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IBPC POEM OF THE YEAR, May 2007-April 2008, Congratulations poets! |
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Jul 6 08, 19:32
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Mosaic Master
Group: Administrator
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Real Name: Lori Kanter
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POEM OF THE YEARMay 2007-April 2008 Judged by Kelly CherryPoem of the Year Bad Weatherby Dale McLain Submitted by Wild Poetry ForumSecond Place A Second Look at Creationby Sergio Lima Facchini Submitted by Poets.OrgThird Place The Man Next Door According to His Pocketsby Adam Elgar Submitted by The Writers Block Honorable Mention Bird Painterby Guy Kettelhack Submitted by About Poetry ForumHonorable Mention Spring Danceby Brenda Levy Tate Submitted by Criticalpoet.comHonorable Mention Carol for the Brokenheartedby Brenda Levy Tate Submitted by Criticalpoet.org
Judges Comments and Winning Poems
Poem of the Year Bad Weather
It is the music first of all that tells me this is a poem to pay attention to. The poet varies short and long sentences, carrying the cadence of them straight through to the slant-rhyme couplet that brings the poem to completion. The diction holds steady thoughout; nothing strays beyond the tessitura of the poem. This very American poem ("Sheetrock," "twister" "prairie boat") adheres to a classical sense of proportion that is equally evident in the speaker's statements. The same is true of the emotions it contains: we hear the speaker's fear and exhilaration but also a carefully calculated self-mockery that derives from years of experience with the phenomena. ("You can grow accustomed to storms," we were told in the very first line, and the poem demonstrates that you can. Accustomed, but by no means passive.) Because the self-mockery is handled lightly enough, it charms and does not depress. The poet's gentle acceptance of the emotions stirred by the storm gives to the poem a good-naturedness that the reader feels must be inclusive: reader and poet can experience--let's say weather--the storm together. --Kelly Cherry
Bad Weather by Dale McLain
You can grow accustomed to storms. Every night they shake our sheetrock, set the bricks trembling. Mortar remembers it is only sand. Our jaunty roof begs to be doffed. And I huddle within my frame with dread and an awful wish that the past proves its redundancies, that miles away the twister will drop- not here, not now when I have just remembered my own name.
When the windows bow like Galileo's glass I begin to pray to deities yet unnamed, beseech the clever stars that hide behind the churning ceiling. I confess that peace is not my plea. Instead I ask for more colors and a measure of strength to face the wind. The red oak fusses at my window, whines and scratches to come in.
But it holds, this vine-covered house, stands on its wide flat bottom, a prairie boat anchored fast in hard white clay and history. Within I slip off my shoes. Tonight is not the night that I will walk on broken glass and wear the unmistakable face of disbelief. The thunder's growl begins to lose step with the lightning. In the attic rafters sigh and creak like scrawny old men. I lay my head on the last damp cloud where dreams of whirlwinds and flying shingles wait. I sleep like a town wiped off the map.
Second Place A Second Look at Creation
Witty and intelligent, "A Second Look at Creation" uses marvelously precise words to make us see/hear/smell/taste/touch the world, even aspects of it we may seldom notice: "every hand that holds money and is diligent" (italics mine), "the admirable number pi" (italics mine--and is not the number pi entirely admirable, succeeding in all that it does?), God wearing a skullcap that hides "a bald spot / high in the crown." Such apt and vivid language. I love it that in the cosmos of this poem there are "five known elements: earth, water / fire, air, and yellowing passion fruit." Sly humor continues in the second stanza, where "God" has his tongue in his cheek when he tells us that spring "will be different / this time." Hope springs again; spring hopes again. Whether or not that hope is fulfilled, we revel in the possibility of the new, and in spring all creation at least seems new again. This poem is clever linguistically but also smart emotionally, and who can resist its appealing portrait of a happy, hardworking God? --Kelly Cherry
A Second Look at Creation by Sergio Lima Facchini
Every biped, crawler and slitherer; every daybreak fast-forwarding past the solstice; every afternoon that loses momentum as it plods into evening; every child born logical and cerebral, proud to be gifted, bright as Andromeda and Cassiopeia; every planet in the universe, comets, black holes, their combined gravitational pull, pulling on each of the five known elements: earth, water, fire, air, and yellowing passion fruit; every pediment, apse, nave, narthex, effigy, oracle, pyramid, every all-seeing eye; every crease and whorl on a palm; every hand that holds money and is diligent, hard-working, closed to commitments; all of those, along with matches, hydraulic presses, arguments, salt water, and the admirable number pi, took long, sweeping strokes to be made, one by one, as God was going through multiple life crises, barely surviving each brainstorm.
