Competitions etc

[Sharra]

It was 'At the Market' in this edition...

http://conversationpoetry.files.wordpre ... umn-08.pdf
Sharra
x

[BenJohnson]

Well done, got confused by the change by the he/ she until I read the note at the end, then it made perfect sense.

[Ros]

Oh, I read that oneyesterday before I realised it was yours. I thought it was impressive

[David]

Ah, now we've seen that here before, haven't we. I remember it. It's a good'un. Good going, Shazam. (Where does Sharra come from anyway?)

Cheers

David

[Sharra]

Thanks Ros, glad you liked it.
Yup David - I should really have a 'Thanks to all at PG' tagged on the end

Sharra
x

PS Sharra's been my online persona for about 10 years

[Wabznasm]

Is that a Canterbury mag Sharra? I recognised a few editorial names.

Great poem by the way, its my second favourite of yours that I've seen. (And good to see you edited the end because of the crits here!)

Dave

[Sharra]

Hi Dave
Yes, thats a Canterbury mag, I've heard a fair few of the contributors read at Orange Street.
Sharra
x

[Nigel]

If you want my twopennth here for what it's worth I think you have to treat competitions like entering a raffle no matter how good your stuff is. If it's good in theory you've got a better chance than low grade poetry BUT it's all down to the judge's predilections on the day. A while back I was contacted by a judge who said he'd placed a poem of mine in the top five of a Poetry Wales comp. but he added, and this is the important bit, on another day I may have won it but someone had written a poem about a son they'd lost, etc. etc,. His winning poem was in fact the most obscene rendering of verse I have yet to come across. If I can find it I'll post it. You'll be amazed. Don Paterson, who has judged many poetry competitions, also agrees that whether you win or not is very much a matter of luck. You have to pay to enter - of course you expect that, the judging has to be paid for - but it is generally considered that winning a presitgious competition is a fast track to recognition and being published. If you are tempted to enter I would suggest you enter only those comps which offer substantial prize money because they will be prestigious, and ony those which are not judged inhouse.

Nigel

[Ros]

Thanks, Nigel. (Do post it if you can find it). I think it does depend very much on the judge.

I've also spoken to people who have judged local competitions - to lessen the load, they only got to see an already-chosen shortlist. So even if a named judge is supposedly choosing, it may be that someone in the back room has already had a go at the entries.

[Sharra]

Nigel I think you are probably right to a certain degree. It's so subjective depending on who's judging them. Last year I entered our Uni poetry comp and didn't get anywhere. However my stuff was definitely as good as those that were shortlisted, and I really thought the one that won was rubbish. I didn't care about not winning in the end as the main judge did a reading and I saw he was very into performance poetry rather than on the page stuff (if you know what I mean), hence why the winner won.

However we had a small comp near us that was judged by a poet I respect very highly, which I would have loved to have won just because if she thought mine was good then I know it is. (I missed the deadline and didn't enter that one - doh!)

Sharra
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[Nigel]

Yes, I forgot to mention that many are shortlisted by a inhouse panel.

Ros, you've challenged me to post the Welsh Poetry Competition Winner 2007. The same judge, and I quote 'judged by famous Welsh writer John Evans' , was retained to judge the 2008 com too. I didn't enter. Check out the comp here -http://www.welshpoetry.co.uk/

So here it is and be afraid, be very afraid !! You were warned !




