Resources
From Category:
The Popsicle Planet
Gears shift, thin wheels sip asphalt
as I ride through soda-water
evening air. A flash of orange leaps out
at my periphery, a sizzling circle
wavering towards the dirt.
It takes my eyes, tricks them
with feverish brightness
like a sickness I somehow wish to catch
and suddenly the bicycle
is not merely going, but hunting,
its toothy metal is bored with
the blue glass twilight,
those abandoned barns which tilt
as arrogant antique lampshades
(the stuff which has already touched its frame:
stone, cool, clear, and moon).
It drinks the small streets of the Midwest suppertime
taut rubber whispery, clinging but smooth,
as the hot candy filters
quick through tree tops
and its elusive flavor
is close to dissolution.
But I find the spot
where it oozes completely; sagging,
so pregnant it could split,
its trembling vicious gas scrapes and shines
the dull rock of this town.
I think it is unfathomably huge
But the Universe is even much larger still.
Riding back there is fire
smeared like butter
on the pedals.
Copyright 2006 by Katherine Fleissner
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, Katherine Fleissner's "The Popsicle Planet," dazzled me with its playful blurring of sensory boundaries. The 19th-century Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud once described his innovative poetic method as an "immense and rational derangement of all the senses," exemplified in poems like "Vowels" (Les Voyelles) where each vowel-sound is associated with a color. Similarly, Fleissner's unusual verb choices (a bicycle that drinks) and comparisons (fire "smeared like butter") merge seemingly incompatible physical states to produce a mystical vision, pregnant with meaning and intensity. The gentle surrealism of this poem also invites comparisons to the Beatles' famous psychedelic ballad "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".
The first line immediately signals that the author is taking us on a ride through a world that is more dynamic and unpredictable than what our ordinary vision perceives. The bicycle has become a living creature that "sips asphalt" as the normally solid surface of the road takes on a liquid quality. What does it mean for the air to be like soda-water? Perhaps it is sweet, or moist, or effervescent with energy. This intriguing image further blurs the lines between solid, liquid, and gas. Meanwhile, the delicacy of "sips" sets a benign mood. Although the barriers of perception are dissolving, there is still a feeling of safety and control. Soda-water suggests innocence, a drink for children instead of a liqueur.
The tension rises with the lines "a feverish brightness/like a sickness I somehow wish to catch", and the bicycle is now hunting like a "toothy" animal. Crossing over into this new realm of experience could be dangerous, but the alternative may be stagnation and a different form of unreality. In contrast to the hot colors of the "sizzling circle" and "feverish brightness", the world we leave behind is sunk in a cool "blue glass twilight", exhausted as a junked lampshade with no more lightbulb. This quiet, washed-out dimension has its own subtle beauty (as found in the totemic recitation of "stone, cool, clear, and moon"), but is incomplete without the energy that the bicycle's quest represents.
The journey culminates with an almost sexual bursting-forth of something from the earth—something that oozes and trembles, "shines/the dull rock of this town" into life. What does the "it" refer to in the phrase "the spot/where it oozes completely"? In the preceding sentence, "it" was the bicycle, so this line confused me momentarily. Here, the speaker is probably talking about the "hot candy" that drips and dissolves through the treetops in the previous stanza. What's great about this image is that the candy, or oozing substance, is not a metaphor for anything; it's not simply that the sunset clouds are like candy, for instance. Instead, it feels as if the speaker has stumbled upon the source of the undifferentiated proto-matter out of which all these other things are made—what Hinduism might call Brahman, or the underlying essence of the material universe.
I would cut the lines "I think it is unfathomably huge/But the Universe is even much larger still." In a poem that accomplishes its goals through sensation rather than analysis and comparison, this sentence seems out of place and redundant. It spells out a message that is already conveyed more effectively through images alone. Capitalizing "Universe" also shades into New Age sentimentality, that self-consciously prophetic tone that can ruin a poem about a profound subject.
The final lines are striking and memorable. The subject of "Riding back there" is ambiguous—is the fire riding, or is the speaker saying that riding her bicycle is like being on fire? The double meaning makes it more interesting. Starting the line with "Riding" plunges the reader into the experience right away, without the interference of a narrator, underscoring that the goal of this journey was to erase the boundary between the speaker and her surroundings. "Fire/smeared like butter/on the pedals" is wonderfully bizarre, yet entirely appropriate as an image of the richness and creative energy that now clings to her every movement.
Where could a poem like "The Popsicle Planet" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Greg Grummer Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: December 1
Competitive award from Phoebe, the literary journal of George Mason University, offers $1,000 for unpublished poems (1-4 poems, 10 pages total); brief, imagistic work does well here
Lyric Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: December 15
Members-only contest from the Poetry Society of America (we recommend joining) offers $500 for lyric poems up to 50 lines
This poem and critique appeared in the November 2006 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Light as Magic
The essence of magic is light
says the puppeteer to me as I peer
through his box of a stage
yet but a shell of trash—
limp pieces of strings,
sleeping snakes of light cords,
tubs of light shades, the puppets
mere swaths of rags.
Life moves only where
there is light, he seems to chant,
invoking magic from his words. In the myth
of creation, God first bid Light with words and Light
burst into rays like wings or so the puppeteer
imagines.
You can ride on light,
the universe does, speeding and crashing
on taut streams of translucence. I can transform you
into a nymph under these lights,
the puppeteer turns
to me, sensing my longing.
Could I grow into wings if
I wish
and vanish in the light? I ask. Or
like my puppets be born
and live if only for a fraction
of light, he answers grinning. I hesitate
but then, step in to his box of a stage among scraps
of life and give in.
Copyright 2006 by Alegria Imperial
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Alegria Imperial's poem "Light as Magic" gracefully explores age-old questions of free will, mortality and faith, through the metaphor of the puppet show. The dialogue between the puppeteer and the narrator can be understood on many levels, but it is fundamentally a poem about trust.
Can the spectator trust the artist enough that she will suspend disbelief and let him turn his "box of a stage" from a "shell of trash" into a cosmos in miniature? She must decide whether to rely more on her skeptical eyes, which see only the unglamorous machinery and "swaths of rags", or on the puppeteer's seductive promises and the longings of her own heart, which beckon her to move from spectator to participant. One could even see this as an example of the tension between scientific and religious approaches to knowledge—the former demanding that the knower remain objective and detached from the known, the latter requiring personal commitment as a precursor to understanding.
This poem also has a romantic dimension, with the puppeteer as the seducer ("I can transform you/into a nymph under these lights,/the puppeteer turns/to me, sensing my longing"). The lady is uncertain, wanting assurances of eternity: "Could I grow into wings if/I wish/ and vanish in the light?" However, her suitor will only promise to make her feel alive as never before. He makes no guarantees as to how long it will last: "Or/like my puppets be born/and live if only for a fraction/of light, he answers grinning."
Similarly, if we read "Light as Magic" as also an allegory of the soul and God (a reading made plausible by Imperial's explicit reference to Genesis 1), the narrator may want a relationship with God but is holding back for fear that she is deceiving herself. It's hard to take the unseen world seriously, when the evidence of sin ("sleeping snakes") and lifeless matter is right before her eyes. She wants a revelation first ("Could I grow into wings"). But the puppeteer responds that this is the world he's made, and the first move is hers to risk.
Certain line breaks in "Light as Magic" emphasize the pivotal moments in this gentle contest of wills. The words "I wish" are set off by themselves in an unusually short line, as if to highlight the fact that this argument is all about the narrator's self-assertion versus submission to the puppeteer. The line break after "Or" toward the end of the poem is like the edge of a cliff. The narrator doesn't know what will happen if she steps off. In the lines "Light/burst into rays like wings or so the puppeteer/imagines", the final word stands by itself to underscore the idea of creation ex nihilo. "Imagining", by itself, contains all things. Imperial's radiant imagery effectively brings this familiar myth to life.
Casting God as a puppeteer suggests a worldview in which human free will is constrained. Yet the poem is all about the narrator's moment of decision. Will she fully participate in life—a life open to the possibility of magic—or will she refuse to step onto the stage? A dazzling future is hinted at in the beautiful lines "You can ride on light,/the universe does, speeding and crashing/on taut streams of translucence." Just as the humble puppeteer's illusions contain a spark of the light that holds the universe together, the narrator has the power to say No to that light. To experience the light, she must become a puppet: "step in to his box of a stage among scraps/of life and give in." Is this giving up free will or becoming truly free? In a sense, it is both, which makes the ending poignant as well as hopeful.
Where could a poem like "Light as Magic" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Writer's Digest Poetry Awards
Postmark Deadline: December 20
Prizes up to $500 for poems 32 lines or less, offered by well-known national magazine for writers
Cecil Hemley Memorial Award
Postmark Deadline: December 23
Members-only award from the Poetry Society of America (we recommend joining) offers $500 for a lyric poem that addresses a philosophical or epistemological concern
Tiferet Writing Contest
Postmark Deadline: December 31
Ecumenical journal of spirituality and the arts offers $750 apiece for poetry, fiction and essays that "help reveal Spirit through the written word"
Wigtown Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by June 7
Literary town in Scotland offers prizes up to 1,500 pounds for the best unpublished poems in English, Scots or Gaelic by authors 16+; no simultaneous submissions
W.B. Yeats Society Annual Poetry Competition
Postmark Deadline: February 1
$250 award for unpublished poems includes invitation to ceremony at the elegant, prestigious National Arts Club in NYC in April
This poem and critique appeared in the December 2006 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
From the Album
That gazes at me from a bygone age
Of monochromes; the family album's place
Where my eyes, captured, fix upon that page.
A gray-beard father of some unknown brood,
Among these fellows in their country dress.
Some with their guns, a posse, hunt or feud;
One man among the others, more or less.
No taller surely, and no better dressed,
But there amidst his, animated, kin;
His hollow eyes apart from all the rest,
As if some old sin brought to mind again.
Without the names, the time or circumstance,
I know no faces from these faded prints;
And only that one halts my casual glance,
Returning stare for stare, a certain sense...
That comrades in the picture failed to find
The specter of some future he must see
That they do not; across the gulf of time
He rests his brooding gaze here, now, on me.
How can we know when we are looking out
Into a void our eyes cannot dismiss;
Despite great faith or hope, beyond all doubt,
The shutter snaps, and springs the dark abyss.
Copyright 2007 by Hank Rodgers
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "From the Album" by Hank Rodgers, pulls off three rather difficult tricks in only 24 lines. It is a well-executed formal poem whose syntax and vocabulary nonetheless sound modern; it makes a philosophical argument feel personal, concrete and immediate; and it sends a shiver down the back of my neck.
Rodgers' work (see here for another example) reminds me of the 20th-century British poet Philip Larkin. In poems such as "Church Going" and "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album", he combined nostalgia for traditional forms with a self-lacerating awareness that the old faiths had become exhausted. Rodgers' "From the Album" similarly derives its energy from the conflict between the romantic, backward-looking style of the verse and the speaker's realization that the chasm of mortality is unbridgeable.
Ironically, the only message that the past can exchange with the future is that communication fails. The speaker cannot know what the unnamed man in the picture was thinking, and it seems that his comrades were also a world away from seeing what he saw, despite being nearest to him in space and time. The man's death, which was mystery and anticipation for himself, is a known fact for the speaker; this cannot help but darken and distort his imaginative reconstruction of the man's thoughts.
The photograph, any photograph, contains a paradox. Because on the surface it freezes time, it appears to be a form of immortality. Yet when we, who are still moving forward in time, look back on it, we see that change has occurred, and we remember the moments that will never come again. Reifying the past as a separate world turns it into a thing that can and will be lost, just as the dynamic life in which we are now immersed will someday be reduced to a static image.
"The shutter snaps, and springs the dark abyss." It's said that some Native American tribes believe that taking someone's picture can steal their soul. In "From the Album", being photographed may not literally kill you, but it springs the trap of self-awareness which includes the awareness of death, and that may be worse—the double-edged knowledge that the forbidden apple brought. The subject's haunted face and aura of separation from his comrades lead the speaker to imagine the possibility of a crime, "some old sin brought to mind again," that the passage of time can only bury, not redeem. In its vagueness, it stands in for all the misdeeds we will never have enough time to remedy if this life is all we have.
Rodgers' varied sentence structure is an essential feature that distinguishes well-written formal poems from those that sound sing-song and unnatural. Beginners commonly make the mistake of having the pauses fall at the end of each line or couplet. Rodgers continues sentences across line breaks ("from a bygone age/Of monochromes") and stanza breaks ("a certain sense...That comrades in the picture failed to find"). The resulting voice flows as naturally as a prose paragraph, without being too colloquial for its poetic form.
I would alter certain irregular punctuation that I found distracting: the ellipsis after "sense" in the line just quoted, and the commas around "animated" in the third verse. While slight deviations from exact meter can enhance a formal poem, I think it's unwise to do this in the first line, which needs to set the tempo in an authoritative way. "There is" is also not the strongest phrase with which to begin.
The last line of this poem hits like the crashing final chord of a minor-key symphony. The repeated S sounds create a sinister background hiss, while the plosives P, T and K convey the quick, nasty surprise of a machine that instantaneously severs life from death. It is a fitting end to a profound and disturbing journey.
Where could a poem like "From the Album" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Poetry Society of Virginia Annual Contests
Postmark Deadline: January 19
Prizes up to $300 for unpublished poems with various themes and styles (28 categories)
Kent & Sussex Open Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by January 31
British poetry society offers prizes up to 600 pounds for unpublished poems by authors aged 16+; pay fees in UK currency only
W.B. Yeats Society Annual Poetry Competition
Postmark Deadline: February 1
$250 award for unpublished poems includes invitation to ceremony at the elegant, prestigious National Arts Club in New York City in April
This poem and critique appeared in the January 2007 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
The Telepathic Bruise
he punched and i heard them
voices internalised by men i hear them still
1. happenstance
tell me everything
fade only with the bruise
life normalising
truth deposed
hiding placed behind backs
blackened eyes weep, waning back to flesh colour
i hesitate so too, the voices doubt
myself into their existence
clever intuition away
i see only the smiling faces, regret tears
they say 'sorry.' but tell me nothing
i believe in monsters
hold on
that's just my imagination
this time was different
the truth-whispering.
constant scolding, scouring
i hear them all in my crouched ear covering
i touch my face and find no wound
but still the throaty rumblings
but still the voices
echoed lodgements
fitted in sand, silver and lime
all purpling from a bath tap
a telepathic bruise
each day now i welcome the truth
i no longer need them to harm me
self-harming becomes salvation
i know what you're thinking
she's mad
one punch too many
hear now, i can hear you now
i thank you for your honesty
little voices in your mind are now little voices in my mind
trust only in my violence
not in my ribbons
eventually they dim
i refine my art, accordingly
a bashful thought
a bash filled art
i am no treasure
2. circumstance
i return from diversion
without my brushes or turpentine hair
i return to him no longer his prodigy
yet still
he defines my art
and sweaty wakings the night stories
the nightmare now becomes me
and the first completes the pattern
he punches and i hear them
i breathe in the death
the death shouts at me
i screw up my face in sanity
listening
Copyright 2007 by Belinda Smith
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, Belinda Smith's "The Telepathic Bruise", uses a fragmented stream-of-consciousness style and unusual juxtapositions of images to convey the psychological disintegration of its abused narrator. As the poem progresses, we become increasingly uncertain who is being addressed and at what point in time we find ourselves. This disorientation reflects the ongoing power of trauma to blur past and present in terrifying flashbacks, as well as the abuse victim's tragic propensity to repeat the pattern in new relationships. The speaker's sense of self has shrunk to a timid lowercase "i" who struggles to differentiate herself from a chorus of internal and external voices. By the last two lines, however, some hope has emerged that she is beginning to find stability and clarity of understanding.
The poem is divided into sections titled "happenstance" and "circumstance". These words have such similar meanings that it initially seems odd to use them as separate section headings. Isn't it like giving two chapters of a book the same title? One is forced to meditate more attentively on the subtle distinctions between them, just as the narrator must look closely at the patterns of abuse in her life to distinguish reality from nightmare, unchangeable past from potentially changeable future. "Happenstance" is a fate outside one's control, suggesting the speaker's passivity and helplessness. "Circumstance" is more open-ended. Her circumstances are merely the facts of her life right now. Do they, too, simply happen to her, or might she have the ability to change them?
The opening lines declare the subject matter of the poem, leaving Smith free to descend into the speaker's disorganized thoughts without fear that the reader will lose the storyline. With the words "tell me everything," we may relax, picturing a therapist and the beginning of a healing confession. However, our expectation of a stable, benign presence is disappointed. Immediately the erasure of truth begins. The bruise fades, and the pressure to deny the abnormality overwhelms her. If she were to tell everything, she would not be believed. She is not given a way to make sense of her experience. "they say 'sorry.' but tell me nothing".
Smith's unconventional speech pattern and word use in the second stanza make this section more compact and memorable. "the voices doubt/myself into their existence/clever intuition away". I was struck by this paradox of doubting something into existence. Doubt makes the real speaker insubstantial while enfleshing the ghosts in her mind. Smith is almost using "clever" as a verb here—the voices are "clever-ing", or tricking, her intuition with the manipulations of a mind run amok. Other unusual phrases that give the poem intensity and texture are "crouched ear covering" and "echoed lodgements/fitted in sand, silver and lime/purpling from a bath tap". Familiar objects are shattered like a Cubist portrait, revealing new angles and unsuspected violent energy.
What makes the bruise "telepathic"? It predicts the future (or one possible future); it communicates without words; it makes connections between different personalities within the speaker's mind, and between her consciousness and that of her abusers. It is even a source of dark power, like a superhero's (or super-villain's) mind-control technique: "little voices in your mind are now little voices in my mind/trust only in my violence/not in my ribbons". These suggestions, of course, do not exhaust the possible meanings of this provocative phrase.
The dark-humored pun toward the end of the first section ("a bash filled art") hints at how the speaker may escape the cycle of abuse. She is speaking the truth that was suppressed in her relationships, but indirectly, through the tools and symbols of art. But don't trust the "ribbons," the artful exterior, she warns; her work is radioactive with violence, even if sublimated into a more acceptable form.
In the second section, "circumstance," the external facts of the speaker's life may be similar but she feels that her attitude is different. "i return to him no longer his prodigy". This man, not previously introduced in the poem, could be an abusive parent, a controlling lover, and/or a domineering artistic mentor. His exact identity almost doesn't matter, because the whole theme of the poem is how she has replicated this relationship in many guises. Despite her new sense of empowerment, he still "defines my art" and haunts her nightmares. But now she is not running away from the pain. Instead of splitting into different voices, the speaker in this section has a unified, if bruised, self. She faces her demons "in sanity", which is a tiny but real step away from "insanity". Let the death shout all it wants—she is listening.
Where could a poem like "The Telepathic Bruise" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Writecorner Press Annual Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: February 28
Writers' resource site offers prizes up to $500 and online publication for poems up to 40 lines; low fee
Connecticut River Review Annual Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: May 31
Long-running award from Connecticut Poetry Society offers prizes up to $400 for unpublished poems; no simultaneous submissions
Fish International Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by March 31
Irish literary publisher offers prizes up to 1,000 euros, anthology publication and reading at West Cork Literary Festival; enter online only
Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: May 31 (don't enter before March 1)
Prestigious award offers $300 for unpublished poems by women, from the journal Calyx; no simultaneous submissions
This poem and critique appeared in the February 2007 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Corpus Christi
I did not wipe my feet dear parson of the midway when
I entered your holy sanctuary
homeless
for there was nothing I could place
in your offering places except tears and blood
borrowed from some other ancient astronaut
that lent them to me when it snowed in the desert
and rained in the sunlight
yes I could not wipe my feet dear deacon
for they were tied down with barbed wire and railroad
nails those giant steel points that kept my feet crossed
at the ankles
and your church members silent
hiding behind that false certainty that i was not welcome
in your holy place
because i was naked
around the waist
and my intestines
were showing at the benediction
song
and I smelled of burnt flesh burnt
by clansmen on a joy ride with the other deacons
gone to barbecue
only the poor could see me there
only the unsaved wept for me there
only the lost could find my way home there
and my head was beaten a thousand million times
blunt and sharpness it did not matter to them
for no one of influence came to my rescue
when i entered your sanctuary today
hoping for some chicken soup and wine
and a sponge to stop the bleeding
nary a shroud to cover my corpse
dripping sadness and outcast
on your expensive carpet i ruined
on your empty cross so sad
this was the perfect place for me perhaps
but I could not audition
there
for i was in the wrong place at the wrong
time
deacon could you spare me a dime?
Copyright 2007 by William "Wild Bill" Taylor
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Corpus Christi" by William "Wild Bill" Taylor, follows the prophetic tradition of scathing critique from within. In the words of Jeremiah, or Jesus, we can find a more searing indictment of religious hypocrisy than anything from the pen of Richard Dawkins. The reformers' anger burns brightest because they love the spiritual truths that their leaders are perverting, and the people who are being led astray.
The sins that Taylor's poem addresses have not changed much from Biblical times: greed, prejudice, unkindness, pride. Elements of dark humor and absurdity mostly rescue the poem from becoming maudlin, though there are some moments of overstatement. This Passion play is littered with prosaic modern inventions (barbed wire, chicken soup, astronauts) that make it uncomfortably real. Christ has been plucked out of his safe stained-glass window. Now he's that strange-smelling guy staggering down the aisle, asking you for a handout. What are you going to do?
The many allusions contained in the title "Corpus Christi" gives us clues to the poem's layers of meaning. In literal terms, it's Latin for "the body of Christ". And it's the body that the Christians in this poem have the most trouble accepting. They can't handle the grossness of the speaker's real wounds. They refuse to see his material needs for food, shelter and medical care. Perhaps he belongs to a different ethnic group (as the reference to "clansmen" would suggest). They may consider him unchaste ("naked/ around the waist") or disapprove of his sexual orientation. Whatever the reasons for their disdain, the central failing of religious community in Taylor's poem is that they don't embody their faith; they treat it like a pretty ritual that sets them apart from the world they should be serving.
In medieval Europe, Corpus Christi was the feast day on which the churches would put on plays re-enacting Biblical scenes. This was the beginning of modern drama. Taylor's poem stages a present-day Passion play, where Christ (concealed in the person of this social outcast) is again persecuted by the Pharisees of our day. Taylor depicts a crucifixion with railroad spikes and barbed wire—a populist image worthy of William Jennings Bryan—and continues the theme with references to the sponge, the wine and the shroud.
That barbed wire, and the line "my head was beaten a thousand million times", reminded me of the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, the gay youth who was beaten and tied to a barbed-wire fence and left to die. Later that same year, playwright Terrence McNally premiered his controversial play "Corpus Christi", recasting Christ and his disciples as homosexuals confronting bigotry. I don't know if Taylor intended these references, but nonetheless the poem may resonate in a special way with those whose churches are struggling with this issue.
Taylor makes effective use of sarcasm and exaggeration to help his narrator retain his prophetic edge, instead of becoming merely a sentimental victim. The opening mock-salutation, "dear parson of the midway", conjures up the familiar figure of the huckster-evangelist, the Elmer Gantry, whose preaching is mere carnival patter. The "deacons gone to barbecue" reinforce the same folklore depiction of the greedy, ridiculous preacher. The churchgoers are fussy and snobbish, primarily concerned with their clean carpets and conducting the service in an orderly, tasteful way ("my intestines were showing/at the benediction/song"—what a faux pas).
The incongruous image of the astronaut functions as a messenger from another realm who has come to turn the congregation's assumptions upside-down. The place where "it snowed in the desert/and rained in the sunlight" may be a place where miracles are real, or it may stand for the inversion of the moral order that he perceives in his listeners. Either way, he is coming from a place where all sorts of things happen that don't fit their tidy theories about how the world works.
Because the poem's message, however creatively presented, is not new (more shame to us!), I felt it could have been a little shorter without losing its impact. I might cut the lines from "this was the perfect place" to "wrong time" towards the end of the poem, and possibly the stanza before that ("dripping sadness and outcast"), though I do like its repetitive rhythm. Overall, Taylor has contributed a worthy addition to the literature of protest.
Where could a poem like "Corpus Christi" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards
Postmark Deadline: Feb 1
Competitive award from the prestigious Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College offers $2,000 and a reading in Paterson Historic District in NJ; judges say, "Please do not submit poems that imitate Allen Ginsberg's work"
Dylan Days Writing Contest
Entries must be received by April 23
Free contest from singer-songwriter Bob Dylan's hometown of Hibbing, MN offers prizes up to $100 for poems and short stories in both open and student categories; enter by email only
Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: April 30
Highly competitive award of $2,000 from the journal Nimrod
This poem and critique appeared in the March 2007 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Bruno Was From Brazil
"I'm from Oakland and I'm not a statistic. Yet. But New Year's Eve I left the Bank of America at 2:30 pm; the news that night flashed on my bank. It was the scene of the last homicide of the year, at 3:20 pm.—, which meant I dodged a bullet by 45 minutes. Witnesses say two Latino males and two African-American males had a parking lot altercation. The Latino driver used an ethnic slur and one of the black guys pulled out a gun and shot him. The two blacks drove off, witnesses say, and Bruno who was from Brazil and delivered pizza, for god's sake, died on the spot...now you know the last word in the guidebook for new arrivals is nigger. Ask Camille Cosby. And I know poor, poor Bruno heard the word a thousand times delivering those pizzas. 'Some nigguz on 90th Ave. want mushroom/salami/chicken...only nigguz want combos like that...you my nigga...when you get money from nigguz, check for counterfeit...nigguz, Bruno, watch out...' Poor Bruno, the word probably came off his tongue like spit. And he didn't know you could call a black person a nigger and get utter scorn and contempt. Like down South where they just ignored it and kept their inner dignity. But Bruno, you don't call a real nigga a nigga. That's like a death wish. Are you crazy? Suicidal? Certain words are like gods. They command respect. Nigger is a god. I'm so sorry for Bruno. He was a sacrificial lamb—that's what you have to do with gods. You have to appease them, give them a lil' somepin somepin. And I know Richard Pryor went to Africa after he made $50 million off the word and came back with religion. Stopped using the word and used crack instead. But he didn't stop folks from using it. He just made the word an academic issue: shall we nigger; shall we not nigger? Forget Dick Gregory's autobiography called Nigger. No, a Harvard law professor writes a book called Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. Nigger is a God, nigger made millions, now it has a career. And the country's leading black intellectual, a guy named Skippy, finds one of the first novels written by a black, titled, what else, Our Nig. So I'm proposing a constitutional amendment on the use of the word. There are simply days when it is dangerous to use the word. And one of those days is Friday night. And another of those days is Saturday night. Ok? On MLK's birthday, abstain. Christmas, it goes without saying. The season is the reason. And proceed with caution on the Fourth of July. Fireworks, drinking and the use of the word by the wrong people don't mix."
Copyright 2007 by Judy Juanita
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's unusual and provocative piece, "Bruno Was From Brazil" by Judy Juanita, crosses the boundaries of genre (appropriately for a poem about explosive cross-cultural interaction). An example of the fluid form known as the prose poem, which has become increasingly popular in literary journals, this piece would also work well as a slam poetry performance. Neither form can rely on line breaks to signify that the text is "poetic", forcing the author to pay closer attention to aural patterns and timing in order to give the piece the musical momentum and intensity of a poem. Writing prose poems, or reading one's work aloud, are both useful tools for free-verse poets to discover whether they are allowing line breaks to substitute for true poetic speech.
What exactly is a prose poem? This overview from the Academy of American Poets website notes: "While it lacks the line breaks associated with poetry, the prose poem maintains a poetic quality, often utilizing techniques common to poetry, such as fragmentation, compression, repetition, and rhyme." Juanita's poem fits this description, with its staccato sentences, its wide-ranging associative leaps between topics and varieties of diction (news reports, conversation, academese and slang), and especially its mesmerizing repetition of That Word.
"Bruno Was From Brazil" initially leans toward the prosy side of the equation, beginning in the voice of a hard-boiled detective story: "I'm from Oakland and I'm not a statistic. Yet." Halfway through, somewhere around the line "Certain words are like gods," the piece takes off as a manic riff on racially charged language and whether its sting can ever be dulled by context. Without line breaks (brakes?), the words spill out furiously, defying decorum and step-by-step logic, so that when we finally reach the author's satirical "solution" of a constitutional amendment, it's obvious that we'll never be able to draw neat lines separating safe from dangerous uses of the word. In this way, the author's chosen form enhances the message and emotional impact of her story.
The hybrid poetic form liberates Juanita to include sentences that would feel too wordy and technical in a traditional lyric poem (particularly the section from "Forget Dick Gregory's autobiography" to "Our Nig"). Other sentences, by contrast, display more of the aphoristic, non-literal qualities of poetry: "now you know the last word in the guidebook for new arrivals is nigger"; "Stopped using the word and used crack instead"; and the passage "Certain words are like gods. They command respect. Nigger is a god. I'm so sorry for Bruno. He was a sacrificial lamb—that's what you have to do with gods. You have to appease them, give them a lil' somepin somepin."
The repetition of the word "god" parallels the subsequent variations on "nigger", reinforcing the connection between these concepts. Gods are lethally unpredictable, a power that we try and fail to contain with words and rituals, and yet a power we can't resist invoking to make sense of our lives. This poem suggests that racial and cultural identity, and perhaps even language itself, are essential aspects of being human, but also have the potential to dehumanize. Where there are borders, there will be wars.
ƒ
The latter half of the poem seems to deride academic efforts to domesticate the word, implicitly questioning whether this is just another way of encouraging children to play with live ammunition. The line between safe and unsafe contexts is easy to cross unawares; wouldn't it be better to suppress the word entirely? On the other hand, how can we think and speak critically about real and persistent racial divisions if we allow racist language to silence us? Neither speech nor silence can perfectly preserve the illusion of a vantage point outside the moral failures of our culture. By choosing to use the word—to rub our noses in it, in fact—but ending with a self-mocking non-solution, Juanita makes us see that cosmetic changes to language only conceal racism, not eliminate it.
Adding to the moral ambiguity, "nigger" is a word traditionally used by whites to oppress blacks, but the homicide victim in this poem is a Latino immigrant who used the word in ignorance, and his assailants are African-American. Who is truly innocent here? The shooters, or men in their social world, might have felt they were resisting oppression by putting a positive spin on a word that the white majority used against them (the way some gays have reclaimed "queer"), but clearly the word still hurts them, no matter how tough they try to become by using it on each other. It's like keeping a loaded gun in your house: all it takes is one curious child to turn responsible self-defense into irresponsible risk.
Some interesting postmodern themes that arise in this piece: "Bruno Was From Brazil" is a poem about language that points to its own inadequacy, yet cannot be silent. It's also about the disjunction between signifier and signified. Repeat a word often enough and it starts to sound strange, almost nonsensical. Abstracted from its interpersonal context, the word as word reveals itself to be empty, arbitrary. Yet this can lull us into a false sense of security, because of course the interpersonal context is always there, and the word in the real world always has a history and an explosive charge. The author, the speaker, is not in complete control of how the word will be received. Is it "just a word"? Yes—and no.
Where could a poem like "Bruno Was From Brazil" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Fineline Competition
Postmark Deadline: May 1
$1,000 award for prose poems and flash fiction, 500 words maximum, from Mid-American Review
Boston Review Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: June 1
Competitive award of $1,500 from well-known literary review that publishes experimental poetry and progressive political articles
1/2 K Prose-Poem/Short-Short Prize
Postmark Deadline: August 15
$1,000 award for prose poems and flash fiction (500 words maximum) from Indiana Review, a prestigious journal
This poem and critique appeared in the April 2007 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Stillborn
In my groins the fire of your passionate kicks
Still burns, though lifeless on my lap
Lie your little legs limp and still.
Last night I heard little footsteps on my wooden floor
They scurried through the open door and faded fast
On the wet wings of the monstrous darkness
Tailed by explosion of liquid light and thunder
That unnerved the firmaments and ripped my inside.
Now I know it was you leaving.
Silence sits so serene on your soft blue lips
That never learned to curse and lie.
Though you speak not I hear you loud
As I always have, when you flipped and tumbled
In your cozy water world deep in my belly
That became your deathbed.
What did you say you'd become?
A president, a preacher, pilot, piper, pauper?
It doesn't matter now!
I'm content to know you were here—one of us.
And in your still little veins ran
The hopes and dreams, the passion and pain,
The frailty and fear that make us human.
Copyright 2007 by Obed Dolo
Critique by Jendi Reiter
I chose Obed Dolo's "Stillborn" as this month's critique poem for its intense imagery and assured pacing. There is a wonderful strangeness to this poem that reveals the clashing spiritual forces contained in the child's death, without sacrificing the tenderness and immediacy of the particular relationship. Birth and death: so commonplace yet so mysterious.
I admired this poem's consistency of tone and its use of varied sentence lengths for dramatic effect. Dolo is not embarrassed to employ a prophetic voice worthy of his serious subject matter, and does not break the spell with interjections of casual diction the way a beginning poet might. Minor suggestions for the first stanza: I would change "groins" to the singular "groin" because that is the more common usage, and the unusual form of the word here is distracting. Instead of repeating "little" in two successive lines, perhaps use a different modifier for "footsteps" in the fourth line (e.g. "faint" or "light"), or none at all. The alliteration of "Lie your little legs limp and still" is effective, so I would preserve that instance of the word and replace the other one.
Elegies work best when they connect the commemoration of a specific person to broader insights about finitude, love and loss. Thomas Gray's famous "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard" still resonates with us today because its theme is the universality of death. Gray emphasizes how much is not known about the souls asleep beneath their humble markers, and we nod in recognition because each of us feels like that "mute inglorious Milton" whose significance is obscured by time and mortality.
Against this temptation to despair, the mother in Dolo's poem insists on the preciousness of her child's existence and his membership in the human family. Though he never had a life outside her womb, he was a person, not a thing. Her empathetic imagination turns an unnatural and grotesque object, the corpse of one who died before he could live, back into a baby. Stillborn is transformed into "still born".
In the first stanza, the dead child is alien, characterized in terms of his effects on the mother and the world. She does not yet perceive him as a person, but as a gateway for the chaotic swirl of spiritual power from which the individual soul emerges and to which it returns. He inhabited her body like a fire. Now his departing spirit is glimpsed indirectly, through the sound of ghostly little footsteps or the passage of the storm, which Dolo magnificently describes as "the wet wings of the monstrous darkness/Tailed by explosion of liquid light and thunder". The use of "tailed" instead of the more predictable "trailed" evokes the image of a dragon sweeping by overhead. After these long, action-filled lines, the terse declaration "Now I know it was you leaving" is stark and powerful.
This depiction of the world's darkness and violence sets us up to view the child's death in a new way, as an escape from the potential for misery and wickedness in every human life. "Silence sits so serene on your soft blue lips/That never learned to curse and lie." The mother turns away from the horrors of the first stanza and chooses to re-value both his life and his death. She finds herself able to be grateful for the Edenic existence he must have had inside her body, "when you flipped and tumbled/In your cozy water world deep in my belly," almost as if he were a pre-human innocent creature.
Where a lesser poem might have left us there, with a sentimentalized vision of death as sweeter than life, Dolo comes full circle to acknowledge the tragedy of wasted potential, as well as the tranquility of an unfinished life onto which we can project our own idealized vision of the future. "What did you say you'd become?/A president, a preacher, pilot, piper, pauper?/It doesn't matter now!" The mother acknowledges that the human condition is duality: "The hopes and dreams, the passion and pain,/The frailty and fear that make us human." Birth and death can each be a cause for rejoicing and gratitude, as well as a source of danger and fear.
Where could a poem like "Stillborn" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Eden Mills Writers' Festival Literary Contest
Postmark Deadline: June 30
Canadian festival offers C$500 for poetry and short stories (both genres compete together) by new, aspiring, and modestly published writers
Abilene Writers Guild Contest
Postmark Deadline: July 31
Prizes of $100 in a number of genres including rhymed and unrhymed poetry, short stories, articles, children's literature, and novel excerpts
This poem and critique appeared in the May 2007 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
The Garden
Blooms the sunrise as the foliage
The will of dawn. Salmon mist
Ochreous with affliction, its colors
Coalesce into infinity.
The whole day is without serenade or sorrow
The black bird
Beats its wings against the fence
Then off like a spear
The flowers are without fragrance
There are only these poppies, blood red
and rose
Swarmed by baby's breath.
The sun blooms, beats high above me
The distance of night is done for
Caught between these two realms, I turn away
Into the startling darkness of the day.
Copyright 2007 by Joleen Leo
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, Joleen Leo's "The Garden", shows one way to make a familiar poetic subject fresh and interesting again. Gardens feature prominently in the Western artistic vocabulary, starting with the Bible. Like art itself, the garden represents the harmonious coexistence of the given and the manufactured, deriving its vitality and surprise from the independent workings of nature, but paradoxically finding its truest essence by being set apart from nature, forced into a human-made form.
In medieval art, the garden was a symbol of purity and tranquility; in the Bible, it represented a safe homeland as opposed to the physical and spiritual alienation of the wilderness. Now that the greatest encroachment on our peace typically comes not from nature but from human activity, the wildness of gardens, rather than their controlled aspect, attracts us as a source of renewal in our sterile post-industrial environment.
