Confetti, champagne, and singing petunias--

Video of the presentation...

Pleased to have won two of the four prizes in this rare international contest for formal poetry--and also tickled that Jesse won the big one. Winning poems can be read here. The full shortlist, which names two of my poems, can be found here. Many thanks to the English-Speaking Union (Victoria Branch), ESU President Robert Furlan, judging poet Stephen Edgar, and Lucas Smith of the ESU and Bonfire Books. (And congratulations to Lucas Smith for his Wiseblood residency award!)

Here's the announcement:

ESU Formal Verse Contest 2024 - Winners
The English-Speaking Union (Victoria Branch) is pleased to announce the winners for the inaugural ESU Formal Verse Contest, for a metrical, rhymed or unrhymed poem of 70 lines or less.

We had a large number of entries from poets in Australia, the USA, Canada and Germany and thank everyone for participating. The final winners were selected by Prime Minister’s Award-winning poet Stephen Edgar. The President’s Choice Award was chosen by ESU Victoria Branch President Robert Furlan. The winners were announced at an Awards Ceremony in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia on 14 December 2024.

Congratulations to our winners!

Winning Poems:

First Prize ($5,000) “Continuing City” - Jesse Keith Butler (Canada). Coming soon: a video of Jesse reading his winning poem.

What struck and impressed me about this poem was the way the form to some extent enacts the content. The formal regularity of the iambic pentameter and the strict rhyme scheme—both handled with skill—are shaken and pulled apart by enjambment and sentences which lie at odds with that rigid grid, mirroring the disruptions to the city’s stable forms by demolition and construction. Repetition of key words creates a sense of urgency, or even panic, and, literally rising above the damaged cityscape, the poem builds to a dystopian vision of the future. --Stephen Edgar

Runner-up ($1,000) “Learning Greek” - Kevin Hart (Australia)

This trancelike--indeed, entrancing--poem in iambic pentameter, though unrhymed, has quite different strategies from the winning poem. Here, the marriage between meter and grammar establishes a mood of quiet ecstasy or yearning. Indeed, the Greek word in the poem, Έπέκτασις, literally a straining-towards, tempts one to read ekstasis. The poem brought to mind Wallace Stevens's adage that the world about us would be desolate except for the world within us. The world within represented by the two languages the poet studies, Greek and French, which inform and transform the world without, or the speaker--in the end virtually recreating it. --Stephen Edgar (transcribed--I hope accurately--from the video)

Runner-up ($1,000) “Ælfstan the Illuminator Begins a Work” - Marly Youmans (USA)

I admired the ambitious scope and richly imagined details of this poem. It made me think fleetingly, though the two poems are quite different in mood and content, of Robert Browning’s ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’, in its reimagining of a mediaeval world and ethos. The language and imagery are impressively charged and evocative, and the poem embodies the very creative process it describes, whereby the naked page is filled with ‘the rich illuminations of the year’. --Stephen Edgar

President's Choice Award ($1,000) “Ælfstan the Illuminator Begins a Work” - Marly Youmans (USA)

An impressive depiction of creativity - from the void of a blank page to the emergence of ideas and images embedded in life's experiences. The sparrow's flight imagery is a clever use of Bede's parable - the flashing wings of insight and inspiration leading to a masterful illuminated expression of meaning. The poem's use of cognitive images which extend beyond the standard earth-bound images of nature are sublime:  "A cosmos gleaming with possibility"; "the Apocalypse of birth" ; "a cloak of endlessness". A refined and thought-provoking poem. --Robert Furlan

In other news, there are some new reviews of Seren of the Wildwood, and I'll soon post excerpts on the Seren-page.

Illumination by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for Seren of the Wildwood from Wiseblood Books

Elder artists, 3: Yeats

Poetry Ireland

Maurice Harmon, "Old Age and Creativity"
Poetry Ireland May/June 2012

The question is what happens when the poet reaches old age. Does he discover new subject matter and different techniques? There are no simple answers. Very often the subjects that preoccupied him in the past still interest him although he may approach them from a different angle and in a different tone. W B Yeats made growing old itself an issue. He did not like it, hated the loss of physical strength and the waning of sexual energy. In ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ he declared, ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing’ unless ‘Soul clap its hands and sing’, unless he can counter physical decline with imaginative intensity. He proceeds to make conflict central to his later work, dramatising and imagining the contrast between youth and age, past and present, stability and change. In the process his style changed from the ringing declarations of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ to the compressed power of ‘Leda and the Swan’ to ballad forms in Last Poems. He was that kind of poet, constantly remaking himself and becoming remarkably vigorous in old age. In these years he also extended his intellectual range, placing his sense of personal loss within the contexts of civilisations rising and falling.

