2009 Red Hot Pawn Verse Awards

Originally posted by ChronicLeaky
That fear comes across very effectively; this poem evoked the strongest feelings for me among all entries, because it is very ambiguous in a way, like when someone tells a joke that some of the listeners complain is "in poor taste" while I nod soberly, laugh my ass off on the inside, and remember the joke in case I ever find myself in a church full of o ...[text shortened]... em uses wit to amplify fear instead. Also, the matter-of-factness is positively chilling.

I noticed that my votes in this competition ("Untitled", "Hibiscus" and "The Wood of Humanity" ) were biased toward poems built around complex metaphors (to answer your question, CFT, "guilt sticks like mud" is technically a simile, but you've expanded it into a full-blown metaphor in my opinion), or at least things that can be reasonably interpreted that way. There was a discussion in General recently about what, if anything, distinguishes verse that is "poetry" from verse that is not. I wouldn't say that a central metaphor distinguishes poetic verse from non-poetic verse, since some of the entires which didn't strike me as being structured around a central metaphor still had a lot of implicit content (see above post about "Walter"; "The Beggar" is dense with commentary that poetically evokes a sight most of us have probably seen; the formal conceit in "Inaugural Address" explores the art that arises from a dialect which has seen a lot of use on RHP and is nowhere near exhausted -- all these and more seem to me to be poetry). However, it is a sensible sufficient condition for a piece of verse to be poetry, maybe.

Unless I'm reading it in a silly way, I like about "Hibiscus" that it can be sensibly read literally or metaphorically such that either interpretation requires an imaginative leap. The constant questions make it clear that someone is speaking -- a flower (literally) or a person (metaphorically). Either interpretation requires entertaining an unusual idea, either by giving human meanings to parts of a flower (in the metaphorical interpretation), or by anthropomorphizing a plant and getting in the frame of mind I used to enjoy when talking to my pet cactus, Desmond, before his tragic drowning last year. The call-and-answer style has a sort of sermonesque quality that I think works quite well as a way of anchoring the verse.

These considerations motivate some general questions. Perhaps we could use the entries to try to answer questions like:

1. Is there a distinction between verse which is "poetry" and verse which is not? If so, what is it?

2. What formal and stylistic features of the entries made enough of an impact to influence your votes?

3. Is it the case that there are certain formal verse-techniques which are better suited to communicating a given idea than others? (For example, is it mere tradition that the limerick template is usually used, not only to communicate humour, but a fairly specific type of humour, or is there some kind of correspondence between the metric and rhyme scheme and the setup-unexpected punchline format of limericks?)

I forgot to thank people for taking the time to read all the entries -- those who voted and those who didn't (some of us read them but forgot that next step 😞). It was a pleasure to participate and an honor to have people vote for my poem. Thanks!!