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2003 Poetry Competition |
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 literary tea in New York, a Saturday in April or May. 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 2004 competition is February 15. 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.
Writing this report on the eve of battle, I think of Thomas Hardy's great poem Channel Firing written on the eve of battle in April 1914 and its concluding stanza:
Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.
Traces of that poem are in much of the war poetry that comes after it,
in Richard Eberhart's On the Fury of Aerial Bombardment, for example, and
in the infantry poems of Louis Simpson, both from the second World War.
In a time of turbulence, poetry can be a help, a momentary stay against
confusion. Many of the poems submitted this year seem to have that as their
subtext, as if in anticipation of what was to come and in memory of 9/11.
One poet announces forthrightly: "Art is an antidote." Would that it were.
But it is a shelter, and the honey of old poems a reminder that not
everything is subject to the ravages of war and time.
Several poets this year make eloquent use of the poetry of the past. One
takes on the voice of Lord Byron ("Primitive Man's Defense") speaking
seductively in his parlor to a lovely woman. Another, borrowing some lines
from Peter Ackroyd's William Blake: an Introduction, describes "William
Blake's Last Days".
Two of the poets courageously invoke our great master Yeats. One writes about a teacher ("To an English Professor Long Since Vanished") who tried to make his young freshmen understand the pathos in the lines: "An aged man is but a paltry thing,/ A tattered rag upon a stick...." They were too young to be moved. Now the poet, led to it by age, understands what his teacher, though somewhat theatrical as Yeats himself at times could be, was trying to convey. And another lovely poem, "Climbing Knocknarea", has as its epigraph words from Yeats.
I think it takes courage in a contest such as this to invoke Yeats, because it might signal to the one who judges an empty piety, a poem that's just going through the motions of being a poem. But in the two poems I've already cited that is hardly the case. Nor is it the case for the poem I've selected for second prize, Benediction. Here the poet places at the very center of the poem the line, "I will arise and go now." How could you find a Yeats quote more worn by familiarity? Yet in this poem it takes on a beautiful freshness because it is heard by an old woman whose ability to distinguish words is fading, the consonants and the vowels beginning to separate themselves.
the t's like soldiers suddenly at attention startle her a little the s's spray from a cool garden hose soothing themselves into the honey of m's and the vowels the vowels luminous as firefliesAnd after this we have the Yeats, no longer deadened by familiarity. I like the quietness of this poem, the language that is inventive but not in a self-advertising way. Take the opening, for example: "How long has she been here, days washing into days...." This saying goodby to an old woman, who is also a writer, blesses us all with its quietness.
Quiet, too, is the poem I've chosen for first prize: Moths; Night Fishing. (I see I too may have crept under the shelter of words to avoid the clash of arms.) I have spent many hours fishing, mostly surfcasting from the beaches along the easternmost shore of Long Island. Fishing is a lot like writing: you cast out into the unknown and when you've hooked something you know it by the energy that travels back to you along the line. Like writing, it's a way to find solitude. Once in a while, to keep the game going, you have to bring something back.
The poet who wrote Moths; Night Fishing is on a mountain lake, freshwater fishing. He begins with the clustering moths and turns them into a symbol of life, "like life's first breath." Then he moves to the joy of "sliding across this smooth surface in a boat, a skin of fog forming...." He describes the slender bass, sometimes as they leap "freeze-framed by a bolt of moonlight." And he concludes "the methods/ they choose to distinguish between my lure slowly spinning and the/ fluttering wings of survival are the business of the world made plain." So moths and bass come together at the end, both of them poised on the thin edge of survival, as are we all.
The two poems that get honorable mention are taken from life, though the second contains an argument with art. In the first, ;Cascade Falls, we are into a little confessional drama in which a wife, addressing her husband, but only in her head, tells him about the many men she had over the years brought to a state park for a picnic followed by a seduction. Though the poem is in the confessional mode, the poet thickens its rhetoric, charges up the language and the emotion with references to Medea, Jocasta, Clytemnestra, and the poem itself reads not like a piece of self-therapy but a piece of literature.