***

The wonderful Louise Bogan on Yeats,
The Atlantic 1938

Muse and poet

William Butler Yeats, at the age of seventy-three, stands well within the company of the great poets. He is still writing, and the poems which now appear, usually embedded in short plays or set into the commentary and prefaces which have been another preoccupation of his later years, are, in many instances, as vigorous and as subtle as the poems written by him during the years ordinarily considered to be the period of a poet's maturity. Yeats has advanced into age with his art strengthened by a long battle which had as its object a literature written by Irishmen fit to take its place among the noble literatures of the world. The spectacle of a poet's work invigorated by his lifelong struggle against the artistic inertia of his nation is one that would shed strong light into any era. The phenomenon of a poet who enjoys continued development into the beginning of old age is in itself rare. Goethe, Sophocles, and, in a lesser degree, Milton come to mind as men whose last works burned with the gathered fuel of their lives. More often development, in a poet, comes to a full stop; and it is frequently a negation of the ideals of his youth, as well as a declination of his powers, that throws a shadow across his final pages.

...

Yeats's faith in the development of his own powers has never failed. He wrote, in 1923, after receiving from the King of Sweden the medal symbolizing the Nobel Prize:—

It shows a young man listening to a Muse, who stands young and beautiful with a great lyre in her hand, and I think as I examine it, "I was good-looking once like that young man, but my unpractised verse was full of infirmity, my Muse old as it were, and now I am old and rheumatic and nothing to look at, but my Muse is young." I am even persuaded that she is like those Angels in Swedenborg's vision, and moves perpetually "towards the dayspring of her youth."

 ***

Monkey postscript

Despite the proliferation of testicular tales, no "monkey glands" were involved in Yeats's self-renewal. He did have a vasectomy, an enactment of what Susan Johnston Graf called "sexual magic," evidently a belief that the "vital energy of procreation would be channeled into imaginary, literary, and visionary work" (W. B. Yeats: Twentieth-Century Magus, p. 203)

Graf suggests that, as Kathleen Raine--a follower of Yeats and Blake, and a poet worth reading--pointed out, the operation (and other sometimes-embarrassing-to-scholars facts like an interest in the occult) may have been one element that allowed a new flowering. His belief in its efficacy, that is, may have contributed to his powers in his late writing. If you really (really, now!) want to know more, you can google "Yeats" and "Steinach operation" to find out heaps more. Richard Ellmann and others have attempted to put the wilder stories to bed, so to speak, but it seems the rumors are a bit too lively to suppress.

Where a thanks is due--

Thank you to Mercer University Press for deciding to nominate A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer. 

And thanks to the 75 people who visited and "liked" my newborn facebook page in its first seven hours of life and left such wonderful comments! If you'd like to join them, visit me here:

https://www.facebook.com/ADeathAtTheWhiteCamelliaOrphanage.

Please slide down to the next post if you'd like to see a new discount offer on The Throne of Psyche.

In which I am thankful

The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction
Read chapter one at Scribd.

Thank you to Marc Jolley, publisher of The Mercer University Press (as well as to Barbara Keene, marketing director, and to the staff) for deciding to nominate A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage for several national awards.

While evident to them that few books make the short list for a major award, writers are quite grateful for a nomination. Compared to the number of books published each year, the number of nominations is tiny, as they are limited, costly, and time-consuming for a publisher.

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage sprang out into the world three days ago. I've been fooling around with various marketing ideas (that thing that all writers these days must fool with!) and have been pleased by shares of the news and a sample on social media. "Reads" at Scribd stands at 626, so I suppose that may be good, although most went up in the first day.

I continue to be very thankful for those of you who share the posted chapter at Scribd and book page, especially since I have laryngitis and can't tell anybody anything!