The decision will have been made some weeks ago and so it will in no way prejudice the judge if I share my entry here now.
Quite honestly, I had all but given up on the chosen theme of 'Dreamtime'. All I could think was to do some sort of pastiche of loose, psychedelic, 1960's culture and one wouldn't want to accidentally win the cup ahead of genuine entries with anything quite so insincere.
Eventually, I realized that the theme lent itself to the 'ripple poem', mentioned here a number of times in the past, that form invented by Roddy Lumsden, as much as an exercise for his students as anything else, perhaps, but it sometimes works. I've done it enough times to know that it doesn't always.
I'm not proud of this, it is an unlikely winner but at least I took part. I hope and I'm sure the judge will have found greater depths in a poem with some emotional engagement ahead of this technical exercise. It's not a good thing when the necessary notes and explanations are as long as the poem itself and that was mainly a disease of Modernism in the hands of William Empson and, not completely his fault, T.S. Eliot.
So, if it's possible to enter a competition with the intention of being a misunderstood also-ran, that's what I've done.
Dreamtime
a ‘ripple poem’ in
which the five consonants
in the title are the
last five consonants, in any order,
of each line
Sometimes I wonder, if I had more time
spent elsewhere in limited R.E.M.,
I might imagine I’m a matador
or an apache with a tom tom drum.
But then one awakes from a mad trauma
or another sinister medium,
a Banana Yoshimoto drama
which I escape with a soft tread I mime.
Note.
Banana Yoshimoto (born 1964), novelist and author of Kitchen.
Yoshimoto claims that her two main themes are “the exhaustion of young
Japanese in contemporary Japan”
and “the way in which terrible experiences shape a person’s life”.
