We are pleased to announce that the 2023 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry, an honorarium of $1,000, is awarded to:

Daniel Williams
Wawona, California
for his poem
“Songs of the Sangre de Cristos”

Honorable Mentions, each with an honorarium of $200,
are awarded to:

Dan Grote
Waymart, Pennsylvania
for his poem “Castaway”

Michele Herman
New York, New York
for her poem “Frying Marbles with My Father”

Ari Mokdad
Traverse City, Michigan
for her poem “Kharma”

Valerie Nieman
Reidsville, North Carolina
for her poem “So What?”

FINAL JUDGE FOR THE 2023 PRIZE WAS JUAN FELIPE HERRERA.

The annual Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry was established twenty-seven years ago 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 with additional support from Honorary Board Member Allen Mears and Board member Lacy Buck.   This year we received 1,032 poems from 42 states, the District of Columbia and seven foreign countries.

THE 2023 AWARD-WINNING POEM

Songs of the Sangre de Cristos

                        Canto I     

            Dance of the Corn Maidens    

Footdrum and windflute know more about flowers
            than highway knows about contours of
A land when land was soft belly and living tissue
            of races of people who breathed the
Earth with their lungs   who saw with lightning
            who heard with thunder   whose lives
Were earthlike    earthbound   whose abundance
            sprung from the land beneath their feet
Even as they walked in a day’s time and a day’s
            time was enough of a walk to see foxes
Of winter   snakes of summer   fawns of spring
            bears of autumn   and everyone spoke in
One tongue   the tongue of the earth   and it was
            enough to speak once then dream mostly
Like coals on hillsides after fires   a fine powdery
            warmth   crackling and popping gone
For a while   everything happening underneath
            that should happen   without thought
Or words but hidden and out of sight like these
            corn maidens who dance first in silence
Then a soft strumming of strings and finally to the
             raucous blossoming of their own spirits as
Though some being incensed of sage stepped down
             from a skeletal stallion to water their hearts                                            

             All our tendrils were connected then   a people
Their animal gods   their place   all in one   and everything
            related to chaparral and the stars   the earth
Cleansing itself of every waste with renewal   soothing its
            people so their circle dance would spin smoothly
On its diurnal course describing flowers of sunlight
            marigolds as round blossoms of star fire
When a child died it toddled back to its great parent
            an adult’s death meant there was a folding back
Into the great womb like the folds of a wild lily  
            an incense of sage   scorching coals of chamisa
The dead were given gifts even as they had gifted this
            world with the vitality of their lives
Then the long sweet song of their absence settled over
everything with pale petals of ash

                                     Canto II                 

                                     Purple Iris      
                                                            for Georgia O’Keeffe  

These stony cliff faces of her paintings sit flat and huge
         roseate   gray and yellow under an
Acetylene sun scoring its sacred path across blue
         invisible half-spheres tracking
 Across the far horizon beyond crystalline shoulders
          of La Joya Del Pedregal her holy place
 Smoking chipotles roast on coals at day’s end
           in blue canyons of crows crying
 Thin fillets of elk on green willow sticks
           drip fat on coals near walls eloquent
 With shadow stories tracking against darkness
           all of it the conduit for her praise of
 Del Pedregal  her mountain she believed if she
           could only paint it enough times
 Merciful gods would allow her to possess it 
           belonging to her alone in spirit even as
 She owns this trail   earth all around littered with
            her vibrant details  everywhere the notes and
 Staff for the life-songs that were her art   talus at
            bases of cliffs   Horus-like abutments
 Table mesas  chopped and broken arroyos   tiny
            nameless blooms   countless brilliancies
 As common as the purple iris never explored until
            she painted her way inward with vivid colors
 Delicate brush strokes whispering clitoral dreams
                                                   
 No possibility overlooked   not gray-furred coyote scat
            not ancestral stone gods or back further yet
 Deeper into canyons where she painted with no power
            no light but that which she generated alone
 Under dark stars as a tiny meteor scratches its way
            through obsidian night all but lost
 Except for its perihelion glory   as surprising as a turn
            around on her trail to find in amazement
 Two ravens floating   the lively black one above in a
            painfully blue sky the shadow one below as a
 Dark crucifix flowing like water over these hot ochre
            faces time has affixed upon Georgia’s ravines

                       Canto III     

                     Wild Grape     
                                              for D.H. Lawrence

Here sounds an empty cantilena whose wind-voice
          leaves no sounds of its singing but for  
Golden leaves of cottonwoods over water that
           click and flash with fresh earthen songs
Often have I arisen from such desultory musings                                                
           in a wood heated room behind adobe walls
Clackity-clack of an old manual Underwood
           come to rest  have peered out
Twelve-light windows at a meadow full of summer
            as if these log and chinking walls had pushed
Their way full of earth like toadstools fisting up
            into sunlight after rain  and then have I said
Hola to my angelic Ponderosa with its wildly
            arcing branches and boughs  a maenad’s
Fingertips and arms  have said buenos dias to my Frieda
            bowing in oak shadow near the horses to gather
Acorns and mast  and often have I stood on this porch
            framed with rusted leaves of wild grape
Gazing with awe past green meadow flames to the crest
             of Mt. Wheeler’s great stone god  he who never
Moves or speaks but is content to stand and watch
             Pedro up from San Cristobal to chop wood
While Manuelita his wife slaps masa between
             avid bronze palms then toasts it
On a flat stone florid with the fire of chamisa coals

Four geese from the yard call out that time is a river
          carving its way into the Parajito
And so good-byes forgotten and without words
          I return to my floorless room behind
Echoing walls where a tendril moves ever deeper
           to penetrate a webbed dark humus of love
Then sings a cantilena of cellos and pure soprano voice
            a melodic glow from somewhere just within
Hearing in counterpoint to a mauve Villa-Lobos dusk

Daniel Williams, a poet of the Yosemite region of Northern California, has published his work
in many journals and anthologies.  He has a master’s degree in English Literature from San Jose State University where he studied poetry under the teaching of Nils Petersen and has taught composition and literature as an adjunct instructor at Metro State in Denver and at Columbia Community College and San Joaquin Delta College in California.  As a member of Poets & Writers and PoetsWest in Seattle, The California Federation of Chaparral Poets as well as The Ina Coolbrith Circle in the Bay Area, he has published his poems and read them on radio and in Zoom Meetings for many years  His work has taken prizes in ICC annual poetry contests.
He is the author of three chapbooks: Prince Hamlet National Park from Cyberwit.net in India; Lost Language of Mars and Angelis Salmonis and a Haunted Coastline from Moonstone Press in Philadelphia  Mr. Williams has  been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry by College of the Redwoods in Arcata, California

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Castaway

Turns out this whole “free will”
thing isn’t all it’s cracked up
to be - trapped on an island
born of my bad decisions and

Poor choices, left alone to fire
off poems from behind this
penitentiary wall, stanzas
flying like sparrows out over

 The razor wire, an encyclopedia
of failures, messages left un-
answered at the bottom of a
bottle that’s been cast out

Into an ocean in which I am no
longer welcome, and I’m not
looking for anything like a
rescue, I’ve simply given up

On that, but I still feel like
screaming out into The Nothing,
making noise is just a desperate
attempt at proof of life, the

Sincerest pleas of a nobody locked
inside of himself who just
wants somebody, anybody, to
know that he’s still here.

Dan Grote is an incarcerated writer whose work has appeared in a wide variety of print and online publications. He is the author of several hold-up notes, a couple of signed confessions, one book of poetry, We Are All Doing Time (Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books, 2023), and one chapbook of poetry, The Sum Total of My Mistakes (Between Shadows Press, 2022).

Frying Marbles with My Father

Five-thirty every weekday
he came back to us, smells
of town and antiseptic
fresh upon his coat.
He came with Polish jokes.
He came with crocheted
scarves and horseradish
root, which was how
his poorest patients paid.
He came with jars
of sour dills. He came
with bubble wrap,
a pogo stick, a Hermes
portable, our wingèd
messenger
in elevator shoes.

I learned to read
his footfalls in the hall.
One day each year
there came no slam
of leather bag
on foyer floor,
which meant a tetanus
shot, a booster dose,
a DPT. I feared
my father’s sting.

He daubed the alcohol,
he slid the needle
deep, he slowly pressed
the plunger down,
then slipped the needle out
and smoothed
the Band-Aid on.
His hands were like
the ones that hold
this pen – blunt, precise,
with well-clipped nails.

A tender father, too,
who climbed the stairs
at night and stood above
my bed and ran a hand
across my cheek and
never spoke a word.
Did he know I was awake?
Of course; there was
nothing that he didn’t know:
Latin roots, the recipe for mayonnaise,
how to represent
himself in court without
a law degree, how to whistle
through his teeth.

He taught me how to fry
a marble and now I need
to bring him back because
I’ve forgotten whether to fry
it wet or dry, whether to bring
a friend along on Sunday afternoon
or keep him to myself.

