The
results of the Poetry Kit Competition 2011 are as follows;
1st prize winner
Brian Logan -
Render
Judges commendation - runner-up
Don Bates – At Kerouac’s Memorial
Commended Poems
Graham Burchell
- Study in Light and Silence
Lesley
Burt - Himalayan
Sky Burial
Marilyn Francis - Time-element
Julian Georges
- Elsewhere
Jan Harris - Poppies
Norbert Hirschhorn - Moses and Yahweh Meet on Mount Nebo
Wendy Holborow -
At Dylan Thomas Deathbed
Susan Jane Sims
- My Father’s
Hands
Jocelyn Simms
- Packing
All the entries were of a very high standard
and we would like to thank everyone who entered.
The winning poem will be published on the Poetry Kit
website together with the judges notes on 4th December update.
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POETRY KIT POETRY COMPETITION 2010
I am pleased to
announce that the winner, runner-up and commended poems in the
2010 Poetry Kit Poetry Competition are as follows.
1st Norbert
Hirschhorn MD - LIFELINE IN THIRTY-EIGHT STATIONS
(Judges comment -
This is an interesting and evocative poem. The experimental
form and content makes this a memorable and exciting poem. June
Clitherol, Competition Judge.)
Runner-up Anne
Swannell On Not Seeing Rocher Percé
Commended (in no
particular order)
wendy holborow
ITHAKA HAS NOTHING FOR ME NOW
copland smith The
Shipping Forecast
Pauline Gould
Directions
Norbert Hirschhorn
MD MELLAWI STATION, UPPER EGYPT John Simon Paper Journey
Ruby Tandoh
Torquay
Joan Gooding Tracy
in the Rain
Lesley Burt
Compartment C
Can I thank everyone
who entered this year. My congratulations to all. And a big
thanks to the judges led by June Clitherol. Their job was
always going to be difficult considering the variety and very
high standard of entries. They managed to pick some great poems
for the shortlist and made some very difficult final
selections. The overall standard was excellent and the winning
poem outstanding. It is not often that a longer poem in an
experimental form is able to win in an open poetry competition,
so I am particularly pleased that we made the decision to open
the competition to longer poems. Below is the winning poem
Jim Bennett
Poetry Kit
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1st
Place
Norbert Hirschhorn MD - LIFELINE IN THIRTY-EIGHT STATIONS
(A Metro-poem, after
Jacques Jouet, Oulipo*)
242nd Street 12:40
pm. Open-air northern terminal of Mannahatta, Lenni-Lenape
word, meaning ‘Rocky Place.’ The #1 Broadway, 7th Avenue local,
the good old IRT, from Van Cortland Park and the Bronx Zoo
(where once a caged lion turned his back and arced his pungent
piss on me) down to South Ferry.
238th Street Train
yard, resting cars, high-rise apartments nestling on Algonquin
burial mounds.
231st Street Young
men in grunge eat hamburgers, french fries from paper bags. I
salivate.
225th Street
Riverdale, and high school sweetie Marion Kane kissing with her
mouth closed. Razor-wire loops on all rooftops.
215th Street Spuyten
Duyvil, Dutch: ‘Spitting Devil,’ traversing the coupling of
waters, Harlem to Hudson.
207th Street White
people, black people, brown, a Tibetan monk; ten-second stop but
no one gets on.
200th Street Dyckman.
Fort Tryon Park on Manhattan’s bluffs where oilman John D.
assembled a medieval cloister scavenged from France.
191st Street
Underground! The station a tomb, we sail through, a cortege, a
ghost-ship; Charon wears a hard hat.
181st Street
Washington Heights. Rats, homeless men bunking in dark recesses
between stations. Walks across George Washington Bridge, one
foot in New Jersey, one foot in New York, on Shabbos.
168th Street
Memories! I went to medical school here, Columbia. I once
jumped into the train track pit and almost couldn’t climb back
up. Mother almost died here. Audubon Ballroom, Malcolm X
assassinated.
157th Street
Memories! I grew up here. I knew every alley, backyard,
basement, rooftop; every hand-hold in the rocks; every crazy
pavement; boxball, curbball, stickball, ‘spaldeens’ down the
sewer.
145th Street Like an
airlock: not quite home, not quite not home.
137th Street Music &
Art High School, City College. My sister went to both, her
memories
–
another universe.
125th Street
Daylight. Harlem. Harlem River to the left, Hudson to the
right, New Jersey Palisades, visions of the old amusement park,
neon lights quickening the river.
I never got off at
125th Street.
116th Street
Underneath again. Columbia, my college, the happiest unhappy
time of my life.
