The biennial Shann Palmer Poetry Contest, named for the late Shann Palmer, a poet and active James River Writers board member, received 210 poems this year, submitted by 62 poets.
Judging the entries was Tarfia Faizullah, a VCU MFA grad who currently teaches in the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program as the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor in Poetry. A three-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, Faizullah released her second poetry collection, “Registers of Illuminated Villages,” in 2018.
Here, we present this year’s winning poem, “How to Meditate,” by Fred Everett Maus, as well as two finalists, Tony Gentry’s “Immigrant Reflection” and Annie Woodford’s “Till You Said Something Neither of Us Knew,” along with Faizullah’s comments.
FIRST PLACE
How to Meditate
By Fred Everett Maus
About the Winner
An associate professor of music at the University of Virginia, Fred Everett Maus took a long break from writing before returning to poetry in 2012.
He produced the original draft of “How to Meditate” in 2013, after attending Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico City. “The first time I ever entered a poetry contest was in 2014, when I placed second in the Shann Palmer contest and was published in Richmond magazine,” Maus says. “It's good to be back.”
From Tarfia Faizullah: I fell in love with this poem in zero seconds flat, which is to say, by the very first phrase of the first line. I was immediately taken in by the interesting tension created by the innocuously instructional title and the surprisingly devastating first phrase: “the image returns” followed by the self-immolation of a monk, which unfolds thoughtfully through the line break. The idea of an image returning haunts the rest of the poem, which is composed of native language, darkly beautiful images lifted from their contexts and carefully juxtaposed, a tempo that pauses and swerves. This poem layers the past, present and future unflinchingly in a world that is both strident and sensual. I loved how the poem ends incandescently in both a pause and a body simultaneously, which returns us to the beginning: the image returning. Thank you for such exultant meditating.
FINALIST
Immigrant Reflection
By Tony Gentry
In my country
we only dressed for church
and let our privates dangle
otherwise. We studied
the webs of spiders, the
flight of swallows, the
whims of the wind.
We never learned much.
How to catch a fish.
How to dip in dance.
How to wait out the weather.
Back there we thought
that was enough. We
honored dogs, fed them first,
sprawled in the sun and tried
to howl in greeting.
We had some rules. People
brought things they’d found
to church and took other
things home. Sometimes
just a smooth rock or a flower
or a feather.
It was like touch chess here.
If you picked it up you had to
keep it and if you brought
it back the next week
people shook their heads.
But nobody would bite you,
not for that. I left before
I learned how we reproduced.
Maybe the same as here, dipping
and howling. I’m trying to
figure it out. What’s
different, what’s the same.
I’d go back. It doesn’t seem
right to wear jeans all day
scrunched on a sofa out of the sun.
I miss my dog. But I’ll
get over it. It’s part of the game.
I gave this girl a pebble
and she smiled.
From Tarfia Faizullah: I love the lucidity of voice in “Immigrant Reflection.” This poem showed me worlds that I’ve never visited but found warmly drawn and happily familiar. It reminds me that life is both grand and quotidian at once: “We never learned much,” the speaker recalls nonchalantly, before stating a number of life’s largest and most crucial lessons: “How to catch a fish. / How to dip in dance.” The conclusion astounded me in its wisdom and its awareness of every immigrant’s strange inheritance: to be always both there and here. This poem made me think, “Yes, it is like that, isn’t it?” And that is a very good thing. The ending slayed me with its casual tenderness. The narrower lines made for a very satisfying tempo. I beamed! Thank you for taking the time to reflect.
FINALIST
Till You Said Something Neither of Us Knew
By Annie Woodford
I used to have a friend with a birthmark map all over her back.
Her name was Crystal and she had strong red hair that had a crimp
in it because she always kept it in a ponytail. She got mad once when
my beautician cut too much of it. I didn’t know she cared.
The boys would do whatever she told them to do.
Once, in the middle of summer, we went and spent the night
at her daddy’s trailer in Ridgeway. She hardly ever saw him because
he had molested her and her sister but mostly her sister and we hated
him and only went there because he would buy us beer. We didn’t think
he could do anything to us if we were together. His head and face
were all shaved the same way and his neck and even the top of his head
was so tan his skin looked like it’d been stained by walnuts. He took us
to a pizza parlor and poured beer out his pitcher into my cup.
It was in a strip mall where there used to be a pet store with a myna bird.
There was nothing better than that myna bird. He was shiny black
and had smart eyes. He had orange feet and a white stripe on his wings.
His voice came from rainy seasons and dripping leaves, from a forest
loud with water, where roots and snakes get all tangled up.
You don’t see myna birds much anymore.
That night we got tired of drinking beer on his vinyl couch.
His trailer was clean the way a funeral parlor is clean. Or a cheap motel.
We decided to go to this house everyone said was haunted.
It was older than the Civil War and you had to go down a red gully road.
Everything in Henry County used to be one big plantation.
Dawn was just starting to steam up out of the fields where something
used to be grown but was now just wire grass and blackberries.
There was an edge of cedar trees at the edge. They were still dark.
It looked like a place where killing could be done. I had a white
83 Mustang, an ugly car meant to be pretty. It dragged in places.
The house was in a clump of bushes. I don’t remember much about it,
except there was a red smear on the wall above the mantel
and I knew enough about houses from my mama to see the wide molding
for what it was and to remember how the fireplaces were angled
in the corner, so that they could share a chimney. The bricks
were that same red and would have been made on the place by slaves.
I don’t know what happened to Crystal. They tore that house down.
I remember her sister was a tough lesbian who worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken
and smoked crack with men who probably wanted to hurt her.
I remember visiting her apartment by the river once, on Kholer Road,
an old boarding house built in the 1920s for millworkers, covered in peeling paint.
The river smells of shit there because of the water treatment plant.
She probably gave us pot. She was known for being a vicious fighter,
but with us she was just a soft-spoken country girl.
From Tarfia Faizullah: I’m admittedly prone to impatience, but there's one thing that’ll pin me in place: a good story, which, of course, depends on a good storyteller to do its bidding. An excellent storyteller, however, is an expert at stepping out of memory and commenting on the telling. The myna bird, for example: what a beautiful tangent! I was genuinely arrested by the context, mid-summer, and the poem’s main character, Crystal. By the end of the poem, I wanted to give her a huge hug and make her a cup of tea and have her tell me everything. This poem is really self-aware in its details and density. It brought to mind the work of one of my favorite poets, Larry Levis, and my all-time favorite poem of his, “My Story in a Late Style of Fire.” The title, “Till You Said Something Neither of Us Knew,” drew me in equally. Thank you for such a good story!
