January 2022 Poetry Challenge Winners: Poems on Aging

Photo by Suzanne Metzel. Used by Permission

Aging proved to be a popular topic for poets! A number of publishable poems were received. Judge Donna Pucciani selected a poem by Kelly Boyer Sagert for third place:

 

Song of a Life

The crone huddles and weeps about winter
then slowly folds
a piece of paper into precise pleats.
Lifting scissors
she carefully cuts the shape of a lily
then opens up
the paper with accordion folds.
When the snow melts
she plans to dance by lilies in the fields
just one more time.
Opening her accordion at dawn,
such melody!
Wrinkles spring to life: an old woman’s smile.

~ Kelly Boyer Sagert

Of this poem, Pucciani says, “The writer captures a moment of art and courage, combining winter images with the vision of an elderly woman cutting a paper lily, a sign of spring and hope and a kind of resurrection, however brief.”

 

Second place goes to Maryann Hurtt.

Glass Bottles and Ice

down long hallways
the old man propels his wheelchair
gets to the window
and stares
as the temperature drops
and flakes of snow pile
his mind winds back ninety years
to blades tied on shoes
milk to be delivered
on ice covered streets
at dawn before scattered coal dust
ruined the glide
but for that little while
and now remembers so clearly
the grace of glass bottles
and ice
the memory enough today
of flight even
when grounded

~ Maryann Hurtt

Pucciani explained her selection of this poem: “A century’s flashback—so much said in such a small space! Not one superfluous word, yet I could hear the clink of the milk bottles at dawn and the sound of the skates. Well-crafted, focused, and utterly beautiful.”

 

Nicole Callräm and Donna Pucciani independently selected the same poem as the best poem submitted, so first place goes to Jonathan Yungkans.

Placed in a Puzzling Light, and Moving*

amid pomegranate and persimmon trees
rooted in shale
whose layers
are pages in a book
or the center of a yellow rosebud

unrolling itself.
I squint
and note legs
which have grown from the sides of words,
crawling caterpillars,

and wonder which of these words
might fly
given time in a jade-colored chrysalis
to change meaning
as words and caterpillars are apt to do

in the shadow
of a butterfly
across my reckoning—
a monarch
fluttering from a blue plumbago hedge

on its yearly migration southbound—
my eyes
on their migration southbound,
in and out of focus.
Age encourages them to misbehave

like errant kids,
following the bad habit of my mind
to wander,
climb where they’ve been told not to go—
if a habit can be called bad

to be a child,
watching sentences writhe on paper
in quiet amazement,
waiting for syntax to take wing,
to catch light and a breeze.

~ Jonathan Yungkans

*Title taken from the name-poem to the collection Some Trees by John Ashbery

Puccini says this is “a brilliant first-person narrative exploring the mind and failing vision of an elder, and integrating the imagery of nature with the love of words on a page. Skillfully developed, beautifully paced, with a dignity of voice and diction.”

Nicole Callräm, the other judge, agreed: "I appreciate the way the poet plays with patterns of nature and how this idea interacts with the physical and mental trends of aging.  The imagery is bright and fresh and the feeling of bugs and words marching across the page and through the poem itself fills the verse with light and life.  The last two lines are beautiful, injecting breath and air into the closing of this moment."

 

You can read the poem by John Ashbery from which Yungkans took his title at https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/some-trees.html.

 

Each poet retains copyright of his or her own poem.

 

Congratulations to these three winners for their excellent poems, and also to the three poets selected for Honorable Mentions.

 

First honorable mention goes to Ron Pullins for his poem, “The desert proves.” Pucciani’s comment: “Simplicity and careful craft characterize this brief glimpse into a relationship and the externalities of geography. A beauty.” Callräm also commented on Pullins’ poem: "The use of line breaks and spareness of language paint vivid imagery that jumps off the page and engages the reader.  I was immediately drawn to the setting, and think that framing the topic of aging as the lifecycle of desert flora is bold and compelling.  The poet's use of repetition lends a sense of calm and eternity to the piece."

The other two honorable mentions, with Puccini’s comments are:

“Slipping” by Christy Schwan. “A realistic family portrait, all too familiar in its exploration of inner and outer details of encroaching dementia.”

“Assurance” by Peggy Trojan. “Lovely piece, clear and focused in its apt contrast of past and present affections.”

 

Bios:

Nicole Callräm is a nomadic bureaucrat and disciple of existence in all her life-affirming and confusing manifestations.  She adores rideshare bikes, red wine, and Osmanthus flowers (preferably a mix of the three...all at once).  Nicole has been published in A Shanghai Poetry Zine, Nude Studio, Kissing Dynamite, and Alluvium.  You can find her on Twitter at @YiminNicole. 

 

Maryann Hurtt’s midlife crisis was playing hockey with Sheboygan's Lady Lakers. But maybe more than anything she savors the memory of skating with her father on a canal next to the Potomac River. Her new book, Once Upon a Tar Creek: Mining for Voices came out 2021.