Leo's garden scene is unsettling, juxtaposing moments of expectant stillness with flashes of energy, even violence. Her fractured syntax jolts the reader into a mode of consciousness where one must process intense sensations without the comforting distance of a narrative framework. Imagine the more commonplace ways that this scene could have been described: the sun rises on some rather common varieties of flowers, and a blackbird flies away. Safe, predictable, ignored on our front lawns every day.
Leo employs several techniques to infuse these small incidents with dramatic tension, thereby telling us that they are worth studying. Like the atom that contains the potential for a bomb, every bird or flower, if seen correctly, pulses with an unbelievable force of pure being.
Consider the opening lines "Blooms the sunrise as the foliage/The will of dawn." Beginning with a verb creates a mood of action, and also suspense because the normal word order is reversed. We look for a subject with which to identify. "The will of dawn" personifies the sunrise—it has a will, a consciousness. Humanity is not the primary or only actor here. Sun and foliage both bloom; does the latter, too, have a will? The possibility is thrilling and disturbing.
The phrases "Salmon mist/Ochreous with affliction" and "The day is without serenade or sorrow" suggest that great emotions are at stake, but in a way that is a mystery to us. "The black bird//Beats its wings against the fence/Then off like a spear". The joyful violence of this image reminded me of D.H. Lawrence's poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1922), such as "Almond Blossom", where he describes the buds emerging on the tree as "Strange storming up from the dense under-earth/Along the iron, to the living steel/In rose-hot tips, and flakes of rose-pale snow".
Some of Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems (e.g. "Tulips", "Poppies in July") perform a similar reversal of our expectations of the pastoral. I thought of Plath when reading Leo's lines "The flowers are without fragrance/There are only these poppies, blood red/and rose//Swarmed by baby's breath." They share the same fascination with uncontrolled fertility (as in Plath's bee poems), the innocent turned suddenly threatening, a too-vibrant life coexisting with a chill waxwork beauty (flowers without fragrance).
I was conflicted about the introduction of a first-person voice in the final four lines. A personal element can draw the reader further into the scene, helping to explain its importance. I've read a lot of beginning writers' poems that present a well-realized description of a landscape, but nothing else, no characters or connection to human themes, and these often leave me feeling flat. It would be wrong to object to non sequiturs in a poem whose style is defined by paradox and surprise, but I did wonder whether the self-identified narrator's storyline or concerns were really the same as those explored in the preceding lines. What are "these two realms"? This reference seems to assume a clarity of argument that the poem has so far avoided, indeed gained its unique power from avoiding. I did love the last line, with its echoes of Henry Vaughan's "deep and dazzling darkness". I could feel the temporary blindness of walking into a shaded room after being out in the garden under the blooming, beating sun.
Where could a poem like "The Garden" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
JBWB Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by June 30
British writer Jacqui Bennett's website offers quarterly prizes of 100 pounds for poems up to 30 lines; online entry/payment accepted
Erskine J. Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: January 1
$200 prize for unpublished poems from the journal Smartish Pace; online entries accepted
This poem and critique appeared in the June 2007 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
The Wild
She would have sworn up and down
That there was nothing more common
Than the constant drip-dripping of the farm faucet.
The warm monotone of hot water against steel
Cancelled the emotion in the farmer's voice.
She didn't have a choice
But to sit there and wait
For one more syllable to explode.
And what a heavy load for such a young girl.
She'd been alive for eight years and still laughed like a child
But the scars on her thigh showed that she's battled the Wild.
Beneath the eyes of a woman, she wore a little girl's pout
As she lined her wall with shards of glass to keep the Wild out.
Scorpion corpses laced the side of the empty chalet.
Like trust, their bodies took an instant to break,
And an eternity to mend.
By then, the screamers from the barn
Refused to be reconciled with their laughing counterparts
By the simple reassurance of fun and games
Perhaps gone just a bit too far.
Her work was careful and clean. She didn't cut herself at all;
Couldn't afford to lose more blood after her terrible fall.
Hot, red innocence had flooded the land,
The day the Wild of home had knocked it out of her hand.
The sour aftertaste of fruits that don't belong in human mouths
Can only be rinsed out by the
Warm, warm water, so
The constant drip-dripping of the farm faucet
Remained more in demand than anything else.
It had taken eight years, but eventually,
She had learned to read
The cryptic braille of scabs that lined his forearm.
She could understand what he muttered
Under alcohol-stained breath,
And the worst part:
She would have sworn that there was nothing more common.
Copyright 2007 by Tabitha Wood
Critique by Jendi Reiter
I chose Tabitha Wood's "The Wild" as this month's critique poem to explore the potential benefits and pitfalls of multiple styles within a poem, and to illustrate how an author can create dramatic tension by withholding information. Fans of mystery and horror films know that the unseen menace is often the most frightening. The creaking door, the odd angle of light, put the audience in the shoes of the protagonist who gropes for clues to the identity of the threat. Our inability to piece the facts together mirrors her helplessness.
With cinematic pacing, Wood focuses first on the dripping faucet, leaving us to speculate what trauma could have turned this ordinary object so sinister. The entire experience of violation is contained within this image. It is an all-consuming wrongness that poisons the smallest, most prosaic details of the child's world. Wood understands that to describe the abuse with more specificity would be to step outside the perspective of the victim, who has no name for what has happened to her—it is simply "The Wild", the haunted forest of fairy-tales, from which the monsters of our collective unconscious emerge. The unspeakable is defined by a negative, "the sour aftertaste of fruits that don't belong in human mouths".
The imagery now takes a more fantastical, overtly violent turn: "As she lined her wall with shards of glass to keep the Wild out./Scorpion corpses laced the side of the empty chalet." Because she began with a realistic, emotionally understated setting, Wood can dial up the intensity without seeming melodramatic. The striking phrase "hot, red innocence" reverses the usual values we assign to these attributes.
The word "chalet" did confuse my mental picture of the scene, since this style of building is more common in alpine or beach resorts than on a farm. I also don't associate scorpions with any of these types of landscape, but rather with a desert environment. Perhaps we are not meant to read this passage literally; it has the feel of a child's embellished imaginings, where the farmhouse becomes a chalet (or castle) and dead grasshoppers could be dangerous stinging insects. This still doesn't fit with how I understood the poem's general structure, putting the real-life segments in free verse and the metaphorical interpretation in the italicized, rhymed couplets.
How wise of Wood to keep those "screamers from the barn" offstage, an obscene parody of the screams of delight from the child's "laughing counterparts" at play. As W.H. Auden said in his famous poem "Musée des Beaux Arts", "About suffering they were never wrong,/The Old Masters...That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course/Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot/Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse/Scratches its innocent behind on a tree." The outside world going about its business, ignorantly and indifferently happy, reinforces the abused child's isolation.
The ending follows the same "less-is-more" logic of the earlier stanzas. The child learns to read the scars on her abuser's body (a parallel to those on her own thighs?) and understand his drunken mutterings, but we're not told outright what she learns. An empathy, perhaps, that would seem like cheap and sentimental moral equivalence if outsiders like us verbalized it. We get a subtle clue in the last line: "she would have sworn that there was nothing more common." The worst part, for her, is knowing that abuse is so common that her tormentor was once a victim himself, perpetuating the pattern. What happened to her, unfortunately, is not a rare exception.
It's risky to include different styles within a short poem, as Wood does here. Done right, multiple voices can add depth and tension as each provides a new interpretation of the same reality. However, it undercuts the writer's authority if she seems unable to decide on the right voice for her story.
I felt the technique was only a partial success in "The Wild" because the rhyming lines are not as tightly crafted or mature in their authorial voice as the free-verse section. Rhyming couplets with no evident meter are a common feature of beginning writers' work, and I find them less effective than true formal verse because they suggest a blinkered emphasis on end-rhyme to the exclusion of the other elements of a poetic line—a musical cadence, varied pacing and syntax, and diction that differs from prose. The line is not disciplined; as long as it ends with a rhyme, it can wander as long as it wishes (a bargain pushed to its absurd extreme by Ogden Nash's light verse). For instance, I felt "the day the Wild of home had knocked it out of her hand" was a mixed metaphor that Wood wouldn't have used unless forced to find a rhyme for "land". When she says "knocked it out of her hand" I picture a solid object being dropped, but the only possible referent for "it" is the "hot, red innocence," presumably a liquid, blood.
Would the poem work better without the italicized sections? I think Wood's intuition is correct that a more emotional interior voice is needed as a counterpart to the repression and confinement of the child's external situation. One reason these sections feel weaker to me may be that they over-explain, compared to the Hitchcock-like subtle terrors of the free verse segments. I would like to see more surrealism, more drama, more lines like "lined her wall with shards of glass" and "hot, red innocence". And perhaps no rhymes. In fact, try going further in the direction of psychological chaos with a fragmented and surreal style, as Belinda Smith used in the poem we critiqued in February, "The Telepathic Bruise", another narrative of abuse. "The Wild" is already a powerful poem, and will be even better when its parts cohere a little more harmoniously.
Where could a poem like "The Wild" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Abilene Writers Guild Contest
Postmark Deadline: July 31
Texas poetry society offers $100 prizes in a number of genres including rhymed and unrhymed poetry, short stories, articles, children's literature and novel excerpts
Connecticut Poetry Competition (formerly the Brodine/Brodinsky Poetry Competition)
Postmark Deadline: May 31
Connecticut Poetry Society offers prizes up to $400 and anthology publication for unpublished poems
League of Minnesota Poets Annual Contest
Postmark Deadline: July 31
Prizes up to $125 for poems on various themes or in traditional forms (18 categories in all); publication not included
This poem and critique appeared in the July 2007 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Kari (my best friend)
Some monster lay deep in the water that day.
It put its fingers to our mouths when it drifted
towards what was left of Kari's lungs.
Our eyes had never heard death, never tasted
that moment when what makes us whole,
separates.
I remember Kari, afraid of monsters,
willing herself to jump from the highest cliff
in the pits of the old quarry.
It was just that kissing game, truth or dare.
The water was deep and black, cold.
The monster cut through her with pure mean
that thickened the day into ice.
I stirred myself into a cocktail of warm.
After all, we were making snow angels in the air.
We were just teasing her a little.
It was all just fun.
Dangling arms and pretentious fingers
waited for childhood to choke as her weight
slammed the rocks and her flesh sliced
down to the water in long strips
making wet slurping sounds.
She jumped too soon.
That summer the pits had no bottom
but open earth sores watered up
to keep Kari's hands spilling over limestone.
A blood angel fades here kids
aren’t allowed to swim anymore.
Copyright 2007 by Kim Mayhall
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Kim Mayhall's poem "Kari" intersperses the awful physical sensations of a girl's death with metaphorical and fantastical images in order to capture the onlooking children's shock when their game collides with a deadly reality. Perhaps any poem about death is as much about the feelings of those left behind as it is about the person memorialized. Here, despite the title "Kari", the primary focus is the impact on her playmates.
Kari, about whom we know nothing except her fear of monsters and her closeness to the narrator, is not an individual so much as a representative of the children's own mortality, which they confront for the first time through her. She becomes a sacrificial symbol, a "blood angel" reminding them of their guilt. They feel responsible for goading her to take the fatal dive, of course, but the guilt is also something more primal that is bound up with their new consciousness of death. The immunity of youth fails in both directions. How much harm even a child can suffer is also a measure of how much harm a child can inflict on others.
Mayhall engages all of the reader's senses from the beginning, a technique that gives this poem much of its power. Fingers to mouths, eyes that hear, a moment so affecting to body and mind that it can actually be tasted. What to make of the synesthesia "Our eyes had never heard death"? The clue may lie in the contrast between wholeness and separation in the next lines. That earliest childhood state, when the self is undifferentiated from the world, and sensations flow in without being consciously recognized as "sight" versus "hearing", is like the unity among the children before Kari steps into the spotlight. Her death names and individuates her. The others are simply "we". (There is a first-person singular narrator in some lines, but she speaks for their collective experience, not revealing any special interaction with Kari.)
The children at first displace the guilt of the accident onto the "monster" that "put its fingers to our mouths" and "cut through her with pure mean". But Kari, though "afraid of monsters", jumped because she was even more afraid of losing face before her peers ("that kissing game, truth or dare"; "We were just teasing her a little"). Who then are the true monsters? They plead innocence ("we were making snow angels in the air") but the next stanza refers back to this gesture in a more candid, less flattering way: "Dangling arms and pretentious fingers/waited for childhood to choke". The end of childhood means that one can no longer blame imaginary forces outside one's control.
The physical realism of the penultimate stanza is almost unbearable, as perhaps it should be, but the lyrical yet horrifying opening of the final stanza takes an already memorable poem to a new level. Again outside the realm of realism, we are in a ghost story where the earth itself will not let the dead rest, but this time the haunting cannot be dismissed as a child's fear of the dark. Everything we fear is already within ourselves.
The grammar of the last two lines is irregular, a stylistic choice that does not show up elsewhere in the poem, which makes me think Mayhall may have meant "A blood angel fades where kids/aren't allowed to swim anymore". However, I like the cadence of "A blood angel fades here" and I feel that two shorter declarative sentences ("A blood angel fades here; kids/aren't allowed to swim anymore") has a stronger rhythmic impact than the longer single sentence. Also, the overstatement of "kids aren't allowed to swim anymore" (ever? anywhere?) conveys the totality of their expulsion from Eden. More has been lost than access to a specific watering hole. What this line tells me is, kids aren't exempt from human nature, and sometimes they discover that in the most painful ways.
Where could a poem like "Kari" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Oregon State Poetry Association Contests
Postmark Deadline: August 31
Twice-yearly contest offers prizes up to $100 in categories including traditional verse, humor, open theme
Robert Frost Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: September 15
Competitive award for poems "in the spirit of Robert Frost" includes $1,000 and featured reading at festival in Lawrence, MA
Lucidity Poetry Journal Awards
Postmark Deadline: October 31
Free contest offers prizes up to $100 (doubled this year) for clear, understandable poems in any form dealing with people and interpersonal relationships
This poem and critique appeared in the August 2007 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Silence
The Eskimos had it right
With all their words for snow—
As if one word,
One small combination of letters,
Could describe
That experience
Which bakes its schizophrenic soul
Into so many dishes,
A veritable many-course meal
For those with stomachs large enough to partake
Each different offering,
Savor the flavor
Of each soundless course
Cooked with care for them alone.
Steamed, sautéed,
Grilled and garnished
By different occurrences;
The champagne-bubbly silence of anticipation,
A soufflé baked with precision,
Apple pie-steam and coffee brewing,
The aroma impatiently unbearable;
The crunchy, loud silence of awkwardness,
Carrot bits flying everywhere
Orange and unforgiving,
Spinach stuck between buck teeth;
The hot silence between lovers not yet tasted,
Fajitas sizzling on the grill, their many trimmings
Displayed carefully side by side,
Waiting to be liberally thrown on a tortilla
Spread open and inviting;
The revolting silence of disbelief,
Leftovers left too long in the fridge,
Crammed behind the mustard, forgotten
Fermenting,
Until the rancid smell pervades everything around;
The bitter silence of jilted lovers,
Burned chocolate, milk gone sour,
Food eaten unknowing,
Its salmonella-poison masked
By other tastes;
The cold silence of grudge,
A brainfreeze—
Icy daggers borne of too much introspection—
That punctures logic
And shatters compassion,
Leaving taste buds numb;
The smooth, creamy silence
Of meditation,
Swirls of custard and meringue,
Key lime pie and fruity sherbet,
Bathing the soul in being;
The spicy cinnamon taste of accomplishment,
Warm, dry silence
That momentarily satisfies the palate
But leaves the soul thirsting for more
In just a few hours;
The blubbery aspic of loneliness,
Gelatin wiggling on the tongue,
Silence swilled
Like too much water
Until the stomach distends of its own accord,
Bloated from unwanted gluttony;
The sweet silence of years of acquaintance,
A familiar, lovely taste—
Comfort food—
Calorie-rich with love and memory;
The tasteless silence of death,
Cottonmouth on the tongue,
Unwanted heartburn
Stuck in the throat,
Which will not go away.
Copyright 2007 by Jessica Keeslar
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Jessica Keeslar's poem "Silence" is full of surprises. Leading off with an observation so familiar as to have become clichéd, she reclaims it by force of will, applying all her inventiveness and exuberance to the conceit around which she has built the poem, until she has established her authority as someone with fresh insights to offer. Her zesty, unexpected, yet always apt metaphors disclose the true character of both silence and food, in the same way as the proverbial Eskimo's vocabulary is meant to reveal fine gradations among weather conditions whose individuality we formerly ignored.
Snow is snow, we might say, to justify our lack of attention. Like snow, silence at first appears simple, empty, easily understood. By pairing this austere and seemingly featureless phenomenon with something as varied and abundant as food, almost its opposite, Keeslar makes us notice both the richness of silence and the loss that is the flip side of food's nurturing.
The opening stanzas, which in my opinion are the weakest, have a cute, chatty tone that led me to expect light verse. The poem's playful spirit is one reason it works: the Eskimo-language factoid has been cited so often in a sentimental, didactic "stop and smell the roses" context that Keeslar's over-the-top descriptions strike a refreshingly self-aware note of parodic humor.
It wasn't until the stanza beginning "The crunchy, loud silence of awkwardness" that I realized something important was happening in this poem. This is where she starts to let it all hang out, digging into the experience of awkwardness with a messy scene that makes us laugh and cringe at once. A bad poem often fails because the author has no humility, that is, no sense that her powerful emotions might be ridiculous in a certain light. I was worried by the portentousness of the first two stanzas, but here, Keeslar winks to let us know she's in on the joke.
The metaphors become more creative as the poem progresses. "The cold silence of grudge,/A brainfreeze—" how clever to pair (sweet) ice cream and (bitter) resentment, forcing us to puzzle out the underlying similarity. Both can be pleasures we gorge ourselves upon, thinking at first to nurture ourselves, but later finding that this self-indulgence is more of a headache than it's worth. "The spicy cinnamon taste of accomplishment" and "The blubbery aspic of loneliness" transcend reductive explanation by analogy. These lines directly translate mental states into physical sensations that startle us because the connections are at once so unexpected and so right.
Keeslar makes the interesting choice to end the poem on a note of deprivation. Though not all of the emotions explored in the poem are happy ones by any means, up to this point the overall mood leaned toward affirmation and abundance. As in meditation, where both pleasant and unpleasant feelings are to be studied and embraced without judgment, Keeslar seemed to be setting negative experiences (awkwardness, anger, loneliness) within a larger, more generous and positive frame of reference. Even decay has its own rich palette to be savored, she says. But ending with the death stanza, rather than slipping it in earlier before an upbeat conclusion, somehow undermines this hope. As a reader, I feel disappointment, maybe even betrayal, because my expectations for the poem were frustrated. As a critic, I'm not sure this is a bad thing.
The descriptions of the different kinds of silence are pitch-perfect and I wouldn't change them at all. I would, however, seriously condense the opening three stanzas. They lack the musical rhythm and unusual imagery of the stanzas that follow, and their tone is somehow too precious. If Keeslar wants to keep the over-used Eskimo-snow reference, which does have the virtue of setting this poem within an instantly comprehensible tradition, she might want to lead off with her own original thought, instead of placing too much weight on an observation already handled so often by her predecessors. Below, a rough attempt at a new beginning for this poem:
Silence serves up as many dishes
as the Eskimos' words for snow—
For those with stomachs large enough to partake
Each schizophrenic offering,
Savor the flavor
Of each soundless course
Cooked with care for them alone:
The champagne-bubbly silence of anticipation,
etc.
In this revision, I tried to preserve the phrases that were most individual, substituted the stronger and more specific word "schizophrenic" for "different", and foregrounded the poem's true subjects in the first line. I eliminated phrases that seemed merely repetitive of concepts already introduced. The Eskimo reference suffices to convey the inadequacy of a single word to convey a multifaceted experience. Thus, I cut out the first few lines of the second stanza, which spell out this message in a way that felt like overkill. I might like to see a more tactile, unexpected word in place of "schizophrenic" (mental illness being nearly a poetic cliché itself) to express the dissonance of flavors that Keeslar is about to ask us to swallow. This author has a great talent for the objective correlative that she needs to put on display right from the beginning of this adventurous poem.
Where could a poem like "Silence" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Second Light Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 1
British group of women writers over 40 offers prizes up to 300 pounds; entries may be published or unpublished
Beullah Rose Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: January 1
$200 prize for unpublished poems by women, from the journal Smartish Pace; online entries accepted
Edwin Markham Prize in Poetry
Postmark Deadline: November 1
Prize for unpublished poems includes $500 and publication in Reed Magazine, the literary journal of San Jose State University
Wild Violet Writing Contests
Postmark Deadline: November 30
Literary e-zine Wild Violet offers prizes of $100 for poetry and fiction; online entries accepted
This poem and critique appeared in the September 2007 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Unbroken Awareness
My life is now a floating shell
I am a vessel on that river.
The storm, the ship, the sea,
Whose shores we lost in crossing.
I can see the milky distances—
In your eyes, but you cannot see me.
A thin melon slice of first moon,
Melting into songs and slivers of ice.
You could feel small creatures dying.
Cowering humans in their burrows.
Fighting for lives other than theirs.
Aware they could not escape.
Each of us came into being
Knowing who we are,
What we are supposed to do
But why do you try to hold back—
The sands, falling in the hourglass?
I am now unconscious.
In a way—, but mute.
A little pearl of awareness,
But this pearl is not me.
Knowing yet unable.
I am now timeless!
All times and in all futures
I am a universe of windows
I cannot be touched again
I am in an endless dream
But I can see you outlined
Looking beyond what you know
One day the seeds would return
And life would continue.
Copyright 2007 by Tendai R. Mwanaka
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem comes to us from Zimbabwean poet Tendai R. Mwanaka. Its themes of ego-less awareness and awakening wisdom reminded me of Buddhist beliefs about the interconnectedness of all life, transcending boundaries of self and other, human and animal, or the living and the dead. The speaker's lyrical insights are comforting even when mysterious, because of their tone of tranquility and faith that eventually the listener will reach full understanding. The poem itself is a "pearl of awareness", polished and pure.
In the opening lines, the narrator seems to be reporting back from the other side of death. "My life is now a floating shell/I am a vessel on that river." Transformed by emptying, simplified, the speaker is content to be borne along by larger forces. The identity that once bounded his entire experience is seen from outside as merely one object in a wider landscape. It was a container for an awareness that now soars above it. (I regret having to assign a gender to the speaker when the whole point of the poem is to transcend such identity markers, but the limitations of English prose grammar require this.)
Contrast this open vista to the confined perspective of "Cowering humans in their burrows." Yet the speaker picks up on and encourages the listener's first stirrings of insight that other selves exist: "You could feel small creatures dying" and perhaps also the line "Fighting for lives other than theirs". This latter phrase could mean several things in the context of this poem. Are the human-creatures fighting to protect someone beyond their own selfish interests—the beginning of the empathy that leads to "unbroken awareness"? Or are they misunderstanding what is "theirs", clinging to an identity that they mistake for the fullness of life? As the speaker later says of himself, "A little pearl of awareness,/But this pearl is not me."
Mwanaka uses sound effectively to enhance the meditative mood of the poem. Listen to the S sounds in the first stanza, which replicate the feeling of identity dissolving: "The storm, the ship, the sea,/Whose shores we lost in crossing." They are joined by the hum of M sounds in the dreamy, beautiful images of the next stanza: "A thin melon slice of first moon,/Melting into songs and slivers of ice." Whiteness pervades the poem: pearls, milky distances, ice, moonlight. Because of this tactile richness, the poem never feels too abstract even though it puts across complex philosophical ideas.
The kernel of the poem, which reads like a miniature poem in itself, is the aphorism that is the fourth stanza:
Each of us came into being
Knowing who we are,
What we are supposed to do
But why do you try to hold back—
The sands, falling in the hourglass?
There are two ways of thinking about the significance of an individual life. One is the futile path of denying and resisting change and death, for fear that the self's evanescence makes life meaningless. The other is to recognize that change and death do not defeat the overall pattern of which each life is a unique part.
The speaker would like to communicate this comforting notion to those left on the other side, but there are limits on their ability to hear him. From their side of the veil, he appears "mute", "knowing yet unable." The next stanza reassures us that his condition is actually one of joy: "I am now timeless!/All times and in all futures/I am a universe of windows". Although we cannot fully experience this connection now ("I cannot be touched again"), he has faith that we will come to enlightenment someday, too ("I can see you outlined/Looking beyond what you know").
"Unbroken Awareness" stood out among critique submissions for its assured pacing, luminous imagery and wise insights. Clear without over-explaining, it is a good example of poetry that works as both spiritual message and enjoyable lyric.
Where could a poem like "Unbroken Awareness" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
National Poetry Competition
Postmark Deadline: October 31
Prestigious, competitive awards for poets aged 18+ from a leading UK-based poetry organization; top prize 5,000 pounds; online entries accepted
The Plough Prize
Entries must be received by March 31
Contest to raise funds for UK arts organization offers two prizes of 1,000 pounds for unpublished poems; 2007 judge is UK poet laureate Andrew Motion; enter by mail or online
Soul-Making Literary Competition
Postmark Deadline: November 30
Prizes of $100 for prizes for poetry, stories, prose poems, personal essays, humor, and literature for young adults; previously published works accepted
This poem and critique appeared in the October 2007 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Call Out of Exile
Come home!
I have not cast you off, my vagabond.
It is I who have borne you from your birth,
and to gray hairs I will carry you.
Why then must I seek you among foreign flocks,
and through caravans of imposters cry out your name?
Have you forgotten your dear Shepherd, my lamb,
or my Name, that you do not call upon Me?
Look up! Look up, my poor one! Where have you fallen?
I come wounded to bind you up, thirsty to refresh you.
Come in!
Don't be a stranger to your Father's feast. It I who host you,
I who crush the wheat and press the oil. It is I who mix my wines.
How long will you linger by half, little sister?
Here, I send out your brother with meat for your mind.
Open and taste! See the passage I make for you,
the ground I've leveled by the weight of my waiting?
Arise and come! Put on again your everyday jewels that blaze
with the light from my Hearth, and come with Me to the kitchen.
I have an apron there with your name on it.
Come here!
Have I held my peace too long, restrained Myself past the measure
of your freedom? You cup your will like a brazier for Me.
No more will your memories shame you, my little one,
nor fear alarm, nor doubt cry out, "Where is your God?".
One look at you, and the fury of my love is stirred up against them.
I make them tinder to kindle your sparkle,
and a sweet-smelling smoke to console you.
I am a Man of War for you, an Army of Love;
and I am the wakeful Governor of your peace.
Come closer!
How have I not noticed that gleam in your eye?
What numb thirst is sealed up in you against all taking-by-surprise,
that I may come and slake it? What delights concealed there
that I might relish, should you return the favor and I be taken too?
Stay with Me a moment in the parlor. Don't dart away
to peek at Me over your books and prayers.
Promises I whispered long ago into your secret ear
are kept here in this ivory box under the hidden stair
for just such a time as this. Open it!
the whole fruit from tender buds
poetry in foreign tongues
dancing lessons
banquet graces
the end from the beginning
Promises I made to you in a fit of love when you were young
now come to term and seek the light.
Will you join your poor Partner in the garden now
that He may keep his word to you? Let's dance!
Every move a metaphor—restrained, oblique—a gloved touch I keep in custody
till you awake and I can take you to the waters at the edge of light.
There forget the limits of desire when my glove has touched your craving
and you awake past day and into night.
Hold still, my love, hold still when you awake past day and into night.
Copyright 2007 by Karen Winterburn
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, Karen Winterburn's "Call Out of Exile", combines the form of a modern personal free-verse lyric with the tone and subject matter of a more ancient genre. Suitable for use in a contemporary church liturgy, the poem resembles Biblical writings such as the Psalms and the Song of Solomon, where God directly and intimately addresses human beings in poetry that is part prophetic summons, part tender seduction.
Like its scriptural antecedents, "Call Out of Exile" imagines God speaking in ways that are sometimes uncomfortably sensual ("forget the limits of desire when my glove has touched your craving") or colloquial ("I have an apron there with your name on it"). This mixing of high and low, I believe, is meant to challenge the reader's impulse to keep God on a pedestal, at a distance. As envisioned by this poem, God seeks relationship with us to such a radical extent that God is willing to come down to our level, risking impurity and foolishness. In so doing, the God of this poem prompts us to revalue those mundane experiences that we considered "unspiritual".
Winterburn plays it a little too safe for the first stanza of the poem, using standard imagery that we associate with Bible scenes. The poem picks up momentum halfway through the second stanza. Although the feast imagery is still rather standard for devotional poetry, a note of mystery and excitement creeps in with the phrase "I send out your brother with meat for your mind". Who is the brother? It could be Jesus (as the Shepherd language in stanza one suggests), a prophet, or a human companion who helps the reader on her spiritual journey. The brother/sister trope is also reminiscent of the Song of Songs, evoking an innocent intimacy. The alliteration in this stanza ("meat for your mind"; "weight of my waiting") enhances the poem's lyricism.
The poem's central theme is captured in the paradoxical line "Put on again your everyday jewels that blaze". We are royalty, in disguise even from ourselves. In exile, we have forgotten that our daily lives are clothed with God's ennobling love. We need to be reminded that the exile is only self-imposed: "I have not cast you off, my vagabond."
I'm still of two minds about the "apron" line. I understand in theory what it's supposed to be doing, namely bringing God down to a level of closeness and familiarity that will make the exiled listener feel comforted, not afraid. However, as the only modern image in the poem, it feels jarring, maybe too cutesy or flippant. I can't help picturing those novelty chefs' aprons with jokes on them, which doesn't feel right for a seduction scene. The stanza would work at least as well if it ended at "kitchen".
Winterburn's imagery really catches fire in the next two stanzas. The thrilling line "You cup your will like a brazier for Me" sounds like it should be in the Bible, perhaps in one of the prophets' visions. The texture of the lines "I make them tinder to kindle your sparkle,/and a sweet-smelling smoke to console you" perfectly fits their content, the first line light and crackling, the second soothing and low-toned. Winterburn lets the rhythms of her speech flow uninhibited at last, as in the line "What numb thirst is sealed up in you against all taking-by-surprise,/that I may come and slake it?" This passionate way of stringing words together reminds me of Gerard Manley Hopkins. "Every move a metaphor—restrained, oblique—a gloved touch I keep in custody". There is so much to enjoy in the sound and meaning of that one line.
The poem becomes quite erotic in the final stanza, yet always in keeping with the modesty and kindness of the Lover, who graciously restrains his great power so as to leave the hearer free to respond. This too is in keeping with Biblical passages where God is compared to weak or disadvantaged characters (a lamb, a cuckolded husband, a hen brooding over her chicks). God's willingness to assume such vulnerability demonstrates the depth of divine love.
This poem's genuine emotion and sensual directness made it meaningful to me, but I would have liked to see Winterburn take more risks with language and imagery, as the lines I singled out above show she is capable of doing. Sticking to familiar concepts may limit the poem's readership to people already inclined to accept its message. To have a wider impact, one needs to get past the skeptical reader's presumption that he has "seen it all" and knows what the author is going to say. This applies not only to religious poetry but to any ground that has been well-trodden by poets over the centuries, such as love poetry and nature poetry.
Where could a poem like "Call Out of Exile" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Bliss Carman Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: November 30
Canadian journal Prairie Fire offers C$1,250 for unpublished poems
Wild Violet Writing Contests
Postmark Deadline: November 30
Online quarterly journal offers $100 apiece for poetry and short fiction
Writer's Digest Poetry Awards
Postmark Deadline: December 20
National writers' magazine offers prizes up to $500 and good exposure for emerging writers; no simultaneous submissions
This poem and critique appeared in the November 2007 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Anne Boleyn
Alone
Standing at the palace window, scowling
Henry waits for news
Hidden from the sight of all
Who'd sneer and cheer the whore's death
The witch must die!
What courage, dignity she doth show
Her last walk slow across the green
Fat bumble bees drone, ravens caw, and peck the grass
A dragonfly flutters still-moist wings in warm air
Spectators talk in whispers, wait
Assembled 'round the scaffold
Its macabre trappings; the block
What say you, now, Anne?
Lost your tongue?
Ah! Mind not—soon 'twill be your head
Masked executioner from France
By God!
Sword not axe
Henry harkened her plea
Mercy prevailed
Muffled drumbeats match her footsteps
Close to scaffold she pauses,
Head held high, dark eyes fearful
With trembling hands
She clutches rosary close to breast
He waits for news
Oh! Anne, my Queen, he sighs
I loved you so
With discontent you plagued
Belaboured me
Your King
He conjured up an image of her face
No beauty this
Bold, small eyes, a mouth too wide
Parchment pale skin
No lowered eyes or gentle ways
A sly, sloe-eyed, mocking smile
So insolent—So arrogant
Mounts steps to platform, resolute and proud
Refuses kerchief binding for her eyes
Her long gown scatters straw
Across the wooden boards
Kneels close to block
In prayer
His face grows red
She shamed him much at Court
Sour bile of rage within him burns
As thoughts of whisperings 'bout wanton ways
Assail his seething mind
Blinded to the gardens, hedges, lawns
His blue eyes streak, like arrow leaving bow
Search beyond the line of mighty oaks
To Tower Bridge
And on to where the dingy, gloomy, old stone walls
Of London Tower wait
Suddenly, is heard the sonorous toll of bell;
St Peter ad Vincula
She hears soft footfalls from behind
The executioner draws close
Affright, she maunders
My neck is small; one rapid stroke will serve
To please My Lord, the King
He nods impatiently, and raises sword
That glints
In noonday sun
The great bell's tolling cease
Unable to contain his rage
His eyes alight with fire
Hal roars,
Madam,
You dared to cuckold me! Your King
As if in answer sound of cannon, loud and clear
Angrily roars back
Copyright 2007 by Babs Halton
Critique by Jendi Reiter
In this month's critique poem, "Anne Boleyn", Babs Halton sets herself the task of restoring dramatic tension to a story whose outcome and characters are well-known. She achieves this by zeroing in on the personal emotions and sensations of the characters in the present moment, allowing the reader's imagination to fill in the familiar historical context.
Most of us who know British history carry in our minds the famous Holbein portraits of Henry VIII: a ruthless, sensual figure whose distance from us is reinforced not only by his sumptuous old-fashioned costume but by his aggressively regal demeanor. Such a defense against intimacy invites breaching by the creative storyteller. Halton gives us a plausible glimpse into the secret thoughts of a man who can command life and death, but not his own heart. He is human after all, as we hoped.
The poem's first line, "Alone", sums up what Halton is telling us about Henry's essential dilemma. Love (albeit a selfish, infatuated version of it) made him more vulnerable than it was safe for a king to be, or so he thought. Suspicion, pride, and violence present themselves as the path of true strength, yet in the end the cannon signaling Anne's death gets the last word, an unwelcome reminder that there are some powers even the king cannot intimidate.
Halton builds tension by having the action occur in slow-motion, focusing with painful clarity on each physical step of Anne's progress toward the block. The beauty and tranquility of nature add tragic irony: "Fat bumble bees drone, ravens caw, and peck the grass/A dragonfly flutters still-moist wings in warm air". These fine observations mimic how the mind of a person in danger can magnify small irrelevant details of her surroundings in order to avoid comprehending the main threat.
The style of the poem occupies the intriguing territory between formal and free verse, an unobtrusive way to make the poem sound natural to modern ears while retaining the flavor of the historical period. The iambic beat is strong throughout, yet the varied line lengths convince the eye that this is free verse. The short lines without end-punctuation contribute to the stream-of-consciousness sensation that brings the poem to life.
I nearly always advise writers to steer clear of thee's and thou's, and their associated verb endings, like "hath" and "doth". Hardly anyone now knows the correct way to use these constructions, and therefore they get interspersed at random in a poem primarily written in modern English. Halton's single "doth" is a minor speed-bump in the flow of the poem, but the problem is worth noting because haphazard thee-thou usage derails so many emerging writers.
Her other old-fashioned phrases worked more naturally as approximations of how the characters would think and speak: "Affright, she maunders..." or "Whisperings 'bout wanton ways". Too much of this sort of language can seem precious, so it is a technique to use sparingly, as Halton has done here.
I found this sequence particularly striking: "Blinded to the gardens, hedges, lawns/His blue eyes streak, like arrow leaving bow/Search beyond the line of mighty oaks/To Tower Bridge". The visual is so important in this poem because all communication between the two main characters must now be indirect: internal monologue, recollected conversation, or clues to the other's actions inferred from surrounding sights and sounds. This may be why, as I entered into the events of the poem, it felt like they were unfolding in an unnatural silence, even though there are sounds mentioned throughout. The only directly observed conversation is Anne's last words to the executioner, and this is a one-sided exchange because he only replies with a silent nod. Is she really even speaking to him, or is he just another indirect vehicle for her final effort to reach out to Henry? "My neck is small; one rapid stroke will serve/To please My Lord, the King". Her thoughts turn toward him, inescapably, as his toward her, yet they cannot cross the gulf between them.
Admirers of this poem may enjoy Maxwell Anderson's verse-dramas "Elizabeth the Queen" (1930) and "Anne of the Thousand Days" (1948).
