 2004 by Ellen Morgan
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Dusty Pearl" by Ellen Morgan, caught my attention because of the many meanings it teases from a single metaphor. Though in a modern style, this piece recalls 17th-century metaphysical poets such as George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, who would build a complex theological argument around a central image such as a storm, a waterfall or a banquet.
"Dusty Pearl" presents a dialogue between two sets of images, corresponding to the speaker's imprisonment in destructive behavior patterns and her hope of transformation through God's love. The theme of heredity is set up by the title, which might suggest an heirloom long forgotten in the attic. We first encounter the speaker entangled in a conflict that seems to have no beginning and no end: "Wearing faces of those/Born before me,/Wielding the sword/Of repetitious sorrows." Those lines capture what it feels like to be trapped in family dysfunction, doomed to become both victim and perpetrator, down through the generations. "I wear the dusty coat/Of choices made,/Tired and gray/Because it fit." This garment, so worn and inferior, is chosen again and again out of habit, not because it is the best.
Contrasted to this coat is "the hem/Of a garment,/Passed through the ages." The speaker clings to this garment as salvation from her captivity. These lines recall the sick woman who was healed by touching Jesus' cloak in Luke 8:44.
Later in the poem, Morgan develops the metaphor further, by mentioning the false finery in which "the kiss of Judas" clothes the speaker. This might refer to the purple robe and crown of thorns in which the Roman soldiers clothed Jesus to mock his claim of kingship, a reading supported by the poem's overall concern with humiliation and the search for self-worth through faith in God.
The central metaphor of the pearl also has biblical resonance. In Matthew 13:44-46, Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a treasure hidden in a field, and then to a pearl of great price. In both parables, the protagonist sells everything he has in order to obtain the treasure or the pearl, but the precious thing itself takes effort to find.
Similarly, in this poem, the pearl of God's love is worth more than all of the world's withheld approval. However, the speaker must search for it amid the concealing sands of her own doubts and temptations. "In my search/To fill the depths/I am blinded by the sand/In my eyes," she confesses. What is the sand? It could be the dust of impermanent pleasures; the myriad irritations and worthless distractions of life; or the "blind ambition" that makes her erect a self on a "sand foundation."
But God turns this despised material into something precious. The grain of sand is the necessary irritant that prompts the oyster to create the pearl "Layer by layer,/Luster to luster." The promise of this transformation lends a hopeful gloss to images, such as the garment and the sand, that started out as symbols of spiritual bondage.
The one thing I would change about this poem is the stanza that begins "Holding ransom". While these four lines contain striking images, I wasn't sure how they fit with one another or with the poem's general argument. "Held ransom by my simmering unrest" would make more sense, since the unrest seems more like the obstacle than the victim. "Running on empty" is also such a familiar phrase that it weakens the impact of the line.
Where could a poem like "Dusty Pearl" be submitted? As I've noted before in this space, mainstream literary journals aren't always receptive to such traditional Christian verse. However, there are several quality journals that endeavor to bridge the gap between the language of faith and the world of modern poetry. See their websites for submission periods and guidelines:
Ancient Paths Christian Literary Magazine
Submit during October-April
First Things: The Journal of Religion, Culture & Public Life
Conservative Catholic intellectual monthly. Publishes 1-3 poems per issue
We would also recommend the following contests for this poem:
Soul-Making Literary Competition
Postmark Deadline: November 30
Poetry and prose contest for "personal writings that illumine the search for the sacred and the spirit"
Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Annual Poetry Prizes
Entries must be received by December 10 (changed to November 6 in 2006)
New contest seeks shorter lyric poems "celebrating the spirit of life"
Chistell Writing Contest
Postmark Deadline: February 28
Contest for unpublished writers, from a small press focusing on women's and African-American literature. Free to enter
This poem and critique appeared in the November 2004 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Antarctica
I
Cold! Cold! Totally cold! Colder than Alaska or Siberia.
Colder than the North Pole. Cold like my former soul
You are, oh age-old Antarctica!
Measureless and empty plains with silences as white and deep as death
Descended on me there, and frost besieged the air
From rocks of ice around Antarctica.
Dark and shapeless were the nights while somewhere deep in space, the Milky Way
Rose beaming like the dawn, but never would the sun,
And I withdrew behind Antarctica...
II
Warm...warm...lovely warm...warmer than the Congo, Spain or India...
Warmer than a bonfire has been my old desire
For always green, tropical Trinidad...
Riverbanks and stars arise despite the walls of ice I once evoked
Around Antarctica, for I am thinking of
My always green, tropical Trinidad...
Oh, there’s the warmth and love of old of starry nights in lovely Trinidad.
Royal are the palm trees, and gentle is the evening breeze
In always green, tropical Trinidad...
III
Long ago there was a time my heart was almost like Antarctica
With blizzards all about, where life was just a shout
Across a desolate Antarctica!
Cool is the light on snowy nights when I am thinking of Antarctica.
The cold is like my past and I have changed at last,
And so have you, oh cold Antarctica.
Warm is the light on starry nights when I am thinking of my Trinidad.
The warmth is in the name, and there’s a perfect flame
Around my self, my age-old Trinidad...
Copyright 2004 by Freddy Fonseca
Critique by Jendi Reiter
The majestic rhythms of this month's critique poem, "Antarctica" by Freddy Fonseca, evoke the grandeur of the two landscapes he praises. More than a mere travelogue or pastoral, the poem uses the essential features of these extreme climates to illustrate the dynamic relationship of opposing principles within the soul.
The poem's subtle yet effective formal structure relies on repetition and syllable counts. At first glance, it seems like free verse, but the subliminal perception of underlying order inspires the reader to look deeper. The first line of each stanza, though pleasantly varied in length, contains nine stressed beats and around 18 syllables. The second line uses iambic hexameter, twelve syllables with an internal rhyme (e.g. "The warmth is in the name, and there's a perfect flame").
Finally, the last line approximates iambic pentameter, always ending with the name of one of the two subjects of this ode. Points of departure from these strict meter and syllable counts (e.g. "Royal are the palm trees, and gentle is the evening breeze") give the poem some spontaneity, a nice contrast with the gravity of its tone. The recurring "Trinidad" and "Antarctica" at the end of each stanza heighten the impression of a timeless landscape, one that is more mythic than naturalistic. (For more on syllabic verse, sample the work of one of its leading modern practitioners, the acclaimed poet Marianne Moore.)
Although they don't tell us anything new (Antarctica is cold), the opening lines narrowly escape banality because of the sureness of this oracular voice. The sounds, rather than the content, carry the poem forward. The opening string of three stressed syllables ("Cold! Cold! Totally cold!") uses the same technique as the famous opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony to demand our attention. Interior rhymes and assonance (cold, totally, Pole, soul, old) resound like a tolling bell. In the second stanza, the poet confronts the haunting scene's stark beauty with an awe that is barely distinguishable from terror.
By contrast, most of the images of Trinidad are softer-focus and sentimental, without the immediacy or tightly constructed sound-patterns of the preceding section. Exception: "Riverbanks and stars arise" is a lovely, delicate image. To some extent, the lesser intensity of the second section is a relief from the inhuman majesty of Antarctica, but I think this effect could be retained while increasing the originality of the wording.
The contrast between the landscapes would not be news in itself, but acquires significance as a mirror of the speaker's inner journey. The speaker introduces both himself and the poem's setting by saying that Antarctica is "cold like my former soul." The word "former" immediately suggests the opening of a story, which we hope will be brought to closure later in the poem. This hope is only partly brought to fruition.
The Trinidad sections imply that the speaker's soul, once frozen like the polar wastes, has been thawed by the romantic hopes that always lay in its depths: "Warmer than a bonfire has been my old desire/For always green, tropical Trinidad." The word "old" suggests that both moods have long coexisted inside the speaker, but now he has allowed the warmer one to become ascendant. Formerly, he "withdrew behind Antarctica," a desolation that may have had its own unique pleasures (solitude, safety, self-dramatizing unhappiness?) but did not satisfy the part of his soul that longed for human connection.
Yet at the poem's end, the speaker is still only "thinking of my Trinidad." It is not clear that he has reached the land of fulfillment. Where is he now, thinking of both Antarctica and Trinidad but not actually in either place? Perhaps one represents the past and the other the future. In any event, the next-to-last stanza's soothing phrase "Cool is the light on snowy nights" shows that he has achieved balance between both aspects of his temperament, and can appreciate whatever sublime experiences each landscape offers. There's a maturity in this conclusion, a harmony with the past rather than a rejection of it, which somewhat compensates for the unfinished nature of the poem's journey.
Where could a poem like "Antarctica" be submitted? As I've mentioned before, many literary journals nowadays are wedded to a modernist, colloquial free-verse aesthetic. The old-fashioned romantic tone and diction of "Antarctica" would be out of place in such venues. Poets with a style like Fonseca's would do better to concentrate on publishers outside the American academic establishment, such as state poetry societies and small independent contest sponsors, especially British ones. Some upcoming contests to consider:
Poetry Society of Virginia Contests
Postmark Deadline: January 19
In addition to open-theme grand prize, several themed contests offer prizes for a variety of verse forms and topics, including poems about nature
W.B. Yeats Society Annual Poetry Competition
Postmark Deadline: February 15
Affiliated with New York City's prestigious National Arts Club
Oregon State Poetry Association Contests
Postmark Deadline: February 26
Also holds contests in August; open-theme grand prize plus smaller awards for traditional verse and other categories
Kick Start Poets Competition
Postmark Deadline: March 25
British contest offers 500 pounds, accepts various currencies; 2004 winner was formal poem
Byron Herbert Reece International Award
Postmark Deadline: April 15 (changed to October 15 in 2006)
Honors Georgia poet who celebrated his native landscape; no simultaneous submissions
In January 2006, look for the biennial Nature Poetry Competition from Friends of Acadia Journal
This poem and critique appeared in the December 2004 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
New World
I crawled for days across the arid Indian plains
until my knee caps bled red and old scars opened
leaving irregular patterns on the hard soil,
seeking the slow flowing Ganges
and searching for silk prayer shawls in the shallow mud.
I dipped my head under the holy waters
looking across to the mouldy green and peeling orange walls
of the eroding temples. Blue saliva stains playing patterns
on the sidewalks seemed to throb and pulse
and the breast pains that I endured pumped up my stomach
into elastic balls that floated with the tides
and currents below, carrying offal and soap suds
that burnt my eyes until I ceased noticing
blank worshippers urinating on banks not so far away.
Holy men limped by and waved with crooked sticks.
Had I transgressed their holy territory and disturbed the calm
as the trees nearby vaguely stirred? I had not seen this sector before
and peeled off my clothes pronouncing that I carried no weapons
nor bibles of the New Testament.
It was only fair that I should float naked.
A holy man with black match stick legs and purple toes
strolled across my wake—the strange strains of sitar rhythms
pierced my ears and deep subterranean tunnel noises
rose to the murky surface in yellow translucent cubes.
My tattered heart tangled in the easy river flow.
My half closed eyes just above the line sought rusty river trams
or logs of debris to help me stay afloat.
But the relentless bloated soap suds burnt my tongue
as I struggled to chant select bible songs.
Laughing filled the blue air and young chocolate coated children
tugged on their garland wreaths, flinging buds and thorns
to where I swam. I choked and coughed
and slowly wore down as the muezzin
from the nearby tower mosque search lighted for
my soul. The high screams of prayers cascaded,
pushing me further down as four black hooded men
dragged me from the flow; I hoped and hoped
they would not sacrifice me in holy flames. I tried to whisper
as they held my arms that I was only looking
for love. Why brand me in sati tradition? I told them,
I know many verses off by heart from the Hindu bible
and the Bhagavad-Gita which is a Song of God. I am untouchable.
I was married to Christ. I was born on a cross.
Does it not count in this new century?
Copyright 2005 by Martin Steele. Mr. Steele was a finalist in our 2003 War Poetry Contest for "Sarel and Samson".
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "New World" by Martin Steele, presents an instantly recognizable character: the naive traveler who is seduced and destroyed by a culture he does not understand. This nightmare recurs often in colonial and postcolonial literature, embodying Western fears that our political dominance is neither deserved nor secure. In depicting the alien culture as a primitive destructive force, the writer can suggest both the powerlessness of Western ideals and, paradoxically, their superiority to the natives' barbaric behavior. (This theme was central to the work of 20th-century fiction writer Paul Bowles.)
The narrator of "New World" seems to have come to India on a spiritual pilgrimage. He seeks out extreme experiences that will break down the boundaries of his old self and put him in touch with a deeper reality. To that end, he immerses himself in pain, dirt and decay, violating "civilized" taboos to reach a state where another's bodily fluids are no more alien to him than his own. In his new world, even humble saliva glows in psychedelic colors, and clean and unclean elements commingle shamelessly. A silk scarf could be found in the mud; "offal and soap suds" combine in the holy river.
Yet how real is this oneness? Using the exotic culture as a tool for his own enlightenment, the protagonist fails to comprehend it on its own terms, with fatal consequences. Despite his physical self-abandonment in the first half of the poem, he is in control of the experience. He chose these privations and could turn back if he felt like it.
The first breath of fear stirs with the line, "Had I transgressed their holy territory...?" The protagonist feels control slipping from his grasp, but still naively hopes that his gesture of good faith will placate whomever he has offended: "[I] peeled off my clothes pronouncing that I carried no weapons/nor bibles of the New Testament./It was only fair that I should float naked." He expects his notions of fair play to be perfectly understood by his mysterious observers. But his gesture of contrition—I am not like those others who imposed upon you with their weapons and their Christianity—may seem to them like weakness and disloyalty to his own kind.
Before he quite understands what has happened, the narrator is fighting for survival: "My half closed eyes just above the line sought rusty river trams/or logs of debris to help me stay afloat." In fear, he reverts to the religion he disavowed: "I struggled to chant select bible songs."
As he endeavors not to drown, he attracts hostile attention from figures who have no comparable doubts about what their faith demands: either convert the infidel ("the muezzin/from the nearby tower mosque search lighted for/my soul") or kill him ("four black hooded men/dragged me from the flow"). Vainly he tries to save himself by offering proof of his good intentions ("I was only looking/for love") and his appreciation of all faiths, veering into delusional overstatement.
The protagonist's cry, "I am untouchable," has a paradoxical double meaning in this context. On one level, it could mean "I cannot be harmed by you" or "How dare you touch me"—an assertion of high status. However, "untouchable" is also the name for the lowest caste in traditional Indian society, a pariah group. Is his choice of words merely another unfortunate misunderstanding, or is he trying to convince his hosts that he is one of them—saying, in effect, "I identify completely with your society, even its lowest members"?
I was somewhat confused by the Muslim characters' appearance on the scene, since the culture that the protagonist had been sampling up to that point seemed Hindu (temples, holy beggars, the Ganges). The confusion is increased by his plea to his (presumably) Muslim captors, "Why brand me in sati tradition," since "sati" is a Hindu ritual in which a widow immolates herself on her husband's funeral pyre.
Perhaps the narrator's fatal mistake was not realizing that India, to him a symbol of cosmic unity, is itself torn by Hindu-Muslim animosity. Thus he unwittingly strays into Muslim territory ("I had not seen this sector before") and is taken for an enemy. While logical, this interpretation diminishes the poem's tragic irony. If the culture that destroyed him is not even the one he idealized and misappropriated, his fate starts to seem more like simple bad luck. On the other hand, if the hooded figures are not Muslim, the muezzin seems out of place in a poem that is otherwise all about a Westerner's encounter with Hinduism.
The last line's rhetorical question was also hard to fit into the story as I understood it. Is the protagonist harking back to the colonial era, when Christians expected to be recognized as bearers of a superior civilization? "I was married to Christ. I was born on a cross," he says, his garbled theology reminiscent of explorers who tried to subdue the natives by claiming to be gods from far-off lands. Still, I would like to know what exactly has changed in this century, and why the unlucky narrator thought it would stay the same.
Where could this poem be submitted? "New World" has more dramatic action in it than the personal lyrics that are standard fare in many literary journals. Some politically correct editors may also have trouble with its depiction of non-Western cultures as less than benign. However, the high quality of its imagery could earn it a place in a major magazine. Some markets to consider:
Sunken Garden Poetry Festival National Poetry Competition
Postmark Deadline: February 1
http://www.hillstead.org/
Prize includes reading at festival in Connecticut in July; no simultaneous submissions
Strokestown International Poetry Competitions
Postmark Deadline: February 15
https://strokestownpoetryfest.ie/poetry-competition/
Irish contest offers a prize of 4,000 euros for poems in English and another 4,000 euros for poems in Irish, Scottish Gaelic or Manx
Florida Review Editors' Awards
Postmark Deadline: March 15
http://floridareview.cah.ucf.edu/submit/annual-editors-awards/
Named for Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of mythology, contest seeks published or unpublished poems that "treat larger themes with lyric intensity"
Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: March 15
http://www.torhouse.org/prize/
Past winners of this $1,000 prize have been emotionally powerful and rich in imagery (read them on website)
This poem and critique appeared in the January 2005 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter.
Wergle Flomp Entries by B.F. Texino, Rebecca Sutton and “Chick L Scott”
This month's critique corner analyzes three of the near-miss entries from our 2004 Wergle Flomp Poetry Contest, which rewards poetry that is deliberately, hilariously bad.
UNTITLED ("I got this bag of oats..."
by B.F. Texino
I got this bag of oats for the goats
but it is not the sort of food for them, the goats.
So I make the list for all the animal to see
who it is that are wanting them, the oats
Here is the list now read it. The Chicken
The Dog The Monkey
The Donkey The Hog The Horse Rats and Mice in pit.
Now we will take some names away
because some animals says no way
no oats The Chicken? Sorry he must die for food
are not oats food says Jesus.
Sorry Jesus, We love Chicken! not oats.
