Forums → Art, Music, and Writing → Periodic Poetry Contest - Theme: Touch of Truth (Page 390, due Jan. 28)
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First, I will post the overall rules, and then I will post the specifics about this week.
Original rules, as stated by Ubertuna:
It must fit the week's theme.
It must be submitted by the deadline.
It cannot have inappropriate language in it.
It cannot be stolen (if you plagiarize, we will find you).
Also:
The poem must be created for this contest
A user cannot win two weeks in a row (though everyone is welcome to submit every week!)
Only one submission per user will be accepted
As we all know, the winner will recieve a merit, and their poem will be featured on the _Poetry_ page.
OK, on to this week's topic...Again, we are having a style instead of a theme. Also, this week we are having TWO WEEKS to do it, instead of the usual one. Why? Because this will be an EPIC poem. Or, rather, a parody of an epic poem. Generally, epic poetry is very long, and tells the serious story of a heroic figure. Well, this week, the epic figure is YOU! Write a long poem (I'll leave the definition of 'long' up to you, but give it a good go) about the heroic story of you! It can be silly, serious, whatever... just have fun with it. You have two weeks, so have a great time!
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i long for the haven
of being clean shaven
it bursts my bubble
at seeing the slightest amount of stuble
the people who dont care
about unruly hair
need to be covered in nair
i think that would be fair
pft! You should try writing with only 5 hours of sleep. Now that's an adventure!
I'll try that next week. Here's hoping for an insomniac themed theme.
Can...can i still enter?? is this okay?? well, I'll find out soon...
HAIRY
There once was a man named Harry,
He had a chest so hairy.
When he took his shirt off, t'was quite scary!
I still can't believe he got married,
I wouldn't want to live in his armpits!
All right, since it's officially the end of Wednesday per AG time, entries are officially closed! Judging will be coming promptly tomorrow, so just sit tight.
Before that secondary tab failure, I was going to say.
You can't sit tight and wait for tomorrow dude.
You tell them when you are about to judge. Not "wait till tomorrow."
Work on your crowd persuasion skills!
Don't be silly. I posted that at November 11 AG time, and now it's November 12 AG time. Your judging will be forthcoming.
The hardest thing about being a judge is making self-imposed deadlines. Once you pop out of the honeymoon stage, it's definitely the hardest. Well, not this time. This time, the hardest thing about judging was actually doing the judging. Three outstanding poems by three outstanding poets...and only one merit to give out. Times like these when I know I love and hate judging the competition at the same time.
It also provides a test for the judging criteria I use, by which I look at the four elements of poetry: prosody, form, diction, and meaning. I'd like to explain this in a further post, but I'll just say that this is the basis by which I judge, not by the first gut feeling I get (oftentimes I actually end up changing my mind from my original feeling!).
So...our finalists are (in order of submission):
wolf1991
Ruffled by the chill wind,
I begin to run.
Slipping through the air
Almost effortlessly.
It pulls and flattens
The coat that I wear,
That keeps me warm
On this winter night.
Fur is ever the best way
To keep warm. Especially
For a wolf.
One of the tenets I hold to that is directly contradictory to many of the views artists and poets have nowadays is that the meaning of the poem is NEVER subjugated to the form. In some cases, I would daresay that the form and the prosody of the poem is even more important than the content, and I think your poem reflects that. In its form, it is lithe and streamlined as the running wolf you depict, but at the same time it reads in a very direct and powerful manner, as if hinting at the wolf's target or ultimate destination. Your words keep up a wonderful dramatic tension, and a tension that doesn't seek to be excessively ponderous at that.
FallenSky
Ever delicate even in its sting
Churned by the littlest breeze
Erratic yet elegant in its swaying
Whimsical and always at ease
That's how you were my good friend
Uncontrollable in your majesty
A passionate soul, ever fiery
Carried by the winds and prone to bend
You never cared enough about manners
Compulsively barging in as would a snoop
Always with pride you lost your feathers
You made an art of arriving like a hair on soup
Fallen's poem, on the other hand, is probably the total opposite of wolf's. It is large and, dare I say, a bit bombastic. It starts off as an ode but turns into a funny-but-true satire of that friend who is always out to achieve what they want by any means, always changing their outward appearance to serve their own ends. I don't think I could have described them as perfectly as your last line: These people are a part of you just as the hairs on your head, but they have the propensity to be a hindrance or an annoyance. You can do nothing except to pick them out as they interrupt you.
Zaork
Bereavement.
A park bench cradles the lost man.
Hands in his head.
Head in his hands.
The wispy wind an enemy.
Emissions of omission.
A fluttering age spirals to the concrete.
A passer-by leaves currency.
Can they not see the wealth pouring out of this man?
Only the time.
I have to admit that Zaork causes me the most trouble in understanding. I love to write heavily allusive poetry, and to an extent I enjoy reading it (although not to T.S. Eliot levels). The image is quite simple, but understanding what it was saying about hair was difficult. For me the biggest clue was in two lines: "A fluttering age" and "Only the time." Oftentimes, when we talk about issues of time and space, we use hair as a comparison. Something might be a hair's width, or we might have missed something by a hair. It seems like such a miniscule amount when we look at them individually, but when we add them up we find how long and how large life is. To keep losing these hairs becomes an "emission of omission": hairs of guilt, hairs of wealth, hairs of time.
So, now the big question: Who is the merit winner? As I hope my analyses have demonstrated, all of them run deep in a specific area, whether it be technicality or universality or allusiveness. To me, to choose a winner would be to uphold one over the other, and I don't want to be misconstrued in that way.
In the end, I have to say that wolf1991 wins out on this one. I employed my tiebreaker, which is delivery, and wolf's showed the best blend of the four poetic elements both on paper and on tongue. So congratulations to our merit winner and our two similarly talented finalists! Please contact a moderator for your merit.
This next theme is going to be very flexible: Quotes! Pick a quote--it can be from a movie, a book, a famous person, or even a saying that you like--and write a poem about it. This is about the closest you'll ever get to a free-write, so don't disappoint me! Deadline is 10 days from now, or November 22.
*blinks* I should write with five hours of sleep more often. I'm actually shocked I won. Thanks.
Caffeine pills + Coca-Cola = A writer's best friend
Who needs sleep anyway?
If you follow guys like Coleridge, some opium also goes a long way too.
If you follow guys like Coleridge, some opium also goes a long way too.
I think I'll stick to Poe's cocaine and Eliot's...well plausible insanity
My quote is- "Beer is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy."- Benjamin Franklin
Beer is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy.
Made from the grains which are quite quite strong.
To much beer will make you act batty.
Beer may make you act crazy but it makes a good song.
lostsage: Hmm...it says on your profile that you're 13 years old. Bit young for an American to start imbibing, hmm?
hahaha theres a brewers by were i live that my father gets beer from and brings me along for free rootbeer. its awesome. and along the wall is that quote and it stuck :P ive never actually had any beer though.
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