Where could a poem like "Anne Boleyn" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Wigtown Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by January 25
Prizes up to 1,500 pounds for unpublished poems, plus award ceremony in Wigtown, "Scotland's National Book Town"; no simultaneous submissions
Fish International Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by March 31; don't enter before January 1
Irish independent publisher offers prizes up to 1,000 euros and reading at West Cork literary festival in this contest for unpublished poems; online entry only
This poem and critique appeared in the December 2007 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Entropy Road
time slips from great to good or, from terrible to wors'ning
down entropic road we pay our toll
paved start toward never ending
that god, what god? the mirror asks, tone optimistic, while condescending
the urge to organize is quite strong
make amends, then share the booty's blending
time slips from me to us or, from you and i to loving
our valentine then seeks its mate
goes the prolific downward sending
that god, what god? the reflection quests, while the last winter sno's still clinging
that holonic symbol, our family crest
wears the blood from each upbringing
the urge to love is as strong to hate, to blend, then split the winnings
our junior is the sum of both
but adds "new" moment's vendings
time drives us from then to now, its final destination reaching
tho next can never touch our lips
it's law, relatively speaking
that god, what god? the question begs, and who should i tell him's asking?
an urge to love and proliferate...
life's sentence, and time's unmasking
Copyright 2008 by Thom Adams
Critique by Jendi Reiter
The form of this month's provocative poem, "Entropy Road", embodies its theme of order struggling to remain distinct from chaos. The headlong rush of syllables in the longer lines and the fragmentary, zigzag presentation of the poem's argument give the poem a restless energy. Meanwhile, the "-ing" rhymes repeating in the first and third lines of every stanza, the refrain "that god, what god?" and the semi-regular meter attempt to corral that energy within a poetic framework.
Making the rhyming words present participles (verb forms, or nouns derived from them, ending in "-ing") was an inspired choice. These words describe action in progress. Just as the stability that the narrator seeks is always a moving target, the concepts on which he depends to convey this argument will not stay put. Each rhyming line also ends on an unstressed syllable, which gives the poem an open-ended, unfinished cadence.
Entropy, of course, refers to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which basically states that the energy levels in an isolated system will tend toward equilibrium. Entropy has sometimes been described as a measurement of the disorder or randomness within a system. In the poem, as in popular usage, it symbolizes universal mortality and dissolution. If evolution drives organic life to ever-higher levels of self-organizing complexity, entropy is the opposite force, that which pulls down and breaks apart complex systems into nature's simplest building blocks. It means that all material energy will ultimately spend itself and be unrecoverable.
As self-aware components of this dying system, how can we find the motivation to go on living, loving, procreating, and planning for the future? Which will win, our philosophical sense of futility or the inward compulsion to survive and create?
Perhaps no one wrote about entropy in this sense more powerfully than the 20th-century British poet Philip Larkin. A sample poem can be found here.
Larkin generally settles the question on the side of death, but Adams disagrees: "the urge to love is as strong to hate". The life force has a fighting chance. Yet it is hampered by our inability to articulate a reason for hope. "that god, what god? the mirror asks, tone optimistic, while condescending". Existentialist philosophers looked to the self to create meaning in a universe made absurd by death's finality. The poem suggests that this answer is insufficient. The individual is merely part of the closed entropic system. He cannot inject it with new energy to reverse its decay.
There are positive, hopeful moments in "Entropy Road" but they come from outside philosophy and science. Whatever the intellect may say, instinct confirms that human connection and creativity are not futile. "time slips from me to us or, from you and i to loving/our valentine then seeks its mate/goes the prolific downward sending". The opaque last phrase may have been chosen mainly to fit the rhyme scheme, but its vagueness felicitously makes it more symbolic than a specific description would have been. It called to my mind both the release of seed in copulation and the movement of the child through the birth canal, but other associations are possible, such as rains watering the earth to bring forth crops, or the descent of angels.
The birth of a child does seem like a miraculous creation ex nihilo, the opposite of entropy. First there were two, now there are three. "Holonic" is a word coined by 20th-century philosopher Arthur Koestler to express the observation that entities in biological and social systems are always interdependent, never completely self-sufficient units. This law of interconnection and symbiosis contrasts with entropy's pull toward disconnection and stasis.
"our junior is the sum of both/but adds 'new' moment's vendings". Is "new" in quotes because the narrator's intellectual side reminds him that this is not a real solution to the problem? On the human scale, parenthood may feel like a triumph over mortality, but on the level of the cosmos, it does not stave off the decay of the whole system, looked at in purely materialistic terms.
The poem ends by leaving the question open, a humility that rings true. Adams does not claim to decide whether the emotional or the scientific perspective on the human condition is correct. He suggests that it is really a question about the nature of the self, or perhaps its very existence. "that god, what god? the question begs, and who should i tell him's asking?/an urge to love and proliferate..."
If pressed to define the self, Adams would emphasize the impulse to love and create, however blind that impulse is, over the scientific description of the individual as a collection of atoms arranged in a temporary order. He chooses the insider's perspective over the outsider's, life as it feels to us, rather than life as the scientists say it is. (After all, they too are part of the flawed system, not truly above it.) Yet the final line, "life's sentence, and time's unmasking", expresses the fear that some trans-human perspective would prove us wrong; the joke of the universe is on us, after all. The dilemma brings us to the limits of reason, where some have found faith, and others merely the willpower to live without it.
Where could a poem like "Entropy Road" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Kent & Sussex Open Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by January 31
British literary society offers prizes up to 700 pounds for unpublished poems by authors aged 16+; fees in UK currency only
Strokestown International Poetry Competitions
Postmark Deadline: January 31
Irish literary festival offers prizes up to 4,000 euros for unpublished poems in English, Irish or Scottish Gaelic languages
Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Award
Entries must be received by February 12
Free contest from ICON, the student literary journal of Kent State University's Trumbull Campus, offers $100 for unpublished poems, any length
Oregon State Poetry Association Contests
Deadlines vary
Twice-yearly contest offers prizes up to $100 in categories including traditional verse, humor, open theme
This poem and critique appeared in the January 2008 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
The Fox Woman
She lives in the urban park, the fox,
The little vixen, with no shelter for her head
Under the sooty trees, in the scraggy grass,
The daily roar of a great city in her ears,
And the shouting of boys flinging cans in the dark.
She feeds from the boxes discarded around, finds
Scraps of food, laps pink-tongued from puddles,
And sleeps curled up, thick tail over her nose,
Her coat ruffled by wind and wet in the dark,
At the side of a bench with her old name carved.
Think fox, and you think thick red fur, bright eyes,
But she is dull and matted, and somewhere she knows
That once she was loved, but it comes and goes.
At times she feels that her hair was long and groomed,
That her eyes, once blue, shone from out a smooth white face,
That her teeth, now stale-breathed fangs, were even,
And smiled at crowds as she swanned serene.
But her foxy brain blurs and the memories fade,
Glimmers come seldom as she sinks with age.
What was it that passed, in a cast-off life,
That caused her to sink and die, fighting for breath
In the bright waters of a far-off land?
She remembers being pushed and thrown through stars
From across the world on the racing jet stream,
Impelled tumbling and breathless, to find her home,
Falling into this forlorn beast with the russet fur,
Hair the same shade as hers. They set this bench
As memorial for a dead girl, her friends,
And here she will live until one morning,
One of too many mornings of winter chill
Will leave her stiff and gone, again.
Davies says of the origin of this poem: "I read a short article in The Sunday Times about a young woman, a minor celebrity, who died in a boating accident in South America on holiday. Her friends erected a bench in the park opposite her home as a memorial, and suddenly a little vixen has taken up residence next to the bench. Could it be?"
Copyright 2008 by Liz Davies
Critique by Jendi Reiter
The human being who is also an animal figures prominently in fairy tales and ghost stories worldwide. Male shape-shifters are often princes in disguise, needing a woman's civilizing love to scrub off their beast nature. Animal-women tend to appear more seductive or sinister, as in the legend of the Selkie, or Korean folktales of fox-demons disguised as beautiful girls. Mystery both allures and frightens us. One way to express our anxieties about the elusive, emotional feminine is to depict a woman who is literally a fox, a cat or a bird—a stealthy predator yet also a fragile, delicate creature compared to man.
Like a small animal, a woman is vulnerable to falling through the cracks of urban life, as Liz Davies' poem "The Fox Woman" illustrates. Whereas the image of a man going feral suggests aggression and inspires fear, a woman in the same plight can inspire the reader's sympathy, even admiration for her ruined beauty.
Davies' successful strategy in this poem is to first build our rapport with the main character as a fox, letting us feel what she feels, through direct sensory description without commentary. We barely register the shift from a naturalistic depiction to an anthropomorphized one ("somewhere she knows/That once she was loved, but it comes and goes") because we have already made the imaginative leap of seeing the world through a fox's eyes.
This in turn generates empathy for the woman for whom the fox is a metaphor, the one with matted hair and gaps in her memory, who sleeps on park benches. She is not one of us humans, so we walk past her, or worse ("the shouting of boys flinging cans in the dark"). But an animal consciousness is easier to fall into than we'd like to admit; we've done it just by reading this poem.
Davies suggests that the hardscrabble little fox may be the spirit of a young woman who suffered a premature accidental death. Here, the kinship of human and animal speaks to our common vulnerability to forces we cannot comprehend. The fox is making her way through a harsh city environment that is not designed for her, from which she snatches crumbs of sustenance, and whose larger patterns her brain is not equipped to perceive. Is that really so different from how human beings feel, in the face of the mysteries of life and death?
Superimposed on the image of the fox is the alternate future of this unnamed "minor celebrity". One can picture her as an old woman, losing her grasp on the glittering memories that make up her identity: "At times she feels that her hair was long and groomed,/That her eyes, once blue, shone from out a smooth white face".
Her fate, whichever way it plays out, seems unfair. She was a beautiful girl, loved by her friends: why has she been reborn as a vagrant animal? Is there a message that she has been sent back to communicate—perhaps the message of compassion for derelict creatures as well as glamorous ones? This beautiful, thought-provoking poem leaves the answer shrouded in mystery, perhaps to be worked out in the fox-woman's next reincarnation.
Readers interested in comparing tales of animal shape-shifters from many cultures will enjoy the complete searchable text of Andrew Lang's classic Fairy Books anthologies, available here.
Where could a poem like "The Fox Woman" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
TallGrass Writers' Guild Poetry & Prose Contest
Postmark Deadline: February 28
$500 apiece for poetry and prose (stories and essays compete together) plus Outrider Press anthology publication; 2008 theme is "Wild Things"; maximum 28 lines per poem
Writecorner Press Annual Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: February 28
Writers' resource site offers top prize of $500 and online publication for poems up to 40 lines
Poetry International Prize
Online Submissions Deadline: April 30
Literary journal of San Diego State University offers $1,000 for unpublished poems
Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: March 17
Prestigious $1,000 award for unpublished poems; read past winners online
This poem and critique appeared in the February 2008 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Flood Sacrifice
He opened a window,
the cupola's shutter,
sole whimsy to this massive
gopher-wood coffin of a boat.
No mast, no steering possible
to where the world
swirled to an end.
Not time for the dove launch,
the grooves on the ladder's top
rung marked day thirty of
the promised Forty.
A Sound, not rain, spliced
the drifting—
a faint rhythm, a drumbeat ap-
proaching—his own
heartbeat? De-
moralized
panic?
He stretched further,
listing into the celestial river,
beard channeling danger for the remnant below.
Mantle saturated,
rivulets coursed
shoulder to sandal.
The cadence intensified,
steaming reminder of
his only world—
Clamminess of a last chance.
Would that his mantle
billow and hover
above the syncopated waves,
above the constant whump of
outside objects, all
in stages of decay—
rudder and lower planks,
sounding boards of wasted echoes!
Between flashes of lightning
the reckoning:
an ax-shaped image descending.
A beak, a giant parrot's beak?
No, an unearthly outline of a
mouth from which the
drumroll now roared—
overpowering everything.
What to take in,
impossible to tune out,
the pitch polarized his heartbeat—
lethal synchronicity.
What life after this massacre—
were the Nephilim to colonize
the earth after all?
Would the Adamic race
now serve a new kind of creator
whose thirst for
death impaled that
for life?
What sacrifice could ever appease
such a god, a vortex not
even the elements could defy?
***
Some one would have to be offered—
not the beasts.
Replenishing the earth was their birthright;
the fulcrum of flora and fauna
beyond the children's ken.
Undiluted human blood could
distill this cesspool of death,
offer the first fertilizer.
Were the Mother, the Garden, the vineyards
never to return?
What sin had turned the God
he had willingly, fearfully worshipped to this?
*** He didn't know. ***
God had picked him,
relatively righteous.
His own propagation completed,
the couples collected,
he'd become the patriarch of orderly patience,
only to be tortured in
this eternal wet night by
guilt?
Those last desperate souls...
pleading had replaced the jeers:
Ropes!
Seasick, he
opened his palms.
Death roiled about him—
how to cajole an unknowable god?
How to invite infinity, eternity
inside to witness the beauty of pregnancy,
to join baby rodent games,
bird song?
The drumming subsided,
he knew what he would do—
unfathomable conviction.
Back down the ladder,
grope in the darkness,
grip the unnamed
stone used only for
cutting the cords of mammals
and for grafting the
vine.
His feet had sunk into
velvet soil for
the last time.
Before raising the stone to his neck, he cried out,
You will teach your children how to play!
Copyright 2008 by Janice Lamberg
Critique by Jendi Reiter
In this month's critique poem, "Flood Sacrifice", Janice Lamberg dramatizes the story of Noah, with a provocative new ending that connects this episode to later Biblical stories of sacrifice, death and rebirth. In her retelling, Noah feels that he has to make the case for the preciousness of earth's creatures, in the face of God's destructive wrath. Lamberg enriches her story with tactile details that demonstrate why this world is to be cherished, such as the "velvet soil" in the closing lines.
Like Moses pleading with God after the Israelites turn to idol worship, the protagonist of "Flood Sacrifice" is willing to back up his plea for God's mercy by offering his very life in exchange. For Christians, this theme recurs most dramatically in the story of Jesus' death and resurrection. The poem's title echoes the familiar phrase "blood sacrifice", often used to refer to the atonement.
From the very beginning of the poem, the reader is convinced that this is a real person in a real place. It is so believable that the ark would have a small touch of "whimsy" to relieve the fear and boredom of a long confinement on a journey into the unknown, and that the inhabitants would mark the days like prisoners scratching grooves on a wall.
Noah is immersed in a chaos of sensations ("the constant whump of outside objects", "sounding boards of wasted echoes"), attempting to cling to his faith in a merciful God when all he can see around him is danger and disorder. These lines were especially vivid: "The cadence intensified,/steaming reminder of/his only world—/Clamminess of a last chance" and "Between flashes of lightning/the reckoning:/an ax-shaped image descending./A beak, a giant parrot's beak?"
We feel how overpowering is the evidence of his senses, which tells him of doom, meaninglessness, confusion. Yet he fights despair with other sensory memories: "How to invite infinity, eternity/inside to witness the beauty of pregnancy,/to join baby rodent games,/bird song?" This reminded me of a common pattern in the Psalms where the speaker begins by lamenting his misfortunes and his feeling that God is absent, then revives his flagging faith by recollecting how God has blessed His people in the past.
"Flood Sacrifice" has many eloquent lines that made this poem stand out among critique submissions. However, there were places where the line breaks didn't match the cadence of the phrases, and interrupted the flow of the poem. I'm generally not a fan of breaking a line on weak words like "a" and "the" (e.g. "unearthly outline of a/mouth from which the/drumroll now roared"). While this does highlight the important word at the beginning of the next line, it does so at the expense of making the line break seem arbitrary (in ordinary speech, one would not pause after "a"), which suggests that the author is having trouble maintaining a poetic voice as distinct from prose. A more natural cadence would follow from putting the breaks after "mouth" (or "of") and "drumroll". Similarly, I would have made "for grafting the/vine" all one line.
By contrast, elsewhere Lamberg more effectively uses very short lines for emphasis: "this eternal wet night by/guilt" and "whose thirst for/death impaled that for/life". Prepositions have more forward momentum to carry the reader to the next line; for me, "a" and "the" feel orphaned without their nouns.
How are we to interpret Noah's final outcry, "You will teach your children how to play"? We expect this sentence to end in "pray", a sufficiently serious remedy for a sin great enough to warrant the destruction of humankind. Surely this is no time for playing around. But let's think this through... People who can no longer play are those who take themselves too seriously, wanting to seem too sophisticated to look at God's creation with childlike wonder. Or they are ashamed and self-conscious, like Adam and Eve after they acquired the forbidden knowledge of their nakedness. Noah's dream is that humanity will once again reflect back God's spontaneous, creative spirit, and remind Him—"cajole" Him—to love us.
Where could a poem like "Flood Sacrifice" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Fish International Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by March 31
Irish independent publisher offers prizes up to 1,000 euros and reading at West Cork literary festival; enter and pay online only
Dancing Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: May 15
Prizes up to $100 plus opportunity to have your poem presented as an interpretive dance at festival in San Francisco
This poem and critique appeared in the March 2008 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
The Mirror
Do you see gazelles pronking up and down like snow flakes falling to the ground
Or do you see the ocean dark and blue
Do you see me on a crystal wave floating out to sea
Or does the tide roll your heart along the ocean floor
My tears for you will never lie
Even though your eyes could never see the tears you had inside for me
You told me life was a balancing game and that we hold the balance
You rode your stallion in the rain
You rode him all through the night
You rode him never letting go for that stallion loved you so
Do you see the meadow in the morning sun
Golden leaves lying on the ground parting left and right like waves rolling out to sea
A faded shadow in a gilded frame trotting faster than before
Towards the scent he knows so well
The reins that hold him tight are now in his sight
Her hand lifting into the air
Golden honey dripping on her finger tips
Dancing drops of golden rain so sweet surround his tongue again
This the angels from above only give for two to share
For love and trust are just skin deep this moment for mortals not to keep
Black stallion's mane waving in the breeze balancing on his knees
Her hand once by her side striking at the fore
Spooked forever more
Galloping into the night
Following shadows cast by stars above forever now in search of love
Never to return again
But you'll hear him in the wind and taste him in the rain
And in the dark of every night you'll see the stars that are his tears
For he will love you for a thousand years
Copyright 2008 by Neville Klaric
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, Neville Klaric's "The Mirror", uses a free-flowing modern verse form to freshen its traditional romantic sentiments and imagery. Energetic as the dream-stallion who embodies the passion of the protagonists, the poem's momentum is driven by internal rhymes and the syncopation of longer and shorter lines. However, inconsistent use of pronouns caused the occasional stumble for this reader, as the poem appears to shift from an "I/You" to a "He/She" perspective without making it clear whether these are the same characters.
The unrequited love of the original speaker is enigmatically interwoven with another story of a woman and a creature who appears to be a stallion, but actually represents Romantic Love itself—fleeting, ecstatic, wounded yet made sublime by loss. ("For love and trust are just skin deep this moment for mortals not to keep.") The beloved must disappear as a mortal individual in order to be transfigured into an immortal ideal, as described in the last four lines of the poem.
This understanding of romance harks back to the medieval tradition of courtly love, in which unconsummated passion for an unattainable Lady was sublimated into artistic expressions of devotion. This state of refined frustration was considered nobler than an ordinary coupling between two individuals. (Denis de Rougemont's Love in the Western World is in my view a matchless history of this idea as well as a critique of its impact on our present culture. For a good summary of the book, click here.)
At first I wondered whether this poem should be called "The Mirror", as this initial image was not always well-integrated into the poem's storyline. However, the title points to the shadow side of romantic love, which is its narcissism. One could argue that the courtly lover actually worships a construction of his own mind, to the point where genuine intimacy with the other person becomes an impediment to the fantasy. W.H. Auden explored this dilemma in his poem "Alone", which begins:
Each lover has a theory of his own
About the difference between the ache
Of being with his love, and being alone:
Why what, when dreaming, is dear flesh and bone
That really stirs the senses, when awake,
Appears a simulacrum of his own.
With this in mind, we can see why the speaker of the poem invites his lover to "look into the mirror" as the first step toward rekindling their romance. He seems to be inviting her to know herself, yet he begins with images that are not really "about" her at all, the gazelles and the ocean. Perhaps he is saying that our heart's deep response to natural beauty is akin to the impulse behind romantic love, and that reawakening the former passion can revive the latter as well.
This argument culminates in the fusion of nature, art and the erotic in the figure of the stallion, who appears to move seamlessly between the realms of imagination and reality. Coming in the middle of the breathless description of the woman and her stallion-lover galloping through golden leaves, the line "A faded shadow in a gilded frame trotting faster than before" adds a surprising twist. This creature, so physically present a moment ago, is seen from another perspective as a distant ideal, a figure in a painting come magically to life, or passing like Alice "through the looking-glass" from one world into another. Again, this subtly raises the question of whether romantic love is more like looking in the mirror than looking outward at the beloved.
About halfway through, the poem undergoes a pronoun-shift that I find confusing, starting with the lines "Her hand lifting into the air/Golden honey dripping on her finger tips/Dancing drops of golden rain so sweet surround his tongue again". From the context, it seems likely that we are still talking about the woman who loves the stallion, but since she is also the narrator's beloved, it's not clear whether the "he" in this episode is the narrator or the horse.
The line "Black stallion's mane waving in the breeze balancing on his knees" further complicates the picture. "Waving in the breeze" suggests that the horse is galloping, so he could not be balancing on his (the horse's) knees. Is it then the narrator who is balancing, as a rider? The position sounds physically awkward even so. I suspect that the phrase about "knees" was put in for the sake of the rhyme, and should either be taken out or set off from the preceding phrase with some connecting words to show that these are two different moments and/or characters.
At the end, the speaker goes back to addressing the woman as "you", which perhaps the author meant to do all along. I would recommend making the usage consistent throughout: "Your hand lifting into the air" and so on. At this point I had to wonder whether the narrator himself was even necessary to the story, because he never reappears after the line "You told me life was a balancing game". After that, it becomes solely the love story of the woman and the stallion. Ultimately I decided that I liked the back-story of the speaker's own lost love because it gives the reader a personal, emotional entry point into the other story—a reason to care about the woman, and to believe she is a real person rather than a stock character in a romantic poem.
However, this frame is still missing one of its sides, in my opinion. I wouldn't want to dilute the power of the ending by adding new lines there; the poem should end on its main theme, not its subplot. A good transition point to add new material would be after "...for mortals not to keep". Here, a line or two could be inserted to complete the speaker's own story. What is he trying to tell her about their relationship by reminding her of this other love in her life? What insight into his situation does he take away from the stallion's story of loss and transformation? "The Mirror" needs one more step in its argument to reach a unified resolution for the profound themes its beautiful imagery sets in motion.
Where could a poem like "The Mirror" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Heart Poetry Award
Postmark Deadlines: April 30, June 30
Nostalgia Press offers $500 prize for "insightful, immersing" free verse
Dancing Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: May 15
Artists Embassy International offers prizes up to $100 plus opportunity to have your poem presented as an interpretive dance at festival in San Francisco
Writer's Digest Annual Writing Competition
Postmark Deadline: May 15
Competitive award for unpublished poetry, fiction and essays; entries in all genres compete for top prize ($3,000 and trip to NYC to meet editors and agents), plus there are prizes up to $1,000 in each genre
This poem and critique appeared in the April 2008 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Plodding Through His Own Death
At eight-and-twenty,
When the immunity eaters—
The weird invisible troop—
Encroached his every marrow,
He was sentenced to sleep and wake alone.
So the immunity eaters
With their shapeless hunger,
Catalysed by Loneliness,
Won all the seats
In the spouts beneath his porous skin.
His shadow, his tears, his paper...and his pen
Became his only kin.
Like a house
That cries for renovation
Or fresh paint—
Unfit for habitation,
Repelling population.
He suffered unforgiving separation.
A desert-isle, bound by moats
Dug by opprobrious disdain,
Inaccessible to carers' boats
Like the iceless morgue.
His senses, all,
Daily dined on emptiness
In isolation's cask.
His tears could not atone.
Captive in varied briers of scorns,
His life bled, leaving behind a convoluted trail,
Like earthworm that crawls
Upon the salty slush
With loneliness as chaperone.
Loneliness rode all his nerves.
His cheeks got profaned with brackish streams.
His eyes locked in the ridges of sour ecstasies,
And mirrored a lost battle.
His heart cried this woe I cannot bear!
Like a wounded snake
That inflicts its fatal wounds
With its lethal fangs,
He pierced his wounded, lonely self with grief.
Life leaked out
In hours, minutes, seconds...
Like cherry trampled underfoot bleeding,
Writing his epilogue....
He dragged and dragged and dragged,
But when he got to thirty-and-one
Then plodded through his own death,
His head never turning sideways or back.
He left behind his breathless frame as proof
Like a punctured tyre that has given up its breath
To let them know that they are
As guilty as the HIV-AIDS they accused.
Since they deprived him
of what to hold or lean upon.
As they look at him
With clinical hands
Cushioned in pockets full of sneer.
Copyright 2008 by Emmanuel Samson
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem comes to us from Nigerian poet Emmanuel Samson, who writes with compassion and prophetic anger about how social stigma compounds the physical suffering of HIV/AIDS patients. "Plodding Through His Own Death" has political force behind it, yet does not come across as preachy or shrill, because Samson keeps the focus on the protagonist as a real person whose pain we feel.
Another temptation in poems about social issues is to fall into journalistic, literal patterns of speech, which Samson wisely sidesteps from the very beginning with the words "At eight-and-twenty". This elaborate, old-fashioned way of stating someone's age can be used to add gravitas and poignancy to a poem about youth: think of A.E. Housman's "When I was one-and-twenty" or François Villon's "Le Testament" ("En l'an de mon trentiesme aage"/"In the thirtieth year of my age"). Here, it signals that the author will take an epic, lyrical approach to his subject, not a flat and factual one.
The opening stanza is tightly paced and holds the reader's attention with original imagery: "When the immunity eaters—/The weird invisible troop—/Encroached his every marrow,/He was sentenced to sleep and wake alone." The combination of enforced solitude (with some connotations of loss of sexual intimacy) and "immunity eaters" suggests that this is a poem about HIV, which is confirmed in the penultimate stanza. Rather than mention the disease by name at the outset, and risk calling up whatever clichéd or hostile thoughts we may associate with it, Samson brings us directly into the experience of the sick person, breaking down our ability to dismiss him with a stereotype.
In this poem, Samson occasionally repeats the same image or phrase too many times within a short period. I found this most problematic in the stanza beginning "Like a wounded snake", which uses "wound" three times in four lines. The rhymes "habitation/population/separation" felt too sing-song; one or two of those lines could be cut without losing the meaning. Similarly, to end a stanza "with loneliness as chaperone" and immediately follow with "Loneliness rode all his nerves" risks diluting the impact of a word that has already appeared once before. I would end the preceding stanza at "salty slush", since the image of the chaperone somewhat mixes the metaphor—not a fatal error in a poem this surreal, but still a technique to be used guardedly so as not to give the impression that the author's thoughts are muddled.
There is a fine line between controlled, intense weirdness and an overwritten poem that throws in too many powerful but unrelated images. Most of the time, Samson's wording is so interesting that I am willing to suspend disbelief, carried along by the emotional impact of the sensations he describes. Since "Plodding Through His Own Death" is about the disintegration of a man's body as well as his social identity, this disjointed style generally enhances the meaning.
For instance, when he says the immunity eaters "Won all the seats/In the spouts beneath his porous skin", we're switching from the metaphor of HIV as invading troops to the metaphor of a parliamentary election, with the unrelated image of "spouts" thrown in for good measure. But it works for me because it's such a creative comparison. Samson is tossing off multiple variations on a theme: AIDS is like being invaded by invisible soldiers, and like a hostile government taking power, and like an abandoned house, and like a lowly, wounded earthworm. It's as if he will never run out of ways to restate this wrongness because it is so immense, so impossible to get one's mind around.
Whereas a one-sided focus on the protagonist's passive suffering would have dragged, the poem remains dynamic by cutting back and forth between different perspectives. The sick man maintains dignity and agency by writing ("His shadow, his tears, his paper...and his pen/Became his only kin"), and at one point speaks aloud ("His heart cried this woe I cannot bear!") rather than being merely spoken about. Samson wants to show that one of the patient's worst afflictions is this transformation from a feeling subject into an object for others to discuss or shun. Thus, at the end of the poem, he widens his lens to scrutinize the community that abandoned the dead man.
The content of the final lines is exactly right, lending urgency and relevance to the dying man's story. This poem hopes to stir our emotions, not for entertainment value or self-flattering sentimentality, but to drive home our responsibility to the sick and marginalized. The ending would be stronger, though, if Samson smoothed out some grammatical bumps in the road. "Deprived him of what to hold" does not sound like standard English. Perhaps he could rephrase it as "Deprived him of all he might hold".
Also, it might be best not to end on an image as confusing as "Pockets full of sneer". I don't think of a sneer as concrete enough to be held in a pocket; it is more associated with the face than the hands. "Sneer" is a good strong word to end on, in terms of sound and meaning, inspiring an instinctive recoil. I'd advise replacing "pockets" with another word that has a more reasonable connection to facial expressions, although on the other hand, the image of "clinical hands/cushioned in pockets" concisely indicts the heartless medical establishment. At the least, I would change it to "sneers" because "full of" implies either a plural of discrete objects or a substance that fills space amorphously (e.g. water, mud, noise).
Despite a few rough spots, "Plodding Through His Own Death" struck me as a memorable, creative poem that will cause honest readers to think twice about their role in perpetuating the stigma of HIV/AIDS.
Where could a poem like "Plodding Through His Own Death" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Poetry London Competition
Entries must be received by June 2
Poetry London magazine offers 1,000 pounds and publication; postal mail, UK cheques only
Bellevue Literary Review Prizes
Postmark Deadline: August 1
New York University literary journal offers competitive award of $1,000 apiece for poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction on themes of health, healing, illness, the mind, and the body
This poem and critique appeared in the May 2008 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
It’s Not About Sharks
"Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of God."
—Jim Morrison
It's about sharks and how there was no warning,
No lifeguard's whistle,
No dorsal fin sailing horizontal to the beach,
No time to decide between flight or fight,
Only sink or swim.
It's about trust and finally feeling safe enough
To lay back and float on the waves,
Eyes closed under the sun's watchful gaze,
Arms extended outward like an aquatic crucifixion.
It's about pain, fear and the heart-stopping shock
Of being dragged down, pulled under,
Where no one can see you struggle or hear your screams.
Your mouth fills with water with each "why?" and "what?"
To a force you cannot yet see.
It's about sharks and what they take from you,
The loss of faith as you remember
The moment before, how sure you were
That the warmth on your face was the smile of God
And the breeze his breath on your skin.
It's about isolation and struggling to survive.
It's the blank gray face, the cold dead eyes
That leave you, bleeding out,
To fight the pain, the undertow and the shock;
To live, if you dare.
It's about sharks and what they leave you with:
A fear of a place you once loved,
Phantom pains that haunt you years later,
An artificial limb that will never feel like your own,
Prosthetic toes that cannot wiggle in the sand.
It's about sadness, madness and the loss of God.
It's about things that can never be retrieved
Even if the fishy guts were split open.
It's about my life and all that was taken from me
On these shores.
And no, it's not really about sharks at all.
Copyright 2008 by Renee Palmer
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Renee Palmer's "It's Not About Sharks" uses her literal subject, a shark attack, as a metaphor for another trauma that is never defined. This indirection gives the poem its universal resonance.
Experiences too terrible to be spoken about find expression in dream symbolism, sensory memories stripped of context, or sublimation into a work of art. This last strategy contains the emotions within a less charged set of facts so they can be viewed apart from the wounded self. Trauma overwhelms our consciousness, cutting off awareness of past and future, and with them the hope of experiencing anything other than the painful feelings of the moment. The healing process can start with the mere act of expanding one's field of vision to include a storyline other than the autobiographical.
Because indirection and metaphor are well-known ways of talking about trauma, the tension between Palmer's title "It's Not About Sharks" and her refusal to talk about anything but sharks convinces the reader that the unnamed event was real and significant. It also leaves a space open for the reader to identify the "shark attack" with an experience in her own life.
This type of opening is one of the main reasons we need poetry. The literal surface of events can distract us from their inner truth. "This is a piece about rape," we might say, or "a piece about losing a beloved parent," and be deceived that we have understood the thing described, that we have exhausted its meaning and can move on. This is especially true if the subject is familiar from other literary or news treatments.
Instead of selecting such an overdetermined narrative, Palmer bypasses explanation and submerges us in the sensations of a scene that cannot help but make our hearts race: the too-placid day, the caressing waters, the benevolent gaze of the sun. We know from the movies that someone is in for a bad shock. Somehow, that predictability doesn't deprive the set-up of its power to lure us in. If anything, it affects us all the more, because we all go around with some half-suppressed fear that any tranquility we've secured in our lives is vulnerable to disruption at a moment's notice.
Palmer's style is straightforward, without a lot of technical complexity, but always seasoned with strong images that maintain the poetic tone. Among the strongest lines were the "aquatic crucifixion" and "the blank gray face, the cold dead eyes/That leave you, bleeding out". In the latter sentence, we confront the alien ruthlessness of the shark, who has transmitted its deathly pallor to the victim "bleeding out", so that her appearance is now defined by the attack. The replacement of her real leg with a prosthetic continues this negative transformation, an alienation from the self, in the same way that the trauma retrospectively leaches the warmth from memories of the place she once loved.
If Palmer was looking to condense this poem, she might consider taking out a couple of lines that verge on over-explaining. They're not jarring, but neither are they strictly necessary. Some candidates are "It's about isolation and struggling to survive" and "An artificial limb that will never feel like your own".
"It's Not About Sharks" is a vivid poem that will resonate with many people's experience. Because of its simple narrative style and direct emotional appeal, a poem like this would probably fare better if submitted to general-audience magazines and contests run by local poetry societies, rather than the university-affiliated journals.
Where could a poem like "It's Not About Sharks" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Arc Poem of the Year Contest
Postmark Deadline: June 30
Arc: Canada's National Poetry Magazine offers top prize of C$1,500 for unpublished poems; online payment accepted
Kentucky State Poetry Society Contests
Postmark Deadline: June 30
KSPS offers $200 for unpublished poems up to 32 lines, any theme or style, in "Grand Prix" category; 24 other categories (various themes/styles) offer top prizes of $15-$100
Writers Bureau Poetry & Short Story Contest
Entries must be received by June 30
British online writing school offers 1,000 pounds in each genre; online entries allowed
League of Minnesota Poets Annual Contest
Postmark Deadline: July 31
Local poetry society offers $125 in Grand Prize category, 17 other themed awards with top prizes of $20-$70
Poetry Society of Texas Annual Contests
Entries must be received by August 15
PST offers Grand Prize of $450 in open-theme category plus 99 themed awards (some members-only) with prizes of $25-$400; no simultaneous submissions
This poem and critique appeared in the June 2008 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
On My Father’s Dashed Hopes of Returning to Normandy Fifty Years Later
Cold for June again this year.
Only in this stupid way
is her heart weak, but his
hale for her, so he won't go,
by himself, saying
it does not matter, those beaches
remain, great gun shocks will resound, strewn
litter of machines and men be again, the floating
harbors and bodies,
will always be there.
Sure a day that defined, refined him in its fire,
the fear, decks slicked by vomit, lip smacking waves, air rip of 88 shells, gun smoke
war fogs, the need for him
Rockaway lifeguard joined to a
life saving service
the need to pass the drowning men, returning
from the troop ships to the beach and back again,
—must get inland, link up, repulse counter
attacks to broom them back to the sea—(where only death is)
the count of drowning men dwindling,
melting into the cold sea,
this as good as any
image of war.
And he is right, what remains remains.
When they do go, they'll find some
of his fellows, some returning in every month
of every year, to remember what they were before
that day and place, what became.
And it is fit she return with him,
since for her he fought in that last good war.
Cold for June again this year. I
will go to Normandy some year
and they will all, all be there.
Copyright 2008 by Michael P. Riley
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Michael P. Riley's "On My Father's Dashed Hopes..." captures the stoic bravery of the generation that fought in World War II. Reticent about the horrors they saw in America's "last good war", these men and women now must call upon that same quiet strength to confront old age with dignity.
It's easy to imagine the narrator's father saying "Cold again for June this year," perhaps in a gruff Yankee voice, as his only comment on his cancelled plans. These are people for whom small talk must speak volumes. (As the military posters said, loose lips sink ships.) While their children and grandchildren, products of the therapeutic culture, are more in the habit of talking their feelings out, this veteran's wife might feel that the most sensitive thing he can do is spare her the reminder of her infirmity and avoid a conversation that would leave her feeling guilty.
His tactful sacrifice mirrors the one he made fifty years earlier, also (the poem tells us) for her. Then, he went to Normandy, plunging into the fear and chaos of battle; now, when that coastline is at peace, his sacrifice is to remain at home, supporting his wife in her fight against illness. The enduring tenderness of their marriage creates a small safe place amid the tumult of "decks slicked by vomit, lip smacking waves, air rip of 88 shells, gun smoke".