110th Street
Cathedral of St. John the Divine, I made love in its shadow. I
realize something:
no one drop-dead
lovely ever rides the subway.
103rd Street What?
I’ve dozed off, lost track. Where did 103rd Street go?
96th Street People
eat, drink, read, think, sleep, emerge from cocoons only to get
off.
86th Street I’m
exhausted. New York is exhausting. I can’t write so fast, the
door closes like a guillotine, “No! Wait!”
79th Street Upper
West Side where fine Jews live. Zabar’s, Fairway Market, first
cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil, six dollars a quart.
72nd Street
Riverside Drive starts here, the old West Side Highway, the old
Viennese pastry shop where every Saturday my father met other
survivors.
66th Street A #2
express train glides past, or we’re moving backwards. I look
into its windows, people in an alternate universe, perhaps I’ll
see myself.
59th Street Central
Park, The Plaza (“Eloise”). Across from me, New York Post front
page: “Millionaire X-dresser Chopped Up His Boyfriend’s Body.
Bobby, Where’s The Head?”
50th Street The
pretty Latina looks at me. Does she know what I’m doing? I look
at her. Do I know what I’m doing?
42nd Street Cliché
station, anus mundi, “Change here for the Shuttle, the A, C, D,
Q, W, and R. Stand clear of the closing doors please. STAND
CLEAR.” Who remembers an all-night hot dogs and knish stand?
Blue balls at 3am.
34th Street Penn
Station! (“Lead us not into....”) Careless: the old one torn
down while Caracalla remains. Careless: I rid myself of a wife.
28th Street Mexican
guitar trio, “buskeros,” hop on, sing a song, take money, run.
Down here not sunny.
23rd Street Nothing
clever to say. Good. Shuddupaminute.
18th Street Garment
district where one summer I shlepped sample bags for a fat-ass
shmatta salesman.
14th Street Walk
east to Union Square, my first pair of long pants at S.
Klein-on-the-Square, and men megaphoned Communism.
Christopher Street,
Sheridan Square They called the school “NY Jew.” Greenwich
Village, I heard Ted Joans at Village Vanguard recite Beat and
Africa. Ted Joans, the poet, is dead. Amato free opera, my
first margaritas, Ted Joans is dead. Fifty years later I read
my own poems at the Cornelia Street Café.
Houston Street Call
it HOW-ston, land of Katz’s Delicatessen: “Send a salami to your
boy in the AH-me”; Yonah Shimmel’s one hundred year old
knisheria. Every Sunday: pastrami on rye washed down by Dr.
Brown’s Cel-Ray Tonic. Tea in a glass (“Nu, vat den, in a
pail?”). My father’s day off.
Canal Street SOHO =
SOuth of HOw-ston, once paddled by the Lenni-Lenape.
Franklin Street Old
warehouse district, now condominiums, John Kennedy Jr., R.I.P.
TRIBECA, TRI-angle BE-low CA-nal.
Chambers Street One
stop from the World Trade Center at sealed up Cortland Street
station.
Cortland Street
Rector Street Still
thinking about this inconstant world; but you know, we’re eager
for change, something, like Cavafy’s Barbarians: “They were,
those people, a kind of solution.”
South Ferry 1:34 pm.
Ferry to the Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazarus, “Give me your
tired, your poor….” Ferry to Staten Island, once the cheapest
date in New York, nickel each way. I landed here in December
1944, Jewish, refugee, age six. Only the first five cars open
doors on the foreshortened platform and I’m in car seven, sealed
in. But it’s okay, it’s okay, just another terminal.
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Runner-up
On Not Seeing Rocher Percé by Anne
Swannell
for Jan Owen
Expectations. Absences. Out there,
somewhere in the fog,
a chunk of rock we’ve come four thousand
miles to marvel at.
What we believe is there—have been told is
there—
have seen photographs of—is swathed in
many-layered tissue now;
a gift from the gods that’s been withdrawn—
like that time we went to Versailles
and all the mirrors in The Hall of Mirrors
had been taken
for renovation. We were not, as we’d
imagined, multiplied.
No point going for coffee either,
to see if this stuff clears. Could be here
for a week,
though I can’t help imagining sun through
mist,
light on water, water on rock, chiffon
ribbons wrapping,
unwrapping, revealing swells that lift, then
drop away.
I think of poets I admire.
Jan, for example. Two otters she saw once
that formed an ever-moving question—
a twisting double-helix—reflection /
disappearance
linked / locked yet always altering.
From behind the dead weeds on this headland—
ragged darkness against the luminous mist—
comes a sound and a silence
a sound and a silence.
One shackles us; one sets us free.