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VoicesDyer-Ives Foundation 2015

47th Annual Poetry Competition

The Dyer-Ives Foundation Annual Poetry Awards

Spring 2015 marks the 47th year of the Dyer-Ives Poetry Competition. The competition was initiated in 1968 by poet James Allen at the urging of John Hunting, the founder of the Dyer-Ives Foundation, to encourage excellence in writing and provide recognition for local work of high quality.

Cash prizes are awarded to the authors of first, second, and third place poems in three separate divisions. Competition guidelines may be obtained by visiting the Dyer-Ives website at http://www.dyer-ives.org.

Walter Lockwood and Philip Jung of Grand Rapids Community College organized the 1969-1984 competitions. From 1985 through 1988, the competition was managed by Larry Manglitz and Barbara Saunier, also with the College. Patty Bridges coordinated the 1989-92 competitions. Kimberly Wyngarden of Grand Rapids Community College managed the competition from 1993-1998. Christine Stephens’ first year managing the competition was 1999, and Melissa Black became her assistant from 2001 through 2008. David Cope, former Grand Rapids Poet Laureate, managed the competition from 2009-2011, and Mursalata Muhammad managed the competition from 2012 until 2014. In 2015, Christine Stephens returns to coordinate the competition with outreach coordinator, Shannon McMcaster. It is the dedication and talents of our local community of writers--the time, energy, and commitment to the discovery of talent--that makes this contest a significant annual event.

Local college professors and poets of note complete the preliminary judging process. This year’s preliminary judges were Beth Sanders, Tim Hawkins, and Amorak Huey.

A nationally known poet completes the final judging of our poetry submissions and determines the prize winners. Past judges include Anne Sexton, X.J. Kennedy, Robert Creeley, James Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Bly, William Stafford, Naomi Shihab Nye, Herb Scott, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Billy Collins, Herb Scott, Alicia Ostriker, Patricia Clark, and Linda Nemec Foster. The 2015 judge is Mark Doty.

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Elementary Division

The Dream of Life

The Farm Down the Road

Healing Spot

Student Division

A poem I can never show my mother

Song for the Netherlands and Losing

a Grandfather

Burdens on a Weekday Morning at a Restaurant on the Way

to Alabama

Adult Division

Cat and Bird: Contrapuntal for

a Grieving Mother

Domestic Scenes I, II, and III

Bye, Bye Blackbird

Judge’s Comments

Credits

Contents

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Gray Butler

Alex Cersosimo

Paul Wisneski

8-13

Katie Dooley

Patricia Schlutt

Kelsey May

14-19

Amy Carpenter Leugs

Molly Batchik

Lisa Gundry

20-23

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Winners of the Annual Kent County Dyer-Ives Poetry Competition have their poems published poems in Voices and participate in a public Awards Reading held during the annual Grand Rapids Festival of the Arts in June.

In addition to funding the poetry competition, the Dyer-Ives Foundation traditionally supported projects which introduced new concepts in educational, social, or cultural fields to audiences in the greater Grand Rapids area. The Foundation plans to spend out its corpus by 2016 and is currently focusing its grant making on collaborative projects which reverse decline and accelerate revitalization of neighborhoods in the central city of Grand Rapids while deliberately including racial equity and anti-displacement strategies. To find out more, go to www.dyerives.org/about.

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Elementary Division

The Dream of Life

The Farm Down the Road

Healing Spot

How old are you? Split it in two.You spend half your life sleeping.Eventually you wake to the light in your dreamsWhich are as thick as clayThat you use to build a little house.You start to live in the house.Inside the house strange cats Chase mice that are gray like suits Not knowing what they are. And when you go outside The clouds are as white as snowy owls That glide across the sky.

by Gray Butler

The Dream of Life

Elementary Division First Place Voices

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The Farm Down the Roadby Alex Cersosimo

At the garage, on old gasoline-stained floors mice race each other to the holes in the corner. There used to be old vintage cars here,but now they are shadowsof old glories. There are stillold engines and rusty hammers,monkey wrenches, and screwdrivers idle on the wall.

Back at the barn there are support beamsthat only a nimble spidercan navigate. The rust is slowly eating away at the gray metal siding.

The lush forest behind the barnpushes it out in the openfor all to see.A bunch of old Christmas treesare strapped together,waiting for someone to pick them up. Furniture is stackedlike a Tetris masteroriginated it.

As the sun sets, it stretchesthe barn to its peeks.The wind blows andthe rafters howllike a lost dogwandering dark alley ways.

by Paul Wisneski

The spot where time stops for you, where you can fix the worstfeelings, from taking a toy from your best friend to pushing your siblings. This magicaltwist of bad soil, writhingand wrinkly vines, and mossy, pointed stones and rubble make even the most miserable personhappy in no time at all.

