2019 ILX Poetry Competition: Open Division

Most ILXors will recall the Poetry Contests of olden days, because, face it, most of us have been around here for a very long time. The last one was in 2016.

This time around the rules are similar to those in ages past. Post your entry in this thread. Poets may enter two poems, if they wish. Try to keep the length under 60 lines and line length under 100 characters, but these guidelines may be disregarded if it's artistically necessary. Titles are optional. Submitting new work is strongly encouraged, but you can post something old, if this is the first time you've submitted it.

Because poets are dilatory by nature, the deadline for submissions is some time vaguely around mid-November, 2019. This may change, depending on the weather, the number of submissions, and my judgment.

I am also toying with the idea of holding a second part of the competition, similar to the Appalling Poetry COmpetition, but this is still under consideration and not final.

That about covers it.

Good idea to revive! Ideally entries would be emailed to you, with you posting them anonymously on this thread.

Regardless, I'll ponder.

If winning this competition had the slightest bit of prestige attached to it, then anonymity would be valuable as a means of ensuring the judges were not unduly influenced by knowing the poet's name. But the real point here is to coax some of our multi-talented ilxors to write a poem or two, because they will have some assurance it will be read and appreciated.

Typically, when the submissions are closed and the voting is over, there are just about the same number of votes cast as there were poets who submitted a poem. This should give you a hint about the thrilling nature of the competition.

It's all good, and you're not wrong; I thought it could only add prestige and grandeur of the sorts that ILX's mighty poets deserve. It's not like we won't recognize an LJ poem if we see one ;)

is that a challenge

Sure is <3

Oh hey, maybe this is the kick in the seat I need to shape up one of those formless, poetry-lookin' things I occasionally and accidentally fart out.

That was my entry, btw. Just break it up into lines and stanzas as you see fit.

Sorry, Old Lunch, but no go. You'll just have to wait for the appalling poetry competition and I'll enter it there if you like.

thanks aimless, will have a better try than the previous few years i hope now that work is a bit less looming (i quit the industrial revolution era cloth trade recently)

Is it ok to submit a poem in Danish, and are people able to appreciate the beauty of that language?
Or, rather, how incredibly hard it is to write 'poesy' in a language that's more like a throat disease...

I will address your question in it's constituent parts:

Is it ok to submit a poem in Danish

Yes.

and are people able to appreciate the beauty of that language? Or, rather, how incredibly hard it is to write 'poesy' in a language that's more like a throat disease...

"People" (and I use the word advisedly) will, as you suggest, be able to appreciate a poem in Danish exactly as much as they appreciate having a throat disease. I recommend gargling with warm salty water every half hour until the pain and inflammation subside.

Oh, lol, that's coincidentally exactly what the poem is about. That and oral sex.

is it okay to just include something fresh from the project i'm working on? tbh i don't really do "occasional" one-off poems, it's just not the way i work.

A close reading of the rules will reveal that most of them are rather optional.

UNTITLED GOOSE POEM

Dead flies on the window frame
Remind me that I'm home
Secret message in the run-out groove
Put there for ME ALONE
I take all my food in sandwich form
Because you've got to have a ~system~
Haven't used my thumbs since... '94?
...can't say that I've missed them

She moved in during gala week
There were flags up round the town
And then a few days later
They'd already took them down
Between the hours of one and three
That's when we're at our most lethal
Ragdoll physics when I'm with her
(we fall about like real people)

You know you're special
When your prison number is a palindrome
But you know you're done for
When you'll go anywhere instead of home
And at some point in our time on the floor
She says we'll be "friends forever"
Full of vodka and Corinthian Love
We'll tell each other whatever

She's never seen me at my best
You never know, she might be impressed
But it's cold and late and I just need a rest

And I think that maybe I could?
Although I'm not the sort of person who normally would
And there's no way that this is ending good

But when she sighs and rolls her eyes
LIKE I'M SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHAT THAT SIGNIFIES
I try to stay awake, and try to stay alive

And when I said "DON'T HOLD ME BACK"
What I really meant was "HOLD ME BACK"
Because I'm clinging onto what I know for fact

KLÆDELIG (INSPIRED BY PUSHKIN)

Dine klæder klæder din krop i dag,
bourdaux er en af dine farver.
En snoromsnøret og stropløs sag
der dels forfører dels forarger
For man kan se dine hår
under armene når
du fægtene står
og foredrager.
For dine klæder klæder din krop i dag
og jeg glæder mig til
at jeg kan klæde dig af.

god that is a good start

Fred, you should post a recording of yourself reading it out loud so we can aurally savour the throat disease.

