Friday 16 December 2011

Results and Judge’s Report, The TRYangle Project Short Story Competition 2011

First Prize

‘Losing Benjy’ – Simon Van der Velde

Second Prize

‘The Waiting Room’ – David Wass

Third Prize

 ‘Hanging by a Thread’ – Claire Pankhurst

Highly Commended

‘Italia ‘90’ – Simon Van der Velde

‘Small Black Flowers’ – Dean Scurlock

Reading the entries for The Tryangle Project Short Story Competition 2011, I was impressed by the thoughtful treatment of the subject matter and I was deeply affected by some of the more heart-breaking stories.  With such a range of voices and settings explored, it was a difficult task to choose winning entries, but those I have chosen are all by skilled storytellers who create convincing points of view.  They draw their characters sincerely and with care, weave poignant insights into immediate narratives and include small telling details that bring their stories to life.

 The First Prize Winner, ‘Losing Benjy’, is narrated by Tommy, a boy whose family is destroyed by his mother’s abusive boyfriend.  The story uses imaginative imagery and fresh language that are nonetheless convincingly the words of a young boy.  All the characters are persuasively suggested through down-to-earth, realistic dialogue and interactions that are tender and brutal by turns.  The challenging theme is adeptly evoked with telling details and throughout, there is a sense of startling and ultimately terrifying insight.  It’s all too easy for the reader to connect to Tommy and to feel what he’s feeling right up to the painful ending.

In ‘The Waiting Room’, winner of the Second Prize, a young Zimbabwean woman named Rutendo seeks asylum after an act of aggression devastates her family.  Beautifully written, this story evokes Rutendo’s intense loneliness and explores the different ways in which violence affects our lives.  Using delicate imagery that offsets the subject-matter, the writer represents the brutality caused by oppressive political regimes, by the state acting against individuals and by nature itself, as well as by the way ordinary people treat each other every day.  Through Rutendo’s poignant memories of home and her harsh experience of exile, we feel her alienation and all that she has lost.

The Third Prize goes to a compelling story about a man whose controlling behaviour has made his wife a prisoner.  ‘Hanging by a Thread’ is pared-down and economical in style, creating a taut structure in which the sense of fear is never diminished.  The writer experiments boldly with point of view, using first person to tell the victim’s story and addressing the abuser in the second.  This technique gives the reader a forceful sense of encroaching violence.  The metaphor of a spider in a web expresses the claustrophobia of the woman’s life and enables the writer to craft a bitter-sweet image of escape at the end.

The two Highly Commended stories, ‘Italia ‘90’ and ‘Small Black Flowers’ are both told from the perspectives of children.  Both use small details of everyday life to show what is being lost and create affecting central metaphors through which the theme is explored.  The five senses are well used in order to evoke, moment by moment, the tragic plight of child victims of violence in the home.

 

The non-winning entries often began with a good idea, but were marred by either giving a stereotypical representation of the theme, not treating it seriously or completely misunderstanding it.  Some stories that had quite strong characters or compelling storylines were undermined by their use of wooden dialogue, clichéd language and ideas or stiff and formal diction that didn’t seem to fit with the story being told. 

Many writers explained the story, telling the plot without evoking it and creating no real scenes.  Those stories that were overloaded with opinions about domestic violence but did not show anything happening were the least compelling.  These stories would have been improved by using imaginative language, fresh images and telling moments of action.  Metaphoric elements could also have been used well to create layering and narrative richness.  Most importantly, those writers who did not win could improve their work by searching for compelling insights into their characters to create a sense of emotional connectedness between reader and protagonist.

 

clip_image002

Kate Horsley

Thursday 15 December 2011

Results of the Stepping Stones Nigeria Poetry Competition 2011

This competition on the theme of Childhood was judged by Susanna Roxman.

