Open Poetry Competition 2011
This year’s competition was judged by the distinguished Hebridean poet James Knox Whittet, familiar to many of our regular festival goers as writer and editor of both poetry and prose. His poetry collections include A Brief History Of Devotion (2003), Seven Poems For Engraved Fishermen (2004), and Poems From The Hebrides (2009). Other works include the anthology 100 Island Poems Of Great Britain And Ireland, as editor, and the prose anthology Writers On Islands (both Iron Press). He has received many awards for his work including three-time winner of the George Crabbe Memorial Award, and the Neil Gunn Memorial Award for poetry in 2009. 2011 saw the release of a spoken word CD of his work, Dark Islands.
Below you can read extracts from James’s adjudication, plus the four winning poems.
It was a pleasure to read all the entries for this competition which explored widely different facets of experience. There were poems about nature, loss and death, love, abuse, memory. Many of those poems are beyond criticism in that they deal directly and sometimes nakedly with personal experiences which it would seem almost arrogant for anyone to judge and place in some sort of order of merit. I think that what distinguishes one poem from another is not the nature of the experience, but the ability to stand back from that experience, whether it is of love or grief... As T.S. Eliot said, in order to turn a good poem into a work of art there has to be a separation from the man who suffers and the mind which creates. Paradoxically, the more the reader can enter into the experience which gave rise to the poem, the more the poem can provide a healing experience. One might say that a true work of art transcends the sorrow of both the writer and the reader.
Junior Competition Winner
Tiffany Haggith
Oil for the Wealthy
I admired the biting, political satire of this poem. The poet mocks the heartless greed of a Western oil executive in a Third World country who uses business jargon to shield himself from the suffering humanity around him. The poet mocks the stilted language which the business man uses to distance himself from painful reality. The poem ends with a plea for the man to listen to the heartfelt words of those he has set out to exploit. It is a plea not for pity but for simple justice.
Hey mister business man.
Chief executive, Sir.
The big time boss.
Standing with your linen suit and silk tie.
Pressed shirt. Crisp. White.
Cuffed and linked.
Hey mister business man
Turn those black shades at me a sec, will you?
I’ll show you where it is.
Crude, how I think of you.
Unrefined, how you think of me.
Hey mister business man,
Don’t talk your air,
I ain’t worried ‘bout your total income revenue,
Annual turnover,
I don’t care for your sales expertise
Or liquid promises.
I know where it is – I know you need it.
Oozing. Black. Insipid.
So , how much you gonna offer?
Cash up front, if you will.
Hey mister business man,
I don’t care ‘bout alkenes and alkanes,
They all mean the same.
I don’t care ‘bout fractionation,
Displacement, hydrocarbons or polymerisation:
Yesterday, my eldest son died.
My new-born’s sick
And I can’t afford to feed my feeble children’s
Hungry mouths,
Fragile bodies,
Starving minds.
They’re already dying –
Slowly.
In front of my very eyes.
So, listen, Mr Business Man – don’t give me no jargon.
I don’t want your pity – I need your dollars
As you need the oil that’s locked beneath
Your patent-leather-lined soles
And my bare feet.
Open Competition
Third Prize
David Redfield
Hitting the Wrong Note
Despite the title, I think that this poem hits the right notes of subtlety and ambiguity ... much is left unsaid but a great deal is disturbingly implied. It's about a child's inability to measure up to the demands of a teacher who we are told, 'craved only angels' even if he had to 'clip their wings'. There are dark hints of sexual abuse in the lines: 'I couldn't breathe, he held one hand to the small of my back, the other across my taut diaphragm'. It's only by hitting the wrong notes, in the eyes of his teacher, that the child, the 'scrawny fledgling', achieves his eventual flight into adulthood
Rooted next to his upright piano,
close in the tiny room,
I couldn’t breathe.
