Campbell Corner Poetry Contest winners captivate contest

by Caitlin Durham

Thursday November 29, 2007

On Oct. 30th, the Campbell Corner Poetry Reading drew an audience of 50 people to celebrate the 2006 and 2007 winners and distinguished entries of the Campbell Corner Poetry contest. The contest, with its $3,000 prize, is partly sponsored by the Sarah Lawrence Language Exchange, the brainchild of faculty emeritus Elfie Raymond.

Faculty member Jeff McDaniel hosted the event and introduced the contest’s judges. Along with praising the poetry about to be read, judges Vijay Seshadri, Rachel Hadas and Phillis Levin unanimously thanked Raymond. Levin in particular described the night’s reading as putting “Elfie’s vision into practice.” Each judge commented on this contest’s emphasis on aspects of poetry and life largely lacking in contemporary American poetry. Hadas remarked on the links between philosophy and poetry and the participants’ “piercing specificity of lyricism;” their poetry reaches “broadly throughout space and time without becoming globally generic.”

The poems themselves displayed the immense variety possible in the art of poetry. Lynn Chandhok, the 2006 distinguished entry, read first. Although she did so nervously, her poem, “Market Place” moved beautifully, describing a typical market day violently disrupted by a bomb. William Wenthe, the 2007 distinguished entry, followed her with a poem addressing in part the difficulty of reading Immanuel Kant. His poem seemed more heavily invested in various imagery and associations than Chandhok’s.

The poems by Susan Tichy, also a distinguished entry for 2007, and 2006 co-winner Veronica Patterson particularly emphasized the variety poetry can offer. Tichy’s “America Guzzles” dealt in part with ideas similar to those of Chandhok’s “Market Place,” but dealt with them in an extraordinarily different manner. Patterson did quite well in her first poem “Around the Block of the World,” holding her audience with her succinct and moving portrayal of a friendship threatened by death. She lost the audience somewhat with her lengthy second reading, “Samovar.”

2006 co-winner John Pursley III read abstracts from his long “A Sea Monkey Dreams.”

The 2007 winner, Barbara Claire Freeman, also read excerpts from the “Apocrypha of St Ursula.” Freeman passed around copies of the poem to the audience to read along with her, because, as she explained, the poem was meant to be seen as well as read. She concluded the evening by reading a new work entitled “The Hurricane of Independence” from a collection about American history.

The event demonstrated that the Campbell Corner Poetry Contest celebrates a mixture of greatly diverse poems on united (even if only by association) themes. The contest gave credit to individual ways of looking at universal human experience.