Summer Prize Poem

Hello everyone - it feels good to be back, though I’m uneasy about asking if you all had a good ‘summer’ because, as far as I can tell, August has not been the sunniest of months in the UK! I hope some of the Cote d’Azur sunshine finds its way north to you for September.

So many good poems to choose from, among them Charlotte Segaller’s ‘Lost' and Linda W’s ‘Spilling the Salt’. Both of these hold back from revealing the full impulse behind the poem, they suggest and imply and leave room for the reader to enter and make their own ‘story’ from the images and ideas. But the poem I’ve chosen as the Summer Prize Poem is Anne Kenny’s ‘Helen Kongai, Ugandan Farmer, July 2008’.

I like the choice of couplets, the two lines supporting the idea of two lives running parallel. I like the line break at ‘unravelling:/’ which subsequently leads us into Helen Kongai’s story, and again at ‘shudders’ for its ambiguity of meaning –the physical action of milking and the emotional connotations of fear or anxiety. It’s a poem that asks us to reflect on the ease of our western lives but at the same time celebrates this woman’s determination to survive and provide for her family. If I had one suggestion to edit a little, it would be to cut ‘to feed her young’ from the 4th couplet, as we have ‘infants to feed’ in the previous one, and ‘the flesh to reap its milky river’ is such a powerful image that it could well benefit from a line of its own. But the last line of the poem is wonderful – the ordinariness of ‘cowpats and cabbages’ anchors us to the earth that Helen Kongai depends on for her life. I feel I want to applaud her as she ‘spreads her word’.

Congratulations, Anne. If you email me (lynne@lynnerees.co.uk) with your postal address, I’ll put a ‘prize’ in the post this week.

I’ll post the first of September’s prompts in the next few days. It’s a good one!


Helen Kongai
(Ugandan Farmer, July 2008)

I press clutch, push pedal, move gear,
drive to gather food from heaving shelves.

Her voice travels with me, unravelling:
after his death she’s left with stony soil,

infants to feed, & the gift of a treasured
cow. She wraps hands around udders, shudders

the flesh to reap its milky river, to feed her young.
A barren land, enriched with dung, she swaps

surplus for seeds, conjures pigweed,
sweet-corn, spinach, leaves hunger between

cowpats & cabbages - spreads her word.

Anne Kenny

January Poem Prompt 1 - Thinking about Couplets

Two lines of poetry working as a unit are known as a couplet. They can be syntactically complete in themselves, or they can employ enjambment and rely on the previous or succeeding couplet/s to complete the thought or image.

Couplets can have a feeling of isolation on the page - there's all that white space surrounding them - or maybe it's not isolation or loneliness, maybe it's aloneness, self-containment. Maybe they can act as a celebration of that white space and what it represents to you.

My challenge to you is to write a poem whose subject matter and theme deserves being shaped into couplets. Your reasons do not have to be the same as any I've suggested above, but try to be aware of the reciprocation of form and content.

And one other thing: couplets tend to draw attention to themselves so make sure that each couplet has some power, something to show or say for itself, even if it does run on to the next.

Good luck. And here's a poem by the wonderful Catherine Smith to inspire you.

Ascension
On 6th July 2005, a fifteen year old girl sleep-walked from her home in East Dulwich and was spotted at 2 a. m., curled fast asleep on the counterweight of a crane.

She doesn’t register
the slap of pavement

underfoot
then the grip

of each rung
as she ascends

towards the sky –
­a mild night,

stars winking
over the library,

the railway station,
the Curry Club.

She’s not dreaming this,
she’s not dreaming

anything. Something
drives her upwards ­

to curl her body
on cooled steel

rest her cheek
against the dust

and pigeon shit,
unaware

she could roll off
like a pea on the blade

of a knife, and her
mouth opens,

bubbles spit,
her limbs still warm

from the tangled nest
of sheets ­–

she’s not dreaming this,
she’s not dreaming

anything, she’s risen
above the tilt

of the earth,
she’s risen

as high as she can,
as high as this.

from Lip
Smith/Doorstop Books 2007

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