Aloes by Josephine Joy. Smithsonian American Art Museum, ca. 1935-38, No. 1971.447.43
The first issue of the Poetry Letter of a given year presents all prize-winning poems from Monthly Contests of the previous year and these poems fill the majority of its pages. I interspersed poetry with illustrations taken from the Smithsonian Museum of American Art: folk art by Josephine Joy (1869-1948), anonymous rural paintings, and California landscape art by Elmer Wachtel (1864-1939), Paul Dougherty (1877-1947), and Edward Bruce (1879-1943).
The majority of paintings come from the oeuvre of Josephine Joy. According to the Smithsonian, “Josephine Joy grew up on an Illinois farm, where she loved to sketch birds, trees, and flowers. Circumstances prevented her from following her artistic calling until 1927, after her children were grown and her husband had died. Joy lived in California then, and the WPA's California Art Project afforded her the opportunity to work gainfully as an artist.” Her paintings are in a folk-art style reminiscent of the French Henri Rousseau or the Polish Nikifor. She painted what she saw and how she saw it, without succumbing to artistic conventions about how art “should” look like, that changed in time like women’s fashion styles. Folk artists encapsulate the freedom of self-expression, and the happiness of creativity.
Maja Trochimczyk, CSPS President
List of Monthly Contest Winners of 2023
Alice Pero, the CSPS Monthly Contest Judge selected the following poems from submissions received each month. The first prize is a minimum of $10. Congratulations to all the winners!
January (Nature, Landscapes):
♦ 1st Prize: Gurupreet K. Khalsa, "Slip Your Mind Into the Water"
♦ ♦ 2nd Prize: Joel Savishinsky, "Orchard in Autumn"
♦ ♦ ♦ 3rd Prize: Colorado Smith, "Spirit-Bears of British Columbia"
February (Love):
♦ 1st Prize: Jean Varda, “Lover”
♦ ♦ 2nd Prize: Erin Garstka, "In the Twilight"
March (Open, Free Subject):
♦ 1st Prize: r g cantalupo, “The Art of Poetry”
♦ ♦ 2nd Prize: Ed McManis, “Thirtieth Anniversary”
April (Dreams, Mythology, Other Universes):
♦ 1st Prize: Lucia Kiersch Haase, "I Have Dreams"
♦ ♦ 2nd Prize: Gurupreet K. Khalsa, "Provisional Identity"
May (Personification, Characters, Portraits):
♦ 1st Prize: Allison Burris, "Two Good Witches"
June (The Supernatural): ♦ No Prizes.
July (Childhood, Memoirs):
♦ 1st Prize Jane Stuart, “When Memories Fade”
August (Places, Poems of Location):
♦ 1st Prize: Jiang Pu, "Hakone Garden"
♦ ♦ 2nd Prize: Michael Shoemaker, "Stargazing at Capitol Reef"
September (Colors, Music, Dance):
♦ 1st Prize: Joan Gerstein, “Grayscale of Truth”
♦ ♦ 2nd Prize: Stewart Breier, “Hellstorm, Stars & Angels”
♦ ♦ ♦ 3rd Prize: Kevin Madrigal Galindo, “the rhythm of the wind”
October: ♦ No award.
November (Family, Relationships):
♦ 1st Prize: Mia Kernaghan, “A Strange Chance”
♦ ♦ 2nd Prize: Jeff Graham, “Though”
♦ ♦ ♦ 3rd Prize: Carla Schick, “Today I Could Be Something I've Never Been”
December (Back Down to Earth – Time, Seasons):
♦ 1st Prize: Thomas Feeney, "Fall Afternoon"
♦ ♦ 2nd Prize: Jane Stuart, "December Melody"
Stag at Echo Rock, Anonymous folk art, oil on canvas. Smithsonian American Art Museum,
Gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr. and museum purchase made possible by Ralph Cross Johnson.
JANUARY 2023
SLIP YOUR MIND
INTO THE WATER
Clinging by the tree-equivalent
of fingernails,
roots forsaken by sandy
shoreline
surrendered companion lying in a
tangle,
of slimed branches, the broken
old oak
leans heavy above the water,
draped in swaying Spanish moss
like an ancient woman, bent and
shuffling
in her drab dressing gown,
waving
farewell to each friend in turn,
waiting
for her time to fall into watery
depths
to become a colony of barnacles.
