Posted: Sat Jul 01, 2017 12:13 pm
Many thanks to those who participated in making nominations for our IBPC submissions this month. We thank our nominees for allowing us the pleasure of having them represent WPF in the competition.
To our entrants, please look over the poems. The poems will be submitted on July 3rd, as they appear below. If the entrants have any edits or corrections to the poems, please send them to me at mjm@wildpoetryforum.com by the morning of July 3rd. If you come upon this notice late and you have edits, please send me any edits anyway. I will try to have the submission updated before it's sent to the judge.
As a reminder, if there are no or not enough IBPC nominations in any given month from the membership, we choose from the eligible poems (those poets who gave permission) from the prior month. So, if your poem was not selected in any given month, please know that you still might have an opportunity for it to be submitted the following month.
Congratulations to our entrants and best of luck in the competition!
Love,
M
__________________________________________________________________________________________
July 2017 IBPC Submissions
Poem # 1
Title: Like Lilacs
Author: Guy Kettelhack
Some lives are like the first apotheosis of the Spring:
beautiful and fleeting – incarnations of the prospect
and the promise of the most alluring loveliness that life
and Spring can bring – that bear repeating and repeating
as they manage to assay their lilting fragrant way to May,
their lilac scent an indescribable intoxication: made
unignorable by traces, faint opacities, of funk: the smell
of Death’s predation – more imminent than we could tell
by looking at them in the full veracities of bloom. Like lilacs,
when they’re cut and placed in vases in a room, they face
the final phases of their doom: in a trauma of aphasia,
incommunicado with the world that was their love and lot,
every floating beauty in them curls up into rot. Once they
were, now they’re not. Though when they die the Spring
of which they are the symbol won’t have reached a pinnacle,
that seasoned season has amassed from lilac lives enough
to know what pinnacles must be. Perhaps all lives
are more like lilacs than we want to see.
-END-
______________________
Poem # 2
Title: Another Planet in the Same Old Universe
Author: Don Schaeffer
It's Earth day 14 of the Mars mission. We wake in the middle of the Martian night. It doesn't matter. When we started this we knew everything would be relative and everything would be switched around and changed. We were not people, none of us were, who loved our lives on Earth so much that we couldn't just dump it. None of us had cherished routines or even special food likes. None of us were comforted that easily, that's how we were selected. The discomfort test is one of the most valid psychological tests ever formulated. Bless the Harvard professors who wrote it.
At the same time, the big shots were a little disappointed with the mission because things were not different or variable enough. This was hardly a challenge that tested any of us. There was solid sand at our well-covered and masked feet. We never flew when we jumped, even though we could jump pretty far. In the distance there were things we still called mountains and hills. The same old sun rose in the martian morning, even though it was so pale and small it made most of us laugh, an emasculated sun god. Ha ha!
Were we going home? I think so. That's what they told us. Soon. I could live with the fear. I like fear. It has a pleasant jiggle on my heart. Anyway what could happen? We could just continue our journey and travel to a lot stranger places.
We rise. We check everything to verify that nothing really happened. We nutrify; we expel; like the our microscopic fellow citizens we so carefully pasteurized out of our lives, ignoring what the gods of bugs wanted us to do--currying their disfavor. We believed our god was bigger than theirs and our god would defend us. But we ended up defending our god instead.
It is cold on Mars. We conserve heat and generate it slowly.
Why does this section of existence feel like home? We have never been here, yet we feel familiar--as if it were another room in a great house. It's subject to familiar rules--the rules we have followed since we popped--were carried and expelled into this territory around Old Sol.
On the 18th day of the Mars Mission, our cynical crew learned that the Archetype was coming. We were told that the being looked very strange, but was very mild, and that, somehow we all knew him, we had seen this being before. This being was the core of the neighborhood.
The great orb of the Archetype rose in the west of the Martian sky, just as the sun was making its thin, frail appearance in the east. In spite of the vacuum of space we could hear the song, as if it were sung by a million voices. It had at least a million eyes, surprisingly human-like with round pupils, Blinking in waves around the face. Kindness suffused the moist surfaces of the eyes, the sadness of eyes that could comprehend the limits. And somehow, we all remembered that face. We had all seen it in the past, while we were travelling from the space before.
-END-
____________________
Poem # 3
Title: Into the Void
Author: Elizabeth Koopman
Who will read my letters
to the Devil?
Should I put them in the fire
rather than the post?
Does some imp of a sub-demon,
Satan’s lowest aide,
read them with curled lip,
toss them in the fire himself?
Or, without reading them,
just drop them in the dark?
Where’s the form response
that earthly demons are paid to send?
“The President has asked me to reply -“
and all attendant bullshit?
I write about humility
and telling the truth.
I write about responsibility.
Words that have no place
in the blank house of hell.
The imp’s eyes glaze over.
My words slide off the page.
I write to the golden calf
who thinks he made himself,
but nothing is there
in the plastic fantastic dark.
