cafeRg
The New SplashHall Is Comin'
Group: The Janitor
Posts: 3797
Joined: Sep. 14 2002 |
 |
Posted: Feb. 13 2006, 11:15am |
 |
How the Judges Voted
Bones Set To Fire by Paulygrl... 4
Passion's Song....................... 3
Valentine's Dream................... 2
As the DJ spins...................... 1
We combine the Judges scores with Splash Members Vote converted to 1 thru 4.
Bones Set to Fire by Paulygrl 8....... 3
A Valentine's Dream by Ceberry 12... 4
Passion's Song by Bittersweet 4...... 2
As the DJ spins, by The Beholder 4.. 2
It appears that Bittersweet and beholder have tied but when we add those to the Judges scores, it comes out like this...
Bones Set To Fire by Paulygrl (total 7 points)....... 4
A Valentine's Dream by Ceberry (total 6 points).... 3
Passion's Song by Bittersweet (total 5 points)...... 2
As the DJ spins, by The Beholder (total 3 points).. 1
Again I apologize to Paulygrl, Ceberry and everyone for the math mistake I made last night. As you see it was a very close competition and only 1 point seperated the top two poems.
Please join me here and congratulate Paulygrl and Ceberry.
Each judge arrives at their final score by scoring poems with the own system and then coverting their score 1 through 4. Below are comments by Judge Dick Bakken and how he arrived at his scores.
~*~ Judge Bakken's Scoring Comments ~*~
How I Scored My Winners
I take a job like this seriously. It took me three days to decide what order to put my four in, because each had weaknesses that non-contenders were made up entirely of. “Bones Set to Fire” gets my top score, manifesting most imagination in making image—root of the word “imagination.” “Her thin dress lay on her nakedness,” “Her eyes make the air pulse,” “torch held high as he walks her body like a jaunty tightrope,” are exacting and lucid. The final stanza, based on an unfulfilled metaphor, would end the poem with true flourish if more specific and thus surprising verbs were used instead of “mark,” “wear off,” and “find” and if the needless word “him” were omitted. Where the poem really gets generic, and thus loses the most of that vitality owned by imagination, is stanza three and the two lines preceding that.
“Words Between Us” gets my second highest score, for being the tightest of the four, not falling into non-contender amateurism of telling us rather than showing us—except for the blatant lapse of line 8, which also marks a turning in the poem and of its quality. The strongest imaginative phrasings are everything that precedes line 8, pure presentation via image, sound, drama, just as in the movies. Everything after line 8 has less vitality because more generic, easier to create—that is, closer to the same words any poet might dash off. A more particularized image would give “movie-scene” (oops! the poet falls again into telling us) more oomph, and there has got to be a less predictable word than “soft” (and maybe “melt”) to kick that last line into the vitality of the first seven. Example: “whisper a flicking / silvery enough to flare through all their film.”
“Passion’s Song” gets my third highest score, due to its music, delightful images such as “salt goes well with my tears,” “their breath sex and Wrigleys,” “celebration of skin,” all built around an extended metaphor, or poetic conceit, at least for awhile. The first three stanzas are freshest and strongest and then the poem begins to slip away along with the martini conceit. To feint away from the conceit in stanzas four and five and then come back to it in stanza six is a good strategy, but somehow the merry inventiveness of the opening images slips away too, except in “celebration of skin / perspiration dripping in sin” and “A man approached me / dressed in mystery.” This poet owns the first three stanzas, some of the second three, but those final two, which abandon the conceit completely, could have been written by any half-awake scribbler.
“As the DJ Spins” gets a contender’s score for rising above the too easy Hallmark urge to just string together clichés, stereotypes, sentimentality, and barely veiled explanatory philosophizing. What we do in poetry is not tell but show. We present via image and sound. Our medium is not ideas, just as a painter’s medium is not ballerinas and lily pads. A painter’s medium is light. Our medium is sound and it is the tone of the words that carries meaning, including denotation, just as in the words “cock-a-doodle-doo,” “canter,” “cascade,” and “crashland,” which are each tiny poems in themselves. A poet must have or develop a feel for words, a right brain ability more valuable, at least to us, than the left brain ability to explain them. This “beholder” poet does hear and feel words, though more in the first stanza than in the second, so much more explanatory.
—Dick Bakken, February 8, 2006
--------------
grapes and champagne in the tub, we'll dance as one, hips sway, lips touch, searching for a magical love
|
