Spring Poetry Search FIRST PLACE
Folded Neatly, Ready to Go Home By Carol Miller
Poetry echoing trauma takes center stage
H
ow would you describe your feelings if you shouted inside a cavern, and hundreds of echoes returned ? And sonorous sounds filled the space? How would you depict the phenomenon itself, and describe your emotions? Breathtaking. Impactful. Touching. Overwhelming. The adjectives—no matter how many accumulate—say too little. The dilemma is comparable to trying to express my feeling after receiving over 80 submissions following the call for poetry on the themes of history and trauma. Before reading the poems, let’s review the contest guidelines. I asked for “poems dealing with a traumatic event that has a deeper history, so that the poem deals both with the present manifestation and the historical background. The traumatic crisis may be cultural, racial, sexual, gender-based, geographical, environmental, or anything else.” Put another way—write me something about where historical tragedy ends, and your public or private story begins. Make me feel the weight of history. In response I received an outpouring of rhyming, confessional and free verse and experimental poetry addressing (thematically) loss, dislocation, isolation, immigration, racism, love, family, guilt, memory and drawing (historically) on memories of the Holocaust, the bombing of Dresden, massacres of Native Americans, World War II battles, Japanese internment camps, Vietnam, Kent State and the killing of George Floyd, to name a few specific references. I can’t humanly convey the similarities and differences in the submissions (because I can’t reprint them all.) But their emotional register hit me. The corpus hit me harder than any individual poem. I didn’t have to wade through the manuscripts, feeling tedium, or annoyance, so much as simply let them wash over me. There is an immense outpouring of goodwill in these poems. It proved impossible to remain unimpressed by the conscientiousness evident. In its own way, although I knew Santa Fe was a progressive city, reading so many meditations on ethics and history written (mostly) by local authors was an affirmation of human nature. If you’re vexed because you submitted, but don’t see your poem printed here, then my advice is to study the chosen poems carefully. Study them for the values that struck me. And that you can incorporate into your next poem. Note Carol Miller’s skillful use of silence in “Folded Neatly, Ready to Go Home.” Alejandro Jimenez’s layered unraveling of dislocation and memory in “Untitled Poem about Immigration” and Leslie Zane’s shrewd use of formalism (a formal villanelle) to contain timeless gravitas and topical events in “History Cannot Be Chiseled Away.” I chose the prizewinners and honorable mentions that evoked history heavily enough for me to feel its import, but balanced inside the shapes, sounds and metaphorical veils of poetry. Enjoy. —Darryl Lorenzo Wellington
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MARCH MARCH 23-29, 23-29, 2022 2022
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My huipiles are crying from the drawer. I can hear them in my heart. They want to go home. I don’t know how to tell them the villages have been destroyed. Daughters of the weavers walking two thousand miles. For a dream. For life. Threads connect me to the hands of many women. Each came from the maker. Or the sister mother neighbor. In a market or at the artist’s small home, made of dirt, like mine. Stacked like beautiful gravestones, memorials to Mayan grief. Too precious to wear. Rematriation is the dream. Each huipile gifted to a woman forced to run with only a pack too small for treasures. Notes: The huipil (plural: huipiles) is a garment hand woven on a loom and worn by Mayan women. For the Mayan women of Guatemala, the woven design identifies which community they come from. Carol Miller is a public health and social justice activist who has been living in a frontier mountain village in Northern New Mexico for 46 years. In addition to being a New Mexico community organizer, Miller has worked at every level of government: local, state, and federal all the way to the White House. Miller is dedicated to geographic democracy, the principle that social and economic justice must extend to the smallest and most isolated areas of the country. No community left behind.
