The winning entry is Hospice by Rhoda Janzen She will receive $250, invited to read her entry at the Annual Luncheon, and inducted as an Honorary Member of the Society, and her entry will be printed in a Society pamphlet and made available below.
There are two second place entries: Dowry by Thomas O'Grady;and Night Talker by
Nikki Moustaki. This is the third
year Nikki Moustaki has been honored in the contest. The two entrants will
divide a prize of $100, be invited to read their entries at the Annual Luncheon,
and Mr. O'Grady will be inducted as an Honorary Member of the Society.
Their entries will be printed in a Society pamphlet and made available below.
There were three honorable mentions: A Modest Service by Peggy O'Brien, Leaving the Eccentric by Larissa Szporluk, and Lullaby Rub by Richard M. Higgerson. Each of these honorable mentions 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.
So that's my experience of moving through a first reading of all the submissions, an experience, I might say, that is punctuated not only by a few groans as I feel a poem has run off its right track into a tangle of underbrush, but by moments of exquisite envy when I wish I'd discovered for myself, for a poem of my own, some particularly felicitous phrase or image or bit of rhythmic bounce. After all that, of course, there's the business of judgement. This is more laborious, especially after the field has been narrowed down to a dozen or twenty especially worthwhile pieces. Then it is a question of being both truthful and ruthless (as well as a bit "ruthful" or rueful, letting go of a poem that has been admired for some special energy of expression or originality of intention and execution, a poem you know there's a genuine poet behind). The end of that process left me with six poems.
Three of these are Honorable Mentions, which I liked for various reasons. I admired A Modest Service for the willingness its author showed to be a plain speaker and yet to work her plain speaking into a decisive formal structure, quatrains and rhymes subtly modulated, not losing the sense of an engaged, agitated speaker behind the lines: "Mother and daughter, we may not color/Our lips madder or ghost our skin/Matte, immaculate, but we are trying/To make up, to smooth things over." I liked Leaving the Eccentric for its own eccentric way with narrative, rhythm and sound, and for the quirky tale it has to tell of "The queenfish... carried away from her silvery coast... because of a whim to be... up to her eyes in the highest/spring on the fringe of fish/civilization." And I liked Lullaby Rub for the lavish way it entered and moved around inside its subject (a father watching his wife bathe their two small children) and for its sensuous, celebratory conclusion as he takes the kiddies from the water: "amazed at the commotion of small/lights in your eyes before I ferry you away/like ancient senators in terry cloth togas headed/towards the fluid republic of dreams."
Of the remaining three poems, I chose two as equal runners- up. Very different from one another, each one manages to realise its subject, to register its experience in an impressive and admirable way. Dowry has only four quatrains, but each one is elegantly sculpted out of deft phrasing, elegant rhymes, and a tone of voice that's entirely apt to its occasion. What I especially love about this is the way the speaker is able to be at the same time relaxed (as you can hear in the colloquial ring of "Some still prefer," "At worst," "Sometimes, though") and yet show signs of muscular verbal organisation, the way sophistication (dabbling in etymologies ina light-fingered way; rhyming across languages) and plain speech are married and comfortable together. It's a poem that Paul Muldoon would like, I'd say, not least for its solid but enigmatic conclusion. Night Talker is a more nervously strung-out performance, but, again, executed with remarkable sense of focus, direction, and depth of thought. What I most admire about this unsparing examination of difficulty, this opening up to honest inspection of the interior of a relationship and the innards of consciousness, is how marvelously concrete the speaker/writer keeps everything, though temptations to abstraction must have been everywhere. Uncompromising in its language of physical fact, serious in its intelligence, able to make a language for the thinking mind and feeling heart, the poem is a succession of surprises from its first bald but startling statement ("He dreams in fricatives") to the way a question ("What language sleep knows?") is transformed into a physical antagonist, but an antagonist close to what a lover has to be ("I'd like to clutch this language harder than sleep"). Different as they are, both "Dowry" and "Night Talker" poems inhabit that place where language has achieved some real distinction, making an experience in the poet's world available to us, felt by us.