Anyway, good stuff. My pathetic grasp of German helped with some of those words.

Yeah this is good stuff, from both of youse. Love me some armpit hair Fred!

(agreed with Pom, your poem 'sounds' very nice, rhythmically and alliterating)

I stopped writing poetry a long time ago because it's too much of a community-oriented activity. Absent a vaguely reliable yardstick with which to determine whether a given poem is worth reading or not, you're supposed to gravitate towards the interpretive community likeliest to share your preferences. Yet such communities are hard to come by. Instead, you generally have no choice but to fall in with a local 'scene', i.e. a congregation of mutually envious individuals who are less interested in the craft itself than they are in their respective personas or – as is increasingly the case – what these personas stand for politically. These days I find it almost impossible to read contemporary poetry without mulling over sociological considerations – so the poem just vanishes in the process.

stop being cynical and write a damn poem

pom lj will tend towards aggressively encouraging participation fyi

I can't bring myself to write anything new at the moment. Graphophobia, you know.

But I may post some residual leavings.

three languages, three poems imo

Caveat: my touchstones tend to be rather hermetic (Mallarmé, Celan, Dupin, Palmer).

pick a topic that annoys you today and throw structure on it

- bob marley

Ok so here is, to my great embarrassment (damn you Ludwig Jäger!), an old suite made up of seven loose sixains, inspired by this Liszt piece:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axhKyU6amY8

La lugubre gondola

I

Some sort of passage –
neither here nor there.
Throw the shroud aside,
bore a hole into its twill.
Circumscribe the sentence
backwards as it streams.

II

Whatever it is, it’s amiss.
As if meant to be poured
into collapsing funnels.
Darkness, thoroughly sieved,
flicks the eye into its cleft.
Something keeps watch.

III

Comes a sign: an undigested
rind, awaiting echoing.
Although the paper’s parlance
is of spare parts, scraps
and delicately wrought coils,
not a seal is left unbroken.

IV

It abides as the flume draws
a fugue out of its fumes – an
unforeseen event. It is night.
The gondola glides along. I
am wherever the refraction
of a furnace breaks its fall.

V

A yarn now, dangled to and fro,
spun out of a distaff. You
pitch it anew with each retelling
and shove the maze aside
for a mesh with which to catch
some semblance of a clang.

VI

Was that it, then? The pith,
the unmistakable spoor
of a retraction? I cannot say
as long as the alluvium’s
fault lines start and stir.
All is pitilessly left in tatters.

VII

Were there matter somewhere
within these muttered words,
an uncowed song could emerge
and suck up the vague sea
across which figments of lips
trawl the depths for sustenance.

I stopped writing poetry a long time ago because it's too much of a community-oriented activity

It doesn't have to be - or at least this mindset will really hamper you, I can see that. A poem can exist in and of itself, outside of any community. Let the poem be the poem, it may bloom in isolation or outside bubbles. Does it not blossom, that is ok too. We all die alone etc.

xp oh shi

Beautiful, pom

Thanks, guys! <3

A poem can exist in and of itself, outside of any community. Let the poem be the poem, it may bloom in isolation or outside bubbles. Does it not blossom, that is ok too. We all die alone etc.

I agree, of course, but I keep failing that 'test of solitude', as Emmanuel Hocquard put it.

Great offerings from everyone so far! Elusive, but not too much so. There's definitely lots to unpack in all three. Thanks for starting this up, Aimless! An exciting time.

I wonder who will be the first trickster to submit an undetectable offering by an established poet so we can have our yearly debate about the weight of proper names and whether plagiarism is acceptable in literature.

Or the first to use Talk To Transformer...

i will submit one constructed from an anagram of the initial letters from the most ugly/best meta thread i can find

If that’s going to be the attitude I won’t bother

poets society is dead

Just a friendly bump. I'm hoping to get some kind of a start on a poem this week. It all depends on this wheelbarrow and the weather. I can't explain it any better than that.

ANAMNESIS

 Remember when you wanted what you have;
it took two dreams of dog bites,
a month of mosey,
year by the sill;
caught sibling wishes
 in fettered breath
  soothed regal guilt
   from nosing the tufts 
 (though mostly wilt)
Now new night spills 
 like scarlet to sink
The old oaken limbs
 kiss streetlamps unlit
The cats mimick -
 all shadows awry
I cultivated calm
 now new night is mine

telegraphic. kinetic. nice.

Fucksake none of youse cunts care, do I need to write a second just to bump this thread?