Just go from the park. It’s downthe street on Oakleigh,into the woods and over hills, water,trees, and fallen logs. The way up can be tiresome, trudging up the steep face of dirt and snow,clinging to a shredded ropeto cleanse your spirit, but it’s worth a good attitude.

The view from the hill is breathtaking:trees, streams, nature galore.These are all the great things in life.You think of the people who love you.The old iron scrap pile is theone thing that sticks out in a bad way, but let the good,beautiful power of nature andlove make it seem invisible.This is what makes you realizethat you don’t have to be selfish,you don’t have to be greedy, youdon’t have to be bad. You can fixit and walk home.

Healing Spot

Voices Elementary Division Second Place Elementary Division Third Place Voices

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Student Division

A poem I can never show my mother

Song for the Netherlands and Losing a Grandfather

Burdens on a Weekday Morning at a Restaurant on the Way to Alabama

Chinese lanterns were floatinglike smoke from a still-burning wildfire.My mother hid flowers in clean sheetsthat rained down like powderwhen unfolded. That was proof. I have her old books, rotting tea bagsused as bookmarks. Stained pagesturned the insides into mosaicsshe was changing the meaningwithout hands, with absence. My mother brokeher back afterwards, after she was burning & burned.The snapping echoes through the insulated wallsand I can’t hear her anymore. Sometimes I wrote letters with the words I hate yourepeated for pages, sent themto addresses chosen from outdatedphone books. She never replied. We used to tell each other about the shades of hair on every girl we passed. I bury myself under the snappingsounds, pretend it’s my own instead,that she could never feel pain because our mothers are guarded and bloomingwrapped in cellophane, packedtightly in our stomachs. My motherwas not in pain, she became it.

A poem I can never show my motherby Katie Dooley

Student Division First Place Voices

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by Patricia Schlutt

On a run today I breathed outthe last of the air molecules from the Dutch countryside.There are secret chambers in alveoli to keep these things.

This is how it happened:I borrowed some air from Giddings St. to cycle through myselfit was green and wheat-like with the smell of lumber. It was like breathing Holland. I felt the hollow space in my lungs. I realizedthat the Netherlandshad left me. Two months agowhen I took it into myself I remembered that I am ancient and shall go on.

There is a dock in Rotterdam where I looked into the ocean as my grandfather must have looked once into it. There is such Sweet dark distancebetween the moment he put on the too-big, itchy overcoat of his American nameand the moment I found a place to hang that passed-down identityto air out in the wind. For the first time I feltthe Rotterdam sun on my arms.

Song for the Netherlands and Losing a Grandfather

This is what I have decided to know:

Home is where love binds to you like you are a substantial center.Home is where the blood sings the song it never learnedand does not know it knows. Home is wherebreath settles and is still like the sea between two ports.

Voices Student Division Second Place Student Division Second Place Voices

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by Kelsey May

We stopped at Charley’s Dinerbecause we were hungry.

By the time we left, we hadno appetitefor food, and for years after,my mother repeated it:

the booth, the plates of foodspouting steam like factory stacks,the pollution from the hostess’s

mouth, spewing words of racism,digging a deep ditchof plantation heat, berry bushes,strange fruit swaying in Alabama skies.

Bruises beneath broke-backbending, burdens of blistering boyhoodand babies born in backyard barnyards,bucking,bickering,

these bastards born bearing burdens,bickering blistering bruises,bucking between bedsheets and bedsprings.

The yoke of slavery was visiblearound the waitress’s shoulders,pardoning, excusing that “boisterousblack lady’s behavior.”

Burdens on a Weekday Morning at a Restaurant on the Way to Alabama

When the Union split over politicsand cotton gins, the only seamswere in the pulpy hands of black folk,tilling, picking, piling, blistering.

Hearts were tarred by more than smoke rings.In the Tennessee Valley, the mountains are purpleand watch over lake sparrows migrating to neststwo months before their eggs are laid,

yet the restaurant workers questionedthe nesting of black mothers beneath 85degree sun, hands bleeding, calloused feet,crippled backs, and nowadays,middle fingers held up

beneath street lights in Fergusonclaim this history and say what the “black lady” could not:

Why would you be entitledto satiate your hunger on the sweatof my ancestorsand then refuse to seat meon a weekday morningwhen two-third of the boothsin the restaurant were empty?