The Dog? Good Dog! No Oats.
Monkey? Monkey-Devil Monkey-Devil
Monkey-Devil!
Guess who? Shut up Jesus!Sorry Monkey no oats.
The Donkey? Will Jesus ride the donkey to
Bethlehem? Yes? Thank you Jesus!
Yes oats! Bye Bye Jesus! Jesus Waves.
Copyright 2005 by B.F. Texino
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Nonsense poems are much harder to craft than is commonly supposed. Our standards are high. When we read gibberish, we want to be moved to shout, "Behold the miraculous workings of the human mind!"
As with the formal-verse parodies, incongruity is often a key ingredient of the humor of a nonsense poem. Craftsmanship, while harder to measure, is also a consideration. Gibberish that displays some emotional range, and that uses a variety of sentence structures, stands out from the heap. Again, contrast creates humor. The trick is to mimic the form of a poetic argument or narrative that moves from point A to point B, without actually saying anything that makes sense.
Texino's poem has a storyline that is both original and absurd: the speaker bought some oats, and is asking a motley collection of creatures whether they want any. It's a very strange barnyard that contains a chicken, a monkey and Jesus. This poem runs the gamut of emotions from affection ("Good Dog! No Oats.") to demented rage ("Monkey-Devil Monkey-Devil/ Monkey-Devil!"), from triumph ("Will Jesus ride the Donkey to/Bethlehem? Yes? Thank you Jesus!") to tragedy ("The Chicken? Sorry he must die for food"). All the ingredients of great literature...and it makes absolutely no sense.
Tone of voice can make all the difference in a nonsense poem. Many of our less successful entries are along the lines of "Deedle deedle deedle/doodle doodle doodle," which is not funny because there is no tension between the speaker's perception of his own seriousness and our awareness that it's nonsense. The poem has nothing to say but "look at how stupid I am." When the butt of the joke is in on the joke, the joke dies.
By contrast, in "I got this bag of oats...", the speaker clearly thinks he's saying something important. Capitalizing the names of the animals strengthens this impression. His words have the portentous slowness of someone who isn't very bright. "So I make the list for all the animal to see/who it is that are wanting them, the oats." Part yokel, part lunatic, he unselfconsciously skips from macabre incantation ("Monkey-Devil!") to sweet baby-talk ("Yes oats! Bye Bye Jesus! Jesus Waves."). The poem's blend of childlike naiveté and twisted thinking gives it a sinister, carnivalesque atmosphere that is quite disturbing.
This poem was also a close contender in the 2004 contest, though it ultimately gave way to poems that had more laugh-out-loud images and virtuoso use of poetic forms. Nonetheless, it is a fine example of inspired nonsense.
UNTITLED SONNET ("Shall I compare thee...")
by Rebecca Sutton
Shall I compare thee to my Great Aunt May?
Thou art more hairy and more flatulent:
Rough winds do balloon her underpants by day,
And night's calm doth not ease her repellence:
Sometime the heat doth cause her brow to shine,
And often doth the sweat stain 'bout her limbs,
And every orifice spurts forth the whine,
Denied her mouth in which cream cakes are brimmed:
But thee to nursing home be not chained,
Nor lost to thee be the baked beans thou ow'st,
Nor from public transport be thou restrained,
Where thou clear the seats about which thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long we gag while seated next to thee.
Copyright 2005 by Rebecca Sutton
Critique by Jendi Reiter
One type of successful Wergle entry is the parody of a classic poem. We like this category because it requires the author to display poetic skill and originality. Many of the unsuccessful entries achieve one objective of the contest - proving that vanity contests will publish drivel - but don't put in the extra effort to write a poem whose badness is truly inspired.
Here, Rebecca Sutton takes off on the well-known Shakespeare sonnet, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" The painfully sincere effusions of a love poem are a perfect target for the parodist. The original author's demand to be taken seriously sets up the contrast between expectation and reality that generates humor. The oh-so-sweet "Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May" becomes "Rough winds do balloon her underpants by day."
Many humorous poems depend on a mismatch between style and subject matter. The high craftsmanship and ornamentation of a sonnet is appropriate for a paean to Shakespeare's beloved; it's ridiculously inappropriate for a description of a gluttonous, smelly old lady.
Bodily functions are a rich source of humor, but a mere recitation of gross words and images lacks the originality that we crave. Low comedy is about contrast, the intrusion of our body's vulgar common denominator into an aristocratic space. "And every orifice spurts forth the whine,/Denied her mouth in which cream cakes are brimmed." That's just funnier than saying "She stuffs her face." I particularly liked the line, "Nor lost to thee be the baked beans thou ow'st," which elevates the musical fruit to the heights of Elizabethan diction.
In a year where we had many fine formal-verse parodies, Sutton's clever poem was a close contender but only made it to the penultimate judging round, mostly because its scansion was too irregular. The lines of a sonnet should generally obey iambic pentameter, with occasional extra beats or varied stresses to prevent the poem from falling into a sing-song rhythm. Lines like "And night's calm doth not ease her repellence" and "But thee to nursing home be not chained" are eloquent and funny, but don't fit the meter. Too many such lines weaken the impact of the parody, whose humor partly depends on its resemblance to the original.
The poem's argument also could have been clearer. Who is being addressed, and why is he/she being compared to Great-Aunt May? In the original, Shakespeare indirectly praises his beloved by listing the things to which she cannot be compared, because she is even lovelier than they are. Here the goal seems to be the reverse: the addressee is more "hairy and...flatulent" than even Great-Aunt May - harsh! Yet the last six lines undermine this comparison; unlike Great-Aunt May, the addressee is not banned from public transport or forbidden to eat baked beans.
The lesson: even funny poems can benefit from more logic. In fact, an airtight progression of logical inferences that reaches an absurd conclusion is one of the funniest things there is.
MY SPECIAL DREAM
by "Chick L Scott" (Sue Scott)
If I was a bird I'd be flyin high
And stare down at the ant-sized world
Through one side of my head then the other
Cause birds eyes ain't up front like humans
And I'd cheep a melodius song
Floating on a wing and a breeze
Doing whatever I want
And not pay no more bills
Or get the car transmission fixed
And drain the septic system
Nothing like that, or anything else too
The only bad part would be in the winter
Cause I get real, real cold and might freeze with no heat
If I didn't fly south
Except that I'd be the lazy kind of bird, like ostriches
Who hates flying long distances
So I'd probably want to change back into human form
I think that's called molten
Around October 15th.
Copyright 2005 by Sue Scott
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Like Texino's poem, Sue Scott's "My Special Dream" generates humor from a narrator who is unaware of her own stupidity. I read this as a parody of the sentimental free-verse poems often written by adolescents and other beginning writers, who are painfully unaware of the blandness of their ideas or the inconsistencies in their tone.
Here, the speaker launches into an oh-so-poetical (if not particularly grammatical) declaration of her special dream: "If I was a bird I'd be flyin high". We're abruptly brought back to earth by this profundity: "And stare down at the ant-size world/Through one side of my head then the other/Cause birds eyes ain't up front like humans." Over-explained and literalized, the image of the bird loses whatever glamour it originally possessed.
She tries again for romantic effect with "And I'd cheep a melodius song/Floating on a wing and a breeze," but is quickly sidetracked by problems little noted by Lord Byron: "And not pay no more bills/Or get the car transmission fixed/And drain the septic system". The speaker goes on to utter one platitude after another, totally convinced that she's making fascinating new observations. Like a child, she can't focus her attention long enough to sustain the original idealized mood, so earnestly does she want to show off her garbled scientific knowledge: "So I'd probably want to change back into human form/I think that's called molten/Around October 15th."
I've seen too many serious poems brought down by clunkers like these. In addition to its entertainment value, deliberately bad verse can hold up an uncomfortable but useful mirror to our own artistic shortcomings. Whether your verse is light or heavy, be conscious of the poetic voice you've chosen, and avoid abrupt changes of tone without a reason.
Instead of our usual "where could this poem be submitted" suggestions, here are two venues that accept humorous verse:
Light
https://lightpoetrymagazine.com/
Brief, clean poems seem to be preferred.
Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest
Online Submission Deadline: April 1
http://www.winningwriters.com/contests/wergle/we_guidelines.php
Sponsored by Winning Writers. Free to enter.
These poems and critiques appeared in the February 2005 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter.
Wergle Flomp Entries by Anthony McMillan, Maria St. Clair and Mark Stevick
This month, the Critique Corner looks at more runners-up from the 2004 Wergle Flomp Poetry Contest, in our continuing quest to define poetry so bad it's good.
INTERNECINE WITH SPAM
by Anthony McMillan
But that one can, acidulous; sitting alone
On the shelf, obeisance to the Cag-mag,
This has gotten out of hand; I am broken
-------The can must be opened-------
I feel a little nostalgie de la boue, as the top of
The can is removed, for it reminds of darkly days
When hunger had its ways and smashed pork in a can
Seemed almost toothsome and grand.
Now I am throe and threnody, loathing my penury
As I spoon the scoria out into a bowl.
It squishes on the spoon, its sibilants, some
Domestic swine like tune; that I cannot understand
But imagine its saying, "Damn, I'm dead/cut up
And crushed in this can". Now I rue the day
I mixed my "babe like," friend in
-----------Mayonaise-----------
Effluvium, on bread and I feel such dread
But I slaver nonetheless, I do hope you understand;
It's truly out of my hand, there was only this one
Can of Spam, acidulous; sitting alone.
So shut up and leave me alone
I'm hungry.
Copyright 2005 by Anthony McMillan
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Anthony McMillan's "Internecine with Spam" is a fine example of the "ode to junk food" genre, to which some of our best Wergle entries belong. As I observed in last month's critique, humor thrives on contrast and incongruity. The cheap mass-produced foodstuffs of modern life defy all efforts to romanticize them in verse. Junk food, flattering our basest tastes, represents the opposite of art's mission to dignify our animal life with meaning. The more elaborate the language, the more sharply the mismatch is felt.
Paying effusive homage to a subject clearly unworthy of the honor is a classic form of mockery. The satire cuts in both directions, however, since lavishing poetic care on a product like Spam also exposes poetry's potential for clueless self-absorption and fussy remoteness from everyday life.
McMillan's poem derives added humor from its occasional misuse of erudite words, giving the impression that the speaker is trying hard to sound "literary" but has more enthusiasm than talent. For instance, the title employs "Internecine" (an adjective to describe internal strife or warfare within a group) instead of the more sensible noun "Interlude". Perhaps "Internecine" is a reference to a lost kinship between man and pig: " Now I rue the day/I mixed my 'babe like,' friend in/Mayonaise".
Similarly, the narrator expresses his inner conflict colorfully, yet ungrammatically, with the words, "Now I am throe and threnody". A throe is like a pang (throes of death), while a threnody is a poetic lament. He might feel throes, or sing a threnody, but his chosen phrasing suggests that the narrator is tossing around lofty words of sorrow without quite knowing what they mean. "Scoria" means "pebbles formed by lava," but it has a vaguely repulsive, medical sound (like "viscera"), as well as being a creative description of Spam's texture.
Another humorous device used by McMillan is the constant intrusion of the grotesque into the narrator's grandiose musings. The narrator tries to give deep meaning to the act of eating Spam: "I feel a little nostalgie de la boue, as the top of/The can is removed, for it reminds of darkly days/When hunger had its ways". However, the disgusting details keep getting in the way: the "smashed pork in a can... squishes on the spoon, its sibilants, some/ Domestic swine like tune". (I found several definitions of "Cag-mag" on the Internet, but the one that seems apt here is the Welsh slang for "unwholesome or loathsome meat; offal.")
I was impressed by this poem's playful rhythm and internal rhymes, particularly in the third stanza. The last two lines ("So shut up and leave me alone/I'm hungry") broke the mood for me. They seemed superfluous, perhaps trying too hard to be funny, and also out of step with the narrator's self-dramatizing, pseudo-intellectual persona. He suddenly sounded like a teenager, certainly not old and refined enough to have "nostalgie de la boue".
The poem could have ended with "Can of Spam, acidulous; sitting alone," which brackets the poem with similar lines in the first and last stanzas. Another option would be to replace the word "acidulous" in the last line with an equally erudite yet nauseating word, such as "glutinous," to avoid redundancy.
I don't think I feel very hungry anymore....
SPINNY SPINNY PINWHEEL
by Maria St. Clair
Spinny Spinny Pinwheel
Go Round And Round
Pretty Pretty Colors
Like Spinning Flowers
Pinwheel Go Spin Spin
Spinny Spin Spin
Spinny Forever
My Little Spinny Pinwheel
Spinny Spinny
Spin Spin
Pinny Wheelie
Spin Forver
Spin Spin Spin
Copyright 2005 by Maria St. Clair
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Inane yet strangely charming, "Spinny Spinny Pinwheel" was the best among many entries that tested the vanity contests' willingness to publish childlike babble. This is generally not my favorite type of humor poem, since it's a little too easy to write, and lacks the complexity and inventiveness that allow a humorous piece to stand up to multiple readings. Such poems are also harder to distinguish from one another, which is a disadvantage in a competition.
So what made "Spinny Spinny Pinwheel" stand out? Maybe it was the poem's artless spirit of fun. Like a toddler who can amuse himself (and annoy his parents) for hours by repeating the same jingle, the speaker finds endless satisfaction in repeating variations on a few simple words: "Pinwheel Go Spin Spin...Spinny Spinny/Spin Spin/Pinny Wheelie". Every word is capitalized, every moment as important as any other. The speaker, like a small child, exists in a perpetual present where the same word or object is always fresh and fascinating.
Also appealing was the sense that the narrator has no idea how dopey her little poem is. We receive many other entries in this style that self-consciously call attention to their lack of merit. Like the comedian who laughs too loud at his own jokes, these authors detract from their humor by belaboring it. "Spinny Spinny Pinwheel" maintains a consistent focus, never glancing over its metaphorical shoulder to see if the audience is laughing. Even the final misspelled "forver" is endearing, like a lisping child who mispronounces words in his eagerness to share his latest enthusiasm.
Having now proven that the inventive critic can find Deep Meaning in just about anything, we proceed to our final poem....
WORM SEX
by Mark Stevick
On certain mindless summer days
we hear the river's throat confessing fish,
and our eyes grow empty toward desire
which swims below our pupils,
and we will not be
until we are stumps beneath the sycamores,
reaching roots into the liquid music
for the singing trout.
From the shed or the garage
my friend resurrects a spade
barnacled with minerals
and spoonish like my tongue but
pointed slightly--I can just see that.
This iron edge will open up another mouth
pronouncing soil and stones.
We will be digging for worms.
It might be anywhere that we will
drop the blade and bite;
we are reckless and slightly desperate,
pace the undulating lawns past shrubbery
past bricked beds,
pacing generally toward some unattended corner,
toward anonymity in the mulch and
our specific relief.
We are always lucky.
Shovelling in sweat I am surprised
at the hole I myself am widening.
The worms turn up.
We stand in the silence of farmers and stare
at their appalling knots and humid tangles,
knowing, as we fish, that some dashing
invertebrate Romeo leeches after his soft lover.
Copyright 2005 by Mark Stevick
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Mark Stevick, winner of serious contests from such fine publications as Swink Magazine and The Baltimore Review, can also claim the unique honor of having his poem rejected by the Wergle Flomp Poetry Contest because it was too good. Although the poem's sexual innuendos occasionally edge toward absurdity, the vast majority of the piece is so lyrical and original that one cannot help but take it seriously. The final image of star-crossed worm lovers is amusing as intended, but the writing that precedes it is too strong to be undermined by a touch of self-parody. If anything, the occasional bursts of humor make the characters more likeable, and rescue their idyll from sentimentality.
The first four lines beautifully capture the haze of desire that descends upon the protagonists. The literal object of their obsession is catching fish, but that activity stands in for all the pleasures of surrendering to a languid summer day.
Chief among those pleasures is sex, a presence that lingers just below the surface for most of the poem, slyly peeking out through the images of digging a hole. "It might be anywhere that we will/drop the blade and bite;/we are reckless and slightly desperate". The protagonists are like teenage boys in love with their own animal exuberance, so caught up in the magic of the act itself that they are indiscriminate about whom they catch.
"We are always lucky./Shovelling in sweat I am surprised/at the hole I myself am widening." It doesn't take Dr. Freud to figure that one out. As these images accumulate, the innuendo becomes more obvious, and the poem risks making the protagonists seem ridiculous. After all, they're getting turned on by the unromantic and slightly disgusting activity of digging for bait worms.
With the last two lines, however, the speaker reveals that he's in on the joke, enjoying the comical side of sex as well as the passionate side. In the "appalling knots and humid tangles" of the worms, the speaker seems to see (and genially accept) how bestial, silly or weird our romantic couplings might appear to an outsider. I loved this poem, but I felt it was not really a spoof but a serious piece leavened with humor.
In place of the usual list of potential markets for the critique poems, I'd like to close with a selection of my favorite books of humorous verse:
Very Bad Poetry
Edited by Ross and Kathryn Petras
Unintentionally awful verse through the ages. Include 19th-century bard James McIntyre's not to be missed "Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing Over 7,000 Pounds".
The Stuffed Owl
Edited by D.B. Wyndham-Lewis and Charles Lee
Another treasury of cringe-worthy classics, with equally amusing commentary by the editors.
Pegasus Descending: A Book of the Best Bad Verse
Edited by James Camp
Much-praised anthology shows that even Emily Dickinson was capable of a few clunkers.
The following two winners of prestigious first-book prizes are not strictly humorists, but their work displays a madcap inventiveness and levity that are all too rare on today's literary scene:
Maine
By Jonah Winter
Offbeat offerings in this winner of the Slope Editions Book Prize include "Hair Club for Corpses" and a sestina in which every line ends with "Bob".