 

First Prize: ‘Little Girl's Antistrophe at 27 Rue de Fleures’ by Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé (Singapore)

Second Prize: ‘Everything is Indestructible’ by W.F.Lantry (U.S.A)

Third Prize: ‘There Will Come a Time My Love’ by Paige Bevans (Canada)

Highly commended poems

 

‘First Memories’ by Anne Ballard (U.K)

‘So you're getting married’ by Copland Smith (U.K)


Judge’s report

There were many good pieces to choose from; however, I felt that quite a few of them are not really finished. The poems are in most cases good (in so far as they are good) on the strength of details and perhaps individual lines, rather than as wholes. This does not hold true for the three winners, or the two Highly commended poems. These five texts are all of them thoroughly "worked out". But in most of the other poems, I can only admire certain images, lines, or stanzas.


I also found rather too many prose-like poems, with few if any lyrical qualities -- texts which, I believe, would have worked better as prose. Sometimes the rhythm suffers in these cases.


Comments on the winning and highly commended poems:


1st Prize poem:

The poet takes the reader on a fantastic, original, totally confident ride through Gertrude Stein's childhood (and also her later life). The poem is modernist in style, as befits a homage to the High Priestess of literary modernism. The imagery is startling and feels fresh.


2nd Prize poem:

A really good poem in its slightly odd way. (This is meant as a compliment.) There is a feeling here that everything hangs together: childhood, adulthood, the past, the present, the seasons, animals, humans. The child is the wise person here, and the adults do well to listen to him. The father realizes this in the last stanza. A Romantic touch -- the child representing wisdom, as well as innocence.


3rd Prize poem:

Here a parent, or at least a kind adult, addresses, with tenderness and wisdom, a child. I like especially the emphasis on being oneself.


Highly commended poems

"First memories". Matter of fact but full of affection. No unnecessary asides or explanations.

"so you're getting married". Tenderness here, too; in this case, what seems to be a parent is addressing a now adult child, at the same time remembering him/her in childhood, many years previously. A strong sense of impending change, but also an equally powerful sense of continuity -- that nothing really changes. The seasons may come and go, but it's the same park as before, and the same love between parent and child. "In those days trees were especially tall." is a marvellous line. It doesn't seem to refer only to the obvious fact that the child has grown up, and is now therefore taller. Also some lost sense of wonder (as in Wordsworth) may be implied.

It's been a pleasure reading and judging this poetry competition.

 

Susanna Roxman

 

Little Girl’s Antistrophe at 27 Rue de Fleures

Just now, I unwrapped her box of letters. Gertrude was an iconoclast

to her gravitas. What she did not know she let travel, recurrence

of rhymes like falling leaves buffeting, autumn breeze from East Side.

Gertrude did not know home tonight or home in the summer.

By the Hudson. Did not know pudding from sauce from Helfgott’s letters.

 

Its mention of parlour poetry as dried hydrangea as pastoral,

as another Gothic point of view. As the bird feeder broke into two,

as freer roads after the scuttling, as prying apart the living architectonics.

Like her piano rolled down the stairs. Of play and vinaigrette

and too much cayenne. That the Tribune was the Tribune after all.

 

But also a need and problem within the chronic hours.

Gertrude did not know the object beyond the object.

Beyond the waterfowl, a duck of oval, of beak and weathervane wing,

of zipper heart, and an accordion tongue. Gertrude did not know

where to put the centre of things. Gertrude did not soak Henry’s cloak.

 

Nor Mildred’s, its hem another herringbone stitch another section

not whole enough or wholehearted or wholemeal enough.

The whole world was no longer a lazy afternoon or abiding love,

an old Gertrude looking at herself in the mirror of the ponding water.

Her head taking the shape of the barn, its shadow a black soot.

 

In midday sun, quiet afternoon cradling itself into the moonless night.

Gertrude was earnest in losing things — the beat-up rosebush

one more variation, foot divisions misaligned, word endings falling

over each other, frothy tumble. Gertrude’s diaeresis, Alice in a deep sleep,

the lean and fallow years from that trembling point onwards.

 

Gertrude’s dactylic dimeter drumming itself into the hexameter,

a twist as with the helix, as with rollercoaster feelings

when affectations run wild, when The Salon levitated

into The Cloud of Unknowing, its noetic white as wispy and dissolving.

