Rattle is proud to announce the winner of the 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award:

George Bilgere
Cleveland, Ohio
for
“Palimpsest”

 
The 2022 Readers’ Choice Award was selected from among the Rattle Poetry Prize finalists by subscriber vote. Only those with active subscriptions including issue #78 were eligible. In the closest vote since the exact tie in 2017, “Palimpsest” earned 20.7% of the votes and the $5,000 award, edging out Francesca Bell, who earned 20.3% for “Conduction.” Here is what some of those readers had to say about the winner:

George Bilgere’s “Palimpsest” is the poem that stays with me the most of several memorable poems among the nominees. The speaker’s awareness of the dark side to the beautiful landscape he is bicycling through with his family, of a hateful history that seems on the verge of repeating itself, mixes with a buoyant love of the life he has, particularly “our little boy/new to history,” who “runs laughing under a blazing sun/through the green illiterate meadows.”
—Penelope Moffet

I live in a retirement home in Bern, Switzerland, and give weekly English lessons to the pensionaries. All are native German speakers but some have lived abroad and are thankful for the opportunity to refresh their knowledge. I start each lesson with a poem and selected “Palimpsest.” I had to study it myself first to try and unpick the various layers. So much in the poem is unfortunately still valid today, which makes it even more poignant for the elderly (and that includes me), born in last century Europe, “that last bad century still bleeding into this one.” A great poem, thank you, George!
—Elsa Fischer

George Bilgere uses a deft touch in reminding us of the horror of German history concerning the Jews in Berlin, contrasting it with the innocence of his young son and the beauty of a summer day there. The way he calls up history through graffiti on statues of poets and composers powerfully demonstrates the hatred that still exists. His awkward encounter of it, first thinking of his proficiency in German more than the ongoing prejudice, is so honestly human. Through masterful understatement, he brings back the Holocaust and makes us see what simmers on—that bad last century still bleeding into this one. And it is the poets, the artists, who remind us of the bloodbath, with the red spray paint on their feet as a symbol. The close is perfect, his young son, new to history, laughing and running through the green illiterate meadows. The poem does not have a word out of place. I was drawn in from the start. It is one of those poems that will continue to resonate in me. His tone and clear description, along with terrific word choice, make this work a complete and compelling package.
—Christine Andersen

A gorgeous balance of humor, joy, despair. No head in the sand, but choosing to see and illuminate the light along with the dark.
—José A. Alcántara

This poem speaks of how the past colors the present—the scope of which extends well beyond even that atrocious graffiti. It reaches deeper than despair to find a hint of hope for the future.
—Katie Dozier

I admire the ways in which the poem encapsulates how we try to craft a happy, meaningful life in a violent world. The quirky jumpiness of the speaker’s perceptions balance the heavy spectre of anti-semeitism in Germany. The poem somehow manages to feel light-hearted without seeming dismissive/hopeful without seeming reductive of one of the 20th centuries greatest atrocities. That’s no mean feat.
—Megan Gannon

It’s a difficult subject to handle, the tone is unusual and brilliantly and subtly handled—managing to suggest both the desire to bypass history, especially when one doesn’t want to deposit the weight of it on a young child, and the necessity of not quite ignoring it. And so very much is said in the last line about freedom from history and the need not to be free of history—with those “illiterate meadows.” Terrific title, too. The more I read this poem the more I admire its artistry.
—Judy Kronenfeld

This poem combines the casual and innocent with the horrible in a brilliant way—with humor—so that the juxtaposition at the end becomes heartbreaking. He makes the plunge that hits you in the heart more powerful by climbing up the lightness scale through most of the rest of the poem.
—Jim Daniels

Read “Palmpsest” online right now. To read all of the finalist poems, pick up a copy of Rattle #78, or read them one at a time this month as daily poems at Rattle.com.

George Bilgere was the winner, but this year’s voters were divided, as they always are, and all of the finalists had their own enthusiastic supporters. Every year, it’s an interesting and informative experience reading the commentary. To provide a taste of that, here is a small sample of what our subscribers said about the other finalists:
 

On Francesca Bell’s “Conduction”:

I could feel the gradual increase of the music’s crescendo and its triumphant sound against the man’s angry finger. Lastly, the way she compared his finger to a baton was brilliant, an ending that made me gasp. Just beautiful.
—Richelle Buccilli

The first two lines masterfully set up the tension in the poem and we know that the impertinent man in the car cannot have any idea what the woman in her vehicle has just experienced and that her cilia cannot be rejuvenated. Nonetheless, he is contemptuous toward her and crosses the fine line of harassment, in my opinion. I have cried on the way home from various medical appointments over the years, so the pause this poem invited me into thinking about was the propensity, at some point, to lose one’s hearing. This was beyond astonishing, particularly in knowing that hearing is the last sense in the dying to relinquish itself. Add to this the incredulous power of music, which the speaker in the poem is desperately summoning in the car for temporary solace, in tandem with the last line, his middle finger like a baton. Francesca’s poem escalates in intensity, like a classical musical score and retains its opening power through to the last line.
—Shelly Reed Thieman

