Dear Poet,

Thank you for entering the Red Shed Poetry competition 2011. The results are as follows:

1^st; John Gallas, Encounter with a Taniwha near Puponga Farm, Onetahua;

2^nd, Sue Vickerman, Train, Water, Geese;

Wakefield Prize; Alan Braddock, Glenbrittle – the loch.

Sorry if you’ve been disappointed on this occasion but consolation may be drawn from the fact that you have helped to keep the Red Shed Readings, Wakefield’s finest spoken word event, solvent and eager for the winter 2011 season. Details on www.currockpress.com soon.

The Red Shed Competition Awards event takes place at Mocca Moocho Café, Cross Square, Wakefield on Sunday 19^th June at 2 o’clock: live music, a reading from Robert Powell and the presentation. Free admittance, do come along.

Finally, we need to publicly convey our thanks to Robert Powell who has been both assiduous and generous in his role of judge and his notes below serve as a commentary on the judging process and as a template for this whole damn tricky business of writing poetry.

John Clarke

Red Shed Competition – Judge’s Notes

There were 137 poems entered. When I took the job on I naively thought that I’d be able to jettison three quarters of them quickly, then concentrate on the rest. I was wrong. I did my first read-through and was still left with over a hundred poems! No, I was not anticipating so many readable & engaging poems, then so many good poems, and then so many bloody good poems, and finally 5 poems I felt were superlative poems, poems which echoed, which I wanted to read again, and then again, and when I did they stayed there, wouldn’t give way. All of them, I believe, were deserving prize-winners.

In poetry I look for freshness and surprise in language --- which is not the same as cleverness. Indeed sometimes the freshness and surprise can come from a stunning simplicity in range and choice of words. I look for imagery which surprises, although not for its own sake but for the poem’s. I also like a measure of ambiguity. A really good poem needs to leave space for the reader, not be too pat or defined or prescribed; something unsaid as well as what is said; something open, even not quite finished. Yet I also look for a level of awareness of the reader --- literature, after all, is a two-way process --- a discernible ‘trail’ laid out, possibly strange but not self-consciously obscure or referential.

For me there needs to be a kind of journey, in which as reader you are set in motion, can’t predict the end, and finish up in a different place from the one you started in. At some point during the journey there is a kind of shift or ripple in the fabric of expected meaning. And yet the end, when it does come, also feels uncannily right. A poem needs to be imaginative, surprising, and yet also sufficiently pinned to the real, tangible world we are in and can recognise. I like poems where the mysterious meets and melds with the everyday. I think even humorous poems need this quality. You must also want to read the poem again, and also more by this poet.

With the quality so high, in the end, tragically, it comes down to the personal taste of the judge. The Wakefield postcode prize-winner, Alan Braddock, uses rhythmn, rhyme and diction to create a kind of chant-like atmosphere in a poem about the power of the natural world.

From the five poems previously mentioned. the ones I rated most highly in the general competition, I could unfortunately only choose two as cash prize winners. My second prize-winner, Train, water, geese by Sue Vickerman, is a perfectly crafted and paced poem, earthed in the watery landscape of the Humber, about human love and longing. A beautiful piece of work.

For the first prize, I have chosen Encounter with a Taniwha by John Gallas, a poem which cleverly, eccentrically, and teasingly hangs on the very edge of sense and language, and on the edge of cultures. It uses an encounter with a creature or phenomenon drawn from the exotic (to us) mythology of the Maoris to talk to us, I think, about the inexplicable and unmeasurable in life and nature, the mysterious that lies within. And I’m afraid one reading just won’t do it. You get to the end and immediately, in a kind of double-take --- what the hell was that? --- want to, need to,  go back and start again. In my view, a wonderful & masterful poem.

Although there was no further prize money, I also felt a need for some acknowledgement of the three other poems that remained in my last, small, hard-won, pleasurable pile. These were Kimberley Could Sing by Matthew Stoppard; Stolen Moment by Mark Stopforth; and Five poets take a walk in the country by Anthony Watts. And so, hoping it won’t be taken as arrogance on my part, I have offered a copy of my book Harvest of Light to these three poets. Congratulations, all.

Robert Powell, May 2011