Then a removal so she would always ask more questions.

 

As supple as her very last. Gertrude’s Sunday clatter in another suite

to rile Chaucer, even in death, even in love from a distance.

Even in wise restraint and a portrait left in the dark, its phonic echoes

a new refrain of face and facet. And fractured verseforms.

Gertrude’s sudden awakening to sovereignty’s shining eye.

 

Not decadence but wonderment. Not meaninglessness but a prayer,

a detachment and reasoned feeling. A small run of sounds and pictures.

Of a sapling writing out its unknown destination, its basis

and other evidence scaffolding, relaxed into a vine far down the road.

In the vineyard, a redder rose held out in the palm of her hand.

 

By Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé

 

‘Little Girl’s Antistrophe at 27 Rue de Fleures’ is the 1st Prize Winner in the Stepping Stones Nigeria Poetry Competition 2011

 

Everything is Indestructible

So spoke my six year old just yesterday.

I did not care to contradict his words.

His face was scratched when falling from a tree,

the neighbour's blossoming magnolia. He

shook off the pain, and saw migrating birds

above his head, flying as they had done

 

how many million years? Their southward run

unchanged, unchanging, as he'd lately learned.

And in his yard, a cherry's broken bough

hangs twisted by a storm. I can't allow

more time to let it fall. My wife's concerned

it's dangerous. And yet, what will become

 

of all that wood? Food for the lathe, and some

will find its way down to our forest where

rabbits and snakes will nest in its remains.

So often here, our losses become gains,

as she is always whispering in prayer:

those hands turn circles on her rosary

 

through endless curves within her ecstasy.

So maybe James is right, something persists

beyond what we can see: the river moves

its banks, but through this transformation proves,

even when changing course, it still exists:

I'll listen more to what he has to say.

 

By W.F. Lantry

 

‘Everything is Indestructible’ is the 2nd Prize Winner in the Stepping Stones Nigeria Poetry Competition 2011

There Will Come a Time My Love

There will come a time my love, when you are

fully grown, you look back at your life

and your heart will swell with love and longing.

 

There will come a time my love

when the grades you got and goals you scored

will no longer seem so important.

 

There will come a time my love

when you will get over that broken heart,

you will see how precious real friendship really is.

 

There will come a time my love

when you will stop caring what others think of you,

and understand that being you is what matters most.

 

There will come a time my love when you wish you could go back

to run wild without a care, to swing so high you become part of the clouds

and to climb to the top of the tallest tree without fear of falling.

 

There will come a time my love

when you will feel so heavy inside

and you wonder how things could ever go back to normal again.

 

But my love, there will also come a time

when you are so proud of yourself

that for just a moment you believe you can do anything in the world.

 

A time when you are so happy just to be. A time

you are filled with more love than you ever thought possible,

and feel a sense of purpose that you never before had.

 

There will come a time my love that God will give you

the greatest gift in the world - a gift that will seem so tiny,

that you will wonder how it can produce so much joy.

 

There will come a time my love that everything

you used to worry about will suddenly seem so unimportant.

 

But until that time comes my love, you will always have me.   

 

By Paige Bevans

 

‘There will come a time’ is the 3rd Prize Winner in the Stepping Stones Nigeria Poetry Competition 2011

So you’re getting married

Today, I did a circuit of the squirrel park;

it’s twenty years since you named it that.

So you’re getting married soon, and I go for a walk

and I’m on this memorial bench where we once sat

and you had a serious, five-year-old talk

about everything, and then fed acorns to a tree-rat.

 

I have a photograph of you under a tree.

The tree looks massive, and you look very small.

Every time I look at it, it captures me.

In those days trees were especially tall.

 

One day you’ll take your baby to feed squirrels,

and under those tall trees you’ll feel the passage of time

as a handful of baby’s fingers grip just one of yours

just like when yours held on to one of mine.

