|
|
 |
Contests : War Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2010 : Judges' Comments
Thanks to everyone who entered our ninth annual War Poetry Contest. We received 656 entries of 1-3 poems each. Our contest began in the wake of the September 11, 2001 tragedy, and much of the winning work from our early years emerged out of a struggle for words to understand the shattering of our premillennial complacency. Now, after several years of low-grade wars whose purpose has become as murky as their termination point, our poets are turning their attention to violence's aftermath—those visible and invisible casualties that remain long after official victory is declared.
The Judging
This year, our two judges reversed roles. Winning Writers Editor Jendi Reiter read every submission first, generating a shortlist of about 75 entries after three rounds of elimination. Jendi and Assistant Judge Ellen LaFleche shared several lively discussions about the shortlist, reading our top picks aloud to identify strengths and weaknesses in the poems' music and pacing. When it comes to targeting cliches, Ellen shoots "expert".
Our demand for originality extended beyond particular words and phrases. We have read thousands of war poems that could have been describing the same stock footage. Give us a fresh voice, like young Wil, the simple-minded Confederate soldier who narrates Peter Taylor's dialect poem "Antietam", or the otherworldly speaker of "Scarlet Seconds After the Last March", presiding over Armageddon with bloodthirsty glee. Is he God or the devil, or a crazed backwoods preacher for whom they are one and the same? We weren't sure, but we got chills.
War poets face the challenge of making a well-known event seem fresh. One technique is to create memorable characters whose unfamiliar perspective is in tension with their expected surroundings. Charles Elliott's "Col. Gabriel", for instance, has used the skills from his closeted existence to become the perfect Secret Service man—emotionless, invisible, with nothing to lose. Susan Gubernat's "Trojan Women" are college students acting, somewhat ineptly and with petty rivalries, in Euripides' play by that name, while the Vietnam War breaks into their cloistered world. The African-American soldiers in Robin Coste Lewis' poems of World War II find more freedom in the war zones of Europe than in their segregated homeland after they've won. We were especially impressed by the range of topics this year, from poetry about the Native Alaskan experience, to the art of folding paper cranes, to women's domestic isolation on the homefront.
The Winners
Poems of epic scope have ruled our winners' circle in recent years, but this year we gave top honors to three writers who were able to sum up the intense, contradictory experiences of war—its erotic charge, anger, grief, camaraderie and dark humor—in the space of a single page.
Gerardo Mena's first-prize poem "So I Was a Coffin" personifies objects from the battlefield—flags, weapons, bandages—as metaphors for dutiful and doomed men. An instrument in the hands of others, the soldier does his best at an impossible mission and takes the blame for its failure. Mena's measured, elegiac lines combine a solemn respect for his comrades' sacrifice with quiet outrage at the exploitation of their naivete.
Mena is a decorated Iraqi Freedom Veteran who served in Special Operations with the Reconnaissance Marines for six years before returning to America to finish his higher education. We were honored to discover that this is his first poetry publication, and sure that it won't be his last.
Bruce Lack's second-prize poems "FNG", "Get Some", and "Hadji" give us a raw, uncensored look at how combat breaks down and reshapes one's identity. ("FNG" is military slang for "[expletive] new guy".) From the first day of training, the new recruits are bluntly ordered to accept the abnormal as normal. Back home, the reverse occurs, as the veteran struggles to navigate ordinary life with a personality transformed by rage, guilt, adrenalin surges, and boredom with peacetime's banal chores.
Anna Scotti's third-prize poem "This Is How I'll Tell It When I Tell It to Our Children" takes a novel and effective approach to depicting atrocities against civilians. The poem rewrites each violent gesture as something beautiful and innocent, a trauma-erasing strategy that is heartbreaking because the truth of the scene always bleeds through the lovely fable. By showing us what humanity could be, she moves us to lament what we are.
Sending work to a writing contest is an act of courage and risk. We both know from personal experience how scary it can be to send a piece of writing to be judged and ranked. We thank each and every entrant for their courage, their commitment to writing, and their willingness to tackle a painful subject. Whether or not a particular poem won a prize in this year's contest, the act of writing the poem was itself an act of courage and resistance against the destructive force of war.
Click here to read all
of the 2010 winning entries.
Click here to read
the winning entries from other years.
Click here for more comprehensive
advice for war poetry contestants.
Click here to enter
the current War Poetry Contest.
Jendi Reiter
Ellen LaFleche
|
 |
|
|