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The winning entry is Study (with Ocean) by Cameron K. Gearen.
Her poems by Cameron K. Gearen have appeared in Crazyhorse, Quarterly West,
River Styx, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, Northwest Review
and elsewhere. She won the Grolier Prize in 1994, placed 2nd in Glimmer Train's Fourth Poetry
Open, and won 3rd place in Painted Bride Quarterly's 1997 Poetry Contest. In 2000, she earned
her M.F.A. from Indiana University. She lives with her husband and daughter in New Haven,
Connecticut, where she works as a speechwriter and editor for the Yale-China Association.
Her poem "The Long View", 2nd place winner of Glimmer Train's Fourth Poetry Open, can
be viewed at the Glimmer Train web site. She will receive $250, be invited to read her entry
at the Annual Luncheon, and be inducted as an Honorary Member of the Society, and
her entry will be printed in a Society pamphlet and made available below.
The second place entry is At the Merchant's House by Zoe Anglesey.
She will receive a prize of $100, be invited to read her entry at the Annual Luncheon,
and inducted as an Honorary Member of the Society.
The poem will be printed in a Society pamphlet and made available below.
Honorable mention wents to: Two Monuments by Elise Partridge and Sea Robins by John Hoppenthaler.
Elise Partridge has published poems or has poems forthcoming in Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, The New Republic, The Southern Review, Notre Dame Review, Agni, Boulevard and elsewhere. Three of her great-grandparents emigrated from County Armagh and Belfast to Philadelphia in the 1890s.
John Hoppenthaler's poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in
Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Chelsea, Tar River Poetry, 5 AM,
Pleiades, and elsewhere. His essays, reviews, and interviews regularly
appear in such journals as Chelsea, Arts & Letters, The Bellingham
Review, and
Kestrel, where he is poetry editor.
They will be invited to read their entries at the Annual Luncheon, inducted as Honorary Members of the Society, and their entries will be printed in a Society pamphlet and available below.
The W.B. Yeats Society of New York poetry competition is open to members and nonmembers of any age, from any locality. For information on the 2000 competition (deadline in February), on our other programs, or on membership ($15 per year, full-time students $10), write:
W. B. Yeats Society of New York
National Arts Club
15 Gramercy Park South
New York NY 10003
or consult our home page.
I have to confess that I was feeling a bit jaded when I sat down to read the four hundred or so poems submitted for the Yeats Society of New York poetry competition this year. This had largely to do with the fact that it's the fourth competition in as many months for which I've been a judge. There was the T.S. Eliot Prize for the best book of poems of the eighty or so published last year in the United Kingdom and Ireland, awarded in January to Michael Longley's The Weather in Japan. Then came the Griffin Prize, a new Canadian award for which I've read about a hundred collections of poetry in English from all over the world. The Griffin short-list was announced just last week, while the prizes are due to be presented in Toronto in early June. Next came the Christopher Tower Prize, another new award, administered from Oxford, this time open to high school students in the United Kingdom. As I say, I was beginning to feel ever so slightly tired of poetry when I started in on the pile of anonymous type- and manuscripts.
I hadn't gone too far when the poems which would turn out to merit Honorable Mentions came to hand and my spirits rose, as they do when poetry works its magic and begins to change one's life. The first of these poems, "Two Monuments", is a diptych which contrasts to striking effect the formal monument to an unknown soldier with a modest shrine on a civil war site. What carries the poem above and beyond being a merely effective contrast is the combination of the last two images, one of the persistent frailty, or frail persistence, of "a grasshopper, clinging", the other of the war machine in a "mower roaring over the field".
The second Honorable Mention goes to "Sea Robins", a rhapsodic riff on fishing which owes a lot to Elizabeth Bishop without being overshadowed by her influence. (I'm quite certain that Bishop is one of the very few poets from whom all of us can learn without being thought to be doing a very faint, very poor impression of her.) "Sea Robins" is a tribute to the effectiveness of Bishop's method of meticulous observation followed by meticulous observation, further proof that poets tended not to heed their parents when they told them how rude it was to stare.