And if you forget the cycle
to descend into your own
dream*
you can slip your mind into the
water.
* Ta-Nehisi Coates,
Between the World and Me, p. 108
Gurupreet K. Khalsa,
First Prize, January 2023
Published
in Mocking Owl Roost Blog, Special
Poetry Issue, 1 September 2022. www.mockingowlroost.com/blog
ORCHARD IN AUTUMN
Nothing seems to be what it is.
The carrots are like cardboard
Tomatoes: tasteless. Too many
mealy melons. The world has
taken a chemical bath, and
my taste-buds admit to
a failure of nerve.
This is not my orchard, and I
have a say only in its sadness.
Beyond the borders where
the trucks and spray do not
reach,
a rogue tree, sidelined,
overlooked,
limbs angled like arms crossed
in anger.
It mimics a crone, overgrown,
whose suckers proliferate,
the mature apples now barely
the dimension of young·breasts
or swollen plumbs, still sweet
but tart, almost embarrassing in
their small, geometric hope for
salvation.
How many more years will these
offerings
keep their virtue? How many more
years
will I be able to hike this far
to find
their weeping crowns, the edges
graced
by the blasts of October storms,
the windfall at their swollen
feet
turning the soil into
apple-earth?
Perhaps this is another
creation's
Tree of Good and Evil, its roots
snaking beneath the boundary
between abuse and neglect,
the latter-day witness whose
autumn fruit embodies the Fall
itself,
last resident of a paradise from
which
one would welcome the relief of
exile and
the exchange of innocence for
character.
Joel Savishinsky
Second Prize, January 2023
SPIRIT-BEARS* OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
When
all animals spoke the same language,
the first Moksgm'ol* showed a human
which
plants were edible,
and
how to catch salmon,
leave
their remains in forest
so
their nitrogen nourishes trees.
About to teach the human how to hibernate all
winter,
the
white-bear was killed by another human 's arrow.
Now
we bum wood all winter to live.
-Kitasoo
Legend
In the spruce forest, to the thump of the
shore-break,
shaman-song purls from a stormy petrel's
burrow.
Muskeg tea tumbles downstream to the
strait
as foamy spume from swells
surround
a sperm whale's stifling stench
as it rots on the rocks—
its purple tongue almost gone
and cavernous cavities eaten into its
creamy blubber.
On black sand under a huge hemlock,
a white bear and her white cub* sleep-off
their feast.
To the rasping cry of Stellar jays,
dippers
and crows harvest salmon eggs
from the riffled edges of the muskeg
stream.
Bald eagles on cedar perches await
silver silhouettes in the Pacific
or unsuspecting shorebirds.
At dusk when the tide is out,
the white bears savor salmonberries,
search the sea wrack for kelp and crabs,
then CRUNCH acorn barnacles off the rocks
...
*Over
I00 white black-bears live on the islands
in
the Great Bear Rainforest.
They're not albinos: both their parents
had a recessive no-melanin gene.
Colorado Smith
Third Prize, January 2023
William Henry Holmes (1846-1933), On the Coast of California, watercolor, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. William Henry Holmes, n.d. Catalog No. 1930.12.8.
FEBRUARY 2023
LOVER
your body
and my body
and the sun
that rises
between us
and melts
my mind
opens
my heart
body of
bird song
clear wind
on the
mountaintop
I
am a cloud
resting
against you
Jean Varda,
First Prize, February 2023
IN THE TWILIGHT
~ for Mark
I want to go back to the moment we met
and make the ocean lie still on the
horizon,
light and shadows bathed in blue
haze,
my only thought that you cannot be
too near.
I want to see your blue eyes in the
twilight,
two stars in the long vanishing trail
of memory,
your hair wild as a tumbleweed and
golden
as sun in the heat of an August
afternoon.
I want to hear your voice in my ear
so soft
it sends down a deep shock of desire
stinging
the tip of my heart and startles my
breath
from lungs easing into o's of ecstasy.