The poem's final lines bring past and present together, suggesting a completion that transcends time. "I/will go to Normandy some year/and they will all, all be there." In the end, there is no need for anxious haste. Whenever the speaker visits, the dead and the living will greet him, reconciled and reunited. The repetition of "all" assures us that death is not a permanent barrier—healing news for those veterans who remember, with relief and guilt, "the need to pass the drowning men" and continue their advance up the beach.
The ending echoes and resolves the earlier lines where the confusion of time periods was not so benign: "those beaches/remain...the floating/harbors and bodies,/will always be there." In a sense, he was not lying to his wife when he said he did not need to revisit the battlefield, since it is always with him, a part of his identity, that "day that defined, refined him in its fire".
What the veterans actually rediscover when they return to Normandy is their peacetime selves, "what they were before/that day and place, what became." Safe at home, they still carry the war inside them, and must go back to the scene of the violence in order to understand how peace feels. This is but one example of Riley's skillful use of paradox to weave connections between the wartime experience and the present day, crafting a war poem that is also a gentle love story.
Where could a poem like "On My Father's Dashed Hopes..." be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Wells Festival of Literature International Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by June 30
Prizes up to 1,000 pounds for unpublished poems; no simultaneous submissions; "poems must not exceed 35 lines of text in length"
Oregon State Poetry Association Contests
Postmark Deadline: September 5
Prizes up to $100 in open-theme category, $50 in other categories
Surrey International Writers' Conference Writing Contest
Entries must be received by September 5
Canadian literary conference offers prizes up to C$1,000 for poetry, fiction, essays, and children's literature; online entries accepted
Firstwriter.com International Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 1
Writers' resource site offers prizes up to 500 pounds for published or unpublished poems, 30 lines maximum; enter online only
Lucidity Poetry Journal Awards
Postmark Deadline: October 31
Prizes up to $100 for poems in "clear and concise English" that deal with people and interpersonal relationships
This poem and critique appeared in the July 2008 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Whisper Without Words
They are all the same
The night
Laughs the last and loudest
My friends
Invariably
Are anxious to creep
Walk taller
And pride their budding beards
This is our fate
That before the sun
Dies down
These children
Should all elope silently
And with silence
Leave us
To our face
Swollen, and ugly with silence
How may we know
Those alive
Seeing that they
Have chosen
Our hearts to walk?
A royal flower
When fading from royalty
And longing for shame
From nature's tempered elements
Too harsh to befriend.
Many a gentle gardener
Allows the gentle dame
A gentle passage
Through waiting earth
And she returns only to return
Yet, not in a fellow flower's soul.
How may we know
Those with us
Seeing
The dead
Have left their graves
To be with us?
The war had many returns
Her sweet fruit
Drove our peering eyes to its hut
Retreating deeper
From the historic, crippling search
For our lost African brothers
Among deafening ranting
Of many maiming machines
We later found them
Snoring merrily
Among other stench corpse
We bore them
(Cherishing the mien of love)
Home on our shoulders
Each heart
A broken article of cold
We lay them on the pyre
We wept
Calling on earth and heaven
To witness our dead
And then came
Departing heart-shake-
It was time to say goodbye
We dug them
Away into waiting earth
But they would not go
They have chosen our soul eternally to roam!
The dead are not dead
The dead are here with us
Alive
Walking tall
Among us
In our memories
Tirelessly
As we also must
Through love in loved ones
When the night
Becomes our light
And to waiting earth
We gravitate!
In learning
To live with the dead
We cherish
The smell of our living friends
Copyright 2008 by Akpoteheri Godfrey Amromare
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Whisper Without Words", comes to us from Nigerian poet Akpoteheri Godfrey Amromare. I've been struck by how submissions from our African subscribers maintain the clarity of free verse without the colloquial, self-conscious flavor of much mainstream American narrative poetry.
As I sift through this year's War Poetry Contest entries, many times I come across what I call the "unnecessary narrator"—the speaker who is not involved in the main action, and therefore writes a poem about how she feels when watching it on television, thinking about it while tending her peaceful garden, and so forth. It's as if we have lost permission to exercise our fictional imagination within a poem, let alone to claim the authority of the omniscient narrator who guided us through the great nineteenth-century novels of politics and society. An epic subject deserves a prophetic voice.
I appreciate the formality of Amromare's speech, a trait I also encountered in previous critique poems by Tendai Mwanaka and Obed Dolo. The emotions are strong and personal yet unadulterated with the mannerisms of the everyday self, the ironic asides and pop-culture details that an American writer might employ to create a likeable and accessible narrator.
Such details are unnecessary to give "Whisper Without Words" verisimilitude. Amromare's poem is made painfully relevant by our knowledge of Africa's ongoing wars. At the same time, because of the style and the narrative's supernatural elements, we feel situated in a mythic or universal realm, not limited to one historical moment.
The poem's subject, of course, is the healing of the community after violence. The physical presence of the "friends" frames the poem in its opening and closing stanzas, reflecting the narrator's progress from alienation to reconnection. I don't know how much importance to place on the shift from first-person singular ("my friends") to the first-person plural ("This is our fate") that is used for the remainder of the poem. It may be just an oversight, or it may signal that the shell-shocked speaker was initially holding himself apart from human relationships, but by the end of the poem he has been rewoven into the community of the living and the dead.
Whether it's intentional or not, I wouldn't change it. The distancing language in the first stanza ("They are all the same"; "My friends" not "Our") effectively conveys the speaker's inability to trust any signs of life and youth. He is not sure who is alive and who is dead. When he sees his young friends eager to reach manhood, he feels they are only racing toward death. Their naiveté makes him angry and cynical ("The night/Laughs the last and loudest").
The speaker and his community must answer the central question: "How may we know/Those with us/Seeing/The dead/Have left their graves/To be with us?" The dead are so present to their memories that the living seem unreal. At this point in the poem, it is primarily the dead who long for connection, who extend tenderness and healing (they only want "to be with us", not to blame us or haunt us) while the survivors are still too afraid to love someone else they could lose.
The line breaks in this stanza embed several phrases within the main one, amplifying its meaning. In the sentence as a whole, "Seeing" functions like "Since" or "Given that..." But we can also break out the phrase "Seeing the dead", which is how war's trauma manifests itself among these people, as well as the question "How may we know [i.e. relate to] those with us [who are] seeing the dead?" How to reach the minds of survivors whose memories overwhelm their perceptions of the present?
In a beautiful moment of insight, the narrator's community finds new life by embracing and identifying with the ones they lost, instead of burying the tragic memories. They must love one another with the love that they would want to receive when they too are dead. Their ability to grieve keeps them human amid war's "deafening ranting/Of many maiming machines".
I loved the physical intimacy of the final image: "In learning/To live with the dead/We cherish/The smell of our living friends". An American author might have noted the friends' voices or movements as proof of the difference between live people and ghosts, since smelling one another is a source of embarrassment in our sanitized society. But what could be more immediate, less likely to deceive, than the earthy senses of taste, touch or smell? How better to show the essential unity of the spiritual, human and natural realms, and thus return a bereaved community to a place of acceptance and peace? Having endured the sensory assault of retrieving their dead friends' bodies ("We later found them/Snoring merrily/Among other stench corpse/We bore them/(Cherishing the mien of love)/Home on our shoulders"), it is fitting for them to savor the familiar smells of their companions.
Some passages in "Whisper Without Words" seemed obscure or distracting to me. The attractive, poignant image of the "royal flower" is welcome after the harsh vision of weeping faces "Swollen, and ugly with silence". However, the action in the opening sentence of that stanza is unclear, perhaps because it lacks a main verb. Why would the flower, or anyone, be "longing for shame"? I was surprised to find that the repetition of "gentle" felt somehow soothing, incantatory, since I wouldn't normally recommend using the same word so many times in succession. "Returns only to return" was less successful, since at that point I was hoping for an explanation and found a tautology.
Ultimately, it was unclear to me what the flower, the gardener and the earth stood in for. Perhaps Amromare was thinking of the foolish innocence of the young men who went off to fight, in the belief that death would be a gentle and beautiful transition like planting a flower, but the allegory is not clearly constructed.
I also had my doubts about the passage "The war had many returns/Her sweet fruit/Drove our peering eyes to its hut". Though the storyline there is evident from the context, it felt like a mixed metaphor. The line about dead friends "Snoring merrily" was a jarring comedic touch in a tragic scene. Finally, I wonder whether the title itself should be replaced by a phrase that is less sentimental and drawn more directly from the imagery of the poem.
With these awkward passages fixed, "Whisper Without Words" should be welcomed by any journal that is open to a fresh idiom and cultural perspective.
Where could a poem like "Whisper Without Words" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Surrey International Writers' Conference Writing Contest
Entries must be received by September 5
Canadian contest offers prizes up to C$1,000 in each genre for poetry, fiction, essays, and children's stories (middle-grade and young adult readers, no picture books)
Firstwriter.com International Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 1
UK-based writers' resource site offers prizes up to 500 pounds for published or unpublished poems, 30 lines maximum
Reuben Rose Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 10
Long-running international contest from Voices Israel offers prizes up to $750 and anthology publication for unpublished poems
National Poetry Competition
Postmark Deadline: October 31
Prestigious award from the Poetry Society (UK) offers prizes up to 5,000 pounds; online entries accepted
Anderbo Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: November 1
Well-regarded online journal based in NYC offers $500 for unpublished poems, any length
We also recommend these literary journals with an international focus:
Deep South
FULCRUM: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics
This poem and critique appeared in the August 2008 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
The Trees Stand Watch
Last month as I lay ill
and dying still,
my neighbor's trees
kept watch
Their bony arms raised
to the skies
defying winter's wrath,
blackly outlining
starkest cold felt deep
within the marrow
of my bones,
and without as well
Then the birches, with March,
heralded false Spring briefly,
with a fuzzy show of slightest green
worn off again in hours
by the ice-storm
I felt surround my heart,
my soul, my everything
Birch is hard-wood
and so am I, so together
we stood strong,
weathered the non-season
Refusing to give up the ghost,
die, as expected;
we toughed out the weeks
until real Spring
Deigned to put in
her appearance
and now the trees stand watch,
their branches lovely,
dancing full of leaves
and grace and hope,
and yet, like sentinels,
they guard my being,
not allowing death
to steal in and make off
with anything
I am loath
to give up
just yet.
Copyright 2008 by S.E. Ingraham
Critique by Jendi Reiter
In this month's critique poem, "The Trees Stand Watch", S.E. Ingraham writes with a simplicity and cleanness of style that befits the narrator's stripped-down spiritual condition. A crisis can force us to abandon the luxury of ironic distance, the fear that our emotions will seem too sentimental if we don't surround them with elaborate artistic tricks. Sincerity is born of desperation.
Illness foregrounds our animal nature and its limitations, sometimes a rude surprise for the artist accustomed to exploring the seemingly infinite territory of the imagination. Here, the narrator learns how to remain present with her painful body by finding kinship with the strong, protective, long-lived trees.
With powerful directness, the first stanza introduces the primal antagonists at work in the poem, death and solitude ("Last month as I lay ill/and dying still") versus life and caregiving ("my neighbor's trees/kept watch"). I think it's significant that we know this detail, that these are the neighbor's trees rather than the protagonist's own property or simply "some trees". "Neighbor" instantly connects the trees to companionship and a kind of unconditional solidarity with strangers in need, as in "love thy neighbor as thyself".
The word "still" in the second line adds no new information to "ill and dying"—one could even call it redundant—and yet I feel it is the pivot of the whole stanza. Some words do extra duty in a poem, common little words with so many meanings that they add layers of significance without calling attention to themselves. The internal rhyme "ill/still" gives a poetic cadence to what would otherwise be a very plain-spoken sentence. "Still" as adverb suggests the long, slow death that we dread—"still dying". "Still" as adjective, meanwhile, sets the tone of stillness, of patient observation. The invalid comes to reinterpret her unwanted immobility in light of the more positive steadfastness of the trees.
The subsequent stanzas flesh out the connection between the speaker and the trees with realistic sensory details. These feel like the genuine observations of a bed-ridden person who has been studying the trees from her window, day after day, perhaps noticing their moods more closely than she ever did in her busy, healthy life. The reader's heart experiences a sympathetic pang as recovery is glimpsed, then lost again: "a fuzzy show of slightest green/worn off again in hours/by the ice-storm/I felt surround my heart". The security reached at the poem's end is earned by this moment of looking into the void.
Something in the rhythm of the final lines falls flat, for me. Perhaps it is because the last seven or eight lines lack the physical imagery that enriches the rest of the poem. The concluding words do not seem strong enough to be stretched out over this many lines. The qualifier "just yet", as the speaker's final word, undercuts the triumph of survival. I would have liked to see a continuation of the parallelism between the condition of the trees and that of the speaker. What sensations experienced by the now-healthy person are analogous to the trees' springtime vigor and delicate beauty? Instead we shift to an abstract explanatory mode after "sentinels", losing some of the sensory grounding that makes this poem succeed.
Though the seasons as metaphor for our mortality are a familiar poetic trope, Ingraham makes it fresh because she is interested in the trees in their own right, not simply as reflections of the human character's feelings. Her real subject is the natural cycle of rebirth that comforts us in our weakness by reminding us that we have companions on the journey.
Where could a poem like "The Trees Stand Watch" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Princemere Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: September 30
$250 prize for unpublished poems, from the literary journal of a nondenominational Christian college
Second Light Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 1
British writers' group for older women poets offers 300 pounds for poems by women over 30; previously published work accepted
This poem and critique appeared in the September 2008 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Riddle
from flints flung off
cliffs where crags snag
fledglings came my seed,
buried, until as sapling
i spiraled off ground. air
feeds me but it turns
poison when i exhale, cracks
when as blossom i break,
feigning petulance. i am crowned
when i abscond words.
i bear fruit when my
flesh oozes. my dreams
drip when birds hang where i gaze
on a promise; moons that sprout on my limbs i count as wings
resisting winds.
my yearnings
wear out the sun, singe my heart
a thousand times. but always
at dawn i bud.
Copyright 2008 by Alegria Imperial
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Alegria Imperial returns to our pages with the haunting lyric "Riddle", which explores how creativity is conjoined with suffering. In the beginning of the poem, the speaker's barrenness of spirit is bitterly contrasted to the abundance of life that surrounds and inspires her. Yet out of this failure, paradoxically, she creates this eloquent poem, following in the tradition of Gerard Manley Hopkins' "dark sonnets" and John Milton's "On His Blindness" ("When I consider how my light is spent...")
What is the riddle this poem poses? To begin with, there is the bafflement that the artist faces when her gift, already mysterious in its origins and operation, suddenly and inexplicably fails her. This blockage is accompanied by shame and sorrow when it seems to her that she cannot offer a worthy response to the beauty she perceives: "air/feeds me but it turns/poison when I exhale, cracks/when as blossom I break". The riddle might be, how can so much splendor fail to nourish me, how can it produce only this stunted growth?
The alliterative opening lines suggest that the speaker was not expecting a shortcut to inspiration. "from flints flung off/cliffs where crags snag/fledglings came my seed,/buried, until as sapling/i spiraled off ground". These lines are dense with F, G and S sounds, conjuring up a rough terrain of hard stones and hissing winds. The speaker nurtured her "seed" patiently in a harsh environment where naive "fledglings" are battered against the rocks. Shouldn't this effort be recompensed? We come up against another riddle, a more unsettling question: is the struggle worthwhile?
I wasn't sure what the poet meant by "I am crowned/when I abscond words." Perhaps she was trying to express the irony that she flourishes only when she renounces speech, the essence of herself. She is "crowned", perhaps praised for her talents, at a time when she feels they have deserted her. "Crowned" also suggests a tree or flower reaching full bloom.
The meaning can be inferred from the context, but I don't think "abscond" is exactly the right word. To abscond means to leave quickly and secretly, generally in order to escape punishment. A better word might be "abjure" or "renounce". Alternately, add a "from" after "abscond" to clarify that she is fleeing from language (abscond usually needs a preposition rather than taking a direct object).
I was also a little confused about the subject of "feigning petulance". Grammatically, it is unclear who is feigning, the air or the speaker. From the speaker's overall tone of anguished sincerity, it seems most likely that the air is playing cruel games, teasing her by withdrawing at the very moment when the long-awaited blossom opens.
The gorgeous, wrenching lines "i bear fruit when my/flesh oozes. my dreams/drip when birds hang where i gaze/on a promise" call up images of crucifixion or Promethean bondage. Like another tragic hero, Atlas, the speaker holds up "moons" on her arms, which become wings, the sign of transformation into the more-than-human. The poem pivots on this moment where the greatest agony coincides with the first sign of renewed fertility. Many cultures have myths of a god or hero who is sacrificed to make the crops grow. The eternal interdependence of life and death is creativity's ultimate "riddle".
Where could a poem like "Riddle" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
The Plough Prize
Entries must be received by March 31
Prizes up to 1,000 pounds for short poems; contest is a fundraiser for the Plough Arts Centre, a UK arts organization
Heart Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: December 31
Thrice-yearly award of $500 for unpublished free verse, from a small independent journal that publishes fresh, original and inspiring writing
This poem and critique appeared in the October 2008 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Note to Self III
Why does the sky steal
my grave mood
like a copycat?
Like a confused maiden that gets all heedless
it loses its possessions and lets them fall to the earth.
With same look as beauteously sparkling diamonds
but all useless still—
for when I stretch out my hand they melt on the surface
like common water.
So, tell me sky:
you, that you are our guardian,
did you come to scorn mankind?
The
tip-tip-tapping
of its precious tears
erodes my mind.
There I see them—
they crash against the ground just like
a shy devotee would do against its crush
to have a chance to touch them and be noticed.
How foolish those raindrops are!
Slapping against my coat, clutching, pulling,
as though they want to say
"take me, take me"
—reminding of a whore.
Why do I seek their company still?
That they are a dear companion to my teardrops
—is not the reason.
But that I hope their slaps will give me some of your essence.
Yes, we are far apart.
But we breathe
under the same sky—
it's mere an effort to have you physically.
All day I hear your voice—
oh, may those raindrops bring me the feeling of your skin
and the wild wind present me your smell!
I understand that I am as silly as the raindrops.
But at least
this way
I'll never forget that I wait for you.
Copyright 2008 by A.J.R. Hewitt
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem comes to us from German poet A.J.R. Hewitt. I chose "Note to Self III" for its apt metaphors and gentle lyricism. The restrained pacing of this wistful love poem allows Hewitt to succeed with a theme that could easily shade into sentimentality.
Hewitt piques the reader's interest by posing a question ("Why does the sky steal/my grave mood/like a copycat?") and reveals the answer gradually, through images of loss and transient beauty that awaken a sympathetic recognition in the reader long before the narrator reveals her own story. This is in contrast to a mistake often made by beginning lyric poets, who state their emotions at the outset as a substitute for creating a common ground of feeling with the reader. We can be moved by a poem about a familiar experience, even one that uses well-worn comparisons (raindrops/romantic tears), to the extent that the imagery stirs our own memories of such an experience before the author tells us how to feel.
Hewitt accomplishes this with two winsome extended metaphors. First she compares the sky to a "confused maiden" that "loses its possessions and lets them fall to the earth". Her jewels, perhaps her beauty and purity, vanish like raindrops. One sympathizes with the artlessness and lost innocence of this character, more than if the narrator identified it as herself from the beginning, because the "maiden's" lack of self-awareness contrasts poignantly with the tragedy we foresee. In the next stanza, Hewitt compares the rain to a "shy devotee" losing herself in an attempt to touch her beloved, the earth.
The poem counterbalances this pathos with the narrator's self-criticism, preempting the reader's potential mockery of her romantic melodrama. The same sensations are replayed with a wiser, more cynical interpretation. Perhaps seeing herself through the eyes of the lover who rejected her, she suddenly disdains the persistent rain: "Slapping against my coat, clutching, pulling,/as though they want to say/'take me, take me'/—reminding of a whore."
In the next stanza, whether wisely or unwisely, the narrator is able to integrate even this negative judgment into a love that continues unabated. At last revealing her reason for identifying with the rainy weather, she says of the raindrops, "I hope their slaps will give me some of your essence". The word "slaps" introduces a darker note, suggesting to me that an infatuation like this can slide into the dangerous self-delusion that prefers abusive contact to none at all. Hewitt leaves that potentiality unrealized, but lingering, at the end of the poem, where the narrator is still dreaming that her beloved will acknowledge the connection they share.
Thus, what seems like a simple traditional love poem is actually a subtle and concise depiction of the psychology of love, with its many contradictory moods following in quick succession, like clouds across a stormy sky.
Considering that English is not Hewitt's first language, she has a fine ear for its rhythms and nuances. I have left the poem as she submitted it, but would suggest the following grammatical changes: In the second stanza, add "the" before "same look", and eliminate the second "you" in the penultimate line. In the sixth stanza, change "mere" to "merely" before "an effort". The phrase "gets all heedless" sounds more like street slang than its author probably intended. I would change the line to "Like a confused maiden becoming all heedless" so that the verb can apply to both the maiden and the "it" (the sky) of the next line.
In the fourth stanza, it would be technically correct to add "me" before "a whore", though not necessary for the poetic flow. I rather like the ambiguity and universality of the line without the pronoun, which is why I did not correct it before publishing. At this point in the poem, the narrator is looking at herself through another's eyes, internalizing their negative judgments. Her real fear is not her own self-criticism but the likelihood that her beloved or other onlookers would have contempt for her devotion.
Finally, I would like to see a more interesting title than "Note to Self III", which sounds more like a writing exercise in a notebook than a title in which the author had real confidence. It is also not really accurate, since the narrator is addressing her beloved throughout, not herself. With these changes, this well-written and affecting poem would do well in independent, small-press and local poetry society contests, though it might be considered too traditional for the university-run publications.
Where could a poem like "Note to Self III" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Franklin-Christoph Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: November 30
Free contest from seller of luxury pens and desk accessories offers $1,000 for unpublished poems up to 100 lines, plus fountain pens for runners-up
Writer's Digest Poetry Awards
Postmark Deadline: December 19
National writers' magazine offers $500 and self-publishing package, good exposure for emerging writers; open to unpublished poems, 32 lines maximum
Poetry Society of Virginia (Adult Categories)
Postmark Deadline: January 19
Prizes of $50-$125 for poems in over two dozen categories including humor, nature, and a variety of traditional forms; top prize in 2009 is $250 for a sonnet or other traditional form
This poem and critique appeared in the November 2008 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
In Break Formation
The indications used to come
like movie fighter planes in break
formation, one by one, the perfect
plummet, down and out. This time they're
slower. But after supper, when I hear
her in the kitchen hum again, hum
higher, higher, till my ears are
numb, I remember how it was
the last time: how she hummed
to Aramaic peaks, flung
supper plates across the kitchen
till I brought her by the shoulders
humming to the chair.
I remember how the final days
her eyelids, operating on their own,
rose and fell, how she strolled
among the children, winding tractors,
hugging dolls, how finally
I phoned and had them come again,
how I walked behind them
as they took her by the shoulders,
house dress in the breeze, slowly
down the walk and to the curbing,
watched them bend her in the back
seat of the squad again,
how I watched them pull away
and heard again the parliament
of neighbors talking.
Copyright 2008 by Donal Mahoney
Originally published in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Winter 1968-69
Critique by Jendi Reiter
I chose Donal Mahoney's "In Break Formation" for this month's critique because it illustrates how understatement and the careful withholding of information can enhance the power and freshness of a poem about a traumatic subject. Families affected by mental illness are often marked by secrecy, shame and confusion. Their members may feel like powerless spectators to the events of their own lives. Mahoney captures the dream-like numbness of this family's surrender, first to the momentum of the mother's madness, then to the authorities who take her away. The contrast between his flat reportage of details and the strangeness of those details sets up a dramatic tension that resembles the "humming" of an incoming bomb.
As we learn from the first stanza, the title was inspired by images of war planes being shot down and separated from their aerial formation. So, too, the woman in this poem is pulled away from her family, her unpredictable course determined by her broken internal compass. "Break formation" in this context also suggests the building-up of forces prior to a psychotic break.
The narrator, who I assumed was her husband and the father of the children in the fourth stanza, tries to steer her "humming to the chair" but his piloting skills are overwhelmed. That phrase gave me a mental image of an electric chair on death row, humming with energy as it is prepared for the next prisoner. Perhaps electroshock treatment, as well? Domestic, military and medical scenarios seamlessly shade into one another, prompting reflections on how dysfunction in one of these systems might impact the others.
The political analogies in this poem are never strained by over-explanation. Items that suggest a wider canvas than the domestic—fighter planes, Aramaic peaks, parliaments—are simply included in his catalog of details, as natural or unnatural as a woman throwing plates. Indeed, what does it mean to be sane in a world of violent conflict? Paranoia is never a purely private aberration. Like Ophelia, or a flower child, the woman could be said to possess a certain gentle beauty in her madness, "how she strolled/among the children, winding tractors,/hugging dolls"—an innocence that offsets the heartless intrigues of rational men.
However, the opening scenes of the poem imply that these moments of trance-like calm portend an abusive outburst. Overwhelmed, "I phoned and had them come again," the narrator says ominously, as if we all know who "they" are. He lets the authorities handle the woman like an inanimate object, or a criminal: "I walked behind them/as they took her by the shoulders.../watched them bend her in the back/seat of the squad again..." Has he betrayed her or saved her? The little word "again" drops a weight of despair on this scene as we realize that this rescue operation has happened before, apparently to no effect.
The last stanza relates the personal tragedy back to structural oppression with the image of the "parliament of neighbors". A parliament should be able to exercise power on behalf of the disadvantaged, but here it is depicted as adding to the shame and helplessness of the victims of this "bombing". Perhaps these neighbors are not so different, after all, from the madwoman cocooned in her dangerous visions, unable to break out of her solipsism and see the suffering of those caught in the crossfire. A lesser poem would spell out the moral, but Mahoney wisely refuses to do the work of self-awareness for us. It is sufficient for him to bear witness to discomforting facts, letting us draw our own analogies to the world we live in.
Where could a poem like "In Break Formation" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Lucille Medwick Memorial Award
Postmark Deadline: December 22
Free contest offers $500 for poems on a humanitarian theme; entrants must be Poetry Society of America members (we highly recommend joining)
Fellows' Poetry Prize Competition
Entries must be received by December 31
Award of 500 pounds from UK-based literary society The English Association is open to British writers aged 16+
Strokestown International Poetry Competitions
Postmark Deadline: January 22
Irish literary festival offers prizes up to 4,000 euros for unpublished poems in English, Irish or Scottish Gaelic languages
New Millennium Writings Awards
Postmark Deadline: January 31
Prestigious twice-yearly award offers large prizes for poetry, fiction and nonfiction, plus publication in handsomely produced literary journal; editors appreciate work with social-justice themes
This poem and critique appeared in the December 2008 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Emulation
"poetry would probably not be the hardest of human tasks to emulate
once computers can do metaphysics human beings are done"
Here then, is a template for your algorithms: Begin
with a sentence of sentient assurance, a bold proclamation
on the Human Condition. It's audience insurance;
a grassroots connection, rocked into rhythm
by daily existence. This is the way we are, you say—
But then, not quite. No image stands
Alone. Tag-clouds drift on every horizon,
bearing silicon linings. There is no straw,
says the camel to his back. Hysteresis is
remembrance seeping into the present, analog
connections slackening. The final straw was
Ophelia afloat, entwined in forget-me-nots.
We will remember you were, we promise. We won't.
Gray is swatches of black and white
stitched into nano-mosaics. Despair means
hope has walked before. Take what I say
and permute it, deny it. You will build a snapshot
or better, its negative, perpetually expectant.
This is the stuff that dreams are made of.
This is the stuff, the ones and the zeroes,
that code is born from.
Copyright 2009 by Hann-Shuin Yew
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Hann-Shuin Yew's poem "Emulation" raises knotty questions about memory, whether personal, cultural or computerized. The creative impulse is connected to awareness of mortality. We strive to produce something that will outlast us, be it a poem that carries our thoughts into the future when we are no longer there to speak them, or a machine that mimics the human brain but is made of less perishable materials. However, success contains the possibility of our own obsolescence. Perhaps we are merely exchanging one form of erasure for another. Will the creation replace the creator?
The poem's epigraph comes from the author's friend Tatsu Hashimoto, a fellow student at Harvard who is majoring in neuroscience. It displays an intriguing blend of humility and intellectual confidence. "Once computers can do metaphysics..." Hashimoto says off-handedly, as if this enormous leap were inevitable. Oh, is that all? Alongside this bold prediction is the stark verdict that humanity will be "done", phased out, superseded. This quote is really a claim for the superiority of one form of memory over another. Ironically, in this manifesto of impersonal logic's triumph over personal sentiment, we see scientists' all-too-human rivalry with artists concerning the best way to describe, preserve and improve our civilization.
And what is this poetry that computer scientists might presume to emulate? Do they define poetry's qualities and purpose the way a poet herself would? Yew takes this question as her starting point.
A scientist might subsume poetry under the category of "data". Yew re-encompasses science within poetry by taking the scientists' own statements as raw material, a poetic "algorithm" that their imaginary computer might follow: "Begin/with a sentence of sentient assurance, a bold proclamation/on the Human Condition." She thus calls attention to the fact that the philosophy of science is produced by human beings, not computers, and humans have emotions that skew the data: arrogance, optimism, a desire for neat solutions to messy problems. "There is no straw,/says the camel to his back"—a neat epigram about the perils of abstract thought without self-awareness.
"This is the way we are, you say—//But then, not quite. No image stands/Alone." Unlike the ones and zeros of code, words never exist in isolation. They have auras of word-associations that differ for each person, not contained within the narrow definitions that a computer might use. That, at any rate, is the image I got from the phrase "Tag-clouds drift on every horizon,/bearing silicon linings." One word "tags" or links to another, but in a drifting, nebulous way.
A poem on the theme of cultural memory invites the reader to hear echoes of other literary works. For me, "No image stands/Alone" recalled John Donne's line "No man is an island". Language is a collective endeavor. Scientists may need poets, and vice versa, to make the picture complete. The isolated computer, generating texts from its algorithms, is a poor substitute for interpersonal creative exchanges.
However, "Emulation" does not wholly concede the victory to art over science. The term hysteresis, according to Wikipedia, describes a system whose output cannot be predicted solely from its current input. When Yew says "Hysteresis is/remembrance seeping into the present, analog/connections slackening", I believe she is alluding to the imperfections of non-computerized memory. We are affected by the past but forget how we got where we are; we transmit our ideas to future generations without being able to control how they will be received.
Even Shakespeare, the poet of poets, is not exempt from the decay: "The final straw was/Ophelia afloat, entwined in forget-me-nots./We will remember you were, we promise. We won't." These lines are poignant, reminding us that the greatest art and the strongest personal affection still cannot make us truly immortal. Why not, then, try artificial intelligence?
Yew ends the poem on a note of openness to new ways of thinking: "Take what I say/and permute it, deny it. You will build a snapshot/or better, its negative, perpetually expectant." Anyone who seeks the truth, in science or the arts, must accept that their own achievements may be made obsolete by those who build on them. Perhaps the endurance of data in memory is less important than the persistence of hope. The "stuff that dreams are made of" paraphrases a famous line from Prospero's Act IV speech in "The Tempest", a play that ends with the sorcerer discarding his books of magic in order to return to human society. A step towards truth, or towards a new illusion? Whether we work with words or numbers, Yew suggests that our very human hopes, fears, dreams and blind spots will always be part of the information we transmit.
Where could a poem like "Emulation" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
The Iowa Review Awards
Postmark Deadline: January 31
Top awards of $1,000 apiece for poems, stories and essays, sponsored by a prestigious journal published by the University of Iowa, a school known for its creative writing programs
W.B. Yeats Society Annual Poetry Competition
Postmark Deadline: February 1
$250 award for unpublished poems includes invitation to awards ceremony at the elegant, prestigious National Arts Club in NYC in April; read past winners online
TallGrass Writers' Guild Poetry & Prose Contest
Postmark Deadline: February 27
Prizes of $500 apiece for poetry and prose, plus anthology publication; 2009 theme is "Fearsome Fascinations: Vampires, Zombies, Artificial Intelligence (with hostile intent)—and other frights. Broadly interpreted."
Writecorner Press Annual Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: March 31
Writers' resource site offers top prize of $500 and online publication for poems up to 40 lines
Balticon SF Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: April 1
Baltimore's annual science fiction convention offers this free contest with prizes up to $100 for poems with science fiction, fantasy or horror themes
This poem and critique appeared in the January 2009 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Reseau
it seems pointless to speak of individuals
when there are so many of us
countless likenesses
with lines blurred between one and the other
a chain of unremarkable events
in China from the train every town was the same
with one main street and its colored flags
identical to all the others
and if the town was big enough
a mob of Citroens and rainbow colored lights
every village was a repetition of fields
(no wonder the Chinese call the world "thirty fields")
any mule in the field the same as one
in the streets of Beijing
every red brick identical and
green and blue glass strewn in great reefs
from high rise to hovel
every Russian tourist
was the same
Russian tourists
being a molecule from which it
is possible to extract many units of sameness
consisting of a man with a gold watch
a bleached blonde and a red-tinted brunette
each in mink coats
a friend asks me what was the most surprising thing about China
because he wants me to say it is so much like America
but he doesn't realize I already knew this
and couldn't see the novelty in
the disappearance of Beijing's nameless neighborhoods
once hidden in the labyrinthine groves of sycamores
their ghosts behind miles of grey cement
"They're just like us in so many ways," he says.
Copyright 2009 by Ellyn Scott
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Ellyn Scott's "Reseau" intrigued me on a first reading and revealed new dimensions when I returned to it. It's a cleverly self-undermining poem whose believable depiction of foreign landscapes and their inhabitants is at odds with its theme of human uniformity. This embedded contradiction should prompt us to second-guess our own impressions of the people we see through this opinionated narrator's eyes.
The online dictionary at Answers.com defines a "reseau" as "a reference grid of fine lines forming uniform squares on a photographic plate or print, used to aid in measurement", or "a mosaic screen of fine lines of three colors, used in color photography". In the context of the poem, the reseau may be a metaphor for the interpretive framework that the narrator seeks, in which she can organize her impressions of people who seem quite distinct from her, yet monotonously identical to one another. The idea with which she opens her travelogue—that the collective is more real than the individual—is her "reseau", the grid whose regularity perhaps makes it a foregone conclusion that she will see uniformity wherever she looks.
It seems more than coincidental that the two nationalities she mentions, the Chinese and the Russians, were both under Communist rule for most of the 20th century (as China still is, at least in name), and both are currently governed by regimes that would be described as authoritarian by Western standards. A common cultural stereotype during the Cold War represented Communist countries as peopled by faceless masses, unlike the free and diverse individuals of the United States.
Thus, when the apparently solitary narrator asserts that "it seems pointless to speak of individuals/when there are so many of us/countless likenesses," to what extent are her observations of China already conditioned by subconscious expectations of this political difference between their country and hers? Overlaying her "reseau" on their lives seen "from the train" (i.e. detached from them, merely passing through), she unconsciously mimics the leaders who hoped to impose scientific, modern, impersonal administration on a nation of peasants.
An entire stanza of abstractions is often a weak beginning for a poem, which is why "Reseau" did not completely win me over on first reading. My interest was piqued when Scott began telling me things I didn't know about the Chinese landscape, those unexpected details that seemed to carry the authority of first-hand observations: the "one main street and its colored flags" and the "mob of Citroens and rainbow colored lights". The local idiom ("thirty fields") and the quaintly incongruous Beijing mule—something we would hardly find in a major American city—are further proof that we are hearing about a real, and different, country. Upon rereading, I had more appreciation for the opening lines as a framing device for the facts that follow.
I had mixed feelings about the description of the Russian tourists. While plausible and amusing, it had a whiff of unfriendly caricature that made me question whether the author was reaching for an easy stereotype, in contrast to the fresh observations of the Chinese. However, as a character in the poem, the narrator may be projecting onto the Russians her contempt for the tourist's role that she and her friend also occupy. Certainly the poem takes a sarcastic turn here that continues to the end, though not without a touch of tenderness for the "ghosts" of "Beijing's nameless neighborhoods". Who is the subject of the lyrical lines of the penultimate stanza? That is, which of them (the narrator or her friend) "couldn't see the novelty" in the erasure of traditional neighborhoods by ugly cement behemoths? I would suggest changing "and couldn't" to "he couldn't" or "I couldn't" to make this clear.
As I interpret this section of the poem, the narrator's friend means to compliment China, in a patronizing sort of way, by comparing it to America: "They're just like us in so many ways," a cliché the narrator lets stand without comment, assuming its fatuousness will be evident. Meanwhile she herself observes a more unwelcome similarity between the two nations: "[ I ] couldn't see the novelty" in China's transformation because we Americans are equally prone to pave over our natural treasures and disrupt settled folkways with urbanization.
Can we, perhaps, find in this poem the suggestion of a further difference, between two styles of uniformity—the pre-individualist culture of the rural poor, which yet has some austere beauty, versus the cold mechanical "reseau" of modern urban planning and the market forces personified by the crass, moneyed Russian tourists? Or does any collective generalization by an outsider underscore the separation between the interpreter and her subject, no matter what she concludes? Scott's poem teases us with its well-realized characters and setting, while making us question whether what we see is really another culture or a reflection of our own preoccupations.