A Defense of Poetry
By Gabriel Gudding
This winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize rediscovers the glorious art of invective in the title poem, comprising several pages of (footnoted) insults such as "your brain is the Peanut of Abomination" and "suing you would be like suing a squirrel".
These poems and critiques appeared in the March 2005 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter.
Inspired by Starlight
Sparks fall like starlight
And a child runs inside,
Where her mother comforts with a promise.
But the streets have all been stained,
Soaked with tears and washed by blood
And covered over by long hours of winter.
No one knows when the end of winter
Will bring hope among the starlight
And the endless reign of blood
Will creep back to hide inside
A psyche that has been forever stained
By the treason of a shattered promise.
Who can trust a promise?
Time brings unto all things winter
Even after life, sun-stained,
Is soothed by cleansing starlight.
Water flows deep, forgotten inside
For it is far less viscous than blood.
Even so, oil is thicker still than blood
And vastly more powerful than a promise
Negotiated by important men inside
Offices guarded, safely out of winter.
They shake hands before the starlight
But with their blood those hands are stained…
The innocent whose eyes are stained
With visions flowing down like blood
Obscuring gentle shafts of starlight
Thinking wistfully of a promise
Made to a maiden with cheeks of winter
Who will now forever wait inside.
Waiting, hopefully, but slowly dies inside,
Clutching a letter with ink all smeared and tear-stained
Heart freezing slowly into winter
Until it refuses even its own life-blood
Making silently a sacred promise
To gaze into eternal starlight.
But what meaning lies inside a drop of blood
Spilled onto already-stained streets? Hardly a promise
Leftover from winter, cracks illumined by starlight.
Copyright 2005 by Dana Bailey
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, Dana Bailey's "Inspired by Starlight", is an example of one of my favorite poetic forms, the sestina. I love writing sestinas because adherence to a pattern is a great way to discipline a poem, but the sestina's freestyle line length allows for a more contemporary sound than forms requiring rhyme and meter. Forms involving repetition, such as sestinas, rondeaus and villanelles, also help the author stay focused on a particular theme and set of images.
As is evident from the poem above, the sestina consists of six stanzas of six lines each, plus a three-line "envoi" or final stanza. The word at the end of each line is called a "teleuton". Each stanza uses the same six teleutons in a specific order, and the envoi uses all six words. The rules for writing sestinas can be found at http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/sestina.html
The best sestinas take advantage of the repetition to disclose new facets of the original image. This quality attracted me to "Inspired by Starlight", a poignant lament for youthful innocence crushed by a world at war. Though verging on sentimentality, this poem moved me because of its gentle tone and vivid, tangible imagery. The compact lines transition easily from one required end-word to the next without feeling forced.
The writer of a sestina should look for teleutons that are elemental and multivalent enough to generate powerful reactions in more than one context. This poem's key words are starlight, inside, promise, blood, stained, winter. The list by itself already conjures up an intense world of relationships: heat (blood) versus cold (winter), purity (winter, starlight) versus defilement (blood, stained), and intimacy and security (inside, promise) versus the indifferent, violent outside world (starlight, winter, blood). These oppositions generate the poem's central message.
Bailey plays upon the reader's emotions by interleaving moments of tenderness and beauty with scenes of pain and destruction. The radiant opening image, "Sparks fall like starlight," and the instantly sympathetic character of the child invite us into the poem's world. All too soon, the second half of the stanza menaces the little scene to which we have become attached. The sparks that seemed beautiful to an unwitting child may have come from bombs or burning homes.
The need to work in those six words sometimes leads Bailey into thickets of abstraction, where it is unclear who or what is the active subject of the sentence. I encountered this difficulty especially in the last stanza, which begins with the subjectless verbs "Waiting, hopefully, but slowly dies inside". I keep searching for the main character of this stanza till I get to "Heart freezing slowly into winter/ Until it refuses even its own life's blood". The "it" of the fourth line must be the heart, but whose heart? Presumably, whoever was waiting and dying inside, most likely the "maiden with cheeks of winter" from the preceding stanza. A clearer transition would have helped here.
Who is the maiden, and how does she relate to the child in the opening lines? I interpreted both characters as archetypes for the innocent next generation whose springtime has been delayed by an endless winter of war. She thinks wistfully of the promise that the young take for granted, the hope—almost amounting to a sense of entitlement—that justice will prevail and the world will allow you to fulfill your dreams. Still, some things about the plotline of the poem remain vague.
By contrast, the stanza beginning "Even so, oil is thicker..." seamlessly integrates the required end-words while adding another important piece of the narrative puzzle. The broken promise is no longer just a metaphor for loss of innocence, but an actual misdeed by leaders who repudiated their treaties and betrayed their allies because of greed for oil.
This return to concrete events is refreshing, not only because it snaps the poem out of sentimental abstraction, but also because it suggests that the permanent winter is not an unavoidable fact of nature. It suggests, ever so faintly, that human beings making different choices could break the spell that freezes the characters inside their besieged homes and traumatized hearts.
The envoi refuses to confirm this hope. "But what meaning lies inside a drop of blood/ Spilled onto already-stained streets?" The lives that were lost, or never begun, on account of the oppressive conflict – were they just wasted? Would it also be a waste for anyone to martyr himself trying to end the violence? The ambiguous final lines—"Hardly a promise/ Leftover from winter, cracks illumined by starlight"—offer a beautiful glimmer of possibility that melts away like a snowflake when we try to grasp it.
I wasn't sure what "Leftover from winter" meant here. The word "from" implies that winter was the source of the promise, but elsewhere in the poem, winter usually stands for the negative forces opposed to the promise. Also, "Leftover from" sounds as if winter has passed, while the rest of the poem says that there is no end in sight. If my interpretation of the stanza as a whole is what the author intended, "Hardly a promise/ Surviving winter" might convey the meaning more clearly.
For more advice on writing sestinas, see http://www.marilynkrysl.com/krysl/poems.html
Sestinas by Jendi Reiter:
The Apocalypse Supermarket
Registering Bliss
Other good contemporary examples of the form are Diane Wakoski's "Sestina from the Home Gardener" in her book Emerald Ice and W.H. Auden's "Paysage Moralisé" in his Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957. Auden was one of the leading practitioners of the form in modern times.
Where could this poem be submitted? These upcoming contests came to mind:
Annie Finch Prize for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: April 30
http://www.nationalpoetryreview.com/
Contest named for contemporary formalist poet, offers $300 and publication.
Writer's Digest Annual Writing Competition
Postmark Deadline: May 6
http://www.writersdigest.com/competitions/
Prizes up to $5,000 and publication in WritersDigest.com for poems 32 lines or less (so no sestinas); accessible yet well-crafted poetry in the style of "Inspired by Starlight" would probably do best here.
Mad Poets Review Competition
Postmark Deadline: June 30
http://www.madpoetssociety.com/
Poets in this annual journal speak directly about universal emotions; free verse predominates, but they are open to formal verse with a contemporary sound; $100 prize.
Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Traditional Verse
Postmark Deadline: June 30
http://www.winningwriters.com/contests/margaret/ma_guidelines.php
Winning Writers assists this international contest, which is sponsored and judged by John Reid. This is its second year. $2,000 in prizes will be awarded, including a top prize of $1,000, and the winners will be published. Submit poetry in traditional verse forms, such as sonnets, ballads, odes, sestinas, blank verse and haiku.
Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Awards
Postmark Deadline: July 1
https://www.wagingpeace.org/shop/poetry-contest-entry/
The antiwar themes suggested in "Inspired by Starlight" would fit this contest; $1,000 prize.
The Writers Bureau Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: July 31
https://www.wbcompetition.com/
An online writing school in Britain sponsors this contest. The top prize is 1,000 pounds. See past winners on website.
This poem and critique appeared in the April 2005 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter.
South of Presidio
From Presidio south, the land is like burnt bread.
The Chichimec's scavenged here, naked, mud-caked, moon-crazed;
Voluptuaries of the blood, ancestors of the Aztecs.
If you see a stovepipe cactus, it's a crucifix, nails and all.
By some law of rot, all weather has stopped;
It's hot, but, it's not—it's dead temperature.
It's got no color—that's what is not—no color at all.
Space, sky, nauseates the eye. The hue of elephant.
You're inside a boundless canvas tent, riding on canvas cement.
And if you break down, thousands of miles from the next town,
And suns and moons fade in and out beyond your count,
You won't die—never! Won't age. Here you remain the same—forever.
Firing across
The abyss
Between
The synapses
The neural messenger
Crackling silently
Through the branches
Of the nerve tree
Arrives
And speaks to the receptor
Soundlessly.
From where does the message come?
What is the message's origin?
What could the message be?
Spoken to the deep ear soundlessly?
And what if
The messenger slows
Stumbles and trips
Into the abyss
And the message doesn't arrive?
Could we survive—south of Presidio?
As I drive, the only thing I can think to do is whistle:
A fountain of melody
Sparkling and crystalline
Flying like glistening water
In arches of baroquean
Architecture
Yet fresh with the freedom
Of a jazz improvisation—
Charley, Antonio, Diz, Johann Sebastian...
Music is
The message
Of what
The message
Is!
South of Presidio
I pull the pick-up over,
Cut the motor,
Get down,
And all around is
Absoluteness
A wall-less
Invisible
Cathedral
Copyright 2005 by Ron Wertheim
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "South of Presidio", impressed me with its gripping depiction of the harsh yet sublime landscape of the desert Southwest. (Based on the references to the Aztecs and Chichimecs, I'm guessing that the author is referring to Presidio, Texas, a small town near the Mexican border.) Though the poem loses focus after the first four stanzas, the strong opening convinced me that the author has the talent to make this piece even better.
Poems that try to capture the spirit of a place are most effective when they make the place the central character. The author must find a delicate balance between too much and too little personal involvement in the story. Too much, and the poem becomes about the speaker's feelings about the place, not the place itself; the narrator acts as a barrier to the reader's direct experience of the location. Too little, and the poem falls apart into a collection of impersonal snapshots that exert no emotional pull on the reader.
The 20th-century poet Richard Hugo was a master of the poetry of place. He excelled at choosing the right details to reveal the souls of forgotten towns. Writers interested in exploring this genre should check out his work, as well as Philip Levine, a notable American bard of working-class people and settings.
In the first four stanzas of "South of Presidio", Wertheim's confrontational imagery draws the reader into the scene by implicitly challenging us to survive in the brutal environment he describes. The first line establishes the land as the main subject. The humans who passed through here, "naked, mud-caked, moon-crazed;/Voluptuaries of the blood," were only a moment in the history of the eternal desert, despite the terrible intensity of their animal lives.
The desert itself is the antithesis of life, where time is suspended and consciousness blurs for lack of any object to fix its attention upon. "Space, sky, nauseates the eye." This unnatural state calls forth a violent reaction from the living things that try to assert themselves against this void: "If you see a stovepipe cactus, it's a crucifix, nails and all." By contrast, those who "break down" and succumb to the desert's elemental power gain a mummified sort of immortality: "You won't die—never! Won't age. Here you remain the same—forever."
These four stanzas successfully capture the essentials of the landscape, using its distinctive physical features not only to make the scene recognizable but to illuminate the powerful emotions that the desert inspires in us. The long lines are well-paced and broken up by internal rhymes, particularly in the third and fourth stanzas. I would have been happier if the poem had ended with a fifth stanza similar to those four in style and tone, perhaps introducing a new feature of the landscape (birds, plants?) that brings in a different kind of energy or a tiny, fragile exception to the oppressive sameness.
Instead, the style and focus of the poem abruptly change, presenting a string of short lines that take place within the narrator's consciousness. For me, the second half of this poem lacked the originality and dramatic interest of the first part. The speaker's introspection did not add to my appreciation of the landscape, and the more simplistic style was a disappointment after the rich imagery and superior craftsmanship of the preceding stanzas. In the second half, the speaker is telling me how he feels about the music that he hears in his head. But in the first half, I heard the music myself—jagged, strange and compelling, like Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring"—in the dance of the desert and its inhabitants.
I'm not a fan of the super-short line, popularized by poets like William Carlos Williams and Charles Bukowski. In the hands of less-experienced writers (and even in the work of these canonical authors), the technique can be exploited to make weak phrases sound more profound than they are. "Music is/The message/Of what/The message/Is!" Delivered with fortune-cookie solemnity, artificially intensified with an exclamation point, this pronouncement actually says very little, and says it without precision.
In writing the conclusion of this piece, Wertheim correctly intuited that the poem needed a change of emotional state to turn a mere description into a true narrative. The second half tries to move the poem toward a hopeful resolution, suggesting how humans can come to terms with the infinity of the desert. Our capacity to articulate and appreciate the transcendent, as manifested in music, helps us comprehend and even revere a natural phenomenon that is greater than ourselves. "Absoluteness/A wall-less/Invisible/Cathedral." Here, the short lines are more effective, letting us hear each word resonate in the slowness and spaciousness of the desert.
Altering the style can be a daring choice to highlight a change of subject and mood. However, in this poem, the shift feels jarring because there is no evident connection between the two halves of the poem until the line "Could we survive—south of Presidio?"
The imagery of the second section is also unrelated to the desert environment that the author so vividly created in the first four stanzas. The nerve tree, the abyss and the messenger are vaporous metaphorical constructs that pale in comparison to the reality of burnt, blood-soaked land and crucified cactus. The crystalline baroque fountain belongs to an entirely different time and place, as well as a more sentimental poetic tradition. Planted amid the desert's tumbleweeds and cow skulls, such a fountain would look more absurd than inspiring. The effect is of a jumble of inspirational images whose lack of connection to the original, vividly imagined setting makes them ineffective to provide narrative closure.
I've been blunt about my problems with the second half of this poem, because I love the first part so much that I want to liberate it from self-consciously poetic musings that it doesn't need. I would delete the lines from "Firing across" till "And all around is," and replace them with one or two stanzas in the same style as the first four, ending with "Absoluteness/A wall-less/Invisible/ Cathedral." Those last words do recover some of the power of the opening, and provide the key to the poem's dilemma: how we can learn to live with the desert's alien grandeur by letting reverence drive out terror.
Where could a revised version of this poem be submitted? These upcoming contests came to mind:
The MacGuffin Poet Hunt
Postmark Deadline: June 15
https://www.schoolcraft.edu/macguffin/poet-hunt-contest/
$500 and publication in this well-regarded literary magazine
Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: June 15
http://www.bitteroleander.com/contest.html
$1,000 and publication in The Bitter Oleander; editors are seeking "serious work that allows the language of your imagination to reveal in you a new perception of your life"
Guy Owen Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: June 15
http://www.southernpoetryreview.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4&Itemid=12
$1,000 and publication in Southern Poetry Review; well-established journal welcomes image-rich narrative poetry
Erskine J. Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: January 1
https://smartishpace.com/poetry-prizes/
$200 and publication in Smartish Pace; atmospheric narrative free verse predominates among the winning poems
This poem and critique appeared in the May 2005 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter.
Trapped in New Mexico
So...the men want to hear about meat.
About how the carcasses would bleed
when we'd strip away the hides after
slicing a bit at the stomach and feet.
Do they want to hear about hunger,
do you think? The emptiness that
drives an animal to take the bait
moments before cold steel jaws spring
shut
killing
and
maiming
everything they catch in their grip?
Should I tell about the owl I saw
upon a riverbank? One crisp morn,
early spring, as I ran the traps?
Ran steel traps on the riverbank.
The broken thing sat with one leg snared
and the other leg free, bobbing,
bobbing, bobbing...so I tried to drive
a .22 into its wise old brain.
Turns out I drowned it with a heel
there in the icy water passing.
Yes, I drowned it with a heavy heel
to bring to an end our suffering
early in the New Mexico spring.
Copyright 2005 by Lana Loga
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Trapped in New Mexico" by Lana Loga, assaults the reader from the outset with the brutal facts of survival in a predatory world. The plain-spoken, repetitive lines summon echoes of old folk songs where nature's laws harshly repay human violence. Here, the trappers themselves are trapped, victims of a fate that their own actions brought down on them. Even the noble owl, an unintended casualty, is implicated in the cycle of predation. His hunger and our own may be equally irresistible, culpable and deadly.
The first line effectively sets the tone of the poem. "So...the men want to hear about meat." The female narrator throws down a challenge to those who prefer not to face the bloody realities undergirding their existence. She is determined to make them see the cost of the life she leads. Setting herself up in opposition to "the men" establishes her basic stance of alienation and aggression. In her world, men and women, human and animal, are at war. The only gesture of sympathy in the poem is an act of violence; she reaches across the divide to kill the owl even as she becomes one with it. "I drowned it with a heavy heel/to bring to an end our suffering".
"Do they want to hear about hunger,/do you think?" The narrator's moment of solidarity with the owl at the end of the poem gives this question a new meaning. Perhaps the same "emptiness that/drives an animal to take the bait" also tempts humans to think they can safely seize the benefits of a way of life that ultimately kills their souls. I sensed an implicit political dimension to this poem, a lament that oppressed creatures would turn on one another instead of joining forces to choose a less destructive way of life.
I loved the rhythmic, incantatory language of "Trapped in New Mexico." Like the refrain of a ballad or the two-part structure of Bible verses, the repeated yet slightly varied phrases "as I ran the traps/Ran steel traps on the riverbank" and "Turns out I drowned it with a heel...Yes, I drowned it with a heavy heel" lift the poem into the realm of legends and archetypes. Loga also makes effective use of intermittent rhymes and assonances (meat/bleed/feet, grip/traps, passing/bobbing/suffering) to drive the poem forward.
