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IBPC Poem of the Year, May 2006-April 2007, Judged by Mark Doty |
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Jul 4 07, 07:17
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Mosaic Master
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POEM OF THE YEARMay 2006-April 2007 Judged by Mark DotyPoem of the Year Dirtby Catherine Rogers Submitted by poets.orgSecond Place The Western Ghats, 1959by Bernard Henrie Submitted by SplashHall PoetryThird Place Wolf Dreamsby Laurie Byro Submitted by Desert Moon Review Honorable Mention The Song of Bobby Margaret Ruth Porter Submitted by Salty Dreams
Judges Comments and Winning Poems
Poem of the Year Dirt
The richness of this subtle poem lies in its emotional ambivalence. Those first three words establish the situation of the poem -- the speaker is waiting with great apprehension for the results a medical test; when the results come, at the beginning of stanza two, he or she goes out to the dirt which seems now not a place of burial but of opening and renewal. This suggests that those dreaded test results didn't bring bad news after all, though this relief comes with the knowledge that we will all enter the soil sooner or later, to be part of "all I have yet to become." But ending the poem on the promising, transforming word "become" suggests that there are other ways to view death than the terror of the first stanza, a perspective we're much more likely to entertain when our test results are negative!
This poet works with polarity in an accomplished way, as these lines demonstrate: "seed-coats crack in rain,/ how root-hairs uncurl, blind..." That's a marvelous passage because of the tension between the affirmative content and the hard consonants of the diction; this play between opposites mirrors the way the poem thinks. --Mark Doty
Dirt by Catherine Rogers
After the test, I waited and thought of its cold hug under the shoulders, its weight on the chest, blackness packing the mouth, the nose, the eyes.
When the call came, I went out and knelt in the dirt, watching the worms and pillbugs work leaf-decay to loam. I lifted
a handful, smelled green earth and thought how hard seed-coats crack in rain, how root-hairs uncurl, blind
and sure of finding. Dirt clung to my hands as I rose and let go a shower of clods that hit my boots with soft thuds and broke into pieces all I have yet to become.
Second Place The Western Ghats, 1959
A richly drawn landscape informed by feeling. That first stanza swiftly creates a vivid panoramic view, and it makes such a difference that it's "my" city, which makes the place feel loved and deeply inhabited. It's isn't until stanza two that we understand that we're reading a love poem -- for both a person and the place -- and the poet here chooses details in a way reminiscent of Cavafy and his beautiful poems of memory: the lipstick tube, the bed against the window, the gold slippers are lovely and ordinary, and fraught with erotic memory and a sense of loss. The sentence-making in this poem is graceful and confident. --Mark Doty
The Western Ghats, 1959 by Bernard Henrie
Indolent dust drifts over the roofs and drains of my city. Barber shops and a lip of rose water, soiled boxes stacked with rendered fruit, faraway, the chug-chug of a bus leaning forward like an animal hunting water. Mumbai half shut down, alcoves falling into darkness.
One electric bulb coming on in a rooming house, heat resting in hallways and squalid yellow rooms. Your suitcase carried away beyond the dry hydrant. A forgotten lipstick tube opened and never closed. Our bed against the window, draped mosquito netting, your discarded slippers gold as aquarium fish.
The language of your underpants cater-cornered in a drawer, your forgotten bra hanging on a hook. Your eyes looking over the androgynous city for rain, monsoon held in abeyance beyond the Western Ghats. Your red lips flung like coins into the face of a beggar.
Third Place Wolf Dreams
Appealling sexy and strange, it's a pleasure to read these images of transformation, which create a vivid physical sense of an animal body. --Mark Doty
Wolf Dreams by Laurie Byro
I wasn't sure what he wanted of me; the ice in winter birches had made the forest slouch into spring. All that winter I peeled
and sucked papery bark for the sweet taste. I recognized him from his red tongue, the furtive runs when I entered his dream
and we crawled along the forest floor, repenting the dark. I had nothing to bargain with, no deal to make him human. The night
was filled with briars and salt. In the summer the air became thick with honeysuckle, slick with mating. Beetles droned in messy beds
of clover. We slunk along, weeds stroking my belly. I hadn't yet decided which life was better. Grass combed the plume of my tail.
The nights were crystal sharp. I waggled my slit high, what was left of my breasts pushed into a pile of decaying leaves. Who cared
how many and how often, I was not entirely his. Eyes of owls glittered in the sleep of trees, tree frogs sang in a green-robed choir. The moon clamped
its yellow tooth into my shoulder. I took the whole night inside. What was to become of us? I had packed away my white Juliet cap and veil for just
such an occasion. I held him like a warm peach in my palm, longed for his juice to run down my chin. Most nights I didn't care about
the names they gave me. I held my fingers out to him, felt the tug as my ring fell off, carried my limbs down to the entrance of his den,
planted a birch just outside his home as a token of my loyalty. I was free of the chains of consequence. I gave birth
to his amber-eyed bastard who without hesitation he devoured. When he becomes old and says he always dreams of me, I shall make myself
a meal of him, savor his voluptuous tongue, and suck all the bitterness from his bones. He will not make such promises again.
Honorable Mention The Song of Bob
A delightfully odd sensibility, blurring the identity of the speaker (who is presumably a neighbor) and Bob's dogs, so that all are barking their love for Bob the prison guard. A goofy, engaging voice here. --Mark Doty
The Song of Bob by Margaret Ruth Porter
(for Fred Tarr and the Radio Room)
The love affair with stangers began with morning glories between us, Bob went to work at the prison at 6:30 as the birds performed their last songs. He quieted Sarge, Berry and Coco with biscuits before he left with his radio on, yet they started barking before he reached the first stop sign. I want to be his wife forever they thought, I thought and we kept barking, as we chased his car for all time in our minds. Bob talks to his ex 1500 minutes a month, he doesn't seem to mind the cost of his past tense. Why didn't you just stay married? I am pretty too behind this fence made of chain-mail. Twenty-one years is all he says from the screened-in back porch where he keeps his old partners, ex-police dogs, his detritus. It is as if 21 years is the official Americana. There must be one hundred morning glories from me to Bob, outflanking the trees choking them slowly. Bob wants me to be his wife forever, waiting in my war torn house next door so he can get home from prison to say goodnight and wake up again to say good morning all over. I am the last sweetheart in town.
THE JUDGE:
Mark Doty is the author of seven books of poems, among them School of the Arts, Source, Sweet Machine, Atlantis, and My Alexandria. He has also published three volumes of nonfiction prose: Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Heaven's Coast and Firebird.
Doty's poems have appeared in many magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, The London Review of Books, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The New Yorker. Widely anthologized, his poems appear in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and many other collections.
Doty has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. He is the only American poet to have received the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K., and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill and Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Doty lives in New York City and in Houston, Texas, where he is John and Rebecca Moores Professor in the graduate program at the University of Houston.
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