Coming up in my next post is an interview with Natalia Darie, first-prize winner in the 2013 Aspiring Canadian Poets Contest. Here’s poet and mentor Shannon Bramer with thoughts on her role as judge and why Natalia’s poem captured her imagination. ~ Allyson
Shannon Bramer
I was flattered and surprised when Heidi Stock wrote to ask if I would judge a contest for aspiring poets. I thought — who, me? I’m still aspiring! I still nervously send work out to publishers and literary journals. I still struggle with every new poem like it’s my first time trying to write one down. So I come to this contest with humbleness.
I chose three poems from a stack of dreams, complaints, heartache, nostalgia, and mystery. Every person who sits down to try and write a poem, no matter how experienced, is taking a risk. Sometimes this risk involves a semi-colon or a lowercase letter — other times it’s an idea or an emotion or a wobbly metaphor trying to find its way into the world.
Poetry is about putting strangeness and beauty to work. Poetry is about the silence between words and all the weight of one word left in the right place, alone. Sometimes a poet writes something down and leaves it there even when he or she isn’t sure how it got there. That’s what I like about poems.
This contest was especially wonderful and challenging to participate in because of the rules: poets entering should not have had a poem published. You must not be a poet yet. You must be aspiring. Hmmm.
I chose Natalia Darie’s poem “Maroon,” because it made contact with me. The title, first of all, a colour: maroon. A brownish-crimson colour, the dictionary says. The colour of dry blood. But the verb maroon is important too. This time the word means to leave (someone) trapped and isolated in an inaccessible place, especially an island.
And so I found myself on this island, within a poem about remembering a body, a voice, a place. Yet this poem also evokes reunion. The past and present are depicted as one landscape: a landscape of lakes, ruins, trenches — the stubborn curve of years that come between people. And finally, one voice, one body — merging with another:
Tighter and tighter you wrap
skin of a still lake
over, water my body
a drum against yours
I read this poem over and over again. I wanted to take the poem apart and put it back together again with the poet. I found the voice raw, not in a crude way, but in a deeply thoughtful, genuine, reaching sort of way. And I wanted to know the person who wrote it.
One must always be aspiring. Being a poet means just this: striving, aching, reaching for the words and silences that seem beyond us.
Natalia Darie
Visit Aspiring Canadian Poets Contest to read the winning poems:
Natalia Darie’s “Maroon”
Whitney Sweet’s “Brass Plaque and a Bottle of Beer” (second prize)
Bria Lubiens’ “Blue” (third prize)
SHANNON BRAMER is a poet, playwright, and co-founder of Broken Cloud Company. She is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently The Refrigerator Memory (2005) published by Coach House Books. Currently she teaches poetry to elementary school students and is the poet-in-residence at The Creative Children’s Dance Studio in the Junction neighbourhood of Toronto. Her newest collection of poetry, Precious Energy, is forthcoming from BookThug.
Shannon blogs at Broken Cloud Company and Poet in the Playground.