Where could a poem like "Reseau" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Connecticut River Review Annual Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: May 31
Long-running contest from the Connecticut Poetry Society offers prizes up to $400 for unpublished poems up to 80 lines
Oregon State Poetry Association Contests
Postmark Deadline: March 1
Twice-yearly contest offers top prizes of $50-$100 in categories including traditional verse, humor, open theme
National Federation of State Poetry Societies Awards
Postmark Deadline: March 15
Founders Award of $1,500 plus 49 smaller prizes for poems in various styles and themes (some are members-only); no simultaneous submissions
Fish International Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by March 30
Irish independent publisher offers prizes up to 500 euros and a reading at their West Cork literary festival; mailed and online entries accepted
This poem and critique appeared in the February 2009 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
What Is There?
What is there?
What is there, when looking out
From the narrow sill of your eye,
Window to what is?
What will you see
When you finally see?
Light and dark limit the possibilities.
Does light pool like a fluid around the little shards of matter
Disguised as dogs and cars and trees?
Can you drown in the all?
I think the ocean of what is
Is there only for me.
I hear its incessant surf beat upon the strands of my mind.
I am so alone in here,
I welcome the sound.
What is there?
How do you define it?
Everyday, I bang a drum;
The vibrations propagate
Across the lawn
Over Jim's house,
They ring all around Kobb Boulevard
And then they bounce off the shells of air and ripple
Upon the placid sea of stars that swells with the night.
And the sound that returns to me,
Is the echo of nothing.
The emptiness is beautiful.
What is there?
I can answer the question now,
But why would I spoil the surprise
For you?
Copyright 2009 by Robert J. Frankland
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Those who have practiced meditation know that the question "What is there?" is the first step on an infinite journey of discovery. We think we know what surrounds us, or at least our perceptions of it. Perhaps we're even bored with the world as we imagine it to be, not sure why we should bother asking the "obvious" question that Robert J. Frankland's poem poses. Yet once we try, with a truly open mind, to quiet our ideas and observe what exists, what vast spaces open before us—and inside us!
"What is there, when looking out/From the narrow sill of your eye,/Window to what is?" Frankland asks. We first become aware of the situated nature of our own viewpoint, and then of its limitations. Most of the time, we live in the closed room of our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, experiencing them as if they were the whole world. The question "What is there" invites us to understand the self as a window opening onto something larger.
"What will you see/when you finally see?" Fresh awareness contains the promise of exciting, unsettling new visions. The narrator of the poem glimpses a unity underlying the phenomena we normally perceive as separate, as expressed in these elegant lines: "Does light pool like a fluid around the little shards of matter/Disguised as dogs and cars and trees?" When he says, "Light and dark limit the possibilities," I interpret this to mean that it takes effort to see past our surface reality, full of oppositions and differentiation, to the unity that he believes is more real.
However, this boundary-dissolving vision can also be frightening. If you asked me why I avoid meditation and prayer, even when my body and mind are clearly calling for the relief of stillness, I would express the same concern as Frankland does in the next stanza: "Can you drown in the all?" Because we can never fully escape the fact that we are ourselves and not another, seeing the world as an illusion can plunge us into a lonely place where there is only the self, face-to-face with the Infinite: "I think the ocean of what is/Is there only for me./I hear its incessant surf beat upon the strands of my mind./I am so alone in here,/I welcome the sound."
In the next stanza, the narrator seems to have emerged from this solipsism by reconnecting with ordinary phenomena in a more humble way. "Everyday, I bang a drum"—the sum total of his words, actions, efforts at communication, reduced to this almost childlike repetitive act, which is nonetheless disciplined ("everyday"). The echoes of the sound spread outward, from his neighbor "Jim", to an entire boulevard, all the way to the stars, yet "the sound that returns to me,/Is the echo of nothing." It's a sublime vision of interconnectedness that resists self-aggrandizement.
I admit I was taken aback by the sudden introduction of named characters and places, halfway through a poem that otherwise took place in a wholly conceptual, spiritual realm. I understand how these details function to re-situate the narrator in common human experience, and to show the continuum from the individual to the cosmic connection. Still, I wonder whether the transition could be less abrupt. Where is Kobb Boulevard? Why is "Jim" introduced without a modifier, as if we should know who he is? ("Across the lawn" implies that he is a neighbor, but the search for contextualizing details creates a speed bump in the reading of the poem.)
After these two isolated facts, we are thrown back into the non-specific heavens. The lines "they bounce off the shells of air and ripple/Upon the placid sea of stars that swells with the night" are beautiful and I wouldn't change them, but I might put a comma after "night" and add one more line referring to specific constellations. Alternately, add one more intermediate layer of detail between Kobb Boulevard and the cosmos—the skyline of a named city, perhaps, or a recognizable landscape (e.g. Midwestern corn fields).
Neither of these solutions really satisfy me, though. The basic problem is that Jim and Kobb Boulevard seem to belong to a different poetic voice or genre than the rest of the poem. It would make more sense to weave such details into earlier stanzas as well, but the first part of the poem is so well-written that I would prefer to go in the opposite direction, take out Jim and Kobb Boulevard, and replace them with brief images of unnamed people and streets.
I'm also not sure the ending is strong enough for a poem this profound. The last three lines felt a little cutesy, perhaps because "I can answer the question now" seemed too neat a conclusion. The whole point is that "What is there?" is an endless question. It's not a finite surprise that the narrator coyly withholds from the reader. I would prefer an ending that puts the narrator and the reader on a more equal footing, as companions in an ongoing exploration of the mystery.
Overall, "What Is There?" is a lyrical and well-paced poem that expresses important truths. With a little work on the consistency of its poetic voice, it could be a winner.
Where could a poem like "What Is There?" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Fish International Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by March 30
Irish independent publisher offers prizes up to 500 euros and a reading at their West Cork literary festival; mailed and online entries accepted
Tiferet Writing Contest
Entries must be received by April 1
$500 awards for poetry, fiction and nonfiction from ecumenical journal of spirituality and the arts; enter online
Kay Snow Writing Awards
Postmark Deadline: April 23
Oregon's largest writers' association offers awards up to $300 in adult and $50 in student categories for poetry, fiction, nonfiction, screenwriting, and children's literature
The Ledge Poetry Awards
Postmark Deadline: April 30
Competitive award of $1,000 for unpublished poems, any length, from the literary journal The Ledge
Connecticut Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: May 31
The Connecticut Poetry Society offers prizes up to $400 for unpublished poems, 80 lines maximum
This poem and critique appeared in the March 2009 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Roster Forever
Spring-sets punctuated with toxic bliss
urban upheavals echoing
chants of social miscarriages
leaving bitter/sweet rhythms to plume
like afros from swaying heads
of '60's hippies uncharted
oomps uncharacterized in free meters
thunder out poignant lyricism
soaked in copper tunes
of hydraulic blues to pump
bruised hearts of a people
an audience witness to archetypes
of inner rebellions awash
with anger primed fists rise high
in a singular movement to rattle
against worn out songs of Congress
only to stamp out idle anger
with purpose and causation
garbed in canvas cargos
and a nearly wild top
a trombonist blows life
onto the backs of bold
crisp notes freshly baked
from the morning high
in tune with a common voice
drum beats swell
charging the multitude
flooding a mesmerized crowd
bitten by inequity and frustration
for one last time
vocalized in every guitar riff
ripping chords of rising up
moving
speaking as one
fighting forward
not within
on the play-list for today
a tide of change
one voice one struggle
a wall of sound
[Author's Note: "A spring-set is the list of songs a band will perform at a particular event. Play-list is similar, but a bit more strict—the music played in this list will be performed in a planned arrangement and not often deviated from. Yet, there is always tolerance for flexibility in either list."]
Copyright 2009 by Ryan K. Sauers
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Roster Forever" by Ryan K. Sauers, employs the freewheeling rhythms of jazz and blues to convey the energy of people seeking social change. These improvisational musical styles befit a moment when values are in flux and established political procedures are overwhelmed by a popular uprising.
The poem's title sounds like a rallying cry, as well as an invitation to imagine an ideal society. "Forever" is such a utopian word. With its suggestion of heaven on earth, it sanctifies a temporal political movement by connecting it to timeless values—justice, of course, as well as the beauty and creativity represented by music. "Forever" also holds out the dangerously simple and seductive promise that the problem of injustice could be permanently solved. If only...
Sauers' vibrant and action-packed imagery honors both the light and dark sides of the revolutionary impulse, the thrilling creative ferment as well as its potential to boil over into chaos. We see this duality from the outset in phrases like "toxic bliss" and "bitter/sweet rhythms". The author's lively verb choices convey a passion that pushes beyond conventional speech, finding release in the musical sounds of "oomp" and "plume" and "rattle", in the way that music has always brought into focus and made bearable the overflowing emotions of oppressed people.
Poetry on political themes must find a way to address specific events without seeming dated or flatly journalistic, a feat that Sauers accomplishes. There are enough details to situate us in the 1960s counterculture, an allusion that enriches our experience of the poem with our own brightly colored memories (or fantasies) of that time. However, Sauers' main subject is not the era's specific controversies but the element that maintains its hold on our imaginations: the genuine and spontaneous hope for a better world, one where art and justice could be intimately connected.
The phrase "worn out songs of Congress" exemplifies one successful strategy for addressing current events in a lyric poem, namely, to include them in a magical-realist rather than a naturalistic storyline. Bureaucracy, the antithesis of song, is "co-opted" (to use a good old counterculture word) into an alternative scheme of meaning. Music is the true language, and political doubletalk is judged and rejected according to its higher standard.
The drug scene makes an appearance too, in language that deftly connects the consciousness-transcending effects of music, drugs, and mass uprising (what could be called, in less flattering terms, the "mob mentality"): "a trombonist blows life/onto the backs of bold/crisp notes freshly baked/from the morning high". The people are "moving/speaking as one/fighting forward/not within". Will they be able to distinguish between unity and unreflective conformity? The poem leaves them on the cusp of change, with a predominant mood of optimism. And yet, the title suggests, it is the "roster" that has lasted "forever"—the change itself, or only the music that carries forward the dream of change? Perhaps that question is the poem's invitation to today's activists to keep the song going.
Where could a poem like "Roster Forever" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Poetry 2009 International Poetry Competition (Atlanta Review)
Postmark Deadline: May 8
Highly competitive award offers $2,009 for unpublished poems, plus publication for up to 20 runners-up
Dancing Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: May 15
Unique prize offers awards up to $100 plus opportunity to have your poem presented as an interpretive dance at festival in San Francisco
This poem and critique appeared in the April 2009 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Songs and Metaphors
For Modupe
I know
There are tunes
My soul should hum
To you, but my throat
Is too sore to attempt them.
I know
There are words
My heart should say
To you, but my mouth
Is too dumb to let her.
I know
My love
You don't love me
But in you
Am too lost to turn back.
Yes
I know
Oh sable homeland
We practice democracy
But my heart
Is too hurt to believe it.
I know
My love
There are spots
My lips should touch
You, but my eyes
Are too blind to see them.
So I say
Oh poor soul sing
Sing of love
To warring homeland
Love too soft to touch
Love much quieter than a burial rite
Love that struck me dumb like thunderstorm
Love that punished my father's purse
But made us one
Love that we lack in Africa!
Open
Pray hungry mouth
Speak of love
Love that weaved webs to steal my sight
A woman too mighty for words to try
Love the silent sky of our earth
Once obsessed
With light like a palace court!
Ah!
Love the thunderous voice of our ancestors!
That blind Africa may regain her sight.
My love
Tell me
How it came to be
That we
To a fierce duet, tempt
The friendly spirits of the gods
By slaughtering ourselves.
Beware!
I say
Recoil from this draw with Liberty.
A portion poured out
To the gods
Isn't for us—poor mortals to sup
Yes
I know I hear
The break of day approaching
Though silently
A voice
Drowned in the chorus
Of tonight's wars
Hush,
Be calm
The sun is returning to her court!
The dews soon
Should descend upon
The slumbering field
Take my hand
Love
It is a sign of daybreak!
Copyright 2009 by Akpoteheri Godfrey Amromare
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Nigerian poet Akpoteheri Godfrey Amromare returns to these pages with "Songs and Metaphors", a stirring combination of the romantic lyric and the war poem. Read his August 2008 critique poem, "Whisper Without Words", here.
"Songs and Metaphors" reminded me of Wilfred Owen's famous World War I poem "Greater Love". Both poems interweave tenderness, tragedy, and prophetic hope, refusing to let the personal remain merely personal against a backdrop of large-scale atrocities, yet valuing that one-on-one intimacy as a possible cure for the desensitized attitudes that perpetuate violence.
The first three stanzas of Amromare's poem lead us to think that it is a traditional love poem. I welcomed the few touches of originality: "tunes/My soul should hum/To you" (rather than the expected "sing") and the personification of the heart as "her" instead of "it" in the second stanza, which gives the interaction a more protective, affectionate tone. But then, in the fourth stanza, an epic lament—"Oh sable homeland"—breaks into the potential narcissism of the lyric. Sentiments that could verge on banality are transfigured by their connection to relationships beyond the two lovers, such that the narrator's personal heartbreak does not distract him from his community's suffering but rather provides a means to empathize with and critique it.
Throughout the Bible, there is the recurring theme of the individual whose pains and triumphs are representative of his entire nation, for good or ill. I'm thinking particularly of the messianic "suffering servant" prophecies in the book of Isaiah, and St. Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 15:22, "For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ will all be made alive." In Amromare's poem, the fate of Africa seems similarly intertwined with the fate of his narrator. The collective wound has left him personally scarred. Like the scorched earth of a conquered village, he feels too damaged to produce the fruits of love. Yet if he can heal, if he can find stillness and tenderness amid the clamor of war, could that be the first green shoot that brings the "slumbering field" back to life?
So I say
Oh poor soul sing
Sing of love
To warring homeland
Love too soft to touch
Love much quieter than a burial rite
Normally I tell poets to be sparing with their exclamation points, but the ones that proliferate in the second half of this poem seem as essential as the crescendo at the end of a symphony, lifting us with the narrator to ever more sublime extremes of joy and grief. Perhaps this technique works because the poem starts out in a restrained, even numb, mood. When passion finally breaks through, we rejoice with the narrator that "The sun is returning to her court!"
I would change a few lines of this poem to make them clearer and correct some word usage. "Love that struck me dumb like thunderstorm" should be either "a thunderstorm" or "thunderstorms". To keep the characteristic rhythm of Amromare's voice, which is tight and assured throughout, I might opt for the plural, though the singular better captures the suddenness of the event.
In the lines "Love that weaved webs to steal my sight/A woman too mighty for words to try", the verb "weaved" should be "wove". I wasn't sure of the meaning of the next line. The woman is probably the beloved to whom the poem is addressed, but what are the "words trying" to do? He seems to be saying that his beloved is beyond words, in a good way. However, "steal my sight" has negative connotations—is his love a delusion? That would be contrary to the positive role that love plays everywhere else in the poem.
Further down, when he asks "How it came to be/That we/To a fierce duet, tempt/The friendly spirits of the gods", I feel like there is a missing verb after "we". It might be smoother to replace "To" with "In", since one doesn't generally speak of tempting someone to a duet, whereas one could conceive of the dance of seduction as a duet. Finally, in the lines "A portion poured out/To the gods/Isn't for us—poor mortals to sup", I would replace the dash with a line break, because I like the pause there but the dash seems out of place in the sentence structure.
These awkward spots aside, I love this poem's prophetic voice and the earthiness of its imagery. Its old-fashioned flavor might not appeal to some of the academic literary journals but it could do well in contests with a more populist aesthetic. Amromare is a poet to watch.
Where could a poem like "Songs and Metaphors" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Yeovil Literary Prizes
Entries must be received by May 31
British cultural center offers prizes up to 1,000 pounds for unpublished poems, stories and novel excerpts by authors aged 18+; online entries accepted
Keats-Shelley Prize
Entries must be received by June 30
British contest offers 5,000 pounds in total prizes for poetry on a Romantic theme (changes annually) and essays on any topic relating to Byron, Keats, or the Shelleys (Percy and Mary)
Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Awards
Postmark Deadline: July 1
The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation offers prizes of $1,000 in adult category and $200 in youth categories for poems exploring positive visions of peace and the human spirit; 30 lines maximum
This poem and critique appeared in the May 2009 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Pouring Shade
if you had the power to pour shade
what color would you use
the color of honey because you like sweet things
or the oil of menthol because it invigorates the nose
my shade would change with the time
rose red rendering incandescent mornings
pink daffodils rising into a noon shower
an afternoon with an orange mist hanging in the air
at night I would announce the moon's etchings
semi-circles surrounded by colored sunbeads
cast on the flowers of heaven
if I had the power to pour shade
I would add laughter
to see how water looks when it smiles
Copyright 2009 by Hzal (Anthony Fudge)
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem comes to us from "Hzal" (the pen name of the poet Anthony Fudge). In "Pouring Shade", he mingles different modes of sensory perception to create a unique experience of an exuberant life force.
Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which real information from one of the five senses is accompanied by a perception in another sense. For instance, a person may see a certain color when hearing a particular sound, or perceive letters and numbers to be associated with different colors. Researchers have noted the similarity between this condition and an artist's creative process, in that both involve unexpected associative leaps and fresh ways of perceiving our common reality.
Perhaps the most famous synesthetic poem is 19th-century symbolist Arthur Rimbaud's "Voyelles" (Vowels): "A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,/I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins:/A, black velvety jacket of brilliant flies/which buzz around cruel smells..." More links concerning art and synesthesia can be found on Belgian researcher Dr. Hugo Heyman's website.
In contrast to Rimbaud's extremes of decayed sensuality and spiritual purity, Hzal's synesthetic poem creates a sunnier mood, using the technique of sensory cross-pollination to express a joy and perhaps an affection that exceeds normal descriptive measures. Having a mind that works differently from the rest of humankind can be both thrilling and terrifying. Whereas Rimbaud's "Voyelles" seems to linger in that solitary place where genius and madness meet, Hzal begins with connection to others, and does not seem afraid that this new mode of perception will be a barrier to communicating his essential feelings.
"Pouring Shade" could be read as a love poem, whether or not that love is romantic. "if you had the power to pour shade/what color would you use", the poet asks, like a genie offering three wishes, or a young man promising his lover the moon. His desire to please her is so extravagant that it is unbound by physical laws. We all know that shade is not a liquid, nor does it have a color, let alone a smell or a taste, as the next two lines suggest. But perhaps we can also remember being this enraptured with a person or a project, almost to the point of believing we could do magic with a mere wave of the hand.
After making this fanciful offer, the speaker invites us to view his own ideal landscape, a pleasantly hallucinatory wash of colors that reminded me of the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" ("Picture yourself in a boat on a river,/With tangerine trees and marmalade skies/Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly,/A girl with kaleidoscope eyes..."). The recurring water imagery in this poem enhances its misty, blurred, dream-like quality.
I wouldn't change much about "Pouring Shade", being hesitant to break the flow of its stream-of-consciousness narrative voice. I might opt for a more original and descriptive phrase than "because you like sweet things" in the third line. If "sunbeads" is a typo for "sunbeams", it's a felicitous one; I loved the notion of bead-like water drops, turned to prisms by the sun's rays, such as one sees on flowers after rain.
For publication suggestions, below, I've emphasized smaller contests run by and for talented amateurs and emerging writers, as opposed to the university-run journals. While I relished the creative and sensual imagery of "Pouring Shade", I suspect that academically-minded judges would prefer poems with a greater variety of light and dark emotions. The diversity of aesthetics within the poetry world is a good thing, in my opinion. Support your favorite literary journals to keep that diversity alive.
Where could a poem like "Pouring Shade" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
League of Minnesota Poets Annual Contest
Postmark Deadline: July 31
Local poetry society offers top prize of $125 plus 17 other contest categories with top prizes ranging from $20 to $70; publication not included
Poetry Society of Texas Annual Contests
Postmark Deadline: August 15
Prizes up to $450 for unpublished poems in 100 different categories (some are members-only); no simultaneous submissions
Penumbra Poetry & Haiku Contest
Postmark Deadline: October 1
The Tallahassee Writers' Association offers prizes up to $200 and publication in winners' chapbook; no simultaneous submissions
This poem and critique appeared in the June 2009 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Lantana Camara, Spreading Sunset
I bought you, lantana plant,
because you are drought tolerant—
or is it drought resistant? I forget.
Your pointed label reads SATISFYING
The defiant flames of your gold and orange
clusters force me to stare
Looking ahead, I wager that your five pound
maturity can handle neglect
Lantana camara, HARDY, INDIGENOUS, INVASIVE.
Spreading Sunset, you grow on me.
I knew I would leave, doubtful
the occupants after me would stop to stoke
your star-like blooms
or lean closer to attend each berry,
red, purple, charred rippled black
ripening toward poison,
changing colors with mood
Renters' sandals slap their beat
on painted gray planks and
drown out your quiet
restless offerings
Vacation a mere week—they almost water you,
the drought-tolerant plant right there on the steps
I knew all this but I bought you anyway
placing my momentary pleasure
above your very existence
Sunsets spread, spread, gold and orange
I return to your blooms, paper ashes
Your leaves clench against the heat.
I try to revive stalky ugliness but your hardened
roots reject my water offering.
No longer a sprawling potted plant, you have become
something a car would whiz by
or a mower would run over.
Lantana camara, spreading sunset.
Next morning I kneel and water again
you cautiously begin to unfasten.
Fruit and bloom are silent, but your leaves—
Were they always so cilia-soft to touch?
Veins like roadmaps stretch out, no longer cloistered
they accept drops of sun offering
As if to say, "I don't care what you think."
Copyright 2009 by Delia Corrigan
Critique by Jendi Reiter
I chose this month's poem, Delia Corrigan's "Lantana Camara, Spreading Sunset", because it illustrates poetry's gift for exploring the universal through the particular. A good poem can devote itself to a small object or event, and by looking at it more closely than we do in everyday life, reveal something of broader significance about human nature. Some examples are Theodore Roethke's "The Geranium" and Stephen Dobyns' "Indifference to Consequence". The poem shows the fractal qualities of its subject matter, replicating in miniature our higher-level patterns of interaction.
Occasionally, Corrigan's poem lapses into an overly colloquial or prosy voice, which is a common problem for contemporary writers of narrative free verse. These "off" notes are most noticeable in her opening and closing stanzas. While I think "Lantana Camara" needs a bit more work before it's ready for professional publication, I decided to feature it in the newsletter because the descriptions of the plant and the woman's evolving relationship to it are so vivid and well-observed, containing complex shifts of emotion in the space of a few lines.
Through the narrator's decision to purchase a plant for her temporary lodgings, we are invited to consider the anonymity and transience of our interactions with others in this highly mobile society, and how this situation can make us selfish. The narrator wants to believe the puffery on the plant's label ("HARDY, INDIGENOUS, INVASIVE") because it relieves her of responsibility for taking care of the plant she's picked out for her short-term enjoyment. She doesn't bother learning whether the lantana is "drought tolerant" or "drought resistant", or if there's a meaningful difference. Quotes from advertising can be an effective way to inject dramatic irony into a poem, since ad-speak tries to force words into a single unambiguously positive meaning, while poetry is about teasing out the ambiguities and unlikely associations between words.
Here, it's ironic that the plant's "pointed label reads SATISFYING" since whatever satisfaction she gets from the plant will be short-lived because of her own plans to move away. "Satisfying" is a word we see on a lot of product labels (not to mention Snickers' unintentionally gross-sounding variation "satisfectellent") although economic logic dictates that the product not satisfy for very long, otherwise we wouldn't need to buy more.
This habitual discontent comes through in the narrator's description of how she and the other occupants of the house are constantly on the move. Their lifestyle works against the tranquil and appreciative state of mind that would let them nurture a specific place and its nonhuman inhabitants: "I knew I would leave, doubtful/the occupants after me would stop to stoke/your star-like blooms", she writes, and later: "Renters' sandals slap their beat/on painted gray planks and/drown out your quiet/restless offerings". The combination of sandals, quiet, and "offerings" made me think of the atmosphere of a monastery, an association that's strengthened by the word "cloistered" later in the poem. The lantana, which has to grow where it's planted, simply devotes itself to existing and making the best of its surroundings, while the humans are rushing around to satisfy their temporary cravings.
The plant's quiet perseverance awakens the narrator's ethical sense. She feels remorse that she's treated the plant as an object for her enjoyment and not as a fellow living thing: "I knew all this but I bought you anyway/placing my momentary pleasure/above your very existence". Corrigan made the right choice in writing this poem as an address to the plant, not a narrative about the plant. If the "you" were replaced by an impersonal "it" or a sentimentally anthropomorphized "she", the poem would miss the chance to have the form reinforce the content, namely the passage from self-centeredness to relationship.
I thought the beginning of the poem was too weak, undercutting the authority of the speaker's voice before it had a chance to establish itself: "you are drought tolerant—/or is it drought resistant? I forget." Since we already know from the title that the poem is about a lantana, and we learn later on that it is drought-tolerant, it would be all right to open with a revised version of the second stanza:
The defiant flames of your gold and orange
clusters force me to stare
Your pointed label reads SATISFYING
Looking ahead, I wager that your five pound
maturity can handle neglect
Lantana camara, HARDY, INDIGENOUS, INVASIVE.
Spreading Sunset, you grow on me.
...
The other part that I would revise is the ending. "I don't care what you think" was too trivial a phrase to sum up the beautiful imagery and serious self-exploration that preceded it. It also seemed to contradict the lessons of compassion and interdependence that the rest of the poem teaches. What would the lantana really say, if it could talk? I don't think it would be this hostile. "I will survive"? "Grow where you're planted"? (Not that I would want to see either of these cliché phrases in the poem.) Actually, I don't want the lantana to speak at all, even in the narrator's mind. Its otherness, its nonhuman quality, has been necessary to expand her moral imagination. By not speaking or moving, it made space for her to examine her own thoughts and actions.
The poem could end by reversing the two penultimate lines to end on the stronger one: "they accept drops of sun offering/Veins like roadmaps stretch out, no longer cloistered." Since the word "offering" occurs three times in the poem, this might be a place to take it out, ending the line at "drops of sun". The travel imagery suggests that the plant has also been transformed by the interaction, taking on some of the narrator's energetic and adventurous qualities while she in turn has taken on some of its stillness.
Where could a poem like "Lantana Camara, Spreading Sunset" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Poetry Society of Texas Annual Contests
Entries must be received by August 15
Prizes up to $450 for unpublished poems in 100 different categories (some are members-only); no simultaneous submissions
Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Contest
Entries must be received by September 1
Prizes up to $1,000 for narrative poetry, from a new literary journal based in Western Massachusetts; enter online only
White Mice Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: October 15
This $200 prize for poems on an annual theme (2009 is "Renewal") is sponsored by the Lawrence Durrell Society; Durrell was a 20th-century novelist who wrote The Alexandria Quartet
This poem and critique appeared in the July 2009 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
And While the Beast Was on the Prowl
And while the beast was on the prowl I read you
dear Andrew with a tumor in my face
with winter just outside the door and ice
gripping the heart: will I ever recapture
youth's immortality?
And you came
with your beloved hills
to which in fury and terror
in delay and inertia
you led your years
of which you begged to be
pardoned, to care and not to care:
riotous fullness, avarice
and your hills right before me
stretched the arid, pure death
to a fiery point so that
paucity and hatred did not sway me
nor the malignant gnomes
golems and tarots and the clown the jerk
the King of Oil the King of Thuribles
the paladins the crescent holy wars
What joy your Hermes tongue
that thwacked all other lights
uncouth and mediocre
of a small world in heat
your realm of ferns and vineyards
for which I whirl, a top
driven by gypsy music
your childlike voice your calm
whispering your nostalgia
for grasses and oaks clamorous
with birds and winds, with strong
aromas, dead at last
all boring melodramas
now silence germinates
for the other hand of man
not the one of the pontiffs
always jilting our songs
no, but your blue-haired town
within its ring of walls
that foil the enemy's thrust
your presence in all things
icosahedral eye
that says to grim nightmares
one more day one more day
we fooled the dragon's fangs
and now the unbridled happiness
of starving children soon
to be fed the eerie trumpet
flourishing over mountains....
Author's note: Andrew is astonishing Italian poet Andrea Zanzotto, born in Veneto, Northern Italy. Holy wars is ironic: the wars waged today between Muslims and the rest of the world.
Copyright 2009 by Ned Condini
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Ned Condini's poem "And While the Beast Was on the Prowl" is both an intimate address to a mentor, and an ambitious meditation on salvaging humane values in a time of violent fanaticism. The personal element helps the reader engage with a topic, the so-called "clash of civilizations", that often remains at the level of mere polemics and theorizing.
Condini's style and theme here remind me of the high-Modernist aesthetic epitomized by T.S. Eliot. The phrase "to care and not to care" and the medieval imagery hark back to Eliot's "Ash Wednesday"; the Eliot who wrote "these fragments I have shored against my ruins" in "The Waste Land" would have recognized Condini's concern that European civilization was crumbling under assault from barbarism and greed.
I chose this poem because I was moved by the beauty and intensity of the darkly mythical imagery Condini uses to dramatize this political conflict. At the same time, however, I felt that the poem had levels of meaning I couldn't grasp because I didn't recognize all the allusions in it. The later-added Author's Note (above) provided a key, but I would like to see more of this information woven into the poem itself, perhaps through a revised title or epigraph. I was distracted at the outset by the question "Who is Andrew?" and I think it would be more effective to signal his identity and literary prominence at the beginning instead of making the reader wait for the footnote.
A writer takes a risk in addressing his poem to a personage whom his readers may not recognize. In judging the War Poetry Contest, I more frequently run into the opposite problem of "borrowed thunder": a Wilfred Owen quote, for instance, does so much to conjure up the culture of the World War I soldier-poets that the author can neglect her obligation to create an independently compelling scene. Here, because Andrea Zanzotto may not be widely known outside Italy, Condini has a fresher story to tell, but this also means that he must work harder to demonstrate Zanzotto's relevance to the narrative, lest the allusion remain at the level of an in-joke.
Even not knowing Zanzotto's work (a deficit I now hope to correct), I got a sense of him in this poem as a man who loves beauty and loves the homeland that inspired his art. The elder poet provides a model for aging without despair. The narrator turns to him, the companion of his imagination, for hope when he feels besieged.
The beast, the forces of death and decay, first attack the narrator on a personal level: "with a tumor in my face/with winter just outside the door". I heard echoes here of the phrase "wolf at the door", often used as a metaphor for starvation. This association led me to picture a poor family hiding from marauding soldiers, as, for example, the Jews hid from the Cossacks during the Eastern European pogroms.
A leap, perhaps, but in keeping with the theme that Condini goes on to develop, namely the ironically named "holy wars" that are ravaging the precious "small world[s]" of "ferns and vineyards". The vineyard, in the Old Testament, is a powerful symbol of the coming reign of God, when even the humblest household will have the means to flourish in peace. (See, e.g., 1 Kings 4:25, "During Solomon's lifetime Judah and Israel, from Dan to Beersheba, lived in safety, each man under his own vine and fig tree.")
In Condini's poem, it is less clear that God is a liberating force, by whatever name God is called. "[T]he paladins the crescent holy wars" suggests Muslim fundamentalism, but the sardonic references to "golems and tarots and the clown the jerk/the King of Oil the King of Thuribles" seem to skewer Western authorities of church and state nearly as much. I guessed "the King of Oil" to be former US President George W. Bush, who also at times framed the Middle East conflict in terms of a Christian crusade. A thurible is an incense-burner on a chain, which a priest swings during a church procession. Incense being most commonly associated with Catholic and high-church Anglican worship, rather than Bush's evangelicalism, could the "King of Thuribles" be Pope Benedict XVI—no stranger to provocative statements against Islam? This connection is strengthened by the later negative reference to "the pontiffs/always jilting our songs".
Whether one matches these figures up to real-life personages or understands them on a symbolic level, Condini appears to conclude that real salvation resides outside the power structure, with the trickster-poet whose "Hermes tongue...thwacked all other lights". I love the vernacular snap of that word "thwacked," upsetting the pretensions of these "Kings" with its sudden dash of comedy. Victory lies in the small moments of beauty and grace that persist despite the seemingly more powerful forces arrayed against them: "one more day one more day/we fooled the dragon's fangs". It is in the poet's love for his particular patch of ground, in contrast to the ideologues who would sacrifice the land and its people for an abstraction, a kingdom of martyrs in the clouds.
There are a few places in this poem where I would suggest some clarifications. Addressing Zanzotto, the narrator alludes to some inner struggle whose significance is unclear: "your beloved hills/to which in fury and terror/in delay and inertia/you led your years". Did the elder poet need to repent of some period of anger and violence that preceded his current humane wisdom? How does that relate to the poem's political theme? (According to the sketchy biography on Wikipedia, he came from an anti-fascist family, so the obvious guess is out.)
I liked the originality of "blue-haired town" but, on reflection, couldn't quite picture what it meant. The first image I get from "blue-haired" is a certain kind of old lady with a fake-looking dye job. This seems too suburban and pretentious for Zanzotto's earthy Italian village. Is he referring to mossy slate roofs, or bluish foliage? Do blue spruce grow in Italy?
Finally, in the penultimate line, I would put either a line break or a dash between "soon to be fed" and "the eerie trumpet". It might also work to end the poem at "dragon's fangs", since the concluding images are not the most original, and ending with the dragon brings the poem full circle, back to the beast—prowling still, but held at bay, for now.
(Purchase Ned Condini's new book, An Anthology of Modern Italian Poetry, from the Modern Language Association here.)
Where could a poem like "And While the Beast Was on the Prowl" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Aesthetica Magazine's Annual Creative Works Competition
Entries must be received by August 31
Prizes of 1000 pounds for unpublished poems and stories from a British magazine that explores the interactions among different artistic genres and their cultural context; enter online
Robert Watson Literary Prizes
Postmark Deadline: September 15
Free contest from the prestigious Greensboro Review offers prizes of $500 for unpublished poetry and short fiction; no simultaneous submissions
Hackney Literary Awards for Poetry & Short Fiction
Postmark Deadline: November 30 (don't enter before September 1)
Offers prizes up to $600 for unpublished poetry and stories, in both nationwide and statewide (Alabama) categories; publication not included
This poem and critique appeared in the August 2009 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Untitled (“mother’s now…”)
mother's now
translucent glowing
coldly by this aging
winter sun
autumnal under
a puzzled cloud
forgetful of both
time and place
her hand cold
as fresh chicken
Copyright 2009 by Hugh Hodge
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
As I begin my tenure as poetry critic here at Winning Writers, I find myself looking towards the future. That is why, of all the many beautiful and intriguing poems that arrived in my mailbox, I picked this SMS text poem by South African poet Hugh Hodge.
You may ask, "What is an SMS poem?" and, perhaps querulously, "Um...why?" I'll admit I did.
SMS, just to make sure we're all on the same page—or, er, screen—means "short message service"—what most people simply call "texting," that apparently all-absorbing and reportedly thumb-nerve numbing activity that has people all over the world hunched over their cells and squinting.
Although the technology was developed in the early 1990s, implementation was slow. But by the year 2000 there were 17 billion SMS texts (yes, that's a "b"). One year later that number was 250 billion, and the millennium was born.
By 2005 the number of SMS transmissions overtopped the trillion mark. And as you might imagine, with all that communicating going on, it wasn't long before poets joined the party.
Enter "cell phone poetry", or "SMS poetry", or the like, into a search engine and you will discover sites offering "funny" or "sexy" examples, many of which you are free to copy. Far and away, most listings are for seduction poems, small offerings to send last night's date. This is comforting. Apparently, the "function" of poetry, as the Marxist critics would say, has not changed much since the early work of John Donne.
But even if the message hasn't much changed, clearly the medium has, begetting orthographic innovations sometimes called "textese" or "slanguage"—abbreviations slashed almost beyond recognition or symbols substituting for letters, such as m8 representing the word "mate". Though oft decried, these devices are lent a degree of legitimacy, indeed gravitas, by world-renowned Cambridge linguist David Crystal in Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 (Oxford University Press, 2008), to which this essay is greatly indebted.
According to Crystal, the first competition for text poetry was offered only two or three years after the arrival of texting by The Guardian, which claims to be the world's leading liberal newspaper. Early adopters though these liberals may be, note that, despite the distinguished panel of judges, the contest and its results are relegated to the technology pages.
Still, the games had begun. A second and more lucrative prize from The Guardian soon followed, then a sister city project between Antwerp and Leeds, a Tasmanian prize, a Filipino one, fourteen from the British forum, txt2nite.com, even a new Dutch literary foundation dedicating to awarding De Gouden Duim (The Golden Thumb)!
All right then, let's play! But what makes an award-winning text poem? Well, obviously, like any text message, it must contain no more than 160 characters. Beyond that, the judges from that original Guardian competition offer some insights; among them, the suspense created when one can only read a single line at a time, and the necessity of an unequivocal opening. As in all poetry competitions, judges enjoy a fresh approach or subject. Nevertheless, I wonder if some of the salient characteristics specific to this new type of poem may have been missed in their commentary—notably, the impossibility of stanzification. Also, wouldn't such a poem, by its nature, be epistolary?