I wasn't sure about her decision to change the line length during the pivotal moment, the phrase "shut/killing/and/maiming". On the one hand, the abrupt stylistic shift highlights the importance of these words. On the other hand, as I've said before in this space, I find that single-word lines more often dissipate than enhance the energy of a phrase. Also, in a short free-verse poem such as this, the inclusion of different styles sometimes gives the impression that the author is not in complete control of her material, that she has not settled on a form and tone for the poem. The other stanzas are so intense and economical with words that another line in the same style could still deliver the powerful effect that she intended. One possibility is to put the words "shut, killing and maiming" on a single line, creating a one-line stanza like "Ran steel traps on the riverbank."
Where could this poem be submitted? These upcoming contests came to mind:
New Millennium Writings Awards
Postmark Deadline: June 17
https://newmillenniumwritings.org/awards/
Twice-yearly contest offers $1,000 each for poetry, fiction and essays; style and content of "Trapped in New Mexico" are good fit for this prestigious journal
Mad Poets Review Competition
Postmark Deadline: June 30
http://www.madpoetssociety.com/
Enjoyable journal publishes accessible yet well-crafted poetry that makes an emotional connection with the reader; top prize $100
SSA Writer's Contest
Postmark Deadline: June 30
http://www.ssa-az.org/
Society of Southwestern Authors offers $300 prizes for poetry, fiction and nonfiction; follow formatting rules carefully
The Writers Bureau Poetry & Short Story Writing Competition
Entries must be received by July 31
https://www.wbcompetition.com/
$1,000 in each genre in this contest from a British online writing school
This poem and critique appeared in the June 2005 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter.
A Dialogue Between Jendi Reiter and Bruce Wilkerson
This month, we're departing from our usual format to share some insights from one of our subscribers about stylistic choices in free verse. In the May and June critiques, I said that poems with very short lines (one or two words) often didn't work for me. I've found that beginning poets overuse them as a shortcut to making prosaic diction look poetic without sufficient attention to the cadence and meaning of the phrases. Not every word in a poem is important enough to carry a whole line by itself.
Newsletter subscriber Bruce Wilkerson felt my criticism of this technique was over-broad, and sent one of his poems along with an eloquent explanation of how he used line breaks to enhance the meaning and sound of the piece. We appreciate his allowing us to reprint the following correspondence.
Date: 7/8/2005
From: Bruce Wilkerson
To: critique@winningwriters.com
...I've been reading through your critiques and I do find them very intelligent and insightful - I've even become convinced that you are truly human. You can't know how much of a relief that is! I hope you don't mind if I say though that you make one affirmation that I have trouble fully accepting; I'm not so sure though that I agree with you concerning the "super short verse" (the May 05 critique) which certainly has the inconveniences that you mention but which does have some advantages (well I often like using it). As far as trying to sound profound, whatever the length, a "poet" - if you like the word - that wants to sound profound, generally comes across as some two-bit prophet. I hope to God I never sound profound! Please tell me if I do.
...Here's a poem I took out and tried to dust off, it has still got a little grime under the fingernails though. I know it's in a style that is very different from what you seem to like but it's the one in which I used the most one word lines. If you are interested in a few reflections about why I like them, you can go down and read after the poem - but don't say I didn't warn you.
untitled still
once in the dark
camouflaged under my cover
from dangers imagined
still
I would ring my haven
with tigers and bears
until the relief of day
let me bolt from my bed
believing all was
won
excited
to
be together with my
teddies
missing
today
so I lie here waiting
once
the clock has rung
twice
recalling those monsters
that would scare me
once
the lights went out
again
hiding
my head under my pillow
hoping they might pass
to where they roamed
once
a dream
now
they rule the world by day
and so must I
hide my face
under my brow
knowing I will be
exposed alone
to this cold morning
once
the alarm has sounded
twice
rousing me
when I only want
seconds
to rest in peace
forgotten
once more
amongst my
kind
teddies
I like using [short lines] because they interrupt the syntactic chain, and thus the phonemic one, giving the reader the choice to interpret the word as an isolated element, the notion(s), or one whose scope is dependent on the other elements in the chain of speech (sorry about the jargon). In other words, it's a nice way to underline the polysemy of a word or eventually bring to mind homophones of the same word. For example, if you add a pause after the word "once", its meaning is quite different from the word "once" when it is integrated into the melody of the phrase. Another example is the preposition "to" in a sentence, the vowel will be realized as a schwa, whereas isolated, it will become a long U sound like in the words "too", "two".
Thanks,
Bruce
********
Date: 7/8/2005
From: critique@winningwriters.com
To: Bruce Wilkerson
Dear Bruce,
Thanks for your poem and thought-provoking "defense" of the short line. You make a good case! I've taken aim at this stylistic choice lately because I see less-experienced poets relying on it too much to break up their prosy phrases into something that looks like poetry. I'm trying to provoke them to listen more closely to verbal rhythms; they may still end up with short lines, but hopefully will have put more thought into why the lines break where they do.
In your poem ("once in the dark...") the short lines generally worked for me, because the rhythm is tense and taut, fitting the subject matter. I initially questioned whether "to" deserved its own line in the first stanza. But after reading your explanation, I went back and realized that the sounds "won" and "to" in the first stanza were punning echoes of the "once" and "twice" in the next stanzas. Clever.
I was going to take a vacation from "critique corner" in July, so I wonder if we could mix things up a bit in the newsletter and reprint this exchange between you and me (plus your teddies poem of course). I liked the high-level theoretical way you defend your stylistic choices. I'd also be interested to hear about writers who have influenced you.
Best,
Jendi
********
Date: 7/9/2005
From: Bruce Wilkerson
To: critique@winningwriters.com
Thank you, I would be very honored if you reprinted it and feel free to do any editing you wish.
Excuse me if I avoid the question of influences - I can't pinpoint anything neat and precise. I would like (egotistically) to believe that it came purely from artistic necessity, some skimpily clad muse sitting by my shoulder, but more realistically I realize that we all have "a virtual library" in our head, often very badly cross-referenced like mine, from which we borrow most of what we utter or write without realizing it.
On the question of line length, I do have to agree with you that cutting up sentences like sausages doesn't make poetry, even if we could come to an agreement on what poetry really is. I find choosing the right length very difficult though; what you gain on one side you often lose on the other. So, if you don't mind, I'll add a few quick reflections and you can keep what you want. If you ever have any responses to my questions, I'd love to hear them.
I like longer, more lyrical phrases too but what I often find difficult with long lines (and with short lines for different reasons) is the division of the sentences or phrases into intonational groups, something the reader will do naturally anyway. Unfortunately these more chewable pieces don't often correspond to traditional punctuation and a change in the intonational group, or a displacement of the nucleus, can alter the message radically. How much do I want to guide this segmentation and impose one interpretation? Short lines can often be too restraining. On the other hand, if I leave it to the reader, (s)he will choose the most obvious. I don't know how well it works but I sometimes isolate a word between two lines with the hope that this will make the reader click out of automatic pilot. You'll notice that the interpretation of the word "once" has to do with the choice of intonational groups. If I had put it with line above, we would have had one thing, and with the line that followed, yet another. The problem was similar with "…a dream/now/they rule…" in which the scope of the adverbial remains ambiguous. I'm just not sure that this sort of thing would work well with longer lines and I’m not even sure it's understood here. I'll give it some more thought myself but I'd love to have other opinions too.
All the best,
Bruce
[End of excerpt]
********
Bruce's poem illustrates an effective use of frequent line breaks to create ambiguity and multiple meanings. For instance, in the first stanza, the one-word line "still" could signify different things depending on whether the reader connects it to the preceding or the following line, or sees it as a separate adjectival phrase. "From dangers imagined/still" foreshadows the later part of the poem where the speaker is still tormented by nighttime fears, whereas "still/I would ring my haven" treats the word as equivalent to "nonetheless" (despite the camouflage, he also needed the teddies to protect him). "Still" by itself describes the child lying motionless. A similar effect takes place in the lines "they rule the world by day/and so must I/hide my face", where the first two lines set up an assertion of adult mastery that is exposed as make-believe in the third line.
During the process of writing, you may be someone who chooses images and techniques in an intuitive, subconscious way, or someone more analytical. I'm not suggesting that every word choice should be the subject of conscious internal debate. But as an exercise, during either the writing or the revision stage of a poem, try to explain to an imaginary other person why you chose a particular method of expressing yourself. Why was the sunset "red as a rose" and not "red as a tomato"? Why was your love poem a sonnet and not a limerick?
Look back over a selection of your poems. Are there words, topics or sound patterns that you return to as a matter of habit? Write a piece that deliberately shuns these familiar tools. Whether or not you like the result, you will have increased your awareness of your own thought processes as a writer, which will help you develop more control over your material.
This dialogue appeared in the July 2005 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter.
At First Light
...greater is He that is in you.... [1 John 4:4]
Half-past five. I am wan and waste.
Destruction clutches
hard beneath these ribs and brows.
Before the sheets are first thrown off,
passions resurrect that nurtured
in the day now past, pestered
on the breaths of night. I mourn
near certain sin in this new day,
yet try to snuff the spark that whispers
Peace, be still.
Please ...
Dew the deserts, salve the stings,
fill this pardoned purgator.
Kindle fresh your resurrection,
warm like anthracite inside.
Bend my spirit's steel
by your holy brawn and brooding.
Guide me with your strong hands,
since I fear that more astrays will come.
Draw near, sweet guest.
Transform my thorns that should be fruit,
Fill me for another day,
that I might not grieve you
even once.
Copyright 2005 by John Alexanderson
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, John Alexanderson's "At First Light," caught my attention because of its economical yet densely textured language, and its continuity with the tradition of classic Christian poetry. The tone and theme recollect 17th-century metaphysical poets such as George Herbert, while the style pays homage to Gerard Manley Hopkins' delight in word sounds, adapted to a more modern idiom.
In the opening stanza, Alexanderson uses alliteration and assonance to intensify the sound of his words, lifting them beyond mere prose. We hear a dark harmony in the clenched sound of "destruction" and "clutches," the grinding "R" of hard/ribs/brows. The slightly old-fashioned vocabulary ("wan and waste") also signals that the author is introducing a subject of more than everyday importance. In a more overwritten poem, such language might seem affected, but Alexanderson skirts that trap by using simple, short sentences that maintain the natural and direct style we expect from contemporary verse.
The second stanza concisely lays out the universal dilemma that torments the narrator. Returning to himself from sleep, he sees himself as the flawed element that will spoil the gift of the new day just as he did before. How soon the passions that seemed to "nurture" in the morning turned pestilent before evening!
The heart of his problem is that he simultaneously desires and shuns God's transforming power: "I mourn/near certain sin in this new day,/yet try to snuff the spark that whispers/Peace, be still." The apostle Paul expressed a similar sentiment in Romans 7:18-19: "For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do - this I keep on doing."
After catching his breath on a stanza break, the narrator gasps out only "Please...." In the release that follows this prayer, cascades of words tumble out, sped by alliteration: "Dew the deserts, salve the stings,/fill this pardoned purgator." Alexanderson channels the voice of Hopkins in the wonderful lines, "Bend my spirit's steel/by your holy brawn and brooding." I loved that unusual, melodious pairing of male and female, forceful and nurturing, with its echoes of Hopkins' "Holy Ghost [that] over the bent/World broods" (from the poem "God's Grandeur").
The combination of tender intimacy and humble formality in "Draw near, sweet guest" reminded me of Herbert poems such as "Love Bade Me Welcome". Because the power to be good comes from God and not himself, the speaker dares to ask what first seemed impossible: "that I might not grieve you/even once." Instead of looking inward with despair at his own faults, he looks outward with hope in his relationship with God.
Where could this poem be submitted? There are a growing number of excellent literary journals with spiritual themes, which I've recommended before in these pages. Publications to investigate include Windhover, Literature and Belief and Image. I support the mission of these journals, but I also encourage writers of spiritually oriented poetry to explore "mainstream" publication outlets, so as to open up new channels for dialogue between the religious and artistic subcultures. These upcoming contests may also be of interest:
Greensboro Review Literary Awards
Postmark Deadline: September 15
http://greensbororeview.org/contest/
$500 in each category (poetry and fiction); no simultaneous submissions, but unlimited free entries allowed
This poem and critique appeared in the August 2005 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter.
Under the Arbor
We came for love
When the light was fleeing
Under the arbor, by a tree.
We sat in silence
On my coat of leather
Under the sky, near the earth
The night was tender
Warm and bright
With you and I, the garden wall.
We came for love
When life was fleeting
Under the arbor, by a tree.
Our ageless day
Yet the inevitable night
Has entwined us forever
With a longing for life.
Copyright 2005 by J.T. Milford
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Under the Arbor" by J.T. Milford, has the timeless quality of an old English ballad. Though not strictly formal verse, the poem develops a song-like cadence through the use of repeated speech patterns and grammatical constructions in each stanza.
The style and theme of "Under the Arbor" reminded me of Lord Byron's "We'll go no more a-roving". What gives these deceptively simple lines so much power? Perhaps it is the immediacy and sincerity of the feelings that the poet shares with us. There is no self-conscious drama, no aesthetic affectation. No matter how many poets and lovers have made the same observations, the ecstasy and the loss are felt afresh by everyone who falls in love.
Similarly, in "Under the Arbor," the scene becomes more poignant for its lack of detail. The lovers are every lover, the arbor is every pastoral scene where the changing light and turning seasons reminded us of life's fragility. This theme comes through in Milford's deft reworking of the first stanza in the fourth: "When the light was fleeing" becomes "When life was fleeting."
The poem uses just the right amount of repetition to create a musical structure without becoming monotonous. The first two lines of stanzas 1-4 have two stressed beats each, but the number and pattern of syllables varies slightly. Lines ending in "silence", "leather" and "tender" relieve the pressure of having each line end on a stressed syllable, which can give a poem a leaden tread. The third line of stanzas 1-4 feels like two shorter lines because it falls into two parallel halves, usually a pair of prepositional phrases. But the poet breaks that pattern slightly in the third stanza, "With you and I, the garden wall," allowing the heart of the poem, "you and I," to stand out more from its context. The three-line structure creates the sensation of two halves joined to form a greater whole in the third line.
I was less enamored of the concluding stanza, which deviated from the pattern of the preceding stanzas without a clear rationale, and lacked their careful pacing. I also felt that the move from physical details (the arbor, the light, the wall) to more abstract images ("ageless day," "longing for life") diminished the impact of the scene. In the first four stanzas, I was seeing through the poet's eyes, whereas in the last stanza, he was telling me what he thought. Sensation is more powerful than second-hand interpretation.
More importantly, I wasn't sure what he was trying to say. The "ageless day" and "inevitable night" appear to contradict one another. These lines could be read as saying that their love made the day seem timeless, yet all along they know night is inevitable. But how has the coming of night "entwined [them] forever/With a longing for life"? Is it that they cling more tightly to each other because they know that the passage of time brings loss? If the point is that they are united forever by love, the last line pulls the reader in a different direction: are they longing for life, or each other?
My suggested rewrite below flows more naturally from the preceding stanzas, while preserving most of the images and clarifying the main idea:
We longed for life
Though night descended
Entwined forever, in ageless day.
The last line could bear a double meaning. The lovers' bond makes day out of night, and night and day are also entwined, just as the lovers' ecstasy is always intermingled with awareness of mortality.
Where could this poem be submitted? These upcoming contests came to mind:
Firstwriter.com International Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 1
http://www.firstwriter.com/competitions/poetry_competition.shtml
Top prize of 500 pounds plus a free subscription to this useful resource site for writers. Submit online only
This poem and critique appeared in the September 2005 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter.
Fire Sale
I dreamed that the seventh house
On the left on my street
Burned down
And every soul perished.
In my dream
Burnt flesh hung from
Silver poles, poked
Through holes of artless parchment
In the evening sky.
A cannon sat in the square
Across the street—
Pointing to the second story window
Where my father leaped—
His diabetic limbs akimbo
Dancing on a treadle to
The Galilean stair.
Soaked white linens he was wrapt in
Set the dream on fire, he was
Wailing as he sailed,
"Why did god the only one
Give me a nigger lover for a son?"
Body to the Anatomy Board
For the docks to skewer, disembowel;
I dumped you there myself, dad,
Though I seldom called you that. All
The soused ensemble was resplendent
In the fall's night air!
The racks are full of you now,
All that I can bear.
I think I'll just go in and browse.
Copyright 2005 by William J. Duvall
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Fire Sale" by William J. Duvall, uses the language of fantasy and nightmare to capture the essence of a son's love-hate relationship with his deceased father. Just as classic fairy tales provided a code language for societies to discuss taboo passions and conflicts within the family, the surreal world of a poem permits the narrator to express feelings he may be afraid to name. Sharon Olds and Sylvia Plath are examples of poets who used this style to create cathartic, powerful poems about their own troubled relationships with their fathers. Finding images for the emotions that the situation generates, rather than simply describing the facts or stating your reaction to them, is a technique that brings the reader closer to seeing the scene through your eyes.
The opening lines of "Fire Sale" thrust us into a shadowy realm where everything we observe has ominous significance. The odd specificity of "the seventh house/On the left on my street" calls attention to itself, recalling the connection between "left" and "sinister" as well as the numerological belief that seven is an especially powerful number. "Every soul perished" tells us we are about to hear a story where redemption is urgently sought but may not be found.
The torn sky implies that the world we lived in is unreal, separated by a flimsy membrane from a mystery whose existence we never suspected. We have crossed over into the realm of the unknown, on the other side of death. The "artless parchment" is like a blank canvas, a Sistine Chapel with no God on its ceiling.
The cannon pointed at the father's window is most obviously a metaphor for death, but could also be viewed as a symbol of the son's disguised aggression. Like death, but also like a poem, it acts at a distance, in seeming anonymity. No one is visible behind the cannon to take responsibility for the judgment or threat that it levels at the father.
Then we receive this amazing vision of the father, transfigured yet still recognizably flawed by the illness, prejudice and bitterness that marked his life. The latter traits still haunt the son, who is repelled by his father's body and soul, as he half-taunts, half-confesses how he "dumped the body" at the Anatomy Board for medical students to dissect. He refuses to sentimentalize his father in death, but cannot avoid seeing that the man has passed, with all his faults, to a plane of existence that makes these resentments seem unworthy.