Whatever you're thinking, I THOUGHT IT FIRST
However you feel, I FEEL WORSE
I took three buses to get here tonight
And smoking's only sexy in black and white
The migraine pills will get me through it
A shotgun with a torch taped to it
A paper bag to breathe into
And a drink for every thought of you

Little Timmy would have gave her the world
But LITTLE TIMMY AIN'T INTO GIRLS
He's into Some Came Running and The Great Pretender
And nostalgia for days he can't remember
Sandinista! from his bed
Six sides just to clear his head
The beats will fade then what we got?
Time-and-a-half, but all for what?

"Corbusien Purity", the "Boy/Girl Aesthetic"
Filtered through his dialectic
Half-past-nothing and I can't feel my legs
Just concentrate on the last thing said
Reflected glory comes in waves
And starts to sting my eyes again
Flinch from a ghost, snow falls on snow
Where did all the good times go?

Sorry, the title is SLOW MOTION WHEN IT MATTERS

heh im not beating that or your other one so as a motivator its unideal

I'll try to post something mediocre, so deems can get motivated.

OK. It's time for all you freeloaders to get serious about pulling your weight. If you can't come up with something original, plagiarize yourself from back when you still had interesting thoughts.

sorry the muse sang to me of puke and shite this month and shes off again

A bit short, but I like it!

I need to get drunk and power something out in twenty minutes like usual

ok stud

I think it's time to set the deadline for entries: midnight (GMT) Saturday, November 23. I'll cobble together the poll sometime soon after that.

On a Rooftop in Manhattan

The planes performed their dance above LaGuardia,
banking lightly into a slow descent.

Margaret regarded the procession with envy.
When she was younger she thought the whole world moved
like gears inside a clock, churning indifferently
around the mounting catastrophe of her life.

Someone told her that this fantasy was called libertarianism,
evoking images of gun shows and New Hampshire
that quickly dissipated into a mosaic haze.

Margaret had no judgments and no ideals
at this moment in time,
and she caught herself saying that fatigue was a kind of nihilism
when she meant to ask for another drink.

thanks, treesh. Last time there were 17 poems. yours makes 9 so far this time around. I'm hoping we can harvest a few more before Saturday.

one last bump before this thread shuts down over the weekend

poets! submit!

I need to get drunk and power something out in twenty minutes like usual

― imago

poets! start drinking!

I've already made an ass of myself. It's everyone else's turn now!

One last reminder:

If you can't come up with something original, plagiarize yourself from back when you still had interesting thoughts.

Just 'thoughts' will do at this point.

I dug up an Onegin stanza I left unfinished, but I just can't get it to work.

I left it unfinished ten years ago, I should say

That's OK. You're already a blood donor.

Slap '(A Fragment)' on it and call it a day.

But it's the middle part that doesn't work...

Replace it with '(…)'. Voilà.

i have pernod, i have blackcurrant

as if under three hours to deadline wasn't always the plan

Oh had I but a cup of coffee
or perhaps a mug of tea
my heart, which as of now is awfully
sad, would would fill with joy and glee.
My dim and incoherent thinking
would, with just a bit of drinking,
become beautiful and bright
and tell my fingers what to write.
I know now that the drought is ending,
as now is done my daily toil,
and on my stove water doth boil.
but woe... I shan't go on pretending...
One thing would be even more dear:
Oh had I but a glass of beer!

Ten years, guys. Or, twenty minutes back then, twenty minutes now.

new church Kidbrooke

I rode a new bus today, the 335 to Kidbrooke
they only introduced it a few weeks ago
and the announcements were broken -
instead of '335 to Kidbrooke' it said
'new. church! Kidbrooke'
so really it was like I was joining a cult and
route 335 was the cult
here's what happened next

but first about route 422, there's a
20-metre stretch of road in the middle
of the route where both the inbound
and outbound buses use the
same lane of the same road
in the same direction, that's the 422 lore
and now you know it too and
there's no way to not know it

so yeah this happened
the 380 goes past my house and
it seems to be more often much more often
than you'd expect from
the law of averages
that the inbound and outbound buses meet
at the crossroads i live on
and one of them has to stop to let the other past

by now i was ecstatic
to tell you about the 763
which doesn't exist yet but when it does
it will have a point on its route
where it has to do a three-point turn
in the middle of the traffic
while the driver sings
his favourite hymns and drums the wheel

so now i'm on the 8004
and we're flying into
~the hexagon~
which is where this route terminates
it is a beautiful place I hear
engines are running
you can queue for the next bus
there is ample shelter

music selection was The Chap and is now The Beta Band. I will write a second

you've all done fine poems btw but aimless' second is probably the best thing anyone's done for one of these? i'm drunk idk. aimless deserves this one, for everything tbh

Lots of excellent things in this thread. I wrote this back when I was alive. Formally, it's a bit fucked but well.

