Buzzwords Open Poetry Competition 2014 – results
Thank you for supporting us with your entries; all proceeds go
towards enabling guest poets to read at ‘Buzzwords’ reading series. Please scroll down for winning poems and judge’s comments
1st Prize: ‘Hands’ by Anna Beecher
2nd Prize: ‘The Outing’ by Pat Borthwick
The Gloucestershire Prize:
‘Ladies' day at Cheltenham Races’ by H. V. Goddard
Commended:
‘Titration’ by Ruth Aylett; ‘Meanings’ by Margaret
Gleave; ‘Foreign Office In-House Style Guide’ by. Josh Ekroy; ‘The Poet’s
Deaths’ by Simon Williams; ‘The Lemon Game’ by Mark Pajak
The
following poems, while not winning prizes, were picked by Jonathan Davidson for
Honourable
Mentions (in no particular order):
Parcour by Jenna Plewes; Weaver by Helen Hail; Notre
Dame, Easter Day, 1962 by Stuart Nunn; 6.00 a.m., 1/1/12 by Leslie Tate; Culbone by Stephen
Carroll; A Woodcutter in the Alder Groveby Iain Jenner; Postscript by Roisin
Kelly; Next Up by Ken Evans; Uses of the Body as a Source for Phrase and
Metaphor by Roy Marshall; Why You Should Get To Know Me by Vishvantara Lewis;
Timeline by Margaret Beston; Your Book by Catherine Edmunds; Flanders' Silent
Tunnels by Julie Fulton; Going Home by Maria Taylor; So Bracing by Pat Borthwick
Judge's Report:
It was with some trepidation that I took delivery at
Cheltenham Spa railway station of a box of over six hundred poems, en
route from Bristol back to my home in the Midlands. In this dense block of
paper - A4 and several inches thick - was the hard-work and hopes of hundreds
of poets. I am happy to say that I read them briskly with a great deal of
anticipation, knowing that I had absolutely no idea what I was to find. There
is a real pleasure in reading poetry presented anonymously and in the course of
judging it never once crossed my mind to consider who these poets were: it was
the poems and only the poems. I read haphazardly to avoid accidentally reading
a succession of poems by the same writer, taking poems from the top of the
pile, the bottom of the pile and just diving into the middle. Every poem I read
with close attention, of course, and increasingly as I got to my final fifty I
read poems two or three times, leaving them a few days between each
reading.
Those I have given an Honourable Mention to just kept
snagging in my mind, each with their own distinctive quality. I warmed to the
solid simplicity of the diction of poems like 'a woodcutter in the alder grove'
and 'Flanders' Silent Tunnels', while the wit and accomplishment of poems like
'Meanings' and 'Uses of the Body as a Source for Phrase and Metaphor' was
pleasing. 'So Bracing' was packed with gorgeous detail, but had just
sufficient detachment to avoid sentimentality. In fact the
detail was so rich and vivid that the past becomes considerably less enticing
as the poem progresses. All the Honourable Mentions were poems that delivered
on their promise and struck a balance between the authorial voice and the
instinct of the reader to hunt out meaning. There was also poignancy and wry
comedy and thoughtfulness.
The Commended Poems revealed themselves by giving
more with each reading. They were all extremely well-written poems, completely
aware of what they are doing with the language and with the experience of the
reader. They were difficult to get out of my mind - and bear in mind that by
this time I had read over six hundred individual poems. 'The Lemon Game', for instance,
is chillingly direct, with the simplest of language used to communicate the
complexity of a child's experience. It is a poem that shares the brutality and
viciousness of its theme and will not let go. 'The Poet's Death' (for Pete
Morgan) uses an almost comedic style of story-telling but manages to wrong-foot
the reader as its point of view shifts disconcertingly. The suggestion that
when one poet dies 'We all move up one' is both darkly comic and illuminating.
