A Letter to the Judges

 This poem won the Silver Medal in the Newcastle Poetry Prize for 2022. 

Congratulations to all who placed in the competition and to all who are published in the competitition anthology. Thanks to the organisers, judges and designers, to Hunter Writers' Centre and the University of Newcastle. 

A Letter to the Judges

 

ONE

You won't believe this. Or maybe you will. Or grudgingly. Whatever.

It's not my job to make you happy. I've spread myself too thin already.

 

I do think you should entertain it though, in all conscience, at least for

the sake of entertainment. You won't get rid of me without odd pangs.

 

I'm going to write this next year too. Only you won't read it then. Unless

it gets in. It probably won't. Whose loss? Some people buy scratchies.

 

You have to admire the cussed persistence of the poem, to have itself

rewritten every year like this. And here's a poet, has to be, trompe l'oeil,

 

as it were, avowing this will be done for as long as it takes. I will will it

to my offspring, even unto the seventh son/daughter, of the seventh, and so on.

 

(How can you know I haven't inherited it myself?... Isn't it as if we were

always here, me with these lines endlessly shaped, you with this silly dare?)

 

Let it be recorded in whichever heaven you like, I have a poem to smoke

to the ancestors, to raise beaker with, take pills for, be bound to that juggernaut

 

revision, until it's past the post and placed, and/or more likely, also ran.

 

O weep but a little for this dross,

I won't be cross.

 

Platonist improvisation. Mirror faceted, and ask, which poem is the original (?)

 

It is a series of tests I have set. If you kill it now, can it ever improve?

The reflex poem. Covid conditions persist. The knee-jerk reaction, precautions.

 

One future of democracy is in these shaking hands. Your mission

should you choose to accept it, (and my mission too) to fall

like sunlight merely, over the object of interest.

 

 

 

TWO

That's the first strophe in the bag. Too easy, as they say.

I suppose I should have started with a 'Dear somebody-or-other, …'

Too late now. Here's poetaster lowering tone again.

 

Like dog's balls or an intentional fallacy. Licked either way. A little one-

sided as conversation goes; a letter is a kind of ode, if you have a think.

But then two poems might meet discreetly. (It happens all the time.

 

Where do you think poems come from?) And as with much romance,

it's hard to see why it's not prose; sometimes you just have to have faith.

'Believe me.' (That was Fats Waller.) I write from the heart. The head itself

 

cannot make poetry, however handy. And yet the head is top

of the tree. And coconut too. Want a wrestle? Howsabout

hide-n-seek, a board game? Or let's canoe? Come out of hiding.

 

You know this voice, don't you? Don't you know all the voices?

Or you want it to be a stranger? You want to be a stranger yourself?

Prosopopoeia! Fresh joy in masks and unmasking. Lavish of throwing voice. 

 

Being thrown by it. And double dare ya. You can just stop reading. Wipe.

Kill this thing off now. There isn't a duty to go on. Only 800 entries to go.

 

 

 

STROPHE THE THIRD

Still here? I hear a stifled moan. Wotsup? Is that pain or approbation?

 

There is a time limit for the writing of the letter. Not imposed

by rigid fear, but product of anxiety. We too, you see, have rules,

of a sort. You only go at it when you want. So it has to be

the honest truth. Many of us are at work in this way. It is a baring

of life and limb to all the colour we can muster. There are numbers

on the backs of our cards. CVC – what's this? But we know now.

We hammer the tongs, by tooth and nail, as hoist to own petard.

 

 

 

Never learn our lesson. (We're paying, so why not bunch the titles up?)

YES, NATURE... it is a highly allusive system, everything connects.

Rhizomatically is cool.  Prayer’s a filibuster.

 

Based on observation – valley shaped to sun, little wonder of a cloud,

but now the moon must mist. See cattle, hear the fark fark crows.

I like to gather in the wood then. Stack branches. All these tasks to laud.

 

In the vizier's garden, a dry sierra. That orchard trickle of the past is dust.

