November 2022 Poetry Challenge: November Poems

 

November by Ludovico Mattioli
(Late 17^th Century)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Here it is November again. Halloween is past and the end of the year is just around the corner. But November has a character of its own—a character that depends, of course, on what part of the globe you live on. In the U.S.A. on November 1, the baseball season is ending, with the World Series overlapping the early stages of the football season. Many families are thinking about Thanksgiving, often celebrated with the traditional roast turkey and with pumpkin pie.

I have read that when General Dwight D. Eisenhower was commanding the allied forces in Europe during World War II, some Europeans were surprised when he asked for pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving dinner. Evidently, pumpkin was considered a peasant food, not fit for a big celebration. But maybe they hadn’t eaten pumpkin pie, pumpkin coffeecake, pumpkin bars, pumpkin cheesecake, etc., etc. I wonder if those same people would consider chili a peasant food? I think of it as a “comfort food,” one especially good for the cooler weather we experience in November.

I found two poems about November—not about Thanksgiving or football. Both were written by poets from Wisconsin. Enjoy their take on November, and they decided how you would write about this month.

I Like November

I like the grey and woody way
November leaves a filigree of trees
stripped and spare
untidy tatters at their feet
            Let it go

I like the grey and weary way
November hunkers down
to stubble in exhausted fields
            Give it a rest

Spring is so insistent
Summer so full of itself
Fall tries to feed everyone
but not November
November says
            Give it a rest

Make soup
with what’s left
from the harvest
Find a good book and light a fire
            It’s almost dark

~ Elizabeth Harmatys Park

from Theater of Seasons. Used by permission.

 

November Bargain

If I could, I would bargain for a day
like this November day at any time,
when I can grasp the sun with fingertips,
feel it throbbing through my marrow.

If I could but catch again the last
warm breeze, jostle it from
where I stand to the dog whose nose
advises him that reprieve is brief,
and he would forward it to jack o'lanterns
hanging on to autumn, their fixed smiles
of astonishment appropriate to this day.

For another day like this I would suffer
the scratch of branches as they etch
their signatures upon my seasoned soul
marking me as offering.

~ June Nirschl

from Slightly Off Q. Used by Permission

 

Some On-line Resources for November Poems:

The “Interesting Literature” website has a list of what it considers the best poems for November. To read an entire poem, click on its title. https://interestingliterature.com/2019/10/the-best-poems-for-november/.

Discover Poetry has 21 November poems to recommend at https://discoverpoetry.com/poems/november-poems/.

 

The November Challenge:

The challenge for this month is a poem on the theme of November. Your poem may be literal or metaphoric, serious or humorous. It can be for children or for adults. It can be about the month as a whole, or about some specific November holiday, activity, or experience. Be creative! Note that the blog format does not accommodate shaped poems or long lines; if a poem has long lines, they are used, they have to be broken in two, with the second part indented (as in the poem “Lilith,” one of the May 2018 winners), or the post has to use small print. Note, too, that long poems are at a disadvantage.

Poems could be disqualified if the guidelines are not followed. Submit your poem by November 15.

1-Title your poem unless it is in a form that discourages titles.

2-Single-space.

3-Whether you put your poem in the body of your email or in an attachment, please put your submission in this order:

Your poem

Your name

Publication data if your poem was previously published

A brief third-person bio

Your email address – it saves me a lot of work if you put your email address at the end of your submission.

4-Please keep the poem on the left margin (standard 1” margin). Do not put any part of your submission on a colored background. No colored type. Do not use a fancy font and do not use a header or footer.

5-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. Poems already used on this blog are not eligible to win, but the poets may submit a different poem.

6-The deadline is midnight, Central Time Zone, November 15. Poems submitted after the deadline will not be considered. There is no charge to enter, so there are no monetary rewards. Winners are published on this blog.

7-Please don’t stray too from “family-friendly” language (some children and teens read this blog).

8- No simultaneous submissions, please. You should know by the end of the month whether or not your poem will be published.

9-The poet retains copyright on each poem. If a previously unpublished poem wins and is published elsewhere later, please give credit to this blog. I do not register copyright with the US copyright office, but by US law, the copyright belongs to the writer unless the writer assigns it to someone else.

10-Decision of the judge or judges is final.

11-If the same poet wins three months in a row (which has not happened thus far), he or she will be asked not to submit the following two months.

12-Send one poem only.

How to Submit Your Poem:

1-Send your poem to wildamorris4[at]gmail[dot]com (substitute the @ sign for “at” and a . for “dot”). The poem must respond in some way to the specific challenge for the month.

2-Put “November Poetry Challenge Submission” FOLLOWED BY YOUR NAME in the subject line of your email. 

3-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.

4-Poems may be pasted into an email or sent as an attachment or both (Doc, Docx, rich text or plain text; 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 capital letters); your name at the bottom of the poem).  Put everything in the order listed above.

6-Also, please do not use multiple spaces instead of punctuation 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 preferred.

 

Bios

June Nirschl has been a resident of Door County since 2000. She has been fortunate in finding a flourishing community of poets. Her career included teaching high school English and serving as a municipal clerk.

Elizabeth Harmatys Park is a past recipient of the Jade Ring First Poetry Prize awarded by the Wisconsin Writers Association. Her poetry has been published in journals, anthologies, and the Wisconsin Poetry Calendar. Park writes with Authors Echo in Burlington, WI.

 

 

Poets retain copyright for their own poems.

 

© 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