[Gail White]

The votes are now tabulated, and there seems no need to keep up suspense. So -- the envelope, please!

Based on popular voting, the TOP THREE WINNERS of the 2013 Sonnet Bake-off are:

1. REQUITED LOVE by Matthew Buckley Smith (136 points)
2. LAST DANCE by Stephen T. Harvey (76 points)
3. CHILDHOOD by Elise Hempel (59 points)

Alex Pepple will contact the winning poets regarding publication of their sonnets.
Congratulations to them, and to all the finalists who are listed below:

FINALISTS (IN ORDER OF POSTING)

1. Elise Hempel (Childhood)
2. Jesse Anger (The Keepsake)
3. Diane Arnson Svartlien (On the Ubiquity of Mobile Devices)
4. Robert Crawford (Calypso Calls on Penelope)
5. Tim Murphy (Mower's Song)
6. Matthew Buckley Smith (Requited Love)
7. Janice Soderling (Film Noir)
8. Marly Youmans (The Baby and the Bathwater)
9. Stephen T. Harvey (Last Dance)
10, Peter Spagnuolo (For Two Lindens Newly Planted on Avenue D)


Also to be congratulated are the
HONORABLE MENTIONS (in alphabetical order by author)

Dave Condell - "Marvin"
Anna Evans - "Tornado Sky"
Claudia Gary - "Desserted"
Peter Goulding - "The Church of the Battered Biscuit Tin"
Simon Hunt - "Aubade: Auburn"
Siham Karami - "Distances"
Austin MacRae - "The Guest Room"
Mary McLean - "New Parents at Feng Sushi"
Donald Sheehy - "A Pine Parabolic"
Geertjan Wielenga - "A Bad Day for Kafka"

Finally, the judges' personal choices will be given in separate entries..

Thanks to all who entered and made the 2013 Eratosphere Sonnet Bake-off a success.

[Gail White]

Judge's Choices for Gail

Based on technical proficiency, verbal felicity, and personal appeal, my choices for the top three sonnets are:
1. The Baby and the Bathwater
2. Last Dance
3. Calypso Talks To Penelope

[Catherine Chandler]

First of all, congratulations to Matthew Buckley Smith, Stephen T. Harvey and Elise Hempel on placing first, second and third, respectively, in the popular vote. Also congratulations to all the poets whose sonnets were named as finalists and honorable mentions.

*************************************

On July 21, Kim Bridgford posted the following question on Facebook: “When is a sonnet not a sonnet?”

I wondered whether she’d been looking in on the various sonnets proposed by Gail and me as finalists in this year’s Eratosphere sonnet bake-off, and whether she had been following the discussion and debate inspired by the trimeter sonnet. And yes, “Mower’s Song” is a sonnet, a compelling, religious work of art that proves how — through poetics — memory and imagination can, as Phillis Levin writes in her introduction to The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, “liberate the soul from bondage to the past, serving the function of redemption” (page lx).

Kim’s Facebook query elicited a few replies, the first being: “When it’s not a good 14 lines of rhyming iambic pentameter (appropriate substitutions permissible for iambs).” That person is entitled to his or her opinion, narrow though it may be. I replied: “When it doesn’t sing.”

In deciding on my personal favorites I also looked for whether or not the sonnet’s flow from start to finish, or, if you will, from “argument” to resolution was successfully and logically achieved. Without totally setting aside the more traditional aspects of meter, rhyme or placement of the volta, I asked myself how the lines performed in relation to one another, in what Levin calls their “choreography” (xxxviii), and whether the conflict or incongruity they portrayed led to a conclusion, an epiphany of sorts, or whether they ended on a note of ambiguity, an aspect I particularly admire. I also looked for striking, sensory images, a distinctive voice, and a feeling that I was present as a witness to, or even a participant in, the sonnet’s moment in time.

I had great difficulty in choosing three “top picks”. I reluctantly set aside “Childhood” and “The Baby and the Bathwater”, two sonnets with distinctive voices and remarkable movement. After re-reading the finalists many times over, I finally made my choices.

But before I list my top picks . . .

An aside about nostalgia and sentiment vs. sentimentality . . . I was going to write a rather lengthy explication of the words nostalgia, sentiment and sentimentality, for those (thankfully, few) who, based on the sonnets chosen as finalists, rather churlishly whined about being most horribly assailed by wistful sentimentality and dollops of treacly nostalgia; but after writing an entire page defending each sonnet against the charge of said bludgeoning and smothering, I decided there really was no need to justify any of the choices we made, and even less, to flog dead horses.