I want to make love beneath a saucer
of a moon
with the tide at its full and the
last ship lost,
every woman who ever loved singing
from my bones,
every man who ever fell beneath a siren's spell answering.
Erin Garstka
Second Prize, February 2023
Josephine Joy (1869-1948), Irish Cottage, oil on canvas. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the Newark Museum, ca. 1935-1938; Catalog No. 1966.31.8.
MARCH 2023
THE ART OF POETRY
I usually get where I’m going
without knowing how I got there.
I’m driving, but it’s not me fighting
traffic, it’s someone else, someone
who’s infinitely better at such tasks.
No, I’m usually drifting along on a song
elsewhere, listening to Bix Beiderbecke
on the coronet say, or Bechet on his
moaning clarinet. I’m here following a
burst of pure expression, gazing up
through the windshield at a splash of
wild, lime-green parrots, while my double’s
out there cruising through amber lights,
negotiating a horseshoe curve. And yet it
is in those moments, in that space between
habit and desire, that suddenly a phrase
will come, a cluster of sounds, a line or two
or even a whole poem, written in my head,
or scribbled on the back of a grocery list
as my other continues squiggling down
the mountain. You might think there’s
more to it than that, a kind of alchemy
to the way I multiply from one to three,
into this one braking into a turn, that one
watching a flight of green wings, and this
last one scatting to the notes of a sweet
horn—a magic say to how one street shifts
into another until—poof!—I am there!—
parked in front of a grocery store or a pet
shop. But, that’s not the way it happens
really. My pen simply rolls forward toward
some place I’ve never been before, (or I keep
revisiting), and I, I just go along, surrender
to the mystery
r g cantalupo
First Prize in March 2023
First published in Wisconsin Review
THIRTIETH
ANNIVERSARY
She dreams
of onyx, I’m
pretty sure,
a beach
in Mexico,
with a child
who sells carved
elephants, jingles
pesos, pans
for American gold.
Before she wakes
I rub lotion
on my hands
and feet
as if I were
an apostle,
an awkward
clumsy one
with wrinkled
sandpaper skin,
a long memory.
Ed McManis
Second Prize, March 2023
Paul Dougherty (1877-1947), California Cliffs, oil on wood. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Carleton S. Coon, after 1935. Catalog no. 1968.148.
APRIL 2023
I
HAVE DREAMS
Watching Britain By Beach,
the ocean gleams
reflecting a quaint
writing shed in Wales
and I'm not there, but
surely I have dreams
where Dylan Thomas wrote midst winded
beams
of windowed sun so near to
sea bound sails.
Watching Bntain By Beach,
the ocean gleams.
Reading Under Milk Wood
and thinking of themes
for poems. Inspiration
never fails,
and I'm not there, but
surely I have dreams
just as a famous Wales
poet, it seems
writing wave length verse,
telling of his tales.
Watching Britain By Beach,
the ocean gleams.
A far away place, yet a
closeness streams
in quiet sea currents of
metered scales,
and I'm not there, but
surely I have dreams.
In the mind of a poet,
there's always schemes
to follow in one's mind
like beachy trails.
Watching Britain By Beach,
the ocean gleams,
and I'm not there, but
surely I have dreams.
Lucia
Kiersch Haase
First Prize, April 2023
PROVISIONAL IDENTITY
For whatsoever from one place doth fall,
is with the tide unto another brought
for there is nothing lost
that may be found if sought.
--Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen
Sliding around on the surface of a soap bubble (also known as the Universe), seeking purchase. Experi'ence the bubble as two-dimensional. Piercing the bubble to vast interior emptiness brings about annihilation
yet
in infinite space
room enough.
In traversing the bubble's surface I run and run to reach conclusion or understanding but end up where I began. Do you believe in this life? What if is the was of what shall be, Lao Tzu said, remember how time past meanders into time present and becomes memories that linger through unforgotten years, dispassionately seeing to the core,
mate
with heaven
feel
no break
return
to quiet.
Measureless untouchable source (repeated), music blowing dust. Hum of bass viols in the ocean. I walk on the beach, eyes on patches of sand just ahead of my feet. I am searching for a perfect rock—round, flat, bubble-smooth. What I find is not perfect. A bump on one side, ridges, swirls that could be a fossilized river, slick riparian eddies, islands, layers —
flow's origin,
mobius thread,
beginning/ending
simultaneous.
