All prize winning poems:
(shortlisted names/titles listed below)
First Prize
Courting
Simpsy Scrumble
by Pamela Trudie Hodge
Simpsy Scrumble, Simpsy Scrumble, fishy-monger on the quay,
Simpsy Scrumble, Simpsy Scrumble, sweetling, will you marry me?
I will bring you gifts from oceans, fishes rare from out the sea,
macklespout and webby cuckroons, dearling, if you’ll marry me.
My cockle-bottomed boat I’ll sail where finny fukills sport and play
with gurnickles, their tails a-twirling at the weeping of the day,
then I’ll net in screels of moonlight grand-falloons with dreaming
eyes,
rainbow frampoles as they frolic where the merman madly cries.
Simpsy Scrumble, take our token, half a shell of squinney tern.
Feed it raggish every Friday, trothing plight I will return.
When the tebrous tide was turning and the mussel-moon shone bright
I rowed away from Simpsy Scrumble, steering for the flimmering light.
From the dandling, star-specked ocean I reeled in the squamus spratt
and caught a flock of polywinkies in my church-on-sunday hat.
Slimpery shoals of shining shantoes leapt, all fibbling, in my pail;
splanish flooms with warty fingals fluting mournful madrigails.
Dreaming of my Simpsy Scrumble, I dove deep into the brine
where the sobbing guddling gloom and lackry moses weep and pine.
Precious pearlings, nacreus numpkings, ninnyhammers dressed in silk
and mooning sandills, sweet as candy, eyes as soft as camel’s milk
filled my boat with chat and chuckle, singing shanties, heave a-weigh,
and telling fishy fables of the fishermen who got away.
Sailing sideways, tacking crabwise, I sailed home to claim my bride,
my valumpshus Simpsy Scrumble, waiting by the waterside
In her dress of silvry smooskin from the fathoms of the Haaf,
holding close the squinny ternshell, sighing for its other half.
Fisherfolk and fishes gathered, footling fast upon the quay.
Parson Gidgeon tied our knot as shippy-shape as it could be.
Soon we were all twirling, skirling, to the warty fingal’s tunes.
Shantoes reeled with polywinkies, sandills spun with grand falloons
and gurnicles with macklespout while lackry moses grin and dine
but, in my arms, my Simpsy Scrumble by the sea’s candescent shine.
Simpsy Scrumble, Simpsy Scrumble fishy-monger never more
playing with our shoals of kidlings on the salt-sea-shimmering shore.
Second Prize
‘Topping Off’ the Shard, (30th March, 2012)
by Kate Goldsmith
O’Reilly
takes a panel from the crane and nudges it to me.
Ninety five
floors up, the wind like ice.
Through
glass, the sky in freeze-frame,
mackerel on
a marble slab.
We lock
position, tighten bolts, we test the seal,
I signal to
Kranz, he angles the crane.
O’Reilly
takes a panel from the crane and nudges it to me.
Like
playground kids in helmets, chin-straps tight,
loose-limbed,
we dangle in harness,
swimming
thin air, we paddle grey steel,
building
onwards, upwards.
Around us,
giant birds are pecking at the building,
heads bob,
pulleys tighten
as they
scavenge the backs of lorries for scraps
feeding us
carbon twigs
to weave
their glittering, heavenly nest.
A thousand
feet down, trains snake in and out of stations
like sand
eels on a murky river. Crossing bridges,
worker-ants
run from one money-stack to another,
eyes down -
they think the streets are paved with gold
but what do
they know? The real money’s up here.
Our
money-stack dwarfs them all.
Our
hard-as-nails digit is giving the finger to the old town,
a splinter
of light, dwarfing the dome of St Paul’s.
Drop-dead-gorgeous
in glass, it solicits in broad daylight,
cashes-in
at night, leaving it hung-morning-after-over,
empty as a
wallet. Built on petrodollars,
our
Ponzi-pyramid is driving a stake through the heart of the city.
But it’s
their city, not ours
and
tomorrow we fly home.
O’Reilly’s
taking the last panel from the crane and nudging it to me.
We lock
position, tighten bolts, we test the seal.
Kranz has
both hands in the air.
O’Reilly‘s
tapping out a rhythm in his steel-capped shoes.
I start to
dance a jig of my own,
O’Reilly
cocks his hip, he takes my arm, spins me round like a girl.
Up
here, on the varnished fingernail of the digit-of-bling,
On the
tallest, most glamorous digit in all of Europe,
we
dance.