 

By Copland Smith

 

‘So you’re getting married’ is a Highly Commended poem in the Stepping Stones Nigeria Poetry Competition 2011.

First Memories

He is in all of them.

I remember him standing, unsteady,

distressed I was ill,

peering into the lap where I lay

cradled and crying.

His effort to help, showing me picture cards

that I disregarded.

 

I learned to count from the lesson

that his fourth birthday did not, for some reason,

make me three, not for another two months

and I would never catch up with him.

 

Next year he rode off on his tricycle,

outpacing our grandmother,

crossed alone at the traffic lights:

said he just waited till everything stopped,

then knew it was my turn.

 

He built a cart, pulled me around in it

till it overturned,

then was blamed for my tears.

I didn’t mind

once my bruise yellowed.

 

That last long summer

we splashed in the shallows together

naked as frogs, brown as the small fish

that nibbled our toes.

I think for a while he was God to me,

filled my sky.

 

I didn’t cry when he left.

Nobody told me

he would only return for short visits:

nor warned that all seasons

from now on would be colder.

 

by Anne Ballard

 

‘First Memories’ is a Highly Commended poem in the Stepping Stones Nigeria Poetry Competition 2011.

Wednesday 30 November 2011

Results of the Swale Life Poetry Competition (November 2011)

We are pleased to announce the results of the Swale Life Poetry Competition (November 2011) as judged by Geoff Stevens.

There are 7 commended in no particular order:

K. Woodrow – ‘Graffiti Artist, 37, seeks symbol with gsoh

Adrian Bushen – Schubertiad

Michael Newman – Sunrise at Wainlode

Michael Newman – In the Key of Regret

Michael Newman – News from Wales

C.J. Korta – A Dorset Couple

Garden Pests – Flick Spear

The Highly Commended Poems which win prizes of £10 each are:

Roger Elkin – Sun Street, Shelton

Troy Elliot – Hurricane Rita

The winner of the Third Prize of £30.00 is Bruce Harris - Commuter Computer

The Second Prize of £50.00 goes to Christian Ward – Scafell

And the First Prize of £100.00 goes to Noelle Janaczewska – Once upon a Tiger

These 12 poems, together with the winners and commended poems from the previous 3 Swale Life International Poetry Competitions held in 2011 will be included in the anthology to be published in December.

Friday 18 November 2011

Results of The TRYangle Project Poetry Competition 2011

Let me begin by expressing the gratitude of all of us at Excel for Charity to the poets from across the world who entered this competition in aid of The TRYangle Project. It was indeed heartwarming to have received 153 poems which raised £143.50 for the charity. A small drop in the ocean of what they need to combat the evil of domestic violence, but surely the cash raised will do something for them, and I cannot thank the poets enough for writing to help.

Great thanks to Gabriel Griffin for a good job done, and for such a lovely and detailed report on the competition which can be read here.

Congratulations to the Highly Commended poets; Anne Ballard for 'Secret' and Pat Borthwick for 'Their Door', third prize winner Simon Jackson for 'Punchbag', second prize winner Desmond Kon Zhicheng Mingdé for 'Inside David's Labyrinth' and our overall winner, Sheffield poet, Jenny Donnison for 'Apology.' Talking of apology, you will notice that the poem is presently differently from the other poems. This has been necessitated by a desire to maintain the poem's layout.

Nnorom Azuonye
Administrator.

Judge's Report, The TRYangle Project Poetry Competition 2011


I usually enjoy judging poetry competitions immensely – but not this one. The theme was domestic violence and the 150 odd poems entered were all, of course, on this distressing theme. It was hard to read them, I had to read in shifts. It was impossible not to empathize with all the writers, many of whom I guessed wrote from personal experience and were not accustomed to writing poems, yet desperately needed to express the horror of their experiences, to give voice at last. The great majority of poems entered were those that described (very vividly) the violence inflicted upon women by their husbands or male companions. Rare were the poems that spoke of women battering men. Several (not as many as I would have expected) related to incest and child abuse.

