W.B. Yeats Society of N.Y. 2012 Poetry Competition

The W.B. Yeats Society of New York poetry competition is open to members and nonmembers of any age, from any locality. Poems in English up to 60 lines, not previously published, on any subject may be submitted. Each poem (judged separately) typed on an 8½ x 11-inch sheet without author’s name; attach 3×5-inch card with name, address, telephone, e-mail. Entry fee is $8 for the first poem and $7 for each additional. Include self-addressed stamped envelope to receive a copy of the report, like this one. A list of winners is posted on our Web site around March 31. First prize $250, second prize $100. Winners and honorable mentions receive one-year memberships in the Society and are honored at a Society event. Authors retain rights, but grant us the right to publish/broadcast winning entries. These are the complete guidelines; no entry form is necessary.

The deadline for our 2013 competition is February 1st. Awards will be presented at an event in April. For information on our other programs, or on membership ($40 and $30 per year, full-time students $15), visit our website, or write us at the National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, New York NY 10003.

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Read winning entries for 2011 and judge’s report

Read winning entries for 2010 and judge’s report

Read winning entries for 2009 and judge’s report

Read winning entries for 2008 and judge’s report

Read winning entries for 2007 and judge’s report

Read winning entries for 2006 and judge’s report

Read winning entries for 2005 and judge’s report

Read winning entries for 2004 and judge’s report

Read winning entries for 2003 and judge’s report

Read winning entries for 2002 and judge’s report

Read winning entries for 2001 and judge’s report

Read winning entries for 2000 and judge’s report

Read winning entries for 1999 and judge’s report

Read winning entries for 1998 and judge’s report

Read winning entries for 1995 and judge’s report

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2012 contest report of the judge, Bill Zavatsky

Over and over, entries for this contest made me catch my breath with pleasure and surprise. You’ll see at once, in each of the winners, how accomplished Yeats Society poets are.

Before I talk about the winners of this year’s competition, I have a confession
to make. I have known the first-prize winner for many, many years, and
even published a book of poetry by him when I ran a small press. It was
pretty clear to me when I read the two poems that he submitted that I would have
to pick Alan. But in all honesty I chose his poem because his work stood out from
any of the other work that was submitted to the contest, and I read all of it.
Feldman’s poetry is passionate and grounded in human experience the
way that most of the poems that I read were not. The great majority of the poets
who submitted work to this contest—the present winners and runners-up
excluded—believe that poetry is mostly a species of nature description, festooned
with leaves and leaves of adjectives. Feldman’s work is immediate where these
other poems are decorative. Alternatively, there were a number of ekphrastic
poems. The feeling I got from the majority of entries was that it was enough to
borrow from nature or art, but not to live them. Some of the poems were highly
skillful, but often piled with the crackle-crunch rhetoric that I have come to find
so odious.

I found this emphasis on human experience to be true of our second place
winner, Wally Swist, whom I do not know. But I think you’ll see how good
his poem is, and how it outlines with great skill a poignant human drama of
missed connections.

I have another confession to make. I also know Alisha Kaplan, whose
poetry group at Barnard invited me to read and talk with them a few years ago.
She and I have kept in touch, but (honest-to-goodness!) I did not recognize the
poem as something of Alisha’s turns, its sense of daring and humor. I love how
she has Yeats pop up in the final stanza.

Michael Miller’s poem, “My Father’s Hands,” also moved me with its
focus and compassion. It bears the same human quality as Feldman’s and
Swisher’s work, as Victoria Givotovsky’s likewise does, with its feeling and wit.
And though I am also from Connecticut originally, I don’t know Ms. Givotovsky,
even though we evidently come from the same ethnic gene pool—I think!

I also didn’t know that three of the winners were going to come from
Massachusetts, but let’s raise a glass of anything to that fact, whatever it means.

By now my bias in poetry should be evident to you. I respond to poetry
in which the human drama is foregrounded, in which the world is presented as
relationships. I also respond to humor and tactile language. One of my favorite
poems is “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” In it Yeats teaches us that “masterful
images” must begin in “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” That’s what the
winners of this year’s contest do.

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2012 Winning Entries

First Prize

At the Dentist

by Alan Feldman

Framingham MA

I am the father of a disabled son
who is now thirty-five. Among his problems,
an extraordinary sensitivity to pain.
I accompany him into the treatment room
and can see his open mouth, spotlighted,
bright blood on his teeth.
Even nitrous oxide doesn’t help,
though he sees the dentist he saw as a child.
We need a world full of people who are kind.
I wish I could alleviate suffering
with some practical training.
Or put in my ear plugs
so deep grand piano chords
resound in my ears and I swell with beauty
as it billows inside me . . .
When my son was born
there was a poem the pediatrician liked
and gave out to his patients
to comfort fathers. Could I write
such a poem? A middle-sized graybeard,
with a voice a little on the high side,
trying to speak gently to the world
that needs so much care,
as it floats like a single-celled organism
in a vast bath of darkness . . .
I’m hardly the astronaut I thought I’d be,
rooted here near my son,
still on his back in that chair.
I’d rather think about the old sloop
that I’ve cared for: after many hours
of scraping and cleaning, we can set forth
with no thoughts of maintenance.
Perfect sailing days when she heels,
then steers herself, and I stand on the bow
beyond the vast curve of the genoa
to look back at the churning wake
that will never perturb the sea . . .
Will my son ever be on his own?
Yesterday I heard him
touch typing, about a hundred words a minute,
very loud, on an old typewriter––

