IBPC Winning Poems, 2011, Congratulations Poets! Options

[Cleo_Serapis]

Winning Poems for January, 2011
Judge Kwame Dawes
Congratulations!

First Place
Infield Chatter
by Michael Harty
Wild Poetry Forum


You don’t hear the old chatter these days,
the third baseman’s chipping staccato
to your right, the random hoot from first,
behind you a warbled stream, a doubleplay
duet like meadowlarks celebrating summer:
that chorus of monologues, chanted mantras
of got-your-back, comebabe humbabe
shoot that pill, rock and fire, you’re the one,
but you’re not the one any more
and the game has changed.

It’s a poor imitation, just the very young
in their home and away jerseys
and all they know is batter the batter
with empty crescendo, like practice
for the talk shows. In the end your best stuff
is thrown into shadowed silence,
the seats half empty, the sun
sunk below the grandstand roof,
the birds gone mute,
even the children grown old.


It is not easy to make fresh a poem about time passing that uses a sports metaphor at its core, but this is a beautifully managed poem. The final image of the sun falling behind the grandstand roof is so evocative and so perfectly moderated for this poem: “the bids gone mute,/ even the children grown old”. The second stanza is the heavy counterpoint to the playful game with words, sounds, and the perfectly captured richness of baseball chatter which is hopeful until those final three lines of the stanza: “…you’re the one,/ but you’re not the one any more/ and the game has changed.” It would be easy for this poem to sound like the ranting of an old curmudgeon complaining about how things have changed, but there is a delicacy here, a self-reflective sadness that undermines any hint of arrogance; and in the end the poem is not about baseball because it is really never about baseball, is it: “...In the end your best stuff/ is thrown into shadowed silence,/ the seats half empty,…”For its pitch perfection, its tidily shaped classic structure, and for its understated honesty, I really like this poem. --Kwame Dawes



Second Place
Death Artist
by Billy Howell-Sinnard
The Writer's Block


Six foot five Kiowa
with one leg,
Sada stretched across a booth
in the cowboy
and oil worker’s bar
like he’d conquered a country.

He sketched with carpenter’s
pencil in a Big Chief notebook.
Nobody bothered him,
except to buy him a drink
from a distance
as if to settle a debt.

He lost his leg in Nam,
wore a long green Army coat,
medal pinned to the lapel,
tall black cowboy hat,
eagle feather
stuck in the beaded band.

He painted murals
of ghost dancers and totems
in acrylics–faster drying
than oils, not as fast,
not as permanent
as bullets.
Brush had replaced gun–
medicine against wolf
prowling inside him.


The poem is a character sketch. The efficiency here must not be overlooked. In four stanzas the poet offers us a way to see a man who is of course fascinating even if a bit of a cliché. But he is what he is and sometimes people are clichés. What the poet is able to do is find some very fetching images to turn this cliché into a poignant poem. First there is the simile of the man stretched across a booth “like he’d conquered a country”—fitting for a soldier returned from a war where that is exactly what did not happen. In the second stanza we find another simile of people buying him a drink from a distance, “as if to settle a debt”. Again, the lines are densely packed with ironies and yet accurate to the moment. Finally, the image that ends the poem: “medicine against wolf/ prowling inside him” brings us to elegant and haunting closure. These are carefully constructed images and they work well. The character sketch is superficial. We don’t know the man any better, but what we do have is a powerful portrait from the outside barely looking in. --Kwame Dawes



Third Place
The Borrow Pit
by Allen M. Weber
Muse Motel


When Earle would say, Need you, Little Bro, I’d always come
running—that’s the way it was. On a visit home from the Navy,
he tells a tale of swimming from torpedo tubes, how his men
take fear to folks you’d never read about in the Daily Gazette.

Growing up, Earle could tread water forever—had to be tough
in the pit by the blueberry fields: the water gets dark, real fast;
the steep mud bottom holds your feet, so there’s no way to rest.
A neighbor boy drowned there—cramped up, maybe, slipping

right under, without calling to his friends. We weren’t allowed,
but some nights we’d sneak down, with a six-pack, to skinny-dip
till the farmer’s hounds got to howling and we’d know that soon
the screen door would bang shut, and we’d see his flatbed Ford

as bouncing balls of light, clattering down the dusty path. Tonight
a black Buick glides in—One Nation Under a Groove and something
like joy pulsing from the open windows—some city boys muling
uncut coke from Chicago. I take one look at Earle—those blue lips,

how they stretch across his berry-stained teeth, and even before
he lifts the grocery bag of money and glinting metal from the trunk,
I understand: not everybody’s leaving this field tonight. Then Earle
tosses a shotgun and laughs, Hey Brother, still like to climb trees?