Ranging in twilight’s palsied silver, at the summit of autumn’s blaze.
Acorn litter, balled under arches –
Demosthenean props, rolled around the woods’ bronzed gape.
Beyond this, nothing is said.
Instead, we go undeceived, suspended in the updrafts of the old silence.

Rooks roil westward, lint in the eye of the sun’s liquid falling.
We crouch at a field edge, thick with dewy foreshadows;
you gather chestnut husks, the needles lancing your palms.
Then: a studied tilt, a new pressure behind your eyes, and there
not ten feet away, belly-deep, scrape-hidden, a deer. A deer.

Before, I’d carry you out, out to sleep off the afternoon’s bright daydreams,
and the deer would always come. They were your anxious, peering avatars,
come to see this strange two-fronted stalker abroad in their crucible of beech-caught light.
Once, walking through a pixellated summer night, a deer watched us home,
A distant, timid chaperon of dusk’s rough palisades.

Now, as the woods shrink, as time shrinks, acre by sodden acre, they come less frequently.
But I feel them, a soft presence at the edge of things,
a modest, unspoken rapture.
We gather each other, and for the briefest moment I wonder if you’re going to stay.
Not yet, I think; not just yet.

Your River, My River

You wanted a river
classically organised
explicable in every tongue and
not burdened or bridled with
oil and tar
A lovely great groundswell
of that old terror beauty
A beauty to be fit over the face
as a veil
of golden, shimmering reverence

I flew apart everywhere
casting sackfuls of sawdust
into unspeakable crevices
Acupuncture horizon
got its god-fearing back broken
right down the seam
I held the split
atwixt a crumbling endpiece
and shouted into it
for your river

Waiting, I listened
Static flashing on and off
like the primeval beginning
of cinematic entombment
Aeons buttered my feet
and then one day I heard it
A focal shifting
and the light
moved
like
this
with big balmy pulses
A diagonal triangulation
on what we had taken
to be river

Here it was then
For you
but really for me
Rippled gunshots in all directions
A crinkled ugly
too horrible to bear
and overdosing on sun
No life
No Wordsworth
But enough liquid matter
to flood
all the droughts in the world

TOE HELL WITH REALITY

Blab blab BLAND sockaroo
I ingest WE INGEST seventeen CRICKET INFESTED PONCHOS
martyrFUCKER
here's the real poem
today at the football just after they equalised
a wagtail flew over the stand
and I was like ah ok a pied wagtail
but it could have been a grey wagtail
and in the end i didn't know but it was
enough that it was a wagtail
this isn't the poem either is it

new tack: i'm listening to total eclipse of the heart
while watching a light aircraft approach landing
on a stream of the cricket, it is a doughty plane
now lady by styx on imperial command

versablutions
commodore inefficacies
the song is good hail howitzer
exactamundo, by gordon
slightly now i am writing a poem and it cannot end now
nu-gold dream drainage dripping
i beef you in writhes
we contangle a biscuit gauntlet

burrett
gondling
haxmet
corbucky
such are the names of elspeth and swot
you've become useless and unfiltered!
many rock stars have been or become sociopaths, NOT JUST REO SPEEDWAGON
the informations got worse
I tried to type got not for
PRODIGAL SON
i don't know

KEEP ON LOVING YOU but wait here's a GUMBUTTON

drunken

here's the real poem

the reeal one:

_
_
we will or won't fast-forward through dipmunks of

no that wasn't it either

the only truth i can communicate right now
is that if I truly understood and drank in the music
of the late 1970s and early 1980s
i would transcend myself and achieve everything
that i want to achieve
and you would too

and that the only truth of the next decade
is the truth of whoever makes ELO but of the 2020s

that is no longer my truth

okay here is the scenario
there are three wizards
one of them is Tolesmord
one Barthsy
one Gonfrak

Tolesmord says: "Ho my spell" and zorks a banister from his gunk
Barthsy yodels in four languages before producing a parcel of penises
Gonfrak is invisible to dogs.

All are competing!