"All/The soused ensemble was resplendent/In the fall's night air!" Dazzling, enigmatic, this moment of revelation slips away from our understanding. "Soused" is a wonderfully earthy word that grounds us in ordinary, tragicomic existence even as we are given a glimpse of the "resplendent" beyond.
So who or what is the soused ensemble? My first impression was of a crowd of men, happily drunk, a little maudlin; perhaps the father's working-class buddies, giving him a good send-off at his funeral. The son, more cosmopolitan, estranged from that community (as we learn from the father's "nigger-lover" comment), uses the judgmental word "soused" but is also surprised to discover a nobility in the bond they shared.
An alternate reading of "ensemble" is a suit of clothing. This fits with the recurring imagery of fabric and sewing in the poem. A treadle is the foot-pedal that operates a sewing machine. The "soused ensemble" could refer to the "Soaked white linens he was wrapt in," a shroud or bedsheet wet with the fever-sweat of illness.
The last stanza, beginning "The racks are full of you now," also seems to use clothing as a symbol of the father. Perhaps he was in the garment trade — an immigrant Jewish merchant, not understanding why his baby-boomer son has joined the civil rights movement? The retail term "fire sale" then becomes a metaphor for disposing of the father's leftover clothing and possessions after his death.
I found the last line jarring ("I think I'll just go in and browse") because it seemed flippant, too casual, after the anguished spiritual journey that preceded it. A poem this weighty needs to end on a powerful chord. Is the son wryly imitating something his father's customers might have said at a literal fire sale? I wanted more context to make this line meaningful. Otherwise, I wouldn't change anything about this mature, well-written poem.
Where could this poem be submitted? These upcoming contests came to mind:
National Poetry Competition
Postmark Deadline: October 31
https://poetrysociety.org.uk/competitions/national-poetry-competition/
Prestigious contest from a leading UK poetry organization offers 5,000 pounds top prize, other cash prizes
Briar Cliff Review Fiction, Poetry & Creative Nonfiction Contest
Postmark Deadline: November 1
http://www.bcreview.org/contest
High-quality journal offers $500 and publication for winners in each genre; read passionate and daring poems by past winners online
This poem and critique appeared in the October 2005 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter.
Zoonotic
Caged, toothless, a lion sits in the manner of Kabul
alley cats, front paws slightly curled inward
toward his chest, hind legs folded close to his body,
head erect, staring beyond what moves beyond the bars.
Marjan's mane mangled from a grenade tossed
five years ago that killed his mate.
He'd mauled the victorious fighter who'd entered
his enclosure to celebrate, lion to lion.
He survives revenge and today's war,
gunfire and guided bombs. Near starvation,
he gums the flank of something tossed to him.
Alley cats steal in to steal choice pieces.
From neglect, old age, he dies.
Ten years earlier, Kuwait City evacuated,
desert-hued walls shrapnel-riddled,
hippos, big as burnt-out Mercedes,
wandered the streets. Sharks, more or less lucky,
pulled from algae-festering aquariums,
eaten by the invading army.
A confused giraffe stared into
a flashing traffic light. Cages opened,
toucan and parrots perched on bullets.
At the city limits, steel-latticed stems
of a hundred desert derricks
sabotaged into unfurling black blooms.
Half-a-century earlier,
by order of the Japanese army,
at the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo,
shortly before the flash and ash
of Hiroshima and Nagazaki,
the cages left open, tigers, leopards,
bears, snakes, all poisoned.
Three elephants, John, Tonky, and Wanly,
wouldn't eat the poisoned potatoes.
The syringes' needles too weak
to pierce their skins. Seventeen days later,
John starved to death. Tonky and Wanly,
weak and thin, lifted their bony bodies,
stood on their hind legs, raising
their trunks as high as they could,
performing their bonsai trick,
begging for food, for water.
No one said a word. No one said
their trainer went mad giving
them what they needed.
Everyone prayed for one more day
that tomorrow the bombing would end.
Two weeks later, they died, trunks stretched,
hooked high between the bars of their cage.
If that prayed for time exists,
perhaps my father found it,
mowing the lawn, raking leaves,
finishing the basement with cheap
wood paneling, washing and waxing
a series of cars, a shine maintained
between wars. My mother kept
some of the bowling trophies,
emptied the closets of his clothes,
gave away all the shoes except
his traditional German dance clogs,
the ones with a military spit-shine.
I kept the patches, the chevrons,
insignias, medals, flags,
the photographs. His leather belts,
I could wrap around me twice.
One cut of gray, wrinkled
elephant skin, stamped authentic
as death must be.
Copyright 2005 by Walter Bargen
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Zoonotic" by Walter Bargen, won an Honorable Mention in our 2005 War Poetry Contest. When you enter a contest with a specified theme, it's important to find a fresh angle that will make your poem stand out from thousands of others on the same topic. Bargen's memorable images and unusual choice of viewpoint—war as experienced by zoo animals—kept his poem in the running.
Still, "Zoonotic" faced tough competition from the other honorable mentions, finalists and semifinalists because I wasn't completely satisfied with the ending. For many of the poems in that last group of 50-100, that was the deciding question: what does it all add up to? Where poems show an equivalent level of craftsmanship, I lean toward the one with something substantial to say, in which the emotions aroused by the story produce a larger insight. Although the last section lacked the intensity of what had gone before, I felt the poem taught me something new about compassion and cruelty in wartime, which was enough to put Bargen in the winners' circle.
The word "zoonotic" makes us think of the zoos that are the subject of the poem, but it is actually the word for any disease that can be transmitted between animals and people. Several kinds of interspecies transmission are at work in this poem. War is a human epidemic that spreads to the animals we have caged. Even before the war, we "infected" them with human culture, taking them away from their self-sufficient life in the wild and teaching them to depend on us for food and protection. We see this most clearly in the heartbreaking image of the elephants Tonky and Wanly vainly doing circus tricks in hopes of being fed.
And yet, the animals also transmit something more positive back to us. The plight of the trusting elephants keeps alive our capacity for empathy, which we are tempted to jettison as a luxury when violence threatens: "No one said/their trainer went mad giving/them what they needed." The Japanese trainer's unselfishness toward his animals, in turn, humanizes him in our eyes, making it impossible to see him as merely "the enemy" in World War II.
Viewing war through the eyes of animals highlights how human violence distorts the order of creation. The disoriented giraffes and hippos "big as burnt-out Mercedes", wandering through a surreal, chaotic landscape, are as unnatural as the "black blooms" of burning oil wells that replace true vegetation. Bargen's wonderful powers of description leave us with indelible images of war's horrors.
In virtually all cultures, animals function as powerful archetypes of human traits. In Marjan the lion, unaccountably surviving the onslaughts of larger conquerors only to die of neglect, we see every once-proud general forgotten or mocked in his old age. Marjan also resembles the beleaguered country of Afghanistan, caught up in the geopolitical struggles of empires while its people starve. In addition, Bargen may have intended an allusion to Ahmed Shah Massoud, the "Lion of Panjshir," a leader of the anti-Taliban resistance who was assassinated (probably by al Qaeda) just before September 11, 2001.
The only thing I would change about "Zoonotic" is the last section, beginning, "If that prayed for time exists,/perhaps my father found it". I had two problems with how Bargen chose to end the poem. First, I wasn't adequately prepared for the shift from a third-person omniscient voice to a first-person recollection. Neither the speaker nor his father appear in the previous stanzas, which take place in a wholly different setting. Thus, describing how the father and his son made peace with wartime memories felt like the ending to a different story. It was answering a question that hadn't been raised yet.
My second problem was that the perspective of the last stanza was several degrees removed from the action, which made the ending anticlimactic compared to the vivid scenes that preceded it. It's hard to make hindsight analysis feel as substantial as eyewitness reportage, especially when the memories aren't even the speaker's own. (Our first-place winner this year, Jude Nutter, pulls it off, but she's an exception.)
If a concluding stanza is necessary after the deaths of the elephants, I would have preferred to stay with the animals' perspective, because that is what makes this poem unique. Bargen could have added another anecdote about a war currently being waged, describing the threat to the (wild or caged) animals there or their apprehension of imminent danger, to arouse the reader to think "it's happening again—we have to do something". An even better ending would be a scene of postwar reconstruction, where the peace is symbolized by humans beginning to take care of their zoo animals again. Either way, what's needed is not simply another anecdote of animals suffering, but something that moves the narrative forward, showing us the means to avert catastrophe or the hope of seeing peace restored.
Where could a poem like "Zoonotic" be submitted? These upcoming contests came to mind:
Ruth Stone Prize in Poetry
Postmark Deadline: December 10
https://hungermtn.org/contests/
$1,000 and publication in the literary review Hunger Mountain; no simultaneous submissions
Poetry Society of America Awards
Postmark Deadline: December 23
https://poetrysociety.org/awards/annual-awards/2020-individual-awards
Highly prestigious awards program for unpublished poems on various themes; poems like "Zoonotic" are a good fit for the George Bogin Memorial Award, given to a group of poems that "use language in an original way to reflect the encounter of the ordinary and the extraordinary and to take a stand against oppression in any of its forms"
This poem and critique appeared in the November 2005 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter.
The Third Millenium
all the good air gone
with the ghosts
live wire and chatter
long for a face
a voice, a torso with arms,
legs, gone the
words, books, love
notes, business lies
scattered to the
air—bugs
tend flowers while
some mammals, wrapped in
aluminum, live without joy
on riches and letters of
the alphabet building
clouds floating
around the
O-zone.
Copyright 2005 by Joan Blake
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, Joan Blake's "The Third Millennium", is primarily concerned with constructing an atmosphere rather than a narrative or an argument. It appeals to our intuitive ability to perceive connections that we may not be able to explain analytically. John Ashbery is one of the most well-known writers in this style, elements of which can also be found in Mark Strand's early collection Darker.
We're taught to decipher poems by looking for the "real" meanings that the surface images represent: the moon is like a woman's face, the fallen leaf is a metaphor for death. For Blake's poem, I think this technique would miss the point. Trying to match up the "aluminum" or "letters of/the alphabet" to literal features of 21st-century life would prematurely arrest the free association of images that these words are meant to provoke. I will share some of my impressions of the poem below, but these should not be considered an authoritative key to its meaning(s).
The overall mood that I got from the poem was one of unreality and isolation, worsened by technology. I was immediately grabbed by the opening lines, "all the good air gone/with the ghosts", with their strong repetition of "GO-" sounds. The words "gone" and "ghosts" cannot help but arouse feelings of loss. Even before we know where we are in this poem, we are already nostalgic for somewhere else. There was a time before this fog descended, but those better days have slipped away somehow.
"Live wire and chatter/long for a face" suggests that this is going to be a poem about how email, phones and other long-distance communication have replaced authentic relationships. The loss of "good air" reminds us of the pollution that often goes along with society's so-called progress.
But then we get images of scattering and dismemberment—"a torso with arms,/legs, gone the/words, books, love/notes, business lies/scattered to the/air"—that for me brought back those post-9/11 scenes of office debris littering the streets around the World Trade Center site. This allusion lends an additional dimension to the "ghosts" and the spoiling of the air.
In a few brief lines, this stanza manages to evoke several recognizable, interconnected ideas, but so fleetingly that we scarcely understand what memories are producing our emotional reaction. Moreover, the poem still works without any interpretive overlay, as a direct experience of disconnection, confusion and loss.
The second stanza paints a picture of the pleasant but meaningless fantasy-land into which "some mammals" have retreated, while the larger world deteriorates as we have already seen. "Wrapped in aluminum" reminded me of the stock figure of the crazy person who wears tinfoil to keep the aliens from hearing his thoughts. It's shiny, high-tech, but actually flimsy, not offering the protection that these characters seem to expect. Could there be a sadder indictment than saying that we "live without joy/on riches"? In the "letters of/the alphabet building/clouds floating", I saw language and symbols, the things that make us more than mere "mammals", becoming unmoored from meaning and productivity. This stanza had a more universal feeling; its mood comes across perfectly without the need for connections to specific events and problems.
It's hard to explain why I found the last lines, "around the/O-zone", to be a letdown. As readers of this column know, I demand a lot from last lines, but that's because they set the tone for how the reader will remember the poem. Did the journey end at a destination or just stop? Maybe the destruction of the ozone layer is an overly familiar concept, maybe the unusual capitalization and spelling hinted at a double meaning or pun that I didn't get, or maybe the final period made the poem less open-ended than I wanted. Whatever the reason, I didn't feel that "O-zone" had enough significance in this context to warrant the emphasis placed on it.
I would have preferred to continue the poem's dominant mood of floating disconnection and unresolved questions, rather than bringing it to a sudden stop that doesn't feel necessary. A change as simple as removing the final period and bringing "ozone" up to the previous line might suffice:
live without joy
on riches and letters of
the alphabet building
clouds floating
around the ozone
One could also experiment with various adjectives in front of "ozone" to create a more specific mental picture. Around the blue ozone? Around the thin ozone? Many options are possible, depending on the final impression that Blake wants to leave in the reader's mind. Overall, this was an intriguing poem that managed to do a lot in a small space.
Where could a poem like "The Third Millennium" be submitted?
These upcoming contests came to mind:
Poetry Society of America Awards
Postmark Deadline: December 23
https://poetrysociety.org/awards/annual-awards/2020-individual-awards
Highly prestigious awards program for unpublished poems on various themes; poems like "The Third Millennium" might be a good fit for the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award for lyric poems on philosophical themes. You'll need to join PSA to enter the Hemley contest and some others, but it's a good deal.
Beullah Rose Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: January 1
https://smartishpace.com/poetry-prizes/
$200 prize for work by women poets, from the literary journal Smartish Pace
Milford Fine Arts Council National Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: January 31
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Milford-Fine-Arts-Council/103514274805?ref=stream
$100 prize for unpublished short poems (10-30 lines, maximum 40 characters/spaces per line); no simultaneous submissions
This poem and critique appeared in the December 2005 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter.
Anthem for the Official Rhode Island State Shellfish
Oh beau-ti-ful, crus-ta-ceous life
A-bid-ing in our muck
Through what a bi-valve knows of strife
We wish you e-very luckkkkkkk
Tho' sed-i-ment, and kinds of silt
May blanket o'er your reign
Sow seeds of roe and mind your milt
Peee-ple your wet domainnnnnnnnnnnn
Behind your bulging azure eyes
Through your breathy mollusk sighs
A clammy ethos mild and meek
Your shell is strong but mind is weak.
When aenemone with stinging spine
Or jellyfish with limbs like twine
Should on your restful time impinge
You just contract—and close your hinge.
While quick seas rush and swell above
The lang'rous shellfish dreams of love
But below in lonely briney sand
His mussel amors meet faint demand
And Lo! his mournful wails expand
Across the Stygian marine land
To fill with rueful cry the oceans
With his forlorn longing a-balone notions
Though sun may shine in air-filled skies
In ombrageous acqueous torpor he lies
His love as great as ever seen. She
Now doth garnish cheese linguini......
Embittered neither, not to grow sick
From thoughts on fate: a clam is Stoic
Would suffer samely less nor mo' joy
Had she wound up upon a PoBoy...
On sunny beaches all palm-fretted
Natives drumming frond-envetted
Stew-pots boil with what they've netted
Clams seek not to be so feted
New England too, its sounds and shores
Abound in Yale and Harvard bores
Who deem it is a mark of stah-tus
To shew our friend their learned glottis
Still so some other humbler genus
Treat the clam in ways as heinous
See the otter on his back
Give the Quahog rocky whack
Seagulls using no stone mallet
No less seek clams to gift their palate
Even octopi, of man-like heart
Are known to prise their shells apart
But though many foreign nation
From his husk seeks his ablation
He cannot loathe he doth not hate
Regards placidly his fate
For when there are two halves of you
Whether in chowder or island stew
Seabird slurp or otter bang
The end is self-same, yin or yang
Copyright 2006 by Matthew Farrell
Critique by Jendi Reiter
It's mid-January; your driveway has been covered with ice for two months; and already your resolutions to eat less carbs and read "War and Peace" are looking like a pipe dream. Here comes Critique Corner to start off your new year on a more cheerful note with this fine example of light verse, Matthew Farrell's "Anthem for the Official Rhode Island State Shellfish". Our Wergle Flomp Poetry Contest, which spoofs vanity contests by rewarding poems so bad they're good, is currently open to submissions through April 1. A poem like Farrell's would be a strong contender. We hope this critique will enhance your understanding of some characteristics of successful humor poetry.
The central joke of Farrell's poem is, of course, the absurdity of writing an elaborate rhyming ode about a clam, yet the poem would not succeed nearly as well were it not for his inventive use of rhyme, which allows him to extend the joke over numerous verses even after we've gotten the basic idea. Pacing is important in all poetry, but especially in humorous verse. We've all sat through comedic sketches that would have been great 30-second gags but are dragged out over several repetitive minutes.
Farrell holds our interest with his rich vocabulary (our hapless hero is variously described as a mollusk, a Quahog, an abalone, a mussel, etc.) and creative elaboration of the perils that can befall a clam. Another way he keeps the joke alive is by creating a storyline, complete with a bit of philosophical wisdom at the end. Thus, the poem not only pokes fun at flowery verse in general, but at a particular old-fashioned genre, the nature poem as moralistic allegory. (See, for instance, Isaac Watts' "How Doth the Little Busy Bee", famously parodied by Lewis Carroll in 'Alice in Wonderland'.)
What makes some animals funnier than others? Physical awkwardness or repulsiveness plays a role; clams, worms and insects invite the gross-out reaction that is central to low comedy. It is also hard to anthropomorphize a clam, since they are virtually immobile and probably lack a complex mental life.