The lonely maple quivers and startles my skin with an earlier rain.
Hugging a lower branch, oiled steel ices my cheek. Between leaves
I make out that Earle’s showing off—got all three flocked together,
bowed down and kneeling, facing the edge of his still moon water.


Were this poem to lose the heavy “prose-markers” festooned first stanza, we would be looking at an elegant narrative poem of such delicately observed emotion and such carefully shaped detail. The line, “not everybody’s leaving this field tonight” is a powerful turn of the poem that studies the understated casual violence of the scene. The poet has an important gift, the ability to discern what is important and interesting in a moment. In the narrative poem, this gift is critical—it makes all the difference in the world because it is, ultimately, the thing that allows us to see the poem in the moment. This is well demonstrated in this poem. --Kwame Dawes




Honorable Mentions

Pack Ice
by Bernard Henrie
The Waters


I will go to the pack ice
and when others return
I will stay behind.

I carry my long knife,
tar black strips of fluke meat
and boots sewn by my wife.

But I have no hunger, no
thirst for the vial of vinegar.
I go pure like the great sea
before the whale boats enter.

In the all day sun
I dry my straight hair
and briefly expose my chest.
I call like a white bear
as my father once called.

My eyes are grown small
as the eyes of fish, but I see
my wife gone over the floes,
not looking back.

My brave dogs strong
as bone hooks.
They pull into white ice.

The great walrus I hunted
and lost in the snow,
death heavy snow with no water
hiding falls in broken places.

I will see you again.
I will wait for the great aurora
to swim in the sky
as sea animals tossed in waves
the color of kerosene and gasoline
spilled on the ice.


Even though I can’t be sure of the accuracy of the arctic details in the poem, what carries powerfully and beautifully is the sense of aloneness, the resignation to the kind of pure emptiness of being alone—a purity akin to the combined desolation and possibility of “the great sea”. The final image, of course, is jarring for the basic way in which what reads like a poem about the natural world (timeless), becomes defined by time, by the contemporary world of “kerosene and gasoline/ spilled on the ice”. Any poem that manages to offer us, “My brave dogs strong/ as bone hooks” is coming from a promising poet. There is something here, despite the occasional imprecision in the poem. --Kwame Dawes



The Forgetting Water
by Brenda Levy-Tate
PenShells


Let fancy still my sense in Lethe steep – Twelfth Night

A woman must have created such a river -
one chance at erasing all her memories,
even the better ones. Heaven, it appears,
is set apart for patriarchs and handsome
boys who please God more willingly.

I shake on the bridge’s edge, listen down
at the current as it sucks, mutters, sucks,
mutters. Sullen infant - barely contained
by its dam – froth rising through a mouth
prepared at any moment to break open.

Green steel rocks me, lulls me, salts
nuggets of rust in my eye-corners. I catch
myself just in time. But this is my temptation:
to balance here like Athena’s bright owl
on a twisted limb. I scan the night for blood.

Overstep, swoop into this field of foam -
my own predator, my own lost prize.


There is a wonderful evocation of sound and movement in the line: “at the current as it sucks, mutters, sucks,/ mutters” that describes the body of water flowing under the bridge. At the surface, the poem seems to be flirting with the idea of suicide, but the epigraph reminds us that the inclination towards self-destruction is often prompted by a resignation to the fact that one no longer wants to contend with the tyranny of memory, the haunting of those things we would rather forget. So the poem. In this sense, the poem takes some interesting risks. Its problems are not insignificant, though—the reliance on the Greek mythology for a certain cleverness is cliché and unnecessary—no real effort is made to engage that allusion. Also, opportunities are lost because of the distraction of the “owl” image which turns the core metaphor of the poem towards that of an owl in hunting. An unfortunate shift, but one that does not completely obscure the deft craft at work here. --Kwame Dawes

[Cleo_Serapis]

Winning Poems for May, 2011
Judge Judith Fitzgerald
Congratulations!

First Place
Ophelia Speaks
by Laurie Byro
Desert Moon Review


I had a river once. No one shared what I had.
I had you, mansion of tears. My love was forever
a country boy, dusty, bumping along the road
looking for a gang of Magi to join. He found a star

to follow, he was a tart seeking fame and alas
the skies found their fiery boy. They stole him,
plucked him down and put him under the ground
to grow, to grow not white birch or a prayer tree

the others tried to climb upon. He is all in green,
my love; he will ferry us straight to the North.
And me? I was fashioned out of petals, rain
and garland paths. When you enter my halls of water,

call me daughter. I am a studded and baubled rose,
gathered in fennel and rue. Rosemary
for an uncrowned Lady. Remember me. What I could not
say, they took that from me too: I speak to the fish.

