 |
|
|
Winning Poems for September 2008 First Place I enjoyed this portrait of St. Louis Jim, simultaneously tender and gross. This poem has a condensed, packed image-palette that swells with assonance and consonance and internal rhyme. Listen to its great language: "Passengers file by, stutter-step / to stare at the split-seam back of his gray suit jacket -- a camel's / back spreads its feather-duster hairs" --- don't you love those sounds? I also liked how the theme of mute musicality becomes verbed into the poem by the hands that "Stammer for / a belt loop," by the passengers who "stutter-step." Mutely, the poem comments on the speechlessness of the mentally challenged protagonist, and of his instinctive, natural self, picking his nose, licking old bubblegum for its flavor, swaggering to his own drumbeat. --Tony Barnstone Second Place I enjoyed the gorgeous language, "Stones shawl / themselves with shade," the folding of night's remnants, and the archetypal imagery of the poem--the baseball mitt crucified to the elm tree, the hammer buried in the sandbox. The domestic narrative seems transparent at first--the father crucifies the mitt to the tree because he wants the boy to work, do his chores, though it's Saturday, not a work day, and this dynamic of work against play is conceptually rhymed against the broken swing dangling from the elm (it would take work to fix the swing, but why fix the swing, if the swing is for play?) Still, I'm not quite sure why the hammer is buried in the sandbox. I'm glad it is, though. It seems that this is a poem whose logic might be more magical than rational. Perhaps I am attracted to the fact that the poem makes sense to me without quite making sense? --Tony Barnstone Third Place Okay, I admit it--this is a peculiar poem, rather elliptical, hard to grasp. It is so lyrical and glancing that I'm not entirely sure what's going on in the poem. I think the poem is about a protagonist who is looking at a video of an ex-lover, or perhaps of a movie star he has a crush on. Thus, the language of the poem becomes all static and light and foolish electrons and tiny transducers and the woman who is brought to consciousness cinematically. I like the way the poem uses light to turn technology into lyricism. I enjoy certain aspects of the line breaks, as in the stanza: Third Place It seems that in this batch I am most attracted to elliptical, strange, lyrical poems that reference physics. Why is that? In any case, I am attracted to this poem. I'm not sure why ghosts are beautiful, or why the stories and poems are stored in the breath, or how we get from eclipses to magnetic forces to coral bubbles to clown paint, but I guess I enjoy the speed and surprise of the voyage, and I understand that all that I don't understand is erotic shorthand, short-circuiting of meaning, and so I don't try too hard to force it into the long circuit of the rational mind. --Tony Barnstone Honorable Mention Honorable Mention |
IBPC is Sponsored by Web del Sol 2020 Pennsylvania Ave., NW Suite 443 Washington, DC 20006 Web Designed by Mike Neff
|