This month's poet, Hugh Hodge, who, as a computer programmer and editor of South Africa's oldest literary journal, New Contrast, is no stranger to either technology or poetry, found himself in such insufficiently charted territory that he felt the need to include his own rules (no textese, message must be sent) and explanation along with his poem.
What is immediately striking about his poem is its subject matter. It is not about dating, not humorous, nor self-referentially about texting itself—none of the cliché SMS topics.
Less fortunately though, the poem opens with some difficult syntax. Follow me here: if the "mother's now translucent glowing" is a compound noun as suggested by the possessive, then it is the "glowing" which is cold. If, more probably, the noun is intended to be "mother", then the meaning is either "mother (is) now translucent (comma) glowing" or "mother (is) now translucent(ly) glowing." Or perhaps the noun is "now" and "mother" is an adjective modifying it.
This may appear nit-picky, but confusing syntax at the beginning of a poem can be off-putting. The reader cannot enter properly. And when the reader is a competition judge with a large stack to get through, your poem may not get the patient response you desire.
My favorite lines are 4-6. I like especially the juxtaposition of winter sun/autumnal. Is it winter or autumn? If it is winter, then aren't we done with autumn? Wait, I'm confused about time here, which is, of course, the point. The reader participates in this confusion. Furthermore notice how each word has an "n" and the "u" and "l" sounds both unify the phrase and propel it forward to the next line, creating a full movement from sun to cloud. Additionally, there is the personification of "cloud" serving double-duty as a metaphor for mother.
Lines 7 and 8, in comparison, are uninspired. They are also explanatory. Mom's confused about time; we've got that. The participation we enjoyed as readers is undercut when prosaically summed by the author. I recommend the lines be struck.
What really makes the poem successful for me are the final two lines which move the poem to an unexpected place with their disquieting image. The chicken may be fresh, but it's dead. And actually, if it were recently dead, it wouldn't be cold. This image is not merely unappealing, but troubling, because it is something as dear as mother's hand.
However, it is not only that final image that leaves me troubled. There is the question of what my response might have been had the poet not informed me of his medium. How does contextualizing a piece affect that piece? Remember, Marcel Duchamp's urinal would have been merely that, had he not signed it. Translations, arcania, invented forms, or resurrected ones require context, but when does context become gimmick?
And when does the need for context disappear? Will we ever recognize an SMS poem as readily as we do a sonnet? Some industry experts predict the volume of SMS messages to be 2.4 trillion by 2010. According to Julie Bloss Kelsey, "twitterzines", like the recently inaugurated Thaumatrope, are avidly seeking—and paying for—160-character fiction and poetry.
On the other hand, other analysts predict texting will be a short-lived trend, with video messaging soon to replace it. So perhaps we'd best get our thumbs working.
Where could a poem like "mother's now..." be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
PANK Magazine's 1,001 Awesome Words Contest
Entries must be received by September 30
Edgy, contemporary literary journal offers at least $200 for creative writing (one prize across all genres), up to 1,001 words; top prize amount is partly contingent on fees received, ranging between $200 and $750
Firstwriter.com International Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 1
UK-based writers' resource site offers prizes up to 500 pounds for poems up to 30 lines (published or unpublished); enter online only
Abilene Writers Guild Contest
Postmark Deadline: November 30 (don't enter before October 1)
Texas literary society offers prizes up to $100 in a number of genres including rhymed and unrhymed poetry, short stories, articles, children's literature, and novel excerpts
In addition, here are two sites that specialize in SMS poetry:
Copyblogger
This copywriters' and bloggers' advice site offers occasional prizes of iPods and gift cards
txt2nite
Online forum collects funny and poetic text messages
This poem and critique appeared in the September 2009 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Note to Van Helsing
Seduction is an art,
And so is death.
To fan the spark of life,
Until raging flames consume the body.
She died in ecstasy you know.
Sobbing her thanks,
As her soul burned away like a wick.
I can still feel her now.
A heartbeat unique among millions.
Within the heated flow of her veins,
Had lain the throbbing birth of womanhood.
Untouched!
An unmarked page,
Floating in the rain.
She danced between the drops,
Waiting for my pen to make its mark.
How could I resist,
This island of purity,
In a sea of sin?
The deep longing within her loins,
Given voice through quickened pulse.
It cried out for me,
And I raged in turn,
To cleanse my soul in the waters of this untapped well,
To douse damnation's fires in this virgin's red fount.
Gentle, so gentle the pursuit.
A soft smile to mask my fangs,
A caress like silk from razor-ed nails,
A knowing look with earthy promise,
And suddenly, so suddenly,
She was mine!
Fragile little leaf,
Twirling in the wind,
Crying on the edge of eternity,
For the thunderous release of the storm.
Within shadows her flower opened,
Within whispers her petals fell,
Within shivers her womb curdled,
To the cold offal of a dead man's seed.
Fruitless rite, empty husk, innocent damned.
She seemed familiar,
Did you know her Abe?
Perhaps your other lambs will bring me peace.
Copyright 2009 by Brian Donaghy
This poem was first published on MicroHorror.com in April 2009.
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Just in time for Hallowe'en, this month's critique poem by Brian Donaghy is based on characters from Bram Stoker's Dracula. In style and tone, "Note to Van Helsing" is a straightforward entry in the erotic-horror genre that Dracula exemplifies, rather than a critical reinterpretation or ironic pastiche, of which there have been many in modern times.
Vampires are the superstars of the monster world because they represent the unholy marriage of our two great preoccupations, Eros and Thanatos. In the Victorian era, arguably the heyday of the Gothic romance, sexual taboos could be explored more freely if the literal storyline was about violence rather than sex. The tragic outcome of uncontrolled passions in the horror novel could redeem a sensual story from charges of immorality.
To some extent this dynamic is still at work in the immensely popular Twilight novels, where the decision to transition from human to vampire is a powerful metaphor for adolescent girls' anxieties about their sexual awakening and the attendant risks of peer-group ostracism and family estrangement. Similarly, one could argue that Anne Rice's elegantly tragic, polyamorous vampires reflected the conflicted emotions of the gay community during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Does the sublimation of erotica into horror reflect the misplaced priorities of a culture that finds violence less obscene than sex, or does it defend the sacred mystery and momentousness of sex in the age of casual hook-ups?
The Romantic poets wrote some of the greatest classics of erotic horror. Among them are Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee", John Keats' "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Christabel", "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", and others. (Read about Coleridge and see more sample poems here.)
A victim of its own popularity, the Gothic poetic style that was so groundbreaking in its own day has become overly predictable in ours. Because "Note to Van Helsing" doesn't reinterpret those conventions, some mainstream literary journals might reject it as "genre" work. However, I admired its lyricism and emotional range, which make it a fine example of its genre.
The narrator speaks with bold assurance from the beginning, as befits a seducer. Even the title is cheeky, calling this elegantly worded challenge to his opponent a tossed-off "Note" rather than a letter. He can spin out verses without even trying, as smoothly as he weaves an irresistible web around his victims.
The vampire-hunter Van Helsing, like the readers of Dracula, wants to believe in his own basic decency, in flattering contrast to the vampire's boundless self-indulgence. The narrator of this poem mocks that self-image by asserting the universality of his dark impulses. Despite himself, the reader becomes aroused by the images of the girl's ravishment, and discovers within himself what the vampire has always known: that sex is dangerous, and death is sexy.
I particularly liked the passages in this poem where Donaghy reaches beyond the stock imagery of blood, sin and purity (is the vampire myth Catholicism-as-fetish?), such as the stanza beginning "An unmarked page, floating in the rain". This cooler and more contemplative moment provides a refreshing pause between scenes of overheated blood-lust. As the tension builds, the water imagery identified with the girl changes from a tranquil baptismal pool to a torrent of orgasmic release: "Crying on the edge of eternity,/For the thunderous release of the storm." She claims sexual agency, it seems, at the price of her life.
This coyness about female desire is a common and, to my feminist mind, disturbing convention of romance writing. The woman must be overpowered, either literally, as in the vampire scenario or other rape/seduction fantasies, or psychologically, by the man's charisma, in order to yield while retaining her virtue. Her flipping back and forth between the roles of victim and enthusiastic participant absolves both parties in the seduction drama.
But these strategies of self-preservation are all in vain, in the world of the poem. Between "her flower opened" and "her womb curdled" there is scarcely a breath. Meanwhile, once the narrator's thirst is sated, his coldness and emptiness return. Whereas before, the girl appeared uniquely desirable and important ("A heartbeat unique among millions"), she is now only another notch on the bedpost ("She seemed familiar,/Did you know her, Abe?"). The nickname, used here for the first time, could be another sign of the narrator's contempt for Van Helsing, but it could also be an invitation to bond over the shared experience of sexual conquest. The two are not mutually exclusive, since male friends often express their affection through teasing insults.
This emotional shift improves the poem, saving it from becoming a cliché erotic fantasy. In real life, coming down from the high of sexual union can stir up feelings of sadness, emptiness, even disgust for one's self or one's partner, as blissful self-forgetfulness is edged out by the self-conscious and separate ego once again. Sex reminds us of death because it makes us notice our embodiment, and bodies perish. What then does it mean that even immortals experience this sense of loss? Perhaps the source of our post-coital suffering is the changeableness of our own moods. We can't sustain the peak experience. The dead girl, alone, never has to face the morning after. That may be why she is such an enduring figure in Romantic literature.
For more reflections on the cultural meanings of the Gothic, check out Golem: A Journal of Religion and Monsters.
Where could a poem like "Note to Van Helsing" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Poetry Society of South Carolina Contests
Entries must be received by November 15
Twice-yearly contest offers prizes up to $500 for PSSC members, $200 for nonmembers, for poems on various themes; no simultaneous submissions
Abilene Writers Guild Contest
Postmark Deadline: November 30
Texas writers' group offers prizes up to $100 in a number of genres including rhymed and unrhymed poetry, short stories, articles, children's literature, and novel excerpts
Wild Violet Writing Contests
Postmark Deadline: December 18
Prizes up to $100 and online publication for short fiction and poetry; longer poems accepted, up to 200 lines
Another publication that appreciates "genre" writing includes:
This poem and critique appeared in the October 2009 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Design
Perhaps paradise, too, blooms in due season.
A fragmentary gift that sprouts in piecemeal design
under a chaotic spring, its lesions
perhaps a paradise in due season.
A distant view from a cool hilltop gives reason
to speculations, and frenzies of color align
to show a paradise blooming in due season,
a fragmentary gift, sprouting in piecemeal design.
Copyright 2009 by Janet Butler
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
In August I asked why one might write a text-message poem. This month, same question, but for a much older form—the "triolet".
Well, for one thing, if you can accomplish a triolet, you will have a piece that requires a second reading to fully appreciate. Inviting a second reading is always a goal of good poetry.
But be cautioned: formal poetry demands more from the reader, who not only has to parse language not delivered in standard speech, but is also expected to understand the rules that the poet was following. (Sites such as Ariadne's Web can help you become a more knowledgeable reader and writer of poetic forms.)
For contest entrants, the use of traditional forms can distinguish your work, demonstrating that you are capable of working on two levels at once. However, you should be aware that while some judges may be impressed, an equal number loathe formal poetry of any kind.
Most importantly for those of us who love to write poetry, a closed form like a triolet gives us something to work against. Until a poet experiments with putting some formal constraints on a poem, it is impossible to appreciate what they can elicit. They can force fresh language, or expand a poet to a more public voice. They can excite rhythms.
Many poets first try their hand at the villanelle, which does share some of the same qualities, but I would suggest that triolets offer a better starting point for explorations. Certainly they make a better stepping stone to the sestina, which so many poets try next and then grow frustrated. And since the poet only composes five lines, it's worth a try.
For this month's author, Janet Butler, it was worth four tries. In her letter she wrote: "I've decided to make July 'write-a-triolet-a-week' month." She went on to say that she and a long-distance poet friend give each other a challenge every week and suggest a theme. Clearly we have a poet here who understands how structure can support her work and help her become a more accomplished, versatile, and prolific writer.
She has chosen for her poem a complexly rule-bound form. Next, she must choose a theme, something that expresses the properties of its tight structure—that expresses, if you will, its "triolet-ness". Not surprisingly, she chose: "Design".
From its first line we are clued that this is a poem meant to be read slowly: the internal clause separated by commas, the slow movement of the "u" sound. It is not so much a proposition (as one might conclude from the "Perhaps") as a thesis—the word "too" inviting the reader to fill in her own examples.
It asks a question: does "paradise"—a word rich with cultural and personal connotations—only bloom for a season in its turn? The next three lines wonder whether there is ever a time in the cycle of seasons that the "lesions" of the creek, its dry rivulets and washes, aren't thriving with life. Notice she has used a second connotation of "paradise", this time not a proper noun.
In lines five through eight, Janet is done asking questions. She turns to argument and provides evidence. Looked at from what she takes the trouble to describe as a "cool" high place, the pattern of colors supports her proposition, for at least as far as her eyes can see.
In other words, this is a poem with an underlying rhetorical strategy. It is very well achieved. The result, just as it stands, is very satisfying.
So much is suggested by the choice of the word "cool". In the same line as "reason" it connotes "mind", "hilltop", of course, the cranium. So another way to read line five is psychologically. When, with a "cool head", we take some perspective, we see that paradise—whatever that means—is not only brief and fleeting but "fragmentary" and "piecemeal". These lines deepen the meaning of the poem and make it more potentially relevant to a random reader's life.
But again, this is a poem with an underlying rhetorical strategy—in this case, an argument, usually the domain of the elegant sonnet. I wonder if Janet's lines, sonnet-like in their length and rhythm, exploit all the potential lively fun out of the song-like, witty triolet? I find myself reading this as if it were written in couplets, and line five, as I've shown, operates much like a volta. Might this be a near-sonnet dressed up as a triolet? Has Janet chosen the best vehicle for her words?
If it has a weak thread, I would pick out lines two and eight. In these lines the "gift that sprouts" is what is called a metonomy—a substitution, in this case for "bloom". What remains of the line without these words is "fragment" and "piecemeal", which describe the bloom.
Because of this, grammatically, they really belong in the previous sentence. But anyone can see why Janet made the choice to end-stop her first sentence exactly as she did. To fix this, she need only remove the metonomy.
She is left with the concepts "fragmentary" and "piecemeal design". I question these. Not only do I not hear music between the two phrases, but I feel their choppy rhythm detracts from the flow that exists in the first and third lines. Furthermore, I struggle to find what resonates between their meanings. Perhaps the words are too close to one another in concept? Or perhaps they are too abstract. Here may be the place for metonomy. What concrete objects might represent "fragmentary" and "piecemeal" as well as connect to and expand upon the image of a chaotic spring?
But this is just one line, and not the rhyme at that. "Design" rings with line 6, which is a model for a good pivotal line in a poem—that comma handing off the topic like a marathoner with a baton. So not even a line—a few phrases! And whether Janet revises them or not, she has, by daring to work with a form, created a tightly crafted, well-argued and insightful poem.
Where could a poem like "Design" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Franklin-Christoph Poetry Contest
Entries must be received by November 30
Free contest from seller of luxury pens and desk accessories offers $1,000 for unpublished poems
The Lyric College Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: December 1
Free contest from venerable journal of formal verse offers prizes up to $500 for poems by US and Canadian undergraduates
Writer's Digest Poetry Awards
Postmark Deadline: December 15
National writers' magazine offers prizes up to $500 for poems 32 lines or less; online entries accepted; no simultaneous submissions
This poem and critique appeared in the November 2009 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
On Battery Hill
I push snow with my feet,
suck ice cookies off one mitten
while dragging the sled
behind like a stubborn dog
on an icy leash
to reach the tin drum bonfire
crowded with Big People
laughing, warming hands,
their faces lively
over the fierce coals.
My dad brings me;
he loves the outdoors. His skin
is thick and ruddy, his voice booms
out, a baritone with basso rumbles.
He stays up by the fire, smacking
his hands for warmth, lets me take the hill
myself. The hill is a test;
fly fast enough to go straight down,
but not slide into the frozen lake.
Footsteps
show me where I've been:
all mixed up, criss-crossed
with the runners and feet
of others. Bundled
in big coats, caps, scarves,
anonymous, you can't tell
if I'm a boy or girl—
even I'm not sure yet.
No one knows me here,
my wet bed, my little lies,
how easy it is to make me cry.
Copyright 2009 by Niki Nymark
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
It is winter here in the United States and the beginning of a long season when we will be reminded of Christmas at every turn and thoughts for many move to family. Perhaps that is why I find myself so drawn to this dramatic persona poem by Niki Nymark, of St. Louis, Missouri, author of A Stranger Here Myself from Cherry Pie Press.
Unlike my last two critiques in which I focused upon a few lines or phrases, the issues with "On Battery Hill", as I perceive them, are more systemic.
Let's start with what's working. Nymark has constructed a durable underlying narrative structure. In three stanzas divided roughly in half in terms of plot, she moves the story consistently forward. First she places the character, then gives her a goal—in this case, a visual target. Stanza two begins by introducing the next character (father) then raises the stakes both emotionally and physically with "the hill is a test".
Notice the restraint of the placement of that phrase. Many poets would succumb to the dramatic effect of ending the stanza with it. Nymark makes a more subtle choice.
She then returns to her protagonist and has her drop her gaze. This completes the action—the visual target—begun in stanza one. It also creates a springboard to move the poem into metaphor, the mixed-up footsteps akin to the protagonist losing herself, then questioning herself, then doubting, arriving finally at her touching confession.
This is enough plot for a short poem. Need to tell more story? Write more poems.
So, plot settled, what this narrative will need is a distinctive voice and a setting. With these, I think, Nymark comes up against some problems.
The voice as it currently stands is inconsistent. "Big People" for example, is not the same level of diction as "a baritone with basso rumbles"; "anonymous" not the same as "ice cookies". The author needs to make a choice. Is this a poem in the voice of an adult remembering or of a child experiencing? Remember, there's no law in any country as far as I know that says you can't write two poems and save your favorite phrases!
If the author does choose to adopt the dramatic persona of a small child, she might try simplifying the verb tenses and shortening the sentences. Run-on sentences can be very effective when writing in a child's voice, but even within these run-ons, try and stick to just the present and past tenses.
We are always taught to be perspicacious in poems, but with dramatic persona, this can make the voice unnatural. At least to my ear, "bonfire inside a tin drum" sounds more childlike than its current, more economical, structure.
Remember: dramatic persona is acting. Before beginning to revise, the author may want to use a few theater techniques to help ground her character.
Probably Nymark already knows everything she needs to know about her young speaker: how old she is, how stable and safe and happy. Nevertheless, it might be useful to locate a few pictures of children that age and ponder them.
Next, even though it may not be included in the poem, she might take some time to fill in the family background. For example, where's Mom right now? Has the little girl seen the hill before, perhaps been on it during another season? What is her relationship with her father?
Now it's time to imagine being there. Poll the character's senses. Nymark might examine in her mind the color of the sky, the sounds of other kids, or of the snow. How cold is the speaker? Is she hungry? What can she see of those coats and caps at her particular height?
In dramatic persona, setting is conveyed through props. These are the objects with which the character interacts. Nymark has given us mittens, sled, tin drum, bonfire. Actors take time to explore their props, to handle them, even though that may just mean pantomime. Through this exercise Nymark might find more fresh and specific details—perhaps something about the sled. She might even find more objects to add, though, in the end, for a poem this brief, the three she has named might prove the perfect amount.
Interestingly, Nymark has not described the hill or the lake. This may be an artistic choice, because to dwell on a description of either would greatly change the poem by enlarging the importance of the setting to the point of metaphor, but I offer it as food for thought.
Finally, she is ready to tell the story out loud while acting her character. I suggest she plan to do so at least several times. It can be helpful to intentionally let go of one's own natural rhythm and experiment with others. For this poem, Nymark might even try affecting a childlike voice. Suddenly it may no longer seem natural to describe the father's skin as thick and ruddy as she discovers ways to convey the same notion in an authentic and consistent voice limited to a child's vocabulary and experience.
Warning: these suggestions will probably lead to a longer draft! Many of the best ideas in a dramatic persona poem come from an initial overwriting. She might even try forcing herself to write as fast as she can. Why? Because writing a dramatic persona is about giving up conscious control of the text and allowing the imagination to take charge—at least for a few drafts anyway. Such poems both require and foster empathy. Perhaps because of that, they are enormous fun, both for the writer and the reader.
Where could a poem like "On Battery Hill" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Wild Violet Writing Contests
Postmark Deadline: December 18
Online literary quarterly offers $100 apiece for unpublished poems and short stories
Dream Quest One Poetry & Writing Contest
Postmark Deadline: December 31
This website featuring accessible work by emerging writers offers online publication and prizes up to $500 for fiction, $250 for poetry
Pennsylvania Poetry Society Annual Contest
Postmark Deadline: January 15
Top prize of $100 plus smaller prizes for poems in two dozen categories including formal verse, humor, and a variety of themes; no simultaneous submissions
Wednesday Club Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: February 1
Free contest offers prizes up to $700 for unpublished poems by authors aged 18+ who live within a 50-mile radius of St. Louis, MO
Memoir (and) Prizes for Prose or Poetry
Postmark Deadline: February 15
Free contest from magazine of personal essays offers prizes up to $500 and publication for "traditional and experimental prose, poetry, graphic memoir, narrative photography, lies, and more"
This poem and critique appeared in the December 2009 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Growing Up Once More
Yet would like to sit near the window,
Taste creamy chocolates, ice creams,
Saunter in the parks, sit in the swings,
Learn to crawl, walk, run,
Behind the butterflies, wings, feathers
Learn to count, read, write once more,
Accompany them to the shore, building myriad vanishing sand castles,
Learn to act, react, realize
Pigeonhole to infinite roles—
At schools, colleges, offices, organizations "homes"
Yet doesn't end the cycle
Begins the peregrination with another generation
Same process, same steps, same formulae
Yet everything remains a mystery
To mysterious man,
Never unravels the patterned parcels or pondering puzzles
And continues the race.
Copyright 2010 by Gargi Saha
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
Somewhere during my primary school years, a teacher gave me an exercise that I have never forgotten. We were handed a copy of a poem—I don't recall by whom, but you can imagine someone like a Gerard Manley Hopkins—and asked to connect sounds, both consonant and vowel, by circling them and drawing lines between. The result looked like a plate of spaghetti; no wonder it gave one's mouth so much to chew. It was this same unadulterated mouth-joy that drew me to this month's poem by Gargi Saha, an English teacher residing in Israel. Phrases like "Pigeonhole to infinite roles" or "the peregrination with another generation" simply make one happy to speak aloud. So let us, at the top of a new year, allow a poem whose very subject is the passing of time, to remind us that poetry can do this.
But first, before I say more about Gargi's poem, I'm going to digress briefly to discuss Gargi's submission—the email to me that contained her poem—because proper submission protocol is of relevance to all Winning Writers readers.
Try to imagine the tasks of a contest coordinator and judge, sometimes, but not always, the same person. Imagine the sudden deluge of mail that must be processed, the task of combing out those that will enter a second round, and so on. There will probably be a time when poems need to be separated from contestants' names, another when poems might be printed out. Imagine all this and take pity.
To be kind to a contest judge or poetry magazine editor, keep your submission simple. All that is needed is a single sentence saying that you have pasted below (or are attaching, according to the rules) an entry. Flourishes beyond that are not considered professional in the United States, and you may hurt your chances by adding them.
Then paste your poem in the body in plain text—no html, no fancy fonts, background or images. If you want your work read more than once or twice, make it easy to print out.
One more caveat before I let this go: think several times before you choose to center your poem. I challenge you to go to any of the fine magazines that contribute to the annual Best of the Net online anthology and find a single poem that uses this format. Why? Because English is read from left to right, and anything but a left to right movement interrupts the reading and calls attention to itself. If there is a compelling expressive reason to center your poem—say for example, its title is "Center," then by all means do so. In every other case, and I would be doing a disservice if I were not frank, you are marking your work as amateur.
Now to Saha's poem. No one can ever know the process of another writer, but my instincts tell me that this was a piece that rushed forth from its delighted author in a flow of inspiration. One clue is that there is a grammatical error in the first line: it should be "needs" an escort. A second clue is in the double use of the word "cream" in line 3. It is as if the author is warming up. But right from the beginning, Saha follows where her ear leads: bonEE chEEks nEEd /silVER hAIR/ Silver, cheekS, needS, eScort...
Somewhere, perhaps with the rhyme between "creams" and "swings", it seems to me, Saha hits her stride and begins to understand what her poem will be about, what its logic will be. She then directs her reader toward the predictable conclusion, but with such a tumbling forth of nonschematic rhyme that the journey is like a carnival ride.
It is always useful, when revising one of those pieces that seems to flow from us whole, to ask: where does the poem actually begin? Often, for the initial few lines, poets do the literary equivalent of clearing their throats.
One method to find the best beginning is to identify the first really striking phrase. For this poem, for me, that would be "run/Behind the butterflies, wings, feathers" where Saha moves backwards from whole to part in a way that both surprises the reader and seems true to the expression of a toddler's chase. So, starting the poem with "Run behind the butterflies" is one experiment Saha might try.
Another method for finding the beginning of a poem is to break it into narrative sections. As it stands, there are four lines of set-up, then seven of chronological development, then four lines of response to the development, and finally, four more lines of response to response. That's a lot of movement for a piece of this length, especially the response to the response, which complicates the reading in a good way—a well-paced poem.
But how much of Saha's set-up is actually necessary? How much does this particular ice-cream eater add? She may be the inspiration for the poem, but that does not mean she needs to be part of it. On the other hand, if Saha began her poem with an imperative (which could be lines 3 or 4 or 5), the reader would be invited to participate in the reading. Suddenly it is a poem about the reader, not about a particular woman. Rumor has it, readers tend to enjoy poems about themselves!
Lines 5 through 11 operate chronologically. One experiment Saha might try is inserting one or both of lines 3 and 4 into their correct place chronologically. If she keeps line 3 (for its rhyme with "swing") I hope she will consider changing the first half to remove "creamy" and allow other sounds in the lines to suggest words—perhaps something with a long "i".
While on the subject of lines 5 through 11: a little paring. The words "shore" and "castle" imply the word "sand". Saha might want to cut that word and also "organizations'" (note possessive after the "s".) which is implied so much more effectively with the quotation marks she has placed around "homes".
Within the final six lines, undoubtedly the poem's strongest, line fourteen is the weakest link, not nearly as fresh as the line before it or the two lines after. I'm not sure the concept is completely necessary and think the line could just be cut, but if the concept is important to Saha, she has already well demonstrated that she can make it more fun to say.
Finally, a thought about the title: should Saha choose to remove the woman from the poem, it would no longer make sense. More importantly though, as it stands, the title gives away the surprise of the poem, taking away some of the pleasure of the discovery from the reader. Sometimes the lines we remove suggest titles. "Formulae", for example, might work for the next draft.
But, if I am at all correct about the origins of this poem, I suspect that what will be the most difficult in its revision will also be the most important: Saha must not sabotage its infectious energy. Somehow, she must summon it again, enhancing and honoring what is genuinely delightful about this piece.
Where could a poem like "Growing Up Once More" be submitted? This style of poetry is most likely to be appreciated by local literary societies and publications geared toward emerging writers. The following contests may be of interest:
Poetry Society of Virginia (Adult Categories)
Postmark Deadline: January 19
Prizes up to $250 for poems in over two dozen categories including humor, nature, and a variety of traditional forms
Kent & Sussex Open Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by January 31
Prizes up to 800 pounds for unpublished poems by authors aged 16+, from a venerable local writers' group in Britain; fees payable in pounds sterling only
Chistell Writing Contest
Entries must be received by February 28
Free contest offers prizes up to $100 for poetry and short fiction by writers aged 16+ who have never been published in a major publication; no simultaneous submissions
Oregon State Poetry Association Contests
Postmark Deadline: March 1
Twice-yearly contest offers prizes up to $100 in categories including traditional verse, humor, open theme
This poem and critique appeared in the January 2010 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
You Are and The Second Million Times
YOU ARE by Prasenjit Maiti
there and you are not
like the dizzy sorrows that are mine
lining my shirt, frosting my drink
as I walk across downtown Calcutta
my beloved misery
where your smiles light up the stairs
and my cigarettes endless
like your days and ways
that are my sorrows, my ins and outs
because you are there and you are not
Copyright 2010 by Prasenjit Maiti
THE SECOND MILLION TIMES by Larry Pontius
How do you say I love you
The second million times
After you've used up all the special looks
Unexpected flowers and quotes from favorite books
I can't think of any more places to walk alone together
That we haven't walked along before
And the only way I can surprise you with a visit on the phone
Is to call someday when I know you're not at home
There isn't another place on your soft skin
That I can give a loving touch
We covered all of that long ago
When our lips learned every loving kiss
And our passions every loving way to go
Is it possible that love only has a million signs
I guess that's what I'm trying to say
That, and how'd you like to start over
Like we just met yesterday
Copyright 2010 by Larry Pontius
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
Love poems—they're been with us at least 4,000 years. Type the single word "poem" into Google and the first item you are offered is a link to love poems. No single subject rushes the poet more breathlessly to his desk, drunk with overpowering emotion, a-tingle with vivid imagery. But given both the love poem's long history and arguable surfeit, however is our poet to find anything new enough, fresh enough, not only to be worthy of his exquisite condition, but of its precious object? And, more importantly to us, as readers and contesters, how is it possible to write a love poem that a third party might be interested to read? The answer, perhaps, has something to do with strategy, because, let's face it, the love poem is a poem on a mission. Its objective: seduction.
This month, in celebration of Valentine's Day, I'll take an appreciative look at two very successful love poems that could not possibly be more different, from authors writing from locales that—beside their heat—could not be more different either, with a particular focus on their strategy. The first, "You Are", is a brief, intense lyric by Dr. Prasenjit Maiti from Calcutta, India, who calls himself "a political scientist by occupation and a writer by compulsion". "The Second Million Times", a superbly crafted light-rhyme, was sent in by Larry Pontius of Florida, who has had a long and distinguished career in advertising.
Maiti's strategy is the simplest and the perhaps the wisest: the most important word in a seduction is "you". As a poet, he recognizes that overusing his most important word would diminish its potency. Look where he places it: the first word of the title, and the first line and their echo in the last two lines, giving this poem both shape and the sense that the poem will continue on as the poet walks in the hot night.
Between these lines Maiti pulls the reader along with multiple sound repetitions. He begins by grounding us in physicality. This poem is between the object "you" and the poet's body; as readers, we are just eavesdropping. With "my beloved misery" the poem pivots elegantly. Maiti has chosen to use no end punctuation enabling just this sort of ambiguous enjambment. Does the phrase refer to Calcutta? Or to the object of his love? Or neither—is it parenthetical, or voiced as if within a sigh?
The thread of sound repetition continues as the referent opens out: we see the lamps in the stairwells, the ember end of his cigarette, made so poignant by the reversal of the adjective and noun. What the eighth and ninth lines lack in specific or sensory image, they make up for in sonority. The heavy rhymes work almost like a pendulum through them. In tone, they almost whine.
All this, the result of too much exquisite pining. Oh, what could be more romantic than that? I feel certain that his beloved will want to race to him. Mission accomplished.
Pining is not, however, the position Larry Pontius finds himself in. The opposite. His long-time sweetheart is still happily by his side. How to tell her he loves her in a new way? Oh, what could be more romantic than that?
For his strategy, Pontius relies far more on design and what is probably the clue to sustaining love: gentle humor. Though as a humorous poem, this one is full of surprises.
It does not scan, for one thing—these lines defy a metered reading. Pontius chooses "alone together/along before" and "every loving way to go" and all the superfluous syntax of lines seven and eight because they complicate his rhymes, undermining expected rhythms and waking up the ear.
The lines break down as four sentences, which the poet packs with rhymes, though choosing to end with them only in lines three through eight. In other words, as soon as the reader comes to expect rhyme, the poet gives them something else. Line nine begins the third sentence, as in a popular song, and is the one sentence that takes five lines to contain. He gives us a new rhyme pattern in the last four lines anchoring the poem not only with the hard rhyme of "say" and "yesterday", but also with "million signs" and "million times"—connecting the last four lines to the beginning of the poem.
The other thing that the first and last four lines have in common is that they are both questions. Only two sentences are: the first and the last. Rather than have all four sentences ask questions, Pontius holds our interest by taking us through a list of increasing value.
Notice how almost every noun has an adjective in this piece. Notice how these adjectives increase the importance or intensity of the noun. Yet, even with the adjectives they are not specific. The poet allows the reader to supply detail, in a sense, making his poem more generally applicable—a desirable quality in a commercial poem.
Look how with "any more", and "only way", and "isn't another", Pontius completely forecloses any prospects for our hero to achieve his desired goal. He "raises the stakes" as the fiction writers say. But before all hope is lost, proffers an invitation—my dear, shall we fall in love again?
Who could help but smile, and be touched, and for a moment, love the poet for writing it. Mission accomplished once again. Ah, the love poem, may we write them always.
Where could a poem like "You Are" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
National Federation of State Poetry Societies Awards
Postmark Deadline: March 15
Wide array of prizes up to $1,500 for poems in various styles and themes; some categories are members-only; no simultaneous submissions
https://saturdaywriters.org/monthly-contests-2021.html
Postmark Deadline: March 15
Missouri literary society offers prizes up to $100 for unpublished poems
JBWB Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by March 31
British writer Jacqui Bennett's website offers quarterly contests with prizes up to 100 pounds; enter and pay by mail or email
Where could a poem like "The Second Million Times" be submitted?
Words of Love Writing Contest
Postmark Deadline: February 20
Prizes up to $300 for love poems, stories and love letters, from the Writers' Workshop of Asheville, NC; fee includes critique
Chistell Writing Contest
Entries must be received by February 28
Free contest offers prizes up to $100 for poetry and short fiction by writers aged 16+ who have never been published in a major publication; no simultaneous submissions
Oregon State Poetry Association Contests
Postmark Deadline: March 1
Twice-yearly contest offers prizes up to $100 in categories including traditional verse, humor, open theme
These poems and critique appeared in the February 2010 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Flaming Comforter and American Charybdis
FLAMING COMFORTER by Airlie Sattler Rose
French whistles sing to the coal train moving mountains, the green motorcycle gleaming under stained glass cylinders, tumbling star-like crystals peacefully rolling, comfortably rolling around on the bed on top of the motion of waves, the bare feet of the catalog's down comforter singed with fire.
It's ok, really. Don't you think the swan song is beautiful and the Lorax might find his way home some day? I look at the concrete, the molasses geography and dream of Jesus bursting through radiant clouds skipping on giant sandal feet from building to building. David Byrne's "Nothing but flowers" mark his steps until everything is flattened into life.
There is no more room. It is either going out or going in, breathing, sustenance, fire. Fire is the root, the structure, the comfort. A burn is a sharp thing that cuts. I sing to my children 10,000 songs, but they always want to hear Happy Birthday. Synchronicity when they line up together and—darn—those bare feet sticking out from under the blanket again.
I keep going, but the horizon is grey with smogulous smog and fogulous fog and everyone is coughing. This nation is so small minded. We are such children—gathering our bugs in a jar. We don't know enough to touch the other. The other's touch inflames us. It is how we grow-up. Un believable the American children. Un believable their world of princess dolls and ballrooms. What do they make of the decaying corpse of nature that fills the air with the stench of poetry? Ugh. It is inescapable.
Fleas contaminate the bed. Plink, plink—they're hard to catch, but I don't mind. I like to squish fleas and lie down in flea free luxury. America doesn't have fleas. I live here. The island paradise awaits, and the sun is setting. What kind of boat is this? Why does green flash as the fireball submerges? and did my freckle move?
Copyright 2010 by Airlie Sattler Rose
AMERICAN CHARYBDIS by Airlie Sattler Rose
I step into the lapping edge
of American culture.
My daughter looks adorable in her red ribbon pleated polyester
cheerleading costume
safely within the eyes
of the camera.
My son is safe.
He stands beyond the jetsam line
yelling "Mommy!"
afraid to come closer.
Good.
Cars snake along
ahead behind
I can't slow down
pull out of traffic.
The guy to my left
flips me off when
I swerve to get off of
here. This bridge isn't safe.
I've got kids on board.
It's rotting from the inside
out and
below the water
sucks around the piling
as it bounces and returns to
New couches smell of urethane.
If they catch fire,
they melt
into a scalding puddle
emitting cyanide.
So, I tell my kids not to play with matches.
It's the sucking sound
of the television
arguments over why we
don't buy from Wal-Mart.
The princess ball is surely happening in the heart of that castle and
the small plastic bucket
holds a blue bubble
that looks like plastic
except for muscle-less twitches
and the slow curl, uncurl
of tentacles.
The water was a draining ache when I got in,
but now it feels ok
warm even.
I pack my thrift store specials
into a charity bag
and take out my Chico's
passport card.
I ask the lady behind the counter
if any children wove until their hands bled
to make this garment, and
when she looks at me like I'm crazy
I feel I have done my duty to the children.
Because the only thing
that is real to me
is the slick
wrinkle-free fit of my pants
and the fact I feel professional
in-front of a class.