Voices Student Division Third Place Student Division Third Place Voices

Adult Division

Cat and Bird: Contrapuntal for a Grieving Mother

Domestic Scenes I, II, and III

Bye, Bye Blackbird

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by Amy Carpenter Leugs

Cat

Angora-furred and feloniousco-conspiratorfor fifteen yearsand a handful of lives

with steps that waver then dareher soft dark pulse outlined by gold light from overheadbacked by the room’s night

one silken-fringed padappearing to rest on methis tower of paper words slipping

instinct tells her the ground may not hold

this is how I speak to youyour boy’s five years on the planetended four years ago

the reddish curls, the busy handswired to wide eyes and fearto miss the clutch and releasethe grit of sand and shovel

two things he lovedtoy train clack on wooden trackshis mother’s dandelioned hair

now your flowerless curls among our stained coffee cupsa sleek animalwithdrawnI know as I speakthe ground may not hold

Cat and Bird: Contrapuntal for a Grieving Mother

and Bird

the dirty kitchen sink and Istealing our moments

with dish soap and saucersnot too absorbed in each other

to heart-leap as the robin wings into the window

reflected by overcast silveralready veering her course

as she collidesdesperate to rescue

this greenstick momenteven as the bruises begin

instinct fails herthe glass is too clear

this is how I know youand your boy who needed dancing

among feeding tubes

the reddish curls, framed by whiteof hospital beds rising

sounds of ventilators forcingthe sterile air bare as November

two things he heldhis father’s hat and smile

worn as though he was already old

now in flight, crash to crashyour eyes slip gray

the wrong side of a geodecracked open for crystals

and as I seek I knowthe glass is too clear

Voices Adult Division First Place Adult Division First Place Voices

1918

I A pregnant woman told me she met her husband while he was tuning her piano. They got married in the living room with the piano as a witness. I imagine him tuning it with tender precision when the house is quiet, closing his eyes and tilting his ear towards the tiny spiral wound strings. I’ve never met her husband, and he’s never met the life growing inside her, yet we all depend on that piano and its tonal fidelity.

II As we dance through the dark, you envelop me in your body. I feel my bones shift and sway, guided by the silent song of your arms. You tell me this is a waltz, the words go like this: “I am yours, I am yours, I am yours.”

III Someone once told me if you dust off moth’s wings, it will never be able to fly again. After, I scrubbed every inch of your kitchen, and borrowed the neighbor’s ladder to brush the dust off the crown molding.

by Molly Batchik

Domestic Scenes I, II, and IIIby Lisa Gundry

My aunt curls her hair, a cigarette dangling from her lips,as I peer at her reflection in the mirror.

A large bird is trapped in my throat,fluttering about. The bird, bigger than my fear,is searching for a way out.

My mouth opens, the bird flies free.

Her mouth hangs open, suspended,like the ash on her cigarette.I have to call your mom, she says,her eyes meet mine in the mirror.She disappears into the kitchen while I wait.

Mom leaves work early to come;I hear the back door open, their feet on the stairs. They are one murmuring creature, coming for answers.

Bye, Bye Blackbird

Voices Adult Division Second Place Adult Division Third Place Voices

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Judge’s Comments2015 National Judge, Mark Doty

Mark Doty has published eight books of poems, including FIRE TO FIRE: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins), which won the National Book Award for poetry in 2008. He has also published five volumes of nonfiction prose, most recently THE ART OF DESCRIPTION: World into Word (Graywolf ), a handbook for writers. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill Foundations and the Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Fund, as well as a Whiting Writers Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the T.S. Eliot Prize. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, he teaches at Rutgers University and lives in New York City. Two new volumes are forthcoming from W.W. Norton. DEEP LANE, a collection of poems, will be published in 2015; WHAT IS THE GRASS, a prose meditation on Walt Whitman, desire, ecstasy and time is in progress.

Elementary Division

The Dream of Life“The short opening lines here, with their strong rhyme, seem to prepare us for a children’s game, though the second line doesn’t answer the question raised in the first, at least not in any ordinary way. This taut little world of a poem imagines life as a dreamed, hurried voyage through familiar things: years and houses, cats and mice, and always those mysterious clouds overhead.”

The Farm Down the Road“Abandoned farms are a part of the American landscape, and they feel haunted by the hopes and losses of those who lived there. This poem observantly details a slow ruin, examining the remains with a tone of quiet detachment. Until that powerful final comparison, when those howling rafters reveal the despera-tion and grief that still echo there.”

Healing Spot“In a casual, very natural-seeming way, the speaker gives us directions to the kind of spot we all need: a retreat, a place that shifts our perceptions. It’s wonderful that it isn’t a convention-ally beautiful paradise. There may be old scrap iron, twisty vines and bad soil, but the poem convinces me that this quirky Eden brings the poem’s speaker to a better state of mind every time.”

Judge’s Comments Elementary Division VoicesVoices Judge’s Comments

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Student Division

A poem I can never show my mother“This haunting lyric is marked by what someone called ‘the good strangeness of poetry’-- that is, it uses an unexpected set of images, often wild ones, to convey emotional truth. The poem creates a dangerous interior landscape beauti-fully (‘Chinese lanterns were floating/ like smoke from a still-burning wildfire’) and its arresting imagery conveys how strongly bound together here daughter and mother are; when we see how terrible the mother’s pain is, and how much the speaker wants to take it away, it’s clear just how loving this fierce and angry poem really is.”