The poem I've chosen as winner this time is Hospice. On my first reading through the pile of submissions, I noted it as a piece with something special going on in it. I kept coming back to it, trying to work out what that special quality was, while at the same time aware that the very fact that the poem had this hold on me meant that I was telling myself something, that some pre-rational pleasure was speaking loud and clear, in spite of the dark, grave title of the piece itself. What I noticed first, I think, was the way the poem was reaching at its beginning for a language of scientific or medical fact that still managed to keep, as it were, the heart in view, that managed by the way rhythm and language and image all stayed elastically alive to what they were saying to knit the poet's sense of the experience itself to an equally alert, always tactful sense of what the language could do. Further readings told me this wasn't a poem trying to make easy consolations out of some articulate control of the hard facts of the represented life. Instead, by its own strict but never constricting insistence on paying attention to the facts of life surrounding the single life of the speaker paying attention to the mundane while in the grip of some heart-gnawing anxiety the poem managed at once to celebrate the vitality and the formal grace of ordinary life (the construction crew who can be "whooping over/the usual curves" as well as assembling "the stairway that races its fragile/beat of steps like hearts") and at the same time respect the sadness in things, a sadness contained in the single-word title and in the concluding vision of those "guests on one elbow in narrow cots,/staring out the window, wondering//whose cast and is it loved?" The frisson created by that last image "whose cat and is it loved?" goes beyond rational explanation. It does the trick: the hair stands up at the back of my neck. "Hospice" does many other lovely things, as you can see, among them a sudden but entirely right swerve into the past ("As a kid I loved construction"); an easy, self-aware but never self-regarding inclusion of the self ("sufficiently robust/to excite attention"), and a marvelous mixture of concrete and abstract in the last stanza, gathering "souvenirs of sadness" into a perfect alignment with those emotionally packed "piles/of mismatched vinyl suitcases." This is a wise, complete poem: in its language hortatory bolts," Lord!) and formal procedures, it has, I would say, wonderfully used up its factual, emotional, intellectual and spiritual matter. It was a pleasure to find it.
A late breeze rustles the tarp; the workers have gone home. I am surprised every day by how fast they work walls up, windows in, a shrubbery flourishing. Inside, the rooms repeat like nascent cells that cluster and divide. The familiar tang of sawdust screws into my nose, pale odor of a construction that levels as it builds. Mornings when I leave I'm sufficiently robust to excite attention. Or maybe it's boredom that clamps the construction crew to me, though I can hardly reconcile that these same guys, whooping over the usual curves, assembled the stairway that races its fragile beat of steps like hearts time running out, completion nearing, project almost done. As a kid I loved construction, the happy promise of corrugated tin stacked sociably along the dry wall, the hortatory bolts. But I no longer pass the site without blocks of panic, the first to dread the courtesy of change. Rentfree, soon the rooms will welcome forfeiture, loss, our modern plagues, guests on one elbow in narrow cots, staring out the window, wondering whose cat and is it loved? Into the body's delicate closet they shrink, stacking against the door their souvenirs of sadness, their piles of mismatched vinyl suitcases.
Some still prefer to use dot (rhymes with got)
a loanword from the French dot (rhymes with go)
when referring to what a bride once brought
to a new union; not just her trousseau
two settings of fine china, a hope chest
stuffed with cross-stitched linens but real chattel:
four fertile fields, turf-rights to the best
half-rood of bog, a few head of cattle....
At worst, the dot might seal a legal pact,
add final punctuation as an end
in itself: a match made matter-of-fact,
a deal approved on grounds of make-pretend.
Sometimes, though, it paved way for the future.
Take that woman from slab-rich Liscannor:
her wedding day a point of departure,
she founded marriage on a flagstone floor.
Limerick, July 1998
He dreams in fricatives, gravel-carved intonations captioning our bed with a rumble, intervening sleep in the little hours, shallow breath punctuated with German imperatives: I'm not learning his language fast enough here's a lover with a point to make, sleeping with a silver river, unpronounceable mountains, history that pocks his bones: smooth acres of bomb- killed children's graves, razor wire, a wall he thought would never topple, and an era still inexplicable to his calm young frame it takes nine generations before human DNA is transformed so radically, it is unrecognizable in the tenth. Nine generations to forget the nose, the hair, the skin of your family before you. After nine generations you won't be them, nine generations after you, you'll be gone. It's been almost three since 1945, and what of those grandparents, those great-grandparents, that still perform on his tongue? And if skin can carry war, which part of him makes blame something to eat with bread and a sharpened knife? If language lives and grows, what part of war still exists inside his throat, what part of sleep remakes the past, and the past's past? There's a zone in language that lay like a road blocked at both ends; when he opens his mouth, he doesn't know what will come out: sighing, weeping, fire? The same road in sleep, on one side an ocean, the other a forest: and when he sleeps, does he know what language the trees and water know? What language sleep knows? I'd like to clutch this language harder than sleep, with two hands, wheeling down the road, taking the barricades with me: I sleep with a German and all his history, misunderstanding when he drags the covers with him, mumbling something he won't remember in the morning when he'll swear I know him, his past, and everything he says.