The Gloucestershire Prize
Farfalle
by Stephen Davies
Turn
the page; put this in the can:
it is
lunchtime. She is cooking pasta
bows
and
testing the word in her English mouth.
Tomatoes
slide from their split skins;
onions
and garlic steep in oil.
There
are peppers, capers, olives, anchovies.
Perhaps
the radio is too loud.
Perhaps
the windows are cloudy with steam.
In
any case, she is reading the recipe
and
he enters. His hands slip round her
and
up to her breasts. There is an awkward
kiss,
in that her neck is turned
while
her hips stay flush with the stove.
Her
eyes are closed. There is no
conversation.
There
is only the knife.
And
that newspaper story:
of
the woman who sliced her lover
with
one careless spin in the kitchen.
But
here, let the blade miss by inches.
Let
the embrace develop. The pasta is done.
The puttanesca is good.
Five ‘Commended’ Poems
The First Avocado
by Liz Cashdan
That
was the first time we’d eaten an avocado
the
first time I’d cut through that animal skin
pulled
it apart and stared at the stuck-in stone.
I
jiggered the stone out and laid each half
in a
little dish, stunned by the pale green flesh,
dripped
vinaigrette into its welcome bowl.
We
spooned up the first mouthful, together
in
time, let the oil and vinegar run to the back
of
our tongues, melted the stuff in our teeth.
We
looked at each other across the table
in
that tiny lean-to kitchen in Belfast
and
I, the Scorpio, had scraped the skin
clean
in a few seconds, while you, the Virgo,
relished
each slow mouthful, precisely.
I
watched you, impatient for the next course.
That
first stone planted in an earthenware pot
has
grown tall, its green leaves drooping on to
my
window sill. But there’s no avocado.
Pimp
By Peter Wyton
Mid-evening
in the taverna.
Pimp
pares his fingernails
With
a knife wicked as his smile.
His
meal-ticket has pushed through
Bead
curtains leading to the stairs,
For
the fourth time in an hour.
Pimp
keeps an eye, not fatherly,
On
her three year old daughter,
Dancing
barefoot in beer puddles.
The
mother reappears, followed
By
a man still shovelling his guts,
his
replica soccer shirt, back in his pants.
Pimp
surveys her with the expertise
Of
an attendant at a hire car agency
Checking
in a recently used model.
No
external damage observable,
His
signals the barman to provide spirits
For
him, for her, cola for the kid.
Canned
music plays. Customers chat.
Bead
curtains rattle. Child dances.
Pimp
pares. Business as usual.
Green Man
By Peter Daniels
And the Green Man’s on an up
so you wouldn’t want to let him down, would you?
Now it’s his go, what he’ll do is gravitate
down to the garden, renovate the beds and edgings,
dig, rake, pot and re-pot
– maybe he’ll take requests
for herbs and herbaceous borders. Me,
I’m on my break from the green margin,
I’ve given up on nature. Nature
retaliates in grey dreams: engravings
of devils that goad, angels that gasp in aggravation;
it’s the last judgement and I’ve been grassed on,
up in the dock for some transgression
had up by a panel of amateur gardeners.
I ask you. I give up. But he could deal with it,
hero of the Horticultural Club;
even though it’s been hard going
since Eden got dumped and Adam got ignorant
cultivating plastic bags and old fridges, with
ugly shrubs gathering in alleys, and the leaves and slime
that block the gutters. They expect ground cover,
bark mulch and winter bedding? As if
that were the half of it. But you:
take him as your model,
give it all you’ve got to grow; dig, double-dig,
and get right down. With a good hoe,
you could do the whole ground over.
Now he’s on an up
and the green is sprouting in his beard.
Board Games
by John Whitworth
by John Whitworth
Our ouija board brings out the dead.
Their shadows flicker on the wall.
Tall candles kiss each grizzled head
Alert and waiting for the call.
Impossible to name them all:
Garbo, the Empress of the Sun,
Vinegar Joe, Napoleon,
Bill Shakespeare, natch. Our singing Swan
Of Avon meditates a sonnet.
The electric charges may have gone
But look! I'd wager money on it,
There's something hums beneath the bonnet.
See – letter after magic letter,
As good as when he lived, or better!
King Oliver, the Queen of Hearts,
The Barons and the Baronesses,
The lad o' love, the lad o' parts,
Eager to chart their late successes,
The girlie gangs, the boys in dresses,
The psychopaths, the suicidal,
The beavers and the sheer bone-idle.