The Second Prize goes to a prose poem, "At the Merchant's House", the prose poem being a form in which Elizabeth Bishop was herself wonderfully adept, and which allows for an extraordinary range of image and emotion, for leaping from "It is the hour pallbearers lower my mother into the ground of a northeast mill town" to "As guide now, I mention Peter Cooper invented jello, and she says, You mean his wife, then we're off to see some art." One does indeed see "some art" in the apparent effortlessness with which the speaker presents us with three generations of women with admirable ease and economy. This is a very fine poem, by turns tough and tender.
The poem which wins First Prize is "Study (with Ocean)", a properly ambitious work with a wonderfully winning tone. To speak of "tone" in poetry is to raise a large, complex issue which, as the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics reminds us, has to do with "word choice, syntax, imagery, metaphors, or other figurative devices" and the extent to which any or all of these might be seen "as expressing the attitude of the speaker". The tone of the speaker of "Study (with Ocean)" is winning in at least three ways. To begin with, there's the wit, be it "What I'm not is inhabiting these sandals" or "come see/ this circa 1909 dowsing rod someone followed". The wit there is combined with a second winning quality, wistfulness, in a line such as "I study your back like some treasure an uncle carried,/ crated, from the Orient". The third winning quality in the speaker's tone is an emotional and intellectual weight which allows the poem to transcend the condition of mere travelogue or journal and, along with the wit and wistfulness, pushes it towards its magnificent conclusion: "I tell the ocean take us, wear us down/ like those sunken mountains, glass to sand."
London Underground, car lit and tunneling, I look for us in the window, find luminous you and, next to you where I stand, also you. Dead blue butterfly you picked up once and either that's my hand stroking or I'm the butterfly, stroked. Feats of empathy? What I'm not is inhabiting these sandals. Days, we haunt Whitby's ruined abbey, you a raincoated raven atop her pillar. Trace churchyard dates etched in stone, dry out in a tea shop, then duck, arms linked, into night tempest. * French prisoners of war, time on their hands, fashioned ships from bone, wrought masts now cased in Whitby Museum where our weight makes floors whine; you study ammonite's swirl, I study your back like some treasure an uncle carried, crated, from the Orient where, Marco says, bats large as vultures and vultures black as crows, much larger than where I've come from, will return to, but now, love, come see this circa 1909 dowsing rod someone followed. * The Great Khan, in 1269, sends Niccolo and Maffeo Polo to Acre to score some holy oil but Pope Clement, in the meantime, dies at which juncture the brothers digress via ship to Venice where they find Niccolo's wife, too, has died and left a son, Marco, now 15, who stands at sunup on the shore, landlocked and wondering, while in our story I'm the prodigal: crossed Siberia mid-November to the place you are, love, and I'm early so I rest in York Minster, let the light from the rose window stain me red. * To do: Breakfast on toast and marmalade, push stewed tomatoes across plate, discuss Day your Bedroom Windows Shattered, discuss again Day your Apartment Caught Fire, perform dramatic reading of Book of Revelation, laugh, exhaust collective stock of Irish ballads, sleep and wake, take afternoon walk past Silbury Hill to the Sanctuary, lose our way, sundown return via the Avenue, belt Motown, consume fish and chips at the Red Lion, skip meteor shower, murmur, sleep: in this way, weeks. * How you walked this field, high with wheat, alone, you're saying, threw yourself into it and held the camera at arm's length until the lens demanded: will you (or not) make something of your life? how the stalks stayed crushed after you rose, proof you lived, then found a sheep which had (to be Biblical about it) strayed from the fold and you dragged the thing to a cottage door whereupon its owner said Happens all the time, Love and closed the cottage door leaving you and the sheep to mutual regard, field's edge. * In ancient times, says Mappa Mundi, this island measured full three thousand some miles but the northern gales which blow-- prodigious violence--have corroded these mountains; so this gale, North Sea, not Formosa, threatens to flatten us, out past the last fisherman on swaying pier, slipping then catching (crooked elbows, linked hands) then slipping, wet wood, and when you scream nightward to hear your voice die in wind, I tell the ocean take us, wear us down like those sunken mountains, glass to sand.