'Foreign Office In-House Style Guide' dissects the duplicitous use of language
by politicians and diplomats. It reminds us that nothing is neutral, or
rather that the more carefully studied the neutrality the greater the
likelihood of sour intent. ‘Meanings’ was another poem that used one register
of language (or indeed language, these were Latin names) to release meaning
from another, and very cleverly done. My final Commended Poem, 'Titration',
sent me to my Concise Oxford, although I had already read the poem several
times before deciding I needed an exact definition. It is a perfect
example of a 'specialist' word (I'm assuming, it is certainly not in daily use
in my world) being absolutely right and allowing a very powerful poem to find
itself. The diction is sparse and unforgiving; the narrative is almost a
storyboard, and the poem finishes with the colourless uncertainty of the life
it describes.
My Gloucestershire Prize winning poem, 'Ladies' Day
at Cheltenham Races' was a fable that began with farce and
finished with dark revelation. That it is set in what probably presents
itself as a glamorous occasion for the great and the good only makes it more
powerful a poem, and suggested that - as poets have always known - everything
is not as it seems. When money opens the door, morality goes out of the
window, as it were.
My Runner Up poem, winning the 2nd Prize, was 'The Outing'.
This is a poem of great restraint, very carefully leading the reader towards a
moment of revelation and all the more powerful for biding its time. Details -
and there are so many - are incredibly important; they gather resonance on
repeated readings and allow the final line - a more well-crafted line it would
be hard to find - to slip into our minds with awful clarity.
The winning poem, winner of the Buzzwords Poetry
Competition for 2014, is 'Hands'. It is unashamedly about age and life and
death. It is perhaps specifically about our English experience of aging, how
reluctant we are to face our futures, to talk, to say what we mean. The poem
very certainly does say what it means, but from its first stanza, tellingly
beginning with the word 'Embarrassed', to the prosaic detail of the last stanza
('dust settles... the worn band of the ring'), it speaks with a cinematic
clarity; unhurried but harrowing for all this. Most importantly, where other
poems spoke eloquently about their situations, this was a poem that felt
written on the behalf of its future readers. It quite simply forces one to
think about one’s life, to assess and consider, to confess and perhaps to take
action. Not many poems do that.
Jonathan Davidson
The Poems
1st prize:
Hands
by Anna Beecher
Embarrassed
at his fingernails, trying to pick
the muck off
hands that gathered eggs
to wrap
instead around her small palms,
smile
floating shyly above the handshake.
Later hands
shaking and the kiss,
her wiping a
crumb from his lips
fingers
tracing thighs beneath
her starched
skirt and smell of her hands
on him, like
the sheets they folded, fresh.
Her index ran
from his forehead to nose
gently
removed a fly from his eyeball
and they slid
rings
down the
barrels of each other’s fingers,
him still
with mud along the creases.
Lines
deepening as palms are moulded
around the
soft backs of babies’ heads.
Once as five
fingers folded around his one
he glimpsed
his own father’s hands
disappearing
into gloves
The slap,
when the children were in bed
which
happened once and stopped time,
remembered in
red, in the fingers bitten back
running
through the hair no longer
tracing each
other in wonder.
Wrinkled
hands ceased to interlace,
wrapping
themselves instead
around coffee
cups for warmth
wool spooling
around her thin fingers,
illuminated
and old under the lamp
skin
shrinking from the bones on the backs
of her hands.
When his
fingers found hers again
there was a
cannula at the elbow crease.
Her pulse was
frantic
fragile as
those first fumblings.
In the
absence of her voice
her hand
replied,
like the baby
taking his finger
A scrap of
life squeezing away doubt
And now when
he reaches into the urn
to take her
out in handfuls,
dust settles
in the space between the skin
and the worn
band of the ring.
Runner up:
The Outing
by Pat Borthwick
I’m trying on necklaces and can’t decide
between the plaits of black Venetian beads
intertwined around my throat like snakes or
the homely sea green and peacock felt ones.
The gallery owner knows women’s ways,
is patient and particular. Has taste.
You can’t miss his white belt with its buckle -
a large silver stetson, his emerald shirt, how
it casually chimes with his lime green glasses
or should that be the other way around?
I’m happy either way. He reminds me
of another man I knew, an only son,
my best friend, until tides drifted us apart.
John would help choose my jewellery. With
nimble hands he would fasten my bracelet
or necklace clasp. Tilt the mirror. I loved
his cliff-top cottage in Robin Hood’s Bay,
his row of teapots on the high shelf,
all their spouts pointing in the same direction.
