The 2010 Poetry Contest

Congratulations to Laura Davenport for winning First Place in the 2010 Best Poetry Contest, co-sponsored by Richmond magazine. For the Richmond magazine article about the winning poems and the judging process, click here:

http://www.richmag.com/?articleID=e2ff35bc11e8cceae8e7ba67eea4d811

The 2010 winners were:

First Place Winner

Laura Davenport
for the poem, “Sermon: New Orleans, 2003”

Two Finalists

Heidi Johannesen Poon
for the poem, “The Problem of the Forest”

Henry Hart
for the poem, “White Goddess”

Honorable mentions

Wendy Miles
for two poems, “The Green Place” and “Memory: Virginia”

Sallie Lupton Jennings
for the poem, “He Stays”

Mil Norman-Risch
for the poem, “Remains”

Virginia Rider
for the poem, “From Miller's Lane”

About the Head Judge:
Joshua Poteat’s first book, Ornithologies, won the 2004 Anhinga Poetry Prize, judged by MacArthur Genius Grant winner Campbell McGrath. Joshua was also awarded the Poetry Society of America’s 2004 National Chapbook Award for Meditations, judged by Pulitzer Prize winner Mary Oliver. His second book, Illustrating the Machine that Makes the World: From J.G. Heck's 1851 Pictorial Archive of Nature and Science, was published in 2009 with University of Georgia Press/Virginia Quarterly Review.

Over the last few years he has won prizes/fellowships from American Literary Review, Bellingham Review, Columbia, Marlboro Review, Nebraska Review, River City, Hunger Mountain, San Francisco State University/American Poetry Archives, Vermont Studio Center, The Millay Colony, Virginia Commission for the Arts, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Universities West Press, and many others. From 2003-2006, his work was part of an international traveling exhibition of painting and poetry, Pivot Points, which featured three generations of painters and poets, including Larry Levis, Dave Smith, and others.

Recently, For Gabriel, a light-based installation Joshua created in collaboration with the designer Roberto Ventura, won the 2009 InLight Best in Show award, judged by Adelina Vlas, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Originally from Hampstead, NC, Joshua lives in Richmond, where he works as an editor of assorted texts at The Martin Agency, teaches classes at VCU, makes light boxes, and wrestles pugs.

The Judging Process

The two-part process implemented to choose the winning poems was highly unscientific:

1. Find the good ones. 2. Be generous and open when doing so. This seemed like the best way to proceed through over 300 poems. Luckily, the contest readers know good writing when we see it. We’ve read widely, across many sub-genres…from experimental/avant garde to straight ol’ narrative…from neo-formalist works to prose poems. Our choices for first place and the finalists reflect this range. Consider Sermon and The Problem of the Forest — both are dissimilar in many obvious ways yet remain tethered to each other by beautiful and brilliant language.

Winning Poem

I don’t want to speak for the other readers, but the title of the winning poem, Sermon: New Orleans, 2003, bothered me ... for a second or two. I expected a five-page Old Testament-based rant on the coming apocalypse. What I got instead was a balance of lyric and narrative intensity, ambitious in length as well as thought. To sustain a poem over several pages is a juggling act to say the least. When done well, however, the results can be extraordinary. In Sermon, the discursive, weaving voice, casual yet insistent, leads the reader through the recent past, through a vivid and crumbling city, a mysterious life, an abandoned church, and finally, a funeral. It’s a dark path, but the holding back of entropy is dark. And it’s what all good poems do, whether you want them to or not. They hold back ruin, if only for a moment.

Assisting Joshua Poteat in Reading the Entries were A.M. Marshall and Allison Titus.

A.M. Marshall is a poet and artist living in Richmond, VA.

Allison Titus is the author of a book of poems, Sum of Every Lost Ship (Cleveland State University Press, 2009), and a chapbook, Instructions from the Narwhal (Bateau Press, 2007). She lives in Richmond, VA.

Here were the rules for the 2010 Contest:

Submit up to four original, never-published poems postmarked by Dec. 15, 2009. A poet may enter only once. Submissions must be mailed to:

Richmond magazine
Best Poetry Contest
2201 W. Broad St., Suite 105
Richmond, VA 23220

Entry fee: $15 per submission of up to four poems. Checks should be made out to James River Writers.

First prize: $500, plus one or more winning poems published in the April 2010 issue of Richmond magazine and a ticket to the 2010 James River Writers conference.

Two finalists will each receive a $200 prize.

Rules: Poems must not include the author’s name or will be disqualified. Each submission must be typed and have a cover sheet with the author’s name, contact information and the poems’ titles. Two copies of each set of poems are required. One poem per page; all poems must have titles. Self-addressed, stamped envelope must be enclosed for notification of winners. No poems will be returned. Richmond magazine employees and JRW board members cannot enter.

To submit an entry, the writer must be a resident of Virginia, a student at a Virginia college or university, or a member of JRW.

Read about last year's poetry contest