Donna Pucciani has a Ph.D. in Humanities from NYU and taught at the high school and college level for several decades. She is the author of six books and three chapbooks of poetry. Now retired from teaching, she lives in Wheaton and continues to write.

Ron Pullins is a fiction writer, playwright, and poet working in Tucson AZ. His works in fiction, poetry and drama have been published in numerous journals including Typishly, Southwest Review, Shenandoah, etc. A list can be found at www.pullins.com

Kelly Boyer Sagert is a freelance writer and poet living in Lorain, Ohio. She is the scriptwriter for the Emmy-nominated/award-winning documentary, “Trail Magic: The Grandma Gatewood Story.”

Christy Schwan is a former hippie chick turned business owner capitalist. Now retired, she is pursuing an "encore" career as an author/poet. A native Hoosier, rock hound, wild berry picker, wildflower seeker, astronomy studier, and quiet sports lover of kayaking, canoeing, snowshoeing and loon spotting. Her work has been published in Chicken Soup for the Soul, Ariel Anthology, 8142 Review, and 2022 Wisconsin Poet's Calendar. 

Peggy Trojan, age eighty-nine, published her first poem when she was seventy-seven. Her latest release, River, won second in the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Chapbook contest in 2021. It also won an award of Outstanding Achievement from the Wisconsin Library Association. Sheis the author of two full collections and five chapbooks. Her books areavailable on Amazon. 

Jonathan Yungkans is a Los Angeles-based writer and photographer whose work has appeared in Gyroscope Review, Panoply, Synkroniciti and a number of other publications. His second poetry chapbook, Beneath a Glazed Shimmer, won the 2019 Clockwise Chapbook Competition and was published by Tebor Bach in 2021.

 

 

Check back on February 1 for the next Poetry Challenge.

 

 

© Wilda Morris

 

 

 

 

Winning Poems about November

 

 

John O’Conner, the judge for this month selected three winning poems. Third placed goes to Melissa Huff for “Where Do All the Colors Go.:

Where Do All the Colors Go

As blues intensify above—
before they fade to winter white—
we crush the russet underfoot,
along with marigold and dusty
orange, grind them with the red
of brick.  But where’s the verdant green?
November swaddles it with cold
and cradles it within the earth
to birth again in fertile spring.

~ Melissa Huff

O’Conner commented, “This painterly poem captures the rainbow of autumn in direct language with nice sounds and a sprightly meter. I like the hopeful turn to the forthcoming “verdant green” that we know will come again…eventually! The second half reminded me of the great folk song The Dutchman – whose title character “thinks the tulips bloom beneath the snow” -- by Michael Peter Smith. (Michael was a brilliant musician and songwriter, and a friend of mine, who passed last year).”  

 

The second place poem is very different. It is a “cadralor.” The poet explained this form: “The cadralor is a five-stanza non-narrative form created by poets Christopher Cadra and Lori Howe in August 2000. Each stanza is meant to stand as an independent poem. While these stanzas are meant to be contextually unrelated, this does not preclude thematic connections which may surface in varying contexts in different sections of the complete work. The fifth stanza should stand as the crucible in which the work's underlying themes come together, though these themes can be implied or inferred, rather than implicitly stated. For more info on the form, please visit https://gleampoets.org/.”

 

Sections of Understanding Were Imposed

a cadralor, title after John Ashbery 

 

1

November’s a devil month down to the name—Samhain in Irish—

and leaves a rainbow of splintered glass. Black eyes reflect trees,

which, ebony-barked atop gold and rust, hoot with owlish hunger.

I’m overrun as the vacant church at Saint-Étienne-Le-Vieux-Caen,

ivy trapezes beneath stone arches and a brook speaks in tongues,

babbling along the nave. Church scene’s Photoshopped, total fake,

but the whiff of moldering foliage genuine enough to summon it.

 

2

The article I’m reading states the universe is locked in one long

sequestration. Galaxies move lock-step without gravity to keep it

flush as a dinner plate, upon which to place Thanksgiving turkey.

Skip green-bean casserole. Save room for dark matter cosmology.

It’s quantum entanglement, like a wife loudly berating a husband,

while family and guests listen, not to buy more Girl Scout cookies,

he’s too fat and suburban, as if the man sees Jesus in a Thin Mint. 

3

I keep getting concerned calls for my afterlife’s extended warranty.

Tell the robo-caller to get lost, it starts prostituting—postulating

or proselytizing. Like being on the phone with a snake in your ear,

slithering between weeds, tongue flicking to tickle the grey matter,

twisting as if a brain was cork, designed for a serpentine corkscrew.

Maybe I should be thankful for metal screw lids on whiskey bottles

or make some Irish coffee and recite my prayers through its cream.

 

4

Sun croons a love song in neutrinos, fusing protons into lithium,

which withheld me from dreaming, decelerated my internal clock.

It took a year to start dreaming again, think of the Moon Rabbit

when I looked at the night sky, saw half a rabbit—the head half—

and remembered the story: Rabbit throwing itself into a cook fire

because it had nothing but its own flesh to feed an old beggar,

the rabbit in the moon a reflection of this act—another love song.

