English Undergrad Wins Academy of American Poets Award
Nationally famous poet Eleanor Lerman has chosen English undergraduate Kathryn Sugar as winner of Cal Poly’s 2011 Academy of American Poets Contest. Sugar will receive a $100 award from the Academy for her poem “Communion."
English undergraduates Amber Brodie and Sierra Jahoda earned honorable mention for their poems “The One Whose Name Was Writ in Water” and “Weather-Worn Abs in the Town of Gym” respectively.
Sugar’s poem is in the voice of a mother whose child has been kidnapped and possibly murdered.
Judging this year’s contest, poet Eleanor Lerman said she chose “Communion” because “the poem is extraordinary in its taut writing; its visionary word constructions, which contrast achingly beautiful images ("My Christina imagines she's a chrysanthemum, begging for blossom from the clay cavity cradling her") with sharp, startling declarations.”
Lerman went on to say that the poem holds a “masterful balance between the harshness of the first line ("My five-year-old, Christina, was stolen on June fourth,") with the last line, which is both poignant and almost threatening ("I'm coming, Christina.") The poem is threaded through with a story line that leaves one wanting to know what is going on beyond the margins of the words written on the page.
“It is a mature, confident and powerful poem,” declared Lerman
English professor Kevin Clark concurred with the judge’s assessment of Sugar’s talent for blending narrative and language.
“Kathryn is only a junior, but her poetry already demonstrates remarkable skill. She’s virtually expert at persona poems, at getting inside the head of someone else.”
“She knows how to keep the reader on edge,” he continued, “at the same time that she delivers psychological insight into a speaker who is under extreme pressure.”
Honorable mention Brodie’s poem floats in the zone between objective reality and dreamy imagination. Lerman asserted that it is “suffused in light and shadow. It's ironic and confident and creates vivid images.”
She went on to say that “[o]ne has the feeling of being told a fable by a poet so at ease with her ability that she's capable of being playful and sharply skillful at the same time.”
The judge claimed that Jahoda’s poem, about a woman working out in gym, “is a tough-minded poem that is crafted with the skill needed to give context to its anger and harsh imagery. That's a difficult goal to reach for, but the poet has more than met the task, creating a tight, hard-bitten poem that seems as guilty a pleasure as enjoying a smack in the face.”
Clark commented that, like Sugar, both Brodie and Jahoda uncover the deeper realities of being female in the twenty-first century.
“Though they write in very different styles,” Clark continued, “both can be so simultaneously frank and imaginative that their poems provide readers with an electric jolt not expected in poetry written by college students.”
“Kathryn, Amber, and Sierra are testament to their own expressive abilities as well as the remarkably inventive qualities of students in the College of Liberal Arts and the university as a whole,” said Clark. “Sometimes people forget that Cal Poly is home to so many artistic students.”
Eleanor Lerman is the much-lauded poet who was the featured reader at the SLO County Poetry Festival this past November. In 1973 Lerman’s first book of poetry, Armed Love, was nominated for a National Book Award. In a famously provocative review of her work, the New York Times characterized the first book as "XX rated," focusing on its straightforward depictions of sexuality and gender. Lerman published a second book in 1975, but, due to the backlash against her work in what was a more conservative era, she stopped publishing poetry. Twenty-five years later she resumed publishing and The Mystery of Meteors appeared. Her fourth book of poetry, Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds, won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 2006, given by the American Academy of Poets, which helps to fund this year’s contest at Cal Poly.
Always judged by an off-campus poet, the contest is sponsored by the Cal Poly English Department and the Academy of American Poets, which is a longstanding advocate for the art of poetry and is located in New York City.
The winning poem is published in the following year’s issue of Moebius, the College of Liberal Arts journal.