some bird, it turns out, trying to find
a home behind one of the shutters.
And in other fantasies he’s driving
a city bus, and will have a steady paycheck
and a good pension. As for my country,
it’s kinder than you’d think
given all the Social Darwinist rhetoric lately.
For example, it provides him with food stamps,
and gives him a bit extra, too,
paying him taxes, just as the dentist
is kind beyond any professional obligation,
and the hygienist too, who modestly states,
“You can hold my hand, and stare
right at me, if you want. I know
I’m not much to look at . . . ”
But she is!––with her brown eyes
behind her tortoise shell glasses,
meeting his gaze the way the world
tends to meet it, without turning away.

Second Prize

Velocity

by Wally Swist

Amherst MA

Through the velocity of love, they crash hard.
       The man recalling the call, years ago, before
                answering machines, after he heard the news

that she divorced, and the woman
        not being home to pick up may have been
                  grace. How in passing, when he worked one

block away he saw her bent down
        on hands and knees in the front window
                 of her husband’s boutique to fashion a display

of gifts from Lebanon. How in passing,
        thirty years later, she saw his name on
                 a poster for a reading, and she phoned to offer

        her thanks to him for his asking her
        to dance when they attended Mrs. Fishbein’s
                 class in seventh grade. Divinity induces speed,

although the grace we live out of today
        will portend whom we might love
                 and how we love years from now. When love

crashes hard, due to misunderstanding,
       and the man phones the woman
                countless times after she has turned off her cell

phone and her landline, it does so with
        a velocity that is neither energy nor grace,
                 but pride, because they both have forgotten that

he indicated to her he experienced
        his consciousness expand after the six-hour
                 marathon call she made to him; how the morning

after, she knew she was in love, when
        boarding her bus to go to work, she realized
                 she had forgotten her purse, and returned home,

not for the credit cards in it,
        but for lipstick; how months later
                 when they held each other in the late February

sunlight, and listened to a CD
        of the melodic baritone voice
                 of Johnny Hartman synchronize with the dulcet

tenor sax of John Coltrane, he asked
        her to bookmark that: just in case they may ever
                 have any problems. When the man thinks of how

he kissed the woman goodbye,
        still tucked in bed, before he drove off
                 to work, he was always surprised when she rose

to flaunt herself for him on the back
        porch, her white terry cloth robe open, it was
                not the energy of their love but the grace of it.

Honorable Mentions

Statues of January

by Alisha Kaplan

Brooklyn NY

When the bronze man moves out of his bronzed statue
and wheels his painted pedestal into a bank off Grafton

When the man in the long white dress with white face
waving his hands, offering a lolly, his last one
When he steps down from his cardboard stand
When he sags into a telephone booth
vanished to make a phone call

I see your dark skin under white paint
and passersby don’t want your candy

When the man in suit, briefcase and hat for change
tie mid-air, blown by hairspray, an invisible wind

walks through the crowd after standing still for hours
under the sky, gray, biding with rain

A rare moment –
gray is lovely
like that woman’s gray stockings
and shiny gray shoes

I have bittersweet chocolate in my pocket
as I lean on a lamppost and listen
to the sad cries of your tinwhistle
I saw you play fiddle beside that ancient Chinese woman
who sits every day in that alley
playing that little accordion

The jingling boxes of change for Haiti
alike to a trudge of feet mark time
The whistful whistle of violin and flute
visit the hills of distant seasides
from before you were born

The homeless man sits between lines of people
who wait to receive paper gold out of holes in the wall
No one looks at him
Where does he look –

I saw Yeats at lunch over tomato soup and sodabread
only he was an imposter, much less mad and mystic
I formed you! he yelled
though I could have sworn his lips did not move

My Father’s Hands

by Michael Miller

Northampton MA

In the all-night coffee shop
where sorrows cannot be wiped away,
I looked at me hands
Cutting a piece of pie
and remembered my father's hands,
how naturally they fit
around hammers ad chisels,
how evenly he sawed through
a piece of maple
clamped in the vise
fastened to his workbench
in our dirt floor basement.
My father carried a rifle
on the black sand of Iwo Jima,
raised a glass to my mother
every Thanksgiving dinner,
wiped my oval face with
a wet washcloth when fever
christened me with fear.
On his deathbed, in that
longest of storming winters,
when his liver-spotted hands
rested upon his scarred belly,
I covered his left hand
with both of my own
as if I could shield him
from the death
I never wanted to come.
Then his weak right hand
slowly lifted
to fall upon both of mine.

Testimony

by Victoria Givotovsky,

Cornwall Bridge CT

Somewhere an old woman
is making love with her husband.
He is old, too. How disgusting
I would have thought,

did think, early one morning
--new to the idea of sex--
glimpsing my father naked,
leaving my mother's bedroom.

Now I am older than they were then.

In the Alzheimer's wing, a stranger
follows my mother, wanting only
to be near her. I have watched her
smile at this man and feed him

special morsels from her own plate.
My father rarely visits. When he does,
he does not stay long. When he leaves,
the stranger comes back. They hold hands.

She calls him Bill--my father's name.

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