The second honorable mention, The Rules of Poetry, is also in a woman's voice. It begins with what looks like a straight statement of fact: "stevens' blue guitar is art;/ the pink foot of the newborn is merely sentimental." But this assertion is tested as the poem proceeds until at the end the poet says: "this child, this poem and play./ my boy,/ the one with my blue guitar."
This year's crop was a pleasure to read?and educational. One poet, in a single poem, had me scurrying to the dictionary to look up dehiscence, talion, and foliar. A lollipop for anyone who knows all three.
It's not their fault that their wings and mouths are selfish? that they use them to make trouble all around this mountain lake or that their lust for the warm places has them recorded among the Johns of the world, seeking from lippy globes of lamp and moon nourishment, clarity, warmth, in all of which their brief faces shine like life's first breath. How pleasurable to be sliding across this smooth surface in a boat, a skin of fog forming, the immediate sound insects preening and probing, and the splash of fish freeze-framed by a bolt of moonlight. Motor off: the purest relaxation is the predator in his element? civilization means we don't even have to purr anymore. The slender bass, horizon-eyed, suspend in their aqueous humor between gravity and the parabola of escape, and the methods they choose to distinguish between my lure slowly spinning and the fluttering wings of survival are the business of the world made plain.
How long has she been here, days washing into days, months since she has had the strength to hold a book, and now her eyes frail clouded too often closed Old age has taken to stuffing her ears with soft white feathers, but still she knows them, her two grandsons, her great-granddaughter, each one carries into her room a distinctive scent, an odor she bathes in, as each reads to her words once so familiar, gradually separating themselves from meaning, and now disintegrating further into their innermost parts? the t's like soldiers suddenly at attention startle her a little the s's spray from a cool garden hose soothing themselves into the honey of m's and the vowels the vowels luminous as fireflies I will arise and go now how in each loved mouth they sound slightly different, but so much the same Sometimes her own work is chosen, past understanding now but she knows her work, that particular pattern of sounds, the rhythms and cadences she labored over time and again, never quite satisfied until now, issuing from the mouths of her children's children, their voices growing more and more distant as she struggles to hear the words
Every man I ever wanted I brought here for a picnic. Walked him out over these horizontal slabs to swish our feet in the water. Packed lunch, my breasts for dessert. I always drove. It was a surprise, you see. But you I never brought. Let's face it, you began as understudy. I had to prompt your lines. This was a big time. Standing Room Only (those jostling trees). And O, the acting, the Stanislavsky method working that green O. The besotted cliffs echoing with a praise. Don't feel bad. By the time you fumbled on the scene the scene was Greek, and I, burning to bury not two brothers but a regiment. I was Jocasta stabbed with dress pins, Medea drenched in blood not wet enough to wash the anger from my hands, and Agamemnon's wife, so picnicked out, so wax- papered in duplicity, I was without shame. No, I never brought you here, even now, for what if time's membrane did not hold and the double axe of Clytemnestra's words crashed through my teeth, and Jason snarled again in your voice? What of Aristotle's unities, not to mention our own, for how many years of marriage shored up is dike enough, dead-bolt and chain enough when such tempting lines are practiced and cued up on an unsuspecting tongue?
stevens' blue guitar is art; the pink foot of the newborn is merely sentimental, with its tape-thin nails and its smell of baby powder. now, the blood-lined pink of pigs' feet under cellophane, to a vegetarian, is superb art -- because it makes us re-think the images which inform our values as well as the values which inform our images. one pink is mean, and that is art. until you hold a baby -- that gadfly in the process -- you will never understand. that poop and snot are not art just because they are base. but that the bow-legs of one who does not yet walk, and blanket lint between the fingers and toes mean this one's alive and not going anywhere soon -- anointed into this world, like nothing that can ever exist again. such a pain, to be loved. and also not to be loved. god, we hope this kid is not a serial killer. this child is so beautiful. and i do believe, and profess, that stevens' blue guitar is art. silk toes. and warm. like baking powder biscuits on Sunday morning, with honey. hold the butter. but never the kisses: hershey's or lips. curses. foiled again. this child, this poem and play. my boy, the one with my blue guitar.
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