I could never
live with anyone, he’d say. Imagine
if I found a pot put back the wrong way round.
Once he asked if I’d visit his mother with him.
I remember her face, her writhing hands
when he broke her the hardest news –
(his father, still at work down the potash)
why she would never have grandchildren.
We all wept then, and for different reasons.
Endless cups of tea. A crocheted tea-cosy.
That lady in a pink crinoline. Round her neck,
a tiny embroidered choker in stranded silk.
Ladies’ Day at Cheltenham Races
by H.V. Goddard
The enclosure’s full of fascinators
trembling. The main event, says
the local rag,
is the well-known Queen Mother Champion
Chase: by evening
all the bars are filled
to capacity, not a taxi to be found for love
nor money, so a party of six men jump
at the offer of a car from a bouncer
awesome, it’s a stretch limo, pile in giggling
like kids as it speeds away.
Squinting through
a pixellation of alcohol they
realise belatedly
that in the long rear seat there’s a brick
shit
house of a man with his arm round a
young
girl, out of it, she looks so out of it, and
he asks you want some snowflake? Hell.
Nah, don’t do it mate, but thanks, her head’s lolling,
neck loose as a baby’s falling out of its
sling, conker eyes sliding, whites blaring
like the sclera of a bolting mare – and
the car's heading the wrong way. Horses
in this race are required to be
aged five
or older to qualify. Keep cool. Blag. Just
drop us here, we want the other side of town.
You wanted snowflake this good stuff, hard
to get, trouble to get the man’s wrist is thicker
than the girl's thighs under her ridden up skirt
why’d you call if you don’t want snowflake, you
fucking
wasters? You
messing? The long-nosed car’s pushing
past unfamiliar street signs, the
wine's
turning back into water inside their veins, fear
connecting them like strings of mushroom roots
we just wanted a taxi no sweat we’ll get out
here fewer lights,
fields The 3,200 meters race
comprises twelve fences over its course
knuckles rise and dip on a fist like a line
of Cotswold hills you owe you pay you
assholes
their shared tributary thought maybe
we should then we could get away thank Christ
thank Christ blue
police lights slue them ram them
into the kerb every man's prostrated, spatchcocked
arms up backs, cheeks split open shoved into
gravel, questions drilled in by different men dealing
scum strip lights searches blood tests computer
checks
a cell. Next morning they’re believed, freed,
informed
that the snowflake/girl combo’s a sweet earner,
ramps
‘em in both ways Jesus, who would? she's
fifteen
and trafficked, but in a year she could be
reclassified
as a sex worker and a twenty-nine year old man
finds
himself bowing his head watching what must be
tears on his black and white kitchen floor,
guilty
of nothing but knowing that he’s been saved,
that for him it will be OK. This race attracts
£350,000, the
largest prize of the day.
5 Commended poems (in no particular order):
Foreign Office In-House Style Guide
by Josh Ekroy
“Proportionate is an emotive word” - Philip
Hammond, Foreign Secretary
Blockade is a member of the family of bl- words eg
bladder,
bloat, blow, bubble, which denote increase in
size
Bombardment is from the medieval Latin bombarda
a mechanical engine for throwing mostly harmless
stones
Displaced, Displacement derive from the devalued
currency
of therapy-speak and thus obsolescent
Does Not Look Good On Television is a jocular interjection
which should only be used informally and in
private
Drinking Water contains a fused participle and is
therefore misapplied
Hospital, School, Mosque are just three of many
euphemisms
for the lid of a terror-tunnel (cf infrastructure)
Human Shield is hybrid Latin and Anglo-Saxon
(cf scyldan - to protect - from Beowulf) a
useful
description of any innocent civilian (qv)
Infrastructure is a modern coinage combining
infra
meaning below, (cf. terror-tunnel) and structure
meaning to build above and therefore a contradiction,
a deception
Innocent Civilians is journalese, encompassing
a multitude of aggressive implications
Occupation as any schoolboy knows, is from the Latin,
the gold-standard of toneless diction, meaning job,
employment
Operation Protective Shield is a dignified
nomenclatural form
encapsulating the means by which a victim nation
defends itself against overwhelming odds
cf Operation Defensive Pillar
Safe Haven is a shop-soiled phrase, thus grey in
colour
Shrapnel derives from General H Shrapnel
who invented this shell during The Peninsular
War
Strafe is from the German - as in Gott strafe England!
a common Teutonic salutation in 1914 and
thereafter
meaning God punish England! - which of course He did
not
Terror-Tunnel, Terror-Tunneller are hyphenated
compounds
whose semantic value is unlikely to alter over
time
Women and Children is a cliche, unacceptable
stylistically
The Lemon
Game
By Mark Pajak
Wet yourself in Tesco. Mum’s finger bullying your
bladder
until the hot purse pops wet in your jeans on the
fruit and veg isle.