He held one hand
to the small of my back,
the other across my
taut diaphragm:
(I can believe he loved
the music, but he craved
only angels, expected them -
and, by God, he was going
to have them,
even if he clipped
their wings along the way).
Here, understand? From here!
A scrawny fledgling, I could not rise -
not that time, the next, not ever.
The news wouldn’t tell
who was among the chosen ...
When I think of the shame
in hitting the wrong notes,
I understand how crooked
my flight could have been
if I’d ever hit all the right ones.
Open Competition
Second Prize
Graham High
Roman Horse
It's a poem about endurance, an endurance that continues even after death since the skeleton of the horse has been dug up and is now displayed in a museum. It's an ironic kind of resurrection where its broken back is now 'braced in steel'. The horse, grossly abused in its lifetime, is now 'stabled in glass' and far better cared for in death than it ever was in life. The closing verse is the most moving of any of the poems in the competition. Each night, the former beast of burden is allowed to return to the silence and darkness form which it came and which it must sometimes have longed for when it was alive.
(Skeleton, 2nd century AD, in the Museum of London)
Born to an earthen patch of a Briton’s house
I was sold and stolen, lost, then sold again,
and finally became a Roman horse.
My life controlled by man I had no lack
of change, endured my many owners, born
to be a beast of burden; use my back.
Though small at thirteen hands I never refused
the heavy loads laid on, proud to be strong
until my vertebrae were paralysed.
I remember the lash, the wicker packs; the goad
and smothering panniers which I endured
as long as fused spine and ebbing life allowed.
And I endure still. Since being gleaned
from squared and griddled soil, my bones are shown
in a Museum, re-assembled, cleaned.
My back is braced in steel, re-set, unstressed;
my skull is brushed, kept clean and free of dust,
and I am softly harnessed; brightly dressed.
So I am cared for, protected, hermetically
stabled in glass where I stand, patient in death
as I was in life, content no hand can touch me.
Nor am I denied the safe retreat
of silence, for at night when lights go out
I am consigned again to darkness of peat.
Open Competition
First Prize
Caroline Gilfillan
Young Samuel Pepys
This very vivid piece is written in two line stanzas which increase the pace of the poem and enacts the vitality of the subject matter. It contains a number of memorable and striking lines such as 'homesick for a sun that licks you clean as a new coin' and 'the language grew in him like winter wheat' and in the final stanza we read: 'in his diary he would lift the skirts of English.’ The reader gets a real sense of a time and a place in many respects so different from our own. It's as if the writer had entered deeply into a strange land and brought back precious fragments for us to contemplate. I think it's only fitting that a poem which celebrates the vibrancy of the English language should win the Poetry-next-the-Sea competition.
He scrambled on to the Thursday carrier at Cripplegate,
the horses shaking their bridles, snorting strings of warm phlegm.
A whip crack and a click from the driver’s tongue started the team
on the plod through Kingsland village and up the long rise
to the scuffed towns of Enfield and Ware, through ruts and bogs,
sucks and splashes, along a muddy Roman road
the auxilia built while centurions yelled orders and shivered,
homesick for a sun that licks you clean as a new coin.
Beside Pepys’ seat on the creaking coach, dabchicks
split the surface of pond after pond crowned in veils of gnats
until, two days later, Sam reached the ditches of black soil fens
patrolled by swans. At Huntingdon he slid down from his hard seat
and walked through gold-pennied water meadows to a house
overlooking the Ouse. In the grammar school the hot breath
of the forum blew through his hair, as Cicero defended
decrepit Rabirius, and Horace advised dawdlers to carpe diem.
He was beaten if he gossiped or brawled in English: only
the stiff declensions and conjugations of Latin were allowed.
The language grew in him like winter wheat. It sprouted, seeded,
bore tough, floury grain that would sustain him year on year,
while in his diary he would lift the skirts of English, enjoying the salt
taste on his fingertips, the codes and curls drawn in slippery ink.
Our congratulations to the winners, and thanks to all of you who entered.