Winners of the 2004 Ars Poetica Competition

Folly is pleased to announce the winners of the 2004 Ars Poetica Competition, in which each poet strives to articulate his or her poetic philosophy in verse form. Our judges had a difficult time deciding with so many fine works submitted, and the winners may feel justifiably proud of being selected from among such stiff competition.

This year's fourth runner-up is Hermann Böring of Bent Forks, Nebraska. Böring's work has recently appeared in The Bent Forks Review, The Procrustean, and Bean Counters Quarterly. His full-length collection, Real Poetry, will be available from Bridgework Books in October. His poem, "Acquainted With the Right," was nominated for a Bushcart Prize by The Drudge City Review.

Ars Poetica, by Hermann Böring

A poem's meaning must be clear as day,
A kind of metered essay, if you will,
As neatly bundled as a bale of hay,
Predictable as water poured downhill.

A poem must consist of fourteen lines,
A period or comma ending each,
As rows of corn a farmer's fence confines,
So as to keep the corn in easy reach.

A pox on lib'ral charlatans who prance,
Like nancy-boys, in universities,
Composing lines that neither sing nor dance,
But read as if produced by chimpanzees.

Conservatives must heed the clarion call,
And kill vers libre for the good of all.

Our third runner-up, Misty Rivers, lives in Lilyvale, Vermont in an old Victorian house overlooking vast fields of wildflowers. When she's not writing poetry, Rivers spends her days making wreaths from dried herbs and posing for the many flattering photographs of herself that appear on her website. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Cloudspeak, The Wan Swan, and Etherea. Rivers' chapbook, Ophelia Dances at Midnight (Will o' the Wisp Press, 2002), won the press's annual Wisp Award.

Ars Poetica, by Misty Rivers

    like quicksilver

it escapes between your
fingers, dissolves

    into sunlight in a brief

waft of humidity like
a breath on your

    neck—this is poetry:
an open-windowed wisp

of the ungraspable

    air, a whisper
of wind ruffling

a lock of hair, the wake

    a v of geese creates

as it flies, the wistful
   dream of a shadow

of a ghost

  of a sigh

    of scented steam

rising desultorily
   from the mildest

      of teas.

Second runner-up: I. M. White

Ars Poetica, by I. M. White

A good poem is like the Rioja
the cameraro pours carefully
into our glasses. Salud y pesetas!
We drink, experiencing the khushi
of wine that is ding hao. The cafe
is decorated with small Nepalese
okimono. Through the open window
I gaze out over the veld. A gentle
simoom riffles the leaves of the
banyan tree, and in the distance
a springbok leaps, scattering
the milling kiwi. I will leave you
tomorrow, cara, but your eyes
say: ça ne fait rien, just leave
your baksheesh on the table,
effendi, there is no need to be
an omadhaun when our glasses
are filled with Rioja. My eyes
would quaff you with the wine
and this cafe, the veld, earth
itself, that sticky globe. But
I must honor the bushido
of my creed, return at last
from my summer vacation
to teach Freshman English
at the University of Cleveland,
though you are my ka,
this meeting kismet,
this Rioja a fragrant
burgundy haiku.

Lotta Gore is our first runner-up. Gore, a taxidermist and aspiring coroner, is the author of a chapbook, Sons and Livers, as well as a full-length collection, The Red Road, both from Grimm Books. Recent credits include The East Idaho Review, Femur, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. Gore's work also appears in an anthology of dead animal poems, All That Remains (ed. D. Kay, Stern-Stafford Press, 2003).

Ars Poetica, by Lotta Gore

A poem must slide as this copperhead once slid
drawing the slow length of its body along
the road's hot shoulder;

but it must also stop as this copperhead did
abruptly.

It must surrender
to the crunching weight of the whitewall
the crush of bone between rubber and asphalt
the burst of scaly skin and the ooze of juice;

it must release its inner self: soft meat,
the tiny, delicate pancreas flattened to paté,
the mouse skeleton to which a half-digested head
still clings; it must offer its heart

glistening and wet to the sun,

it must give itself over to the silence
of the empty road.

Winner: N. Koded

Ars Poetica, by N. Koded

He who is not others¹
awoke as fire ascended
in the east.² He

mouth-chasmed,³ elongating
his arms,⁴ & hallwayed footly⁵
to the white palace⁶

where a lone biter bather⁷
hung by its slender blue
neck. The long arc

of Alpheus⁸ commingled
with the pool of Arethusa⁹
& all Sicily was flushed

with golden poetry.¹⁰

_____________

¹ I
² the sun rose
³ yawned
⁴ stretching
⁵ walked down the hall
⁶ bathroom
⁷ toothbrush
⁸ Greek river god
⁹ Pursued by Alpheus, Arethusa called out to Artemis, who transformed her into a spring, which flowed through an underground channel to Sicily. But Alpheus turned himself into a river and mingled his waters with hers.
¹⁰ Figure it out.

About the 2005 Ars Poetica Competition

Details for entering Folly's 2005 Ars Poetica Competition will be announced shortly. The winner will be featured in Folly, and have ten photocopies of his chapbook made at Kinko's. The entry fee is $50.