Judge's Comments: Poetry

by Louis McKee

I spent much of the recent holidays reading, and thinking about, the more than 400 poems submitted to this year's City Paper contest. Predictably, there was a great range of styles, of interests, of musics. There are a lot of different drummers out there, and each has a song and dance like no other.

Considering the state of the world, though, and the inescapable urgency of the day's headlines, I was surprised to find that most of the poems were personal, and that many gravitated toward, if not exactly into, strict forms and metric marches. The entries were decidedly urban, more lyric and meditative than narrative. Old Walt and Dr. Williams would be pleased, I'm sure, to hear the voices, the varied carols, colloquial and precise, truly of an American grain.

Some poems finally stood out; these are, to me, the best of a fine lot.

There is the one in which a man fiddles in his loneliness ("Jonathan's Island Letter" by Sarah Dews, first runner-up), finding reels and jigs and other more natural sounds at his fingertips on a quiet October island. "Playing alone, I sometimes forget/ the beginnings of things,// … I lose you sometimes, like the songs;/ you disappear from view/ and the time outside at night is hard,/ thinking about driftwood and geometry."

And another one ("Winter Notes" by Natalie Hope McDonald, second runner-up), which celebrates the mind, and the assault of stimuli and stream-of-consciousness, as the speaker entertains one thought after another, a catalog in couplets, "the stoop and the snow,/ Mahler, tail pipes, pancakes// and carless days/late in the year smelling woodchuck …" -- any one of them worth sharing with Aristotle, or even a metaphorical sleeping dog. "There was a wild pigeon/ attending to the past// in slow motion …"

In a more formal impulse, ("Sestina" by Sarah Dews, third runner-up): "When I connect you to my daring dreams/ each wistful knot I tie forges a net." But nets can save, while webs entangle. "And though it shimmers every time we move,/ I know it will ensnare me, limb by limb,/ when, later on, the truths of you expand/ beyond the edges of this fiction field." Loving attention to music, its rhythm and sounds and the mining of rich, sensual imagery, whether in strict or open forms, is a delight in itself.

The poem that jumped out at me, though, and so, the winner, was "Pawnshop" by Sean Webb. "All failure ends here," we're told, "and the failures are beautiful." This is a tour of the shop on the corner, or the new place that just popped up on the avenue, the one with the three balls in front, broken dreams and lost hopes displayed floor-to-ceiling inside. The tone of the poem, like the shop itself, is at once rich and sad; one gets a sense of the lives that have been put on hold with the goods. "Failed marriages, failed music, failed attempts. …" Rings, saxophones and tools, all a bit tarnished, but still with promise. And the toolboxes, "red as shamed faces, heavy as lapsed mortgages and drug habits." If we're lucky, we are there to look around, to find an inexpensive spark for our day; some of us, though, gingerly carry a package that is always worth more than anyone believes.

"Pawnshop" is a solid poem, and the writer of these lines knows the value of things, the weight and the subtlety of words, the wonders of sound. It is a pleasure to find such a keen ear and a sharp eye working in tandem, and then to share that poem -- these poems -- with all of you.

Louis McKee has been a fixture of the Philadelphia poetry scene for more than a quarter-century. The author of Schuylkill County (Wampeter, 1982), The True Speed of Things (Slash & Burn, 1984) and nine other collections, his most recent books are River Architecture: Poems from Here & There 1973-1993 (Cynic, 1999), Right as Rain (Nova House, 2000), Loose Change (Marsh River Editions, 2001) and a volume in the Pudding House Greatest Hits series. A longtime editor of the Painted Bride Quarterly, he returned to guest-edit three special issues, celebrating the work of Etheridge Knight and John Logan, as well as a retrospective 20th-anniversary volume. He currently operates Banshee Press and edits the little magazine One Trick Pony.

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