WF also has a poetry competition, but monthly and without the stringent specifications of CV2'S challenge (see below). Top prize in the WF competition is £100. I might yet have a go. And you?
INSTEAD OF A MINUTE
Neon, the new one,
with New Latin name.
We call it noble
for its non-reaction,
but garish for its
red-light energy,
like one
jumped-up, pulling a bogus rank
into trapeze
rococo, gambit after gambit
to take the place
of record, and we fall
with a sententious
relish on the story.
Please don't kick
me, being no Stedman expert
(John Stedman,
that is, maverick slave-fighter,
not Stedman as in
church-bells and bob-changes),
starting to write
as if I knew at all
his archive with
its scraps and pots and bones
jangling reproach
to mine, likewise chaotic
but less alive.
His pictures were the draw.
I wrote the
Stedman piece, a scrubby growth
unfed by
knowledge, but, with help from kin,
meeting the
questions, and it went online
to universal
silence. In relief,
reporting to
Committee, I admitted
imposter syndrome
and the agonies
it had imposed on
me. Not for the minutes.
The CV2 Two-Day Poem Competition required a poem produced in 48 hours and including, in 2013, all ten of the following words: neon, relish, scrubby, bob, gambit,
rank, sententious, record, trapeze, and rococo. The competition
weekend included, for Clare and me, a journey to Birmingham. The
poem was written on trains and in a room of the Premier Inn.
One elusive word got placed when I told
Clare I was including a reference to John Stedman. Clare, an aficionada of Dorothy Sayers' novel The
nine tailors, thought first of
the Stedman whose name is attached to some of the campanological
terms in that book – and I remembered enough of those terms to see
that this would fit the word 'bob'.
The
Brum trip was for a memorial service to a friend, Jo Austen. My
mind was in the right place during the service. The poem didn't
distract me from the tributes to Jo.
Nothing from the memorial service appears in the poem. At one level, what that means is that the first draft was probably completed before Sunday afternoon. But the poem's closeness to Jo's memorial does make another point become obvious. Jo had cerebral palsy from birth. The poem's boasts about an occasional sense of professional inadequacy on my part are in perspective alongside what she had to work with in living well.
Nothing from the memorial service appears in the poem. At one level, what that means is that the first draft was probably completed before Sunday afternoon. But the poem's closeness to Jo's memorial does make another point become obvious. Jo had cerebral palsy from birth. The poem's boasts about an occasional sense of professional inadequacy on my part are in perspective alongside what she had to work with in living well.
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