I write to make sense of the world.
I will bake a cake instead.
-END-
To our entrants, please look over the poems. The poems will be submitted on July 3rd, as they appear below. If the entrants have any edits or corrections to the poems, please send them to me at mjm@wildpoetryforum.com by the morning of July 3rd. If you come upon this notice late and you have edits, please send me any edits anyway. I will try to have the submission updated before it's sent to the judge.
As a reminder, if there are no or not enough IBPC nominations in any given month from the membership, we choose from the eligible poems (those poets who gave permission) from the prior month. So, if your poem was not selected in any given month, please know that you still might have an opportunity for it to be submitted the following month.
Congratulations to our entrants and best of luck in the competition!
Love,
M
__________________________________________________________________________________________
July 2017 IBPC Submissions
Poem # 1
Title: Like Lilacs
Author: Guy Kettelhack
Some lives are like the first apotheosis of the Spring:
beautiful and fleeting – incarnations of the prospect
and the promise of the most alluring loveliness that life
and Spring can bring – that bear repeating and repeating
as they manage to assay their lilting fragrant way to May,
their lilac scent an indescribable intoxication: made
unignorable by traces, faint opacities, of funk: the smell
of Death’s predation – more imminent than we could tell
by looking at them in the full veracities of bloom. Like lilacs,
when they’re cut and placed in vases in a room, they face
the final phases of their doom: in a trauma of aphasia,
incommunicado with the world that was their love and lot,
every floating beauty in them curls up into rot. Once they
were, now they’re not. Though when they die the Spring
of which they are the symbol won’t have reached a pinnacle,
that seasoned season has amassed from lilac lives enough
to know what pinnacles must be. Perhaps all lives
are more like lilacs than we want to see.
-END-
______________________
Poem # 2
Title: Another Planet in the Same Old Universe
Author: Don Schaeffer
It's Earth day 14 of the Mars mission. We wake in the middle of the Martian night. It doesn't matter. When we started this we knew everything would be relative and everything would be switched around and changed. We were not people, none of us were, who loved our lives on Earth so much that we couldn't just dump it. None of us had cherished routines or even special food likes. None of us were comforted that easily, that's how we were selected. The discomfort test is one of the most valid psychological tests ever formulated. Bless the Harvard professors who wrote it.
At the same time, the big shots were a little disappointed with the mission because things were not different or variable enough. This was hardly a challenge that tested any of us. There was solid sand at our well-covered and masked feet. We never flew when we jumped, even though we could jump pretty far. In the distance there were things we still called mountains and hills. The same old sun rose in the martian morning, even though it was so pale and small it made most of us laugh, an emasculated sun god. Ha ha!
Were we going home? I think so. That's what they told us. Soon. I could live with the fear. I like fear. It has a pleasant jiggle on my heart. Anyway what could happen? We could just continue our journey and travel to a lot stranger places.
We rise. We check everything to verify that nothing really happened. We nutrify; we expel; like the our microscopic fellow citizens we so carefully pasteurized out of our lives, ignoring what the gods of bugs wanted us to do--currying their disfavor. We believed our god was bigger than theirs and our god would defend us. But we ended up defending our god instead.
It is cold on Mars. We conserve heat and generate it slowly.
Why does this section of existence feel like home? We have never been here, yet we feel familiar--as if it were another room in a great house. It's subject to familiar rules--the rules we have followed since we popped--were carried and expelled into this territory around Old Sol.
On the 18th day of the Mars Mission, our cynical crew learned that the Archetype was coming. We were told that the being looked very strange, but was very mild, and that, somehow we all knew him, we had seen this being before. This being was the core of the neighborhood.
The great orb of the Archetype rose in the west of the Martian sky, just as the sun was making its thin, frail appearance in the east. In spite of the vacuum of space we could hear the song, as if it were sung by a million voices. It had at least a million eyes, surprisingly human-like with round pupils, Blinking in waves around the face. Kindness suffused the moist surfaces of the eyes, the sadness of eyes that could comprehend the limits. And somehow, we all remembered that face. We had all seen it in the past, while we were travelling from the space before.
-END-
____________________
Poem # 3
Title: Into the Void
Author: Elizabeth Koopman
Who will read my letters
to the Devil?
Should I put them in the fire
rather than the post?
Does some imp of a sub-demon,
Satan’s lowest aide,
read them with curled lip,
toss them in the fire himself?
Or, without reading them,
just drop them in the dark?
Where’s the form response
that earthly demons are paid to send?
“The President has asked me to reply -“
and all attendant bullshit?
I write about humility
and telling the truth.
I write about responsibility.
Words that have no place
in the blank house of hell.
The imp’s eyes glaze over.
My words slide off the page.
I write to the golden calf
who thinks he made himself,
but nothing is there
in the plastic fantastic dark.
I write to make sense of the world.
I will bake a cake instead.
-END-