So, my top three, in REVERSE order are :

(THIRD PLACE) For Two Lindens Newly Planted on Avenue D
by Peter Spagnuolo

As a preface to my comments on this sonnet choice, I would like to refer readers to one of my favorites from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree:

Grow not too high, grow not too far from home,
Green tree, whose roots are in the granite's face!
Taller than silver spire or golden dome
A tree may grow above its earthy place,
And taller than a cloud, but not so tall
The root may not be mother to the stem,
Lifting rich plenty, though the rivers fall,
To the cold sunny leaves to nourish them.
Have done with blossoms for a time, be bare;
Split rock; plunge downward; take heroic soil, ---
Deeper than bones, no pasture for you there:
Deeper than water, deeper than gold and oil:
Earth's fiery core alone can feed the bough
That blooms between Orion and the Plough.

Like Millay’s poem, “For Two Lindens Newly Planted on Avenue D” is only ostensibly about trees. But even if it were, the fine craftsmanship alone — including not only its technical merits but also its vivid language rendered through metaphor, imaginative slant rhymes, muscular verbs and a distinctive voice in words charged with what Elaine Scarry calls “radiant ignition” — would have catapulted this poem into the top ten spots. Were it not for the word “morn” in line 14, it would have been my #2 pick. It’s a nit easily fixed, especially by such an excellent wordsmith.

This sonnet is a double dare on steroids. As I read the very first words, I was immediately reminded of the memorable scene in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz in which the Wicked Witch of the West skywrites “Surrender Dorothy” above the Emerald City. This image, along with the use of the words “box-cutter boys” brought to mind the haunting image of 9/11.

I love how the volta has to wait around until line 12 to occur, since I don’t consider the narrator’s finely-tuned, attitude-filled list of insult and injury to be in any way hyperbolic. All of the senses necessarily and skillfully come into play — the smell of piss, the lingering taste of cuchifrito grease, the cruel lacerations, the sound of crashing errant cars and backing-up beer trucks, the eyesore of deli bags in the branches. I am there on Avenue D.

It is the uncovering of deeper layers of meaning that raises Spagnuolo’s sonnet, like Millay’s, to a higher level of excellence and places it in my top three picks. Is this a poem about hope? Faith? Survival? Who or what do the linden trees represent – the “other”? Immigrants? Is it a tribute to my native New York City post-9/11? To the human spirit in general? To poetry? To formal poetry getting pissed on for so long? All of the above? None of the above? You fill in the blanks.

“For Two Lindens Newly Planted on Avenue D”, delves deeply into “Earth’s fiery core” — the heart — and leaves the reader root-root-rooting — pun intended — for the home team. ♫


(SECOND PLACE) Requited Love
by Matthew Buckley Smith

The repetition of the word “Here” in “Requited Love” not only shows, in a series of matter-of-fact, striking images, how life’s great expectations may, must and do change over time. In a way it’s a cautionary tale asking us to “hear” (and perhaps act on) its underlying message.

The painful irony of the title becomes increasingly apparent as one reads through the list — through finely observed sensory details — not only this particular couple’s slipping-down life, but also acts as a memento mori, immediately recognizable, though artfully disguised, as the “skulls” in line 12.

I greatly admire the craftsmanship required to write such an excellent “Wyatt/Surrey” sonnet, and how Smith uses the rima baciata (aka kissing rhyme) of the three quatrains to throw into sharp relief the spiritually and physically impoverished life the couple now leads.

Regardless of how one interprets the final five words of the poem (and I came up with at least five possibilities), in the end, every fear mentioned — from infidelity to mice — becomes insignificant when faced with the living death the couple now experiences: two lives now reduced to a shoulda-woulda-coulda, monotonous routine of silent eating, bathing and sleeping. The only thing this couple shares is the bed they made and now must lie in. Pun intended.

♫ ♫ A heartbreaker.


(FIRST PLACE) Last Dance
by Stephen T. Harvey

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows. ( -- Robert Frost, “The Secret Sits”)

“Last Dance” is a poem of exquisite beauty and subtlety, a finely-crafted work of art rendered with striking images, replete with “joy, passion and flow”, qualities which new Eratosphere member James Wright rightly states, to paraphrase him, are not often seen in a piece of writing. It concerns two main branches of philosophy: metaphysics and epistemology. It is also the only poem of the hundreds I read that gave me goose bumps each and every time I read it.