In my kingdom of carp, all my Princes know
who they are. Make no mistake, there is no hidden treasure
in frogs. They stray away from me, always my lot,
they nibble and taste but they don’t stay long.

The moonlight drapes their green throats in luster
like ermine. All these dazzled spirits flutter and descend
on my lips: ruby-winged darter, gold ringed nymph.
And you, who said I never had a treasure worth keeping?

How can I live without a name: a father or a brother?
I beg you, call me daughter. The turtles lay down
their robes before me. We have no need
for jewels, no Queen to steal my pearls.


Where do we begin after we've already dove head-over-hurt first into that sublimely controlled, frigidly fixed, and cataclysmically chaotic pièce de réjoycement "Ophelia Speaks" intimates, animates, implicates, and articulates? Where, indeed. "Ophelia Speaks." And how/ls, heart-attacking, soul-wracking, and brain-whacking utterances of every devastating ideational structure potentially in possession of its inherent realisation. (Ophelia Speaks.) "OS." (Does she ever.)

S'pose a scholarly soul might cite the poet's deft technical expertise (best evidenced in its unflinchingly down-and-dirty divagations or investigations as well as its near-obsessive attention to line compression, Byronic illusion, or Plathtic disingenuous illogicollusion when "it" gets down to "it," so close to "id," even closer to "ego," the delicate balancing act see-sawing between altruistic strands of love (self) and apposite streams of hatred or fear (ego). The rest? Just news that stays news.

An exquisitely shaped achievement of the highest magnitude, "OS" rips our hearts to shreds, smashes our skulls on Babylonian rocks, carelessly plucks and plants us squarely in the beautiful downtown muddle of diddly-fuck until that instant when tangential effluvia and inconsequential extrania give up the ghost ipso-quicko. Spectacularly — cf. Guy Debord's give-and-take on same in his seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle (http://www.judithfitzgerald.ca/spectatoes.html) — encarved upon readers' memories the moment the poem rearranges the new world ordered, the one simultaneously within and beyond ourselves.

Interweaving such as "He is all in green" or "these dazzled spirits flutter and descend / on my lips: ruby-winged darter, gold ringed nymph. / And you, who said I never had a treasure worth keeping? // How can I live without a name: a father or a brother?," amplifies the way in which compression intersects with concision to shiverously gorgeous effect. The wordworks, finishment's flawless imaginative outposts, go with the everslow evenso flow. Love limned in the details. Life embraced unconditionally at large (at first, at last). Looking over shoulders. Resisting salt in wounds. Practising admirable restraint à la Conrad. Frantic prantics. Crime-time rhyme :).

Tethered to decadent moorings, the poetic vessel sails calmly through Poe's maelström eddying at the delicate edges of near-transparent verglassic skin. The scope's eternity times grasp exceeding reach on this gawd-forsakin' twenty-worst century planet. (Baudelaire and Dickinson stand down. Rimbaud stands up. Spectral Whitman rises.)

Think spaces, elisions, gaps, and syllable air among allusive riches, chiasmus, the kind of linguistic abutments for which one invariably gives thanks that now-or-never instants remain indelibly preserved by the light of a blood-orange moon that turns out her light (precisely when she's most needed, natch).

Think sorrowful sea crashing gently against humanity's protracted withdrawing roar, the rush of a generation unto its complementary closing, the wholly and fully realised scaffolding enabling participants to happily drown in the drench and dazzle of the poet's signs, significations, thefts, themes, and endlessly shored-up schemes. Ah, the mag-pied magnificence enwrapped with something-special deliveries; and, make no mistake, another angle on a heart unpacked emerges. (Bonus gloriosus?) The grand tradition, the resonant rendition, the heart-whacking works. (Plath beams, the uneven lines complement the structured solidity telegraphing either adoration or immolation. Passion or poison. Prince or frog? Does it matter? Yes. And, no.)

Cast off pearls, plucked eyes, the rue of indifference. Here, the edge of sanity's coherent enough to communicate the essentials intertwined, travelling from jewels to Magi no less, a singular submerged metaphor built to endure death by dreaming for a lady who once owned a river. Lady Lazarus? (Why it matters? No. And, yes. The Future becalming what remains of a present gone long. Mercy taking flight.)