Daughter Melanie takes my hand like I'm her little girl, she leads me through a crowd, slips by guys intent on body contact, they force bee-lines shouting above speaker reverb and canyon echo. Seated on a bale of hay, we hear an emcee go through rules. Balancing paper plates of oysters on the half-shell, it's number seven for us, and yes, he wins for shucking speed and presentation. To a reporter he says softly, I'm from Puebla. Within earshot, a bystander mutters, Do you think he has a green card? It is the hour pallbearers lower my mother into the ground of a northwest mill town. She must have moved on with, Don't explain. I tell Melanie I love her, am grateful for my true moms- Anci, Yuri, Frances-stalwarts on picket lines, they lived up to being strong and forgiving. If the boss gives him time off, Adolfo replies, he'll take the Guinness prize and lift a glass in Ireland. My mind clicks to an eagle, beak tight, shaking a livid snake, to restaurants where Puebla poblanos earn $4 an hour, to Micks in early Boston and maíz as crispy cornflakes. Turning the comer toward Cooper Union, I see a school my mother once dreamed she'd attend and her dream I repeated until Melanie came first born. As guide now, I mention Peter Cooper invented jello, and she says, You mean his wife, then we're off to see some art.
1. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier White marble. Rolled sod. Black-shod guard: shining shoes glide up and down red carpet. The steed's bronze lip disdainfully curls. Inside a colonnaded rotunda, under a Latin diadem, cases of medals and rosettes. 2. Civil War Battlefield One-room museum: a letter from an eighteen-year-old, bragging we’ll whup ‘em yet! His dingy, bullet-shredded epaulet. The wire-rim glasses and dogeared Bible of the grandmother who refused to leave her house when the battle started. (She died at noon under an exploding shell.) A grasshopper, clinging to a swaying stalk. A mower roaring over the field.
In the dampest comer of the basement, the persistent Frigidaire
rusted away on cinder blocks. The freezer jammed full with bunker,
cakes of ice in plastic margarine tubs, and the refrigerator
stocked with sweaty six-packs of Black Label Beer. We'd cram the stuff
into a scarred blue cooler, grab our rigged poles off the pegboard,
and take rickety stairs down the bluff to the Sound.
Mostly what we caught were sea robins. My grandfather would mutter
damnsonuvabitchseasonnies at what we pulled up,
always hoping for better, something he could eviscerate and grill.
Nevertheless, with spine-plated heads, wide pectoral fins
spread out like wings, they were dinosaurs, far more interesting
than blood-thirsty bluefish that could snap a boy's toes off were he careless
enough to wade barefoot through the scaly wake of frantic menhaden
chased close to shore, far as they could go. Landed, sea robins barked,
their twin-chambered swim bladders contracting in distress.
Then my grandfather would sing again a boozy line
from his favorite chantey, a song learned in the Navy before I was born:
And the sea robins sing as we roll on our way. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.
The first time I recall facing up to fear was placing a finger on one,
grasping it in my hands, pulling the hook free from its rubbery lip.
When grandfather's creaky ship left port it was time. Fish stories
had been forgotten with the others, grandson and pirate songs.
As we flung his ashes in the ocean, the hum
of the long discarded refrigerator breathed in my ear. Light
gave out behind us. Under the surface, sea robins
took small measures of revenge, picked their churlish way
through memory-the clownish indignity of flopping
over beach sand, sharp barbs, my impudent boldness and their
ineffective wings. Next morning, driving home, who could
have blamed me, then, for croaking out his song, lowering
the car window to catch the heavy air. That first blue glimpse of water.
To touch it.
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