The cane is, of course, the secret that “sits in the middle” around which we all dance, an ingenious conceit handled expertly from start to finish. The epistemic paradox of memory weaves, as do the sonnet’s rhymes and two main protagonists, throughout the poem, culminating in the brilliant and haunting closing lines of the sestet.

Some people have a deep, existential concern about the nature of time and the scope of knowledge, while others but passing, theoretical interest. To those who groaned, growled or otherwise grumbled about what they saw as a surfeit of poems about ageing in this bake-off, I would point out that “Last Dance”, though it portrays a frail, 99-year-old man, is much more than that. The man is only one-half of the “counterbalance”. He is not

. . . a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless . . . . ( -- W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,”)

but rather what comes after that word, “unless”. He and the toddler are souls singing “Of what is past, or passing, or to come.” If “Last Dance” is to be understood and appreciated on more than a superficial level by a jaded audience, it must be seen as addressing one of the central and largest subjects in philosophy: truth. The elderly man and the toddler are truth-bearers.

But that’s a huge topic for another time and another forum.

♫ ♫ ♫ Bravo, bravissimo!

Gratitudes

First, I would like to thank Gail White for being such a wonderful co-host/co-judge and for posting the finalist sonnets and my comments when, due to an urgent family situation (still very critical), I was unable to do so. We had some lively exchanges, both serious and fun-filled, and she knows I will now have to wean myself off jelly doughnuts, which at times I found myself ingesting as a source of energy to deal with the onslaught of entries .


I would also like to thank the hundreds of poets who entered a sonnet in the bake-off and Eratosphere members — old and new alike — who read and commented on the finalists. Some interesting and thought-provoking topics have arisen from these exchanges, and that’s a good thing. Who can tell what the sonnet will look like or sound like in another 500 years?

Last, but never least, I thank Alex Pepple for the honor of being asked to co-host and co-judge this year, for setting up the tag-team email address and his assistance with minor glitches throughout the process, for trying to deflect some of the slings and arrows, for his continued support of the annual Eratosphere sonnet bake-off, and for Eratosphere itself.


Catherine Chandler
July 23, 2013

[S. A. Wyatt]

Congratulations to the winners, runners up, and honorable mention. Just for the record, I did not guess any of the writers I thought I knew. It's good to see a mix of familiar and unfamiliar faces in the contest.

Thanks again to Alex, Cathy, and Gail. Well done.

Sean

[Shaun J. Russell]

Congrats to all the winners, finalists, and honorable mentions...especially to Matthew Buckley Smith for winning the popular vote by a landslide. It's kind of amazing how it wasn't even close. For the poets and critics here who often don't agree about much, it's a testament to the strength of "Requited Love" that it captured votes by a solid majority of participants.

I'm also heartened to see so many entrants who were not "regulars" at Eratosphere. Hopefully many will decide to stick around and contribute to the various forums. They can only get better.

[Mary McLean]

Huge congratulations to all the winners, finalists and hon menshes. I'm surprised and delighted to be included in such distinguished company. And thanks again to the judges who have dealt with such record amounts of both entries and flak.

[Gail White]

May I just add my thanks to Alex for setting this up, and to Cathy for doing heroic amounts of work during a stressful personal time. Had either of us been in sole charge, a couple of the finalists would have been different, but agreement was mutual on the final choices -- and I was encouraged by the number of people who thought, after all the teapot tempests were over, that this was one of the best bake-offs ever.

Once again, congratulations to the winners, and thanks to everyone who entered and commented.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Hell, I didn't even enter, yet I seem perhaps to have made off with at least a portion of the Most Churlish Award!

I'd hate to jeopardize that distinction by congratulating the winners, but I will anyway. Congratulations.

Nemo

[Ed Shacklee]

When reading just for myself, I never hand out awards; but I enjoyed all these poems enough that I wish I could get a peek at the honorable mentions, too, and suspect I will someday. Congratulations to all the participants, and my thanks to the judges for a good time.

Best,

Ed

[Pedro Poitevin]

Lots of dear poets in here. Congratulations to the winners, finalists, and honorably mentioned. Thanks to Gail and Cathy for their work.

Pedro.