How many times he's come back from the brink of losing face, such as when in the midst of a heated debate over who made what and to what purpose, a sudden gust of wind blew off his skullcap, exposing a bald spot high in the crown. But for the most part he's feeling good; he's glad it's spring even if it means he must restart from scratch, trying to convince things buried and burrowed to come back up, saying tongue-in-cheek it will be different this time.
Third Place The Man Next Door According to His Pockets
Short as this poem is, it offers a heartbreaking glimpse of a life entire. A man living next door to the grown children of parents who were of his generation has become, with age, suspicious, insecure, secretive. His daughter has not kept in close touch with him, is living with a man of whom he disapproves. His wife and sons have, he thinks, turned against him--and perhaps they have, given his changed personality, or perhaps he misinterprets their responses. Brilliantly, the poem saves its revelation for the last stanza: this same man was once adored by his children, and he was glad to share with them what he had. The use of hemorrhage in the last line is an extraordinary choice, emphasizing the free flow of the gifts he gave and simultaneously suggesting the "hemorrhaging" of his own life. Other words that carry deliberate weight here include "talismanic," "slouches," "conjuror," and "intolerable." Let's note also the fine lineation, which moves us swiftly from beginning to end. The speakers ("we") of the poem are psychologically astute and humane; the portrait is bittersweet, honest, and forgiving. --Kelly Cherry
The Man Next Door According to His Pockets by Adam Elgar
He's losing faith in us. We feel him check and re- check that we have his keys and wallet, and the talismanic letter from his daughter, wherever she may be.
He slouches down the same streets to the same work, mistrust a whisper that aspires to clamour. Which of us is guilty of the hole that everything slips through?
Some conjuror has swapped his life for one where wives' eyes redden and accuse, obsessed sons slur and darken, daughters abandon him for intolerable lovers.
Our forebears knew his children when they were little more than half our height, those soft fists reaching up to tug out treasures, his reward to let his pockets haemorrhage for those he loved.
Honorable Mention Bird Painter
Internal rhyme strengthens the poem, which carries its bird imagery successfully through all four stanzas to create a persuasively heartfelt grief and tribute. --Kelly Cherry
Bird Painter by Guy Kettelhack
I didn't use to like the ones with birds in them -- she'd paint alluring skies and water -- minerally brimming glints -- then seem to feel she had to punctuate their ambiguity with some expected
order -- carefully assorted gulls: culled illustrations out of greeting cards -- obligatory birdies dotting gleaming shards of sky and sea to add cliché to the topography: some expected notion of what
ought to be above, beyond, around an ocean: turned the beach from vague-and-haunting-lone to Jones. But I was an elitist prig. Now I look at each meticulously painted sprig of wing and breast
and tail and beak: and almost hear my mother speak: each fine careful flying thing belies her death: bears witness to what's left -- lifts the gulls and deftly keeps them up: her artist's breath.
Honorable Mention Spring Dance
Excellent description, grounded in observed details. Dynamic verbs charge the poem with energy. --Kelly Cherry
Spring Dance by Brenda Levy Tate
Route 22 ripples to an axle beat as the red pickup approaches. Puddles pulse, wheels veer, water arcs like a tide parting before the F-150's tire hiss. Beer cans snicker beneath ice-wire-wink.
Sleet coats cables, gone by noon. Pavement's a mosaic -- broken headlights, embedded pennies. Mouse bones crunch under Goodyear studs.
First tractor out of the yard wallows with a pulmonary wheeze in muck stubble. Field's black, twisted as abandoned shirts. An old collie three-legs it down the chain track because that's what he was born to do.