Let me bring him up
the cellar stairs where he spent
his evenings welding steel,
into the female world.
Let me bring him up
still young, with that eagle eye
that stared
at every object until
he figured out how it 
was engineered, let me
bring him up in navy
work clothes, not a suit
that chafed around the swelling
lymph nodes in his neck,
and let him show me how
to fry the marbles
just enough
for them to crack
a thousand crazy ways
but never
fall apart.

Michele Herman is the author of the novel Save the Village (Regal House, 2022), which was a finalist for the 2023 Eric Hoffer Prize, and two chapbooks from Finishing Line Press: Just Another Jack: The Private Lives of Nursery Rhymes (2022) and Victory Boulevard (2018). Her poems and essays have appeared in recent issues of The Sun, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Carve and other journals. She spends much of the rest of her time helping other writers write better, as a longtime teacher at The Writers Studio and as a writing coach and developmental editor. She often performs her own prose and verse in the New York cabaret world, sometimes pairing up with her singing husband.

Kharma

We barely made it; I couldn’t carry the olives’
heavy green-stretched skins in couplets of diaspora

Lebanon was invaded, the land was burned,
the smell of burnt olives turned into diaspora

I’m addressing the loss of an entire culture
never examined in couplets of diaspora

fighting against lost time, no language,
survivor’s guilt in this couplet of diaspora

We carried زيت and زيتون, hope, 
our family’s aid during couplets of diaspora

smuggled through borders, Lebanon to Syria, Jordan,
the way everything burns in couplets of diaspora

There are more Lebanese living outside
of Lebanon from couplets of diaspora

I wondered about the persimmons, the red-orange flesh,
juicy stains of sugar in couplets of diaspora

Would the persimmon trees still grow
if we could not pluck them in years of diaspora?

 The Bekaa Valley full of kharma, the fruit of the gods,
I bet you never learned that during couplets of diaspora

When we eat the persimmons now, they are soft and jelly-like
shipped across the ocean of diaspora

we never taste the tannin-rich immature fruit with firm skins
and just like the olives, disappear into couplets of diaspora

Ari L Mokdad is a Detroit-born poet, choreographer, dancer, performance artist, and educator. She received three Bachelor of Arts degrees from Grand Valley State University in Dance, English, and Writing. Ari received an MA from Wayne State University in 2017 and an MFA from Warren Wilson College in 2023. She lives with her partner in Northern Michigan on the ancestral and unceded land of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Pottawatomie people, The People of the Three Fires.

So What?

I use my grandmother’s quilts
to warm my bed. When we make love
I hear her fine stitches popping,
one two three along fault-lines
of fragments cut from old clothes—
“use it up, wear it out,
make it do, or do without.”
I’m done with doing without.

Every time I cut meat,
the knife mars the old plates.
Fragile glassware dulls each time
it’s washed. So be it.
I’m saving nothing. Goodbye
to dishes and coats and quilts
reserved “for good”—
the sexy dress Mother kept
in the closet til it no longer fit.

This body is aging—so what?
I don’t need reminders
of the ticking heart, the popping hips.
If famine’s predicted tomorrow,
there’s still a lot in the larder
and I’m having it. Strike a match.
We’re cooking it all.

Each morning I stretch
and crack joints, make room
for whatever light arrives—
the kiss, the embrace,
the invitation to slip into love
like a well-made suit that lasts and lasts,
becomes unfashionable
and then en vogue again.
Wear it out? I grab it
by the soft lapels
and press my face into its bounty.

Valerie Nieman has published three poetry collections, most recently, Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse. Her poems have been chosen for anthologies including You Are the River, Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, and Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods. Her Southern gothic suspense novel In the Lonely Backwater received the 2022 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for the best fiction by a North Carolina writer.  To the Bones, a genre-bending folk horror/thriller about coal country, was a finalist for the 2020 Manly Wade Wellman Award. She is the author of three other novels and a short fiction collection. She has held state and NEA creative writing fellowships. Nieman has degrees from West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte and was a reporter and farmer in West Virginia before moving to North Carolina, where she was an editor and a creative writing professor at NC A&T State University. 

We are pleased to announce that the 2022 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry, an honorarium of $1,000, is awarded to:

John Blair

San Marcos, Texas
for his poem “The Box”

 Honorable Mentions, each with an honorarium of $200,
are awarded to:

David Bailey

Inverness, California
for his poem “Wind Charts”

Carson Colenbaugh

Kennesaw, Georgia
for his poem “An Oyster Bank Outside Beaufort” 

Winifred Hughes

Princeton, New Jersey
for her poem “Revenant”

L.J. Sysko

Wilmington, Delaware
for her poem “M.I.L.F.”

Final judge for the 2022 Prize was poet Forrest Gander.

The annual Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry was established twenty-six years ago 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 with additional support from Honorary Board Member Allen Mears and Board member Lacy Buck. This year we received 1,076 poems from 43 states, the District of Columbia and two foreign countries.

2022 Prize for Poetry Award Winning Poem

THE BOX

She carried the box under her arm. It smelled lightly of perfume. She saw her own
reflection in a big mirror and thought, ‘My God, am I standing here holding in my
hands the only thing that is left of Hitler?’ 
Interview with Liubov Summ, Granddaughter of Yelena
Rzhevskaya, in The Times of Israel

       Eight teeth all told       broken from the skull but held together by a gold bridge married to
the first left tooth with a window crown (also of gold).

       To Yelena Rzhevskaya       Russian and frightened and twenty-six       they are still somehow
a mouth chattering in spastic rattles       hot inside the box in the pocket of her woolen coat.

       The driver is taking her to the surgery in the Reich Chancellery which squats abgefuckt and
sullen on far Wilhelmstrasse       where the Fuehrer’s dentist had in piety practiced       because
she is searching for some proof that the devil is really real and really dead.

       The story she is telling herself is this: there is this thing that was a man       and only a man
and it cannot gnaw and gnaw through wood and cloth and flesh       to take in its rotten teeth the
candy-hard knot of self that is all she really owns.      

       But the box rattles gleefully in her pocket        next to the place inside her chest where her
own true life still waits to live its smaller self       in ever smaller ways       for all the long that
she might live.

       The box is an ark of cruel commandments       shouting like a nail torn back to the quick.

       The box is the dark       wringing itself like a dishrag over a tub full of fingerbones sucked
clean and white.

       The box is ash sifting like flour       thin snow       filled with falling.

       The box is a voice like pressure from the bottom of something deep       the blood-dark
Volga gripping its banks       a mine in which hard men work in the hot hot dark      and it is
saying listen listen listen.

       The point of the world is to change it      it says       the point of the world is to make it obey.

       In the box       something is scratching      is trying to find its way into her lungs like a kind
of drowning.

       In the box      something sits perfumed and golden in its coffin of teeth       and without flesh
or light it speaks and its voice is Russian and imperious and twenty-six.

       What it whispers is a lucid history.

       What it whispers is what wants to come out      always in this wretched life       comes out
and Yelena Rzhevskaya       Russian and obedient and twenty-six       like the good soldier she is       
       believes it       can see it in the imagined gleam of gold      the manic      missing eyes.

       The box is a box and it holds the empty truth like any box       a mouth filled with the
ravenous nothing that is always waiting to be heard.

 John Blair has published six books, most recently Playful Song Called Beautiful (University of Iowa Press, 2016) as well as poems & stories in The Colorado Review, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, The Antioch Review, New Letters, and elsewhere. His seventh book, The Aphelion Elegies, is forthcoming this spring from Main Street Rag Press.

Honorable Mentions

WIND CHARTS

No book of becoming
you--just the way a tree
becomes by reaching
and balancing
in one wrong turn
after another.

No map to your depths
but the way a bud
discovers itself
by letting go of itself
continually--a journey
in itself.

No compass but the weathervane
in your chest, no friend
but the wind
to steady yourself by.

And it’s not an infallible
road, but the way the wind goes striding
off the cliffs of the known world, sailing over the edge
of the old maps--leaving the path’s
burnished stones behind, your cherished visions
of arrival falling apart like
worn-out boots.

Something beginningless
and wise, kinder than
your best intentions will carry you
over the million-faceted waves.

David Bailey graduated from Principia College (Elsah, Illinois) with a degree in Creative Writing and Philosophy, and spent the next three years living abroad, mostly in India and Nepal.  After traveling, he found a home in Inverness, California, where his first book, Journeywork, was published by Mount Vision Press (2016).   In 2015, David was awarded a Fellowship at the Mesa Refuge, and in 2017 was a fellow at the Lucid Art Foundation’s residency program.  He is also a founding editor of the Inverness Almanac, a journal based in Northern California.  He is currently pursuing an MFA degree at San Francisco State University.

