POETRY WINNER

What do you enter in a competition when you can pick your favourite or best poem? Wonderful winners, says the judge of WM’s Open Poetry Competition, Alison Chisholm

Alison Chisholm

Open poetry competitions give poets an opportunity to find their favourite or their best poem, and submit it knowing that it fits into the parameters of the competition. It also gives far too many options, like the cliché of the child in the sweetshop who can’t make up their mind because there is just too much choice. When poets have the limits of the universe to select from alongside their unlimited imagination, it can be surprising that the same topics arise several times among the entries. On this occasion there was a little duplication of ideas, but poems on a vast array of themes jostled for attention. There were pastoral and philosophical pieces, biblical references and a smattering of witchcraft, mythology, mothers, hate and love. At least a dozen different set forms were represented, and some free verse of the highest quality.

Some poems had a message that was too slight to make them serious contenders. While there’s nothing wrong with a simple snapshot poem or a momentary, passing thought expressed in poetry, it’s seldom robust enough to stand up against more substantial entries. Four problems that weakened poems recurred time and again. These were the perennial issues of weak sentence structuring and no – or inaccurate – punctuation, so that the poems read more like a series of preliminary notes; and poems that used language so sparsely, (rather than neatly and tightly), that they read more like telegrams than poetry. Then there were finely worked free verse poems with poor lineation, so that words like a, of and the appeared at line ends; and poems in set forms weakened by dodgy rhyme and metre. The poems remaining after weaker pieces had been eliminated left a satisfyingly difficult task of the adjudication, resulting in powerful winners and a strong shortlist. Coincidentally, both of the winning pieces are written in set forms. The first prize goes to a pantoum, The Wild Wood by Elizabeth Horrocks. The five stanzas, where every line is repeated or near-repeated, give just ten different lines to establish a mood, tell a story, and provide the reader with a frisson of horror. They do this magnificently.