www.bellinghamherald.com

Monday, June 12, 2006
'Community' poetry contest's 146 entries enliven and fulfill
Fairhaven stores, local buses to display winners

DEAN KAHN
THE BELLINGHAM HERALD
Organizers had just six weeks to spread the word about the first Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest, but they were delighted with the quantity and the quality of the entries.
A total of 108 people submitted a total of 146 poems. Winners were honored at a ceremony Friday.
Named in honor of a civic-minded Whatcom County poet who wrote about matters close to heart and home, the contest is for Whatcom County residents. This year’s theme was “community.”
The top 20 poems will be mounted in Fairhaven store windows, while another 14 poems of merit will be displayed in local transit buses. Poems were limited to 100 words, or less.
“I was so pleased with not just the number of poems, but the number of really good poems,” said Western Washington University English instructor Nancy Pagh, one of the two judges. “Because the poems had to be rather short, many of them were direct and simple and accessible — but even with that as a given, I discovered so many poems that went far beyond the simplistic or merely descriptive.”
The other judge, Jack McCarthy, a performance poet and retired classics instructor, said he looked for memorable poems with an element of surprise and evidence of professionalism.
“What I really mean is the absence of amateurish giveaways,” he said, “ … awkwardness, a phrase that undermines the poem because of its ambiguity, a rhyme that is stretched far too obviously, too painfully.”
McCarthy cut some slack for the student entries, but he and Pagh agreed that Sergio Rangel’s vibrant “I Am From” didn’t need any help being a winner:
I am from ostrich boots, cowboy hats,
And golden belt buckles
From shiny shirts, Wrangler pants and
Fancy jewelry.
I am from watching soccer on TV
And crying out GOALLL!! when Team Chivas scores
From neighbor’s dogs howling,
And neighbor kids playing street soccer,
And horseback riders waving “good day” to us
I am from families dancing to blasting
Ranchera music at parties lasting all night long.
I am from a community proud of being Mexican
And also from the stars and stripes
And where the eagle flies.
Rangel, a 13-year-old seventh-grader at Kulshan Middle School, started writing poems last year to impress a girl. Teachers encouraged him to submit “I Am From,” a shortened version of a poem he wrote for a class assignment this year.
Rangel said his parents, Marselino and Susana Rangel, moved to the United States from Mexico when he was an infant, and he still visits occasionally. He learned last week that the judges liked his poem as much as his teachers did.
“It feels good,” he said.
SNAPSHOT POEMS
Jeanne Yeasting, a part-time teacher of creative writing at Western, was one of two people with two poems among the top 20. She described her entries, “Distance” and “November in the Northwest,” as Polaroid poems “capturing a moment in time, in a short space.”
“Distance” describes the sights and feelings of walking on a beach. “November in the Northwest” describes, appropriately, the sky “unplugged” and the wind “rasping like an angry saw.”
“No one to wipe away the mind’s haze,” it concludes, “only the rain, the rain, erasing itself with ease.”
Pagh said she and McCarthy initially agreed on about a dozen poems as winners, then discussed which of the rest should join the top 20. One of her favorites, a three-line untitled piece by Stephen Peters, was one of the 14 poems of merit.
farmer's market
the week
under a fingernail
“To me,” Pagh said, “that poem insinuated so much about the ethics of work, of living close to the land, of ‘wearing’ our labor and the place we live literally in our hands.
“I felt that was a way of living that speaks to many of us in Whatcom County, even if we are the shopper and not the farmer at the market.”