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.
Maybe my task of sorting through so many poems-more than 200-for this competition was made easy by its setting. I was in the apartment of of a friend on Pacific Heights in San Francisco. The view from the desk I was using stretched from the Golden Gate Bridge to the shadowed foothills across the bay. Every morning was sunny, the white buildings and the red-tiled roofs of the city below me were brilliant in the sun. I had given a reading in Los Angeles and was in San Francisco to spend the loot. It may be a bum's life, as Eliot says, but there are tangible rewards, sometimes, in this bardic business.
Anyway, reading the poems was easy. Judging them was hard because so many of the poems had evident virtues, even when the poet couldn't bring the poem to a successful conclusion. I liked a poem called "Rimbaud's Blue Pen" because in the penultimate line the poet, characterizing Rimbaud's work, says, "It was true punk." True and sage, I think, and a way of highlighting both the vanished French kid-poet and his just-gone-from-the-scene inheritors.
I liked a poem called "Raptor" because the writer managed to fuse his vision with the vision of a hawk, and feel in himself the same "One gut-spoken intent." And this single, intense appetite becomes the mark of any poet.
I liked an ode to a 1948 Oldsmobile, "Ole Black Joe", because it conjured up a time when a car was an instrument of liberation, bringing city folk into the country. The writer of the poem charmed me with the description of the car, from its chrome bumper to its five layers of black lacquer.
Many of the poems this year were to vanished friends, mentors, parents (a byproduct of 9/11 perhaps). Acts of homage, mainly. I chose one of these for first prize-"Darkness with Lantern: for William Meredith". One poet's tribute to a damaged mentor, it describes a party for Meredith after his first stroke. It's a night party in a garden, candle-lit. I love the gentleness of the poem, the gentle way the stricken poet is treated by his friends, the way the candles light up the darkness, but only fitfully, as Meredith's memory flares up for him, but only fitfully, and then the words fail him as darkness takes over. I like the way the writer of the poem is able to say of those words: "I remember them for you with this pen stroke"-an act of bravado that works. That last "stroke" gathers in the whole poem.
The last few months I have been preparing the Library of America anthology of American poetry of World War Two. In the course of doing that, I had to return to the great war poems of World War One-the work of Yeats, Graves, Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg. Perhaps that is why I have chosen "1917" for the second prize. It is an eerily accurate World War One poem- the recruiting officer, the bugle playing over the field that becomes a grave, the telegram from the officer at the front. It's all done as a pastoral anecdote about a father and son, almost a Georgian poem, but still very apt for our day.
Honorable mention goes to two poems-I can't rank them because they are so different- "Running with a Teacher" (another poem of homage) and "City of Ghosts". "Running with a Teacher" lightly yokes the act of jogging with the academic life, a single figure running through it, a figure of speech and the protagonist. Its precise, carved quatrains catch the sound of the "size-ten Nikes slapping the blacktop", the labor of doing the hills, the physical pain and then the release when the testing is over. I like the way the language contains the energy of the poem: "each foot prime mover to the other,/ arms Copernican in their sure sense/ of preordained and right continuance". As the poet says at the end, "Not quite an A, but close enough".
"City of Ghosts" brings back to life the Holocaust-killed Jews of a Lithuanian town, sits them at tables outside the cafes where they can gawk at the girls, whistle and stomp their feet. I love that vision and the vision in the second stanza, which I quote whole:
They rise naked, with shovels still in their hands. They rise with bullet holes through which air passes as they rise-blue Lithuanian air- it passes through one Jew to the other. They rise holding hands, embracing, singing songs they remember from childhood.One would have thought this subject exhausted, but this exuberantly surrealist poem, part elegy, part curse, proves this isn't so. When language and imagination dance together, even dead Jews can dance.
