The theme of this year’s contest was “history revisited,” in connection with the forthcoming International Lawrence Durrell Society Conference in Toulouse, France in June 2022.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n Each of us has a history.\u00a0 A personal history, some of which is known only to ourselves.\u00a0 But we also participate in communal history, not only in the events and relationships of current times but also those of previous centuries, which we have inherited from our ancestors, still present both in our blood and in our collective consciousness.<\/p>\n The theme of \u201chistory revisited\u201d for the 2021 White Mice Poetry Contest was selected for two reasons: 1) to honor our commitment to the 2020 On Miracle Ground conference sponsored by the International Lawrence Durrell Society, scheduled to take place in Toulouse, France that year but canceled due to the pandemic; and 2) to honor the history of the current moment, which involves revisiting much that has become suddenly relevant and revelatory by the intensity of our suffering and dislocation.<\/p>\n We became suddenly re-aware of the devastation wreaked by the flu pandemic of 1918, as well as by the mid-14th-century Bubonic plague, which wiped out a huge swath of Europe\u2019s population.\u00a0 We also became re-aware of signal events like the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment on unsuspecting African-Americans, a history suddenly re-vivified by the racial injustices still rampant in American life.<\/p>\n The winners of this year\u2019s White Mice Poetry Contest address historic resonance in a variety of ways, both personal and cultural.\u00a0 In Laura Budofsky Wiesniewski\u2019s \u201cHartford Rail Disaster, 1877″ (Third Prize), an historic event remains ever-present, \u201cfrozen\u201d in the speaker\u2019s consciousness.\u00a0 Jane Mary Curran\u2019s \u201cArmy Chaplain receives news of the death of Ezra Pound, November 1, 1972″ (Second Prize) describes the arrest and incarceration of the famous poet, narrated from the perspective of the chaplain who reflects, years later, on his death in Venice.<\/p>\n The other three winning poems offer a more personal perspective. \u201cAre We here Yet?\u201d (Honorable Mention) by Partridge Boswell delineates a boy\u2019s experience seeking to locate \u201cthe toy machine gun he lost in the leaves behind our house.\u201d\u00a0 The poem becomes a meditation on war, devastation, and the enduring struggles of love.\u00a0 In George Held\u2019s \u201cLegacy\u201d (Honorable Mention), the speaker describes the powerful after-effects of his mother\u2019s suicide, a famous poet whose work \u201cburnt \/ Her legacy into literate \/ Minds.\u201d<\/p>\n The overall winning poem, \u201cFlora,\u201d by Jesse Arthur Stone of Hedgesville, New York likewise focuses on conflicts, this time in the family home.\u00a0 Those skirmishes continue to resonate in the life of the speaker\u2019s sister, as her now teen-aged daughter rebels against her authority in a continuation of earlier domestic histories.<\/p>\n All these poems evoke ways in which distant events interact with and haunt us in the present, turning us somewhat askew but with enriching insights that only time and thoughtful consciousness can provide.\u00a0 You could say that our histories live us forward, as these meditations make abundantly clear.<\/p>\n \u2014David Radavich<\/p>\n Dear Sister, after I chased you One morning, when you were just bursting This gave way to brotherly pride, when, At dinner, you sassed Mom, and she threw Days later, you married the man you thought You recognize the old complaint, and begin to see \u2014Jesse Arthur Stone<\/p>\n Jesse Arthur Stone\u2019s poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines.\u00a0 He has won awards from the Arvon International Poetry Competition, Artemis, Atlanta Review<\/em>, the Dallas Poets Community, Paumanok Poetry Award Series, and West Virginia Writers 2018 Annual Writing Competition.\u00a0 He lives in West Virginia with his wife, poet, novelist, and dance educator Lynn Swanson.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n At the end of the war we arrested him, Ezra Pound, the Fascist Traitor, The colonel sent me to talk with him. Pound hunched on the scalding concrete, He never stopped talking through pealing lips, wrestling words His eyes \u2026 his eyes burned in his face, enflamed from sunlight I dipped my fingers in holy oil, offered to touch his face through * I still hear your monologues I listened, Look at me!\u00a0 Me!<\/p>\n I offered you oil, \u2014Jane Mary Curran<\/p>\n Jane Mary Curran lives in Asheville, North Carolina. She is retired from a college professorship in piano and a second career as a hospice chaplain and spiritual director. She is the author of\u00a0Indiana Girl: Poems<\/em>\u00a0(2019), and\u00a0Midwives of the Spirit: Thoughts on Caregiving<\/em>\u00a0(2002).<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n The train derails \u2014Laura Budofsky Wisniewski<\/p>\n Laura Budofsky Wisniewski is the author of the collection,\u00a0Sanctuary, Vermont<\/i>\u00a0(Orison) and the chapbook,\u00a0How to Prepare Bear<\/i>\u00a0(Redbird).\u00a0 Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in\u00a0Narrative<\/i>,\u00a0Image<\/i>,\u00a0Peripheries Journal<\/i>,\u00a0Hunger Mountain Review, American Journal of Poetry, <\/i>and others. She is winner of the 2020\u00a0Orison<\/i>\u00a0Poetry Prize,\u00a0Ruminate Magazine\u2019s<\/i>\u00a02020 Janet B.\u00a0Mccabe<\/span>\u00a0Poetry Prize, the 2019\u00a0Poetry International<\/i>\u00a0Prize, and the 2014\u00a0Passager<\/i><\/span>\u00a0Poetry Prize.\u00a0 Laura lives quietly in a small town in Vermont.<\/p>\nPreface<\/strong><\/h3>\n
First Prize<\/h2>\n
Flora<\/h3>\n
\naround the house with a pair
\nof opened scissors when you whispered
\nDad had built the tall latticework
\nto shut me in the backyard, I learned
\nto climb the lattice, and unhook the tongue
\nfrom the eye of the latch.<\/p>\n
\ninto womanhood, through the half-slit
\neyelids of pretended sleep, I glimpsed
\nthe reddening buds of your breasts.