A judger of wizard looms before them, cape a-ghast
They utter some words: "You are all so special,
But I order that the winner is GONFRAK"

And this is so unusual and out of order
because they all thought they were going to win equally
that the three wizards organise the following array:

Judger, BANISTER PROTRUDING FROM GUNK
is not only invisible to dogs but is being LICKED and MATED WITH (rude!)
even though the dogs do not know why they are mating
and actually they are yodelling

think on that as your world disintegrates like mine
think on that as you are consumed in language
think on that and of that and in that and through that and while that
is the thing you think of
as i say that you
are the martyr

By the powers vested in me by me, I declare the 2019 ILX Poetry contest closed to new entries. But of course this thread isn't locked and no one can be stopped from slipping some further poems over the transom. Special pleading, accompanied by breast-beating, sitting in ashes, or bribery may be employed by poets seeking inclusion in the final balloting -- and might possibly heeded. I'm a soft touch.

with the clock ticking so....

ive a clock ticking fifty seconds a minute
not a ten second gap at one end, or within it
nor spaced so the rhythms are even but slow
just ten odd-second gaps where a tick doesnt show

on the wall in the kitchen it hangs and it chides me
reminds me my time isnt filled as it should be
a man cannot sit and be still with such stutters
an audible heartbeat that randomly flutters

id been minded to bring to a sure resolution
this case of a-one-in-six-missed revolution
but a damnable fact that has turned out in time
is this odd missing tick suits my rhythm just fine

a fellas time cannot be pursed, is the message
into regular moments of dignified passage
that hours are more than the sum of their parts
whether fittingly fitful in stops or in starts

so it hangs as it hangs, and well hang it i say
what's a couple a thousand less ticks in the day
we'll offer them up to the god of the gaps
gift moments presented that land in our lapse

so many awesome posts

goddamn, deems. every year

says the guy who voted for mordy.

i dont forget.

yours and mordy's were the other best things to ever be in this maybe

id read a book of hellion mumble's stuff, and i wont read a book of anything usually tbh

there are forgotten heroes

Gatemouth did some truly staggering forgotten-hero work for instance, and then stopped posting

mordy's 2014 poem is the great one from the the archive if anyone is ever making a zine

careful, deems won't forget you said that ;)

in a smallshit factory town down west
the college is hosted macabrely
between st marys, where the nurses now train
(amongst the easier cases)
and teresas

johnny was easy. hed wander the campus
asking have ye fags, have ye fags- he was harmless
but startling

fergus another, he wandered around once
one thursday (id had an accounting exam)
saying i kilt a man
i kilt a man ah god help us i kilt a man

hed stabbed johnny five times in the back,
out the back
fergal probably shouldnt have been in st marys,
we reckoned

that was for easier cases

the other flank of my beloved alma mater
was teresas: secure, for the difficult cases.
secured to their beds
or secured by prescription
or secured in the first and last instance by mick
who was alright of a guy, all considered

i never got used to visiting teresas
but many years later, with clipboard and tie
i carried out duties vested in my person
by the county of mayo-god-help-us
and a fella climbed onto my car while i did so
and wouldnt come down til they threatened the doctor
and i thought

ive had worse visits to this fucking kip
that left worse dents and scratches
and at least this time its on the clock
and none of my brothers are crying

AI think it's time to set the deadline for entries: midnight (GMT) Saturday, November 23.

― A is for (Aimless), Monday, November 18, 2019 8:24 AM (five days ago)

According to my calculations, midnight had passed had passed at the Greenwich meridian when deems posted both of his poems to this thread. Personally, I am not averse to including them in the official balloting, but I throw open the floor to other participants who may feel aggrieved by darraghmac's flouting of the announced rules. Until I hear further, they are held in official limbo, pending adjudication.

Hint: Some sitting in ashes, or thoughtful bribery, might soothe the feelings of the other contestants.

serve me right

This morning, upon further thought, I remembered that flouting announced rules is vmic for poets, so any caviling would be ungenerous of us. You're in. I'll post a polling thread in an hour or two.

i knew pretenitence would do the job

Voting for your most-preferred poem may be done on 2019 ILX Poetry Competition: VOTE HERE.

Poets who vote for themselves will be judged in heaven upon a scale of perfect justice, but since all votes are anonymous let's just accept the eventual outcome as being uninfluenced by undue vanity. I'm just hoping there are more total votes than the eleven poets who saw fit to show us their poems. Good luck, y'all.

btw, you have invented a new and valuable word - well done, deems:

Your search - "pretenitence" - did not match any documents.

ack too late to submit - alas. next year i'll do better.

Have to work tomorrow
But will be back here again believe me
Once the barmaid options are exhausted
Back here to fucking decompose

(Aimless opens thread, expecting to find a decomposing calstars. Does not and is relieved.)

I forgot to say thank you to my voter!

And, by the by, via some weird cold clockwork of the stars, Christopher Fairbank ended up reading and recording my poem: https://soundcloud.com/mattpoacher/deer

it was me fwiw

pfft

Thanks imago.