I like the way it feels
to spend money like smooth silk
spread over the rotting infrastructure.
The murdered land off-gases
beneath our feet.
It all feels normal.
Copyright 2010 by Airlie Sattler Rose
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Many authors have a set of core concerns to which they return, in one form or another, throughout their career. Mary Oliver's prolific volumes of nature poetry share a common message that life is precious and paying attention is a spiritual practice. At the other end of the mood spectrum, Stephen King is obsessed with the artist's evil double, the dark side of genius. With each variation on their theme, writers hope to come closer to finding the best form to express an idea that won't let them go.
For this month's critique, I chose Airlie Sattler Rose's poems "Flaming Comforter" and "American Charybdis" because they represent two such variations on a topic that attracts many contemporary poets: how to survive the unwholesome excesses of American commercial culture. Rose has tried out two poetic forms, the prose poem and the free-verse lyric, each of which is suited to explore different features of this dystopian landscape.
The prose poem is a hybrid form, rapidly evolving, elusive of definition. In this it resembles the mutating, confusing environment that the protagonist of "Flaming Comforter" inhabits. Surrealism is a natural tendency of the prose poem because it lacks the ruminative pauses of lineated verse, and also the logical progression of ideas we expect from prose. The quick succession of associative leaps can overwhelm the reader's analytical mind, just as this poem's narrator and her children are overwhelmed by the seductive pop-culture data stream.
One might say that the prose poem is the perfect form for our wired age. More than ever, it's up to us to connect and filter the random information that engulfs us. No one is going to shape it into a nice sonnet or an executive summary.
From the first paragraph of "Flaming Comforter", the reader is immersed in a stream of gorgeous yet disorienting images. Just as we begin to relax and enjoy it, a note of danger is introduced, "the bare feet of the catalog's down comforter singed with fire", followed by a hasty retreat into false hope: "It's okay, really. Don't you think the swan song is beautiful and the Lorax might find his way home some day?" (The Lorax is a Dr. Seuss character who warned in vain about all the trees being cut down to make consumer products.)
The narrator sounds alternately disgusted by, and tempted to share, the willed naivete of her fellow citizens. It would be a relief from the vain struggle to protect herself and her children from a corporate monoculture that threatens not only their physical ecosystem, but the biodiversity of their imagination: "I sing to my children 10,000 songs, but they always want to hear Happy Birthday."
The childhood references (Dr. Seuss, princess dolls) are part of the storyline of the harried parent, but also suggest the culture's general immaturity and egotism, an inability to grasp the implications of one's desires: "America doesn't have fleas. I live here." In other words, we can't be wrong! It can't happen to us! The stream-of-consciousness voice of the prose poem, which does away with explanatory transitions, makes it harder to differentiate between the narrator's own views and the messages she receives from outside—which is precisely the point.
Bagginess and a loss of direction are special hazards of writing a prose poem. The stream of consciousness must be edited, but it must not seem so. The pitch of the poem falters, it seems to me, in the fourth paragraph, which is a bit preachy and uses nonsense words in a way that feels out of place. The Seuss-ism "smogulous smog and fogulous fog" isn't how the sharply intelligent and wary narrator would speak when she is making a serious argument, in fact the central argument of the poem.
Before moving on to the next poem, I want to say a few words about the wonderfully multi-layered title "Flaming Comforter". As a literal, physical description, the paradox instantly draws us in. The security blanket is on fire. Something dramatic is happening here. I also thought of the Holy Spirit, one of whose traditional epithets is the Comforter. Angels are radiant and terrifying, like fire. That green flash on the horizon...is God going to intervene? Will we be happy to see Him? Maybe not.
In Greek mythology, Scylla and Charybdis were two sea monsters living on either side of a narrow strait. Charybdis took the form of a whirlpool, while Scylla was shaped like a woman with wild dogs' heads coming out of her waist. The story has passed into common parlance as a metaphor for navigating with difficulty between two disastrous alternatives.
As in "Flaming Comforter", Rose uses water imagery in "American Charybdis" to represent the overpowering and chaotic force of a toxic culture. But if the prose poem was a flood, this narrative lyric is a drip-drip-drip, moving with the exaggerated slowness of paranoia, as the narrator must think and re-think the ramifications of the mundane choices that others rush through.
It seems to me that the target of this poem is false individualism, the privatization of public burdens. How interesting to use the first-person lyric, that supremely personal form, to critique an ideology that puts private choices at the center of the universe.
Try as she might, the mother cannot avoid being implicated in harmful decisions that are made at the corporate level. She has all of the responsibility, yet none of the power, to protect her family. Are your couches flammable (the flaming comforter again)? Well, just tell your kids not to play with matches! Simple as that.
Both of Rose's poems create the effect of two voices talking over one another, the ambient noise of the culture and the narrator's interior monologue which is in tension with those media messages. In "American Charybdis", the voices are more clearly delineated by the use of italics versus plain text, yet despite that, the voices bleed into one another as speakers break off mid-sentence and switch typefaces. It's like trying to read a book in a hospital waiting room where the TV is always blaring.
Perhaps because it has a clearer narrative line than the surreal "Flaming Comforter", this poem's political outrage feels a little more heavy-handed. Wal-Mart is almost too easy a target, and I would have liked to end on a more subtle and surprising image than "murdered land". Rose has no shortage of original images earlier in the poem, which makes her work stand out from the mass of other anti-corporate screeds. Some of my favorites are "the lapping edge of American culture", "money like smooth silk spread over the rotting infrastructure", and the lovely and strange sequence about the delicate sea creature in the bucket. Like the spirit of Hope at the bottom of Pandora's box, this little creature offers us relief from Rose's otherwise unbearable dystopian vision.
In style and content, I see similarities between Rose's work and the poetry of Joy Harjo, whose book A Map to the Next World also juxtaposed lyrics with prose poems on parallel themes. Other poets writing in the same vein include Pamela Uschuk and William Pitt Root, the husband-and-wife team behind the literary journal Cutthroat. Their annual contest will reopen in the summer.
Where could poems like "Flaming Comforter" and "American Charybdis" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Solstice Literary Contest
Entries must be received by March 23
New online journal offers prizes of $500 for poetry, $1,000 for fiction and essays; 2010 final judge for poetry is Terrance Hayes
Foley Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: March 31
Free contest from the Jesuit magazine 'America' offers $1,000 for a poem of 30 lines or less; no simultaneous submissions; past winning poems have touched on morally significant issues, but have not been "religious" poetry in the conventional sense
Bomb Magazine Biennial Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: April 1
Well-regarded literary journal offers this $500 award for unpublished poems in even-numbered years only; 2010 final judge is Susan Howe
Tiferet Writing Contest
Entries must be received by April 1
Tiferet, an ecumenical journal of spirituality and the arts, offers $500 for unpublished poems of any length; enter online
Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: April 30
Highly competitive $2,000 award from Nimrod International Journal; editors seem to like poetry with a progressive political bent
These poems and critique appeared in the March 2010 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Understanding Modern English-Language Haiku
By Tracy Koretsky
This month, in a special edition of Critique Corner, we've invited five editors from top online haiku and related-form publications to demonstrate the revision process they used to arrive at these poems:
flies explore
the newly painted sign
fish market
—Jane Reichhold, editor of Lynx
cold night
the dashboard lights
of another car
—John Stevenson, editor of The Heron's Nest
snorkeling
a chasm as deep
as fear
—George Swede, editor of Frogpond
dune wind—
the blackened seed pods
of a bush lupine
—Linda Papanicolaou, editor of Haigaonline
blue sky
before me
beyond me
—Colin Stewart Jones, editor of Notes from the Gean
Copyright in these poems is reserved to their authors. George Swede's poem was first published in Acorn #24.
Like it or not, American poetry is factionalized. Academic poets snub gesturing street poets; language poets bar-brawl with new formalists. It's the kind of passionate squabble that, at the very least, proves the vitality of the source from which all these tributaries flow. Yet, with rare exception, haiku, the most practiced form of literature in the world, is segregated, as if in a lake of its own. Ask an American poet what a haiku is and you are likely to be told that it is a three-line form with 5, 7, and 5 syllables per line, and that it contains a nature image. Neither is true.
This is unsettling given the seminal relationship of haiku to American poetry. In the early twentieth century, a time when American arts of all types were struggling to distinguish themselves from European conventions, there was a concurrent interest in all things Oriental—an interest shared by Ezra Pound, the intellectual center of the first truly American movement of poets, the Imagists. Through them, haiku—or rather, what Pound and his circle misapprehended to be haiku—came to provide the formal tenets (though not the subject) of modernism.
Half a century later, during America's next significant cultural revolution, poets would once again misapprehend haiku, this time as philosophical fuel for those poets known as the Beats. Pound misunderstood the two parts of a haiku, believing they were meant merely to describe one another rather than to resonate. He even called his experiments with the form "equations". As for the Beats, they thought their subject entirely Zen, which, in reality, is a small subset of haiku. Now, not all misunderstandings—especially among poets—are bad. Something new and fresh arose from these accidents, something still easily evident in American poetry today.
Just to parse haiku and understand its mechanisms can provide keys to reading American poetry with greater sophistication, which in turn matures our craft. Through haiku, a poet can begin to comprehend contemporary poetry's disjunctivity—its leaps in logic and argument, and the space it must leave for the reader's participation. In terms of craft, it can help teach where to cut lines and how to work across stanzas.
But beware, despite its brevity and seeming transparency of diction, there is nothing simple about haiku. It is a deep and highly nuanced genre with sensibilities that can take years to comprehend. That is why this primer attempts to introduce only how to read haiku—not necessarily to write it.
To begin, then, let us turn to some of the genre's best magazines. In 2004 I conducted a poll of 22 such publications, discovering that none of them—that's right, none—sought poems with lines of 5/7/5 syllables. To oversimplify, Japanese and English sound units are not easily comparable. As a result, it is rare to find a poem as long as seventeen syllables in today's English-language haiku, and the way those syllables are arrayed varies widely.
As you go through the demonstrations our kind guests have donated, take note of the syllables and the way they are distributed across the lines.
How to do so most effectively will be the topic addressed by our first guest, Jane Reichhold, a renowned teacher of haiku. In addition to these superbly lucid primer pages from her excellent book Writing and Enjoying Haiku: A Hands-on Guide, Reichhold provides a free peer-critique website for the benefit of the world community of English-language haiku writers: the popular and lively AHA Poetry Forum.
Yet, have a look at Lynx, the magazine Ms. Reichhold edits with her husband Werner, and you might not see any stand-alone three-line poems. What's going on? Well, there is a whole universe of material that shares the essential qualities one finds in haiku; material not far, in some aspects, from Western poetry, but possessing a somewhat different logic. There is inspiration to be found there, but you have to know how to interpret these poems first.
To help us do so, Ms. Reichhold begins:
"Haiku is a genre of form poetry meaning that the form has a definite form. Though we non-Japanese do not count syllables, I do strongly believe that we should maintain the shape of haiku with short, long, short lines. Take:
fish market
the flies explore
the newly painted sign
and notice what happens by simply rearranging the lines:
flies explore
the newly painted sign
fish market
First of all, we eliminate an article (the)—always a plus when trying to be succinct. Secondly, all haiku writers search for interesting first lines that grab the reader's interest. 'Flies explore' opens up an activity—stronger than if on a place—'fish market'. Thirdly, since this haiku uses the riddle technique, the author should set up the riddle with the first two lines, then give the 'answer' in the third. As the haiku is originally expressed, the 'answer' is given away in the first line.
I created this poem for this demonstration, but often the original version is the way the author experienced the poem: being in a fish market, then noticing more flies are crawling on the sign than on the fish. In the revision the poem is expressing a situation: "flies are crawling on a sign—why?" The answer comes in the end "because this is a fish market!" —the AHA moment of the poem."
That "aha" moment one hears so much about in haiku circles basically has to do with allowing the reader to make the connection for him- or herself. Haiku demands an active reader.
In fact, our second guest, John Stevenson, editor of the venerable publication The Heron's Nest, ties this to the form's origins: "Haiku itself comes from an earlier form of poetry known as renku—a collaboration in which two or more poets contribute verses."
So you see, haiku began as something of a game—or at least a participatory improvisation requiring the total involvement of the poets. But like games or musical improvisations, there are some rules, and one is that the opening verse, from which the form we know as haiku derives, contain a seasonal reference.
Note that this is slightly different from the common Western understanding that haiku is about nature. A seasonal reference is not only about nature, but about nature within time.
Mr. Stevenson expands on this: "The reference can be a single word or a phrase. Some of the most frequently used are snow, cherry blossoms, and fireflies, denoting winter, spring, and summer respectively." Take some time with some issues of The Heron's Nest for a sense of how haiku poets make seasonal references. While there, notice how they operate with the rest of the poem.
To show how such references function expressively, Mr. Stevenson offers us this:
overnight travel
the dashboard lights
of another car
"This may have evoked a haiku mood for some readers, but the application of a traditional seasonal reference can offer powerful associations. Since one has so few words to work with in a haiku, it's important that each carry its weight. Why not avail myself of the additional resonance of a late autumn seasonal reference suggesting the imminence of winter—especially when it expresses part of what I am feeling:
cold night
the dashboard lights
of another car
Since I have said no more in the poem itself, I will say no more now about the particular associations this adds to the poem. But perhaps you will agree that an additional element has been introduced and that it broadens the implications of the poem. Not to be overlooked are the implications of the fact that I have identified with other poets through the act of using a traditional season reference."
This sense of referring to, and thereby resonating with, centuries of poets who have used the same or similar seasonal references is often cherished by people who love the form. It is the principal way to access emotion in these poems.
The concept of resonance is perhaps the most difficult for Western readers to understand. We tend to make Ezra Pound's error and read the second part of a haiku as an expansion upon the first, as if there were a colon between the two parts. Rather, the intention of the combination is to create a sort of chord—the relationship may be subtle or oblique or witty or stark or joyous; the relationship is literally the crux of the form. To read haiku means to make the connection.
People who write haiku in English generally use the term "juxtaposition" to describe this, and it is never easy. "A successful juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated things leads readers to a moment of awe and wonder; an unsuccessful one leaves readers disinterested, even irked," says our next guest, George Swede, editor of Frogpond, the journal of the Haiku Society of America.
"Across the centuries, writers have over-used some pairings, so that rather than being unexpected, they have become familiar: blossoms/spring, rose/woman, rain/tears, night/monsters, and so on. Any poet who employs such established associations must find a fresh way or risk boring the audience. To avoid this, the poet can always opt to unite two things no one has yet considered as possibly belonging together. But, an unusual combination risks that readers will find the pairing incompatible."
Mr. Swede shows us how he struggled to make choices in this poem, the final version of which is forthcoming in the haiku magazine, Acorn:
snorkeling
a chasm as deep
as a massage table
"The two main elements were the deep chasm and the massage table; snorkeling provided the context or linking mechanism. My reasoning was that snorkeling involves the same posture as getting a massage—lying prone. The reader was supposed to connect the chasm in the ocean floor with the idea that a massage table can also lead to deep experiences, sometimes painful or exhilarating.
Looking at the poem again, I found the connection too far-fetched. I had to find something more meaningful than a massage table:
snorkeling
a chasm as deep
as feeling
This change didn't work either, but for a different reason: 'feeling' was too vague. So, I recalled what emotion dominated my adventure snorkeling:
snorkeling
a chasm as deep
as fear
At last the two chief parts were linked in a way that made sense, but the poem no longer possessed what I had originally sought: two entities never before juxtaposed. Instead, I had brought together two oft-associated things, chasm and fear. I can only hope that readers will find snorkeling to be a context novel enough for them to experience the haiku as unique."
Notice in each of these examples how the third line operates. In Jane Reichhold's poem, it answers a riddle, in John Stevenson's, it subverts our expectation—the intimate light does not originate in the poet's own car. As for George Swede's, we expect something tangible, concrete; what we get is anything but. Appreciating these small surprises yields much of the delight of the genre.
Why "genre" and not "form?" Sample the online contents of Frogpond, the publication Mr. Swede edits, and you will discover other types of work within the haiku family. To learn what these poems are and how to read them, Mr. Swede suggests the definitions of the Haiku Society of America, the parent organization of his publication.
What they have in common is that a resonant juxtaposition is relevant in all of them. This is the quality shared by the daring work on the pages of Lynx. It is true also of haiga, the exciting visual collage form, in which a haiku is paired with an image.
"There is an openness in the relationship—a 'link/shift' relationship to each other," says Haigaonline editor, Linda Papanicolaou. "Images are not coupled with captions or explanations that tell us what we're seeing in the photo. The haiku may, in fact, be about what's in the image, but amplify or complement it, say, with sound, smell, or other imagery beyond the pictorial. Or, it may be about something else completely, linking to the image through comparison, mood, etc. A good haiga suggests rather than tells; this allows the reader to enter the work as aesthetic experience."
To see what she means, click through an issue of Haigaonline. You will find there everything from ink brush painting, simplified in style, with a haiku written in calligraphy on an empty section of the paper, to Western-style drawing and painting, collage, digital imaging, photography, etc. Doing this may be the fastest way to comprehend the range of sensibilities current in contemporary English-language haiku poetry.
Ms. Papanicolaou, for example, studies and often tries to emulate traditional haiku. She demonstrates:
"I wanted to write a type of haiku called 'shasei'—a sketch. It was early October, I was in some dunes in California, and the wildflowers were past their peak. I jotted:
blackened seed pods of lupine
on my pad.
Often in traditional haiku, the first line is a season word fragment, but mine already had its season—blackened, dry seedpods occur in late autumn. I felt they brought to the poem the Japanese aesthetic of impermanence and loss. So what I still needed was an image that established setting, or complemented and deepened the phrase:
dune wind
evokes harshness and brings in sound as well as the tactile sting of blowing sand.
blackened seed pods
of a lupine
needed something—more specificity, perhaps—so that the phrase didn't just end with a third line that just completed line two without bringing something of its own. The original plant was what's called 'beach lupine', a small, blue-flowering mounding plant. But a taller, more robust yellow-flowered lupine called "bush lupine" is also native.
dune wind—
the blackened seed pods
of a bush lupine
I liked the sound; plus, 'beach' lupine with 'dune' was redundant—closed. The larger, showier species, with its sense of resilience, seemed the right way to end the poem."
Toward the other end of the spectrum of haiku sensibility is Colin Stewart Jones, editor of Notes from the Gean, who uses his "sketch" to somewhat different ends:
"To choose to record an event in haiku form is a subjective act and one has, therefore, given the event meaning. So I tend to record my initial reaction to a set of circumstances and then work on the composition later. I use the word 'compose' deliberately. For example, I remember first taking a note of the scene:
the expanse of summer sky ahead of and behind me
I then started thinking about how the sky was also above me, so I jotted down:
over my head
This started me thinking about how the sky was beyond my understanding, which led me to other philosophical questions and my emotional responses to them. I felt like I was young again, looking up at the sky in wonderment for the first time. This would become the essence of the haiku I would try to write.
Often, when I try to write my thoughts as a haiku, it just doesn't work. I had:
summer sky—
the expanse of blue
ahead of me
summer sky—
the expanse of blue
all around me
I thought of synonyms for 'ahead' and 'behind,' and came up with 'before' and 'beyond.' These would better suit the philosophical questions I had posed as they had more depth of meaning. To finish the haiku, I simply pruned and arranged these elements:
summer sky
expanse of blue
before me
beyond me
I wanted not just to set a scene, but to pose an existential question then supply an answer of sorts. Thus I arrived at my arrangement.
I decided to drop the obvious seasonal reference 'summer sky' for 'blue sky' which I felt was more universal yet still gave a strong sense of summer. I deliberately chose no punctuation so the poem could be read in multiple ways.
blue sky
before me
beyond me
The consonance of the B sounds was serendipitous but, with the monorhyme of 'me' on the end of lines 2 and 3, added a dimension to the poem, highlighting man's eternal search for understanding."
Mr. Jones explains the somewhat cryptic name of his publication this way: "A Gean tree is a wild cherry which, though not as showy as the formal Japanese variety, is nevertheless still rooted in the same ground and will produce fruit." In Notes from the Gean, readers will encounter one-line poems, and poems on subjects not usually associated with haiku. "There are many poets whose work I admire," says Jones, "but I still feel the haiku community could do with some radical new writers."
His publication features them from every place in the world where English is spoken, and sometimes where it's not; its masthead reflects this. "I first 'met' the original editors of Notes from the Gean on an Internet discussion forum," he said—a forum very much like the spirited community Ms. Reichhold hosts. "There," he continued, "as I developed as a writer and started to submit my poems for publication, I began to encounter the work of, and form relationships and even friendships with, other poets."
Which is what I, along with all the hard-working editors who generously donated their time to this piece, would like to invite you to do. It's a great way to begin a practice that will allow you to be highly creative with words and images for free every single day if you like. Listen well and patiently, and you will strengthen your ability to read and write poetry—both Eastern and Western—that surprises and delights.
This essay appeared in the April 2010 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Six and Rain Sestina
SIX by Charlotte Mandel
At six, my cheeks were apple red.
Relatives pinched me like fruit on a stand,
testing me. I longed to be pale,
glassy and flat like the people
reflected in black mirror windows
staring in the howl of subway tunnels.
Riding to Coney Island, the tunnels
blasted into daylight. Veiny red
blobs flooded my eyes. Sun melted the windows.
I jumped and slid off the wicker to stand,
squares imprinted on my thighs. I smelled people
and corned beef. I could hear the rattle of my pail.
Under my wet wool suit, sand rubbed the pale
hidden chinks of my body. I dug tunnels
with care, my fingers creeping like people,
sandhogs meeting, their torches red
fire boring through. I mixed mud to stand
firm, fit in bits of shell for windows—
white, like eyes of a fish. Windows
couldn't be trusted. Glass looked pale
but might be backed with silver, force you to stand,
rigid, planted in a screaming tunnel
watching faces staring in the dim red
narrow passage, the eyes of bodiless people.
In the movies, behind the screen, real people
ballooned like silhouettes in windows.
My mother sat beside me, offering a red
apple that felt cold and black in the pale
gigantic flickering talking tunnel.
A man was touching me—I didn't understand
why my mother looked away, letting me stand
it, letting me suffer eyes and hands of people—
the man's fingers groping for tunnels
under my dress. The wall in front was a window
framing a strange man's eyes magnified, pale—
a scream in my throat like sand, burning red—
"We'll go home, your skin is red." My mother made me stand,
pulled off my bathing suit. Pale bodiless eyes of people
stared through black mirror windows at my body screaming in tunnels.
Copyright 2010 by Charlotte Mandel
RAIN SESTINA by Chuck Levenstein
Patience is a virtue nurtured by endless rain:
Old forests are proud of their ability to wait
While lesser shrubs insist on irrigation ditches
And pipes of stolen water, streams diverted,
Dams inserted to pool and pump the skies
While the trees and I are dry or wet as Nature wills.
My tribe is not inclined to subdue weather with its will
Our rites include no prayer or sacred dance for rain
Or sun; legend tells that for forty years we had to wait
With backpacks and flat bread, trudge through desert ditches
And dunes behind old Moses, from refuge diverted
Because the fool struck a rock, impatient with the skies
A pity we were abandoned to sand and white skies,
And a jealous god insistent on his will,
When there were swimming deities who loved rain,
Imbibed heavenly nectar and were content to wait
While we stumbled away from digging Egyptian ditches
(Desire to escape from slavery, of course, not to be diverted.)
Suppose, just suppose, the fleeing caravan had been diverted
And dark Atlantic waters parted under Brazilian skies,
And we trailed the Amazon drenched as a wet god willed,
My ancestors might have learned the Portuguese for "rain",
And armed with arrow and bow we would wait
To ambush Herzog's Jesuits in soggy ditches!
Alas, we were not born with the britches to sit in ditches!
The fate of a destined stream cannot be diverted,
Exiled tribes may yet find their way to Himalayan skies
Where upstream Tzaddiks spin the wheel of no-one's will
And on Bhuddish heads snow falls, quiet as this summer's rain,
And Godot! There he is! Sits but doesn't wait.
These umbrella musings keep us dry while we wait
For slippery waters to cease slithering by in roadside ditches.
Our wetlands misery, malarial mold and all, must be diverted
Until clouds dissipate, as in memory did clear the skies
And they filled with radiant Apollo's will.
How long will our patience be tried by this damned rain!
Yes, even flowery patience will wilt if forced to wait
For an end to endless rain, the petals diverted
From terran skies end their short lives in a ditch.
Copyright 2010 by Chuck Levenstein
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
The sestina is scary. That's what I think most poets think, and I find that sad because the sestina is one of the most enjoyable ways I have ever found to write a poem.
But I think I know why they're scary (I have three reasons, actually) and this month in Critique Corner, with contributions from two highly accomplished poets, I'd like to see if I can allay some fears.
They are Charlotte Mandel with "Six", which was originally published in her collection A Disc of Clear Water (Saturday Press, 1982), and Chuck Levenstein, editor of the former online zine Poems Niederngasse, with "Rain Sestina".
Scary Thing #1: I Flunked Math
These charts one sees all over the Internet! They make the form appear like kabbalistic numerology comprehensible only to pattern-seeking savants. No! Remember this is a form invented by people who wove their own belts; the rules of the sestina are no more complicated than tying a macramé knot, each line of poem, a cord of twine. As a string of knots, the pattern doesn't refer back to the first knot but just to the previous. The stanzas spool off of one another: 6,1/5,2/4,3 of the previous stanza, 6 times—a simple braid.
Now to finish a row, some sort of edging stitch is needed. In sestinas, this is called the envoi. Although once there were traditional patterns for the envoi, they have long ago been abandoned to more general rules: all the end words appear somewhere in the last three lines, usually two per line, one at the end and one somewhere in the middle. Also, most sestinas end with the last word of the poem's first line. Not only does this not require any computer programs to remember, but it is a pleasure of the form to exploit it to expressive effect.
Notice how Charlotte Mandel does this in "Six". The end words correspond with the end words from the first stanza as 1,2,3,4,5,6—not just a clever reference to the title and form, but highly expressive as well: a childish counting up suiting the theme and adding an ominous touch.
Now, the evolution of variations on the envoi is an essay in itself, which brings us to...
Scary Thing #2: History is Long
It seems one can't enter a discussion of the sestina without first encountering its long history. To be fair, its history is quite interesting, in part because more details of it are known, at least more so than some of the other forms of its day. It makes a good story that no one can resist. Unfortunately though, all this ado has the effect of casting the form as unapproachably venerable. No again. Sestina is not venerable; it is vernacular. (Allow me just one colorful factoid: its main proponent, Arnaut Daniel, was depicted in Dante's Purgatory as the vernacular poet.) More importantly, the sestina has had numerous revivals amongst poets since, clearly attesting to the pleasure they give one to write.
Why? Because the sestina is a prose form, built in sentences not phrases, unlike its more design-dependent contemporaries, the triolet and the villanelle. As opposed to these phrase-repetition forms in which the phrase drives the poem, the end words in a sestina serve more as destinations. Choosing how to get from one to the next is much of the fun.
As a prose form, the sestina is particularly suited for argument. In Levenstein's poem, for example, stanza four begins with "Suppose" and stanza five with "Alas." These are rhetorical terms, meant to propose new facets.
Most sestinas are written in the third-person form, often covering big sweeps of time as Levenstein has done. Elizabeth Bishop's famous "Sestina" offers an interesting contrast. This poem reads as if it were a screenplay—so many shifts in vantage point.
Bishop has chosen present tense for her narrative. It did occur to me to wonder how that might work for Mandel's poem, especially in the first line of the sixth stanza, if not all the way through.
In both cases, the guideposts of end words elicit surprising turns in the journey. In this sense, the sestina is a poetic form.
It is poetic in another sense as well, that is, in its music. The sestina has a way of generating riffs. Scan the left-hand column of "Rain Sestina," and you will detect a pattern of "and"s resolved in the envoi as "an end".
Now a form that shifts and riffs lends itself to humor. (Though the all-humor-all-the-time mode that dominates the form's latest revival, the postmodern sestina, is admittedly amusing—all right, often very amusing—it limits the expressive range of the form to glib to outrageous.) Levenstein made me laugh twice in stanza five, just the right time to vary the tone and keep the poem lively.
A second characteristic of the postmodern sestina, obviously, is to be self-referential, or perhaps more apt in this case, form-referential. Charlotte Mandel accomplishes this nicely in her envoi as mentioned above. Her title is a hint as well.
But there is a problem with being too self-referential: it can be paralyzing.
Scary Thing #3: But, But...What If I Choose Wrong?
All the free advice out there about homonyms and words that can be used in multiple tenses and invisible words and words from the same family and so on, turn a form so relaxed it could easily be used by a child into an ordeal. Moreover, cute as the postmodern wink can be, too much self-consciousness about the end words puts an inordinate emphasis on something secondary to meaning.
In practical terms, you need about 45 words in your first stanza. You can get those words from anywhere, a diary entry, the back of a cereal box, one of the poems in your unfinished file. Now pick some words you think you might like to work with. Choose wisely: thematically, musically, sure, but don't fret it. You will discover that it is possible to make adjustments.
In fact, so adjustable is this form that you can begin with any stanza and the pattern will hold. Pin the cut stanzas back onto the end. Often the meaning will render this ridiculous and new lines will need to be composed, but sometimes they merely need a bit of reworking. At best, sometimes this is just the leap a poem needs to keep it energized.
Here's how this revision would work with using the poems of both of our guests as examples:
In Levenstein's "Rain Sestina" the last two stanzas and envoi would now be:
These umbrella musings keep us dry while we wait
For slippery waters to cease slithering by in roadside ditches.
Our wetlands misery, malarial mold and all, must be diverted
Until clouds dissipate, as in memory did clear the skies
And they filled with radiant Apollo's will.
How long will our patience be tried by this damned rain!
Patience is a virtue nurtured by endless rain:
Old forests are proud of their ability to wait
While lesser shrubs insist on irrigation ditches
And pipes of stolen water, streams diverted,
Dams inserted to pool and pump the skies
While the trees and I are dry or wet as Nature wills.
Yes, even flowery patience will wilt if forced to wait
For an end to endless rain, the petals diverted
From terran skies end their short lives in a ditch.
In Mandel's "Six" the last two stanzas and envoi would now be:
why my mother looked away, letting me stand
it, letting me suffer eyes and hands of people—
the man's fingers groping for tunnels
under my dress. The wall in front was a window
framing a strange man's eyes magnified, pale—
a scream in my throat like sand, burning red—
At six, my cheeks were apple red.
Relatives pinched me like fruit on a stand,
testing me. I longed to be pale,
glassy and flat like the people
reflected in black mirror windows
staring in the howl of subway tunnels.
"We'll go home, your skin is red." My mother made me stand,
pulled off my bathing suit. Pale bodiless eyes of people
stared through black mirror windows at my body screaming in tunnels.
In both cases, there is most certainly something to be said for the choice. As Levenstein's poem currently stands, the final stanza is sort of a summation, resounding themes that have been previously stated—another god brought in, a return to the theme of patience. This poem has just been something to do to kill time while it rained. But in the new arrangement, the thematic statement "Patience is a virtue nurtured by endless rains" is now offered as a wisdom discovered—way more worthwhile than a time killer (at least to me as a reader). The address shifts too, from "we" to "I," adding another level of cadence.
What is lost is the inviting first line. "My tribe..." is less generous, less inclusive, less obvious too—that is, it takes more parsing. The opposite effect is true for Mandel's "Six," where much is gained by beginning with the second stanza with its active, in-progress, "Riding to Coney Island, the tunnels/blasted into daylight."
Simply tagging on the first stanza with no revision would be risky in this case. Personally, I like it. I like the shift from the memory to the adult reflection upon it coming at this point in the poem. Reworked or not, what it definitely does demonstrate is how a digression of some sort at this point would heighten the drama of the mother's response in the envoi. This revision sacrifices the form-referential design of Mandel's envoi, but she might yet be able to save that idea.
The larger general point, though, is that the sestina is more flexible than one might think. So relax, pick a few words, and settle in for a long poem. There's nothing to be afraid of.
Where could poems like "Six" and "Rain Sestina" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Virginia Warbey Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by May 19
UK-based literary society offers prizes up to 800 pounds and possible anthology publication; no simultaneous submissions; fees in pounds sterling only
Connecticut Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: May 31
Connecticut Poetry Society offers prizes up to $400 for unpublished poems, 80 lines maximum
New England Poetry Club Annual Contests
Postmark Deadline: May 31
Various themed contests, including a members-only category for poems in traditional forms, with prizes of $100-$1,000
Bridport Prize
Entries must be received by June 30
One of Britain's largest and most prestigious awards for unpublished poems, short stories, and flash fiction by authors aged 16+, with top prizes of 5,000 pounds in each genre; enter by mail or online
Margaret Reid Poetry Prize for Traditional Verse
Postmark Deadline: June 30
Prizes up to $3,000 and online publication for published or unpublished poems in traditional forms; Winning Writers assists with entry handling for this contest
These poems and critique appeared in the May 2010 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
No Salvage
The first time I married
we lived in the woods,
a spot clear enough
for a sixty foot trailer.
At night, we heard
bobcats scream. Our lab,
Sonia, whimpered, took refuge
in a break in the underpinning.
My husband shot targets
from the back door. I tried once,
the recoil of the .357 magnum
pushing my arm past my ear
like a starting gun.
Later, ducking thrown dishes, I ran,
watched from the Home Stretch Inn
as a wrecker hauled the steel trap away,
the frame sprung in the middle,
both sides pulled apart.
Copyright 2010 by Barb McMakin
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
"If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are," wrote that famous poet from Kentucky, the conservationist and contemporary transcendentalist, Wendell Berry. He was referring to the powerfully—even viscerally—expressive, if hard to define, quality that poets refer to as "a sense of place."
This month Critique Corner will look at a fine example of how a new Kentucky poet, Barb McMakin, has evoked that quality in "No Salvage", part of her just-released collection Digging Bones from Finishing Line Press.
"No Salvage" is a compact piece, fewer than a hundred words. From them, three images evoke a sense of place. Each earns its keep.
Most of the first stanza is given to "woods/a spot clear enough/ for a sixty foot trailer" establishing the importance of place in this poem. It is a pellucid description. It gives enough information for almost any reader to conjure a picture. For an American, the word "trailer" carries connotations of class and transience. It is a laden word.
Later she uses the proper noun, "The Home Stretch Inn". This is a clearly readable regionalism for a certain sort of roadside bar/motel near a woods in that part of the U.S.A. But this is a poem, so diction counts more than specifics. McMakin could have chosen any name. With "Home Stretch Inn" she contrasts "home" to "trailer", while at the same time, the phrase "home stretch"—the last leg of a race—makes a sort of witty rejoinder to the starting gun in the previous stanza.
Bobcat is another regionalism; the same cat is called wildcat or lynx elsewhere. While Kentucky's "Bob" screams, the more exotically named "Sonia" whimpers, providing an audio track for the reader's sense of place. Sonia is a symbol for what this couple shares, as she seeks safety within this frightening setting beneath the "break in the underpinning".
This is muscular writing: words chosen to do more than one thing. McMakin has multiple reasons to support every detail selected that also pertains to scene. Each contributes thematically. Each contributes to the poem's coherence. There is nothing esoteric about them; they are not named flora or proper nouns. She does not list. Her choices are more subtle and far more integral to the poem as a whole.
Toward revision I would suggest a reconsideration of the line breaking. One method to test whether a poem might not be achieving its most effective line breaks is to look at the words that begin all the lines and also those that end them. Are all the power words—the verbs and nouns—at one end or the other? Same question for the supporting words, prepositions, for example.
"No Salvage" provides a strong model of diction chosen to operate on a number of levels. Perhaps there are some line breaks that might do the same.
Take line seven. If it ended with "in," McMakin could underscore the repetition of two final lines of the second stanza. The refrain of "in, in, in" is already present. Reinforcing it could be a choice.
More importantly though, line breaks can be exploited to heighten drama or suspense. What if the line ended with "shot"? Or "ducking"? Then, for the briefest pause, the reader would ask, "Shot what?" "Ducked what?" This is the suspension and resolution discussed in the April 15, 2010 Critique Corner as the function of the third line of a haiku.
Another way a line break can operate expressively is by changing the tone. If line ten ended in "tried", you might not only have suspense as in the previous examples, but also the emotional implication of resignation.
While these might or might not affect one's reading, what is indisputable is that this author was able to make every word count in this unsettling poem.
Where could a poem like "No Salvage" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Kentucky State Poetry Society Contests
Postmark Deadline: June 30
Local poetry society offers prizes up to $100 in open category, plus smaller prizes for poems with various themes and styles, including formal poetry and humor
Narrative Magazine Annual Poetry Contest
Entries must be received by July 18
Competitive award offers prizes up to $1,500 plus publication in this high-profile print and online journal of narrative poetry and prose
Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Contest
Entries must be received by September 1; don't enter before July 1
Well-regarded journal of narrative poetry offers prizes up to $1,000 plus publication for winner and numerous runners-up; enter online only
These poems and critique appeared in the June 2010 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Fishing
Copyright 2010 by Hank Rodgers
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Flash fiction or prose poem? Like the optical illusion that can be either a vase or two facing profiles, this hybrid genre eludes a single definition. Its multivalence makes it an apt form to address the mysteries of faith and doubt, as Hank Rodgers does in "Fishing". A good story or poem, like a spiritual parable, will reveal paradoxes and ambiguities in the reality we take for granted, awakening us to multiple perspectives even as it also brings out universal themes that connect us.