\nYou complained to Mom, and I never
\nsaw you naked again, though I was sure
\nI would marry you.<\/p>\n
\nin your third year of high school, you stood up
\nin biology class, told your teacher: \u201cMiss Smith,
\nI don\u2019t like Biology, and I don\u2019t like you!\u201d
\nand walked out of school forever.<\/p>\n
\nthe metal salt shaker, hitting you in the head. Dad
\nyelled at her as you sat stunned and fingered the lump
\non your forehead in disbelief.<\/p>\n
\nwas a \u201ccreep\u201d the first time you saw him, and moved
\naway, swearing you\u2019d raise your family differently. Now,
\nyour grown daughter tells you to back off and let her
\nlive her own life, and you lament, \u201cThe mother
\nalways gets the blame.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nthe irony as you trim your backyard trellis\u2014 bloodroot,
\nbittersweet, forget-me-nots \u2014 and you admire how
\nsome keep coming back year after year, no matter
\nhow harsh the weather, how tender the shoots.<\/p>\n
\nSecond Prize<\/h2>\n
Army Chaplain receives news of the death of Ezra Pound, November 1, 1972<\/h3>\n
\nlocked him in a cage in the Italian sun,
\nset up flood lamps so he was lit all night.
\nHe hunkered and sweated in that six-by-six cage,
\nan old poet without paper or pen,
\ncurled behind wire while
\nGI\u2019s sprawled in the shade, told stories of home,
\ndrank casa vino rosso
\nand watched him burn.<\/p>\n
\na good-looking sixty, crazed around the eyes,
\nbragged he was a friend of Mussolini,
\ntold me Hitler was a saint.<\/p>\n
\nWho better to contend with Judas than a priest?<\/p>\n
\nstared through wire walls, as though I were the animal,
\nan ape on display. Heat rose through the soles of my boots.
\nWe cooked together on his doorstep of hell.<\/p>\n
\naround his swollen tongue.\u00a0 He piled philosophies, loaded
\nwith Latin, on top of Confucius, intellectual noise.\u00a0 A brilliant mind
\nbut his soul rattled, lost in its cave of conceit.<\/p>\n
\nand dust. He reeked of urine. And weeks of sweat. I requested water
\nfor him and a hat. Requests denied. The Army mourned
\ntheir dead and missing, not an old poet, lost to treason.<\/p>\n
\nthe wire, but there wasn\u2019t enough oil in heaven or earth.
\nThe mad man crouched and babbled on.<\/p>\n
\nThe news says you died in Venice today,
\ntraitor, prisoner, trenchant ghost.
\nYet here you crouch beside my chair.<\/p>\n
\nthrough the wires of your cage
\nwhere the Army locked you to shut you up,
\nbut you kept talking, building worlds.
\nIf suns could spring from single words,
\nyou\u2019d have created galaxies.<\/p>\n
\nwatched how you turned the cage to a nucleus,
\nsweated out poetry from your heated brain.
\nI loathed the sight and smell of you,
\nthe sound of your voice beating against me.
\nI was too pathetically sane to follow the maze
\nof your intoxicated mind, full of tricks and false turns,
\ndrunk on itself.<\/p>\n
\nbut you had yourself,
\nA Poet in chains,
\nyour own salvation.<\/p>\n
\nThird Prize<\/h2>\n
The Hartford Railroad Disaster, 1877<\/h3>\n
\na hundred, a thousand times a day.
\nI am always ten minutes away
\nfrom White River Junction.
\nI am always speeding
\nnorth to Montreal.
\nThe last car
\nis mine. It always jumps
\nthe trestle
\nfloating
\nin that endless
\nweightless moment,
\nthen
\ndrops.
\nThe river is frozen solid.
\nThere is always the fire, the screams, the arms
\nstretching out to me
\nin gaudy blouses of flame.
\nThere are always my father\u2019s new boots
\npushing me out through the window
\nbreaking me into pieces, a hundred, a thousand pieces.
\nI am punished
\nby the cold. I crawl
\non ice in darkness.
\nI do not turn around.
\nMy hands are dead forever.
\nI never turn around.<\/p>\n
\n