JUDGE'S REPORT FOR 2017 BRONZE QUILL
POETRY AWARD
I thank the esteemed Society of Women Writers (WA) for giving me the privilege of selecting the 2017 prize-winners for the annual Bronze Quill Award. It never ceases to amaze me that our WA can keep on producing wonderful poets. In fact these entrants can well and truly match those of competitions in other states of Australia. The quiverful of entries handed to me (if l may be permitted to extend the metaphor of the quill slightly) vindicates my high opinion of our local poets. So many topics, so many different kinds of poetry! I kept turning the pages with ever increasing envy at the talents revealed in poem after poem.
Frequently when I attend poetry prize-givings I hear the judges trundling on with lots of advice to competitors and wonder sometimes if they are relieving their frustrations about ploughing through heaps of entries that disappointed them. So then they lecture the hopefuls who are actually only waiting for the announcement of the results. If I am an entrant in such a competition, the more advice I receive from such well-meaning poetic authorities, the more my heart sinks. I keep thinking I must have committed most of the sins they have enumerated. Then my chances of success seem to evaporate like some wonderfully dry deodorant under the armpit.
So I am going to give very little advice today. In fact, the Bronze Quill entries have convinced me that, if only I could qualify, I ought to attend whatever poetry classes The Society of Women Writers conducts for its members, and then my poetry might come up to the standards of the winning entries that I am about to reveal.
What I have noticed recently on the poetry-writing scene is that traditional poetry writing forms such as the ode, sonnet, villanelle, ballade, cinquain, naga-uta, ghazal, pantoum, rondeau, epithalamion and even the acrostic, are less often seen these days, more's the pity. Most poets seem preoccupied with free verse. And that form doesn't seem to pay much attention to syllable counting. Free verse poets wanting to avoid rhymes might choose blank verse (like Shakespeare or Wordsworth). It does at least have the regularity often syllables to the line. There is a case for any use of form and repetition in poetry because to most people that is the quality that distinguishes it from ordinary prose (prose is what we have been speaking for most of our lives!). And, as even children know, part of the delight of poetry is in anticipating the rhythm or meter and expecting the rhymes to work out.
A real poet might pride herself on knowing the distinction between rising and falling rhythms, the many different kinds of rhyming schemes and other such intricacies. You might not scale the dizziest heights of Paruassus with your own poems but there's no excuse for not knowing your 'trade'. For those who claim to be judged a poet, I know no better reference than Frances Stillman. She devotes more than a hundred pages to offering a poetic apprenticeship in her famous Poet's Manual and Rhyming Dictionary. I strongly recommend it.
But one more available bonus for writing in verse is memorisation or 'mnemonics'. Before poetry was generally published in print for the average reader, it just had to be committed to memory. How else could you even keep the number of days in the month in your possession? As we all know it is far easier to commit to memory words that are arranged more deliberately than those of ordinary prose utterances. Not only do the meter and rhyme help us to 'learn' poems by heart, but other repetitions such as adding a 'chorus', as in songs, make it far easier to memorise verse than prose. When you also add alliteration, especially in those patterns the earliest English poets relied on (before they started copying rhyme from French and Latin verses), you have a lot of ways by which poets give themselves a much better chance of their creations staying around in the minds of their admirers.
It is by adding formality to the lines. And of course there are all those figures of speech that make poetry so colourful-helping to concentrate our minds and contributing to the poem's memorability.
This brings me to the four Commended poems for this year's Bronze Quill awards, so tuck it away in your heads that you too may like to increase your chances in poetry competitions by first of all making it harder for the judges to forget you. My first selection of these 'commendable' poems has used 'pattern' very cleverly. The poem is entitled "Optical Illusion" and is by Rosie Barter.
She uses repetition marvellously. This is because she started with the old argument that you cannot fold a sheet of paper more than seven times. Then she goes on to deliver a biography reflecting the rule of repeating numeral patterns from music to the hours in the day, maths at school, patterns in art school to astronomy-'She folds A4 in four, unfolds and folds again
Again/ again/ again/ again/ again/ again/ again. '
The next of the commended is "Last Dance" by Maria Bonar. It is another little life narrative. The poet's protagonist is a lady ultimately smitten by a bushman or farmer who, although he at first is 'smelling faintly/ of horses and sheep', becomes her rescuing hero in a bushfire. Alas! Before things can lead to marriage the hero has had to leave from Greenmount's "Blackboy Hill Camp" for the warring fields of France in World War I, never to return. So their haring of 'the last dance' at a social function at the Camp really is just that. The title takes on some more irony when we get to the end of the poem, an image of the narrator's fiance as he rides 'through the smoke/ at Villers Bretonneux' among exploding bombs is really-'last dance!'
The third Commended poem 'to nowhere' is by Rosie Barter and bears a title somewhat reminding us of Samuel Butler's famous novel Erewhon, which of course is 'nowhere' spelled backwards. The theme is a medical one which is ironic because the same Samuel Butler proposed that illness would eventually be regarded as a punishable crime. Determinedly a free verse poem, 'to nowhere ' tries very hard to put us into the situation of a family where a loved one is diagnosed with breast cancer. The daughter is at first told she is ok, only for the decision to be revoked and the dread saga of 'chemo' surgery, more surgery and more anguish. Interestingly, in this well narrated free verse story, the poem concludes with the ultimate rhythmic effect-perhaps recalling that memorability in poetry is often best reinforced by metrics-listen to the run of heavy 'spondees' 1 in the last two lines. Unforgettable!
