October 2016 Poetry Challenge Winners

Christine Swanberg, the judge for the October Poetry Challenge picked an interesting “praisesong” as third place winner:

Praisesong In Late October

Praise to the grasshopper, highjumping over the dung.

Praise to the grasses, coming up green in the midst of fall.

Praise to the Douglas firs, vertebrae on the far hill.

Praise to the crooked fence, bent by vinca’s load.

Praise to the fallen apples, let us gormandize them 
into pies and poems.

Praise to the worms that certify them organic.

Praise to the stealthy grey tabby, belly low to the ground.

Praise to the sun, silhouetting the branches of dawn, dusk.

Praise to the flute and the flautist,
etudes gamboling through the valley.

Praise to the shriveled up plums on my tree.

Praise to the rose bush, all thorns and no flowers.

Praise to my cane waiting patiently on its four feet.

Praise to my book and my blanket, my hat and my pillow,

my bottle of water, my notebook and pen.

And praise to this body, this mind, this God

who have brought me to this present moment,
the out breath, the in.

~ Barbara Ruth

The judge commented that “This incantatory poem has some delectable surprises. It begins with an intriguing, unexpected line. The cane is a nice, unexpected touch.”

For second place, Swanberg selected the following:

Indian Summer at Holy Hill

and we stand in the bedazzled warmth

of late afternoon, when the clans

of Schwedler and Birch begin to speak

in reds and yellows. Snatches of words

skim and swoop, sail over the parapet,

race for the cobbled courtyard.

Syllables scuttle across worn paths,

sound out the gusty wind, bump against stone walls.

Children chase these tongues of fire, understand

the foreign alphabet that rustles and crackles beneath

their feet. An unexpected flare flames this October day.

We chatter and laugh as a leaf of perfect crimson

lands on my sweater, a copper fragment snaggles

in my husband’s hair, and everything, everywhere

steeps in the burnished fragrance of now.

~ Mary Jo Balistreri

The judge said of this poem, “The sounds, senses, and specific details create a tantalizing poem that ends well.”

The first place winner this month is a narrative poem:

The Apple Seller

Days are like candles

burning at both ends with dark.

Shortening sunlight panics

the apples into ripening.

Those that don't fall

are plucked, fill buckets,

are trafficked from orchard

to ramshackle road-side shack

where scrawled sign and cheap scales

make for a fleeting autumn store.

While some rake leaves into

mounds of pastel uselessness,

this one taps slow-motion seasons

for their cash: bright red Washington

fruit traded for crisp green Washington

money, a plush, juicy Granny Smith

sold to a bent, age-tarnished Granny Smith.

This makeshift merchant does her business

from ancient lawn-chair while noisy children

race in and out of her legs chasing dogs.

A guy in a Mercedes drives up, is checking

through a bushel so fresh, the smell of tree's

still on their skin. He scowls at the spots,

the bruises. The first law of apples is that

nothing ever tastes like it looks.

The second is that she in rumpled dress,

unwashed hair, a thick wad of dollar notes

oozing from her fist, is the law-giver.

~ John Grey               

Swanberg explained her preference for this poem in the following words: “This poem has a lot going for it: simile, interesting verbs, narrative line, as well as vivid description.”

These poems are the property of the poets who wrote them. Please do not copy them without permission.

Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to Christine Swanberg for judging.

Bios:

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in New Plains Review, Stillwater Review and Big Muddy Review with work upcoming in Louisiana Review, Cape Rock and Spoon River Poetry Review.  

Mary Jo Balistreri has two books of poetry published by Bellowing Ark Press, a chapbook by Tiger's Eye Press. She is a founder of Grace River Poets, an outreach for schools, churches, and women's shelters. Please visit her at maryjobalistreripoet.com.

Barbara Ruth grew up in villages and towns with populations between 300 and 6,000 in the Midwest (US.) Her career goal, when she was twelve and happened upon a book called The Beats, was to move to Greenwich (which she pronounced with a “w”) Village, wear all black, and drink coffee laced with heroin while she snapped her fingers at some cat’s poem. She does, on occasion, wear all black. As an adult she has lived in small towns in Vermont, Massachusetts, Michigan and California. She currently lives in Silicon Valley, which strikes her as very unlikely.