She tuts and it sounds like a slap. She shakes her
head. Dangerous.
You are five years old and together you are buying
lemons for the lemon game.
Walk a stranger’s distance behind her all the way
home. It’s the stink of you
she says, jeans a honey-rot blot catching stares
like wasps, cold as nappy rash
when you reach the flat. Sit still on the kitchen
floor like a rabbit
put your eyes front, corners on her. Here is a
sweet apple sweet-thing she says
drops down a lemon green and yellow like an old
bruise.
Palm it up in a bite
wax-skin bursting, wetting you chin to chest, your
mouth mulling the red taste
its soft clod nothing like an apple’s crunch but she
studies your face
referees your face pours over your face like
scalding kettle water.
You know the rules.
It must not screw up like a fist.
It
must not screw up like a fist.
Meanings
by Margaret Gleave
Though you know every Latin name
ranunculus
urtica lythrum
for me it's the fairytale world of Goldilocks;
the letting loose of purple strife and urtica just nettles me.
My Jacob's Ladder reaches all the way to heaven;
my pansies are pensées,
not violae;
and thrift, clinging to cliffs, means look after the
pennies;
paints the coast more vividly than armeria maritima.
Though I can name Old Man's Beard, Traveller's Joy,
I picture Santa and a countryside stroll.
And when I say monkshood,
wormwood, love lies bleeding;
snapdragon,
baby's breath, pis-en-lit - I'm not thinking of flowers.
The Poet’s Deaths
(for Pete Morgan)
by Simon Williams
1
The boat docks, maybe a trawler or something bigger,
a ship. No Matter.
Down the plank, between
the tied hull and the jetty, comes the poet
wearing a hat without a bobble
and carrying a rucksack like you had at school.
The poet comes, whistling a tune he collected
from a proper sailor.
Along the quay, with the smell of gutted herring
and diesel oil mixed in the
sun risen air, it’s 8 o’ clock,
he walks with five tenners in his pocket. A man with
a real job, who spent his money
in a club till 4, drives a forklift round the corner
of the
gutting shed, loses control, pins the poet to the
wall,
not under the arms.
2
The poet goes into a bar. This isn’t a joke.
He sees a friend, another poet,
lifting a glass of Heavy.
‘Have you heard about MacNiece?’ the poet asks,
‘he died today.’
Later, they will talk into the evening as the pints
go down,
as the light dispenses with itself. For now, ‘Good,’
says the friend,
‘We all move up one.’
Two poets round another’s life up, till time is
called,
push the door,
take separate directions.
The poet, that by now we know and love, walks home
by the canal, hums MacColl.
A freak tsunami, wake of some hemi-headed narrow
boat,
washes him into the water. He can’t swim. His friend
moves up another step.
3
The poet gives a reading in some Glasgow pub
speaks of grey mares
and disreputable shirts,
speaks the words that might be song, the music
curling through them so.
He wears a white jacket, keeps his shoulders back.
Most of his audience is attentive, there are grunts
of
approval as each poem ends.
A big man, late arriving from the bar downstairs
stands up at the back,
shouts ‘That’s not poetry!’
That old chestnut, thinks the poet, will it be the
lack
of rhyme, perhaps the metre?
He has the wherewithal to put down hecklers,
but this small death is resurrected. The man continues,
‘Poetry’s awful.’
by Ruth Aylett
A drop at a time from the
burette,
known into unknown
waiting for the giveaway colour
change
titration on a quiet afternoon.
She wanted to be a boy.
Drip drip drip
Pink pink pink,
Princesses, ribbons; smile.