An Oyster Bank Outside Beaufort

I.
Skiffs putt from barnacled moors under mid-August sun, daylight 
Or moonlight dragging ropes and blocks out to the pluff beds.
Old men with salt-stained baseball caps, running engines
And knees hard as they can until they break, slip into the slow
Marsh flow: clear sky, brackish flow dark against mead-light
Patches of cordgrass. Every bivalve in this oyster bed is farmed
By hand, cultured in aggregate, picked as a flower is picked.
Though the yields, one mud-dog says, are dwindling
And that’s not even considering the wild beds. Lab Coats report
Shells grow thinner by the year: carbon filtered through seawater
Makes the bite harder, acid noticeably stronger, and oyster shells,
Like so much of the world, it seems, are really just chalk.

II.
So it’s our memories which break us down. The myriad gasses
Stroking atmospheric balance into orgasm come from everything
We’ve left burning—coal veins, crude oil, torn couches, dolls,
Plastic cups—burned or dumped, volatilized into a thicker sky.
Let me repeat that nothing is lost. Each form is manifested
From a singular perfect code, from universal law. Look to these
Constants: things fall apart however drawn to one another, heat
Is the natural waste of organized systems, energy flux is required
To keep them going. Let me repeat that nothing is lost. The shells
Grow slower now, if at all. But what is an oyster? Spontaneous
Arrangement of the rest of the muck: cyanobacteria, comets,
Colossus of Rhodes, owls, salt, locust trees. Nothing is lost.
Religion, language, the shells of oysters. Things fall apart
And reach out for one another. There is a rhythm, like the tide,
Like a heart-beat: it is full of blood and it does not stop.

III.
Daylight or moonlight, skiffs chug across the sizzling channels
For oysters or crabs, or flatfish. They will not bleed when caught,
Although we do: bleed subtly alkaline wine from each delicate
Vein, though there is not enough to balance the world’s gradual
Dissolution. We all head home while things run the perfect cycle,
Crumble, and persist. I am thankful to have seen oysters, yaupon,
Saw palmetto, tarpon, cordgrass, egrets, but it does not matter
If they die, or if we do, and many a Beaufort oysterman
Does not even believe in warming, acidification, absolute death.

Carson Colenbaugh is an undergraduate student studying forestry and horticulture at Clemson University, where he conducts research in environmental history and sets prescribed fires with the US Forest Service. His poetry appears or is forthcoming in Birmingham Poetry Review, Chautauqua, Poetry South, Delta Poetry Review, and elsewhere. His scholarly work in the field of ethnobotany can be found in Castanea. He will begin his MFA in poetry at Vanderbilt University in the fall.

REVENANT 

I held back one key, which let me in 
where I have no rights now but had 
for so many years—let me in to that 
particular past, not just the long ago, 

though that too, but the rawly recent, 
as close to now as your drawn breath, 
the past we lived in in this house 
only months ago, as we always had, 

as though it would go on as it always 
had, as though we could own it as we 
owned these timbers and shingles, 
these windows to look out on the bay 

and the ocean, these doors to shut us in. 
And now I have sold them, as though I
could sell the past, which is our only 
place now, the only house that is not 

just mine but ours, sold it as though 
other people could own it—our house, 
our past—as though they could simply 
move in and move on, the house itself 

mute and helpless, piled up with all
the incidentals of going out and going in—
beach equipment, cheery maritime prints 
and hangings, braided rugs, wicker furniture, 

now detritus I am sorting through for more 
keys to what’s irrevocably locked, where 
I can enter only obliquely, only alone. I walk 
the rooms, still so familiar, yet so estranged. 

I’m not supposed to be here, I’m as ghostly 
as you are, but seeing and feeling, alive 
in what’s invisible, what’s meaningless 
to anyone else, now even to you. Can I 

reach you here, you then but here, 
if nowhere else—simply open a door 
and walk into what’s gone?  Out front 
the buyers have heaped up what they don’t 

want—chipped crockery, a glass tabletop, 
heavy wooden wardrobe broken into rough 
planks, the drawers handleless and gaping 
that once held fragments of our daily living, 

that we could pull open and find something 
we were looking for, something we could grasp 
and take for granted, now emptied out like 
our time together as tenants of this house.  

Winifred Hughes is the author of Frost Flowers (2019), which won honorable mention in the Finishing Line Press chapbook contest, and Nine-Bend Bridge (2015), winner of the Red Berry Editions summer chapbook competition. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Atlanta Review, and International Poetry Review, among other journals. “Dyslexic” has been recorded for the Poetry Foundation’s permanent audio archive. “Kingfishers Catch Fire” won the 2014 Wild Leaf Press poetry award. She has been the recipient of two independent artist fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. 

M.I.L.F.

The M’s self-explanatory.
The I is a boy-man’s first-person pov—
a set of eyes evaluating
her body’s sensual potential
relative to his anticipated pleasure:
a furtive cost benefit analysis
taking into account hidden value against
asset depreciation.

L stands for like, but it’s the K in like
that I like for its indecorous clack
of tongue against soft palate
followed by a tiny capitulating exhale--
breath that subordinates itself
to the future’s pulsing throb,

a throb I can feel from here
as I stand at the gas pump
near a boy-man topping off
his already-full tank
with aggressive lever-pumps.
He’s like a nearly-satiated baby
nodding off to sleep
but awakening with a start
once the nipple pops free of his lips.
He’s got a clamping latch
and loud, complaining colic.

That cry’s going to shatter your nerves
the nurse said to me postpartum,
and my firstborn— my daughter— did,
but I got my nerves back.
Or, we grew them anew
together.

My favorite nerve’s still the one
connecting my nipple to
my contracting womb.
I’d never have known
how animal and wild I am
but for that burning flare,
casting light enough
by which to survey the ground
of my body’s farthest biomes.
Boy-man at the gas station
doesn’t know nipples, or nerves, or
wombs from Adam, but
judging from his handling of this moment,
he knows what the F signifies.
His thoughts’ transit
from M to F
seems quick,
prematurely coming
without verification
of my M status
or the length, depth, or
breadth of his own L.
What I think
he knows best is
I.
He’s an I expert,
giving tours of local,
erect monuments to: being.

And his being wants me to know
he sees me: being.
I to I.
And for that, I thank him.
His is an affirmation
of a kind, here at Pump #3.
Even as his gaze travels
across my body, he’s tearing the receipt
hard and fast away from the pump,
crumpling it in a clenched fist as
his eyes move like the jet stream that
rakes then dips
across America’s
breadbasket, dropping heat
and moisture down and down,
before rising up and
peeling out
to sea.
In a Ford F 150.

L.J. Sysko is the author of BATTLEDORE (Finishing Line Press, 2017), a chapbook of poems about postpartum depression and early motherhood. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review's "Poem a Week," BEST NEW POETS, Mississippi Review, and Degenerate Art, among others. Honors include Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Delaware Division of the Arts Fellowships as well as finalist recognition from Copper Nickel's Jake Adam York Prize, Mississippi Review Prize, Marsh Hawk Press, and The Missouri Review's Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize, among others. You can learn more at ljsysko.com.

We are pleased to announce that the 2021 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry, an honorarium of $1,000, is awarded to: 

Tom Goff

Carmichael, California

for his poem “Blind Tom’s” Battle of Manassas

Honorable Mentions, each with an honorarium of $200, are awarded to:

Dannye Romine Powell

Charlotte, North Carolina
for her poem “November” 

Larry Ruth

Berkeley, California
for his poem “Leaving Manzanar”

Pamela Wax

North Adams, Massachusetts
for her poem “Walking the Labyrinth” 

Nicole Windhausen

Fayetteville, New York
for her poem “Ocotillo Dreams”

Final judge for the 2021 Prize was poet Kim Stafford.

The annual Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry was established twenty-five years ago 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 with additional support from Honorary Board Member Allen Mears and Board Member Lacy Buck. This year we received some 1,350 poems from 41 states, Canada, Iceland, Japan and Mexico.