On Sarah Ederer’s “Basic Needs”:

There are so many amazing things about this poem: it addresses a topic not well-known or acknowledged (severe neglect); it tells a long and powerful story yet leaves me hungry for more at the end; it touches on complex feelings and a complicated situation in a conversational tone, as though speaking to a friend; and its use of choppy, often unpunctuated lines to mimic the chaos of the narrator’s childhood home. It’s difficult to write convincingly about issues surrounding PTSD, and in a way that leaves the reader eager to join the poet in this painful place where the past can be joined with an artful present. But in this poem, Ederer does it beautifully.
—Anne Rankin

The voice is so authentic, funny and sad, but not self-pitying. The poem, at its end, is a triumph for the speaker and for the reader, as well. We all deal with some kind of shit. Great self-awareness and growth about dealing with other people’s shit, which becomes your shit, and what are you going to do about it. This poem does it, and in a wonderfully structured, wild, and surprising way. Literal and metaphorical all at once. The writing hits all the human notes: physical, intellectual, emotional, psychological. I love the way the poem builds, the hard, “shitty” work sometimes of becoming conscious. The use of repetition is masterful. Nothing is “wasted” in this poem, not a word. I didn’t mean to make a pun, but there it is. I loved this poem.
—Susan Browne

On Jennifer Griffith’s “Augury”:

This poem is most true to its title, and also the most complex in layers of imagery and meaning. The predictive omens of life after high school, instantly recognizable, flash and crackle throughout the piece. In the highly charged incubator of teens in a school setting, the sexual workings of physical bodies vie with new found emotional highs and lows. Throw in foreshadowing of racism, sexual violence and incarceration, and we are given a vivid reminder of what this experience is. All of this is conveyed with carefully chosen words and form, in a clear and honest voice. I find the poem more rich with repeated readings.
—Nancy Walters

I’m voting for Jennifer Griffith’s “Augury” because the language is so poetic and complex. The first line is stunning, aphoristic, a mysterious first sentence for a horror story, which is what it is, in a way.
—Jendi Reiter

On Elizabeth Hill’s “Slut”:

The real-world details, the conflict, and in particular the phantasy made this poem stand out for me. The ironic contrast between the narrator’s real sexual relationship and what her mother fears and her imagination spins up is moving and revelatory.
—Walter Lawn

The title is provocative on its own, yes, but to have a title with that much oomf—and to have the courage to title the poem as such—you better have the poem to back it up. And Hill does. The speaker in her poem is the only speaker I’d ever want to take to dinner. Most of the other speakers in this batch of ten were either whining, grieving, or trying to make me feel sorry for them otherwise. This speaker doesn’t, and the speaker also doesn’t really care what I think. It’s a poem that stands in its own and was not overwritten because it was trying to sound intelligent, or funny … or win a contest. And yet the poem is deserving of all those things. The voice is unmistakable and the truth does not hide itself in Hill’s poem. But the truth is also not over-explained. Most importantly, the speaker in “Slut” is a voice we need to hear.
—Veronica Schorr

On Richard Jordan’s “Diary Poems”:

I won’t lie—I’m a sucker for sonnets. Richard Jordan has beautifully illustrated how a character can be developed in few words, even following constraints of rhyme and meter. Words and music sneak up on you. When you read it aloud it slowly dawns how closely this follows the sonnet form, which I especially appreciate these days when any 14 lines of free verse are often declared sonnets. I sometimes wonder why.
—Holly York

As I read Dusk rolls a coral carpet down the stream, a lump formed in my throat.
A hard-pressed woman has passed on her language gift to a grandchild. I love Jordan’s writing—also the way his poem echoes something of what I discovered in my own family: When I was a child, about fifty years ago, my grandma told me she had wanted to be a poet, but she’d completed only eight grades. During my college years, I asked her to tell me more. She brushed away the topic as foolishness. Like Jordan’s, my grandma’s life involved saved feed sacks. On winter evenings, she poured her poetic self into quilting.
—Gloria McElearney

On Shannan Mann’s “Your Hands”:

I like the poem for its rawness, it is a deeply painful poem. The poem is powerful and speaks to me and I am sure it would speak to so many others who have faced the wrath of abuse in all forms.
—Masoyo Hunphun Awungashi