Making this lowly mollusk the central player in a drama of love and death, as Farrell has done, creates an amusing incongruity that is often an important ingredient of light verse. The poem becomes only superficially about the clam, and more about gently satirizing recognizable social types (the Stoic philosopher, the star-crossed lovers, the Hahvahd man with his "learned glottis") by applying their self-important rhetoric to the unlikely mollusk. We become uncomfortably aware of the poetic cliches and mannered insincerity of our conventional love-talk when we read of the clam whose "breathy mollusk sighs" and "mournful wails expand/ Across the Stygian marine land" because his lady-love now "doth garnish cheese linguini."
"Anthem" contains many delightful rhymes that depend on unexpected yet perfectly apt word choice, like the song lyrics of Noel Coward or W.S. Gilbert. Some of my favorites were "stah-tus/glottis", "seen. She/linguini", and "mo' joy/PoBoy". The last four verses flow especially smoothly, unlike some of the earlier lines where the meter is less regular. While the first two stanzas are entertaining as parody, I found them distracting overall because the rest of the poem follows a different pattern (AABB rather than ABAB rhyme, roughly four iambs per line instead of alternating four and three). I would suggest that Farrell should replace the parody lyrics with a single introductory stanza in the same form as the subsequent ones, and complete the parody as a separate poem following the structure of the original ("America the Beautiful").
Even more than serious poetry, light verse often benefits from rhyme and meter. Natural-sounding poetry in contemporary language but traditional forms is much easier to find in our Wergle entry pool than among our War Contest entries, for instance. Perhaps our modern ears have become so unaccustomed to formal verse that many poets can only use its techniques ironically. Yet I also think form has a special role to play in humorous poetry. Good "bad" poetry requires a tone that is delicately balanced between sincerity and self-consciousness. The form requires the author to take the poem somewhat seriously, avoiding an excess of forced laughter at his own joke. The poem must first set up a convincing authority—in this case, the authority of poetic conventions—before it can deliver the satisfaction of undermining that authority through satire. As in Farrell's poem, the clever elaboration of the form can also do some work toward holding the reader's interest, taking the pressure off the joke to carry the poem all by itself.
Where could a poem like "Anthem" be submitted?
The dearth of significant awards for high-quality light verse is an opportunity for some enterprising publisher. Meanwhile, in addition to our Wergle Flomp contest, the following contests may be a good fit:
CNW/FFWA Florida State Writing Competition
Postmark Deadline: March 15
Top prizes of $100 for entries in poetry, fiction, nonfiction and children's literature, from Florida Freelance Writers Association
The following journals are also open to publishing light verse and satire:
Light Quarterly
The only US magazine exclusively publishing light verse, satire, cartoons, parodies, and word-play
Main Street Rag
Edgy literary journal enjoys satirical and dark-humored socially conscious poetry; accessible free verse probably preferred (think Edward Field rather than Hilaire Belloc); no simultaneous submissions
This poem and critique appeared in the January 2006 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter.
No RSVP
He won't worry about how to help,
what tie to wear with which shirt color,
how center pieces fit with dishware,
if gifts might be necessary. She
doesn't care in which chair he may sit,
should a gravy spill blot his clothing,
if such worry's worth it. Thoughtlessly
guests resume games throughout the evening,
take dessert, crumbs dropping to carpet,
during her home vigil. Still she
did plan space for him in an event
knocks upon her door materialize,
should it freeze in hell. He looked a damn fool
lying in sand without a face, breath-
less, with arm and leg remaining, no,
not even requesting vacation,
leaving quite unannounced. What matters
to anybody; who now could care?
In spite, he should've shown! For she, sweet
hostess, shall greet no gentle-caller,
table-head, soldier, friend nor lover.
Copyright 2006 by Ron Dean
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, Ron Dean's "No RSVP", subtly employs irony and misdirection to channel our outrage at the intrusion of violent death into our carefully constructed lives. By pretending that a dinner-party faux pas is the most important thing about this soldier's absence, the poem mocks the narcissism and misplaced priorities that permit war to continue.
"No RSVP" reminded me of a famous war poem, Arthur Rimbaud's "Le Dormeur du Val" (English translation). Both poems set a scene that initially appears benign, to heighten the reader's shock and sense of wrongness when death breaks in. We're tricked into complaining against the writer for ruining a pretty picture, only to realize that we may be perpetuating ugliness by refusing to see it.
Social conventions in "No RSVP" are untrustworthy, inadequate to bear direct conversation about the hostess' loss. At first, we think we're hearing about a well-adjusted couple who are above arguing about trivia such as place settings and gravy spills. How gracious they are to one another, we might say. But these opening lines were meant sarcastically, and like strangers at a party, we were not "insiders" enough to understand the story beneath the story. Of course they can't worry about these things—he is dead, and she will never see him at her table again. What seemed like evidence of their freedom is actually a sign of their powerlessness.
The poem mocks human attempts at graciousness and order, even going so far as to call the young man undignified in death ("He looked a damn fool/lying in sand without a face")—perhaps a dark pun on "loss of face" as a term for a social gaffe. Yet I never felt the author was being mean-spirited. Rather, he gives voice to our feelings of frustration, humiliation and helplessness before death's lack of care for what we treasure.
Whether or not the guests are truly thoughtless, the bereaved hostess cannot help resenting them for being absorbed in life's ordinary details, which the soldier's death has put into such stark perspective for her. She is angry at him, too, for dying without even a chance to say goodbye. As a description of this lack of closure, the ironic understatement of the phrase "no RSVP" harshly reminds us that we are not entitled to any advance notice from the Grim Reaper. On one level, we know it is absurd to be offended that death sets no value on our lives and loves, but on another level, we cannot shake the feeling that they nonetheless have infinite value. "What matters/to anybody; who now could care?//In spite, he should've shown!"
I liked the courtly, old-fashioned cadence and vocabulary of the last lines ("sweet hostess"... "gentle-caller"... "friend nor lover"). It was like an acknowledgment that the rituals of civilization, however insufficient to save our lives, are still worthwhile to help us make sense of our losses. The tenderness of these lines also softened what could otherwise have been too cynical a poem.
Where could a poem like "No RSVP" be submitted? These upcoming contests may be of interest:
GSU Review Annual Writing Contest
Postmark Deadline: March 4
Recommended contest from Georgia State University offers $1,000 each for poetry and fiction; prestigious judges. Email Jody Brooks for details
Florida Review Editors' Awards
Postmark Deadline: March 15
Prizes of $1,000 each for poetry, fiction and essays from a well-regarded journal; note new deadline (formerly February 15)
National Federation of State Poetry Societies Awards
Postmark Deadline: March 15
Prizes from $25 to $1,500 in 50 contest categories, including open-theme awards
This poem and critique appeared in the February 2006 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Persistent Armageddon
(dedicated to Joseph Campbell)
I deserve to die in Potter's Field
Fall on my face in the dust.
A place for those who have no name
Because they have no reason.
I have crucified all I have and all I am
And still left empty.
This is Your struggle, not mine, not ours.
You let Lucifer dabble.
Alienated at Babel.
Heels are bleeding
Crushing the constant snake.
Why am I talking to You so?
I told You. You are deception.
Created the Kings of the North and
Sovereigns of the South
Only to amuse Yourself
Watching them raze.
This is Your struggle, not mine, not ours.
Horsemen driven
By your monotony.
A One incapable of monogamy
Desires one, seven, seventy.
They battle in the valleys, you dry their bones.
And raise them up to brawl again.
Your many illicit sons—doctrines without foundation,
Tenet against tenet fighting over You.
Offerings approved, rejected—brothers killed.
Inheritances taken by trickery You instilled.
I told You. You are deception.
Did you spin the clay
Only to bury it here
In this sand with weapon in hand?
Truly the Potter's option?
That's their opinion, your bastard canon
Persist to create a printed desolation.
Abomination? In the True Creator's eyes—
Latent, covert, dormant. It seems so.
I will not die in Potter's Field.
A truth revealed, a heart healed.
This is not Your struggle, nor mine. Not ours.
Only Confusion re-written,
Mythology-smitten
That placed me in this furrow
Chained-metal in hand.
Paradise intended, perilous game and
It ended.
With every event has transpired.
Benevolence warranted, you determined it,
I will expect it to stand.
I will shore up for the race, I will arise to your face.
I will see through the glass before long...
Copyright 2006 by Charlet C. Estes
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Persistent Armageddon" by Charlet C. Estes, stands in a tradition of spiritual protest literature as old as the Biblical book of Job. Some see doubt and anger as incompatible with faith, but one could also consider them signs of a mature faith, like the shadows that show an object to be solid and three-dimensional. (For a classic example of this tradition, see Gerard Manley Hopkins' "dark sonnets".)
The more deeply we commit to our spiritual path, the more we may become pained by the gap between our ideals and reality. Hence doubt arises: do these beliefs really fit human experience? do they cause more suffering than they cure? and can they be implemented in this imperfect world? And anger: at human beings who pervert spiritual teachings, at the Creator who made us this way. As we see in Estes' poem, faith and doubt go hand in hand because we may need to see through false dogmas in order to reach a faith that fits the truths of the heart.
"Persistent Armageddon" is an example of a poem based on literary allusions (in this case, to the Bible), yet one that can also be understood and appreciated by readers who are less familiar with the source tradition. One of the pleasures of studying literature is finding these keys that unlock multiple levels of meaning in a poem, so that one suddenly finds one's self sharing an experience not only with the individual writer, but with an entire community of writers who have pondered the same issues.
On the other hand, a poem heavily reliant on allusions will be frustrating to the uninitiated, unless there is something evident from a first reading that directly touches the emotions. Without this personal connection to the poem, the reader may not be motivated to puzzle out the additional meanings. Though the argument of "Persistent Armageddon" may be hard to follow absent some familiarity with the Bible, one instantly recognizes its heartfelt anguish at the problem of evil, expressed in traditional apocalyptic imagery.
Estes' poem dares to call God to account for the "persistent armageddon" of human warfare, especially religious war. With the reference to the Potter's Field, the speaker boldly identifies with Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Jesus who was buried there. One can imagine a remorseful Judas, as he tosses away his thirty pieces of silver, saying that he has "crucified all I have and all I am/And still left empty." A potter's field, whose soil was not good enough for growing crops, was traditionally used for burying unknown or indigent people. The speaker of the poem here groups herself with those outcasts. She is opting out of the system that took everything from her and gave nothing in return. This rebellion is not without guilt ("I deserve to die") but it is the only honest course she can take.
The next stanza tells us why: "You let Lucifer dabble./Alienated at Babel." Was it not God, she asks, who allowed evil into the world? Having divided the human race into mutually uncomprehending tribes, can God really be surprised that we have descended into warfare? "Heels are bleeding/Crushing the constant snake" is a reference to Genesis 3:15, where God curses the snake after it tempts Adam and Eve: "And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel."
In frustration, the speaker concludes that God must not care about His creation. He created us and watches us suffer "Only to amuse Yourself". God, not the devil, is the great deceiver. Therefore, we should refuse to keep playing His game of fighting over "doctrines without foundation": "This is Your struggle, not mine, not ours." Her argument reverses all the traditional attributes of God—not truth but deception, not creating but devouring, not faithful but "incapable of monogamy". The sonorous stanza "Horsemen driven..." inspires a chill of horror at this merciless, insatiable deity.
Subsequent lines continue to indict God for our fratricidal ways. "Offerings approved, rejected—brothers killed./Inheritances taken by trickery You instilled." These references to Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, also describe a universal pattern of human misbehavior.
Now the poem truly takes an interesting turn, as the speaker realizes she has other intuitive knowledge of God that cannot be reconciled with this cruel theology: "Did you spin the clay/Only to bury it here/In this sand with weapon in hand?" Surely life cannot be that pointless.
Perhaps the God that the warring factions invoke is not the "True Creator" but an erroneous image of Him. "That's their opinion, your bastard canon/Persist to create a printed desolation." It was false mythology, not the will of God, that put the swords in our hands. The somber refrain is given a new twist: "This is not Your struggle, nor mine. Not ours." The dedication to Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of world mythology, suggests that critical analysis of religious traditions need not be an obstacle to faith, but instead may help us gain perspective on destructive misconceptions that we accepted as dogma.
"Heart healed" by this new discovery, the speaker readies herself for a more constructive struggle, namely the effort to see God more clearly and to bring that peacemaking knowledge to the world. "I will shore up for the race, I will arise to your face.//I will see through the glass before long..." (an echo of St. Paul's words in 1 Cor 13:12, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known").
I found the first five lines of the final stanza somewhat confusing. Though I grasped the general idea—God's intentions for His creation are good and faithful after all—the manner of expression seemed unnecessarily convoluted. "Paradise intended, perilous game and/It ended" has a satisfying cadence. Does it mean that God intended paradise for us, but we chose to put it at risk? Or does the speaker still feel that God was playing games?
The lines "Benevolence warranted..." suggest that she has rejected the latter idea. Still, I wasn't wholly comfortable with the use of "warranted" in this context. Is the poem saying that we "warranted" benevolence, in the sense of "deserved" it? Or that God made a promise ("warranted" in the legal sense, i.e. "swore") and we can "expect it to stand"? The multiple meanings are intriguing, but the insertion of "you determined it" adds confusion with the unclear reference to "it". I might prefer simply "Benevolence warranted, I will expect it to stand" (with or without a stanza break in there). "With every event has transpired" did not make grammatical sense, nor was it clear to what it referred.
When analyzing this poem, I was impressed by Estes' ability to compress so many ideas into a small space. She was able to rephrase or economically hint at many familiar Bible passages, while for the most part steering clear of cliche. Like a military drumbeat, the strong rhythm of these lines propelled the poem forward and created an ominous tension, gladly dispelled by the hopeful last lines.
Where could a poem like "Persistent Armageddon" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: April 1
Top prize of $250 plus smaller prizes including a $25 award for best religious poem; sponsored by the Midwest Writing Center, this contest is now in its 33rd year
This poem and critique appeared in the March 2006 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
People Like Me
We are held air in iron-banded lungs
we sear in our own fires,
inside flesh falls off like fat off a roast
we are oven we burn or
burst like weeds, swell like a malignant lump
in some breast, becoming bloated
bogs in our own shadows inside
where people like me can forget
what sunlight feels out of glass.
We die before we die
consumed by our fusion reactions
swallowed by our inside shadows
until we are nothing more than
eggshells, with the white and yolk
blown free
Our garden is rock.
Shale and granite and limestone
road rock is our garden
and any blossom, any green, any growth,
is pulled burned and poisoned
as a weed.
People like me haunt doorways
never completely in, never completely out,
never to be here or there, we are nowhere,
doorways and cracks and in between spaces, lost places
lost people like lost keys lost in between
and we can be found on the bottom of dry riverbeds,
see us walking there, people like me,
we who walk through the silt and dust
of desert canals, we
don't live long, people like me.
How long can a person live
with gasoline for blood
we are raped by our intensity
wasted, wraithed by it, we don't
live long, we weren't meant to.
Copyright 2006 by J. Malcolm Browne
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, J. Malcolm Browne's "People Like Me", takes us inside the psyche of someone who is battered and shipwrecked by his own emotional storms. Wisely, the author does not "diagnose" the condition in clinical terms that would permit us to label and distance ourselves from the speaker. We are left to speculate about the reasons why he might experience life as alienation and nightmare: hallucinatory drugs, mental illness, the aftermath of a tragedy, or the morbid romantic temperament of the artistic genius. By speaking not only for himself but for a shadowy cohort of "people like me", the narrator makes an almost political demand for empathy and recognition. (I was reminded of the line "Attention must be paid" from Death of a Salesman, whose theme of invisible desperation finds its echo in Browne's poem.) The poem makes us feel these sufferings as our own, thereby revealing our common humanity with the self-destructive or delusional characters we might otherwise stereotype.
What impressed me about this poem's technique was how the author provides just the right amount and type of information to avoid being either too prosaic or too maudlin and gothic. Both of these pitfalls are common when writing about depression and emotional disorders, and both stem from an excess of self-consciousness. The prosaic poem uses the vocabulary of the medical or journalistic observer to define the condition from outside, never allowing us to see the sufferer as more than a statistic. At the other extreme, the poet is too aware of talking about his own feelings, and over-adorns the poem with blood and devils, like a bad action-movie director throwing in more and more explosions to add punch to a dull plot.
By contrast, Browne takes us directly inside the surreal realm that his characters inhabit, reporting their experiences through images of ordinary objects (an oven, an egg, a garden) gone terribly wrong. In this, the poem resembles Anne Sexton's masterful, disturbing "Angels of the Love Affair" series from The Book of Folly. Some of the most affecting images for me were "inside flesh falls off like fat off a roast" (you can just see that, however much you don't want to); "eggshells, with the white and yolk/blown free"; and "gasoline for blood".
The jagged rhythm and headlong rush of Browne's run-on phrases ("we are oven we burn"; "lost people like lost keys lost in between") convey that the speaker is being driven wild by his own emotions, his agitation mounting as he strives to make others hear his plea for understanding. The abrupt, broken-up lines of the ending are just right, a final failure of breath. I loved the disjointed repetition of "people like me" in the penultimate stanza, breaking up the grammar of his sentences like a madman's interior monologue that is bleeding through into his conversation.
Browne's incantatory use of repetition is another thing that gives the diction of "People Like Me" its poetic quality. "Free" verse is something of a misnomer, because good poetry always requires structure, only here it is the hidden musical structure of language rather than an obvious pattern. I personally feel that poetic speech needs to sound different from ordinary dialogue and description: more intense, compressed, almost prophetic. Paradoxically, sometimes this means using more words than are necessary simply to convey the plot. Lines like "consumed by our fusion reactions/swallowed by our inside shadows" and "any blossom, any green, any growth" reveal the same thought from multiple angles, in the tradition of the two-line verses of Psalms and Proverbs. Such repetition, if not done to excess, can add emotional intensity and increase the musicality of the poem. Preachers and politicians know that catchy rhymes, alliteration and grammatical parallelism help the message stick in the minds of the audience. Good free verse takes advantage of this fact in a more subtle way.