In a heifer-gnawed grove behind the loafing shed, deer scrabble snow crust under bare oaks; limbs scratch cloudskins. Mated robins drop sky bits onto dull moss. New melt trinkles and plishes off the gambrel-roof barn.
On the porch step, farmboy smooths his trout filament between forefinger and thumb, feeds it into the Shakespeare with a handful of hope.
The day flows around him -- river and rock -- while mother sings from her clothesline, "Fare thee well, love," hazel gaze a salamandrine fire that burns what it touches.
He listens, furrows deep as plowed dirt above his eyes; matches reel spin to wash-pulley creak.
Milkroom radio chatters about foreclosures, lost soldiers and protests against a mine two counties away. Fishhook snags the little fellow's thumb.
Long driveway rasps its monotone; gravel shoulders shrug still-frozen clods into ditches. Muddy Ford swerves, bumps over brushcut lawn, halts beside a lattice arbor where rambling roses will soon explode like ruptured hearts.
Woman-song stops. She turns - sliced lemon smile - carries her laundry basket, sets it down carefully. Then she straightens to confront the truck, but won't glance at her son. Not even once.
Out on bleeding earth, her husband inhales the dark diesel, whistles off-key. "This will be no ordinary April," he assures his crippled dog.
Honorable Mention Carol for the Brokenhearted
The use of metaphor allows a reader to make associations that would otherwise not occur. --Kelly Cherry
Carol for the Brokenhearted by Brenda Levy Tate
Can you hear the whole sky ringing? I watch you stumble under its alleluia bell. Your bare feet string a dozen prints like pearls across the December grass.
These soles are your only stars, girl. Hours, days, years - every last wound you'll ever endure - catch in the silty net you drag behind, sans mermaids, moths
or seraphs' teeth. Your uncombed dreams pour down your face, white as salt. Listen, the sea is shifting in sleep. It's Christmas, and you are unparented
again. We both wait in this empty inn-yard; a few stray gods quarrel behind their curtain. Since they have been replaced, no doubt they can discount one more failed prayer,
one more gloria in excelsis. A feather zags its way to earth. This is only an owl's trick, girl. If you pick it up, you will be lost. Can't you feel the darkness gathering itself?
Midnight snaps shut, a padlock against hope. Tomorrow is ordinary, as you must surely expect by this time. Come into the pub-light where a solitary barman offers decent ale
and music for all the bruised people. We are among them, we whose homes and lovers have blown like scarves over the world's edge. Here's to absent friends, someone says.
I lift a mug; foam spatters my right hand. A nearby church peals one o'clock and I almost believe in something. Then I look down at the tabletop reflecting your face. Its eyes
turn to knotholes, beaten into the wood. Its mouth is the crack under a door. You've damned me, girl, with a feather saved from dirt. Now you wear it in your hair.
THE JUDGE:
Kelly Cherry is the author of seven books of poetry (most recently, Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems), seven of fiction (most recently, We Can Still Be Friends), and three of nonfiction (essay, memoir, criticism; most recently, History, Passion, Freedom, Death, and Hope: Prose about Poetry). She has also published eight chapbooks and two translations of classical drama. Her book Girl in a Library is forthcoming in the fall and The Retreats of Thought: Poems in 2009. She is Eudora Welty Professor of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lives with her husband on a small farm in southside Virginia.
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"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." ~ J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the RingsCollaboration feeds innovation. In the spirit of workshopping, please revisit those threads you've critiqued to see if the author has incorporated your ideas, or requests further feedback from you. In addition, reciprocate with those who've responded to you in kind. "I believe it is the act of remembrance, long after our bones have turned to dust, to be the true essence of an afterlife." ~ Lorraine M. KanterNominate a poem for the InterBoard Poetry Competition by taking into careful consideration those poems you feel would best represent Mosaic Musings. For details, click into the IBPC nomination forum. Did that poem just captivate you? Nominate it for the Faery award today! If perfection of form allured your muse, propose the Crown Jewels award. For more information, click here! "Worry looks around, Sorry looks back, Faith looks up." ~ Early detection can save your life.MM Award Winner
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