Christine Swanberg has published several books of poetry, including Tonight on This Late Road, Invisible String, Bread Upon the Waters and Who Walks Among the Trees with Charity. Her work appears in numerous anthologies. She has published hundreds of poems in journals such as The Beloit Poetry Journal, Spoon River Quarterly, Amelia, Chiron, Kansas Quarterly, Creative Woman, Earth's Daughters, Mid-America Review, Powatan Review, Midnight Mind, Sow's Ear, Wind, and others.

Swanberg's awards include a featured reading at Seattle’s Frye Museum through Poetswest, first and second place in Peninsula Pulse, first place in Midwest Poetry Review and the Womanspirit Award from Womanspace. She received a merit scholarship to attend the post-graduate seminar at Vermont College, where she worked with the late Lynda Hull.  In addition, several of her poems were selected by the Poetry Center of Chicago for a juried readings.  She has edited Korone; Confluence: A Legacy of Rock River Valley; Land Connections: Writers of North Central Illinois. She founded the  Rock River Poetry Contest and has judged many contests including  Pen Women and Illinois Emerging Writers. She has been a teacher for over thirty years.

Check back on November 1 for a new Poetry Challenge.

© Wilda Morris

Two-Way Challenge for October

I spent some time at the end of September this year in Massachusetts—in Boston, Quincy, Plymouth, and New Bedford. When I arrived, few of the leaves had turned red or gold. But while I was walking the Freedom Trail, boarding the Mayflower II, and wandering down The Street in Plimouth Plantation (where they invite you to enter the 17^th century), the weather chilled. Wind beat the Atlantic, waves beat the shoreline. Summer was over and fall was on the way.

If you ask people in the U.S. what their favorite season is, I suspect most would answer either spring or autumn. Or they might declare a tie between those two seasons. Christine Swanberg wrote a beautiful poem about a particular part of the fall known as Indian summer. Some people use that term to refer to especially warm days in late fall, probably coinciding with what Shakespeare referred to as “All Halloween Summer.” The Old Farmer’s Almanac says that a warm spell is not Indian summer unless it falls between St. Martin’s Day (November 11) and November 20. However that may be, these warm days that follow a heavy frost are usually hazy, and that fall haze is generally considered part of the definition.

Swanberg says, “My understanding of Indian Summer is warm weather after the first frost. It's a time a warmth blended with trees and foliage reaching their deepest colors, kind of the best of both worlds of summer and fall.”

There are also different explanations of the name. Some say it when the weather was cool, the native Americans put aside their bows and arrows and didn’t fight the settlers. When a warm spell came in late fall, they started attacking again. Others say that the name relates to farming practices of the native Americans. There is another hypothesis that originally the name had nothing to do with native Americans; rather it relates to shipping in the Indian Ocean. If the name comes from warring between Native Americans and settlers, it certainly qualifies as politically incorrect, and I would not want to use it. Nevertheless, I am very fond of Swanberg’s poem.                                                                                                     

Indian Summer, Come

     

Indian Summer, blaze through brown grass blades.

Ripple around all that is gold:

field corn drying on stalks,

all the russet maiden grass on plains,

the amber seed heads of goldenrod and aster.

Indian Summer, come.

Come burning the sun’s last hot rays.

to the red pony’s black, muddy hooves,

to the pink snouts of possums asleep behind logs,

to fuzzy fountain grasses swaying in prairies.

Slant down on blue spruce and white pine.

Indian Summer, come.

Come whispering on tabby cat whiskers,

tippling moss-coated trunks of maples,

shimmering on small, red crab apples in meadows,

landing on looping groups of cedar waxwings

as they huddle on trees near the river’s edge.

Indian Summer, come.

Arc over river bluffs and castle rocks,

over every circling bird of prey.

Glint from the eagle’s chartreuse eye

Glimmer from the red hawk’s splayed tail.