Rock, warm in my hand. If returned to shore, how long before its swirls, eddies become part of vaster ocean and shore, indistinguishable beginning and ending, yesterday on the edge of tomorrow, measureless untouchable source, found if sought.
Italics: from Sue Brannan Walker's poem, Yesterday on the Edge of Tomorrow
Gurupreet K. Khalsa
Second Prize in April 2023
Arthur F. Mathews (1860-1945), Spring Dance,
oil on canvas. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David J.
Carlson, ca. 1917, Catalog no. 1982.126
MAY 2023
TWO GOOD WITCHES
they cool their legs in the
little pond,
watch the hopping frogs
glisten and swim, frogs gliding
under the pads, plopping,
lilies bloom & feet sway
back and forth
tell
me who you helped today,
tell
me the song you sang
to
the tune of human foibles
sharing rice cakes,
crustless cucumber sandwiches
cut into triangles,
carrot sticks & cold brewed
tea
blended specially to face
another day of kindness
they’ve rucked up blue &
gold
skirts past their knees,
dancing feet stilled
paddling, paddling
point with flicking eyes
as the woodpecker knocks
& the fir answers--
they admire his plumage
Allison Burris
First Prize, May 2023
JULY 2023
WHEN MEMORIES FADE
What lasts is the wind that
followed you home
and the color of my morning
star,
your footprints hurrying across
wet sand,
my twist of the rain-soaked rope
to the moon
and all things that happened
that wonderful day
when we said goodbye to children
we were
and began our trip to the sky,
we said
through marshmallow clouds and
hundreds of stars,
mysterious time not yet written of
but a promised world full of
Christmas toys
and books that told of deep
rivers and trees
where life's melodies were
always sung
and our tracks were easy to
follow,
our tracks are so easy to
follow.
Jane Stuart
First Prize, July 2023
Josephine Joy, Prisoner’s Plea, oil on fiberboard. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from General Services Administration, ca. 1935-1937, Object number 1971.447.38.
AUGUST 2023
HAKONE GARDENS
Once in a while
I need to come back to you
pluck my heart out soak it
in the jade-green wave
of bamboo
rinse off its dust in your pond
set it free
let it swim
chase koi fish & a
few
wandering clouds
until cold morning dews
all evaporate
from the mossy mountains
& white-sanded rock garden
I need to shower
in the slow scent
of a sweet
olive tree
which flickers like incense
grandma's wrinkled hands
held
and a bell's wavering ringing
from a blue-bricked temple
on the other side of the
ocean
I need to look up
to a sky dressed with
cherry blossom
maple &
magnolia •
to the silent sound of
whispering wisteria
drop a petal
or two
Jiang Pu
First Prize, August 2023
STARGAZING
AT CAPITAL REEF
It’s a mysterious
nonmystery,
As I contemplate
numberless
stars with the
same mind
that counts out my
correct change
at the checkout stand
at the supermarket
I am baffled by
the mathematical infinity,
An expanse of
beauty I see
and yet I do not
feel alone or distant.
There is something
right on the outskirts
of the soul that
lets me know
I am in some way
more a beloved brother
than a rejected
outlander
to these living, rotating masses
of hydrogen and helium.
I am so glad you are here to hold
my hand.
Michael Shoemaker
Second Prize, August 2023
Landscape With Castles and Deer by M. A. Hall, n.d. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr. and museum purchase made possible by Ralph Cross Johnson, 1875, Catalog no. 1986.65.116
SEPTEMBER 2023
GRAYSCALE OF TRUTH
Gray
or grey
colorless
yet a
huge range of hues
even fifty
sexy shades
supple
as silly putty faded drapes
solid
as knitting needles sewing kits
mules
hooves flannel suits a plane
mushroom hair gray matter brain
elephant
and beluga whale
sunning
lizards leisurely snails
dolphins
cobblestones killer sharks
end of
day just before dark
smoke
from a distant fire
charcoal
bullet wire spoon
staples
drains cloudy afternoon
sardines
drab depressed so sad
mold
growing on a peach gone bad
a
pirate’s
hooked hand caste iron will
a cool
hip cat whose teeth are grilled
It's
monkey bars slide and swings
ashes
and squeaky box springs
It's
lemur parrot pigeon gull
Unclear
undefined distant dull
It's
braces tools zipper and needle
Dubious
areas that may not be legal
Joan Gerstein
First Prize, September 2023
HELLSTORM, STARS & ANGELS
While the hellstorm beat outside,
There were angels singing on the radio,
And the flickering of theater light,
Stars
Winged,
They descended,
Offering water and nectar to the parched,
In our flame drive land
Stewart Breier
Second Prize, September 2023
THE RHYTHM OF THE WIND
song sparrows forced to course correct
real-time, to get from A to B.
