THE TRUMAN CAPOTE SCHOLARSHIP
FOR CREATIVE WRITING
for 2012-13
has been awarded to
KATHRYN KEHOE
for Poetry
Runner-Up: KIMBER CAMPBELL
Honorable Mention: Miranda Mash
Many thanks to all entrants.
Next year's competition for 2013-14 will be in creative prose (fiction, creative nonfiction, and drama) with a late March deadline. Please watch bulletin boards or www.english.appstate.edu for guidelines in Spring 2013.
Comments by final judge Peter Blair (poet, UNC-Charlotte):
I enjoyed reading all of the poems... I admire all of the students' work. They made it a hard choice.
[Kathryn Kehoe's] poems have a delicacy and moral commitment to their characters and their subjects. This poet cares about the world and what's right or wrong in the world. The sounds and line breaks in the poems underpin this delicate listening to the soul and what it means to be human. The surprising rhymes of "Beloved" sustain the villanelle's compassion for the "you" to which the poem is addressed: "calm," "psalms," "qualms," "balm," and "salaam" bathe the ear and seek to heal the "bullets of pain". In "The Felt Maker," the music of the lines and the assured delicacy of the line breaks convey the ritual of felt-making, how a woman wraps wool around a seashell to make felt. The poet compares this to a religion because the felt-maker "said it symbolized protection, / to wrap something so delicate, / like the self, in wool / to create felt." The repeated "el" sounds and the double meaning of "felt" merge the craft with the creation of emotion itself. In "Learning to Eat Sardines Again" and "Learning Wifely Obedience in 16th Century England," the poet uses images of sardines cans and the story of Griselda, respectively, to reflect the perils of love and marriage. In the former poem, the persona remembers the "fishy kisses" of her lover as perhaps a salty foreshadowing after a meal of sardines. When the antagonist turns unfaithful, the cans become images of hurt, then in the final stanza, "All they are now, / are cans of sardines." The humor and wit of the poem is underpinned by the repetition of "cans, cans, cans" at key points in the poem to indicate their significance to the poet. In the latter poem, after hearing the fateful story of Griselda, and all the severe tests her future husband puts her through, "the girl stares at the fingers / on the painting of future husband / sent over the night before. / She wonders what kind of hands are these." The care and attention to moral detail makes the poems have resonance and felt life.
[Kimber Campbell's] poems have a wide and surprising range of subject matter (from Chinese fishing to an old world cathedral to Irish dancing). Each poem tries to capture that culture or activity with characteristic forms and sounds that embody the subject and spirit of place. In the best poems, certain lines have a nice quality of internal rhyme, and there is a striking tension and energy. In "An Ancient Alleluia," for instance, where the persona sings in church, the repeated "o" sounds create a haunting melody that embodies the echo of the singing: "The hallowed chambers, hollow, echo / as if in thanks for the pleading voices rising together / robed in controlled beauty, clothed carefully / like their owners' bodies to ward off the / chill exuded by the ancient stones." In "After the Bands Played," the poem begins, "Those nights the Irish rocked the sun awake." It starts a staccato iambic rhythm which is like a dance itself. The line breaks and alternating line lengths and reversals of meaning in "Chinese Bird Fishing," capture the gentle art of fishing with birds. The interconnectedness between man and bird is nicely rendered in the second stanza: "Attached to the fisherman / is a conical hat, secured under his chin; / so too is the grey, short-legged stork / connected by fondness / and a string about its neck."