Skip to main content

THE WINNER OF THE FOURTH FORTNIGHT POETRY PRIZE IS....


Dominic Leonard
Runner-up, Meg Eden
Dominic Leonard is an undergraduate studying English at Christ Church, Oxford. His poems have appeared in IRIS, the Oxford Review of Books, The Kindling and the Poetry Business Book of New Poets (forthcoming), and in 2017 he won the Poetry Live competition. He is the President of Oxford University Poetry Society for 2017-18. 
a new poet with a future
Judge's Citation (by Oliver Jones)
This fortnight's raft of submissions contained many poems remarkable in their willingness to push their poet's expressive range to the very edge of non-sequitur.  None did so with such superb panache as Dominic Leonard's winning submission, which stretched personification to its logical limit  - as did our runner up, Meg Eden in the highly effective 'Alzheimers, In Which My Grandmother Is A Blueberry Bush'. 
Dominic's gift for accelerating his abstractions up to an impressive tempo is typical of a cluster of emerging British poets - Daisy Lafarge springs to mind, as does Andrew Fentham. His dislocated narration, simultaneously anatomical and cosmic,  gives his poems a freedom and freshness that rewards multiple readings.
Choosing among such strong pieces was no easy feat, but ultimately it was the pleasing prosody of 'No God Is Like A Vapour' - Dominic's paean to the deep sea jellyfish - that set it apart. The words in this poem seem to drift apart on the page, scattered and disarticulated; a mood that's belied by the piece as a whole, which shows exemplary concision and focus. Like a Bartok variation, it turns sharply around its key image without ever allowing the reader to face it full-on, and reaches far beyond its subject matter towards something equally diffuse and ungraspable. A young poet to watch out for, certainly.

No god is like a vapour *
Stygiomedusa Gigantea



no  god  is  like  a  vapour           gods are   as oil   & sponge   as this      here  are  my   droplets  :   here  are   my tendrils   &  their           galactic
 
melting           here    :  i am   a dish   of  brine  &  pink  water          watch :   i will  show  my face  to  death       except   do  not watch          i can  only 
 
  perform           down here          here    under  a  thousand   atmospheres in   dreams   i was  not   licked into this   salt existence        down in      these 
 
 murky  whirlpools       not  licked  into  this almost-life           in   dreams  i am shocking  everything   with   my  hot twitching knowledge          but i   fear
 
corners &   small  rooms  & i      can do  nothing  but   atrophy this   almost-flesh  through  the           water        in  dreams i   am  not  naked   &  afraid        in
 
dreams i   have  been  given    hands  so  that  i  might   hold  myself
 
 
 
 
 
copyright the author 2017
 
* due to blogger limitations this poem may not display its full typographical design on all viewings

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".