Congratulations to the following winners!
Thank you to judges Joseph S. Salemi, James Sale, and Damian Robin.
First Place $100 Prize: Ben Foreman, Cascabel, Arizona
Cheesemaking
Find a way
To weigh
The whey.
Second Place: James B. Nicola, New York, New York
Trip of a Lifetime
The place within.
Shall we begin?
Second Place: J. Simon Harris, Raleigh, NC
Homeric Hymns*
A Homer
misnomer.
*Footnote: the Homeric hymns were probably not written by Homer.
Third Place: Leo Yankevich, Gliwice, Poland
Liberals
Christians who neither search,
believe or go to church.
Honorable Mentions:
Bruce E. Wren, Chicago, Illinois
Meditation on Aging
Such amazement
at where his days went!
Juleigh Howard-Hobson, Cascadia, USA
Martyr’s Imperative
I
Die.
Amy Foreman, Cascabel, Arizona
To My Children, on Winning
Don’t shun
The one
Outdone,
My son.
Way to go, Ben! (I couldn’t resist!)
Congratulations to all!
Nice! I’m honored to share second place! Congratulations to all the winners, and especially to Ben Foreman for taking the gold.
SPC was a lot of fun.
Congrats to ALL winners,
and Judge thinners!
Now I have to give Ben my advice on winning, since he beat out his brother and sister as well as me, his mom: “Don’t shun the one outdone, my son!” 😉 Thanks, SCP . . . this was a fun experience for him!
There’s some clever stuff here! Congratulations to all the winners!
I am soooo glad I didn’t have to judge between all the clever submissions. Congratulations to the winners.
And as for everyone else,
“Well done and thanks for the fun!”
If I were a judge Bruce E. Wren’s “Meditation on Aging” would have won first place. “Cheesemaking” and “Homeric Hymns” are both lame, stupid and unfunny.
A tough contest to judge, to be sure. I really like “Meditation on Aging” as well. “Martyr’s Imperative” is a good one, too. Sorry you didn’t like mine, but thanks for your frankness.
J. Simon Harris,
I felt your poem, though terse, was too short and said nothing. I really believe that “Meditation on Aging” was the best, better than even Count Leopold Yankevich’s attempts. But we had only one competent judge, Dr Joseph Salemi.
Congratulations to the winners! With such a large number of entries received, and the level of interest generated, this contest was a great success for the SCP.
Reading the comments on “Meditations on aging” I can only say:
Son of a gun,
Did the right ones won?
But no kidding, my congrats to all,
Contests like this, are really a ball!
Just a pick a small nit:
The “Homeric Hymns” were not called by that name because they were ever assumed to have been written by Homer[*]
Rather the name uses the purely adjectival sense of the term “Homeric”; that is they were written in the “Homeric” style. E.g. they employ dactylic hexameter; they were written in the same dialect as “The Illiad” and “The Odyssey”; etc.
(In a similar way, the use of the formal descriptions “Shakespearean Sonnets” or “Petrarchian Sonnets” is not meant to imply that they were actual written by those authors.)
[* Setting aside the issue of whether such a person ever existed.]
A valid point. I didn’t really intend my little poem to be taken so seriously. According to the Wikipedia article on the Homeric Hymns, some writers in antiquity (the article specifically cites Thucydides) did “uncritically attribute” the poems to Homer. I am by no means an expert on the matter, and of course a Wikipedia article by no means settles it. Certainly no one today believes they were written by Homer (as you say, assuming there was a Homer), and the way people use the term today is undoubtedly in the sense to which you refer. So thank you for pointing that out.
Right. Likewise I apologize if I sounded overly-snarky; that wasn’t my intent. I just thought it was an interesting point worth mentioning. (Sadly, sometimes it’s hard to suppress the effects of the pedantry gene. 😉 )
Thank you, Leo, for your appreciation. It has permitted me to go to your web-site. If you would, I would gladly substitute the $100 for the volume of your own poetry that you consider most exemplary… Once again, thanks.
Congrats, Ben.
You may find this of interest.
http://thedabbler.co.uk/2010/12/james-mcintyre-the-cheese-poet/
James McIntyre: the Cheese Poet
Very Best
Damian
They’re all so clever! But, I thought I/Die. Was the shortest