Cardiff International Poetry Competition

2009 Cardiff International Poetry Competition
Adjudication

By Kurt Heinzelman and Ian McMillan

The first thing one always notices when judging poetry competitions is that a poem entered for a poetry competition is not like what you might call a ‘normal’ poem. A ‘normal’ poem is one that you might read in a magazine or a book, a poem that you might take to a writing workshop or an open mic night. A ’normal’ poem may be improvable, redraftable, and will be seen in the context of the poet’s other work, no matter how big or small that body of work is.

A 'competition poem' is different. It has to stand on its own feet. It can have no relation to the poet’s other work because the judges don’t know who the poet is. The poet has to believe that this poem is worth thousands of pounds, and because of that the poem has to be not only well-crafted and original, it also has to be startling.

Many well-crafted poems get entered into competitions and as judges we wish that we could talk to the poets who’d entered the poems, we wish we could make suggestions for reading and writing, for redrafting and abandoning, for small changes or major re-imaginings. We can’t: the poem is there, a fact like a broken window or a sunset. It’s just there. It believes it’s worth thousands of pounds. And it stands in isolation from the poet.
Many of the poems entered for the competition were about big events, personal and political; many were about Things My Parent Said, many were about Visiting Relatives in Hospital or Going to a Funeral. Many of them were delightful and moving and well-crafted, but not many of them were worth thousands of pounds.

So, the winners had to stand out. They had to startle the judge as he works his way down the pile of poems. They had to have something a little different that made them leap from the stack. We're not talking gaudiness here, ostentation or preening. The 'leap' we're talking about need not have anything to do with excess but more like the way marathon runners excel in a field of joggers. As it happened, the more than 400 poems we received after the initial screening, from the more than 2000 submitted, soon sorted themselves out into a smaller pile of about 40. We agreed on many of them, which must mean that they were not just good poems but that they were also good competition poems. We each missed some good ones as well, perhaps because real life nudged in and took our attention away, but the experience gave us both a new perspective on and new sympathy for having our own poems rejected by editors of literary periodicals.

We were very impressed by the five Runners-up and believe that another set of judges, or even ourselves on another day, might have lifted any one of them into the final three. The Bride looks at first glance to be a devotional poem but quickly discloses a different agenda. The Man Who Kept Bees in his Beard had the stunning effect of a good fable. And Suddenly the Bitch Was Talking Poetry is a scary, funny, and oddly predictable response of a teenager to her single father's girl-friend. The setting of Wild Ice seems to be stable—Oslo in winter—but other events intrude, how and from where the poem doesn't say, to transform that placid northern landscape into something disturbing because not quite surreal enough. Owls at Midnight, about a mother taking her sleepy daughter to the window to hear two owls calling, was a worthy latter-day variant on Coleridge's The Nightingale and Frost at Midnight, the second of which gives the modern poem its title.

The third-place poem, Strange Fish, is a piece of reportage, but it is a very strange piece, both vivid and distorted, like observations made underwater. The strangeness is present in how things are observed ("I watch beer slide into the black n of your mouth, its light tail shivering", what kind of summary statements are offered ("nothing really sinks in beer but money"), and even in what kind of poem it is, an elongated sonnet. But "vivid and distorted" are not, by themselves, terms of approbation unless the poem also lets us know why its vividness is distorted. In this case, the work is about a relationship, but the recollection of the relationship causes the poem to think about relationships as such, and then about how we memorialize them—that is, how we store them in, and perhaps try to remove them from, memory— all that "stuff so light it surfaces however much you weigh it down."

The second-place poem, Pink Dog, is plain-spoken in inverse proportion to the wroughtness of Strange Fish. It, too, is about the process of memory, in this case, about a dying dog that never stops dying. There isn't really a single piece of figurative language, unless watching the dog "cling / to his last afternoon" is figurative. The crux of the poem comes right in the middle of the poem's 16 couplets: "He's six years' dead, / but I'm not rid // of the pink dog of Penang / and his drawn-out dying." The dead/rid off-rhyme in the poem's central couplet signals the switch from description in memory to description of memory. It is noteworthy that the switch involves, for all intents and purposes, no switch in verb tense: the emergence of the past's presence occurs in a present tense that turns out to be eerily seamless.

The first-prize winner begins with "a present"; it is called The Gift of Boats. The poem turns out to be not so much about the gift boats that are bestowed as presents but about the man who makes them. The boats are "not made from a kit, by a modeller, / but by someone who knew about boats," and the joy of the poem—for the poem is entirely celebrative, even though we understand elegiacally that the boat-maker is past the age of being able to go out on the water himself—is the verbal and observational precision by which the gift boats are described. This ode may recall for some readers the description of Odysseus making his raft in book 5 of The Odyssey, but by the end of The Gift of Boats we, the readers of this poem, know that we also are in the hands of a master mariner and master craftsman.