Good Doctor Grace, with beardy chin
And dirty neck, Bad Doctor Death
Who did so many patients in –
He cashed their cheques then stopped their breath –
MacHeath, McGonagall, Macbeth,
The Thieves, the Poets and the Kings,
We feel the flutter of their wings.
The mermaids and the sirens sitting,
Their tails curved prettily beneath,
Atropos and her sisters knitting,
The harpies with their sharky teeth,
Bald Caesar in his laurel wreath,
The boy who stole the funeral,
Impossible to name them all.
The dead inhabit every room,
Their dead hearts beating boom-a-boom,
Like shadows in the shuttering gloom,
Like babies strangled in the womb,
Like mummies rising from the tomb,
Like fishes in a catacomb,
Like whispers in an empty room,
They stretch out to the crack of doom,
The crack of doom, the crack of doom.
Foley
By Jamie Walsh
Towards the end of the training
you’d want to take the gloves off
and put the shrieking willies up
the old guard: payback for those
months of mockery at the bespoke tit
you’d made of yourself tailoring noise;
for all the secret talk of a celery’s
snap as ‘underweight’ or ‘mooey’.
After putting in the work with
the squelch-tubs and tin kettles,
squeaky wheels and balloons,
the nuances of the ground under
the trapdoors – gravel, grass,
starch on sheet ice – the true test
of your worth is to steal into the
tutor’s house in the craw of night
and see if he can tell between
you or his own dread at three a.m.
This is the moment of your art,
your mastery of fire: massage
the creaking grief from a wooden
chair, draw a nail file through
the pinched mitts of a clothes peg,
unlock a fell apple in your teeth.
By Jamie Walsh
Towards the end of the training
you’d want to take the gloves off
and put the shrieking willies up
the old guard: payback for those
months of mockery at the bespoke tit
you’d made of yourself tailoring noise;
for all the secret talk of a celery’s
snap as ‘underweight’ or ‘mooey’.
After putting in the work with
the squelch-tubs and tin kettles,
squeaky wheels and balloons,
the nuances of the ground under
the trapdoors – gravel, grass,
starch on sheet ice – the true test
of your worth is to steal into the
tutor’s house in the craw of night
and see if he can tell between
you or his own dread at three a.m.
This is the moment of your art,
your mastery of fire: massage
the creaking grief from a wooden
chair, draw a nail file through
the pinched mitts of a clothes peg,
unlock a fell apple in your teeth.
Shortlisted poems/poets
Slow-worms, Stephen DaviesIdiot at the Wheel, Mark Mayes
Mailbox Montage, Jean L Kreiling
Bus Shelter, Roger Turner
Raga on Raglan Road, Marilyn Francis
Intrigued, Liz Cashden
The Midnight Moving Company: Interviewing the Apprentice, Judith Green
Engineers, Peter R White
SloeGin, Howard Wright
Making Soup, Penny Harper
2012 Competition results and judges comments
(the winning poems, and names of those who came very close will follow very soon)
Remember, all who entered, these decisions
are those of a single judge, with prejudices, preferences and a rather odd
sense of humour. There are many poems in the pile alongside these that would
have been winners had they confronted a different scrutineer.
To give you an idea how I worked, without
naming and shaming and in the hope of giving a nudge to the makers of some good
poems, I’d like to make the following comments.
Spelling is vital, especially in poems that are otherwise excellent. If
you are writing about a soldier in Helmand, don’t spell it “Helmond”, if you
name a whiskey Jim Bean when the judge knows it’s Jim Beam, your work will be
regretfully laid aside. You can’t have a single spermatozoa – that’s a plural
noun. Spermatozoon is the word you need; alter and submit again. And the lovely
conceit that drew on the difference between lay and lie was scuppered by the
grammar, but it’s saveable. My greatest grief was the poem that misspelled its
subject - Sei Shōnagon. Only a vowel between that one and success. Do amend and
re-send.
I do like formal poems, but the best of the
free verse submitted here did itself more than justice. However, much was passed over on the grounds
of inexplicable line endings. In the
absence of rhyme and scansion, my head needs a reason for a line to end where
it does. I can’t ask the poet, so the poem has to tell me.