Your lotus blossom hand in mine, The two of us like weary geishas Who have given up at last on hate And love, all for the sake of the mime. Mother and daughter, we may not color Our lips madder or ghost our skin Matte, immaculate, but we are trying To make-up, to smooth things over. I admit neglect became an art With me: the sadistic fit of symmetries, Tit for tat, but even I, as you say, As hard as nails can have a heart Or in lieu of that generous organ a limit To the suffering I'll inflict, even To get even. Your brittle, bird bones Once heavy, heaved, levered, hit; But that was of no moment when, Sitting in that waiting room waiting For results, I saw your broken wings Flapping in your lap, your sad talons And my shame exposed. You've been alone Too long and I orphaned by anger. This is not a cure; it's just a manicure. Even I can't file and polish pain. Whose hand is it? Mutilated, Jagged, ribbed and split, unregenerate, These nails are mine, their high instep Also mine. For the first time I see it. You begged me to paint you blowzy As a poppy, but taught me not to tell A lie. I chose instead a mountain laurel Beige closer to what's natural. "I'm sorry," I say, "I have to leave. Let them dry Thoroughly, eat more, please, and take your new Medicine." All you reply is "Thank you," As you stand in the doorway waving good-bye.
The queenfish visits the spring every spring, and she does it alone, carried away from her silvery coast, the blue drum region, carried away by the aerial ocean above, the dipping and rising, sidling along saddles of thawing mountains, thrashing through caribou tracks, past dens of bears, exposing herself to countless dangers, because of a whim to be in the iciest possible water, up to her eyes in the highest spring, spring on the fringe of fish civilization, spring where the king, who loves her, lives, year after year, for this single visit, the look of pain on his outer face as he remembers he should eat her. That's when the queen takes her leave, flapping her battered tail, slipping her body under. That's when the one who loves her screams, sharding the spring with manic octaves (like bells of mules setting hills ringing with each beating) what else can they do but follow its law in wonder, the law of the sun which burns, pulling the world to it, the paradox of equinox, when light and dark, and less and great, are all the same, and every answer strings its questions up in space: are blood and love just things that run, and if they're not, do they belong to what they are, or to the place they're running to or from, and what if that's the point of life, to turn your back into your front and mount the beast again?
When I watch my wife kneel nightly by the stone tub, the capitoline of bones in her spine pressing flesh up in a chain of small hills left unconquered & see the spidered, branching blue highway of veins run in her back, a vision undiscovered by her forever, I imagine the tight & tortured route these two children must have swum & I'm possessed by dejagging the velvet upsweep of all their lives. I've bumrushed that narrow hall. I've already heard the echo of the thousand cells pinging in the dark. What does it do to me to tell you that the secret of this love affair might be our mutual fear, or that I've seen the first room of their growth laid out haphazard like some $0.79 a pound throwaway chop you'd think twice about grinding into sausage, like something beautiful I swore was her heart carved out of her that lay beating on her knifed & gory stomach while she lay under gas, the sweat on my lip beading like a gift of pearls come unstrung? I embraced a feeling of swooning amazement. I knew how to say This is a galaxy & when I said this all the air left me. I said, This is the blood-black orb where it all begins. They had made a small room of sheets around her middle & the nurses were ready to catch me. The surgical specialist who the night before had stitched the ditch-rolled, bumper-pressed, stray dog on my aunt's kitchen table gleamed a smile & stuck her hand inside my wife to make room for the room that had held our sleeping, wet child she'd just removed. It has happened twice this way. Kind strangers patted our children dry. So this absolving nightly ritual of the bath, the suds like halos ringing them, I love. I don't question why water beads the way it beads & prisms itself in the mirrored light into more colors than there are words for. We collect it. We make a city of it. We stake our lives on it running clear & we baptize innocence in it nightly. So when I die children, I promise to surface. I promise to fly out of all this water. I promise to walk back across the air to you. For now I promise to watch you come clean from the tub, breaking the tense skin of surface water, this reborn amnion, amazed at the commotion of small lights in your eyes before I ferry you away like ancient senators in terry cloth togas headed towards the fluid republic of dreams.
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