In the spirit of self-examination that I urged on readers at the beginning of this critique, Browne's poem got me thinking about the darkness of modern poetry. Why does it seem that the majority of good poems are depressing, or at least contain significant suffering and gravity? The connection between creativity and bipolar disorder continues to be debated, but if that were the whole story, one might expect to see more happy poems from the manic phase. Perhaps happiness makes us more completely absorbed in the moment, to the point that we would break the spell if we stepped outside to describe it, while in sadness we look for an imaginary world in which to rewrite or escape the present. Are we more likely to reach out for companionship from our readers when we feel insufficiently loved and understood in our personal lives?
For myself, the impetus to write has often been a problem that I needed to work out, struggling to reconcile my duties and desires, or what lesson to draw from a mistake I made. Happiness seldom needs to be "solved" in this way. There's a reason theologians talk about the "problem of evil" and not the "problem of good". Maybe we poets really are optimists, or at least idealists, believing that suffering, however widespread, is an aberration whose causes we need to discover so that Browne's "people like me" can live a little longer.
I invite our readers to send me their thoughts on this topic, in poetry or prose. For extra credit, tell me about a well-written classic or contemporary poem (think Wordsworth's "daffodils" poem, not greeting-card verse) that you consider uplifting, joyful or optimistic. The poem should not only have a positive intention, but succeed in making you, the reader, experience that mood. We may publish some of your responses in our July newsletter.
Where could a poem like "People Like Me" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Boulevard Emerging Poets Contest
Postmark Deadline: May 15
Prestigious journal Boulevard offers $1,000 for poems by authors with no published books
Five Fingers Review Awards
Postmark Deadline: June 1
$500 each for poetry and fiction from journal with a preference for experimental work; 2006 theme is "foreign lands and alternate universes"
Bridport Prize
Entries must be received by June 30
High-profile award offers 5,000 pounds each for unpublished poems up to 42 lines and fiction up to 5,000 words
Bellevue Literary Review Prizes
Postmark Deadline: August 1
$1,000 apiece for poetry, fiction and essays about themes of health, healing, illness, the mind, and the body; no simultaneous submissions
This poem and critique appeared in the April 2006 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Geoffrey and Margot, After the Breakup
On second thought
he should have brought some wine and cheese.
But he showed up, instead,
with a loaf of plain white bread,
some cold cuts and a box of faded memories.
There wasn't anything to drink,
just water from that rust-stained sink.
He would have liked some tea but
she ran out the other day.
So he squeezed a withered lemon slice
and wondered if the awful price
was something that he honestly
could ever hope to pay.
The years they spent together,
like the vagaries of weather,
were highs and lows and arguments,
the kind most people have.
But the roads were getting much too steep,
the wounds were getting much too deep
to be healed by any ordinary antiseptic salve.
He knew it wasn't meant to last.
She ran her life so god damned fast.
He had trouble keeping up with her
just getting into bed.
She was like a lonely rose
thorns disguised in perfumed prose.
Holding on would leave him
with his fingers freshly bled.
So he finally broke it off
announcing with a nervous cough
that he'd rented an apartment
on the other side of town.
There was a sadness in her eyes
that somewhat softened her replies
though she stung his ears with one last taunt,
"You'll never live this down!"
But like a knitted sleeve's unraveling,
love's tether seems an endless string,
so he'd look for vagrant reasons
to take that crosstown ride.
He'd find her scarf among his things.
He'd hear a song they used to sing
and so he'd go, they'd share some bread
and all the truths they used to hide.
Copyright 2006 by Gene Dixon
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Gene Dixon's "Geoffrey and Margot, After the Breakup" is a bittersweet poem that makes the most of the ambiguous terrain between serious and light verse. Like the ex-husband it describes, the poem does not make a show of its romantic intentions, but sidles up to the reader, seeming to have nothing consequential on its mind, till the poignant surprise of the final lines. The irregular number of lines per stanza, and the relaxed meter, similarly disguise the artifice of the consistent "aabccb" rhyme scheme.
I appreciated how all these elements of the poem worked together to create an unbroken mood of quiet intimacy, tinged with equal parts humor and sadness. The characters' names are well-chosen; I pictured a middle-aged British couple who see themselves as too old and sensible for the operatic language of love, preferring the depth of their relationship to remain unspoken. The ending leaves us wondering whether the price of their newfound trust is too high. Did love have to die before friendship could begin—or will they find their way back to each other?
The opening lines do not give a hopeful prognosis for the relationship. Here are two people who can scarcely be bothered to do anything for each other, or for themselves. He "should have brought some wine and cheese" but the best he can manage is cold cuts and white bread, whereas she is even worse off, with only rusty water and withered lemons in place of tea.
But are they really so badly off, or is this bleak perspective the flip side of the same self-pity that made ordinary "arguments, the kind most people have" look like wounds too deep to heal? Not until the very end of the poem does it seem as if the characters are ready to give up the melodrama and see one another clearly. This poem's stubborn demythologizing of romance, its dissection of the shabby realities beneath our self-serving fantasies, reminded me of the work of mid-20th-century poets Philip Larkin and Alan Dugan.
Later in the poem, we unexpectedly learn that Margot was originally too passionate for her husband. How did someone who until recently "ran her life so god damned fast" become incapable of remembering to buy tea? Perhaps Geoffrey was always after her to tone down her emotions, and now that she has changed into the person he thought he wanted, he sees what a mistake it was. The "awful price" he fears he cannot pay could be the guilt he feels at her apparent depression, or the way in which their separation has cut them both off at the roots and made them only half-alive.
The metaphor of the unraveling sweater in the last stanza prepares the way for the literal scarf that triggers Geoffrey's nostalgia. The touching detail "He'd hear a song they used to sing" shows them in a new, less comical light, as a couple who did not merely bicker over sex and cuisine but whose hearts could respond to art and romance.
There is a feeling of harmony in this stanza, as if the characters' real lives and their imaginations are at last in sync. Previously, all we hear about are mismatched expectations and disappointments, both before and after the breakup. Margot, at least as seen through her ex-husband's eyes, may have been somewhat phony and self-dramatizing ("a lonely rose/thorns disguised in perfumed prose"). But somehow, sharing a simple loaf of bread has become enough to overcome their estrangement and insincerity. The trivial or stylistic differences between them were not the issue after all. The question that remains is whether either one has the courage for a relationship where "all the truths they used to hide" are now in the open.
Where could a poem like "Geoffrey and Margot" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Best New Poets Open Competition
Entries must be received by June 15
Meridian, the literary journal of the University of Virginia, offers $200 and anthology publication for poems by writers with no published books; no simultaneous submissions; enter online only
Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: September 30
This contest, sponsored by Winning Writers, includes prizes for verse in traditional forms.
This poem and critique appeared in the May 2006 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
A Day in the War
We lurked in the shades of a wasted heritage;
We scorpions in uniform awaiting orders to act.
Heights lined the horizon like drums
Tolling the knell of another man's war.
"Just give us time," Air-command demanded;
And the razed brush blazed like symphonic scales
Of sunlight strumming waves on the Kinneret.
The skies churned black as if vomited
From the bowels of the earth.
Then the words from the wireless
Wafted through the silence
"Move in after me!"
Columns of armor and swift moving armaments
Lurched into action.
No one could boast that the going was good;
Slopes steep as they were,
And our guns probing the sky
Beyond enemy bunkers, antennae
Impotent as blind insects.
Yet when we'd surmounted ravaged slopes,
With barrels of our arms
Still shining and cold,
The plateau stretched ahead
All bleak, charred and shelled. No cohorts
Were gleaming with purple and gold,
But the Syrian lay strewn
Like a frieze out of hell.
Copyright 2006 by Mike Scheidemann
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "A Day in the War" by Mike Scheidemann, blends firsthand war reporting with literary and historic allusions to depict not only the immediate sensations of this Israeli soldier, but the tradition that he draws upon to explain to himself why he fights. Though he would like to mythologize his actions, the predominance of mechanical and insectile imagery suggests that the contemporary conflict is only a mocking imitation of more-heroic battles of yore.
The vivid opening lines take us right into a scene of darkness and conflict, hinting at a reverse evolution that has turned men into insects and civilization into decadence: "We lurked in the shades of a wasted heritage;/We scorpions in uniform awaiting orders to act." The first thing we learn to situate ourselves is that we are fighting "another man's war". This phrase suggests the soldiers' lack of personal belief in the mission. It could also be read as "another of Man's wars"—which one, it scarcely matters. As the title suggests, this could be any day, any war; the idea of human progress is a joke.
Later details, such as Lake Kinneret and the Syrians, let us know that this is an Israeli-Arab conflict, most likely the Six-Day War of 1967 when Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria. The last four lines rework a famous quote from George Gordon, Lord Byron's "The Destruction of Sennacherib", which itself is based on the Biblical account of the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem (2 Kings 18:13-19:37).
In the original story, God sends angels to slay the Assyrian warriors. "A Day in the War", like the Bible passage, ends with the soldiers discovering that their enemy has already been killed, but the culprit is more likely a disorganized military bureaucracy that was unaware that the protagonists' campaign was redundant. By giving his poem such an anticlimactic, absurd ending, Scheidemann calls into question the ideology that would cast the Israeli soldiers as modern-day warriors for the Lord.
While this poem says something important and has a number of elegant lines, there are a couple of missing elements that might keep it out of the running in our annual War Poetry Contest. This is the hardest kind of poem to judge, one that has clear poetic merits but somehow doesn't knock me out. I would probably reread it a dozen times before marking it down as a semifinalist, or perhaps a finalist. (The next War Poetry Contest will open for entries on November 15.)
For starters, I felt it didn't take me far enough, in terms of storyline or emotional connection. We began this contest after 9/11 in hopes of finding poems that could help a modern audience make sense of the political, ethical and personal significance of war. Scheidemann's poem expertly depicts the dehumanization and pointlessness that became the dominant focus of war poetry after World War I. But then it just leaves me there, without an emotional resolution or a new understanding of what lesson to draw from such experiences. Having tracked down the literary narratives with which "A Day in the War" is in dialogue, I can appreciate its hidden complexity, but I also feel that a great poem should provoke a powerful response on a first reading, before looking at the footnotes.
I'm no fan of tacked-on last lines that explain the meaning of a poem, and I think the ending of this poem works well in terms of scansion and a powerful final image. Perhaps more development of the speaker's personality and inner conflicts, interspersed with the external action of the strike preparations, would have given me more of a stake in the outcome. When he realized the men he was preparing to kill were already dead, did he feel disappointed, ashamed, powerless, relieved, triumphant? Some mysterious mixture of the above? "A Day in the War" keeps me at arms' length from these questions.
The other element that drags on a poem like this one is that a few lines lacked rhythmic momentum, which stands out more in a poem this short. The opening lines (through "Kinneret"), and the lines from "Yet when we'd surmounted..." to the end, fall into a strongly accented, orderly-sounding march of iambic and anapestic feet, echoing the Byron poem's four-anapest lines. When this pattern was broken by the insertion of more irregular, conversational cadences, I found it jarring. The lines from "The skies turned black" to "Lurched into action" sounded prosy compared to the rapid, complex meter and sharply textured consonants of "And the razed brush blazed like symphonic scales/Of sunlight strumming waves on the Kinneret."
How much music is packed into those two lines! The open, bright sounds of "razed/blazed/waves" help me visualize the sunlight on the water, while the hum of M and N sounds in "sun/strum/Kinneret" and the alliteration of "symphonic scales/sunlight strumming" produce the drowsy lull of an afternoon by the shore.
Anapestic lines can sound quite sing-song to modern ears, especially in a poem that presents itself as free verse. I would suggest Scheidemann either transform "A Day in the War" into an overtly formal poem, or loosen up the predictable rhythm of the final six lines (the ones that most closely track Byron's version) while adding more poetic imagery and psychological depth to the middle stretch of the poem.
Where could a poem like "A Day in the War" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
The Bridport Prize
Entries must be received by June 30
One of Britain's largest awards for poetry and short fiction, offering 5,000 pounds in each category; enter by mail or online
Writers Bureau Poetry & Short Story Contest
Postmark Deadline: June 30 (formerly July 31)
UK-based online writing school offers top prize of 1,000 pounds in each genre, plus several runner-up awards; online entry option new for 2006
Erskine J. Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: January 1
Award for unpublished poems from the journal Smartish Pace offers $200, print and online publication; online entries accepted
This poem and critique appeared in the June 2006 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
The Sport of Kings
Bucephala to the Nile, all lands southeast from Thrace.
In ten short years those kingdoms fall. Alexander rules.
Macedonia's king. In pictures he walks his horse and cools
the stallion's flanks, sweat-flecked by the conquest's pace.
Astride his horse, a Draft/Moor's Arab blend,
the Emperor of the West subdues Italy, then Spain.
In 768 Pope Leo crowns him the Frank king, Charlemagne.
From that year, European culture and the thoroughbred, descend.
Now I, beside my horse, with nylon braided tethers,
hold one of history's haltered legends by his lead.
I walk my trotter slow through clover fields
to dry the first heat's sweat from his chestnut withers.
His in-suck of air, high-pitched like a wind-raked reed,
subsides. His flaring nostrils slow. His labored breathing yields
as we meander through tall grass, above deep-buried peat.
In service to his king, El Cid walked beside his mount.
And did not knights, who served too many kings to count,
lay hands, like mine, on horses' ribs, to feel the pounding beat
of equine hearts? King Arthur, seeking Holy Grail,
sometimes walked to spare his horse...
and so nobility and noble bloodlines, in due course
came down to this...a race along a rail.
In the paddock I re-install his harness, adjust the girth,
and settle in the sulky for the race's second round.
While lining up to post, I think of things
like bloodlines reaching back. No, I'm not royalty by birth,
nor lineage, yet in each race we've run, I've found
a link to all of history in this sport of kings.
Copyright 2006 by Barclay Franklin
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, Barclay Franklin's "The Sport of Kings", appealed to me because of its positive outlook and conversational adaptation of the sonnet form. While the meter is irregular and approaches free verse in spots, the rhyme-scheme is that of a pair of Italian (Petrarchan) sonnets: two sets of abba abba cdecde.
In an Italian sonnet, the transition in line 9 (known as the "volta") to a different pattern of rhymes is supposed to mark the beginning of a new topic or line of reasoning. We see this clearly in the third stanza of Franklin's poem, where historical reflection gives way to the present-day activities of the speaker and his horse. A similar shift occurs between the fifth and sixth stanzas, as we move from King Arthur and the history of racing to the contemporary scene once more. This transition feels more muted because it is a return to a theme we have already visited, rather than an entirely new turn, and also because past and present were already commingled in stanza four. Because the author has taken some liberties with the meter and thematic structure we expect from a traditional sonnet, the casual reader may not notice how elegantly he has structured the interplay of past and present in this sequence.
When writing about the distant past, especially when a great swath of history must be surveyed in a few lines, the temptation is to fall back on stock images or a dry recitation of facts. The first two stanzas sometimes fall prey to the latter error. However, the poem as a whole has the vividness of lived experience because of Franklin's reverent attention to the equine personality, physical behavior and emotional bond with the human rider.
Taking a "horse's-eye" view of history is a creative way to awaken our feelings of personal connection to these remote events. A familiar legend can be given fresh life by reinterpreting it through the perspective of a formerly minor character. Examples include Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (Hamlet), Virginia Woolf's novel Flush (the love story of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as told by her dog), and W.H. Auden's poem sequence The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's 'The Tempest'. Often, this technique is used satirically, to puncture the authority of the official version and bring out insights that it had repressed. (See, for instance, T.P. Perrin's "Thersites" from our 2005 War Poetry Contest.) "The Sport of Kings" has a gentler intention, to humanize the past and evoke the fairy-tale atmosphere of kinship between man and beast.
We don't dare identify with Charlemagne or Alexander the Great, nor imagine that we could see the world through their eyes, but we can vicariously participate in their glory through the more accessible role of the king's horse. (It's appropriate that the poem begins with the word "Bucephala", the city that Alexander founded in honor of his horse, Bucephalus.) Although the world of the kings is lost to us, the timeless nobility and beauty of the horse, before which even King Arthur bowed, is a historical constant that overcomes the divisions between past and present, or king and commoner.
This poem is strongest when describing the physical sensations of horse and rider, and weakest where it becomes wordy with historical exposition. Lines like "he walks his horse and cools/the stallion's flanks, sweat-flecked by the conqueror's pace" are full of compressed energy and hard consonants. Notably, the stressed syllables are more closely packed together in this line, as compared with "In 768 Pope Leo crowns him the Frank king, Charlemagne./From that year, European culture and the thoroughbred descend." This prosy sequence did not have the same well-wrought tightness and personality. This was one spot where I felt the limitations of Franklin's decision not to stick to a particular meter.
Could some extraneous information be cut here? I'm not sure we need to single out a particular date, when the other historical events are not so specified. "768" adds a lot of syllables that break the roughly iambic meter we've heard so far. Moreover, the abstraction "European culture" sounds too academic and lengthy in a lyric poem such as this. Suggestion: "Pope Leo crowns him the Frank king, Charlemagne./From thence Europe and its thoroughbreds descend." This revision allows a double meaning for "thoroughbreds" as horses and also their noble riders. Among the other lines I would tighten is the last line, where eliminating the "of" in "all of history" nudges the meter back toward iambic pentameter. One could also consider cutting the "we've run" in the penultimate line for the same reason.
