Poet Judge Dick Bakken's Commentary ~ CafeRg's Splash Mother's Day Poetry Competition

Poetry Judges were ask to score poems submitted in CafeRg's Splash Poetry Mother's Day Poetry Competition and choose 4 poems for the SplashHall Poetry Membership to vote on the Top 2 Poems. You can view the poems submitted, final results and winners for the Mother's Day Poetry Contest here. Below is Poet and Judge Dick Bakken's commentary.

"How I Scored My Top Four"

My choice for 4 points is “a week later the cruisers came” by cy street. Though images are not so startling as some in my 2^nd choice, they are competent and this poem is more fully realized. What is startling is a weave of these images into twists and turns that surprise throughout the poem. I am happy to find effort by someone who managed to avoid all that saccharine Hallmark schlock. The poet surprises immediately with comparison of mom to a cactus, underscoring with “yeah” that we are not in for highfalutin sentimentality, then really yanks us to earth—surprising and turning us—with “thirty north twenty,” again with “she is small,” again with “pardon me,” and so on. Even “I love you” twice works since not drowned in surrounding grandiose syrup. “The beach is soft / and the gentle waves know well” is a lapse into what most were regurgitating from Rod McKuen or Hallmark, and the finale line is too cerebral, obtuse, and non-earthy for the rest of the poem. But this is the one poet who got the job done without fainting back into that swamp of clichés-stereotypes-schlock that seemed to mesmerize most all of the others. So kudos are due.


My choice for 3 points is “Everyone Knows” by dublinsteve. This poem flashes such original, startling images—at least through its first half—that it stands out from all others. Though “sun’s shout” is not new—“strafes the edges of the blinds,” “the bully’s huff,” and “orange fire of merthiolate” are strikingly original images that we all can envy. It is too bad that this burst of a beginning suddenly washes out in the image-empty generic rhetoric of the fourth stanza. The poem never recovers. Though the final stanza does flood back to imagery, there is nothing but overused Disney-like stereotypes, clichés, and preciousness. All that opening fire of originality—the genuine hallmark of imagination, and thus of artistic excellence—is long gone by then.


My choice for 2 points—“A Mother and a Child” by ceberry—washes out even sooner. But what a beginning. The first stanza, especially its concluding line, give the liftoff that word-expression is supposed to when language is used to its highest potential, when we call it poetry. Do note how differently that opening stanza works from those that follow, which communicate data much the way a textbook or newspaper does, by telling rather than showing. The only lines that come back to the way that poetry presents data are the final two. And though they comprise a longtime poetry cliché—Wordsworth: “the Child is father of the Man,” etc.—they are nicely rendered.


My choice for 1 point—“In the Eyes of Innocence a Mother is God” by ecodelluvia—manages to avoid the sentimental preciousness that traps most writers into just regurgitating what they have soaked up from Walt Disney’s cutesifying of reality, Hallmark’s saccharine distortions of it, or five-hanky cinema’s laying into the violins to manipulate tears about it. Well, yeah, that title plus its repetition in the final sentence is a bit sticky. But what remains avoids the syrup and schlock that pull the rug out from under artistic integrity. Even though the images are not striking or even notably original—due to such a generic approach—the whole feels competent and euphonious.


I couldn’t score any points for “Mother of the Year” by scarletsphinx because it is so unfulfilled. But I like the shock of the maverick approach. A poem needs more than daring, though—much more than sincerity—so absolutely more than emotion, whether sweet or bitter. This one does achieve it in “snide my choices,” pretty damn awakening diction. However, that is it—since all the rest is but strings of pure cliché. A poem must transmute language, not just toss back what has been said before, no matter how well. But—whoa!—imagine fusing scarletsphinx’s daring with dublinsteve’s startling opening images, cy street’s surprising turns and subject matter, and ecodelluvia’s euphony. We would have created a poet to rival Sylvia Plath at her fiercely best.

--Dick Bakken, May 7, 2006