I spent last weekend working on this year's entry in the "2 Day Poem Contest", sponsored by Contemporary Verse 2, a Canadian literary magazine published out of Winnipeg. This is a contest wherein you are given 48 hours to write a poem which must be 48 lines or less. Seems easy? Well, here's the tricky part...they also provide you with ten words of their own choosing which you then must use in your poem. The words are all random and dis-connected and fairly straightforward. The contest organizers do, however, take some sadistic glee in tossing in two or three words you quite likely have never heard of!
As strange as this may seem, it is part of the great attraction of this contest. Here are this year's words!
Anyway, it's always one of my favourite weekends of the year. You receive the words via e-mail at midnight CDT time, when Friday turns into Saturday. You then have forty-eight hours. Unfortunately, midnight CDT time is 1:00 a.m. in Ontario so it feels like we need to stay up later but then it also feels like we get an extra hour at the end. Mind games.
My normal procedure (this is my fourth or fifth year doing this) is to take a look at the words when they come in, look them up if necessary (it always has been), write them out, and then head for bed with the words swimming about. Then, the following day, I get started.
There always seems to be a word or two which provide you with some grain of inspiration and then the job becomes getting the rest of them to fall in line somehow. Sometimes, this happens miraculously. Sometimes, it is an ignoble failure. The words all do get used, one way or the other though, so it is no small feat when that poem gets sent off.
In past years, I have been happy with pretty well all the poems I've entered, feeling they were sure winners. The fact that you have never heard me talk about this contest before is, however, indicative if the success I've had with it.
But here's the thing---for that forty-eight hours, you are totally immersed in one of the things you love the most and that thing is writing poetry. The reason and the inspiration for writing the poem may have arrived at your doorstep as a strange, almost-uninvited house-guest that you possibly wish you could send on their way but once you have invited them in, fed them and made them comfortable, you are then regaled with all the new and strange places they take you.
This is what last weekend was like for me, trying to make strained connections with absurdly incongruous words. It was wonderful!
My crazy week then continued!
A couple of months ago, I entered a poetry contest run by Poetry London (London, Ontario, Canada for those of you perhaps less familiar with me). The aim of Poetry London is to try and provide an outlet for local poets to share, enjoy and work at their craft. They do this by hosting regular readings and workshops here in the city. This was their annual contest where you get to send in one poem on any theme and in any style. This was a new contest for me so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I picked a poem I'd written recently, sent it off, and then forgot about it. I try and do this with any contest or submission I get involved with, it's just easier to send things off and then forget about them, the same way the whole "boiling pot" thing works.
So, as it happened, this past Tuesday morning rolls around and I have to get up before anyone else and head to work. I turn on my phone to see what's new in the world and find there's an e-mail for me from David Barrick of Poetry London saying that Lucas Crawford, the contest judge, had picked my poem for first prize! Amazing and totally unexpected, all at the same time! Please feel free to head on over to Poetry London's website right here and read not only my poem but the other two winners' poems as well. There is nothing more subjective than "judging" poetry and you could very well find yourselves enjoying the other poems just as much (or more!)
Yes, a crazy week for me. Apart from the odd poetry contest giving me some incentive to write lately, I have not really fully immersed myself in the poetry world for the last thirty years. I am, however, now feeling rejuvenated, almost like everything is a poem again!
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