"Fishing" begins, at least, in the conversational voice of prose. We expect that it will take place in the everyday world of hobbies ("I love fishing") and practical details ("I took my rod and tackle and a small lunch"). Although the syntax remains straightforward and suited to realistic narrative throughout, the content drifts imperceptibly into the metaphorical realm of poetry.
The "once upon a time" feeling starts with the decontextualized voices whom he quotes as the source of his contradictory information about the lake: "I knew that many said that there were no longer fish in the lake, but I had also heard otherwise"; and later, "Over the years, while I have heard others say that the lake was drying up, shrinking in size, I have noticed little change". We are deprived of the cues that would tell us whether these sources are reliable or whether the narrator has waited an unreasonable length of time. That is, we don't have the data to assess his character or theirs, which a proper naturalistic story would provide.
Meeting vagueness where we expect a further fleshing-out of the specific location, as befits a story, we begin to feel that the lake is more of a symbol than a place. On the other hand, the narrator's apparent failure to remark on this transition could also be a reason for us to question his sanity, if we choose to remain with our feet planted on the farther shore of narrative realism, where we began. It could still be a story, but a story about someone who has lost touch with the reality that we, outside the narrative, must fill in.
Rodgers' piece reminds me of Mary Ruefle's fascinating book-length foray into prose-poem-parable territory, The Most of It (Wave Books, 2008). Tagged by the publisher as an essay collection, it's nothing near as rational, which is precisely the point. Each stream-of-consciousness discussion unwraps the strangeness, even the incoherence, of the original concept, and makes that bewilderment a pleasurable resting place. This is the mindstate of Zen, and also of poetry: the shift from analysis to awe. (Read samples here and here.)
"Fishing" takes the reader on such a journey from the realistic to the mythic, and possibly back again, depending on whether one prefers to see the narrator's persistence as enlightened or deluded. It is what we bring to it, the piece seems to say.
"Those who have ears to hear, let them hear," Jesus says after telling one of his parables. You'll recognize the signs of God's presence if you're looking for them, and on the other hand, if you want your doubts confirmed, that's what you'll get. Jesus isn't in this poem, of course—or is he? In the Western literary tradition, you can't write a poem about faith and fish without situating yourself in the Christian dialogue.
As a believer myself, I'm inclined to focus on this narrator's progressive sense of peace as he leaves the agendas and security of the practical world behind, along with his lunch and his fishing gear. Letting go of the intention to catch fish in the literal sense, he finds their shapes again in the mysterious patterns of the heavens. By not striving, he is effortlessly aligned with his environment, which is almost personified, almost expressing volition and benevolence toward him: "The places, the spaces where I was, close up behind me, and the new spaces I occupy open for me, as always."
However, from Rodgers' other writings, I know that he's interested in religion but comes down on the side of materialism and atheism. The moral purpose or personality we might read into the cosmos is comforting but illusory. There is fodder for that worldview in "Fishing" as well.
Critics of religion say that faith-based habits of mind are dangerous, making a virtue out of indifference to contrary evidence. So, when our narrator says, "The fact that I have caught no fish has little meaning for me, while the possibility exists", we could worry that he's joined a cargo cult. As the popular saying goes, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result."
Of course, a person of faith would say that the spiritual discipline of surrendering to the unknown is the real answer to prayer. Since so much of life really is unpredictable and precarious, this kind of equanimity may be more practical than you'd think.
What's more Zen than the willingness to make a fool of yourself? Without it, none of us could sit down to write, to shut out the world's practical demands and chase the cloud-fish of poetry that we're never quite sure we've caught.
Where could a poem like "Fishing" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Donald Barthelme Prize in Short Prose
Postmark Deadline: August 31
Gulf Coast, the literary journal of the University of Houston, offers $1,000 for prose poems or flash fiction up to 500 words; online entries preferred
Gemini Magazine Flash Fiction Contest
Entries must be received by September 30
New online journal offers prizes up to $1,000 for stories up to 1,000 words
Other resources of interest:
Poemeleon: The Prose Poem Issue (Winter 2007)
This issue of the online journal Poemeleon features examples by notable poets such as Jimmy Santiago Baca, Chad Prevost, and Cecilia Woloch, plus book reviews and an essay on prose poetics.
The Best of The Prose Poem: An International Journal
Online anthology at Web del Sol includes work by Robert Bly, Maxine Chernoff, Russell Edson, Charles Simic, James Tate, and other leading lights.
This poem and critique appeared in the July 2010 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Marry Me and Praise for Wyatt
Marry Me
My friend Susi and her boyfriend
were in the bleachers when someone
launched a home run.
Fireworks burst
like a corsage over their heads.
That's when she said Robert
leaned over and proposed.
The whole ballpark was cheering.
What did you say? I asked.
"I couldn't hear over the crowd
a word he was saying.
But the cheering got me excited
and I stood up jumping like crazy
and my boyfriend thought I
had said yes. He threw his arms
around me and five years later
we have a gaggle of children."
Praise for Wyatt
As a bachelor the only thing I could cook
was the smoke alarms.
You steam vegetables in woks,
flip crepes deftly, paddle creams and butters,
and aren't afraid to try new recipes
whether from Beijing or Tuscany.
Your skills at laying cables,
editing audio tracks, playing drums
and writing impromptu songs
at jamming sessions makes me think
that everything comes easily to you.
I admire your confidence
but I love your kindness more,
and I pray for your good health,
for a cure of your diabetes.
You don't remember receiving
your first injections, 18 months old,
or your tiny fingers bleeding
four times a day...your cries
needles through my heart.
Copyright 2010 by Bob Bradshaw
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
If you are a frequent reader of the type of literary e-zines included in the Best of the Net Anthology, you have probably encountered the work of the much-published Bob Bradshaw. His talent for the refreshingly apt and original metaphor, coupled with his charmingly self-deprecating humor, give Bradshaw's deceptively simple poems a distinctive voice popular with editors. So when I received a letter from him containing poems that, he said, had been rejected numerous times, I became deeply curious as to why. Little did I know his poems would lead me to question the very nature of poetry itself.
You see, Bradshaw favors poems that tell stories, usually of the head-scratching variety. The reader is left thinking, "Well, who would have seen that coming?" or, "Isn't that just amazing?" The narrative poem is often accessible, which explains why it is so frequently enjoyed, but it is problematic too. What makes a story a story and a poem, a poem? Indeed, what, in fact, is a poem?
Consider for a moment that the Latin origin of the word "verse" means to turn. The word "story", on the other hand, comes from the word "history"—a series of events. In fiction, one event generally causes another, or is, at least, related in some way. Furthermore, story—as opposed to history—has a beginning, middle, and end, though, as any first course in writing will teach, they do not necessarily have to be presented in that order. Nevertheless, causation is the logic of plot, and therefore of story.
Not so for poetry. Poems "verse"; they turn, sometimes several times. They may leap from the logic of the story to a metaphor bringing in a wholly new idea or image. They may leap to another level of meaning, suddenly more universal or personal, serious or surreal. The address—that is, to whom the poem is speaking—might redirect. Even something as subtle as an alteration of verb tense can affect a turn.
Sometimes poems open as if they have windows within them, bringing in another context or reality and then rebounding to the original one. Often the turn comes at the end, so that the reader lands in a new place, not one hinted at by the original story or subject or theme. Making this leap is the work of reading poetry, its surprise and delight.
It is this quality that, in my opinion, "Marry Me" lacks. Here Bradshaw has put forth a story in its chronological order. The single metaphor: "Fireworks burst/like a corsage", while not the freshest in Bradshaw's oeuvre, is wonderfully resonant in its context, but does not really constitute what I mean by a "turn" in that it does not depart from that context.
Reworking the poem to end with the metaphor might be one way of building a turn. In this case the poem would transit from the literal to the metaphorical. In so doing, the poem would move from the drama to the setting, landing the reader in a new location in the end. This would require rethinking the order of the story's plot, which in any case might be a good idea here. Beginning with "The whole ballpark was cheering," for example, would bring the reader immediately into an active scene. Another strategy might be to begin with Susi and her gaggle of offspring and move chronologically backwards. Every story has multiple points of entry; it is always valuable to investigate several.
Actually, our second piece, "Praise for Wyatt", provides an excellent example of the concept of turning a poem. In line 12, Bradshaw moves from "you" to "I", taking the poem in a more personal direction. In line 15, there is a sudden change of tone. More significantly, though, the poem moves from the present to the past in its final stanza. We come to understand that the narrator has known the subject all his life, that Wyatt is, in fact, most likely a son. This shines a whole new light on everything we have read so far, complicating and enriching it.
But "Praise for Wyatt", because it is not based upon a plotted story like the one in "Marry Me", is not strengthened by the logic such a story provides. This is another difference between poems and stories: the ways in which they unify. Poems can be brought together through music or other formal or structural elements. For example, Bradshaw could rework "Praise for Wyatt" as a litany, perhaps by repeating the phrase "I admire", or even more subtly, by creating parallel grammatical structures in his second through fourth sentences.
Most often though, in free verse narrative poetry, unity is achieved via the extended symbol. In other words, the logic of the piece is created by the development of its central trope. At this point, I would say, "Praise for Wyatt" lacks such a cohering trope, and so reads like prose. Focusing on Wyatt's hands might be one solution; they're already present in the final stanza, and certainly the activities depicted in previous stanzas rely upon them.
Both poems might also be nicely complicated with more abstract titles, offering thematic suggestions to the reader. The point is not to be obtuse, but rather to create some layers of meaning. Because, unlike stories, which are like exciting trolley rides, speeding along on greased rails, poems are like gifts for readers to savor as they unwrap.
Where could poems like "Marry Me" and "Praise for Wyatt" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Oregon State Poetry Association Contests
Postmark Deadline: August 31
Twice-yearly contest from local poetry society offers prizes of $50-$100 in categories including traditional verse, humor, open theme
Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Contest
Entries must be received by September 1
Prizes up to $1,000 for narrative poetry, plus publication for many runners-up, from a new literary journal based in Western Massachusetts
Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: September 15
Contest for Massachusetts poets offers $100 and reading at annual poetry festival in Somerville, near Boston; previously published work accepted
Firstwriter.com International Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 1
Prizes up to 500 pounds for poems up to 30 lines (published or unpublished), from UK-based writers' resource site
Lucidity Poetry Journal Clarity Awards
Entries must be received by October 31
Twice-yearly free contest offers prizes up to $100 for poems in any form dealing with people and interpersonal relationships, by authors aged 18+
These poems and critique appeared in the August 2010 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Kansas
I'm being dropped. I took a turn pulling the head of our long line of humming wheels and bobbing legs traversing the empty landscape, and now I've rotated to the back, following behind my neighbor and longtime riding partner. Marc is still getting stronger, but age and injury have started to exact their toll on me.
The peloton is a loosely coupled train. Gaps develop and widen as the pace quickens, and I find myself slipping off Marc's tire. I try to sprint back, but there's no starch left. He spins up to another rider in front. Gradually the riders in front grow smaller in the distance and finally disappear. I am churning along with my aching quads under the blue dome of the sky, pulling only myself, being pulled by no one. Suddenly I am no longer in Vermont, but in a place I've been blown back to all my life. I am in Kansas.
I was a child in Leavenworth, in a large brick house beside the Penitentiary. A guard tower stood in our yard, and behind the house the wheat began. I watched squirrels chase each other through the tops of the tall elms. I stood on a wall and directed the black storm clouds in their advance. I built a paper zoo, with paper cages for paper lions. I waited each summer day for my father to come home from the prison in his suit and tie, newspaper folded under his arm. I walked to school across the wide reservation and through the leafy neighborhoods alone.
Father bought me a red Schwinn a few days before my ninth birthday, and taught me to ride it, running along beside as I wobbled. On my birthday, while I was at school, he pulled away, borne beyond the horizon on a swift coronary. His last words were "What a beautiful day!" My mother packed our things in cardboard barrels and we left Kansas. I later marveled at how few memories I carried, as if I hadn't been paying attention.
Still doggedly pedaling on today's empty road, I spare a look around. The flat fields of Addison are pleasant on this beautiful day, but the winds in Kansas rippled the wheat fields like waves of a golden ocean. I made friends with myself while watching them. I learned to enjoy my thoughts. Today I feel the winds of age blowing against me, a privilege my father never had. I try to imagine my young self riding out of my childhood not fatally damaged or condemned by circumstance, but just another odd variation of the human species. It's time to rewrite myself.
Marc is lying on a church lawn. I thank him for waiting, and he says that he wasn't sorry to let the group hurtle on without him. We resume a brisk pace of our own. I'm grateful for his friendship. I'm happy to be riding right now, right here, with a mind and body that could be worse. I'm grateful even for Kansas.
Copyright 2010 by Ken Martin
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
Free writes, automatic writing, journaling, the Amherst Writers & Artists method—what we have here are a lot of expressions that, when applied to the composition of poetry, all amount to same thing: much poetry begins with prose. This makes sense. We think in prose. We are natural with it. Streaming our consciousness through a pen can, indeed, help us discover and explore our material with an ease that may elude us when faced with the more formal concerns of constructing a poem.
But then what? How do we locate and shape a poem from the raw material we have produced? This month, Critique Corner is indebted to Ken Martin of Vermont for allowing us to use his flash memoir "Kansas" as an object lesson. Though far more polished than a typical sample of, say, automatic writing, this 500-word personal essay does provide clues that may help us lift the poems from our prose.
To begin, let's recall a few notions discussed in last month's Critique Corner, which addressed some of the differences between story and poem. Poems, I wrote then, "verse", which is to say, turn away from themselves, sometimes returning, sometimes not. Obviously, "Kansas" does this. The first two paragraphs establish a frame to which Martin returns in his final paragraph.
What makes this set-up and return an essay device, as opposed to a poetic one, is that the first paragraph clearly establishes a theme (aging) and the final paragraph provides an epiphany relating to that theme (the gratitude he feels for his vigor, his friendship, even his awareness that he is grateful). A poem is usually not quite so tidy. We do not neatly sum the turns we take in our poems. Rather we leave the reader to make of them what he or she will, inviting participation. While this is a large part of what makes reading a poem enjoyable, the conclusive nature of essay is what makes it satisfying. Every form of writing has its merits and uses.
Remove that frame, however, and what remains reads very much like a poem. Recall once again last month's essay, in which I stated that one way poems unify is through sound devices, and one way to create a sound device in a narrative poem is to create parallel grammatical structures. Now look at the third paragraph of "Kansas". Beginning with the third sentence, every sentence has the same construction. It begins with "I" then uses a simple past-tense verb. In the first two sentences, the nouns in the second half of the sentence are modified with adjectives. In the next sentence, all the nouns are modified with the same adjective, "paper". Language need not be ornate or grand to be musical; rather, it requires pattern. See for yourself how these two plain but effective repeated structures organize the remaining sentences of the paragraph.
Often, when using prose as a pre-writing technique, we fall into this type of repetition. Noticing it will help pull the poem out from the prose. Reinforcing it or building it in revision can help give the material shape. Be sure to vary the pattern as you work to keep the ear surprised.
Paragraph four has a graceful balance between specificity and abstraction, furthering its resemblance to poetry. In the first sentence we are given a color, a brand name and a number. In the second, the phrase "pulled away" comes, in context, to have a double meaning. It refers to the previous information. But then, without further ado, Martin pivots the phrase to apply to what follows, the abstract "borne beyond the horizon", then quickly returns to more concrete diction with "swift coronary". Though subtle, this shift of tone is enough to underscore the heightened importance of the event. There is no need for explanation or italics.
The sharper turn, however, takes place in the final sentence of that paragraph. Staying true to the timbre of the piece, Martin uses no artifice to move from the memory to his present-day reflection upon it. With this, he progresses from the specifically personal to the universal, that is, from his childhood in Kansas to the way all adults feel at some time about their own childhoods. This would make a fine ending to the poem.
But then, so would "It's time to rewrite myself" which concludes the following paragraph. Is that material also part of the piece? Taste and author's intent would ultimately govern that decision, meaning some close analysis will be useful to inform the decision.
The first sentence of paragraph five is really there to tie back to its frame. By simply removing the word "still", the poem would continue along the new path the previous paragraph laid for it. So, it could "work" but what would it add? Well, it adds what the larger frame gave the essay: a springboard to the memory.
Next, there is a comparison between the present and the past. This might be a worthwhile contrast for the poem, though the simile of wheat fields to ocean waves is not nearly as original as the paper zoo. Anthropomorphizing the fields (making friends with them), on the other hand, is considerably fresher.
The deeper question, however, rests with the final three sentences of paragraph five. The choice ultimately is: does the author want this to be a poem about the nature of childhood memory, or about living past the age at which one's parent dies?
This is a decision that only the poet can make. The more relevant point to our consideration today is what to do with the raw prose material. I submit that paragraph five could be divided in two. The first half might begin the poem, establishing a frame and context. The material starting with "Today" might end the poem.
I point this out not because I think it's the best choice, but only because I want to demonstrate how malleable the prose pre-writing can be. Just because the thoughts occur to us in a specific order, or because we conceive of them originally as being part of the same paragraph, does not mean that they should remain that way as we redraft. One practical technique for re-opening prose for reshaping into poem is to separate every sentence from its predecessor—cut them apart, if need be—and then experiment with new arrangements.
Of course the poem is not finished. It will require a title—which the raw material seems almost magically always to offer—and a form—stanzification, line breaks, etc. Surely these topics merit their own discussions. (You will find a few tips on breaking lines in June's Critique Corner.) My point today is that before all that, the poem requires something more basic: it requires recognition. If you find yourself just breaking your prose pre-writing into lines, then you will have prose broken into lines, not a poem. So look for pattern and repetition, look for turns and shifts of tone or subject or audience, and perhaps before any of that, look for what will be your final line. You're on your way.
Where could an essay like "Kansas" be submitted? The following contest may be of interest:
Writers' Workshop Annual Memoirs Contest
Postmark Deadline: December 30
The Writers' Workshop of Asheville, NC offers $300 for personal essays up to 4,000 words; fee includes critique
In addition, this upcoming contest may be a good fit for narrative poetry based on personal experience
Founders Award
Postmark Deadline: October 15
The Georgia Poetry Society offers $75 and anthology publication for poems up to 80 lines on any subject; no simultaneous submissions
This essay and critique appeared in the September 2010 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Brotherly Love and Stamens and Pistils
BROTHERLY LOVE by Ellaraine Lockie
I knew cancer was coursing
through his body
in stage four deadly drama
The doctor having prepared us
for the final act
in his appointed position
A combination of God
and aggressive casting director
Allocating antidotal roles to archangels
with names like Leucovarin and Kytrel
Typecast as side effect soldiers
Performing all-too-temporary truces
I knew he'd be a memorable hero
Benchmark behaved like a hundred year oak
Even though no malignant knots
ever before blighted our family tree
He sits rooted by the peace
of each pain-free day
Suspended in the soft deception
of a leather lounge chair
While bombs of chemotherapeutic
proportion drop from plastic bags
Staging his private world war
Poisonous parts played out
in provisional victories
I didn't know I was an actress
Another stretch he's pulled
in my elastic existence
Like the tugs that lured
a little sister from farmwife fate
The push into college, classical music, safe sex
All the quality-of-life debts
scripted across my cinematic mindset
As I sit watching the IV
rerun its surreal suspense
And I pretend in Oscar-quality portrayal
that oak trees are immortal
and make-believe can recast reality
Copyright 2010 by Ellaraine Lockie
STAMENS AND PISTILS by Margaret Sherman
After I was fixed
people sent me mixed baskets of
carnations, daisies, roses
lilies to acknowledge my sterility.
Surrounded by these living arrangements
I fell into a deep sleep wondering
where a useless uterus
and a pair of damaged
ovaries would end up
while my fat orange tomcat
ate all the perfect flowers.
Only a few petals were left
in memoriam.
Copyright 2010 by Margaret Sherman
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
Illness, our own and those of the people we love, often compels poets to the page. We struggle to give voice to the mute and expression to the inchoate. Just the act of this striving is moving. We all have bodies; there is no topic more universal. Yet poems about illness can be tricky, skirting mawkish sentiment. One way to successfully avoid this pitfall is to use metaphor. In this month's Critique Corner, we will look at how two poets have attempted this. They are Ellaraine Lockie of Sunnyvale, California, with her poem "Brotherly Love"; and Margaret Sherman of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, with "Stamens and Pistils".
To begin, let's compare their basic structures. "Brotherly Love" consists of three stanzas, the first two of which begin with the words "I knew" and the last with "I didn't know." With this, Lockie ensures a turn in her poem (see August's Critique Corner) by providing a simple but durable structure upon which to hang her rumination. Sherman, on the other hand, does not ruminate, but rather organizes a narrative around a cohering symbol: flowers sent by well-wishers.
This is not to say that Lockie doesn't use metaphor. In fact, she brachiates from one to the next. In the first stanza she seizes upon the word "drama" to generate "final act", "casting director", "roles", "typecast", and "performing".
The "hero" of the first line of the second stanza can then be read simultaneously as both war hero (suggested by "soldiers" in stanza one, line eleven) and dramatic hero. In either case, the notion is temporarily set aside as lines two through five exploit instead the possibilities of "tree" as their dominant metaphor. Line nine, though, harkens back to "hero" in the first line of the stanza, still referring concurrently to both "soldier" ("bombs", "war") and to its original reference to theatrics ("parts", "played").
The conflation is somewhat confusing, a condition given voice in the strategically placed following line "I didn't know". With this line Lockie returns to the metaphor of drama, possibly implying "costume" with the "elastic" trope over the next three lines. Finally, at the end of this stanza—which by the framework of the poem is pre-designed as its conclusion—the metaphor of "tree" is re-sounded within the very same sentence as the more sustained metaphor of "drama" (now morphed specifically to mean "cinema").
Ultimately the question must be: are all these various strands of concept effective? Do they, by their very abundance, their compounding and intermingling, evoke a sense of overwhelm for the reader that might reflect the competing and complex internal processes of their narrator?
The key to understanding this poem, to my mind, is actually a single, tiny, word. It begins line nine of the final stanza. That's right: "As".
With this sudden shift to the present tense, I find myself with a clear picture of the poet with her notebook open. Lockie is an extremely experienced, well-published, and frequently-awarded artist; she knows how to generate a poem. She knows, for example, the time-tested dependability of the "I knew...I knew...I didn't know" framework as a way to initiate material. She knows the value of the specific and exotic and so gives us the names of drugs. We witness her following out avenues of ideas as she milks the possibilities of diction within the theater/cinema family.
The same generative quality occurs in the occasional examples of strained syntax ("Benchmark behaved", or the full sentence about the doctor in stanza one). Likewise for the multiple occurrences of consonance as words suggest other words to her. ("Poisonous parts played out/ in provisional" is the most extensive example of this.) Her considerable experience tells her not to overdirect, but to let the ideas come. And come and come. There is no shortage of ideas in this piece; the poet has a kit of tools and knows how to call upon them.
Now, at this stage of her career, Lockie is incapable of writing a bad poem, even as a first draft, and this poem has enjoyed multiple publications (first in the journal The Hypertexts and then in the poet's chapbook, Finishing Lines). Nevertheless, here at the Critique Corner, all poems are read as drafts. So, responding as such, I would say that, in this piece, my attention is constantly called to the poetics as I am further and further distanced from the feelings motivating it. In the end I know nothing of the brother nor anything memorable of the narrator's experience with him. I understand that the narrator senses an unreality in this experience—that she is being called upon to play-act—and I believe that to be a powerful notion upon which to base a poem, but rather than delve into how uneasily this requirement sits, we are instead asked to ponder trees.
One way the author might drill to the truth of this piece might be to recast it entirely in the present tense. By imaginatively revisiting the moment, she might access the kind of self-referential details that would let the reader truly inhabit the space with her, as opposed to watching her from a distance.
The operative word there is "details" because, by providing the reader too much undetailed information, a poet can give away some of its power. Let's take a look at Sherman's "Stamens and Pistils" with this idea in mind. In her first line she says she was "fixed". This is an ironic choice that not only tells the reader what the poem is about but also how the poet feels about it (more like broken). However, in the sixty words of this poem, we are given this information twice more: "my sterility", and "useless uterus/damaged ovaries". With each iteration, its potency is drained.
Look to the details of the poem to see what might convey the information without explicitly reporting or instructing the reader how to feel. We have a list of flowers, the aforementioned internal organs, a cat, some petals. Notice the adjectives associated with these in the main stanza: "mixed baskets"; "living arrangements" contrasted against "deep sleep" (with its implication of death); the pairing of "useless" and "damaged"; three adjectives for the cat: "fat", "orange", and "male"; and finally "perfect flowers". Within these well-selected phrases lies the poem. Notice, for example, that the flowers have no color. Only the tomcat—which most specifically refers to an un-neutered animal, as well as being slang for seeking sexual adventure—has one.
It is easy to strike "to acknowledge my sterility". The poem loses nothing since the same information is stated with more explicit detail within the next five lines. The question is, should the first line—with its all-too-rare use of effective irony—go as well? Alas, I would say yes. Beginning the poem without it would leave open the question as to why the poet is receiving flowers and return the impact to the phrases about the uterus and ovaries, where it belongs. It would allow the reader to discover as opposed to being told. Whenever possible, make room for readers to participate in putting your narrative together and they will become engaged with the piece.
The same concept can be applied to the final two lines. It is easy to identify "in memoriam" as being too telling, but what of the petals? Allowed to imagine them for myself, I conjure something that looks a bit like tears, or that browns. Even simply read as fallen petals, they make a lovely image. Just cutting the final line would leave this strong poem with a weak verb; that won't do. So, the poet will need to work with it to find something—perhaps, as I've suggested, the word "falling"—that will give the piece cadence, but retain what is powerful about it: its coherence around a simple but potent symbol, its reliance upon the logic of metaphor to speak to readers.
Because, even as we write through our grief, even as we work to release the silent tongues of our bodies, it is the reader we must write for. Whether the choice is to be more brave and share more deeply, or more subtle, to leave room for the reader to take part, the solutions become more readily apparent when we put the reader first.
Where could poems like "Brotherly Love" and "Stamens and Pistils" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Lucidity Poetry Journal Clarity Awards
Postmark Deadline: October 31
Free contest with prizes up to $100 for poems in any form dealing with people and interpersonal relationships; authors must be 18+
Beullah Rose Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: January 1
Literary journal Smartish Pace offers $200 for unpublished poems by women; enter by mail or online
Cafe Writers Open Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by November 30
Norfolk-based writers' group offers prizes up to 1,000 pounds for unpublished poems; online entries accepted
Soul-Making Literary Competition
Postmark Deadline: November 30
National League of American Pen Women chapter offers prizes up to $100 for poetry, stories, prose poems, personal essays, humor, and literature for young adults; open to both men and women; previously published works accepted
Writer's Digest Poetry Awards
Postmark Deadline: December 15
National writers' magazine offers prizes up to $500 for unpublished poems, 32 lines maximum; online entries accepted; no simultaneous submissions
These poems and critique appeared in the October 2010 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Lost
I take your hand
which has at times enfolded mine,
with fingers certain of their strength and power
I search your face
so familiar as you turn to me,
each line etched upon my heart
by our countless years as one
Your eyes seek mine
yet gone from them is the heat,
the blazing force of passion
now cooled by drifting clouds of fear
Your mind, once compelled to dwell in
fierce logic and complexity,
has lost its way in the fog of disease
leaving you forgetful of even simple tasks
I loved you then; I love you now
yet my heart aches with the memory of the man I knew
as I live with the man who remains
Copyright 2010 by Maggi Roark
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
The difficulty in writing about illness, whether our own or that of someone we love, is that the emotions are so very strong. We long to express their full magnitude but have only feeble words to work with. Poetry presents itself as a way to empower, even venerate, these words, yet poetry requires form—some sort of containment. While this may seem oppressively restrictive in the heat of our urge to communicate, it can—in fact, must—become an asset if we are to write a successful poem. Containing our feelings pressurizes them, and it is this threat of explosion that moves the reader.
In last month's Critique Corner, we compared two poems that wrapped their narrator's experiences in metaphors, much as bitter medicines are wrapped in pill casings. By doing so, they enable the reader to swallow them, and so, feel their effects. This month, for contrast, we will look at another, very different, poem: "Lost" by Maggi Roark of San Diego, California, who told me in her letter that she originally turned to poetry while deep in grief. With "Lost" Roark has been less gentle than last month's poets, forcing the reader to look directly at what she herself is seeing.
The strength of "Lost" is its simple but elegant form: stanzas one and two begin with "I"; stanzas two and three begin with "your"; stanza five achieves a satisfying cadence by balancing "I loved" with "I love." This clean, musical structure helps to quiet the revelations of the text to a volume at which the reader can hear them.
Without it, phrases like "countless years" or "blazing force" might shout. They are, essentially, hyperbole, and hyperbole, when not used as irony or wit, can strain a reader. A second sort of hyperbole evident in this poem is redundancy—in other words, one way to overstate something is to say it twice. "Heat" in stanza three is restated as "blazing force"; "so familiar" rephrased as "etched upon my heart".
Since simplicity is this poem's chief asset, I suggest looking for ways to strengthen that quality, with a particular eye toward removing redundancy.
One way to revise towards simplicity is to scrub the text of extraneous words and syllables. "Helper" verbs, prepositions, articles, and so forth, can often be excised with no loss to meaning. For example, stanza one might lose "has" in line two and "with" in line three.
In stanza three, one word the author might want to reconsider is "countless" for the obvious reason that they are not countless at all, though perhaps seemingly so. Therefore the word needs either to be cut or modified.
More importantly though, as I said above, stanzas two and three contain restatements. Unless there is an expressive reason to do otherwise, only the strongest phrasing should survive revision. In this poem, "familiar" in stanza two could be removed. So could the entire second line of stanza three, especially since the third line with its lovely sound correlations between "cooled", "clouds", and "now" as well as "drifting" and "fear" make it the poem's strongest line.
Part of that strength is owed to the way the metaphor of the line extends into stanza five, as the clouds descend to fog. Following that image up with an explanation greatly reduces its impact. The reader understands line four of the stanza even without its being stated.
As for the final stanza, its beauty is in its balance. Besides, we have "heart" above. I suggest reinforcing the balance by removing everything in lines two and three but "the man I knew/the man who remains".
It can be an amazing and wonderful discovery for a poet to realize how powerful simplicity can be. Poems are constructed upon tensions. The contrast of overwhelming emotions plainly put forth is potent. Organized into an unassuming form, they become a plangent and universal song.
Where could a poem like "Lost" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Abilene Writers Guild Contest
Postmark Deadline: November 30
Prizes up to $100 in a number of genres including rhymed and unrhymed poetry, short stories, articles, children's literature, and novel excerpts
Writer's Digest Poetry Awards
Postmark Deadline: December 15
Good exposure for emerging writers in this contest from a national writers' magazine, which offers prizes up to $500 for poems 32 lines or less; online entries accepted; no simultaneous submissions
Dream Quest One Poetry & Writing Contest
Postmark Deadline: December 31
Twice-yearly contest for emerging writers offers top prizes of $500 for prose, $250 for poetry; previously published work accepted
Heart Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: December 31
Twice-yearly contest from Nostalgia Press offers $500 for "insightful, immersing" free-verse poems
This poem and critique appeared in the November 2010 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
How to Respond to Criticism of Your Poetry
This month, in a special edition of Critique Corner, we deviate from our usual format to address a topic close to our hearts: how to accept and use criticism.
Dear reader, I feel I must insist: There is only one way to do it, only one way to respond to criticism of your poetry: "Thank you for your time and interest. You have given me food for thought."
I offer these words in quotation, as a model; I offer them for your safety. I mean that—those are our poems out there. Just as you need to stop and look before you turn right on a red light, for your own sake and that of others, this is a rule of the road. You never know who's hurtling at you down the Avenue of Communication.
Of this much I am certain, as a strategy it will not fail you. Honor the risk required to offer comment; retain your autonomy as author. However you convey it, your reply will come off upbeat and brave.
It sounds simple. It's not. It can be one of the hardest things that, we, as poets, must master. Must, because, if we don't, we will never grow and learn. And if we stop doing that, we eventually stop writing.
Why does this work? Because writers are talkers, but to use critical feedback, we have to listen. Let me show you how a reply like, "I really appreciate your thoughts; they will be with me when I revise," can help you switch the talker off, so that you can benefit from the time and attention people have taken to consider your work.
Your Wish is My Command
"If this were my poem, I would cut the last stanza," and so you do.
"I went to a lecture by a famous poet and I am sure he would tell you to cut the first stanza." With that, stanza two? History.
"I don't see how the middle stanza is working for you?" So much for your triolet!
Poets are often eager to please. Poets are often impressionable. But poems are not the work of committees. If you're taking every comment, you may be losing the you in your poem. Not every comment every person makes is going to serve the poem or your vision of it. So, lift your finger off that delete key; you know what to do: "Lots of really great input! I thank you so much for your time and attention." Then set the notes aside to return to another time.
You know you have heard an idea worth heeding when the same comment, or a comment about the same phrase or quality, arises again and again. You know you have heard an idea worth heeding when it refers to the very line or image you were uncertain of yourself. Sometimes a little "aha!" will sound within you when someone offers an idea you wish you'd had yourself. Wonderful!
The Defense Rests
Someone has just commented on your poem. They're wrong, of course. Obviously. More than that, they're insane, boorish, and wouldn't know a good poem if it took off the top of their head. Of course, you're too refined to say so (or at least you know that if you do, you might not be asked to return to the group, class, or forum you are working with). So you sigh, patiently gather your words, and present your case—or worse, you interrupt—"You're not seeing my point..." you say. No one contradicts you. Clearly you have persuaded them.
Well, the last sentence is true anyway. Everyone is now convinced that it's not worthwhile to offer you honest opinions. Ask yourself: what would they have to gain by arguing with you about your piece? They will either stop offering you feedback altogether, or, if it's a situation where comment is required, proffer vague blandishments.
This can become a dangerous cycle. Your defensive posture makes it uncomfortable for anyone to give you anything but praise; you receive nothing but praise and believe there is nothing to improve.
How to avoid this? "Such smart and interesting replies! I can see you gave this some time and I want to thank you for that." One thing that helps, if you are working with other people in a room, is to take verbatim notes. You may be head-down, biting the inside of your cheek the whole time, but your hands will be scribbling away. You won't have time to formulate push-back. If you are working online, massage the input somehow. For example, make a separate document and turn the notes into some sort of outline. This way you can process them without actively responding.
In both cases, set the notes aside to return to another time.
Straight from the Horse's Mouth
If a horse made a comment on one of my poems, I'd like to think I would listen. But what if it came from a jackass? Using criticism is no different from reading an op-ed page: you have to consider the source. I regret I must add, dear reader, though once again, for your own good: be sure to ask yourself if the source stands to make any money from your continued allegiance.
This is actually more important than whether you like the source's poetry. A better question is whether you think his or her comments on other people's poems improve those poems? Do they reflect your sensibility? Sometimes wonderful poets, even famous ones, have no talent for helping someone else achieve the poem they'd intended.
Which is not to say that they have nothing to say. Everyone has something to say, even—maybe especially—non-poets. We write for the response of readers. Be grateful for it. Honor every comment as you would have your own met: "Dear Online Poetry Editor, I know you receive a lot of mail, and I thank you for the time you've taken on my work. You've given me new ways to see this piece." Then set the notes aside.
Sometimes poets, perhaps from an impulse to focus, censure: "Thanks, but I'm only looking for comments about my title." Beware. For one thing, you never know what comments will resonate or spark inspiration in later pieces. Besides, you might happen to be seated next to a large animal veterinarian with a specialty in dentistry: someone with just the right instrument for the job.
Love is Blind
You wake up from a feverish dream and grab your pen. Your very words flush with bright vitality. Mama was right; you are brilliant. Just wait until you show it to the gang tonight. You leave the poem you'd prepared standing at the altar as you take your new love in hand. But ah, will you still respect her in the morning?
To benefit from criticism requires distance. Fresh work, the kind that still reverberates in our inner ears, is not yet seasoned for outside influence. Hear me now, you know I care: when possible show your penultimate poem, if not something even older. But should your crush prove too irresistible and you find yourself wounded to the core, summon your courage, you can do it: "I see. Thank you. A lot to think about. I'm sure I will." Okay, that might not be the best response, but, hey, you did it! And the notes will be there when you're ready.
The Twelfth of Never
We have been setting an awful lot of notes aside. Now what? A big bonfire?
The time to take up a revision of a poem is, of course, any time the mood strikes you. Reading newsletters like this one, full of opportunities and deadlines, can provide inspiration, as can a class. If you have some sort of regular exchange with other poets, set aside some of them each year for revisions.
New perspectives are especially fruitful. If you admire someone else's poetry, ask yourself why, then revisit your old work. Reading critical essays or attending live intensives and craft lectures can also re-open poems in a useful way.
This essay appeared in the December 2010 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
