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2004 CELEBRATE THE USA

During July through November of 2004, we asked poets to write about where they were born, where they live, or a state they would like to live or visit.  They told us what they've seen in person, books or on film, deluged us with history and common mythology about each state, but each poem showed something unique about the special character of each state.  Over the course of this project, several poets entered as many as five poems per month.  Thank you for the wonderful response!  Since there were so many poems involved, we've decided to publish only the winning poems, one from each month.

July: "Texas—A World Apart" August: "Permian Basin, West Texas" September: "Florida, the Thunder Coast" October: "Nebraska, Sea of Grass" November: "Gators Inherit Louisiana Heaven"

JULY:  FIRST PLACE WINNER OF A $10.00 ELECTRONIC BOOK GIFT CERTIFICATE

Texas—A World Apart

He called me from Santa Fe,
said, since you live in Texas,
how about running over to Amarillo
and checking up on my client?
I said, I live in Houston,
run over yourself, you're twice as close.

She called me from Albany,
said, how're things in the desert?
I said, I'll try to find a desert dweller to ask,
as soon as I finish figuring out
how much my insurance will go up
now that the flood plain includes my property.

I've heard people say,
You're from Texas and you can't ride a horse?
Mountains in Texas? What are you talking about?
I met someone from Canada yesterday,
he said, Americans don't understand us.
I said, I know how you feel.

Katherine Swarts, Houston, TX, USA
COMMENTS:  Delightfully tongue-in-cheek, this poet utilizes the difficult mechanism of satirical, sarcastic humor to convey a keen to-the-point sentiment about the sheer size of Texas, not to mention its diversity.  Excellent touching-upon of many different points of view, from desert to flood to mountain to plain, with a gloriously hilarious closing rueful line or two.  The lines are spoken with a casual Texas tone.  Each stanza balances the next.  Details like flood insurance, mountains, and riding a horse are good examples.  Solid poem with attitude.  The greatest strength of this work is its tone, its use of tongue-in-check irony.  Its chatty style adds color and charm.   At times, its unusual diction teases, such as  the phrase "twice as close."  Not exactly correct formally, of course, but this is perfectly appropriate to the theme.  The ending is a nice humorous touch.

AUGUST: FIRST PLACE WINNER OF A $10.00 ELECTRONIC BOOK GIFT CERTIFICATE

Permian Basin, West Texas
 
In Western Texas oil fields
legends spout
a tale of gold,
black gold,
in rivers
underground
pooled in caverns,
stew pots of the earth;
refined
for years
in ancient boil.
 
Black
pump jacks
dot the western deserts;
candelabra cacti
in fields of sage.
 
Yvonne Nunn, Hermleigh, TX, USA
COMMENTS:  This succinct poem vividly and beautifully describes the Permian Basin.  Lovely diction, language and metaphor.  Excellent writing!  This  entire poem is a metaphor of sound.  The syntax is wonderful; its rhythm is so strong that the reader hears the oil pumps throughout the poem.   Example:  the "Western Texas" oil fields - the usual "West Texas" oil pumps would be too smooth, not suggestive enough of the up-down pounding of the pumps.  Sound is what's most important in this work, but it has wonderful images, too, such as caverns are "stewspots of the earth" and "candelabra cacti."

SEPTEMBER:  FIRST PLACE WINNER OF A $10.00 ELECTRONIC BOOK GIFT CERTIFICATE

Florida, the Thunder Coast

Where the barrier island shelters the sandy beach
From the waves’ rough reach, our ancestors watched
The shorebirds with envious eyes.  How easily
The sweep of a gull’s wings defeated gravity!  So we
Learned to fly, but our eyes climbed higher, above the
Ocean of air and into the empty splendor of space where
Stars float like feathers on night’s black tide, endlessly
Twirling.  Cape Canaveral cradled dreams like turtle eggs
And rightly so, for something in us has always yearned
For space, the way newly hatched leatherbacks long
For an ocean they have not yet known.  It’s been over
Fifty years since the first rocket rushed from its pad
And still the crowds come, like pilgrims to a holy place
Or turtles returning to the beach of their birth.  Here
We have learned to harness the thunder, leash lightning
And fire, fly on wings of steepening steel.  We may not
Be perfect, but we can lift our heads and our children
To see that we have, at last, created something
That can drown out the roar of the Atlantic Ocean
And leave a silence after, deeper than a hurricane’s eye.