2021 PRIZE FOR POETRY AWARD WINNING POEM

“Blind Tom’s” Battle of Manassas
(composed by pianist Thomas Wiggins in 1863)

I.
This cataclysm on piano keys
Begins with bass clef cadences on “drum,”
Snatches of “The Girl I Left Behind Me,”
In piccolo octaves, à la Doodle, Yankee…
Yes, here comes “Yankee Doodle,” prancing frieze-
Flat in elongated fife-line, tootling glum;
The drum tattoos turn distant blast; on come
Naïve cadets who still believe one breeze
Of musket breath will shear those shako plumes
Aimed like cocked snooks at gallant batteries.
We’ve heard from Yankees; here come Dixie’s kids,
Arrogant as are all raw but colorful
Parade-ground victors; open eye-wide lids.
Pamplona-like, this first Run of the Bull
Will soon begin; first hear an elegy,
A stripped-down nocturne for the stripping-down;
Seems placed right about where the canopy
Of smoke is to becloud noon mock dusk, false dawn.
Next, fresh enigma: why the Marseillaise?
A cavalryman’s conceit, supposed quite suave,
Meet for sword-slashing, lathered-horse forays?
Or is this the knell for uniform-frogged Zouaves?
Abrupt as the jerky start that snaps from sleep,
The nearer, nearer cannon-blast tone clusters,
Exploding song as torn young corpses heap,
From Earth by cannonball and canister
Discharged: as much from illusion as from life,
Storm routing the drummer, scattering all fifes.
Now, the shredded flag; Star-Spangled Banner,
Holed everywhere the cluster-blast scores hits;
Each levels the railroad magnate with the tanner,
Smithereens boys into smaller bits
As the mock-thunder-intervals come shorter,
Thinning the ranks that run to red disorder.
If only in one Battle-Piece Herman Melville
Had fitly depicted Blind Tom Wiggins’ work,
Spanning Wilderness, Gettysburg, Malvern Hill,
Chancellorsville, synods of the devil’s kirk,
Blasts back to front and front to back across
Four years of cenotaphs, long architraves
On colonnades (each column tallies one loss),
Greek Revivals built on the frames of slaves
Such as Tom Wiggins whose whole enterprise
Was crafting chords from ambient dissonance,
—Discords to subtly underscore the lies
Of Lees and Stonewalls, even perhaps of Grants?
From camp Tom leads; we wade the fever swamp,
Cross flaming rivers: Tom’s our psychopomp.
What white man’s riddled ghost can have suggested
To this disabled man far from the fight
How leaden musket balls can be ingested
By slaver and liberator wrong or right?
What psychic tremors vibrant in Tom’s mind
Evoke men fractioned by remorseless math?
How, decades before Charles Ives could dream or find
Such clangors, was Tom born a telepath?
Prestissimo octaves, Lisztomania clatter;
Contending hands delve opposite keyboard ends,
Pound into goulash all remaining coherence,
Objective correlative of the battle-shatter.
At last, all tunes accelerate, ribald, antic,
As terror whips the horse with empty saddle,
Supplanting the bravado with the frantic,
The anguished cowardice, the Big Skedaddle.
And last of all, bone-rattling, one more blast
Disperses as it affixes us in the Past.

II.

Great Wiggins’ ghost! Slave, yet master of your medium,
Your sleepless keyboard-carillons toll your fate,
Your genius robbed of life’s relieving tedium,
Each closed eyelid’s an impassable postern gate
Shut, even as perked ears cup: the clashing teeth
Of unoiled gears; the squawks crows make when pressed
Instinctively to speak; wind-shear across heath
That snaps trees—snap’s a noise!—or flays the hill’s crest.
It’s clear the daguerreotype’s ungainly plate
Will catch none of the ecstatic blush on dark cheeks
When, clicking into the mosaic template,
Locks that last sonic chip your earsight seeks.

Tom Goff is an instructional assistant in the Reading and Writing Center at Folsom Lake College. He has degrees in music performance from Sacramento State University and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He has written five previous chapbooks of poetry and a full-length collection, Twelve-Tone Row: Music in Words (I Street Press, 2018). He has lately had a poem published in Spectral Realms #14 (Hippocampus Press, 2021), and is represented in Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager Press, 2018; one of his two poems included is on Robinson Jeffers).

Honorable Mentions

November

The boy—your boy—almost eight,
cross-legged in the wing back chair,
head dropping into his hands.
Out the window,
a sky so vivid it might crack
like a plate or a face
or the naked truth.
You looked at him
and wanted to erase
what you’d said and promise
to stay. You didn’t. You escaped,
though for years, you’ve re-lived that day,
especially in November.
That sky. That chair. The air
bright, brisk. Those ginko leaves
flown overnight — every limb exposed.

Dannye Romine Powell's fifth collection of poetry, In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver, came out in 2020. She's won grants from the NEA, the NC Arts Council and Yaddo. For many years, she served as book review editor of The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer. Her book of interviews with Southern writers, Parting the Curtains, now out of print, includes conversations about craft with Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, Eudora Welty, Pat Conroy and others.

Leaving Manzanar

Jan. 4, 2020 AP — “A skeleton found by hikers
last fall near California’s second-highest peak was
identified as a Japanese American artist who had
left the Manzanar internment camp to paint in the
mountains in the waning days of World War II.”

I
Twenty miles by trail, then south and east,
leaving Symmes Creek, he hiked here,
talus and tarn, climbed scree and snow
seven thousand feet to a deep bowl,
three lakes over a high saddle, taking colors
of sky, cobalt, ultramarine, cerulean,
he’d hiked with younger men, all of them
from the camp, Manzanar, free to leave, no
place to return now, nowhere called home,
so they ascended, first Shepherd Pass, then
a boulder bridge to a ledge above, the basin
too high for fish, yet there were fish,
Colorado River Cutthroat trout, exotics,
transplanted from the Rocky Mountains.

II
Transplanted from the Rocky Mountains,
the fish arrived in Nineteen Thirty One,
concern over Colorado trout led to a plan,
mules to pack them in, high up and away
to lakes in Williamson Bowl, waterfalls
and rock on the creek below, once there,
the fish were safe, and trapped, no escape,
kept Colorado Cutthroats out of trouble,
forty-odd years later, worried over survival
of Cutthroats in Colorado, fisheries folk
learned of their Sierra refuge, wondered
if some of those fish, returned as natives
could multiply, stave off danger, save
habitats, and help the Cutthroats survive.

III
Habitats and help, the Cutthroats survive,
the younger men carried fishing rods,
the older man, watercolors, pad, pencils,
looked for a place to paint, dark of granite slide,
solitude above streams fed by snowmelt
and ice from the mountain, a niche to wait,
caricature a single fish, body twisting,
as it rose out of blue water breaking
the surface, rubies on its throat and fins
showing against long dihedral faces
of Mount Versteeg, or the shadows
thrown by Trojan Peak, two long clouds
peer over the ridge, weather turning
in the high country at the end of July.


IV
In the high country at the end of July,
separated from the fishermen, the artist
on his own in the bowl, no warning,
watched the storm, lightning, thunder,
wind funneling rain, made it hard to see
the deluge in the canyon, the artist lost
the trail, no way back to his companions,
the fishermen too lost their way, sheltered
under overhangs in the mountain, rock
and roof enough, perhaps the older man,
they hoped, had scurried down the creek
to safety, yet he was not seen alive again.
In Twenty Nineteen, near summer’s end
two hikers found part of a man’s skeleton.

V
Two hikers found part of a man’s skeleton,
the body of the artist was buried long ago,
after the storm, a makeshift grave by a lake,
stones of gray granite marked his tomb.
A photograph of the burial site was taken
by the men who had gone up the mountain,
all that remained to give to the family,
the memory of the storm left in the basin.
Over time, the grave in that high bowl
was lost, until the mountain, its shift
and slide, exposed the bones, no one
knew at first, no one could remember
who the man might be, or exactly how
a man’s body came to rest in this place.

VI
A man’s body came to rest in this place,
forty years on, the Cutthroats journey
home, arrangements made to fit the fish,
logistics to reduce risk, shorten the hours
fish’d be out of water, transported, in tanks,
helicopter, until they made it to the Rockies
two hundred forty-six river trout, high
up Ptarmigan Creek, high up and home again.
Where the Cutthroats thrive, maybe a child
maybe Colorado, pastel, or chalk, her hand
traces the flash of fin, swerve of body, tail,
she pauses, rubies rise out the water.
What was found, what was rescued,
what was lost, what is saved.

VII
What was lost, what is saved,
a half-century ago, looking for the artist,
two of his sons climbed over twelve thousand feet,
then clambered down dark rock to the water.
Searching, one always thinks rescue,
hopes for the best, though one cannot
always save what is loved once it is lost.
What was found there somehow stayed lost.
What was lost, what they searched for,
what was found is memory,
not memory of losing the artist,
it is memory of a man, his family,
and those who walked mountains to find him,
twenty miles by trail, then south and east.

Larry Ruth is a consultant in environmental policy. He lives in Berkeley, and conducts research in forest and natural resources, wildland fire policy, and ecological sustainability. He enjoys the vestiges of the wild, far and near.

Walking the Labyrinth

I am a connoisseur of labyrinths. I can tell
you about the ancient drawing with Jericho
at the center, suggesting that the walls

came a-tumbling down because of a
parade of seven circuits, a merry-go-round
of intention. What we do here stirs

heaven to act. Tiny finger
labyrinths were carved into walls outside
old country churches in Europe,

so supplicants might ground themselves
for the sacred within, a prayer before prayer.
I could explain how a maze

confounds, a labyrinth uncovers
the self, meditation in motion.It resembles
a womb, a brain, a fingerprint, the revolving

planets, the primal and timeless. I weave
and spiral like Ariadne across the length
of a football field contained within a 42-

or 20-foot or 5-inch round.
I might carry a question lightly in the back
of my throat or a prayer

tucked between my breasts.
I may be in a candle-lit rectory in the Bronx,
following a unicursal path branded

in black paint on a waxed parquet floor,
or inhaling an autumn Berkshire landscape
while weaving in lanes drawn

by shrubs, string, or stones.
I could be prancing barefoot on grass
or solemnly marching to the cadence


of a dirge-like owl demanding answers
to unknowable pain. Sometimes I create
a Cretan-shaped labyrinth on a blank

page starting at an intersection
of four straight corners, then fill
in seven concentric circuits, one arc

following another, rainbows radiating,
seeking the Eureka of wisdom
that King Solomon honed on his daily

constitutional through a whorling solar system
on his palace grounds, seven orbits
of stepping holy, holy, holy into the whole

world of God’s glory, while he composed
love songs and proverbs.
I am superstitious but not fussy

about my labyrinths if they get me
where I’m going, which is now here
and nowhere in time, mindful not to cross

boundaries, ethical or spatial, to finish
what I begin, and to remember that the one
way in is the only way out.

