The winner from the So to Speak prompt from the summer challenge is in!  To read the winning poem, log into the forum.

Megan Ronan, Poetry Editor of So to Speak had this to say about the judging prociess and John’s poem:

This was hard!

The winner is John Stadler.  What I like about this poem is how it seems to struggle to pick apart our world and problematize the very practice of doing so.  The tercets read as attempts to isolate the items that build our environment (Like Stein said, think in stitches, think in potatoes.) but leave me feeling that we’re not really getting at the smallest particles that build this chaos.

The poem displays a mastery of tone and image in mixing the calm deflation of “a bag of popcorn sighing” and “a ball of yarn we call a child” with the confusion, urgency, and chaos of “beneath us is a bomb” and “sirens blaring on all sides.” The almost mundane balls of yarn and bags of popcorn in our lives are at once the violent bombs and sirens–their violence perhaps coming from their omnipresence. “We want to notice everything” seems like the driving impulse behind the poem–we want to see things sharply and isolate the building blocks of our world. But instead of the “crisp” and hopeful “something” we started with, “there are worse things to see / than there ever were before.”