if you gaze upon the earth,
you'll see a scape of green
& whorled milkweed flowers bloom
dancing to the rhythm of the wind.
A striped licorice black and golden yellow bee
lands on milkweed petals.
Hopping from one beautiful blossom
to another in an improvised choreography,
it takes a moment to dip every new
partner lightly. They will spring back tall
when the bee is gone.
A strong gust announces itself
brushing the trees.
This wind has traveled by ocean
you can tell, the way it uses forest
to mimic the sound of receding waves
on shimmied sand.
The trees will pay no attention
to the syncopation of birds
chirping, instead they will slow dance
the day away to the rhythm of the wind.
Kevin Madrigal Galindo
Third Prize, September 2023
Waterbirds nesting, Josephine Joy, oil on canvas. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from General Services Administration, ca. 1935-1939, Object number 1971.447.42
NOVEMBER 2023
A STRANGE CHANGE
Here is an hourglass of our time,
two spirits swirling like a carnival ride —
one with silver strands slowly coming undone,
and slips a light year away as we sit palm to palm —
the other newborn girl looking out at the world
and smelling sweet as Texas strawberry pie.
Here is where these two spirits meet —
at the kitchen table where all sins are atoned
and we wait with teacups half full,
watching a thousand crystal grains settle into place
to form only a minute’s worth of passage in time.
One minute of life almost done and the other just begun —
paper thin skin hands turn to stardust under hospital lights
and a newborn is carried home for the very first time —
this is right before the hourglass is flipped once more
and life is reassured by the sadness, the strain,
the change and the flight.
Mia Kernaghan
First Prize in November
Each transparency: worlds of, conceivables beyond.
A hundred transparencies: one and none.
Transparent mirror: window’s glance at window.
Transparent wall: rooms unending as they enter.
Inevitably, two people, face to transparent face,
invariably find themselves in the other’s selves –
glimpses amidst and amongst
coinciding concretias of atmosphere.
Sometimes, infinite existences of and by a fingertip
touch another fingertip brimming
with alternate actualities unending.
Nothing changes, everything changes,
The hand that holds the hand that holds.
Jeff Graham
Second Prize, November 2023
Josephine Joy, Trysting at Evening, oil on fiberboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from General Services Administration, ca. 1935-1939, Catalog no. 1971.447.39.
DECEMBER 2023
FALL AFTERNOON
The long breeze with its warning
sweeps down from the woods
heads straight for the lone boy
sprawled half asleep on the steps
snatching petals from flowers
He blinks up into the troubled air,
yawns at the gold-touched forest
moving hard upon the house
Patiently his day dreams on
while black-tigered trees laugh
they’ll swallow house and boy by spring
Published in Breathing in Technicolor, Fall 2013
DECEMBER MELODY
Tiger lilies
creek side flowers
shimmering drops
of silver rain
—such cold starlight
is this tomorrow
or today?
Bright and shiny wind
snowflakes in the air
winter's golden harp
plays on
in memory
but we wish for more
than yesterday
Shadows
light the sky
starry moments fall.
On the shore, a fishing net
full of broken shells
...but the sea is far away
Clouds cover the moon
night's shadows fall
over a stone garden.
You are planting
flowers made of glass.
This is time's menagerie
Jane Stuart
Second Prize, December 2023
Josephine Joy, CCC Camp Balboa Park, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from General Services Administration, ca. 1933-1937, No. 1971.447.41