Pamela Wax is a poet-rabbi whose poems have been published or are forthcoming in journals such as Pensive Journal, Heron Tree, Green Ink Poetry, CCAR Journal, and Paterson Literary Review, and whose essays on Judaism and spirituality have appeared in many books and publications. Pam’s first book of poetry, Walking the Labyrinth, was a finalist for the Main Street Rag Poetry Contest and will be published in early 2022. Pam serves as the Spiritual Care Coordinator at a social service agency. She and her husband live in the northern Berkshires of Massachusetts and the Bronx, NY.

Ocotillo Dreams

I.
I wrote this poem in 1999,
ghosts of Dillard and Abbey looking
over my shoulder
all of us feverish with sun, crazily happy.

My high desert journal already jammed
with second thoughts,
sketches of road runners and stratified field notes,
I mouthed each word as it came
carried every newborn syllable, careful
not to look directly into the burning centers.

At dusk lines ran out
onto shadow filled mud flats
leading me to follow,
wildly sucking finally cool air
lungs aching in pursuit.
Under looming moon
we became one, bodiless
grey spirits clinging
to the backs of coyotes.

II.
We were geology students in the field,
each morning breaking camp
unshowered and freshly awed,
heaping banter with our cowboy coffee.
Packed into the van
weeks of gear sliding among dusty limbs,
we wove endless dirt roads;
hide and seek
with unmapped, wind carved formations.

Diligently deciphering rock layers,
we turned rifts between epochs
into thoughts on adulthood,
recorded our findings, blindly
missing the depth of sacred silence by mere inches.

If only we had chosen botany,
succulents named in Latin
slipping among shadowed images of our sleep
or ministry,
that we might have prayed
a divination upon such green spires
jauntily ascending.

We crammed promises
to always wander
into muddy frame packs already stuffed
with molding clothes, sleeping bags and perfect stones.
Boarded our flight home exhausted
clutching weeks with words,
moments blurring like the landscape
fading to a sea of brown below.

III.
Twenty years of wandering continents, while
Ocotillo still bloom red in earliest spring rains,
damp air suspending weighty tendrils.

Ancestry lines of cacti
weave like burrows under burning earth
crossing one another at random junctions
only to fan out like silt in a basin; alluvial scars
photographed as rare beauty.

Even now from east coast suburbs
waist deep in snow,
musky scent of creosote lingers.
Memories drift on a desert wind;
unbroken hiking boots dancing
across frozen Kaibab limestone,
body aching to dissolve
into infinite North Rim sky.

Evening traffic creeps
through slushy roads.
I am lost in imagining
quiet, joy walking
among nomadic sands
land of hide-and-seek,
of wild eyes, weathered rock.

Remembering ancient saguaro
each new arm a human lifetime,
ironwood and mesquite
tough skinned and pungent,
while predawn color bleeds
through night’s thin coat.

Nicole Marie Windhausen lives in Central New York, on lands originally occupied by the Haudenosaunee peoples. She graduated from the University of Southern Maine, Portland with degrees in English and Creative Writing. In addition to writing, she owns a wellness business and designs opportunities for ecosystem restoration and species diversity within her community.

2020 Robinson Jeffers Tor House
Prize for Poetry

 WE ARE PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THAT THE 2020
ROBINSON JEFFERS TOR HOUSE PRIZE FOR POETRY,
AN HONORARIUM OF $1,000, IS AWARDED TO:

Jerl Surratt

Hudson, New York, for his poem 
“Twilight Time”

Honorable Mentions, each with an honorarium of $200, are awarded to:

Joanne M. Clarkson

Port Townsend, Washington
for her poem “When Grief is Animal”

Lesléa Newman

Northampton, Massachusetts
for her poem “The First Time We Visit”

Ellen Romano

Hayward, California
for her poem “Walking”

 Jess Skyleson

Rehoboth, Massachusetts
for their poem “Clearing”

Final judge for the 2020 Prize was poet Marie Howe

 The annual Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry was established twenty-four years ago 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 with additional support from Honorary Board Member Allen Mears and Board member Lacy Buck. This year we received some 1,200 poems from 49 states, the District of Columbia, Canada and Qatar.

2020 Prize for Poetry Award Winning Poem

Twilight Time

 One bee stepping sideways around
   one ripened cone of an echinacea, burying
its head repeatedly in miniscule florets,
   is the main attraction in the garden tonight
and as such my reward for planting out that bed.

I count from this chair in the shade fifty-two
   purpurea heads in flower.  To one bee.
And it’s bee season.  Two more of its kind
   about ten feet away are surveying
and landing, supping, lifting and landing again

on buds that have opened since yesterday
   in one of three African Blue basils.
Last year, my journal says, I counted eight
   to nine big bees in each of the three Blue basils
in that bed at about this hour (it’s after six).

There’s no plague of purple martins,
   no orchard or meadow nearby more enticing
that what I’m growing this year for the bees I enjoy
   feeding and watching as a way to wish them well
for the rest of their short lives.  Everywhere

these days I’m forced to concede, despite not
   wanting to, that I may have the bees with me
at the threshold of my personal nonexistence,
   that already vast-enough catastrophe,
and with us there as well the earth entire.

Jerl Surratt’s poems have been published in Dash Literary, The Hopkins Review, Kenyon Review, Literary Imagination, The New Republic, Podium, several other journals and an anthology. A native of Electra, Texas, he now lives and works in Hudson, New York, after many years’ work in New York City as a writer for and advisor to progressive nonprofit organizations. He is the author of A Blind Bit of Notice (2017); a second collection of poems is nearing completion. 

 Honorable Mentions

When Grief is Animal

                  for D.

She didn’t get out of bed for a month
after she hit the deer.  Her mind
replaying the curve over 
and over.  The distraction of rain.

When you live near mountains
there is always shadow.  Where the narrow
seam took decades to reach
the sea.  Coyote country.  Cougar kingdom.

The leap was an instant.  The impact
endless.  She sat in the middle
of the misted road, doe’s muzzle
in her lap.  The stiff, soft fur.  The occasional
spasm of half-life.  Last year
her sister.  A decade ago, her
mother.  The one child 
she imagined she could keep.

A deputy arrived and lifted her up.
Some other arms carried her home.
To heal means to dream
until the world is forgiven.

She didn’t drive for a year and never
that road again.  Some nights she senses
a flank against her skin, rising
and fading in familiar animal rhythms:
her sister, fresh from nightmare,
climbing into her bed.
The shadow of a daughter
breathing for an hour
under her penitent hands.

Joanne M. Clarkson's poetry collection, The Fates won the Bright Hill Press annual contest and was published in 2017.  Her chapbook, Believing the Body (Gribble Press) came out in 2014. Her poems have been published in Nimrod, American Journal of Nursing, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Northwest, Alaska Quarterly Review and other journals.  Clarkson has Master's Degrees in English and Library Science, and has taught and worked as a professional librarian. After caring for her mother through a long illness, she re-careered as a Registered Nurse specializing in Home Health and Hospice Care. She lives with her husband in Port Townsend, WA.  See more at www.JoanneClarkson.com.

The First Time We Visit

the neurologist, he gives us
exactly 7 minutes of his time.
“What’s 8 plus 15?”

he asks my father who gives me
a look I know all too well:
What is this guy, an imbecile?

“8 plus 15 is 23.”  My father speaks
loudly as if the doctor hears
worse than he does.  “C’mon, ask

me a real question.”  My father puts
up his dukes and punches the air
eager for a good fight.

“8 times 15 is 120.
120 times 15 is 1,800.
1,800 times 15 is 27,000.”

The poor neurologist
has no way of knowing what
a math whiz my father is,

how he’d entertain us on long car
rides by barking out math problems
or better yet dare me to challenge

him.  “Dad, what’s 11,327
plus 10,695?” I’d ask.
“22,022,” he’d say in a second,

waiting for me to work it out
in my notebook.  He was always
right.  “Dad, what’s a million

plus a trillion?” I’d ask, searching
my brain for the biggest number
in the universe.  “A million trillion,”

he’d answer.  “Dad, what’s
a million trillion plus
a million trillion?”

“A ba-a-a-zill-ll-llion,”
he’d say, shaking his head so fast
his cheeks turned to rubber

and I’d crack up.  If only
we were laughing now
but the neurologist is not

amused.  He leans forward
to study this puzzle of a patient.
“Where were you born?”