 

5

Rain or snow coming. Nothing hollow in the quiet as grass sways,

careless about which way wind blows and caught in a querl for it.

John Lennon chants “Number Nine.” November’s out for blood—

its nineness a noneness—name for the Old English blood-month.

Name all the animals sacrificed while the song plays backwards,

to appease the gods, stock the larder for blizzard and apocalypse.

A snippet of Lakme’s flower duet as red snowflakes begin to fall.

 

 ~ Jonathan Yungkans

 

The judge’s remarks: “Ok, I’ll admit I had not come across this form before. But this poem immediately struck me with its lively language(s). I love the code switching here – the jumps in diction from low (“Tell the robo-caller to get lost) to high (“sun croons a love song in neutrinos”). Its abstractions hint at the month of November, with the bookending first and last lines of the poem nodding directly at the season. The title anticipates the readers’ anxiety over the kaleidoscope of images that follow, but the author’s love of words here has a momentum all its own.”

 

First place went to a poem in another form: a cento, in which each line comes from a different poem:

 

All Souls’ Day

There, at the pivot
of the seasons
a low light is floating
like smoke
in a rising wind.

It fades in, fades out
again, and cloud shadows
chill through our skin
like a brushstroke
in a fog.

Afraid to be alone,
a body without
defense
succumbs to a slow ache—

a reenactment or a revenant?

How much we carry around
the old faces
now blind and hunkered in the earthen air.

November, late in the day
and the glow of the sunset scattered.

Planet growing colder, little
corkscrew of smoke, a wisp of blue
emptiness
fading into night.

~ Patrice Boyer Claeys

Cento Sources:  D. H. Lawrence, May Sarton, Elizabeth Bishop, David Ignatow, Stanley Kunitz, Kirill Medvedev, Brendan Galvin, Alice B. Fogel, Jack Vian, Giovanni Pascoli, Robert Pinsky, Michelle S. Reed, Engracia Melendez, Peter Munro, Jake Adam York, Martha Collins, Robert Duncan, John Wilkinson, Sherod Santos, John M. Ridland, John Gould Fletcher, Theophile Gautier, Stepen Dunn, David Mason

 

John O’Conner explains his choice of this poem for first place: “A main challenge in writing this kind of poem (a cento) is the difficulty in suturing together lines from such different voices. But this poem expertly captures the essence of November by seamlessly weaving together lines from 25 different poets. I especially like the simultaneous attention to the freighted (“how much we carry around) and the fleeting (“a wisp of smoke…fading into night) senses of the 11^th month. And I enjoyed the movement into the interior world of the speaker which imitates our desire to escape the chill of the season.”

 

 

Congratulations to the three winners, and thanks to everyone who entered the November Poetry Challenge. Each of the winners retains rights to his or her own poem. 

Come back soon to check out the December Poetry Challenge.

 

 

Bios:

Patrice Boyer Claeys is the author of three poetry volumes: Lovely Daughter of the Shattering (Kelsay Books, 2019), The Machinery of Grace (Kelsay Books, 2020), and Honey from the Sun (with Gail Goepfert, Blurb.com, 2020). A collaborative chapbook, This Hard Business of Living, (also with Goepfert), is due from Seven Kitchens Press in 2021. Patrice has served as a judge of Wilda Morris’s Poetry Challenge and has been nominated for both Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes. More at www.patriceboyerclaeys.com.

Melissa Huff feeds her poetry from many sources—the mystery of the natural world, the way humans everywhere connect and the importance of spirit.  Her love for reading poetry aloud won her awards in 2019 and 2020 in the BlackBerry Peach Prizes for Poetry: Spoken and Heard, sponsored by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies.  Recent publishing credits include Gyroscope Review, Blue Heron Review, Persimmon Tree, and Northern Colorado Writers’ Chiarascuro: Anthology of Virtue & Vice.  Melissa has been frequently sighted making her way – by car, train or airplane – between Illinois and Colorado.

John S. O’Connor teaches English at New Trier High School and Education at Northwestern. He has written two books on the teaching of writing, two books of haiku, and three chapbooks of poems. His poems have appeared in places such as Rhino, Bennington Review, Poetry East and The Cortland Review. O’Connor has written essays and reviews in places like Colorado Review, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Schools, and Under the Sun. His last two essays were Named Notable in Best American Essays, and one also in Best American Sports Writing. He is the creator and host of Schooled: the Podcast www.schooledthepodcast.com.

Jonathan Yungkans is a Los Angeles-based writer and photographer whose work has appeared in Gleam: a Journal of the Cadralor, MacQueen's Quinterly, Synkroniciti and a number of other publicaitons and was recently included in The International Literary Quarterly's ongoing anthology of California poets. His second poetry chapbook, Beneath a Glazed Shimmer, won the 2019 Clockwise Chapbook Competition and was published by Tebor Bach in 2021.

© Wilda Morris