Here (hear), Ophelia struts her off-handed elegant stuff upon the stage/s accumulated over millennia in a poem so utterly amazing in its subdued and succinct virtuosity, the ultra-condensed mini-epic's closer, its ka-thudding final lines involving that "Queen" and those "pearls" (plural), executes a backward glance at a garden and Eliot's corpse hoves into view accompanied by not one (but two) — "Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!" — while forcing each and every reader to address the future (imperfectly rendered) armed with another angle trained up on "lady of situations" (patterned upon The Tempest's Ariel). It almost echoes without saying both Narcissist and Martyr trade places in much the same way colour functions in Tristan & Iseulte, « Les fleurs de mal »; or, sans façon, Charon himself (navigating the Styx or Acheron).

What an accomplished tour d'bliss-bless finesse, indubitably worth its weight in withits. --Judith Fitzgerald



Second Place
brief
by Dale McLain
Wild Poetry Forum


I found the blue one on the bottom of the cage,
dead in the way that only birds can be,
a feathered husk. It weighed no more
than the memory of an unremarkable day.

I might have worn it on a thread, an ornament
of sky and sad curled feet. Things die.
We are such unheeded orphans, afterthoughts
at best. Our histories are barely mounds
upon the earth’s resilient back. Our stories

find no audience. The long nights consume
the heart, the heft of bone, the light
that someone might have cherished.
We are fistfuls of feathers, so insubstantial

we fear the wind and the crush of wheels.
It would take so little for us to fall,
to be wrapped in a shred of lace
with only a suggestion of blue to mark
an epoch that once was winged.


An outstanding lyric among many cut-above compositions this quarter, "Brief" immediately captures its reader's attention laying down exquisitely original lines and startling breath-catcher phrases — from the way "it weighed no more / than the memory of an unremarkable day" to "an ornament of sky" or "the earth's resilient back" (identifying but a trio of its stunners) — that build towards its subtle conclusion concerning the fragility and tenacity of both our humanity and our environment(s), those grounded in the sensorium and those founded upon physiological, psychological, and bedrock standstill. Profoundly gentle yet never maudlin, wistful yet never wanton, "Brief" dishes up an imaginative slice of living better electromagnetically meshing in the moment while simultaneously transcending it. Finely honed to a near-elegiac exactitude, the poem sticks to one's ribs, its many layers consummately polished and supremely controlled by inevitable stanzaic arrangements to bring the work's persuasive — although hardly pedantic — ingredients together in a veritable food-for-thought feast. Form and content blend seamlessly, oddly complementary, given jouissance's brief ecstasies, unevenly accurate, drolly contained, and masterfully restrained. Unforgettably lovely. Why? Primarily because "our stories / find no audience" (but "Brief" nevertheless preserves them with compendious care and precision). --Judith Fitzgerald



Third Place
End of the Road
by David Durham
PenShells


At the end of the road is blond prairie
where a broke down truck left us,
stopped short of rotten fence posts
beside a tumble of thistle weeds.
You spoke to me then as if a wind
that sweeps grass and soil; an arid voice
choked on barbed wire’s song,
reminding me that a furrowed brow
is a restless prairie’s cemetery
and regret a ghost town.
It is a weathered memory, but not unwilling.
You leaned against the faded red fender;
blue jeans, stained with clay, loose
about your hips. Your skin like sunlight
through branches of a cottonwood tree.


Inscrutably ambiguous, either the best or worst of poems, "The End of the Road" deploys shop-worn phrases to sublime (or sardiculous) effect. Dramatic irony or temporal fluidity never had it so good (or has it?). The sententious speaker gently skims and peels skin-thin realms of memory's dominant driving force to reveal an integral character central to our collective (or nearly unconscious) recollections of an earlier era (sans irony. Or not).

Apparently, given the offhand style balanced by sly alliterative internals, externals represent the timely and timeless, the quotidian trite but tricksy, an elementarily essential stratum unique to homo sapiens. Thanks to the author's veracious nimbletude, readers either accept the exaggerated yet admirably sustained clichés at face value or see, all too clearly, through the cottonwood true, despite the contradictionaerial imagery. Lacking middle ground, "The End of the Road" cranks up the shaft a notch, challenging — almost — for even the most accomplished post-apocalyptic filmmakers; and, then, automagical automobility. (Cormical.) A faded red fender. The submerged Wallace-weathered metaphors redeem these lines of toothless tiger perceptions overlaying sere slant projections, digressions, interruptions, distractions, and reformulations across one league of notions. Or, courageously approximate the cinematic scope swathing this work (which works. Or doesn't). The nifty thrifty morphs into the piece's underpinnings, its fragmentary yet consistently inconsistent philosophy: It takes two takes to fire on all four cylinders. Win. Place. Show and tell. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis (or what the hell). --Judith Fitzgerald