W.B. Yeats Society of N.Y.
2006 Poetry Competition
2006 Poetry Competition
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2006 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 2007 competition is February 1st. Awards will be presented at the April 16th event. 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.
What a refreshment it has been, to read the manuscripts entered in this contest. Page after page, I enjoyed the dexterity of their true gestures in the forum of literature, made with grace and intensity across a broad range of techniques, motifs, and themes. Finally, I’ve chosen five, drawn by their respect for the real and their gift of transfiguring the random into the beautifully intelligible.
First prize goes to I Thought Only and Finally of Sound. It is a poignant urban elegy, with a richly developed sestina-like music. Its images are up-looking; they move through wings and constellations to call up a sense of flight and rest, a sense of what we may keep, what we must lose.
Second prize goes to Country Song. Its quick descriptions are observed, felt, and thought through, so we are in place for the last stanza which speeds us to the moment, intimate and visionary, of the last couplet.
There are 3 honorable mentions, each irresistible. Blue Heron is a little stunner that does perfectly the great things poems can do: liberate. It takes us out of ourselves, so we are beside ourselves with joy. Albayzin#apos;s two characters, entwined in a vivid anecdote, enact a silent drama and evoke a great question. Nymph, Dun,and Spinner delectates in the language of fly-tying while it evokes the deep satisfaction of teaching on behalf of tradition.
Beyond the varied music of these poems, I discern a commonality. They are moving and touching because they are all–in their many guises and voices–love poems. The glory of their attention to the evidence of the given world lifts up our hearts. Yeats is justified. He was and his poems are great with love. These poems have his ardent spirit; his love of the work of poetry, love of others, love of a time, of a place, and love of the wretched and blessed human condition here and now.
Never was I afraid of the city. It was the sound of flight being let go of, and whenever I turned to the coming height of its stones, as sparrow and finch—and to the wind, the wind taking my face— stars would draw me to their degrees, and I would night by night be Auriga’s whitened thoughts—the man holding the goat and her two across my back. Never had I wanted to be an instant of will, to tender about the city as a grey wing sound dividing and crossing, or a word of wood or stone holding shape in my hands, believing in form compassionate coming to make safety of us all—all night as we walked, all day as we dreamed. I understood the face of the city as they saw its shimmering haste, its attention, the face of its common offerings arched to the stone that held all other stones to their roots, rain falling to the streets, slipping the night of its shadows. And it was neither the city nor what they loved of it— the sound of will or of sudden steps—that brought me to the aviaries, but the idea that coming flight was not the work of wing, feather, adjustment, height holding stone, wood, weight, feel. And in my first dovecote, pigeon was holding her tappened fingertips against a worn clip latched to a metal rod. I saw her press her face close to the lathe leveled edge of a frame, to a spun handle, to a nail. And in that coming moment, in her pause and in her aim to court what staying was, I heard the sound of clay pipes, glass rings, memories, of lead shavings fitted against a night dowel. And before she left, I hoped that in a night of stars untimed, she would turn to happiness, holding in the changing age of city, motion, sound, the near touch of golden owl’s lift, his tempered will against mine, and in his face, not that pull of flight or stay—tree bark; galls; lichen to stiffen the oval perch of his claws; moss. So I held to his coming as if it were the return of a name, a word of will coming against it all, and I made a box so fine and full of watching night, that even your absence was radiant. Even your rest, taken. And you would rise to it—the city still; time held close, its holding like the envelope of wind you knew, like light falling across your face. I thought only and finally of sound. Let the sound of their coming wings rise, go by. We lose nothing. Let their faces be bird-thin and shining. Let night remain. And may God forgive us as they move past—we who are holding, to our stiffened chests, everything they had to offer.
Signs and signifiers be gone. The cow reveals everything. An abandoned plough hums a rusted version of a crop song, winnowing and dying out, no better testament to time and its arrangements. Clouds return shaking the rain from their backs. Meanwhile, deep in a furrow, a field mouse hunkers down, taking a place in history, and the wind in the slender leaves of corn is a premonition, a prophecy. Everywhere I look and especially where I won’t are found great revelations of life’s mysteries, so I cultivate a habit of looking and not looking, and I see what I could not see before when I see you stepping through the door.
A blue heron stands poised in the river, opening its wings to become a shadow canopy over a knot of eels. Its dagger bill strikes, hurling an eel up into the air, to catch it and swallow it, head first. The heron steps forward then, neck upstretched, and cries out a piercing tremulous call, over and over. After a silent while, it collects itself and takes to the sky, soaring, in no time at all, out of sight.
Scabbed and bloodshot he rises from the step as she thrusts the iron strutted portal closed but for an instant face to face they lean the addict and the sister white gauze veil drawn back to latch the oaken doors in ice-caked and he to raise an arm too high for alms Bulging winter-watered gaze meets lids fault-lined from age a tight-lipped tortoise lifting keys in spotless robes a drooling cormorant tar-clogged swaying to touch her breast The bolt clicks shut she glides he lurches the face of Man diaphanous or ravenous in laundered hoar or fulvid crust which one is God the one who locks the church at two or picks the vomit from his beard to guard the stoop with still farewells still trailing from his eyes
We fabricate culture, pass it on from generation to generation in winter, talking of silk and fur and feathers as we drive to shops in distant strip malls, buy our mink underfluff and peacock herl, our deer hair, seal fur, and black bear hair. We knot the nymph, dun, and spinner, wind the small unsinkable bodies, jerk the hairs into the muddlers, add the hooks. It takes years of experience to calculate a hook, judge the length, consider the weight, know how ephemeroptera touch down on water, how trout thrash and lunge. We celebrate artifice, we factor panic, hunger is not the same as pride for man, woman, or fish. It is all practice, no theory, tying the knots tightly, knowing they will hold. Father and daughter, our river runs between granite shores where gaunt men once sharpened scissors and knives, shivering in noisy factories. The town runs on waders and canoes now, on February Reds and March Browns, rapids and whirlpools, stars leaning into dawn. We murmur the names, Parachute Adams, McMurray Ant, Barret’s Bane, Cahill. We could be two monks chanting a litany as we guide novices to water and hills, mark the hours, demand miracles, Goddard’s Last Hope, Dambuster. The skill in the tying, the skill with the rod, the need to endure, my father speaks-- and of course, I listen. It is not pleasant, far from my down-filled comforter, my thighs deep in the rush of the hard river. I respect his thousand facts of angling, I mark the lure of his stories—R. S. Austin tied a female spinner of fine yellow wool from ram’s testicles in 1900. After he died, his daughter sold "Tup’s Indispensable" for twenty years. Like her, I’m second generation. From my father, I learned birth, mid-life, and passing--the agile nymph, the olive dun, the drowning red spinner. When I place my feet in the freezing river, I map the geography of patience. When I hurl a winged impersonator concocted of blue cock hackle and red seal fur into the dawn, I write fiction. Pass it on.Return to Yeats Society page
