Essays

November 12, 2008

Essay: “What’s Really Wrong with Poetry Book Contests” by David AlpaughPosted by

David Alpaugh

WHAT’S REALLY WRONG WITH POETRY BOOK CONTESTS?

Note: As winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize and owner of SmallPoetry Press, David Alpaugh has both won and run a Poetry Book Contest.

Isn’t that a rhetorical question? Everyone knows what’s wrong with poetry book contests. They’re rigged! In 2004 the web site Foetry began investigating personal connections between contest judges and winners. The poetry world was shocked by allegations that some of America’s most prestigious prizes were going to the judges’ students, friends, colleagues, even lovers.

Dishonesty! Cronyism! That’s what’s wrong with poetry book contests, right?

Not really. Most contest operators, screeners, and judges would never engage in the deplorable but statistically rare conduct outed by Foetry. I didn’t know any of the parties involved in the judging process that led to my own book award. During the five years that I ran a national chapbook contest there were never any personal connections between my screeners and judges and the finalists and winners they selected.

A glance at recent headlines should assure us that there’s no more corruption in “po-biz” than in sports, medicine, law, politics, media, religion, or any other human enterprise. To their credit, many contests responded to the concerns that Foetry raised by establishing clear ethical guidelines for screeners and judges and by taking steps to assure the anonymity of contestants. Manuscripts are more likely to be evaluated solely on their merit today than ever before.

Exclusive focus on the minor problem of contest fraud, however, has allowed more serious, systemic problems to go unnoticed. What’s really wrong with poetry book contests? They are being rendered less effective each year by the supply side economics that has subsidized their exponential growth and that promises even more in the foreseeable future.

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September 10, 2008

Essay: “A Split Personality” by Anne WebsterPosted by

Anne Webster, RN

A SPLIT PERSONALITY

When I was fourteen, my Uncle John—then in his twenties—chased his pert, blonde wife through their neighborhood with an axe. Grandmother explained that he had something called schizophrenia, or a split personality. I imagined the playful, sweet John I knew cut down the center, as with that axe, the nice part off him peeled away from the violent half.

A few years later when I graduated from high school, I thought of John, and wondered if, like him, my two halves would always be at war. In my case, the smart, creative person and the numbingly practical fought to control my future. Despite a desperate yearning for college, where I wanted to follow in the footsteps of one of my two heroes—the impressionist Mary Cassatt or the scientist Marie Curie—my divorced mother, a government stenographer, declared she could barely feed and clothe me, much less pay for college. She suggested instead that I use my typing skills to take a government job as a stenographer in the Forestry Department where she worked.

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August 7, 2008

Essay: “Nursing and the Word” by Cortney DavisPosted by

Cortney Davis, RN, MA, ANP

NURSING AND THE WORD

First of all, I have to confess right off that I never wanted to be a nurse. When other ten-year-old girls were reading “Cherry Ames, Student Nurse,” I was riding my bike, pretending that my Schwinn was a bay stallion and together we were galloping down Sylvandell Drive in Pittsburgh, always under the gray cloud of steel-mill smog that hung in the sky. When I was twelve, my father, a public relations writer for Blue Cross, was transferred to New York City, and so we pulled up stakes, said good-bye to the smog and moved to Connecticut. I continued to ride my bike but alas, most of my new friends, just like the friends I’d left behind, thought about nothing but becoming nurses. They donned candy stripers’ uniforms and gave of themselves at St. Joseph’s Hospital while I signed up for Saturday art classes at the local museum. After high school graduation, my candy striper friends debated the size, shape and overall appearance of nursing caps—the main criteria for deciding which nursing schools they’d attend—and I went off to Gettysburg College where I wrote poems, wore black net stockings, played the guitar and grew my hair down to the middle of my back. The thought of giving someone a bedpan or even a bed bath gave me the creeps. But life has a way of sending us where we never thought we’d go.

Move forward several years: I’m married with a baby daughter and my husband and I aren’t meeting the monthly rent. His cousin, a nurse’s aide, suggests that I become a nurse’s aide too: on-the-job training, flexible hours, uniforms provided and, best of all, decent pay. Feeling somewhat up-against-the-financial-wall, I enrolled in the six-week course, got my blue uniform (eerily similar to a candy striper’s garb), bought white stockings and white Clinic shoes and went to work four evenings a week from 6 to 11:30. When I returned at midnight, all was quiet—the baby in her crib, my husband snoring in our bed.

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July 24, 2008

Essay: “A Kind of Gift” by T.S. DavisPosted by

T. S. Davis, RN

A KIND OF GIFT

…I resign’d myself
To sit by the wounded and sooth them, or silently watch the dead…

I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet wound,
Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so offensive,
While the attendant stands behind aside me holding the tray and pail.

I am faithful, I do not give out,
The fractur’d thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen,
These and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in my breast a fire, a burning flame.)
        —from the poem “The Wound-Dresser” from Drum Taps by Walt Whitman, 1865

Imagine Walt Whitman moving among the Union soldiers’ beds lined up like fallen dominoes, holding a dying boy’s hand, mopping a feverish brow with a cool cloth, bowing his head while a gangrenous soldier prays for his life, touching water to parched lips. What’s the connection between being a nurse and a poet? I don’t know for sure. And I am a nurse. And a poet. I know the connection is elemental, almost primal, but it’s difficult to talk about, to analyze, without seeming almost voyeuristic.

I was a poet first and became a nurse later because I needed a day job to support my real profession. I wanted a vocation that would allow me to work awhile and quit, to move from place to place and always be able to find a job, to work whatever shift I wanted, and to get a decent wage for it. But there are other occupations that afford that, so what attracted me to nursing? Or more to the point, what has kept me a nurse? I had friends who were nurses, and surely that made a difference in my initial decision. But as every nurse knows, when you talk about your job, most people react by saying, I could never do that. Why is it that so many poets can?

I’d like to be able to argue that poets are a special breed, sensitive, compassionate, and empathetic, and certainly that may be true. There’s no doubt that those are traits needed to make a good nurse as well. But that’s not the whole story. Another trait of poets is the desire to strip away the trappings of civilization and the accoutrements of culture, to get down to the fundament of existence, to engage love, procreation, spirituality, death, to marvel at the universe revealed in a leaf of grass, and to somehow bear witness to it all with mere words. Nurses experience all this and more.

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