OPEN JUNIOR JUDGE’S REPORT – JOSIAH MORGAN

Of all the numerous ways to win a competition, the element of surprise unified and bound the pieces that spoke to me most this year. It was a real joy to read the numerous poems from so many talented young writers, almost all of which focused effectively on sound, music, rhyme and rhythm. Reading open junior entries this year made me excited to see what kinds of innovations continue to take place in Aotearoa poetry in the years ahead!

The year’s theme was music. The theme choice is great because it’s universal – almost all of us have a relationship to music in some way or other. This year, I read numerous poems about the music that’s already embedded each day in the world around us, and numerous poems about the ways the human body or human soul can echo the sounds of music around us. This collapsing of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ was the primary theme in this year’s entries, as was a lot of musical lingo – as a non-musician myself, I’ve never read the word ‘pizzicato’ so much in my life!

What stuck out to me across the entries this year was the wide range of tones – poems ranged from the comedic to the blunt. Our young poets traversed topics as wide as grieving for someone no longer with us to logging in to a video game. Across all topics, no matter how serious or minute, our young poets made surprising observations. Poems also demonstrated a range of attitudes to poetry, poetic personas and craft.

As I said at the beginning of this report, there are a number of ways to win or place in a poetry competition. I had no specific criteria from the start of judging this competition, though this year, the entries I selected startled me, jolted me to sit upright and reread them. After reading poem after poem about music, all of the winning poems this year surprised me, approaching the topic from a sideways angle, at a tilt. Not all of these poems are loud – some of them crept up on me from behind, lived in my head for weeks and weeks until I couldn’t ignore them any longer – as great poems tend to do.

I chose four commended entries.

It’s hard to be locked in sometimes utilises its hilarious, contemporary title to launch into a humorous, voice-based poem filled with provocative statements – “I wouldn’t say it’s a miracle there’s cohesion.”

an imperfect cadence satisfies instantly in its single-stanza prose-poem combination of musicality and imagery – “sunburns leave stings that reflect through photo albums.”

No, don’t look back now boldly experiments with using Alien Stage song titles cento, and therefore goes straight to my heart as a lover of cut-up poetry, blackout poetry and poetry with strong formal restrictions.

Shhhhh, Rattle, Rattle uses onomatopoeia to great effect, driving toward its startling and sudden ending.

I then chose three highly commended entries.

to the blinkered is a poem written after Belle & Sebastian’s The Boy With The Arab Strap. The poem captures the melancholy, contradictory tone of the song and utilises lots of opposing imagery to make its point: “drown the kitten, pet the dog,” the poem offers violently, almost an instruction. Its moralistic bent is haunting; I thought about it for days: “watch the children playing in rubber rings / knowing the sea wouldn’t be as tame as the pool you taught them to trust.”

In-fill housing is another melancholy poem. It begins with stark sensory clarity: “musk of the limestone and basalt” before moving into such startling observations as identifying the contemporary era as the “generation of gentrification and ‘Christchurch Grey’” – as someone that has grown up in and always lived in Christchurch myself, this poem spoke to me, even as it grinds to its grim ending: “there is nowhere for the music, / at least not here.”

The busking bard child draws an effective character study in the first person, utilising an at first strict rhyme scheme in each stanza (ABAB CDCD etc) before driving to its final stanza in which rhyme and rhythm collapses almost entirely into this wonderful image: “coins / clink / into / our weathered / leather hull” – though note, of course, that the rhyme continues subtly between “weathered” and “leather.”

The primary/intermediate placegetter is Angela Zhao’s poem Notes. This poem sneaks up on you – you read it once, and move on. Then it lives in your head, and urges you to come back to it, to listen to its music. Zhao gently observes “every single sound / has its own meaning” and then goes on to suggest at the meanings without telling us directly: “one, of a dog, / happily chasing its tail. / One, the story of a moa and its chick.” The sounds themselves remain invisible to us, only suggested. The level of craft shocked me, particularly in the primary/intermediate section!

There are two secondary placegetters.

The first is Yang Zhang’s Lament of the Tide. This poem draws an evocative storyline about losing your way with an overarching sense of calm. “The sea is wide, the stars mislead – / men like you forget to breathe.” Such musical chants interrupt a poem that largely deals in free verse, including in its opening declarative character portrait: “I met him on the harbour stones – / a coat of rags / his eyes two lanterns / burning.” It is this opposition between tight construction and free construction that gives the poem its power, echoing the contradiction in tones throughout the poem – the calm with the wild, the scary with the sacred.

The second is Minh-ky Pham’s booting up Alpha Sapphire, a gentle and simple poem about the sanctuary of calm that is video gaming in the school holidays. The poem works so well because of its suggestion that there is something else going on beyond the image in question. “The solitude of the school holidays / forms a bubble,” the poet writes. But a bubble from what? There are clues throughout the poem. Playing the game is “like wandering through / a vibrant green summer garden.” This in turn raises questions: where is summer? Where is the real garden? This poem is a question, not an answer. Its gentleness will surprise you, but I found myself coming back to it over and over again.

That leaves me with just the Overall Winner to write about.

France Ogilvie’s Domini Nox Aeterna is a poem that will live rent free in your nightmares. It opens with a horrifying couplet that stopped me in my tracks. “The violin’s bow was horse tendons. / Of course they screamed.” The entire poem builds a case for the relationship between sound and suffering, as “acoustics crave echoes, not mercy.” The poem gestures in its title toward a lord of the night, but the poem also effectively gestures at the traumas accrued through artistic discipline. “Pain is my craft. I’ve claimed the chisel.” I’ve read this poem tens upon tens of times now and it still gives me new things to think about.

Thanks to everyone who submitted a poem this year! The competition judging process was not easy and required lots of reading and rereading. If you’re thinking about entering again next year, I’d strongly recommend reading this year’s winning, placegetting, highly commended and commended entries to see the range of approaches to the topic!

JOSIAH MORGAN