2015 Prize Winners
The judge for our second year was Marianne Taylor. Professor Taylor taught at Fullerton College and the University of California at Irvine after receiving her M.A. in English literature and completing Ph.D. coursework. As Professor of English at Kirkwood she teaches literature, creative writing and composition classes online as well as in the classroom. She studies and writes poetry, and her work has been published widely in national journals. She has been the recipient of the Allen Ginsberg Award and the Helen A. Quade Memorial Writer's Award; and her manuscript, SALT WATER, IOWA, has been a finalist for the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, the Richard Snyder Memorial Poetry Prize, and the Winnow Press Open Book Award. She also enjoys cooking, watercolor painting, running, and spending time with her husband and four sons.
From Professor Taylor: "Each of these poems, and the Honorable Mention poems as well, exhibit confidence and careful attention to craft. Some are 'formal' and others free verse, but each utilizes language purposefully, understands what to do with the line, offers images that are fresh, and keeps the reader guessing as he or she proceeds through the poem. There's music in these poems as well, and they are a delight to read aloud. My best advice to future contestants would be to send work that is meticulously crafted and that readers will care about because it speaks to them and their own experiences, regardless of the subject matter. There's a big difference between the poem that is personal and heartfelt and the poem that is both those things but also genuinely inviting."
2015 WINNERS:
First Place: "Vrikshasana" (Sonja Johanson)
Second Place: "In the Beginning There Was" (Ellaraine Lockie)
Third Place: "Grand Canyon" (Amy Brunvand)
7 Honorable Mention (in no particular order):
"Daumier's Baby" (Elisabeth Murawski)
"Words Borrowed from Sensible Things" (Emily Allen)
"M. Caillebotte Paints Mme. Boissiere Knitting" (Kathleen Spivack)
"What the River Took" (Susanna Lang)
"Katabasis" (Michael Collins)
"Aspects of Marigolds" (Sally Zakariya)
"Leaving the Tamaracks" (Rage Hezekiah)
Congratulations on a job well done!
Winning Poems:
Vrikshasana
This -
my body
to your body,
skin to bark, flesh
becomes sapwood,
heartwood, spleen.
Respiration.
Your breath in, my breath
out. You transpire, stomata
open, mouths, nostrils
gasping. I die a little.
Branches, brachia, arms,
axillary buds burst -
watersprouts. I reach.
We both turn to the sun,
my face, your lamina.
Sweet, sweet sugar.
We drink it in.
We send it down.
Messages in the soil,
hyphael exchanges;
we speak in chemical
whispers, root to root,
rustle to
rustle.
In the Beginning There Was
A woman who bit into the forbidden apple
Call it sin or weakness, stupidity, naivety
Or maybe call it clairvoyance
How all it took was one look
into the crystal ball of a serpent’s eye
To see Rome fall with its cultivated apple orchards
and vessels of cider still standing
Medieval monks using them for centuries of medicines
She saw the words in an Old English rhyme book
To eat an apple going to bed
Will make the doctor beg his bread
Saw Shakespeare savoring a roasted apple
with a saucerful of caraway
Johnny Appleseed walking barefoot
to deposit the seeds of his passion
across the American wilderness
She could almost smell the sweet scent of goodness
in the trees’ virgin white blossoms
Almost taste the candy-like fruits
studded with cinnamon and cloves
that wives floated in wassail bowls and apple pies
And she rolled the delicious lyric beauty of their names
off her tongue--Roxbury Russet, Cornish Gilliflower, Ambrosia
Aurora Golden Gala, Pink Pearl, Pitmaston Pineapple
And later words like polyphenol and antioxidant
How her body would have worshipped them
She lived the future like a past
Wrapped her arms around the millenniums
of daughters and granddaughters
And laid her explosive bite on the altar of womankind
As harbinger for the Joans of Arc, Sacagaweas
Susan Anthonys, Harriet Tubmans, Eleanor Roosevelts
and all the others who have dared and will dare to defy
Those who inherited the Eve gene
Because in the beginning there was rebellion
Grand Canyon
From certain places we can glimpse the path
Ahead its switchbacks neatly organized
In folds that intimate a labyrinth
On a cathedral floor where pilgrims plod
In meditation, unspooling in their minds
The tangled strands of misery that snare
The manufactured world. The trail descends
Into a chasm of black schist that quivers
In the heat, a metamorphic stone
That gasps and pulses with each breath of air;
The canyon is not bottomless, I know
That we will find a river flowing there
Whose name is Endless Life, and at her shore
We’re halfway back to where we were before.