'... dalai lama smiles! reminds me there is no god/ a slow drum beats. '
The fourth of the Commended is, appropriately ironic, especially for its title, "Forgetting" by Rosie Barter. It is one of those stories where the reader has to work really hard to pick up all the clues about an apparently failed relationship. The tale is neatly done and the prospect of the rejected but persistent admirer "grinning/through the key-hole " stays with the reader. In a way it suggests the ironical self-image of the speaker too. And the irony of the title-yes, something you can't forget-and the essence of a good poem.
Now to the Highly Commended poems. I chose three fantastic efforts, beginning with "Parade of Snakes" by Sue Colyer. The poet of course acknowledges D H Lawrence's famous Sicilian poem "Snake" from his 1923 visit to Taormina. Setting aside my own regard for Lawrence's work, especially his free verse, I feel this poem has its own sterling qualities. Sure there are phrases that allude to Lawrence but "Parade of Snakes" is not set in Sicily. It describes an unusual procession of serpents seemingly in a rainforest (presumably Australian) setting. As the poem proceeds, it becomes somewhat of a one-sided meeting with Lawrence in the manner of that master of the dramatic monologue in poetry, Robert Browning:
'What wonder to have had a chat!/ To talk with Lawrence, to vision his snake both admired and feared '
I would have to say, this is a good-humoured poem, something of a palimpsest or ekphrastic work, the subject of which, snakes, might make readers otherwise uneasy. But is the power of humour, to make snakes entertaining, I'm sure.
The second of the Highly Commended is by ... and the simple title "Balance" gives no clue to the content. However, as a male driver, recently incapacitated with a broken foot, I identify easily with the partner of the driver in this poem. It is true that sometimes you feel you have only really discovered a person close to you for the first time, when that person takes on an unaccustomed role, such as becoming your chauffeur. All those uncontrollable instincts to put on the brakes, signal, watch out for hazards and so forth still have the new passenger behaving like some wild victim of Asperger's Syndrome but without the compensating gift of genius. The poem has far more to offer than the source of the initial humour for it is clear that more serious problems explain the passenger's abstaining from driving. Memory loss is a rising problem now, as we all live longer, particularly poets, but in "Balance" the hidden tragedies of this ailment are treated very sensitively.
The final poem to be Highly Commended by me is "cosmology and life" by Frances Richardson which covers unexpected ground in only 15 lines. Informed by knowledge and terminology from astronomy and space technology, the poet ponders on the black holes of inevitable ageing, or so it seems. String theory, Fermi's Paradox2, spectroscopy and the Hubble telescope are invoked. Certainly this is a poem where the poet (in the manner of the Renaissance writers and artists) embraces the progress of human scientific knowledge in a most forthright manner. Many of the greatest writers in history looked forward in the light of science rather than retreating into Celtic and other romantic twilights.
And now to the Second-prize Winner-"Muresk" by Lyn Cairns is a poem that appealed to me personally because of my great love of our Wheatbelt landscapes that I have spent a lifetime travelling through often in search of inspiration for stories and poems. Both sides of my family had important associations with farming and mining in this part of WA and my first teaching of high school students in the Avon Valley is associated with Northam. Furthermore, I did much of my enforced military training in the area where this poem is set. But in any case, it is the intrinsic qualities of the theme, content and form of this poem which made it emerge a little above its fellows in this year's Bronze Quill entries-an entry list that was remarkable in its even quality. The precision of the language in "Muresk" and the memorable images conveyed in highly original figures of speech are its accomplishments. White cockatoos are said to 'applique the treetops/ With white ephemeral flowers', for example. To write with such apposite metaphors is a sign of the very proficient versifier. The other characteristic I admire greatly here is a kind of simplicity and purity of both image and sense that belies the very significant poetic skill which such expression requires.
Coming to the Winner at last, I must congratulate Fran Graham, whose poem "After the Blast" is one of a number of entries which tackled the difficult subject of the aftermath of war. In this case it is a more recent example of such conflict, in Iraq. All wars that have involved Australian soldiers since the Boer War have taken servicemen and women away from their own homeland to fight on foreign continents. The inevitable result is that their families bear not only the loneliness of that absence but then there is the challenge of the rehabilitation of damaged bodies and souls when servicemen and women return. This poem is a remarkable and sensitive saga of such a process.
Of course we know much more about 'post-traumatic stress' these days but we see in this poem we see how loved-ones have had to learn about on their own terms (at their own cost). This is a poem that with enormous gravity re assembles the battleground experiences and then the long recovery saga
'He had to keep on/repeating himself It caused embarrassment. Like defeat./lt was beginning to look like a hill he had to climb. '
So eventually the returned soldier required clinical treatment until he could-‘forget the madness, his and the world's, and articulate/clearly that he's come through, flying like a bird/ the ceasefire resting easy in his head '
The metaphor of the psychological 'ceasefire' is an admirable ending to a poem that from the beginning signals that it will always operate in the poetic mode-using language with the concentration, elevation and organisation which distinguishes it clearly from prose. And then we will want to remember "ceasefire" because the poet has gone to that kind of trouble for us.
I congratulate this year's winner and second placed contestant and the commended entries. Finally I want to applaud all the other poets who entered for the 2017 Bronze Quill Award. You are gifts to Western Australian poetry.
Glen Phillips, November, 2017
1 Spondees in metrical terms are a double-stressed foot-like 'ding-dong'
2 The apparent certainty of the existence of aliens
