You can read the poem here.
The headline reads: Poem of ‘beauty, wit and grace’ about fathers and sons wins National Poetry Competition” and continues: Ex-New York cab driver Lee Stockdale wins £5,000 after My Dead Father’s General Store in the Middle of a Desert beat 17,000 other poems ‘
Poetry competitions are a lottery. In the absence of a stated criteria it must be very difficult to distinguish between 17,000 poems. The thought of having to read 17,000 poems is frightening. How could you pay each one the attention a poem requires? How easy would it be to miss subtlety?
When you read the article, the events behind the poem, and the author’s comments on the poem, come before it and that will inevitably colour your judgement. But the judges were reading without these, and every poem should stand on its own, without any external information about the writer.
Apparently this poem exhibits: ‘beauty wit and grace’.
As a description this is vague, if not practically meaningless. It’s the kind of thing people say about poems when they have nothing specific to say. How would you quantify those qualities? How would you explain how one poem has more ‘beauty’ than another? How would you make your draft more ‘graceful’?
And when you read the poem you’re going to wonder how any of those words apply to it, especially ‘wit’.
As an occasional editor, my very rough way of assessing any poem is to start with the basic idea that writing a poem offers the author the possibility of manipulating diction, syntax and line endings for effect. Content can be put to one side.
This is not a precise criteria. If you read a lot of poetry you will have your own but it’s flexible enough to accommodate the many different kinds of poem that are in circulation today. It’s possible to look at any poem, in any style, and ask what does the writer achieve with these three possibilities. Their interactions will, in skilful hands, bring about the effects that can be associated with good poetry and deliver the pleasures that only a good poem can.
I see little happening in this poem with any of these three.
There is a possibility that the diction is being deliberately used to blur the age of the speaker. 'Bullshit’ sounds like a contemporary adult, 'mean to me' like an eight year old, 'a dear sweet man' like a stereotypical maiden aunt. But it’s not consistent and it doesn’t tie in with the rest of the piece.
‘The judges called My Dead Father’s General Store in the Middle of a Desert a “remarkable” poem that “caught and held our attention from first reading”.
Think of the great opening lines you know. Your choice, not mine. You’re reading 17,000 poems, and you read:
It has gas pumps with red horses and wings,
but is not merely a gas station, your father is not my father,
standing over me with a clipboard, checking off things done and left undone.
How does it measure against your gold standard? Why is the poet telling me his father is not my father? What purpose is served by the abrupt pauses in the 2nd and 3rd line? What is gained by setting the lines out like this and not:
It has gas pumps with red horses and wings,
but is not merely a gas station,
your father is not my father,
standing over me with a clipboard,
checking off things done and left undone
Unless it’s to keep under the 40 line limit?
Think of the great lines you remember, and the images that stick in your head even if you can’t remember them word for word.
Now read this:
I begin to see what a dear, sweet man he is. Is this because he is dead?
I wish he were alive again.
I don’t think he killed himself to be mean to me personally.
The first line sounds very clumsy to me and the abrupt break in the middle calls into question why it’s such a long line. The is/Is is awkward. You’re forced to stop after one to pronounce the next one calling into question the unity of the line. The third line jangles to be/to me/personally with the second half hanging off the first. Word choice? Do you need ‘personally’? Isn’t that implied in ‘mean to me’? Is there a meaningful difference between ‘I wish he were alive again’ and ‘I wish he were alive’?
Would these lines lose anything written like this:
I begin to see what a dear, sweet man he is. Is this because he is dead? I wish he were alive again. I don’t think he killed himself to be mean to me personally.
Is this even good prose?
Arrange the lines like this,
I begin to see what
a dear, sweet man he is.
Is this because he is dead?
I wish he were alive again.
I don’t think he killed himself
to be mean to me personally.
The first two are a guess but the others follow the abrupt breaks in the long line There’s nothing wrong with declarative statements in a poem, or a conversational diction, but these staccato statements of the obvious would not be out of place on a post card.
In the article, the poem is placed after the poet’s biography. And we realise this writer experienced an horrific trauma as a child when his father committed suicide. But while we must sympathise with the writer, it doesn’t redeem the writing. It would be grossly inappropriate to perform acts of literary criticism on a poem written for a funeral or a wedding, or written as a private way of coming to terms with a trauma. But once that poem is offered for publication, or entered into a competition, then the writer is claiming this poem is worthy of a stranger’s interest, and inviting critical scrutiny.
15,000 entrants must be wondering in what way this poem is better than theirs.
(For the record I did not enter this competition and I have no desire to be a judge. And last year's competition winner seems so much the better poem.)
