Right, the deadline is up and we’ve had a really impressive turnout. I will now put on my official judge’s hat (which looks suspiciously like the hat in the picture to the left), and give my thoughts on each poem before declaring a winner - whose prize, such as it is, is to liaise with Qimi about organising the next contest.
Without further ado...
YesNo, Individuals Avant-garding the Community: This poem is a clever two-parter, and I like how the two parts balance each other out in a number of ways: one is short and the other long, one uses (and perhaps apes) standard form and language whilst the other defies them, one is humorously callous and the other endearing. Stream-of-consciousness can be difficult, but I felt you handled it very well in the second part - there was never any sense that you were losing control. The nursery motif, with references to Mary and a figure with at least a passing resemblance to Carroll’s Alice, is intriguing: the greater world beyond the poem is hinted at, and there is a sense of progression from a state of innocence to experience. The voice of the first poem, expressing cynicism through the medium of a nursery rhyme whilst implicitly longing for that earlier and more traditional time through its disparaging of new poetic forms, is an excellent counterpart to Alice, who teeters on the brink of self-awareness but ultimately finds comfort in an old lie of the imagination. She, after all, still lives in a world where the imagination still has meaning - hence her rather sweet concern over the imaginary arsenic. Overall, a very successful poem.
Pendragon, In a Group of Angels, One Devil: An interesting piece that I felt celebrated conventional forms, even while flouting them. The aphoristic nature of the poem, with its reworking of many folk maxims, harks to traditional styles - but I get the impression that this is a sort of camouflage for a more serious, and certainly more contemporary, point. These aphorisms all serve to single out the one from the many, the single rotten apple from all the good ones - I get the sense that this is a poem about victimisation, how so-called traditional values and wisdom seem to find a scapegoat for the failings of the many, and how that scapegoat is depersonalised through the use of these folk clichés. From a linguistic point of view, I also really enjoyed your use of assonance, consonance and half-rhyme (villain/village, blend/extend, sheep/show etc.).
mal4mac: Well, if you can’t be anarchistic in an avant-garde poetry contest, when can you be? However, in the interests of fair competition I can only allow one poem to be officially entered - and as you declined to nominate one, I must simply accept your first entry (10111011) as your official one. I will, however, pass comment on the others.
10111011: I suppose that to not even use letters is, in its own way, a rather avant-garde approach! I did copy-paste this into a binary-to-English translator, but sadly without success. The poem, then, becomes a blank canvas on which the reader imposes their own meaning - one that, in its reduction to binary, takes on a mechanical/simplistic overtone.
Bernstein’s Dysraphism Dissipated: I thought this was the best of your three poems. The shambolic, nightmarish imagery of its first half gives way to a more elegiac sentiment in the second half, all pivoting around that central piece of direct speech - it’s very effective. It seems to me to be tapping into ideas of madness - the strange figures and their stranger actions, all of which semi-connect.
Dyfed Rock Festival Encountered by Accident: An amusing parody of Wordsworth, though not perhaps as avant-garde as some of the other pieces on display here. Still, I enjoyed the humour of it, even if there is perhaps a little too much of the original poem intact for it to be a truly accomplished parody. I also had no idea there was a rock festival anywhere in Dyfed!
DieterM, Jis anuvva summah evenin’: I felt this was a really experimental piece of poetry, and that you succeeded beautifully with it. The crassness of the language is all the more effective when compared with the eloquence of traditional poetry, which the shape of the poem hints at. The obscene text message is a beautifully distorted image of the love poem, the genre this seems to be aping - its romantic qualities seem to me emphasised by the title as well. That the ‘composition’ of this text/poem literally ends up mired in the sh*t, with abuse hurled by the neighbour, seems to me to be a very funny deconstruction of the idealised female and the art done in her name. Overall, wickedly funny and totally convincing.
Lykren, Junk: There’s some really startling imagery here, and you convey it really well - the terse, economical lines of the poem lose nothing in being so. You paint a really effective tableau of hard light, and small but deliberate movements - I was strongly reminded of De la Mare’s Silver. The second stanza stood out with particular force for me, particularly the idea of exhalation - the whole poem feels like an exhalation, a tense breath of something into cold air. If I have to fault anything, it’s the word ‘pistols’, which I don’t quite get in this context (not least because they don’t come in waves) - for whatever reason, it struck me as a wrong note in a poem that otherwise carried me with conviction.
cacian, failure to ornate societies's waste: Cacian knows of old that I’m not a huge fan of her poetry, and I would be lying if I said this piece had any different effect on me. That said, in its loose use of language, form, and expression it is definitely avant-garde in its own way. The stream-of-consciousness approach leaves the images in confusion, but I suspect that is the intention - through the constant, if fleeting, focus on aspects or institutions of society (norms, laws, democracy, ceremony), and the repetitive quality of the sound, you give the impression of a world slowly falling from order into chaos. In that regard, it is an effective poem.
tailor STATELY, Headlines: How to Keep Your Brain Young: I’ve often said that short poems can be just as, if not more, effective than long ones - and I think this piece demonstrates that admirably. In four lines you satirise (or at least I get the impression that you do) the idea of rolling news, and the media’s compartmentalisation of events. The alternation between the serious and the banal is well done - particularly the contrast between the first and final line. The idea of the horror of kids in bondage juxtaposed with some piece of pap about Disneyland is wickedly amusing. I would be interested to know whether this is an example of found poetry - are these real headlines you found, or did you make them up yourself?
Well, those are my thoughts - I hope no one is terribly offended if I’ve managed to grasp the wrong end of the proverbial stick with regard to the meaning of the poem. It’s been delightful to read all these poems, and spend time thinking about them. This has been a very close competition, and picking one winner is not an easy task. However, I am delighted to announce that the winner is...
YesNo!
Very well done to you, and to all the entrants. I look forward to the next competition.
Loka
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Originally Posted by YesNo