Through all these poems ran coloured threads: purple, violet, blue, red and black; the colours of the bruises and wounds inflicted physically on the victims – we can only guess at the immense psychological damage. There were a fair number of birds fluttering over some of these poems: birds trapped in cages, birds of paradise, a woodpecker and a handsome bird that pulps its prey. There was a tomcat, a rat, a fox and a wolf.

A handful of poems were from the point of view of an onlooker, a would-be helper relating the impossibility of assisting someone who dare make no move to help herself – in one the victim, a young woman, prefers to be “abused than unwanted, despised than alone”.

Occasionally the victim attempts to call for help, one dials “the three nines”. But when she is asked whether she needs fire, police, ambulance, or coastguard, she asks herself, uncertain, “was she burning or drowning?” and puts the phone down. Another victim asks her priest for help with a bipolar, violent husband but the priest just tells her “to offer up the pain”!

Most of the victims of male partner abuse have developed that devastating conviction that the violence is their own fault – in one the victim says “leave him? You must be joking, my fault, always provoking”. This is an attitude that the majority of battered women and children (according to these poems) assume and I find this extremely sad. A devastation that is both physical and psychological. It was a relief to read the words of one battered wife to her husband: “There is only one ceremony I wish for you/ and it has fuck all/ to do with forgiveness”. I wanted to cheer this woman.

But another woman who had the courage to denounce her violent husband and take him to court saw the abuser get off scot free because, according to the author, both he and the judge were freemasons. I find this example of ‘brotherhood’ very troubling.
Children in these poems are abused by neighbours, brothers, fathers. Babies are battered . A kid is forced to eat food he finds revolting. Onlookers hesitate to help. But some children can be extremely difficult and terrorize their parents , although I have a sneaking sympathy for the boy who carried on provoking his too-perfect, composed mother until she lost her temper with him at last, the boy finding her anger “the warmest thing/ to have passed between them” .

All the poems were extremely eloquent and stirred a strong emotional response in me. But at this point I had to put emotions aside and judge them not merely for their subject matter but as poetry. Almost all were written in free verse, sometimes rather too freely, perhaps the authors were overcome by the emotion and distress they were attempting to portray. There were two rather informal sonnets (I had expected more sonnets). A few entries were written in rhyming couplets or quatrains, the rhymes being often a little too obvious. There was a well written villanelle.

I put on the ‘No’ pile poems with clanging rhymes, those that used hackneyed phrases, those that slammed the message home, those that said what they had to say in a rather monotonous way with no image or turn of word to engage me. I looked for poems that intrigued me, that arrested my attention, that made me wonder, not just exclaim “Oh how terrible!” and turn to the next.

After much reading, re-reading and pauses for reflection, I had a final shortlist of ten poems. These poems were the ones that stayed in my mind and had me thinking of them while I was doing other things. They were very individual and different poems; there is the monologue of ‘Forgiveness’ in which the poet reassures her batterer over and over again that “it’s alright”, she accepts what’s happened and forgives him but ends “I’m not going to talk to you again./Nor anything else to you again”.

‘Crossword’s is rather unsettling: the mother trapping her adolescent son (I guess a son rather than a daughter) in the ritual of her crossword puzzle. The mother shows off her ability, cheats rather. As the boy grows older, he realizes “how many of the clues/were repeats from other weeks, /how the language used was simple and limited.” It ends with the boy catching up and overtaking the mother, all the time careful to keep between them “requisite blank spaces”.

‘Pomace’ has some memorable images, of Nona, the grandmother, in the kitchen sieving “the hush flour, dribbling the mummed oil”. In contrast with these peaceful domestic images is an undercurrent of contained violence, “the knives’ fangs” and “slicing the muscle of love”. The making of olive oil is used to express something we can guess happening to the young girl but that she won’t admit even to herself, nor will anyone else speak of it: the secrecy conveyed by the adjectives ‘hush’, ‘dumb’, ‘ mummed’.