I love this poem for many reasons: First of which is how strictly she adheres to the form of the ghazal—an Urdu (Persian/Arabic) form, the rhythm of which she has translated into English almost seamlessly. I see Agha Shahid Ali’s deep influence on her work, especially when she strays from a strict rhyme and experiments with her qaafiya by using the word “palette” as a rhyme of admit/commit/submit. I found the musicality and simplicity of the coupling of the qaafiya and radeef (bit your hands / commit your hands) to be particularly helpful in following the piece along. A ghazal is written in couplets which may or may not connect with each other. They connect, of course, by theme, as well as by radeef. That is, for example, the third couplet could, in theory, be traded for the sixth and no difference will be made to the overall meaning of the piece. But Shannan’s ghazal also works perfectly as a narrative poem. There’s something to be said for the couplets’ relationship to one another when read back to back. Urdu ghazals are sung within a community of passionate poets and lovers of poetry who call back to each other different lines, and repeat the qaafiya and radeef again and again—the chant rising and filling the circle of voices. A ghazal is an act of community—it forever seeks to link, to connect, to respond, to move. Thus, one of the most important aspects of the form is how the individual lines of the couplet respond to each other. Do they displace each other, do they reunite something, do they add, subtract, divide, conquer? What drama is created between the lines? Is there a surprise? Is there a realization? What treasure lies at the end of the rainbow that is the couplet? Shannan’s couplets are complete and full of this tension. Her language is dramatic and grand and in line with the form. The poem is truly a masterclass on the Ghazal, each couplet unique yet subservient to the form in many beautiful ways. It honors the previous masters while simultaneously creating a fresh work as a woman of color in the here and now.
—Karan Kapoor

On Candace Moore’s “Projection”:

I started to read, and I started to smile, all the glorious fun, and relatable notions. So simple, yet profound when you reach the ending, a heartfelt surprising twist, the kind that makes a poem memorable.
—Sharon Ferrante

Wry and almost devious is Candace Moore’ poem “Projection.” The touching truth within it is way too familiar to this old reader who only last month underwent scary procedures and surgery on both peepers. Even with the surgery, I still need glasses. I’ve worn them for seventy-four years, so what’s the big deal? But ocular impairment does taunt. A slight irony is that should I see a photo of me without glasses I react as though it’s evidence I suddenly became bald. Moore’s bemusement and stoicism makes me smile when I think of her poem. She is in fact the Buddha reading under a tree.
—Noreen Ayres

On Kaitlin Reynolds’s “Patsy”:

This poem surprised me so much that I immediately went back to the beginning and read it again. It was that magic trick of writing: How did the poet get us from where we began—that wry third line (“He calls it Just Driving Around to See What’s What”)—to the exquisitely tender ending of the shared, polite illusion and the reality of the two hands in the car? How did she manage to mix all those disarmingly funny phrases (“a welfare check on the dead”) and come out with a poem I felt so deeply in my body? This poem takes a story that, when summed up in a sentence, might sound banal, like “My husband loved and misses his late mother, and I love him and I see that he loved and misses her.” But the poem does what good poems do: it paints a complex, layered picture of what that emotion/moment looks like: the slight embarrassment of the husband being so fond of his mom, and of the wife caring enough about her husband to allow him space and privacy to have the moment, even when they’re sitting next to each other. It’s a portrait of love in multiple dimensions: she sees the love he has for his mother, and we, at a greater distance, see the love she has for him. And she never really says any of that. Brilliant.
—Amy Miller

I voted for this poem because I like the soft way that loss is weaved within the poem and the way that consolation is threaded in the quiet act of going to visit a loved ones grave.
—Omayya Hussain.

On B.A. Van Sise’s “Baseball”:

I am going with “Baseball” by Van Sise. It feels so honest and unadorned. I loved the warm humor in the line “pulled me aside and said what / were to her, surely / the most necessary words / in the American language.” Not English language, but American. What a nuanced choice! Also the ending which hearkens back to a simpler time but is so suggestive in the “uncut” grass. I love this poem on reading and rereading it, and though it’s quiet and low profile, I hope it is the reader’s choice.
—Betsy Mars

It is so hard to come up with a great ending. For this accomplishment alone, in my opinion, Van Sise deserves the prize. In addition to a great ending, the poem is filled with wonderful details, rendered in strong, crisp language, which vividly describe a not always pleasant relationship between a mother, a father, and a son. Throughout the poem, certain words and phrases repeat themselves: the dust of peanuts/peanut dust, America/American, New York Mets x 2, Italian x 3, blue x 3, care x 3. I like the way the two adverbs, surely and gently, are so carefully set off by commas. It’s as if all the repetitions spread throughout the poem set up the reader for the very singular phrase of the last line, which contains the word uncut and is the most “cutting” of all.
—Robert Allen