In celebration of National
Poetry Month the Magazine presents the winners of its Alumni
Poetry Contest.
Mark Strand, the Andrew
MacLeish distinguished service professor in the Committee
on Social Thought, spent much of January eating poetry.
As judge of the Alumni Poetry Contest he read 400-plus poems
written by 246 Chicago alumni. The poets spanned nine decades
of degree years, from a Ph.B. earned in 1928 to a phalanx
of 2002 grads. They wrote free verse, haiku, sonnets, even
limericks (“Professor Mark Strand/Placed his head
in his hand…”). They wrote of love, loss, libraries,
and bookshops.
Four hundred poems, as Strand
laconically puts it, “is a lot of poems,” and
so, in addition to the three prizes—first place, $600;
second, $300; third, $100—outlined in the contest
guidelines, he chose two more entries for honorable mention.
What made these poems stand
out? The first-place “Potter’s Song,”
Strand says, “is a successful solution to the formal
problem the villanelle sets; the repetitions and circularity
of the villanelle very suitably reflect the poem’s
content.” He admires the second-place “Pockets”
because “it combines fastidiousness and wildness in
an obsessive attempt to locate oneself—with the unsought-for
result that one is nevertheless lost.” Of the third-place
“Little Red Schoolhouse,” Strand says, “I
like the simplicity, the rhythmical rightness.” And
of the honorable mentions—“Unavoidably Detained”
and “Lowdown Lovesick Blues”—the judge
notes, “They came close.”
—M.R.Y.
Select a poem:
First Prize - Potter's
Song
Second Prize - Pockets
Third Prize - Little
Red Schoolhouse
Honorable Mention - Lowdown
Lovesick Blues
Honorable Mention - Unavoidably
Detained
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