W.B. Yeats Society of N.Y.
2007 Poetry Competition
2007 Poetry Competition
|
|
2007 Poetry Competition |
| "Sing what is well made" |
The W.B. Yeats Society of New York poetry competition is open to members and nonmembers of any age, from any locality. Poems in English up to 60 lines, not previously published, on any subject may be submitted. Each poem (judged separately) typed on an 8½ x 11-inch sheet without author's name; attach 3x5-inch card with name, address, telephone, e-mail. Entry fee is $8 for the first poem and $7 for each additional. Include self-addressed stamped envelope to receive a copy of the report, like this one. A list of winners is posted on our Web site around March 31. First prize $250, second prize $100. Winners and honorable mentions receive one-year memberships in the Society and are honored at a Society event. Authors retain rights, but grant us the right to publish/broadcast winning entries. These are the complete guidelines; no entry form is necessary.
The deadline for our 2009 competition is February 1st. Awards will be presented at an event in April. For information on our other programs, or on membership ($35 and $25 per year, full-time students $15), visit our website, or write us at the National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, New York NY 10003.
First, let me proclaim that every entry is a winner. To make a poem and to put it out among us in its true social place Fare winning acts - good for each poet and stunningly good for the abused propaganda-torn words of the world we live in. I thank and congratulate all participants for the delight I took in reading them.
Here are a few thoughts about the work of our official winners.
Gaia’s Song (first prize) is deeply and thoroughly imagined, and realized concretely on a breath-taking visionary scale. Our earth tells her history; by Stanza 10 she opens her theme toward voice, toward naming, toward language in its haunting power to identify. A subtle music carries images out to us.
The "I" of the poem is Gaia herself, a modest eloquent omnipresence.
I want to move things with my mind" (second prize) reminds
us how the infant cry of "I want!" echoes through us always, in
a tumbling rush of energy. We can picture its eager ambitions,
because the amplified naming of wants beautifully displays how
language in action creates a virtual reality between speaker and
reader.
In the wonderful Rising in the Dead of Winter (honorable
mention) we find yet another use of "I" – and by no means an
easy one to achieve. This "I" captures one of us, triumphantly.
Here is an ordinary soul, not mythic yet never prosaic. This "I"
speaks as "we" go about our dailyness. A cold dawn at a mall
sale is transfigured just enough by the narrator, so that we sigh
with huge relief at the end of the elegantly managed couplets,
when "warm breath merges.../and rises.".
The clothes in the bottom of the drawer (honorable mentio
also has a speaker we are close to at once. She meditates, in a
musing, internal voice, as she organizes her household while
sorting old clothes. They spill memories as she unfold them,
lives and loss and joys come to us in vivid dress. Time becomes
timelessness as she proceeds.
2007 Winning Entries
First Prize
Gaia's Song
by Steve Lautermilch
Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina
When I was young
water taught me how to speak.
Once I spoke, reed and stone and canyon wall
taught me to pause and listen and hear.
But light and shade and hazel leaves
broke that dream and brought me to my feet.
In a round of standing stones on holy ground I watched
the sun dawn and magnify in seed.
Grasses and flowers heavy with dew, dancing
long-haired corn rose and burned like children loose in a field.
Bearded rain, darkening earth, mountains like bears
asleep with snow, each of these took turns to lay me down to sleep
bedding me away like the dragonfly in amber
the needled forest floor and rainbowed desert plain, the seep
of sand and rising mist, slip of fog clasping my hands
until my closed palms opened and were free.
Walking fish and swimming, diving birds took me
to the shore where every breath I breathed
joined everything that breathes.
Now a face looks back in every shape I see.
I hear a voice
on the lips of bud and berry, salmon and scree.
In the storm that whispers and in tongues of fire
a name is calling on every wave and tide. Who are you, easy
and hard in your ways, who come to talk but like a breeze
turn and die away.
Many you are named, and savage.
And sweet.
(See prize entry for 2005.)
I want to move things with my mind like your orange blossom face between my blue hands the delphinium embrace of equinox cradling her white tears new beginnings. I want to sing you back to yourself in English or French or yellow hypericum I want to move things with my mind like you, like dark marello cherries from the ripe fall trees warm skinned, and deep with Spanish sun and stain your mouth with dark purple spirits. I want to move things with my mind like my heart like oak trees surging up from below the ground, like the color dark, my fingers brown strong in the earth. Divining you your realness I want to move something larger than the god’s honest truth, and smaller than a safety pin broken or orion’s sash—open swaying freely from the brightest red star I want to make you plant cedars and passion flower vines throughout my body to apex my bow with wonder I want to make you plant blood orange seeds and bella donna on my mouth with your skin when you smile dark and tilt your head, I want to slide you across the table so fast—you’ll spill into my arms and forget there was ever a time before I moved you. I want to feel the stone of you heavy in my hand and wear away all but is the earth of you I want to spin the leaf of you with the motion of my air and the deep wtering of you so you’ll grow crazy brambles of wild roses instead of hair I want to move you with my mind and crawl on my knees through thick undergrowth until I find—your spine in my palm and the dye of forget-me-nots blue on your skin
Rising early in the dead of winter to queue in pre-dawn bitterness, we long for the unlocking of Upstate Discount Furnishings, earthly home of E-Z credit, and a One-Day-Only-Clearance Sale on the birthday of George Washington. No firestorms, no earthquakes, no archangels blowing riffs. Only the store manager pacing the icy sidewalk with a bullhorn as I assemble with the others on a Monday in February to wait for the opening of doors. Huge savings draw a crowd to every entrance. Floor samples. Carpet remnants. Four mismatched washer-dryer sets. Six scratch-n-dent TVs. Personally, I'm after broadloom at $4.99 a yard, a discontinued line, but I'm ready to cover everything, to create a sound-proof writing cell, a tomb. We're quite a horde—retirees with frozen noses red-veined as tulip bulbs, young handymen with hardened eyes who look like they want carpet too, want carpet more than anything, would kill for carpet, and welfare moms with dirty-diapered kids who know that they don't stand a snowball's chance against those old-world grannies in babushkas. It's sales final. No returns. And yet we yearn away our lives as if our commerce here will never end. We stamp our feet, complain about the cold, but watch transfixed as warm breath slowly leaves us, merges with the white exhaust from cars, and rises.
RealAudio 
MP3
those you are supposed to throw out because the rule of organization is, if you haven’t worn it in the past three years you’re not going to wear it again those are the magic garments used to make connections to past lives. a pair of white kid gloves elbow length, and the dress it went with, a bright magenta taffetta, the only dress like it at my cousin’s wedding. the skirt size 6 my father sent me from Paris when I was in full pregnant bloom unable to reach down to tie my shoelaces. a shimmery blouse I wore to my son's bar-mitzvah woven of colors and dreams. and my mother's clothes that still have her scent an amalgam of perfume and powder. her down coat, a must, should she realize she made a mistake dying and decides to return. a pair of shoes my father wore black leather with intricate tooling. expensive, but they would last longer he said and they did so that when he was ill and couldn’t sit still in a shoe store didn’t know what a shoe was we managed.
Return to Yeats Society page