“Brooklyn, naturally,”
my father says as if the doctor
should know that anyone who is

anyone was born in Brooklyn.
“What did you do for a living?”
My father sits up a little taller.

“I’m an attorney.  Still practicing.”
The neurologist looks to me
to confirm that either this is true

or that my father has gone bananas.
“Yep,” I say, hoping to convey
that this is a real problem.

The neurologist does not catch on.
“Who’s running for president?”  he asks
my father who is now convinced

that the doctor is completely bonkers.
“Hillary and that son of a bitch,”
he bellows, causing the two

receptionists out front to break
into peals of squealing laughter.
“He’s fine.”  The doctor leans back

and glances up at the clock
to let me know I’ve wasted
enough of his time.  “He’s great.

Take him home.”  My father is already
out of his seat.  “But what about
his delusions?” I ask, “the men

singing in his head, the little boy
at the foot of his bed?”
The neurologist shrugs.

“Old people have delusions,”
he says, pulling open his file
cabinet’s top drawer

clearly done with me
and my father, who is already
out in the waiting room

waving my coat by the shoulders
like a matador taunting a bull
then hustling me down the hallway

c’mon let’s go, shake a leg
we have more important things
to do than deal with this nonsense

and this doctor who I know
my father thinks is a real nut job
and will never again agree to see

not next week
not next month 
not in a bazillion years

Lesléa Newman is the creator of 75 books for readers of all ages including the poetry collections Still Life with Buddy, October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard (a novel-in-verse), and I Carry My Mother.. Her literary awards include poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation. From 2008 - 2010 she served as the poet laureate of Northampton, MA. “The First Time We Visit” is from her poetry collection, I Wish My Father, which will be published in January 2021.  www.lesleanewman.com 

Walking

 In the school our children once attended,
where I spent so many years of our marriage
teaching other people’s children,
I walked the halls with my eyes closed.
Alert to the subtle signs I was passing a window,
the light that penetrates the darkness.

Counting out my steps,
I seldom got past twenty before I opened my eyes
for a quick peek, a readjustment.
It was peaceful once to walk in self-imposed blindness
early in the morning before the children arrived,
or in the sudden quiet at the end of the day.
I would imagine myself walking over
the footsteps my children made
in this place where I first came as a young mother
then walked into old age.

Now I move only toward your remembered image
and I know what I was practicing for all these years.
You are meeting me for lunch with sandwiches and drinks.
Am I getting closer?
You will only stay until I open my eyes.
I am counting my steps,
twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three.

Ellen Romano graduated from San Jose State University and has spent 30 years in public education. She lives in Hayward, CA and is currently sheltering in place with her two sons and her dog. This is her first major publication.

Clearing

 I awaken to discover the driveway gone: 
its tall stand of pine trees now stooped,
branches twisted down

and the front yard looming
with hunched, misshapen masses—
our familiar rocks and bushes

rendered suddenly alien,
their features erased
by an early season snow.

I cross this shrouded expanse, steps timed
to the rhythmic scrape of my shovel,
square strips of blacktop appearing

like my shorn head, on that last day
before the first chemo
(do you remember how we laughed

in fear, saying I finally looked
like a Buddhist monk—the one that,
without you, I would have become—

and then, later, when my eyebrows
and eyelashes fell out, too,
how you comforted me, whispering

that I gleamed at night, like moonlight
reflecting on the snow?)
But now it is the driveway that gleams

like a bare chalkboard, washed clean
of yesterday’s lessons,
and I can feel the strength

in my back, my arms,
stripping away the words,
breaking through the ice that formed

over our lives, and brushing off
the last traces of snow from my gloves.
The driveway cleared, I put away my shovel,

thinking, “There, now that is done.”
Going back inside, I feel the sting
of cold flakes caught in my brows,

dampening my lashes,
as they slowly melt
into my skin.

Jess Skyleson is a former aerospace and mechanical engineer who began writing poetry after being diagnosed with stage IV cancer at age 39, subsequently achieving remission after extensive treatment. They will begin pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, this September. Their poems have previously been published in the online journals Evocations and Nixes Mate Review, and will be included in the upcoming Wickford Art Association's 2020 Poetry & Art book and exhibit. 

2019 Robinson Jeffers Tor House

Prize for Poetry

 We are pleased to announce that the 2019 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry, an honorarium of $1,500, is awarded to:

Sarah Matthes

Austin, Texas for her poems

“Wet Body Hot Stone” and “The Seventeen Year Cicadas”

 Honorable Mentions, each with an honorarium of $200, are awarded to:

Partridge Boswell

Woodstock, Vermont

for his poem “Thinking of Klimt’s Stoclet Frieze during a Two-hour Delay””

Marc Harshman

Wheeling, West Virginia

for his poem “On the Edge of Time” 

James Davis May

Blairsville, Georgia

for his poem “On the Last Night of the Summer I Wanted to Die”

Khaty Xiong

Columbus, Ohio

for her poem “Therefore”

Finalist judge for the 2019 Prize was poet Brenda Hillman.

 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 with additional support from Honorary Board Member Allen Mears and Board member Lacy Buck.   This year we received some 1,060 poems from 43 states, the District of Columbia and one foreign country. 

The Award Winning Poems

WET BODY HOT STONE

 In everything, I see only myself—
no need to paint irises on stones

Dark fish gasp across rapids,
and my lungs and stomach gather

in a tight bouquet to spice the blood
I cut my finger—the skin grows back 

strong, and smooth
A new bright brick in my barricade

Then comes the night
and there are no stilting tree tops

to make into my fingers, no nape of neck
pressed into this ditch of clay

Night eats the liver
out of the river’s stunned pools

There must be more left than my mind

Universe, please
Send me the ghost
of the one I love

The old woman made a nightmare
who sits on my chest—even she
has her bad dreams

My life has been the wet imprint
of someone else’s body
as they rise from a wide, hot stone
and take to the river to rinse again

When I die free me from parallel

Let me feed every tree

THE SEVENTEEN YEAR CICADAS

 We dared each other to eat them

A dollar for a hollow husk
Two for the living ones

Some bodies are warmer than others
Some sweat is so sweet

Wading ankle-deep
The dead crisp foliage of wings

I got to touch you

Brushing one off your neck
Pinky skimming the hot cotton of your summer shirt

The flinch of your body, the tightening skin

You lit up

Either your chest beating forward or
your shoulders cringing away

That distinction making all the difference in my world

And I was unsure, and I was ashamed

And then I went around touching everyone for years

Blaming cicadas

Can you imagine it

Standing young and shoeless in a purple dusk

The field so empty, the trees so still

Wondering where did all their bodies go
They were just here, right here

The sound still humming in your memory like a grooved tinnitus

Can you discern it

The difference between what you loved
and what was there

The trees so empty, the field so still

Like the living room the morning after a party
when you wander downstairs to find everyone

has rolled away their sleeping bags
and gone to the lake without you

Sarah Matthes is a poet from central New Jersey. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, where she won the Gutow prize and was a finalist for the Fania Kruger Fellowship for Poetry of Social Vision. She has received support for her work from the Yiddish Book Center and the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming at The Iowa Review Online, The Feminist Utopia Project, Yalobusha Review, Inkwell Literary Magazine, Prodigal, and poets. org.   She serves as the managing editor for Bat City Review in Austin, TX.

 Honorable Mentions

Thinking of Klimt’s Stoclet Frieze during a Two-Hour Delay

                                    I think I’m on the planet Mars!
--Belgian architect upon touring Palais Stoclet

 The tree glows leafless but alive, its spiraling tendrils
frozen as it twines from floor to ceiling of the Palais
dining room.  A degree warmer and this would all be 

melted and we’d be on our way to school.  A degree
colder and the curling branches would not be crazed,
the roads lightly dusted with snow, not slicked with ice.

A degree or two and we’d be happy and warm inside
and out, not shivering before the storm speculating
if forecasts are real or fake, straddling the threshold

 in liminal jaundiced light, Expectation’s gaze fixed
on Fulfillment’s embrace.  Life/death heaven/earth
intertwine suspended in space.  A fist-sized hole

 in the wall would be a hole, an absence of plaster
and paint, not the grief you walk around all day
and at night fall into.  You’d be sitting at the table

 wielding a Wiener Werkstätte spoon over a bowl
of warm fiddlehead soup, eating your meal in peace
while trees are growing over you instead of cities.

Partridge Boswell is the author of Some Far Country, winner of the Grolier Poetry Prize. His poems have recently received the Edna St. Vincent Millay, Red Wheelbarrow and Lascaux Poetry Prizes, and have surfaced in The Gettysburg Review, Salmagundi, The American Poetry Review, Green Mountains Review, Plume, Poetry Ireland Review, The Moth and Forklift, Ohio. Co-founder of Bookstock Literary Festival, Boswell troubadours widely with the poetry/music group Los Lorcas, teaches at the Burlington Writers Workshop, and lives with his family in Vermont.