Other fine moments in "The Sport of Kings" are the alliteration in the third stanza ("hold one of history's haltered legends by his lead") and the lovingly observed mechanics of how this powerful beast moves and breathes. The lines from "I walk my trotter" to "deep-buried peat" are the heart of the poem, with every word rightly placed in a fine sprung rhythm and woven into a compelling texture of sounds. This is no abstraction, but a flesh-and-blood animal, gracing us with his mysterious presence. By the time the narrator leans in to feel the horse's great heartbeat, the reader cannot help but hear it too.
Where could a poem like "The Sport of Kings" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Abilene Writers Guild Contest
Postmark Deadline: July 31
Prizes up to $100 in various genres including rhymed and unrhymed poetry, short stories, articles, children's literature, and novel excerpt
Wells Festival of Literature International Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by June 30
A good contest for both emerging and intermediate poets, this award offers 1,000 pounds and a reading at Wells Poetry Festival in Wells, Somerset, in October; fees in UK currency only
Oregon State Poetry Association Contests
Postmark Deadline: August 28
Twice-yearly contest offers prizes up to $100 in categories such as open-theme, formal verse and humor
Surrey International Writers' Conference Writing Contest
Entries must be received by October 25
Canadian literary conference offers prizes of C$1,000 each for poetry, fiction, nonfiction, children's literature, by authors aged 18+
Robert Frost Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: September 15
$1,000 and public reading at festival in Massachusetts for poems in the spirit of Robert Frost
This poem and critique appeared in the July 2006 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Ground Zero
a sunroof sky
full of kanji and silk
wisteria dancing across the wind
my daughter laughing in that so saturated face
as friend and i sit down to a morning game
i swore i would take advantage of his saki rejuvenation
i seem to remember
the taste of my wife's lips
so sweet a touch of harmony
quickly replaced by the happy wet kiss of my child
giggling so to almost annoy
this fierce competition
my new pocket watch stating
with such fine western precision
you have time to champion
it's just but 8:13
i seem to remember
wind chimes singing
to the laughter
and graceful chatter
that rose to cacophony
as i anticipate movement
then look out and vision
with ancient eyes
the whirl and rash
of humanity
i seem to remember
the distant sound of wings
floating across my sunroof sky
of eyes squinting to see through the roof
and my child suddenly turning white
the brightest white
the hottest white
the darkest white
i shall never see
i can't seem
to remember
where I left my soul
i think it's where my shadow
left a halo
burned into the ground
Copyright 2006 by Shaun Hull
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Ground Zero" by Shaun Hull, offers a devastating first-person account of the atomic bombing of Japan during World War II. Sixty-one years ago this month, the US Army Air Forces dropped nuclear warheads on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first, and hopefully the last, time that nuclear weapons were deployed in warfare.
I held Hull's poem for this issue of the newsletter because the phrase "Ground Zero" also reminded me of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It is hard to believe that it will be five years this coming September. And how many other sad anniversaries will pass this month, and every month, remembered only by the families around the world who have lost loved ones in war? Hull's poem artfully combines these particular and universal concerns, adding enough historical detail to bring the characters to life, but appealing to primal emotions that cross cultural boundaries.
The opening lines immediately convey a mood of elegance and freedom, a lightness that also makes this idyllic world fragile and vulnerable. Sunroof glass can shatter, silk is easily torn. This is a ceremonial and civilized culture, as symbolized by the chess game, the kanji (Chinese characters used in the Japanese language), and the pocket watch's "western precision". There's a subtle irony in the speaker's trust in Western (maybe even American) technology, which will soon incinerate everything he holds dear. Unknown to him, the watch is counting down the seconds until their death.
I admire how this poem is so dramatic yet so understated. Hull doesn't need to use the words "atomic bomb", "World War II", "Hiroshima", or any other explanatory terms that are already overdetermined by the readers' familiarity with these events. The saki, kanji and other evocative physical clues create the Japanese atmosphere, while the blinding light and burnt shadows are recognizable as the effects of an atomic blast. This is how a bombing victim would actually experience it, without the interpretive overlay. The war is the farthest thing from the narrator's mind when the bomb hits, which makes the destruction of his world more poignant.
Hull chose to write this poem in a modern stream-of-consciousness style without punctuation or capital letters, such as e.e. cummings and William Carlos Williams often used. The advantages of this style are its accessibility and spontaneity; the disadvantage is that it can create a monotone effect. "Ground Zero" largely avoids this trap by varying the length and rhythm of the lines, and by repeating "I seem to remember" in order to give the poem a formal structure.
A few lines could use some editing for clarity or grammar. "It's just but 8:13" sounded awkward to me. In ordinary speech, a person would use one or the other of those modifiers, not both. "It's still but 8:13" or "only just" or "still just" would all sound more natural. In the second stanza, the lines "then look out and vision/with ancient eyes" did not make grammatical sense. "Vision" is being used here as a verb, which is unusual enough that it breaks the flow of the poem. Perhaps Hull was thinking of "envision." Since "look out" sufficiently describes the action, the lines could be rewritten as "then look out with ancient eyes/at the whirl and rash/of humanity".
Finally, poets should be careful not to repeat their own good lines within the same poem. The phrase "sunroof sky" was powerful the first time, but when re-used just two stanzas later, it felt belabored, especially since "roof" occurs yet again in the next line. Try a different modifier for the second "sky", something about its color perhaps, or an image from an earlier line (silken sky, wisteria sky, chiming sky). The image of the floating wings is lovely, and heartbreaking when we realize that these are the wings of enemy planes, not graceful birds. Don't distract from it with recycled lines that remind us that a poem is artifice, not real life.
Hull uses paradox to excellent effect in the last part of the poem: "the darkest white/I shall never see". This inversion shows us how dramatically the narrator's world has turned upside down in an instant. From vision to blindness; from light that illuminates to light that, unbelievably, brings darkness. "i seem to remember" becomes "i can't seem to remember". And finally, the ultimate reversal or impossibility: is the narrator speaking to us from the other side of death? His soul is missing, his shadow "burned into the ground". He is like a wandering ghost, a spirit in limbo, unable to orient himself in this new reality. Like radiation, the spiritual fallout from atomic warfare lingers far beyond the victims' lifetime, to haunt the place where the angel of death left his dark halo.
Where could a poem like "Ground Zero" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Joy Harjo Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: October 1
$1,250 award from the Colorado-based literary magazine Cutthroat is named after a prominent Native American poet and activist
Reuben Rose Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 10
Contest run by the Voices Israel poetry society offers $750 and anthology publication for poems up to 41 lines; fees accepted in US, UK and Israeli currency
This poem and critique appeared in the August 2006 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
The Clash of Life
I'm easing home across the hills and angling west to a sinking sun,
When suddenly in a clash of wills two hawks are at it, one on one,
With flashing wings and slashing bills—to fight all night for pride won't run.
They wheel and rise and go much higher, then turn and peel into a dive
That streaks the sun with a flash of fire; they swoop on up that each may strive
To make the cast they each desire—could either one remain alive?
But just as swiftly as the fight began one was struck with a telling blow
And then as vanquished turned and ran, a desperate glide to the void below
Far from the sun and the eyes of man—to the haven only darkness could bestow.
But the victor rose once more on high, to salute in triumph the fading light,
As though into the sinking sun to fly, to cut its rays with glistening might,
To stake his claim to all the sky—then turned and streaked beyond my sight.
As I turned to follow the homeward trail the red of the sun was almost done,
But that clash of hawks, one strong one frail, had asked of me would I be brave or run,
Would I in the clash of life prevail—to make my glory flash in the sinking sun.
Copyright 2006 by John R. Sabine
Critique by Jendi Reiter
I chose this month's critique poem, "The Clash of Life" by John R. Sabine, for its skillful use of rhyme and meter and its dramatic imagery. Sabine's is an old-fashioned poem, not just stylistically, but also in the boldness with which the author delineates the moral lesson that we should take from nature.
Nineteenth-century writers were especially fond of such exhortations and inspirational conclusions in their nature poetry. Examples include Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Seaweed" (urging the strong-willed poet to seize and preserve fleeting moments), William Cullen Bryant's "To a Waterfowl" (the bird returning safely to its nest gives him assurance of heaven), and William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence" (seeing our mistreatment of animals as a sign of original sin). Emily Dickinson also frequently compared herself to small creatures such as birds, insects, or flowers, to remind herself to be content with the crumbs of happiness that God gave her. (See, for example, #230, #335, #442.)
With the decline of traditional religion among the intelligentsia, and the advent of Darwinism, this type of poem fell out of fashion because it was no longer taken for granted that nature revealed God's moral order. We see glimmerings of this doubt in Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam", from which comes the famous phrase "nature red in tooth and claw", and the skeptical tone of voice had become well-established by the time of Robert Frost's "Design". However, the popularity of contemporary poets like Mary Oliver suggests that there is still an audience for optimistic, inspiring pastoral verse.
Sabine's poem displays some of the characteristic strengths and weaknesses of the genre. On the plus side, humanity has always sensed that the animal world contained spiritual wisdom. Most of us have known the feeling of kinship with a creature whose struggles and passions seemed to mirror our own. This moment of recognition, similar to what we feel when a work of art touches us deeply, somehow ennobles our personal drama by suggesting that it is connected to a universal story. On the minus side, poems that draw a neat moral from nature can be unsatisfying because they leave out too much of the strangeness that makes nature so awe-inspiring. Sometimes her lessons are neither clear nor heartwarming.
"The Clash of Life" takes this very precariousness as its subject. Sabine shows us the fearful glory of the hawks' battle to the death. Nature is beautiful but also terrible. In fact, it is nature's lack of compassion for weakness that pushes these creatures to heroic extremes of strength and skill. Though the awareness of danger and uncertainty fits the modern sensibility, this poem harks back to the Victorians in its confidence that the human observer can be the master of his fate. It does not end with a message of submission to natural law or the superior sensitivity of animals, the way contemporary nature poetry often does, but with acceptance of "survival of the fittest" as a principle of self-improvement.
The lack of moral ambiguity in this poem—the defeated hawk does not get a lot of sympathy—for me makes the lesson somewhat less realistic and compelling. On the other hand, Sabine's unabashed celebration of a victorious warrior strikes a nice note of contrast to the maudlin sanctification of the underdog that afflicts much contemporary poetry about politics or the environment. Every era has its characteristic extremes.
Despite the cautionary words above, I wouldn't advise Sabine to change the poem much. My main edits would be to tighten the phrasing of some lines so that the meter flows more smoothly, because the beat plays such a key role in transmitting the energy and tension of the scene.
I was also perplexed by the phrase "to make the cast they each desire". Since the hawks are probably not auditioning for a play, I assumed they were fighting over prey, "casting" the way a fisherman casts a line. "Cast" here would mean something like aiming correctly to hit their target. The unusual use of the word makes the storyline unclear, though, and I would change it to something like "seize the prey" if that is what Sabine is trying to describe.
The template for each line of this poem is eight iambs, with the rhymes on the fourth and eighth stressed syllables of each line in the stanza—basically an ABABAB rhyme scheme without the line breaks after the A's. Omitting those line breaks emphasizes the hawks' headlong, high-pressure race to survive.
If Sabine wanted to make the meter of the first line more regular, he could eliminate the word "west" because we already know that the sun sets in the west. "Angling toward the sinking sun" would convey the same information. Since the first two stanzas follow the meter quite precisely, this change is optional. Slight variations (as in line 2, with the extra unstressed syllable in "suddenly," or the two-syllable rhymes "higher/fire/desire") help avoid a sing-song intonation.
The meter becomes more careless in the third stanza, and here I feel that editing is more necessary. Fortunately, most of the key words and phrases can be preserved. I would rewrite it along these lines:
"But swiftly as the fight began, one hawk sustained [or "was struck"] a telling blow
And then as vanquished turned and ran, a desperate glide to the void below
Far from the sun and the eyes of man—for darkness its haven to bestow."
The last line is still a bit wordy, but I like the rhetorical pattern of the first half enough to retain it. The reversed verb order in the second half is old-fashioned, but that does not seem out of place in this poem.
The first line of the final stanza could be rewritten as "the reddening day was almost done". This avoids the repetition of the word "sun" and the excessive internal rhymes using that sound. In the next line, I would tighten the meter again by omitting "of me".
I'm having a hard time with the final line, because it has 20 syllables rather than the correct 16—a bagginess that lessens its impact in a poem that just has to end with a bang—yet the phrases themselves strike just the right note, and I'm hesitant to pick them apart. "To make my glory flash in the sinking sun" has at least two too many syllables, but every word is necessary. The "sinking" sun suggests that the window of opportunity is brief, and that death overshadows even the victor. This tragic irony is essential in a poem that could otherwise feel too triumphalist. Possible rewrites are "Would I in the clash of life prevail—my glory flash in the sinking sun" or "a glorious flash in the sinking sun", but perhaps these are less satisfying in terms of meaning. Such are the tough choices that formal poetry requires! I commend Sabine for telling a compelling story in natural-sounding contemporary language, while remaining mostly within the constraints of his chosen form.
Where could a poem like "The Clash of Life" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Firstwriter.com International Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 1
Prizes up to 500 pounds for poems 30 lines or less (published or unpublished), from UK-based writers' resource site; enter online only
Edgar Bowers Prize
Postmark Deadline: October 15
One of several Georgia Poetry Society contests offering $75 for unpublished poems, this prize commemorates Georgia poet Edgar Bowers (1924-2000), whose compact and rigorous formalism defined the spirit of his work
Soul-Making Literary Competition
Postmark Deadline: November 30
Prizes up to $100 for poetry and prose that illuminates humanity's search for the sacred and the drive to realize one's potential; sponsored by the National League of American Pen Women (Nob Hill Branch) but open to both men and women
Other publications that might welcome a poem like "The Clash of Life" include Measure: An Annual Review of Formal Poetry (successor to The Formalist) and the e-zine The HyperTexts.
This poem and critique appeared in the September 2006 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Cold Turkey
Thistle-stubble thirst clanks
like an old town clock on
the hour of death through
putrid, clinging, sweaty fog
clay-coated doorstop tongue pants
outrage at the relentless tinny
dong, dong, donging
cracked lips like wayside prunes lick
no relief from this parched hell
no spit to float an ant
kill for a dewdrop, just
a dewdrop, who’d know?
nothing soft!
thirsty! don’t you hear?
something charmed
green-gold
no ice, no mix
something to thrill swollen smouldering
burnt rubbery mouth
away from garish deformity
something to numb excruciating hollow
something to beat off glowering
foul breath demons
some
pretty please
thing
to stop the goddamned shaking so
hands can hold the paddles long enough
to row to the next heave
salty, scorched-sand searing thirst
like that crusty old clock
obsessive in the worship of time
Copyright 2006 by Susan Tearoe
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Cold Turkey" by Susan Tearoe, takes the reader inside the mind of an alcoholic trying to quit drinking. The struggle feels excruciatingly real, precisely because the speaker's mental world is so surreal and nightmarish. Bracketed by the images of the slow-moving old clock, the poem seems to take place within a single moment that lasts an eternity.
I was reminded of Salvador Dali's painting "The Persistence of Memory", that endless barren vista populated by melted watches and mutating organic forms—a dreamscape whose eerie stillness and hyper-clarity contains intimations of disaster. Just so, in Tearoe's poem, the simultaneous frozenness and endlessness of time heightens the tension of each moment's battle for sobriety.
"Cold Turkey" also resembles some of Sylvia Plath's later poems, such as "Tulips" and "Fever 103°", in depicting how a fevered mind seizes on small details of sensation and blows them up to an unbearable intensity. The narrator of Tearoe's poem is so consumed by her withdrawal symptoms that there is no longer any boundary between herself and the world. She is the world. The clock tolling in the fog and the doorbell ringing could be real-life sounds that agitate her, or could exist only in her head.
The bargaining that goes on in the middle of the poem definitely rings true: "kill for a dewdrop, just/a dewdrop, who'd know?" The reader feels grateful for this oasis of refreshing, pretty images ("something charmed/green-gold"), which fuels the necessary descent back into the "swollen smouldering/burnt rubbery mouth" of thirst. Back and forth goes the internal debate, like the little rowboat she imagines plunging up and down on the waves, hoping for the strength to "row to the next heave".
Tearoe mixes metaphors of wet and dry, but in a way that feels right. Addiction is like a tempting, dangerous ocean, and also barren and gritty as a desert. The thirst is worse because the imagined liquid feels as real as her current dryness.
This well-paced poem uses varied sounds and textures to enhance the meaning. Lines like "Thistle-stubble thirst clanks" and "salty, scorched-sand searing thirst" are spiky mouthfuls that slow the reader's progress, like clearing a path through brambles. This creates a feeling that time is dragged out and resistant. I liked the similar sounds of "lips" and "lick" in line eight, though I wasn't sure what "wayside" meant as a modifier for prunes. Phrases such as "garish deformity" and "glowering/foul breath demons" verged on being overwrought and Gothic in an unoriginal way. It might have been more effective to continue with the technique of ordinary objects and situations turned monstrous (e.g. the clock, the rowboat). As a whole, however, the poem has enough true-life detail that the reader cannot fail to be moved and, perhaps, recognize one of his or her own battles against temptation.
Where could a poem like "Cold Turkey" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Strong Medicine Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: October 31
$2,500 and publication in MARGIE Review, an eclectic journal with a social conscience
CBC Literary Awards
Postmark Deadline: November 1
Canadian authors can win up to C$6,000 for unpublished poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, in French or English; no simultaneous submissions
Firstwriter.com International Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by November 1 (extended from October 1)
UK-based writers' resource site offers prizes up to 500 pounds for published or unpublished poems up to 30 lines; good for emerging writers
New Millennium Writings Awards
Postmark Deadline: November 17
Prestigious $1,000 awards for unpublished poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction from a journal with a magical-realism flavor
This poem and critique appeared in the October 2006 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