All the poems in this final selection have
been read and re-read, scrawled on, shuffled around and wondered about. And the
result is:
First Prize (£600)
Courting
Simpsy Scrumble by Pamela Trudie Hodge Possibly an unexpected choice. This sang in
my head from first to last and answered too many of my personal questions to be
ignored. It’s a ballad, a nonsense poem,
a nursery rhyme, yet none of these and all at the same time. It was, from the point of view of this
competition, one of a kind and I peeled a series of skins off it as the judging
period progressed. I love the language, the cross-over between specialist
terminology and creative invention, the faux-etymology of which adds an extra
layer of glee. It scans superbly, with sensible enjambment and easy stresses
and upholds an intrinsically English tradition that I feared had died with
Causley.
Second Prize (£300)
“Topping
Off” the Shard by
Kate Goldsmith Oh, this has had a stormy ride in your judge’s list! I
gasped with delight at the title – we all know that shard, along with myriad
and aeon, is on the proscribed list
of poetry-words. Then I fell in love with the concept, the nudging of the panels,
the feeling of being up there with O’Reilly and Kranz and the poet who invited
me to share the illusion. I worried about the last two lines which seemed to
follow a stanza break and then realised they they didn’t; it was just the way
the poem fell off the first page and perched awkwardly on the next. I asked a lot of questions of this poem, and
in the end it answered them all and I danced in triumph along with the
fictional builders. As Beckett said, “Dance
first. Think later. It's the natural order”.
This poem exemplifies that sensible view.
Five runners-up.
(£50 each)
Foley
by Jamie Walsh
Beautifully crafted from specialist language, made accessible by honest
vernacular. The whole notion of the artful craft of the Foley Artist is embodied
in the poem.
Green
Man by Peter Daniels. I wrote “Yes!”
alongside the second stanza break – that’s the way to do it.
Pimp
by Peter Wyton Sharply tailored like an expensive suit; a
suit that fits the creep – and the poem – perfectly.
The
First Avocado by
Liz Cashdan. Skilfully shaped, the easy, even stanzas making steps from
thought to thought.
Board
Games by
John Whitworth Reader-bliss. Shiny tesserae all picked from one busy head
and fitted together with the consummate skill of a craftsman.
Gloucestershire Prize (£200)
Farfalle
by Stephen Davies. This was earmarked early on as a contender. An easy little picture
with a lot of sparks setting off lines of thought that are backed up by the
words. The poet here is totally in control, leading us by our ears and our
tastebuds to a tragedy that doesn’t happen; that slips past like the careless
knife as the poem chooses with deceptive ease between death and sex.
Deliciously clever.
And it must go on record here that the
Gloucestershire entry was of a consistently high standard in relation to the
rest of the competition.
Welcome to the 2012 Buzzwords Open Poetry Competition page. Details of the 2012 competition are below. The competition is now closed. Watch this space for the winning entries.
Our Judge, Prizes and More About Us
Sole Judge: Ann Drysdale
who will read all entries
Closing date for entries. 31st July 2012.
1st prize-£600. Runner-up- £300. 5 x commended-£50 each.
The Gloucestershire Prize- £200. (for Gloucestershire residents only).
Proceeds of the competition will be used to fund ‘Buzzwords’, which is the longest running and most respected regular poetry gathering in Cheltenham.
"A warm, intelligent - and going on the evidence of the floor readings - a very talented group, Buzzwords was a great venue for reading and listening." - George Szirtes
Interesting site. Thanks for the info re buzzwords. In the middle of writing my first novel but I may be tempted to enter.
ReplyDeleteI read the judge's report with interest (as an entrant but one who didn't win!). Are you going to print the winning poems so that we can enjoy them - and see what the judge's comments mean?
ReplyDeleteYes we are - just waiting for all the prize winners to send electronic copies (to save us the typing!)
DeleteWould be lovely to see the winners/almosters, are they imminent?
DeleteAh. Spelling.
ReplyDeleteReally looking forward to seeing the short-list and winning poems. I am checking every day. Any closer to being posted?
ReplyDeleteAn appalling judge's report. Does anyone agree? Ghastly capitals. Horribly punctilious, small-minded, self-serving. The injunction: 'alter and submit again' - distasteful, leads one to realise what we all secretly know. Save us from such 'Scrutineers' - frightful word choice there. Poor John Clare would not have passed the
ReplyDeletespelling test, one fears. And no, I am was not an entrant to this competition.
Sour grapes, methinks!
DeleteWell deserving winners all round! One that stands out to me is The First Avocado, such a mischievous, fun little poem!
ReplyDelete