‘Gnome Princess’ consists of two stanzas with many phrases of the first repeated in the second while assuming an opposite meaning. A little girl stands in the garden (I loved the phrase “All nithered and withered”) observed by a kindly neighbor who has no idea of the true nature of the child’s father – the daddy the girl is trying without hope to avoid. This poem invites us to ask ourselves how often do we fail to notice when something is dreadfully wrong with those near us, children especially, who haven’t the comprehension of their situation or the language to ask for help.

‘Dressed to kill’, a short, neat, vivid poem, describes a many-hued bird “posed/as if waiting at a hotel bar” that batters its prey to pulp. A charming analogy! Since the name of the bird isn’t mentioned and I was intrigued, I spent some time on the RSPB and similar sites before finally deciding (there are clues in the poem) that it might be a bee-eater.

Highly Commended: ‘Secret’. The form is a villanelle, well-worked, very visual. A father persuades his little girl to stay with him all day and a night in their secret place in the bracken: “We may spot a lark, like a speck in the sky/ till it snaps out of sight and the song drifts away” adding “No need to tell Mummy, for Mummy might cry/then bad men would come and take Daddy away”… the subject is, alas, all too clear.

Highly Commended: ‘Their Door’ is a spare, sad poem, the poet wanting to go back to the past and see “two beaming faces with a look of me/arms outstretched” but the door will not open and the poet remains outside in “this cold, endless night”.

Now for the three prize-winning poems: each one is very different in form and subject from the other two, but all three are extremely assured, each poet is obviously in full control. And says exactly what he or she wants to say in the best language, whether this be dialect, everyday speech or very elegant writing.

3rd prize: ‘Punchbag’ A short poem (16 lines) telling of a battered husband and father. It is written in dialect and describes the father as “shan, weak, pathetic/an empty shirt blown in the wind”. The child would join the mother in hurting the father both physically and with words, but the poem ends “It’s only now I ken/that accepting the jags and burling shoves, just as the need tae inflict them/ shows a girning kind of love”. A wonderfully descriptive and moving conclusion.

2nd prize goes to the extremely well-written, elegant ‘Inside David’s Labyrinth’.I was enchanted by this poem because it is mysterious, it doesn’t tell but alludes. The protagonist says he needed “this evening of gin and single malts/just to get these words on the page…”. Thirty-six lines and nine stanzas to recall a past of fractured pictures, beginning with a Hakone puzzle box (I didn’t know what that might be, had to look it up on internet: a craftsman-made Japanese puzzle box requiring anything from 5 to 66 moves in order to open.) What was inside the puzzle box we are not told, and perhaps the poet doesn’t know either because, he tells us, the opening mechanism of the puzzle box is broken – possibly something to do with a photo of David “in pantaloons as a child, smudged lipstick and rouge”? The poem ends, “Then, he shook it, for a charm to fall out.” This is a haunting poem, beautifully written.

It was almost a toss-up between first and second places. Because the theme of the competition was the one it was, I finally decided on the winning poem because it expressed so very well what many other poems entered had also said, or attempted to say, in concrete images and with no word wasted.

Ist prize: ‘Apology’. The theme of this poem was one common to so many entered: the battered woman apologizing to her violent husband/lover because she is convinced that if he hits her – and he does and has – it is entirely her own fault. The form of the poem, unlike some of the other poems on this theme, is controlled to perfection, consisting of only one sentence with no intervening punctuation between the opening and the final full stop. Thirty-six lines of equal length compose a rectangular block on the page that invites reflection: her house/a cage/ a prison in which the woman is trapped? Inside this box violence is expressed in vivid images: a smashed china teapot, a yellow fruit bowl overturned, purple plums bursting out of their skins, her torn red and black dress. This woman is violently beaten and raped in her home by her husband – and yet she is convinced it is all her fault and apologizes to her assailant.

To conclude: I have really appreciated how all the entrants, placed or not, managed to express themselves so well and vividly and thank those relating their own experiences for allowing me to enter briefly into their world and share a little of their sadness. To all these poets my very sincere good wishes.

Gabriel Griffin