 

All through the sun, and the billowing sails

fish in the net flap silver, gold.

 

The last two centuries? Who needs 'em? Be sublime.

 

Say ‘delicate’ – you’ve done your dash. Make twee. With dappled dulcet zeal.

Might as well have ‘cerulean’, ‘petrichor’ – ‘effulgent’.

 

Shockers! Yet gong to smartypants won’t go.

By the time you read this though, the wicked Tories may be done.

 

 

 

SQUEAL NOW (Mainly it’s the sins of the fathers.)

Or something more evocative. There has to be urban grit

in the works. His slutty face, her leer. And the bodies later

 

with whom cause shall not attribute. Detective poem?

The future grammar is imagined. Can't be a pretty sight;

 

not for us in our nowadays nighties. We've forgotten years.

Just as the ideal map exceeds territory in scope,

 

the poem can never be more than a plan of/for itself.

And of its time, and limits, telling – living work.

 

Rhetorical knockout punch somewhere round here.

Lines to ring forever, like pennies in a till.

 

 

 

STROPHE THE NEXT

Is it a journey?  (Yes, we're working through a list.)

Could be a walk across the empty city. The Hill or Cook's Hill.

Let's not give too much away. Say Merewether Baths to Nobby's,

few lattes, swim, bit of a chat, best part of a day. Our ocean was allowed.

Why do people live anywhere else? (A: So we might pity them.)

And industry's out there, still queuing on the horizon.

Coal! The future's going to be the past. They're breathing this

in India now (And some must breathe their last)  … No,

it's too ponderous to tell. Which centre cannot hold?

 

Parts of the poem should seem still like draft...

 

rhymes buried and long rhymes too, this could be dictation,

automatic writing, the epistolary italic, aliens in the anthology

 

(and just as suddenly, the punctuation's back, if erratic though).

Effort of months/of years to seem dashed off as if last minute,

to a deadline … True pride of craft self-deprecates. 

 

Struggle to strike right note. Somewhere between Dryden and Pope.

Balmain needs harrowing again. Glad to have got that out of the way.

 

 

 

 

Refrain ?

Yes, praps you wish I had. So pencil in some indignation.

I write out of moral responsibility. Witness all kinds of vanishing.

 

Economy, for instance. It's the war on the world I don't get. And on the trees!

It’s every lie was white once. Are there Nazis in Ukraine? Yes, and in Moscow too.

Nazis are everywhere. Here, try this spray. It’s good beyond the grave.

 

 

 

NEXT SECTION BAROQUE (with ‘Ventilator Blues’)

The noun phrase, like expanded territory – a season end to it.

The poem is concertina; every world is filed somewhere. Spuds under ‘P’.

There's 'handle' – that's 'off which to fly'. Want pandering, do you?

 

Another artform or narrative of voyage, this day containing all others before.

 

We're somebody else's exoplanet. Suck that up, you fool. Un-pun!

 

 

 

CONFIDE AND THREATEN  (in Dale Carnegie's sinister cypher)

I know about... the accident (so-called) and the letter (dodgy hand),

the deleted messages… Who do you think you are and what gives you

the right? Is there such a thing as a safe secret? Ah, but there's nothing that

must really spill. Destiny is in your hands if we can agree to terms.

 

 

 

APOLOGIA

Forgive this last outburst. Of course I accept your what-shall-we-say (?)

unreservedly unconditionally anonymously, etceterally.

 

Or are we just a little superstitious, game to leave this out?

Shortlist's the only way to know. Good oil that you can trust.

 

You'd think a letter had a middle; this simply isn't true.

There's a moment though you know you're well past. Symmetry

must be defied. Belly ache or belly laugh? Even if

you should decide you wouldn't be able to tell.

 

 

 

EPIGRAMMATIC

Go to bed and the day's still in us.

 

So many are birds, those of the air –

there must be a trick to it.

 

In little wildernesses of the missive,

where grief outpours the heart to live –

ask, would women ever love (?). Did men?