Song for the Netherlands and Losing a Grandfather“A moving and beautifully shaped meditation on memory and legacy. Just this sentence alone would make this a poem of distinction: ‘There is such/ Sweet dark distance/ between the moment he/ put on the too-big, itchy overcoat of his American name/and the moment I found a place to hang that passed-down identity/ to air out in the wind.’ That’s a remarkable evocation of what it is to be the child or grandchild of an immigrant, and it’s accurate, original and tender all at once.”

Burdens on a Weekday Morning at a Restaurant on the Way to Alabama“One thing that makes this poem so effective is the elegant way the poet chooses to tell the story, working with chronology for the maximum effect. The family arrives at the restaurant and leaves, but it isn’t till we’ve looked back at the brutality of Southern history that we understand what’s happened. The final raging, expertly timed lines blaze with the speaker’s rage at the still-unfolding drama of American racism.”

Voices Judge’s Comments Student Division Judge’s Comments Adult Division Voices

Adult Division

Cat and Bird: Contrapuntal for a Grieving Mother“The pain of losing anyone we love is enormous, but there’s a particular heartbreak in the loss of a child, and it presents a great challenge for a poet: how to find language for that grief without sentimentality? This layered, unexpected poem ob-serves a mother’s grief through the eyes of two creatures, a cat and a bird, each speaking in a separate column of text, ‘this tower of paper words slipping’ in which we learn how hard it is, even after four years, to confront a child’s absence. ‘The ground may not hold,’ says the cat; ‘the glass is too clear,’ says the bird, but in truth it’s the shattered mother who’s the ventriloquist here, using these voices to speak the truths of her own heart.”

Domestic Scenes I II and III“These three sly, delightful vignettes together make for a lively prose poem that considers devotion, fidelity, and the lengths one might go to make sure the beloved sticks around. Deceptively straightforward, this poem demonstrates real control of tone, since it manages to feel both playful and sincere, wry and full of yearning, and all in a compressed, seemingly effortless form.”

Bye, Bye Blackbird“Who hasn’t opened his or her mouth to a relative and said something awkward or inappropriate, or felt the desire to do so, as if there were something in your throat that just had to get out? This poem literalizes that feeling with a striking, comic metaphor –- but it’s an uncomfortable sort of humor, and when aunt and mother become ‘one murmuring crea-ture, looking for answers’ we can’t help but remember how it feels to be interrogated by our families, and of the strictures that tradition often places on young women, for whom such expectations can feel like a jail cell. This darkly playful poem provokes the reader to consider quite serious subject matter, evoked here with humor and style.”

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Dyer-Ives Foundation Board

OfficersJohn R. Hunting, Chairman John D. Hibbard, Jr., Vice Chairman Steeve Buckridge, President R. Malcolm Cumming, Secretary Susan C. Cobb, Treasurer

DirectorsRosalynn Bliss Dotti Clune Jocelyn Detloff Julia Guevara Andy Guy Paul Haan Carl D. Kelly Jose Reyna Levi Rickert Darel Ross Carlos Sanchez Betty Zylstra

Trustee EmeritusDavid Jensen

Honorary TrusteesDuncan E. Littlefair (1912-2004) Steward R. Mott (1937-2008) Lewis A. Engman (1936-1995) David D. Hunting, Sr. (1892-1992)

Kent County Poetry Competition

Program DirectorLee Nelson Weber

Executive DirectorLinda Patterson

Coordinator for the Poetry CompetitionChristine Stephensw/ Shannon McMaster

Design for Voices Peopledesign

www.dyer-ives.org

The Dyer-Ives Foundation would like to extend a special thank you to the following:

Peopledesign provided design and production for our posters this year, as well the design for Voices and a special award honoring two local poets. Thank you, Peopledesign- especially Yang Kim and Emily Cowdrey.

Many thanks to UICA, our venue once again for our Poetry Awards Reading 2015.

The Awards Reading joins the larger effort of Grand Rapids’ Festival of the Arts, whose volunteers make the magic happen. Thanks especially to Kellie Colosky, Co-chair 2015, and Fred Bivins.

And finally, many thanks to our national judge, Mark Doty, whose involvement adds a spark to the excitement.

The 48th Annual Dyer-Ives Poetry Competition will accept poems during the Month of February 2016.

For more information: www.dyer-ives.org

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The Dream of Life

The Farm Down the Road

Healing Spot

A poem I can never show my mother

Song for the Netherlands and Losing a Grandfather

Burdens on a Weekday Morning at a Restaurant on the Way to Alabama

Cat and Bird: Contrapuntal for a Grieving Mother

Domestic Scenes I, II, and III

Bye, Bye Blackbird