Tor House Poetry Prize 2007

We are pleased to announce that the 2007 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry, an honorarium of $1,000, is awarded to:

The annual Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry is established as a living memorial in honor of American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962). The Prize is underwritten by Tor House Foundation Board member John Varady. Additional support comes from Honorary Board Member Allen K. Mears. This year we received over 1,600 poems from 45 states and three foreign countries.

Gentiana Gashi, age 11

Parthenia Hicks is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in a range of journals, newspapers and nonprofit materials. She manages the Tree of Life Bookshop for the Center for Spiritual Enlightenment where she is earning her Masters of Divinity in Kriya Yoga. Most recently, she has received two Pushcart nominations for her short stories, Fire and Miss Lady, and the Villa Montalvo Poetry prize. She is currently working on a group of poems, One Night She Swallowed the Moon and an imaginary life history, Apostle Notes. Of herself, Parthenia says, "I was born in the King’s Daughter’s Hospital, in a Navy town, along the Eastern Seaboard, in Portsmouth, Virginia to a half-Cherokee mother and a Jewish father who committed bigamy in order to marry my light-skinned, black-headed Mama. That was the start of following the call of the wild writing."

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Debra Marquart is a professor of English at Iowa State University and the Coordinator of the MFA program in Creative Writing and Environment. Her books include two poetry collections—Everything’s a Verb and From Sweetness—and a short story collection, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories, which draws on her experiences as a road musician in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Marquart continues to perform with her jazz-poetry, rhythm & blues project, The Bone People, with whom she released two CDs: Orange Parade and A Regular Dervish. Her latest book, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, A Memoir, was published by Counterpoint Books in 2006. She’s currently at work on a novel, set in Greece, titled The Olive Harvest. www.debramarquart.com.

There were woods, there were winters, summers and a girl
Lying under the elm. She was ten, a new watch on her wrist,
And she thought, this is enough, this is everything,
From her cushion of ten times ten, the peat from fallen leaves.

She was lying under the elm, a new watch on her wrist,
The scent of resin and damp earth, musk and bark in the air.
Her cushion of ten times ten from fallen leaves
Lay as powder, thick and brown from slow-melting snow.

The scent of resin and damp earth, musk and bark hung in the air.
That day sun licked the elm leaves, licked her eyelids
As she lay on powdered leaves, thick and brown from melted snow.
Sun stirred the air soft, warmed spots on Great Pond.

That day sun licked the elm leaves, licked her eyes
And looking up she saw the leaves turn young green
As the sun stirred the air soft, warmed spots on Great Pond
Where she always swam, right over there.

And looking up she saw the leaves turn young green
As though sun birthed early spring in August,
Warming where she swam, just right over there.
Only the lazy traffic of birds, a breeze, shook the elm

As though the sun was birthing early spring in August.
She thought, this is enough, this is everything.
There were woods, there were winters, summers in those days.
She set her new watch to keep that time. She was ten that day.

Judith Pacht's work includes poems published in Ploughshares, Runes, Cider Press Review, The Los Angeles Review, Red Hen Press, Solo 6, Site of the City, the Los Angeles postcard competitions, and Gastronomica (UC Press).

She is a finalist in the University of Arkansas open submissions (2007) and was a finalist in Tupelo Press's open submissions, 2007, and the Smartish Pace Erskine J. Poetry Prize, 2006.

Ms. Pacht was first place winner in the Georgia Poetry Society’s 2005 Edgar Bowers competition, and she received the Margaret Reid High Distinction Award (2006) for her poem "On a Line from Salvador Espriu." Her work appears or will appear in the anthology The Reach of Song, Georgia Poetry Society; Smartish Pace Poetry Journal; Tebot Bach’s Anthology of California Poets, 2003 and 2006; The Invisible Plane, Collected Poems to and about Saints, Angels and Deities, Spout Graphic Press, 2000; as well as in several other anthologies. Her chapbook, also her first poetry collection, Falcom (Conflu:X Press), was published in 2004.

Every marriage is its own universe.

Each has laws that may defy the logic
of all other systems. Elsewhere,

what little light there is collapses.
Auroral flares are wind across the tops of flues.

But in a certain Lithuanian town,
snow melts and walls turn green in the sun.

