In-Just Spring Contest Winner!

April 14, 2008

I have finally had a moment to sit down and randomly pick a winner from my In Just-Spring Mudluscious Poetry Contest. I have had a lovely time reading the spring poetry that you all chose for this contest! Some of them were old favorites of mine, and some I'd never read before. Take a look at the fabulous entries posted here.

And congratulations to Jennifer at Diary of 1! While I did pick Jennifer totally randomly, I'm happy that she won because she posted a poem that her mother wrote, called "Morning." Someday I'll have a fall poetry contest and post my father's poem called, "Kicking Leaves in Mr. Gage's Orchard."

Lots of people wrote to me and said, "I can't write poetry, so I can't enter." Well, actually I didn't ask you all to write a poem for the contest, just to submit a spring poem that you like. But here lies a phenomenon that seems epidemic: people are intimidated by poetry. Certainly, poetry can be intimidating. I think most of us were exposed to a similar canon of poetry in high school. I can remember reading sonnets by Donne and Shakespeare and finding them obtuse. I remember being utterly perplexed by iambic pentameter and trochaic octameter.

But somewhere along the line I fell in love with poetry. It was something inside of me that insisted upon expressing myself through poetry. I loved the sound of words, the cadence of language. Poets could evoke such a range of emotions with such a sparseness of words.

If you haven't read poetry since high school, please try again. This is National Poetry Month. Try visiting one of these sites and browsing. You may find something that touches your soul:
Poetry Foundation
American Life in Poetry
Poets.org

Thanks, everyone, for playing, and congratulations, Jennifer in OR! I'll be sending off a box of Spring Things very soon!