Elizabeth Barrette, Charleston, IL, USA
COMMENTS:  Using a  meter that rolls like the sea, this poem has a labyrinth of metaphors that double back and play  off each other.  It becomes a game of hopscotch from one allusion to another, the interplay of the gull, sea turtle, and men's ambition to conquer space.  The "black tide of night" is a nice metaphor.  One of the most interesting metaphors is unstated and depends on the reader's experience of seeing the audience when the "rocket rush" happens - they look up; parents lift their children to shoulders to see better.  This poem gets a lot of mileage out of interior rhymes and half-rhymes; consequently,  "beach" and  "reach" don't  sing-song.  Enjoyable alliteration in "stars floating like feathers," and "Cape Canaveral cradled," etc.

OCTOBER: FIRST PLACE WINNER OF A $10.00 ELECTRONIC BOOK GIFT CERTIFICATE

Nebraska, Sea of Grass

The earth rolls in endless waves, shallow and soft,
Topped by a sea of golden grass.  In places, the wind
Scoops out a divot to show the pale sand underneath.
This beach has not seen the ocean in millennia, but
Something in it remembers the sad song of the gulls.
The moon still rides low on the horizon, as if dancing
With an invisible tide.  At twilight, a stallion silhouettes
Himself against the sunset, then whirls to vanish in a
Swirl of dust.  Here even “National Forest” means
Mostly prairie.  The wind whistles and wails along the
Hills, carrying a hint of flute music.  The ground recalls
Drumming hooves, and galloping drums.  There were
Winnebagos here long before the invention of the
Recreational vehicle – and there were also the Crow,
The Omaha, the Lakota.  They rode these waves of
Grass through the rise and fall of years, and still cling
Like barnacles.  When the slow tide of history turns
Again, we too will be remembered, like a line of white
Salt between layers of light red sand.

Elizabeth Barrette, Charleston, IL, USA
COMMENTS:  In this work, poetic devices such as onomatopoeia are used extensively and extremely well.  There are so many "s" sounds, for example, that the poem seems to hiss, like grass in the wind.  Or personification - the moon dances with the tide; the ground recalls old sounds.   Rhymes are interior, like the stallion that whirls in a swirl of dust.  It is replete with consonance and similes, as well as metaphor. The "tide of history" is a clever return to  the sea.  So is the thought that the Red man clings like barnacles to the prairie.  As is the final line - the vivid image of  white Americans as salt in the sand.  This poet obviously enjoyed her play/work.

NOVEMBER: FIRST PLACE WINNER OF A $10.00 ELECTRONIC BOOK GIFT CERTIFICATE

Gators Inherit Louisiana Heaven

They hunt to seize that time of day
slipping closer to a darker edge.
They glide through translucent water
to feed on snake, fish, and frog,
or the occasional lazy hound
contemplating a useless life of ease,
or lonesome pigs grunting in amazement
that fate could have offered them so little.
Then these flat-eyed plated logs of hunger
snap bags of teeth over unsuspecting morsels,
carry grudges down to bottom mud
scarred by bones of past feasts,
leave creatures to die where even light sinks,
drowns, and never lives again.
These guiltless predators swallow lesser souls,
spew blood over the kingdom they inherited
when politicians left Louisiana on extended vacation,
and Cajuns followed God into town.

Larry L. Fontenot, Sugar Land, Texas, USA
COMMENTS:  The meter of this work is gnashing, as jarring as the "snap bags" of the gators.  It's oppressive, downward, and pounding.  How appropriate.  One can hear the gnarling, smashing jaws crunching.  Good metaphor - light sinks and drowns, never to live again. Diction is excellent.  Glide, slip. a life of ease.  This delightful work is strong, vivid in description.  Plated logs - great.
 

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