What has happened has not yet happened.

The painter’s wife appears in a cloisonné
of blowing petals. She has lifted off

and her husband holds her hand
with the grip of a trapeze artist: ready

to follow. He grins with incredible joy.
It’s true that someone’s poured some wine,

but there is just one glass.

Meanwhile, the green village has begun
to come apart. A chasm splits the town—

but what has happened here cannot be
undone. He thinks he should drink deeply.

He remembers nights when Bella used to climb
out through her bedroom window.

She came to his studio to pose for him.
He’d never seen a naked woman.

Vitebsk was scandalized.

Try and tell them my fiancée is purer
than Raphael’s Madonna and I’m an angel.

Elsewhere, too much has happened.
They think they know how the world works.

Such knowledge keeps them down.

Carol Quinn grew up in the San Gabriel Mountains of southern California. She earned her doctorate from the University of Houston, where she was the recipient of C. Glenn Cambor and Donald Barthelme Fellowships in Creative Writing. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, The Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, The National Poetry Review, the American Literary Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Towson University in Baltimore.

(The lines in italics in "The Promenade" come from Chagall's My Life [tr. Elisbeth Abbott], Orion Press.)

Three years later, I am back
in the land of car wrecks,
kidnappings, weather reports
that matter. Wires spliced with black tape
dangle from the dead starter.
Knock each side once with a pipewrench,
then turn the worn key.
A bitter nest rumbles,
rises around the truck.

I am back
in the land of fundamentals,
where all living things are hungry,
and even the nonliving play
dead, come running
only when they are properly called.
Raising a life means dividing back
from death, and using a thing means
fixing it first, your hands
in its guts, your mind
mapping its moving parts. Think
like an engine,
a starved coyote, a migrating
herd. Wrench,
rifle, walking stick, the familiar tools
become your body, shadow you
in absence
like phantom limbs.

Fundamental:
The burnish tells a tool’s worth.

Hands on the smooth wheel
I drive through the heart
of the county, a sensate homing, more animal than arrow,
passing through the early summer core.
The cars angle close
around the courthouse, dense with purpose, salted with sap
and backroad dust. People move
to documents and deadlines. I have no business
here.

Fundamental:
A dog worth naming
knows its way home.

Driving on,
I cross the ring of convenience stores
where farmhands
back out of the glass doors into the heat,
cigarettes, honey buns, and sundrop
in their burnt arms. Last year on Christmas Eve,
a night clerk, closing late,
disappeared. Struggled,
the radio said, the contents
of her purse spilling across the floor, then
disappeared. End of an endless story.
What now but backfill? Someone’s sister,
my distant cousin (fundamental
to this place: relatedness).
What but a thick and futile pause? Impossible
to imagine such dark migrations
here, in the daylight of sun
and visible shadow. I keep driving

across the low plain toward the narrow river,
sidling along the new strip mall,
already outdated, haunted
with weeds of impending gloom,
cheap touch for tornado or flood.
Over the rhythmic thump of the bridge,
I finally break

the outer ring and enter open country again, green
spilling
from every shadow and curve,
pronouncing
the first name, the unshaken nerve, of every living thing.
I let that singing overtake me,
would close my eyes to see even clearer my part
in the profusion
except I am aware of the center line,
how those who cross it at just the wrong time, even in joy,
stall forever
in second thoughts, never fling
the screen door open as freely
or go home
the same.

Fundamental:
Held or lost, beauty
causes an unavoidable swerve,
wet life
reaching for the elegant

fray of dandelion
or downed power line.
For that I almost
would skip it,
but the green brims so absolutely, presses
so insistently,
I cannot deny
the muscle we share, dog,
river,
even wrench. That burnish,
that hunger,
this other way of belonging.

Alice Templeton - Originally from Tennessee, Alice Templeton now lives in San Francisco, California, and teaches creative writing and literature at the Art Institute of California-San Francisco. Her poems have been published in Poetry, 88, Puerto del Sol, Many Mountains Moving and elsewhere. In addition to writing poetry, she is also a songwriter and the author of a critical study of Adrienne Rich's poetics, entitled The Dream and the Dialogue (University of Tennessee Press, 1994).

2007 Prize For Poetry Awards

Gentiana Gashi, age 11