 

Obscurity – the dark will choose us.

 

In trouble for being cheerful again?

Don’t get into the Bible that way.

 

 

 

IN AUTOBIOGRAPHIC MODE

The poet with the specimen box collecting wilds of her own mind,

just to be generic. It's like the idiot in the story and just don't get it

about cliques and bubble ambition, vanity of human wishes, the poetry

compulsion – clinical variety. Once friend of mine tried to stop – poet I mean –

churns out the good stuff. Was so sickened by how it all goes; thought what's

the point (?). Made a month on the poetry waggon and then began to feel

physically ill from not making. Realized poetry's something you do

for the sake of a little lie down. Have to give yourself the guernsey.

 

It's like managing sex urges of the upper primates. Will not be done remotely,

but we lure them in. There are about five hundred in this country – seriously

afflicted. How contagious? It's hard to say. Never seems to catch on. Next.

                                                                          

Shake my hand and double your dole. (Limited period offer). That was Hawaii Smoko

of the eleven million hectares. Has to be dated for a footnote later. Then there

were the floods. And go again. A catalogue of lies. What’s carbon footprint of a war?

All oil. One in five deaths worldwide now are smog, did you know?  Seven mill. Play market

yo-yo. Blow up a sacred site. Have another? Here’s old growth. The koalas and me still.

 

 

 

Do lives matter? ANTISTROPHE around about here.

It could simply be a question of losing count. And yet the poet

keeps toting up lines! As if they were Noble Numbers. You bet!

 

Lip twitch of herpes or an itchy arse. The hip that tells of autumn,

as ants of rain. Once the ache gets in, like rats in the rafters, hell to be rid of.

 

You ask after my health? That’s kind. Might be form

or you're just trying to be funny. The ringing in the ears won't stop.

 

One could grizzle one's tits off in a letter like this

and where would that get us? Torn between two genres, more,

 

feeling like our work's to get thing all measured.

How many tracks can the poem run on? You tell me.

 

You can do it in the speech. No one'll mind much and here I am

getting a tedious job out of the way for you. How many poems

 

are as helpful as this? How can you think I'm not owed?

Poetry's grim reaper too. Or else – your time will come!

 

It's the thing you think won't fit that makes it,

sets the whole thing snug.

 

 

 

EPODE

Swear out an affidavit that all the words are mine. Because

anyone could have written this. I'll see you in the O.E.D.

That's what you have to bear in mind. How can we believe

though? Committing words to paper as such, can't be sure

that I'm alive. I could be wraith here for appearance… Dark vanishing,

fully Victorian; if it wasn't for the breathy patches... Pinch and Tickle.

(Solicitors.) Two hundred lines is a fair whack of frame.

 

The forms defy coherence. I become a school.

And swim for it. Sunlight's for the treetops now.

 

Assume there must be an ending somewhere though possibly in media res.

Hard to catch a coda when you've swallowed your own tail.

(Great garbage patch now in the fish. Look just like single-use soy.)

 

Nietszche, when he was most mad, then wished to be understood.

A few of us have got this, like we're where light lasts. You could make

your way by just a dim poet once. Too much photopollution now. Things

were twiddly in the ancient days, now they call that steampunk. Sigh.

And LOL, he he. Notice planets line up of late – let's take that for a sign.

 

Who's the one nearest and next? Head of an ox or a cow? Chicken's feet?

Yours faithfully and with regards. And here for my last wishes – the pizza,

coke (full strength) and cigarettes as back in the day. (Turns out the filters

are worse for you!) Life always had to end, we knew. What a privilege

being is/was. A fearful thing one might butt up against the 200^th line.

IMHO, it's where we are today. Is the election over yet?

 

You don't need to be a prophet to know

that when this cinder Earth goes out,

every phrase will be long forgotten.

Whatever wrongs remain to right,          

however much better we all and it might be;

so long lives this? So long! One shuns formality,

and yet I am sincerely yours.

So say a fond hooray.