Soar wide as the vulture’s black wingspan.

Indian Summer, come.

Come in full head-dress, thundering.

Drum full color on leaves,

rattling and shaking fall’s last tassels.

Let it shout. Let it whoop and whirl.

All creatures deserve one final dance in the sun.

O, Indian Summer, come.

Christine Swanberg

Rockford, IL

First published in Who Walks Among the Trees with Charity (see http://windpub.com/books/WhoWalks.htm).

When I first read Swanberg’s poem, I immediately thought of Jane Kenyon’s beautiful poem, “Let Evening Come,” which you can read at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/46431. Both poems use repetition, both move toward strong endings. And they use the word “come” in similar ways. Each of the poems may be interested literally or metaphorically.

The October Challenge:

There are two options for this challenge. You may write your own poem inviting something to come: a season, a time of day, a day of the week, a holiday or something else (but not a person or pet). Or you may write a poem about the autumn.

Title your poem unless it is haiku or another form that does not use titles. It may be free or formal verse. If you use a form, please identify the form when you submit your poem. Please single-space, and don’t use lines that are overly long (because the blog format doesn’t accommodate long lines).

You may submit a published poem if you retain copyright, but please include publication data. This applies to poems published in books, journals, newspapers, or on the Internet. Note that this is a recent change in the rules.

The deadline is October 15. Poems submitted after the deadline will not be considered. There is no charge to enter, so there are no monetary rewards; however winners are published on this blog. Please don’t stray too far from “family-friendly” language. No simultaneous submissions, please. You should know by the end of the month whether or not your poem will be published on this blog. Decision of the judge or judges is final.

Copyright on each poem is retained by the poet. If a winning poem is published elsewhere later, please give credit to this blog.

How to Submit Your Poem:

Send one poem only to wildamorris[at]ameritech[dot]net (substitute the @ sign for “at” and a . for “dot”) . Include a brief bio which can be printed with your poem, if you are a winner this month.

Submission of a poem gives permission for the poem to be posted on the blog if it is a winner, so be sure that you put your name (exactly as you would like it to appear if you do win) at the end of the poem. Poems may be pasted into an email or sent as an attachment (no pdf files, please). Please do not indent the poem or center it on the page. It helps if you submit the poem in the format used on the blog (Title and poem left-justified; title in bold (not all in capital letters); your name at the bottom of the poem). Also, please do not use spaces instead of commas in the middle of lines. I have no problem with poets using that technique (I sometimes do it myself). However I have difficulty getting the blog to accept and maintain extra spaces.

Poems shorter than 40 lines are generally preferred but longer poems will be considered.

Bio:

Christine Swanberg has published several books of poetry, including Tonight on This Late Road, Invisible String, Bread Upon the Waters and Who Walks Among the Trees with Charity. Her work appears in numerous anthologies. She has published hundreds of poems in journals such as The Beloit Poetry Journal, Spoon River Quaarterly, Amelia, Chiron, Kansas Quarterly, Creative Woman, Earth's Daughters, Mid-America Review, Powatan Review, Midnight Mind, Sow's Ear, Wind, and others.

Swanberg's awards include a featured reading at Seattle’s Frye Museum through Poetswest, first and second place in Peninsula Pulse, first place in Midwest Poetry Review and the Womanspirit Award from Womanspace. She received a merit scholarship to attend the post-graduate seminar at Vermont College, where she worked with the late Lynda Hull.  In addition, several of her poems were selected by the Poetry Center of Chicago for a juried readings.  She has edited Korone; Confluence: A Legacy of Rock River Valley; Land Connections: Writers of North Central Illinois. She founded the  Rock River Poetry Contest and has judged many contests including  Pen Women and Illinois Emerging Writers. She has been a teacher for over thirty years.

Note:

You can read more about “Indian summer” at http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15127159, http://www.themountaineagle.com/news/2007-10-24/news/019.html,  and at http://www.almanac.com/content/indian-summer-what-why-and-when.

© Wilda Morris