Pretty dresses, don’t get dirty,
tidiness, helpfulness,
the good wife always…
She looked a mess, climbed trees,
wrestled with her younger
brother;
went topless on sunny days
in the woods, wore jeans.
Because they were fourteen
Because they were a gang
Because women gag for it
Because it was easy.
She had never learned how to
scream.
Dragged under a young oak
a good one to climb
branches touching the ground
making a green tent
enough of them to hold her down.
When they got the jeans off,
puzzled, found she had
no hair yet, could not respond
to their fumbling attack,
unformed and terrified.
Conferred uneasily.
Let her go.
A drop at a time from the
burette,
known into unknown
the whole world in a colour
change
titration on a quiet afternoon.
Closing date: midnight on 17th August 2014
Sole
Judge: Jonathan Davidson
who will
read all entries
Closing
date for entries. Midnight, 17th
August 2014
1st prize-£600.
Runner-up- £300. 5 x commended-£50 each.
The Gloucestershire Prize- £200. (for Gloucestershire residents
only).
Postal entries:
Download entry form and postal instructions here
Entry fees: Postal entries; £4 per poem or 3 poems for £10.
Email entries will carry a surcharge for PayPal & printing
costs:
One poem £4.35, two poems £8.70, three poems £11
Email entries:- please go to the bottom of this page for how to enter by email.
Email entries:- please go to the bottom of this page for how to enter by email.
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
Rules of Entry.
1.
Poems should be no longer than 70 lines.
2.
No translations are accepted.
3.
Poems must not have been previously published
in print or on the internet.
4.
Entries must be clearly typed on single
side(s) of A4 paper in a clear font e.g. Arial 12 point. No curly or obscure
fonts please.
5. Please leave a resonable margin on the paper so that it is legible when printed and kept in a file.
5. Handwritten entries will not be considered.
7.
Entrants’ names should not appear
on the poems. An entry form or covering letter or email should accompany all
entries and contain name, phone number, address, email address and titles of
poems entered.
8.
Entries for the Gloucestershire prize should
mark their poems with ‘GL’ in the top right hand corner.
9.
Gloucestershire, for the purposes of the
competition, includes South Gloucestershire
10. Entrants may enclose an s.a.e. marked
‘Results’ for postal notification of the prize-winners or state in their cover
letter/email that email notification is preferred.
11.
Results will also be published on the
Buzzwords Competition Website.
12.
Prize winners will be contacted by October 2014; winners will be welcome to read their poems at the next ‘Buzzwords’
13.
The judge’s decision will be final and we
regret that no correspondence will be entered into.
14.
Copyright will remain with the competitor,
but Buzzwords reserves the right to publish the winning poems on the website,
or to use them in publicity, for 12 months after the results are announced.
15.
Poems may not be altered after entry.
16.
Cheques should be clearly made out to
‘Cheltenham Poetry Cafe’.
On-line entries: Please pay for your entry by the paypal button below.
Your entries can then be emailed to us at: buzzwords.poetry@gmail.com
Please send all the poems you are entering in a single file, with each poem on a separate page (use page breaks).
Please attach the poems to a covering email giving:
a) name, address, telephone number
b) number of poems submitted
c) your Paypal email address if different.
d) the titles of your poems
e) please make sure the attached file has just your poems and their titles, but no identifying information.
f) please send the email to buzzwords.poetry@gmail.com
Your entries can then be emailed to us at: buzzwords.poetry@gmail.com
Please send all the poems you are entering in a single file, with each poem on a separate page (use page breaks).
Please attach the poems to a covering email giving:
a) name, address, telephone number
b) number of poems submitted
c) your Paypal email address if different.
d) the titles of your poems
e) please make sure the attached file has just your poems and their titles, but no identifying information.
f) please send the email to buzzwords.poetry@gmail.com
g) please let us know if you would like to be kept informed of future competitions
Is a pdf file okay?
ReplyDeleteyes, pdf should be fine
Deletecan the poems submitted be under consideration elsewhere?
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteWhen is the next competition, have i missed the 2015 comp?
ReplyDeletewww.westcars.co.uk
Limonation provide the great services for Limo, Limousine, Limo Hire and Limousine Hire. Get the special and good services in very good prices.
ReplyDelete