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.