From Professor Taylor: "Each of these poems, and the Honorable Mention poems as well, exhibit confidence and careful attention to craft. Some are 'formal' and others free verse, but each utilizes language purposefully, understands what to do with the line, offers images that are fresh, and keeps the reader guessing as he or she proceeds through the poem. There's music in these poems as well, and they are a delight to read aloud. My best advice to future contestants would be to send work that is meticulously crafted and that readers will care about because it speaks to them and their own experiences, regardless of the subject matter. There's a big difference between the poem that is personal and heartfelt and the poem that is both those things but also genuinely inviting."
2015 WINNERS:
First Place: "Vrikshasana" (Sonja Johanson)
Second Place: "In the Beginning There Was" (Ellaraine Lockie)
Third Place: "Grand Canyon" (Amy Brunvand)
7 Honorable Mention (in no particular order):
"Daumier's Baby" (Elisabeth Murawski)
"Words Borrowed from Sensible Things" (Emily Allen)
"M. Caillebotte Paints Mme. Boissiere Knitting" (Kathleen Spivack)
"What the River Took" (Susanna Lang)
"Katabasis" (Michael Collins)
"Aspects of Marigolds" (Sally Zakariya)
"Leaving the Tamaracks" (Rage Hezekiah)
Congratulations on a job well done!
Winning Poems:
Vrikshasana
This -
my body
to your body,
skin to bark, flesh
becomes sapwood,
heartwood, spleen.
Respiration.
Your breath in, my breath
out. You transpire, stomata
open, mouths, nostrils
gasping. I die a little.
Branches, brachia, arms,
axillary buds burst -
watersprouts. I reach.
We both turn to the sun,
my face, your lamina.
Sweet, sweet sugar.
We drink it in.
We send it down.
Messages in the soil,
hyphael exchanges;
we speak in chemical
whispers, root to root,
rustle to
rustle.
In the Beginning There Was
A woman who bit into the forbidden apple
Call it sin or weakness, stupidity, naivety
Or maybe call it clairvoyance
How all it took was one look
into the crystal ball of a serpent’s eye
To see Rome fall with its cultivated apple orchards
and vessels of cider still standing
Medieval monks using them for centuries of medicines
She saw the words in an Old English rhyme book
To eat an apple going to bed
Will make the doctor beg his bread
Saw Shakespeare savoring a roasted apple
with a saucerful of caraway
Johnny Appleseed walking barefoot
to deposit the seeds of his passion
across the American wilderness
She could almost smell the sweet scent of goodness
in the trees’ virgin white blossoms
Almost taste the candy-like fruits
studded with cinnamon and cloves
that wives floated in wassail bowls and apple pies
And she rolled the delicious lyric beauty of their names
off her tongue--Roxbury Russet, Cornish Gilliflower, Ambrosia
Aurora Golden Gala, Pink Pearl, Pitmaston Pineapple
And later words like polyphenol and antioxidant
How her body would have worshipped them
She lived the future like a past
Wrapped her arms around the millenniums
of daughters and granddaughters
And laid her explosive bite on the altar of womankind
As harbinger for the Joans of Arc, Sacagaweas
Susan Anthonys, Harriet Tubmans, Eleanor Roosevelts
and all the others who have dared and will dare to defy
Those who inherited the Eve gene
Because in the beginning there was rebellion
Grand Canyon
From certain places we can glimpse the path
Ahead its switchbacks neatly organized
In folds that intimate a labyrinth
On a cathedral floor where pilgrims plod
In meditation, unspooling in their minds
The tangled strands of misery that snare
The manufactured world. The trail descends
Into a chasm of black schist that quivers
In the heat, a metamorphic stone
That gasps and pulses with each breath of air;
The canyon is not bottomless, I know
That we will find a river flowing there
Whose name is Endless Life, and at her shore
We’re halfway back to where we were before.
