03/22/2023
Congratulations to the winners of the 2023 Ragan Poetry Prize, judged by GC Waldrep!
First prize: David Collins, “Jayus”
Judge's Citation: For me, poetry is always, at least in part, about surprise: at what moment does the world turn on itself and reveal itself as more, less, or other than we ever expected? Some of those turns happen in language, or to language: the ground of the poem shifts even as the poet attempts to make some record of experience, whether through memory or experience-through-writing, experience-in-writing. We return to poetry, and to art generally, because we want to be shocked out of this world—our daily, often deadened understandings of this world—into some other. Which may also turn out to be this one.
“Jayus” is a poem of calculated surprise, with its enjambment, accumulating rhythms, and sudden shifts of register and consciousness. This is a world of “lexical lacuna[e],” but also of baseball and Christmas and marbles and cousins and gratefulness, rage too—and writing. Writing doesn’t make this world heavier, but it does introduce into the world difference. Writing leaves a consciousness of difference, which—as a consciousness—is a form possibility takes, as well as a precondition for justice. But writing on its own guarantees nothing: as the poem warns in its closing line, “you can be both well-rehearsed and ill-prepared.”
“There’s a word for a joke,” the poem affirms, “that is not so funny that you might laugh.” And the world, as Heidegger insisted, goes right on worlding, doing its world-work. We are in it. This is a poem of surprising depths, a set of nested soundings that strikes deep into the world worlding. We come into the presence of the joke—any joke—as we do into the presence of a world, “well-rehearsed and ill-prepared.” The poem leaves us there, at the threshold of the world: where we already were, but with a richer understanding.
Second prize: Oli Grogan, “How a dog came to live with a family and their little girl, and what it did there”
Judge's Citation: Part of the essential mystery of childhood—our own childhoods, any childhood—is that as a childhood it comes to us via memory, memories: shards of experience that endure in us, that form parts of us. It is never one single, unified thing, this “childhood.”
The poet in “How a dog came” takes a basic, common memory—the arrival of a pet into the family circle—and isolates various shards relating to this experience. “i don’t know what you were expecting—fairy tale maybe,” the poet drily offers in the first stanza. And yet what the new dog, Sam (“isn’t he nice”), teaches the speaker is a series of lessons in violence, in the corrupted nature of our shared world, a world of torn-apart stuffed bunnies and ruptured arteries. In this everyone becomes complicit, even those who love us: “it’s our mamas who teach us to eat spoiled fruit,” the poet slyly reminds us. In this shared world there are “two kinds of big,” namely eating and being eaten, and what we think of as celestial, or heavenly, is in a state of continual recession, “let[ting] the evening in.”
The world’s counsel, pouring through the speaker’s parents and elders, through the speaker, and ultimately through the poem, is “don’t worry.” What this poem does is not “worry.” Instead, in its fierce irony, it rages against a certain loss of innocence, which happened long before the speaker’s childhood, but in which, no longer a child, the speaker is now implicated. This is a poem of bitter discovery, but somehow also a poem of triumph.
Third prize (tie):
Kyra Lipetzky, “fishlegs [I look at my fish]”
Sophie Neubert, “Scenes Characterized by Encounters with Bees”