ON THE EDGE OF TIME

  after Pierre Reverdy

 The trees stranded beyond the white river
            have penetrated the clouds
            with their spindly arms:
                        frail scaffolding for a sky
                        intent on widening.
Here, below my feet, the busy gossip
            of crocus pretending
            they know the hour.
I find only words circling a dial,
            a rooster crowing under a bridge,
            a ruined wall flowering toadflax.
I study a field
            where an animal without feathers
            sings to its shadows.
I determine this to mean someone
            will lay before me a tolerable path
            with middling weather
            and a few wild beasts.
You hold me to your breasts
            and I relearn the sound
            of breath.
I look in your eyes for the space
            where song, like a strong forest,
            fills with leaves.

Marc Harshman’s collection of poems, Woman in Red Anorak, won the 2017 Blue Lynx Prize and was just published by Lynx House/University of Washington Press. His fourteenth children’s book, Fallingwater, co-written with Anna Smucker, was published by Roaring Brook/Macmillan in 2017. His poetry collection, Believe What you Can, published in 2016 by West Virginia University Press, won the Weatherford Award from the Appalachian Studies Association. His poetry has appeared in The Chariton Review, Salamander, Gargoyle, Shenandoah, and Poetry Salzburg Review as well as in anthologies by Kent State University, the University of Iowa, University of Georgia, and the University of Arizona. He has just been named co-winner of the 2019 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. Appointed in 2012, he is the seventh poet laureate of West Virginia.    

ON THE LAST NIGHT OF THE SUMMER I WANTED TO DIE

 I spread the blanket over the driveway 
that still remembered the afternoon’s sun, 
and scanned the darkness that was too much 
for the light from our mountain town to matter. 
It would be too easy to say it was the falling stars. 
Too easy to say it was the thrill of seeing some  
seem to come so close they made me flinch,
too easy to say that they brought the realization 
that I did not want them, or anything else, to kill me, 
though a month earlier I’d sat through a storm alone
hoping the wind would rip off the roof 
and take me with it. 
                                    No, it was what happened 
after I went back inside and came out again—
my daughter’s head, still half in dreams I woke her from, 
resting against my chest, my wife on the other side, 
how we all pointed to each brief and ridiculous splendor
of this unasked for show, how I loved their laughter, 
how I wanted to stay alive to remember it longer. 

James Davis May lives in Georgia, where he serves as Writer-in-Residence at Mercer University. His first poetry collection, Unquiet Things, was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2016 and selected as a finalist for the Poets’ Prize.

Therefore 

              In a dream I lay beside my dead brother.
We are grinning, absolving our hearts in wide orbit.
But in dreams there is no such thing as forgiveness.
We extend this news to our father who is currently living
in the highest tower.  When the news reaches him
he brings down every corner of the house.
We come to be loyal exactly like this.
            Swelling above the eyelids
we let our gods see us.  We are the meat of their foundation,
the wells of their drinks, so why can’t I still my mouth?
Opening and forgiving, terms too young
to be songs but I feel them plotting. How revolting.
We let them see us small though we mean ill.
Even the trees, dirt, and waters pray for us.
For a time our clothes bubbled with thick silver coins,
our ears heavy with acetylene rocks. Mild curses
giving us the impression we are well.
My brother reminds me gently of a tale long forgotten,
our father reenacting in a game of charades.
            In the Scene of a Great House he stands on
an imaginary rock, his arms stretched heavenward,
his mighty palms bulbous, arthritic, and touching.
He completes the roof by looking chin up.
We guess and guess the name of the ancestor.        
            Tus Nyuj.  Tus Zaj.  Tus Noog.
When we run out of guesses father spins his grief
into a ball.  A metal hide, olive, sealed with a pin.
We bring our mouths to this hive and promise it life.
But we are always in a hurry.  My brother shaking.
My father catching fire to light us through.

Khaty Xiong is the author of Poor Anima (Apogee Press, 2015), which holds the distinction of being the first full-length collection of poetry to be published by a Hmong American woman in the United States.   She’s held the Nadya Aisenberg Fellowship at The MacDowell Colony and an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council.  Her work has been published in Poetry, the New York Times, How Do I Begin?:  A Hmong American Literary Anthology, and elsewhere.

2018 Robinson Jeffers Tor House

Prize for Poetry

The Award Winning Poem

Take Nothing

Not the great blue skimmers warming their wings
in the May sun before flight,
the red-eyed vireos’ here I am, where are you,
or the radiating catenaries of the weaving spider,
lingering, dew-strung,
not the intricate machinery of the wonderous foot
with one-quarter of the bones in the body,
or the fascicles of nerves firing in the lightest touch,
not the easy assumption of motion
in neck, limbs, torso,
not the syrupy evening light of summer,
somewhere bees gravid with pollen
and the promise of rain, not August’s crickets
whirring their incessant clockwork,
not the white-bearded waves following in furrows,
the boom and bravura of surf,
or its lace and small applause,
not the guttural rubato in the throat
at the end of the barn owl’s call,
or the orange Chinese lanterns of persimmons,
not the way the light bends in autumn’s russet afternoons,
or the fraying draperies of fog in the hollows,
not the faithful bellows of the lungs,
the free-flowing tributaries of the heart,
or the black, rickety branches of trees against
a full winter moon, like the raised hands
of Giotto’s saints in prayer, 
not the tellers of night tales,
or the light from extinguished stars,
not the friable fabric of memory,
nor any love’s precarious survival,
not even the soul at night---
take nothing,
nothing for granted.
Not in this world.

Honorable Mentions

Letter Home

I’m staying among strangers.  On the shelf, A History of Finland.
I spent three days in Helsinki once.  When I left, a man saw me off
on the train, made me promise to write, but I couldn’t spell his name.

I know nothing about the history of Finland, the way I know nothing
about the strangers I’m living with here, each a country with allegiances
and anthems and alibis.  A History of Finland makes me think

it is one of many Finnish histories, and possibly not definitive.
My history of Finland has a chapter titled: “Autonomy Lost
and Independence Gained.”  Could that be us, love?

The Finnish man was a stranger, a blind date the night before.
He took the morning off from work to say goodbye and pressed
his folded future in my palm.  To this day I have no idea why.

Maybe he thought I was a country he could live in.
I don’t understand what makes people seek each other out.
So many possible histories, so many impossible endings.

I could be speaking Finnish now, farming fish and naming
each of my babies with three k’s and too many vowels.
But I’m joined with you, sharing the citizenship of a long marriage,

both of us tending our borders.  I’ve never asked if I turned out
to be the person you thought I was, since I’m not the person
I thought I was.  I could say you and I will always be

on a blind date—but I don’t want to scare you.
When I return home this week, you’ll welcome me,
I know, my native land.  Love.

Prayer

       Golden Shovel after Galway Kinnell

Vivian is almost two she wanders the backyard whatever
        she sees she points at wherever she points the world happens

she crosses the lawn climbs into my arms whatever
        happens now is enough it is dusk I do not know what

will become of her the carrotwood tree is
       thick with low-hanging deep-green leaves Vivian is

reaching for them she says leaf the tree’s growth is
       vigorous threatens to crack the concrete of our patio what

does one do with such robust life this evening I
       hold Vivian her hair carrot red she points up Want

that she says Want that in the evening sky only
        the full moon is visible no clouds no stars that

I guess is what she wants the carrotwood tree darkens but
        the moon is a bright light Vivian points up says Want that

Waiting for the Perseid Meteor Shower

by Deborah Pope

A dogtooth moon, horned and dim,
hangs over the suck of midnight tide,
the skirt of beach, where wet gusts spin
the windsocks, flog the docks of cottages.

We are silent except for the ice
in our glasses, the creak of rockers,
eyes raised to the ruined
theater of stars.

We have come here
to the continent’s edge,
like plunderers, to see what
can be salvaged from the wreckage

we have made.  Here is a spar
of pain, is that some rigging
of hope?  I don’t even know
what we are looking for—

stars flashing from black curtains,
some fire-fall of legend,
red snakes in the sky,
a revelation so obvious

they say the casual eye
can’t mistake it.  Wordless,
we wait for signs, earthy
or celestial, something more

than the remote Morse of a plane,
a whittled moon and the wheel
of Orion into the sea.
The August night steams on, 

yields nothing to the watch
we keep.  What’s become
of all the storied gold
our nights once showered down?

Is there nothing left within us
to pick the lock of dark?

Buenos Aires

January 2010

I told myself the place
            would make a difference:
                       busy, humid, distant, utterly

foreign.  For a month, we walked
             or trotted, trying to catch a subway car
                        or train to take us to whatever site

we had settled on that day:  cemeterio,
            museo, jardin botánico.  The heat
                        was piercing, solid as the ice.

Most nights we ate late, midnight
            or one, leaning our elbows against
                      the table to hear the other clearly, to watch

the stream of people outside, oblivious
           to the hour. The home we made was small—
                     two rooms, a balcony—but there,

so many miles beneath the everyday
            that had defeated us, I thought
                      I felt the change I wanted, a release

like the pop of breaking ice early spring,
            the water below still moving as it has
                        all through the frozen months,

                                                         the whole long year.

