Petersham Poetry Competition
As part of the new Stage 6 syllabus, the Year 11 cohort have been exploring Narratives that Shape Our World through the poems of the American modernist poet William Carlos Williams. Williams has a distinct perspective of the world and a unique style of free-verse poetry that is both idiomatic and complex. An early proponent of the imagist movement, his poetry deals with experience of the common man in his home town of Paterson, New Jersey. He rejected the literary elitism and labyrinth of allusions that were associated with his contemporaries T.S. Elliot and Ezra Pound and attempted to explore the human experience through the local in a linguistic style that came to define American Modernism.
An example of his writing can be seen in the poem The Red Wheelbarrow:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
Williams’ most famous piece of work is Paterson, a multi-volume collection of poems that explore the small New Jersey town. The English Faculty decided it would be a great idea for the students to try and engage more critically and creatively with the work of Williams by having them write their own poems in the style of Williams. This is where the Petersham Poetry Competition was born. The similarities between the title of Williams’ seminal work and our own suburb was serendipitous.
The brief:
1) It could be no longer than 24 lines
2) It had to capture the essence of Petersham
3) It had to written in the style of William Carlos Williams.
The student’s participated in an excursion on August 22 that allowed them the time to visit four main sites in Petersham – Petersham Park, Petersham Station, a local café and New Canterbury Road – and were allowed to make notes on what they witnessed on that warm winter’s day. From there, the students had a week to draft a series of poems, and to choose one for an anonymous submission for the competition. In total there was over 70 submissions. These submissions will be created into a volume of poetry title Petersham, that will be kept in the school’s library and front office.
It was decided that there would be two awards given from the submissions. The first would be decided by the teachers of the English faculty. The second would be decided by the students of Year 11. Each English class chose the poem which best matched the criteria. From the four classes, a student representative was chosen, and these four panel members chose the winning poem from the finalists. Each award came with a gift voucher from Gleebooks.
The quality of the submissions was of a high standard and the range of ideas/observations varied, making choosing winners incredibly difficult.
The Student’s Award was awarded to Leon Stokes for his poem Small Talk:
The clock strikes nine,
Disinterested, tardy students scatter off trains
Smalltalk dribbling off their lips
Conversation designed to take up time
Consisting of no pattern or rhyme
Restrained to a handful of topics
“God, it’s cold today”
“How’d you go in geo”
“You watching the fight”
The burgundy tone of the school uniform
Reflected this smalltalk,
Dull and mediocre
It just takes a moment of reflection
To deduce that the architects
Of Petersham aimed to capture the essence
Of smalltalk in planning their suburb
Tediously safe
Painfully protected
Thoughtfully bland
The language of smalltalk is universal,
The forced facial expressions
The archaic attitude
I hate smalltalk
I hate Petersham
The Teacher’s Award was awarded to Eric Deng for his poem The Field. Eric’s poem was the only poem to be selected by both the students and teachers for the finals.
The Field
to consider It beautiful.
the field,
a warm green —
despite
being a chilly afternoon —
It is the green field,
the pigeons playing,
the boys running,
the men working —
beautiful, perhaps.
the men force the unworking
machine towards the centre
of the field, in hopes of
reconstructing the pieces there —
with each new push stronger,
more straining than the last.
It is the broken, the painful,
that makes It a rich comradery —
all built from revolution.
the field becomes cool
and the men share their final cigarettes —
red dots in the dark that stay in the field.
though unseen, unheard,
shall we assume that they grin, laugh and cheer?
or is It stripped of Its beauty then
Congratulations to all the students who participated in the competition. The students approached this with enthusiasm, behaved sublimely on the day of the excursion and were prompt with their submissions. They also showed great maturity and diligence in the selection of finalists. It was an extremely rewarding process that produced a collection of poems that the year can be proud of. A big thanks to the English teachers who put their own time into supporting this competition, namely Mr Leonard, Mr Rosin-Melser, Miss Maddox and Miss Lawson. A final congratulations to the competition winners, Eric Deng and Leon Stokes.
Jonathon Glover