The winners of our first annual Fall for the Book Poetry Contest, co-sponsored by Fall for the Book and the Writer’s Center, have been decided. Thanks so much to everyone who entered! It was a joy to read the poems and extremely difficult to decide winners among the many, many entries we received.

Stay tuned to the site to read the winning poems–and, of course, for more prompts!

- Lucy & Ellie

FIRST PLACE: “MOTEL,” by Missy Purcell: We love the surprises in this poem, like the description “smells like people” and the sounds of the alphabet sung in the next room.  The way it incorporates the quotations from its chosen Fall for the Book author works with the poem’s progression to create a mysterious setting.

SECOND PLACE: “Yes, Gale,” by Alyse Knorr: This poem’s sardonic tone creates a believable persona that pulls us into it again and again.

THIRD PLACE: “Sounds of Unforgiveness,” by Maggie Beetz: This is a beautifully constructed poem that uses its Fall for the Book author quotation in a way that allows insight into its story without giving us exposition.  We love the rhythms and tone created here!

Honorable Mentions [in no particular order]

[Untitled], by Cori Stash

“The Navigator, by Stephanie Myrick

“Some Might Say It’s Hot,” by Eleanor Graves

“Or as you say, ‘bread and butter,’ by Liz Gerber

“The Message,” by Clarinda Harris

Thanks again to everyone who entered! Congratulations to the winners for your awesome poems. Rock on, poets.

Though Delmore Schwartz was once considered the greatest young poet in America, now his name is rarely mentioned without the term “failed promise” somewhere nearby.

In WOUNDED SURGEON, a book about Schwartz and five other Confessional poets, Adam Kirsch says that it was Schwartz who first “enacted the transition from Modernist to post-Modernist” poetry, but he calls Schwartz “the only important poet of his generation whose work declined, rather than improved, with the years.”

Robert Lowell’s poem “To Delmore Schwartz” and John Berryman’s set of Dream Songs mourning Schwartz’s death are full of romantic reminiscences–and of the dream of being a poet. Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift is based on Schwartz’s early rise and precipitous fall.

For the literary generation to which these writers belonged Delmore Schwartz became almost a caricature, cautioning against the hubris that can come with early promise. He died a virtual unknown in a seedy Times Square Hotel.

DREAM SONG 150:

He had followers but they could not find him;

friends but they could not find him. He hid his gift

in the center of Manhattan,

without a girl, in cheap hotels,

so disturbed on the street friends avoided him

Where did he come by his lift

which all we must or we would rapidly die:

did he remember the more beautiful & fresh poems

of early manhood now?

or did his subtle & strict standards allow

them nothing, baffled? What then did self-love show

of the weaker later, somehow?

I’d bleed to say his lovely work improved

but it is not so. He painfully removed

himself from the ordinary contracts

and shook with resentment. What final thought

solaced his fall to the hotel carpet, if any,

& the New York Times’s facts?

Write a poem about Delmore Schwartz, or about what he represented to his peers either at the height of his success or at the time of his death. Learn about his life and incorporate what you’ve learned into the poem–or imagine details of his life, and substitute those invented details for the real.

OR erect, in a poem, a contemporary Delmore Schwartz: What would his poems sound like? who would he write like? look like? act like? Where would he live? Who would read him? Who would he drink with? Where would he go to school?