Concrete

Con construct, nae lay deified, serpentine eye belie bitter ego
Denied, satiate and purify chase.
Lick batteries not pylons
Likely geezers selling nylons in the lanes,
they all stink of old spilled spunk,
crusty gunk, sticking vile to their long johns,
she don't suck that hard for no one or no stocking,
saliva slopped in the ginnel gutter,
she tossed him off he finger fucked her,
pope don’t mind so long as dick don't linger,
he drank beer she drank cider,
that's apple juice to you.
Lights, powerless observe mutely,
behind blackouts the keen and the curious hide,
think they can tell a stranger from shadow,
but cant tell their arse from their elbow,
doodle bugs come and do them good,
fall and flatten their comfy homes,
shake and rattle their rattling stoves,
as they cook up crack for a car boot sale,
e-bay or some other god forsaken trading hole.
She spat her teeth as she went of her feet,
ripped from head to twat by a sword on the wall,
uncle Billy saved from the paws of a kraut,
must have been a general or fancy dressed contestant,
either way dead as dead old fuck now,
sing songs to keep them whole and sane,
aim at the base and exclaim to the tone,
of an ever flat marching band,
"granny got fucked in old johnnies shed
if grampy finds out they’ll both be dead
granny got rimmed, Johnny got head
on the blob, he did her arse instead
because were fucking for a better time
were fucking for a better life
were fucking, were fucking"
but they dont sing fuck they sing
"um tiddly um pum, pum pum"
if vou don't like the taste don't swallow
old Chinese saying,
“don’t be a cunt and you wont get fucked”
Old man sage says
"there's a snake in my spine"
Zen says
“ ”
the Buddha just smiles,
realises its not quite a cry but close enough
stretch your legs Susie girl,
stretch em wide and give us a twirl,
Oh John be honest son,
you twist your charm and turn out scum,
when the law strikes you down,
you'll try your wit and half a crown,
but unbought the time will stamp
Seven times seven and cast you out
Oh Johnny boy don't you know
War, make beasts of us all.


To be fair it does have something if you can fight your way through the sexual imagery.

[BenJohnson]

Sorry I gave up quarter of the way through, you are right Nigel. If that was the best Wales had to offer it was a sad day for Wales. What idiot retained the judge?

[Nigel]

Fortunately, Ben, it's not the best that Wales can offer but it certainly reflects on the judging which is relevant to this thread.

[Ros]

You're having us on! But I fear you aren't... What a load of garbage. And they wonder why people don't read poetry any more.

[Nigel]

Sadly a lot of people will read this and get something from it but is it the way forward for serious poetry ?

[Wabznasm]

But come on, it is completely the sort of thing to win a modern competition focusing on the modern. For what it's worth I quite enjoyed it; it has the hallmarks of risky contemporary verse although without (and this is what I'd say is lacking) the academic rigour. Know what I mean?

This won for the forward prize for instance (although I think it's quite good; and Don Paterson is a biggie; and it's especially odd to see Venetian Snares crop up as a poetic topic, but there you go)

“Love Poem For Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze”

O Natalie, O TBA, O Tusja: I had long assumed the terrorsits balaclava that you sport on the cover of Annule
which was, for too long, the only image of you I possesed -
was there to conceal some ugliness or deformity
or perhaps merely spoke (and here, I hoped against hope) of a
young woman struggling
with a crippling shyness. How richly this latter theory has been confirmed by my Googling!

O who is this dark angel with her unruly Slavic eyebrows
ranged like two duelling pistols, lightly sweating in the pale light
of the TTF screen?
O behold her shaded, infolded concentration, her
heartbreakingly beautiful face so clearly betraying the tru focus
of one not merely content - as, no doubt, were others at the
Manover Elektronische Festival in Wien -
to hit play while making some fraudulent correction to a
volume slider
but instead deep in the manipulation of somecomplex
real-time software such as Ableton Live, MAX/MSP
or Supercollider.

O Natalie, how can I pay tribute to your infinitely versatile
blend of Nancarrow, Mille Plateaux, Venetian Snares, Xenakis,
Boards of Canada and Nobukazu Takemura
to say nothing of those radiant pads - so strongly reminiscent
of the mid-century bitonal pastoral of Charles Koechlin in their
harmonic bravura -
or your fine vocals, which, while admittedly limited in range
and force, are nonetheless so much more affecting than the
affected Arctic whisperings of those interchangably dreary
Stinas and Hannes and Bjorks, being in fact far closer in spirit
to a kind of glitch-hop Blossom Dearie?