At that party in your garden, red azaleas candled the evening, their burning blossoms threading a willow's feathered green with rosy assurance. Guests fanned out in circles around the patio and its stone fountain. You had just suffered your first stroke and sat, motionless in a chair, threading your fingers through each other. When a man rose to pour you a drink, you never moved. A circle of friends gathered around you. One stroked your white hair. The flames of flickering candles fluttered beneath an incessant wash of fountain. Flashbulbs popped and spilled a searing fountain of sparks across the party. Someone threaded the crowd, draped a sweater across you, rose into darkness with a lantern, its glowing circle bright but your jumbled words faltered, thought strokes never connected. Richard put a lemon cake with candles on the table next to your arm. Blue candles flared and waned while you described the fountain of flames when you burned Auden's letters. Your hand threaded the air with an authority your words could no longer rise to. I was there with you, claimed your lover, who circled you as a mother circles crooked flame in the strokes of aphasia. I think not, you cried, remembering threads of fire rimming white packets. A fierce certainty rose. I think not, you shouted. My sister there-only! The stroke as you struggled to speak, took over. Memory circled memory in a winding spiral of ash, candled toward meaning then drifted into the fountain of the forgotten. Your face grew flushed in its circle as awkward tremors, unformed ideas fluttered into candles of thought, then halted, unraveling. Night rose in its cloak of unfinished threads. You remembered no more words, staring passionately into the fountain. I remember them for you with this pen stroke.
That northern spring the boy walked out with his father as he had each spring since he was seven through waiting apple blossoms up to the sugar maples whose slow sap they tapped for syrup. Each year they took a share of it down to the fire-hall for the firemen's benefit pancake supper. This year the fire-hall had turned recruiting-office for the war. The boy decided he would go. He made a bad soldier. The autumn afternoon death took him by the shoulder, he didn't pay attention. He had turned away, his mouth full forever of the thing he was about to say, his light pulse beating away too quickly for him to feel anything but surprise. And when the bugle played, the evening spread its muted colors out over his open eyes, over the field which was his grave. Later the officer's telegraph would send out a reveille to wake the boy's father in the morning, and he would go out with the white paper still in his hand, out walking over the frozen ground to the orchard, to where each late apple wore its peaked cap of snow.
Old Jews fill the empty streets of Kaunas. They sit on boxes, chairs, they sit at tables in the fancy cafés on the Laisves promenade. They gawk when long-legged girls stride by in four-inch heels and skin-tight trousers. They whistle, stamp their feet and spit three times. Others rise from the ditches their neighbors made them dig. They rise naked, with shovels still in their hands. They rise with bullet holes through which air passes as they rise-blue Lithuanian air- it passes through one Jew to the other. They rise holding hands, embracing, singing songs they remember from childhood. They're old Jews now. Even the youngest, who were murdered as infants. A whole city of Jews, old Jews, on boxes, on chairs, ghost Jews on every corner gossiping and laughing at problems they no longer have. And here's the Japanese consul disobeying his orders, sending Jews on cruise ships to Shanghai. The train pulling out of the station as they expel Sugihara from Kaunas. He pulls transit visas out of his luggage, throws them out of the moving train's window. Sometimes wailing breaks out on one street and other streets join in. They would like to leave it all behind, to lose this world completely, but none of them can leave so many stories untold, haunting the young who half-hear and see them, the innocent young, who are clueless but know there's a secret their parents have never told them.
Early mornings like this are best, even a New England autumn unable to compete with his red face as he grinds up the second of three steep hills, somehow making it to the other side, a Rilkean angel in running shoes who knows about the physical things of this world: the intricate frost on cold October mornings, millions of wings enmeshed in leaves, the spillage of pumpkins. By the third hill each ache is a stiff pop quiz he goes against the fact of gravity to pass, each gasp an F more awful than the one before. Like the squirrel he sees high up a dead tree, he says nothing, nothing on his mind but black spasms as he runs past pastures and fields, past chalky grasses, cattail corpses, past silos and barns and sheds. Ahead of him, when it feels his size- ten Nikes slapping the blacktop, even a snake gets out of his way, crossing at twice its normal speed, more grace in his determination than in its undulations. Pumping his arms, jabbing at air, up the third hill he labors, every breath he draws expelled like an insufferable student, each foot prime mover to the other, arms Copernican in their sure sense of preordained and right continuance. Then it's over, then the afterglow, the coming down. All right! he blurts, and the season reasserts itself. Not quite an A, but close enough.
Return to Yeats Society page