Tor House Prize for Poetry 2017

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 with additional support from Honorary Board Member Allen Mears and Board member Lacy Buck.   This year we received some 1,150 poems from 37 states and five foreign countries. The finalist judge for the 2017 Prize was poet Eavan Boland.

We are pleased to announce that the 2017 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry, an honorarium of $1,000, is awarded to:

Donald Levering
Santa Fe, New Mexico
for his poem
“The Notebook”

Honorable Mentions, each with an honorarium of $200, are awarded to:
 
Justin Hunt
Charlotte, North Carolina
for his poem “Somewhere South of Coldwater”

Mary Pinard
Roslindale, Massachusetts
for her poem “Late in the Season, Widow Gardening”
 
Cynthia C. Snow
Shelburne, Massachusetts
for her poem “To Maria, the Naturalist/From Esther, the Arawak Servant”

Chelsea Wagenaar
Valparaiso, Indiana
for her poem “Batrachomancy”

2017 Winning Poem "The Notebook" by Donald Levering. 

Honorable Mentions

The 2017 Award Winning Poem

The Notebook
by Donald Levering

Abda, Hungary, 1944

Miklós Radnóti’s poem inches along
his forbidden notebook.
He can’t see his words
as he writes of his wife, Fanni,
and of a wiser death waiting back home.

In the dark he doesn’t imagine
today’s torched houses and haystacks,
but home with its plum trees and honeybees.
He almost tastes the sweet preserves
instead of the moldy potatoes.

His writing scarcely mentions the long march
on ruined feet, the beatings.
He wants us to picture him younger,
swimming in the little stream,
its ripples and jeweled dragonflies.

The poem discloses blood in the drool
of oxen hauling artillery,
but not his own crimson piss.
Milklós tells himself not to listen
to the hellish ravings of prisoners

gone insane. We must downplay
their miserable shame. He wishes instead
we would see him welcoming the dawn
that counts him one day closer
to sleep untroubled by fleas.

We’ll linger with him on the drug of dreaming,
on the vision of his devoted Fanni.
We’ll open the notebook tucked into
his exhumed body’s overcoat
with his final fevered verses.

In Radnóti’s work our ears won’t throb
from point-blank gunshots. He left us
no lines on tumbling into a pit
with fellow captives. No poems
on seeping rain and cold

he could no longer feel.

Donald Levering’s most recent book, Coltrane’s God, published by Red Mountain Press, was Runner-Up for the New England Book Festival contest. His previous book, The Water Leveling with Us, placed second in the National Federation of Press Women Creative Verse Book Competition in 2015. He is a former NEA Fellow, a finalist for the 2016 Dana Awards, Runner-Up for the 2016 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, Finalist for the 2016 New Letters Award, and First Runner-Up in the 2015 Mark Fischer Prize. He has been a Willapa Bay Artist-in-Residence, a judge for the New Mexico state finals of the Poetry Out Loud competition, and a volunteer with Earthwatch. He lives in Santa Fe with his wife, the painter and poet Jane Shoenfeld.

Honorable Mention

Somewhere South of Coldwater
by Justin Hunt

for Reid 

As night thickens, we slip
into lawn chairs, pour
a glass of merlot. Wichita’s
dim glow reminds
us where we are, though
you and I both know
we’re nowhere
but the edge of empty—
the hollow where our sons’
last steps, their self-inflicted
deaths tap and spatter.

Childless now, leaden
with legacies unbestowed,
we stumble into final
years and hereafters
we distrust, kingdom-comes
come and gone already,
nothing left
but all those miles
we still drive—dirt roads
and wind our solace,
silence our guide.

We uncork the bottle,
pour again.  A breeze
sweeps August into dark
fields.  The catalpa
by your ditch rustles
above a throb of crickets,
and I’m grateful
for this moment, the quiet
sense this is all
there is and ever will be.

But in the morning,
my friend, we’ll steer
again to Comanche
County, somewhere
south of Coldwater—
into dust and treeless sky,
the long horizon
of what we cannot speak.

Justin Hunt grew up in rural Kansas and lives in Charlotte, NC. In 2012, he retired from a long international business career to write poetry and memoir. His work has won several awards and been published in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Atlanta Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Comstock Review, Dogwood, Crossroads Poetry Journal, Freshwater Review, Pooled Ink, Kakalak, and What Matters, among others. Hunt is currently writing a full-length memoir about his relationship with his father, who was born in 1897 to Kansas pioneers.

Honorable Mention

Late in the Season, Widow Gardening

by Mary Pinard

First, though, to determine what must go—
fading dianthus, silvering thistle, and the end of a bee
balm bloom, the ragged crown’s last glow.

Pruning, next, a taking that knows
pressure, where the blade should kiss, cleave,
to undo what was, make way for the slow, low

new growth.  How does it always know
about opening there, where nothing is, despite grief
fuller than all those fragments of Sappho?

            *

Fuller than all those fragments of Sappho
about opening there, where nothing is despite grief,
new growth.  How does it always know

to undo what was, make way for the slow, low
pressure, where the blade should kiss, cleave?
Pruning, next, a taking that knows

balm, bloom, the ragged crown’s last glow—
a fading dianthus, silvering thistle, and the end of a bee.
First, though, to determine what must go.

Mary Pinard teaches in the Arts and Humanities Division at Babson College in the Boston area.  She has published poems in a variety of literary journals, and she has written critical essays on poets, including Lorine Niedecker and Alice Oswald.  Portal, her collection of poems, was published by Salmon Press.  Her poems have also been featured in collaborative performances and exhibits with Boston-area musicians, painters, and sculptors.  She was born and raised in Seattle.   

Honorable Mention

To Maria, the Naturalist
From Esther, the Arawak Servant

by Cynthia C. Snow

You ask me to bring you a humpbacked cricket.
I march in with a tetrio sphinx moth, a huntsman
spider, and fourteen leaf cutter ants.

You send me out again.  “Humpbacked cricket,”
you say.  I saunter back with a mesquite bug, a longhorn
beetle, and a South American palm weevil.

A third time, you plead, “Please, a humpbacked cricket.”
The jungle, a green hoard, reaches,
gropes at the hem of my skirt.

You fail to know, humpbacked crickets favor
the bellyache bush, a bush I visited after that man,
after my belly, after my aunt made me

chew those leaves until black as tobacco, then
swallow, then more, again, until doubled over squat

by that ditch, it was done.

Cindy Snow’s writing has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Peace Review, Crannóg, and elsewhere. She has been a writing fellow at Cill Rialaig, Ireland, a Platte Clove Artist in Residence, and the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center Writing Residency.  Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart.  Cindy holds an MFA in Poetry from Drew University, where her poetry focused on the 17th Century naturalist and botanical artist, Maria Sibylla Merian.  Slate Roof Press recently published her chapbook, Small Ceremonies.  Cindy works at Greenfield Community College and lives in Shelburne Falls, MA, with her family.

Honorable Mention

Batrachomancy

    --divination by frogs

by Chelsea Wagenaar

Somewhere they leap on soft wet banks,
crouch in clear waters, their mottled skin
as dew brilliant as the spiderwebs were the spring
my father saved them.  They don’t know how
they were spared, of course, the wrist-thin skin
of their throats pale and pulsing to sound out
the hours, each other.  Perhaps only a few
still survive that spring twelve years ago,
when their mother trekked up from the wooded stream
that bordered our yard and emptied her belly
in our swimming pool—nebulous cluster
of milky globules suspended there, each an eye
with its black, pinpricked center.  There,
to our spellbound disgust, they hatched—
the pool a frantic bevy of heads and tails,
the luck or curse that placed them there.
If I follow them back through their afterlives,
bellowing and skin-darkened to herald
a coming rain, voluble with warning
when storms approached, some lost,
perhaps tweezed apart in junior high labs,
or caught again by my father, cupped too tightly
in the hands of his new daughter—if I follow them
back through their chorused, forested lives,
I can trace them up the garden hose
that poured them in synchronized frenzy
into their rightful waters, the hose
a sinuous lifeline climbing the yard to our pool, 
where its other end siphoned the tadpoles
from a water thrilled with their darting chaos.
Look harder, farther:  I see my father
by the stream, kneeling in damp clay,
his lungs full, his mouth around the hose
inhaling a deep, slow gasp, then another,
until the summoned water met his mouth.
The bodies pouring out into the life
they had not known to imagine.
And his watching them arrowed away
in the current like undoused green flames.
And the bitter, secret taste on his tongue.

Chelsea Wagenaar is the author of Mercy Spurs the Bone, winner of the 2013 Philip Levine Prize.  She holds a PhD from the University of North Texas, and she is currently a postdoctoral Lilly Fellow at Valparaiso University.  Her poems appear recently or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, 32 Poems, The Normal School, and Poetry Northwest.