I have also deduced from your staggeringly ingenious
employment of some pretty basic wavetables
that unlike many of your East European counterparts, all your
VST plug-ins, while not perhaps the best available,
probably all have a legitimate upgrade path - indeed I imagine
your entire DAW as pure as the driven snow, and not in any way
buggy or virusy
which makes me love you more, demonstrating as it does an
excess of virtue given your country’s well-known talent for
software piracy.

Though I should confess that at times I find your habit of
maxxing
the frequency range with those bat-scaring ring-modulated
sine- bursts and the more distressing psychoacoustic properties
of phase-inversion in the sub-bass frequencies somewhat taxing
you are nonetheless as beautiful as the mighty Boards
themselves in your shamless organicizing of the code,
as if you had mined those saw and squares and ramps straight
from the Georgian motherlode.

O Natalie - I forgive you everything, even your catastrophic
adaptation of those lines from ‘Dylan’s’ already shite
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
in the otherwise magnificent ‘Sleepwalkers’, and when you
open up those low-
pass filters in what sounds like a Minimoog emulation they
seem to open in my heart also…

[...]

At least, my dear, let me wish you the specific best:
may you be blessed
with the wonderful instrument you deserve, with a 2 Ghz
dual-core Intel chip and enough double-pumped DDR2 RAM
for the most CPU-intensive processes;
then no longer will all those goreous acoustic spaces

be accessible only via an offline procedure involving a freeware
convolution reverb and an imperfectly recorded impulse
response of the Concertgebouw made illegally with a hastily-
erected stereo pair and an exploded crisp bag

for I would have all your plug-ins run in real-time, in the
blameless zero-latency heaven of the 32-bit floating-point
enviroment, with no buffer-glitch or freeze or dropout or lag;
I would also grant you a MIDI controller of such responsiveness,
such smoothness of automation, travel and increment
that you would think it a transparent intercessor, a mere
copula, and feel machine and animal suddenly blent…

[Ros]

Nah, it was garbage pretending to be sophisticated and cutting edge.

The love poem, now, that was quite amusing and clever. Would still have a rather specialist appeal, I feel.

[BenJohnson]

I can see the appeal of the second, clever use of rhyme, mix of technology with traditional words of love, a bloody good trim and it could almost be respectable, but not something I would pay to buy. Maybe, just maybe this is the sort of thing that is responsible for the decline in poetry sales. Clever yes, talking to the common person no way.

[stuartryder]

I can see the appeal of the second, clever use of rhyme, mix of technology with traditional words of love, a bloody good trim and it could almost be respectable, but not something I would pay to buy. Maybe, just maybe this is the sort of thing that is responsible for the decline in poetry sales. Clever yes, talking to the common person no way.

The thing that does my head in these days is "new" poets name-dropping technology as if they actually care about it or are trying to make a connection with sci-fi writing. As if aliens, on discovering burnt-out Planet Earth, will turn to these works to figure us out. They most likely have Pulsar Galactic Edition v2.0 already.

Stuart

[Nigel]

I actually prefer Concrete. The Forward prize winner above reads like pretentious designer prose breaking its neck to embrace modern trend culture. It has no integrity to my mind but is written in a style favoured by the poetry alumni at the moment but how long is the moment. I favour Polonius' advice: 'to thy ownself be true'

[Ros]

Pity Polonius was a rather shifty old chap! But yes, I agree. Following the latest style is not going to produce good stuff if it's not the style you feel easy with. And I wonder how many poets actually understand the techo-terms they are throwing around.

[ray miller]

I found both those poems boring in the extreme but what I find more interesting is the remark about the second one having "all the hallmarks of risky contemporary verse". What on earth is the writer at risk of? There are some poets, no doubt, in certain parts of the world whose work is indeed risky. This, though, is smug and pretentious and perfectly at one with the status quo.

[Ros]

The risk of being laughed at, presumably.

[Nigel]

or did he mean risqué contemporary verse ?