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ProForma 2017: “Here Is a List of Words I Prefer” by Eric Dovigi

April 4, 2018 By Grist Journal

ProForma 2017: “Here Is a List of Words I Prefer” by Eric Dovigi

To read Eric Dovigi’s ProForma Prize-winning piece, download “Here Is a List of Words I Prefer.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Eric Dovigi lives in Flagstaff, Arizona. His work can be found online at: Grist, Hobart, Waxwing, Sourland Mountain Review, Universidad de Madrid’s JACLR, and elsewhere.

Judge Alex Lemon writes of Dovigi’s “Here Is a List of Words I Prefer”: From beginning to end, “Here is a list of words I prefer” is an expression of full-throated joy: it is a lyrical exploration/ explosion with manifold pleasures. Electric in its deepening, expressive movements—from “yelwe orca crustacean grass burgundy” to “I’m a google search away from a final cynicism,” to the delightful, intellectually vibrant, and emotionally palpable—it is a piece of writing humorous and wise and human. Its graceful modulation of tone allows it a splendored use of both text and image. The suppleness of mind behind it makes the writing leap and plumb, to be beautiful and strange and confess while always, always celebrating.

For more information on Grist‘s ProForma contest and how to submit, here’s our contest page.

Filed Under: Contest Tagged With: Contest, Eric Dovigi, fiction, hybrid, nonfiction, Poetry, Proforma

ProForma 2017: “Five Poems” by Philip Schaefer

April 4, 2018 By Grist Journal

Never Have I Never Have I

                                                   Death is the only adventure where I live.
                                                                   – Dustin Hoffman (Captain Hook)

Story of a boy’s peach kite. Story of the butterfly

knife divorcing his hand from its thin tether.

Story like every other, beginning with a toaster,

ending in a clawfoot tub – wet lightning. Memphis

nude as ever. Rice fields up to their throats in holy

water. We know the one about the jaguar tooth

necklace and the broken spear. The slow salvation

of amphetamines and the wooden steps to Harlem.

You are a dot in the wild eye of a poppy. You can

mean everything but only once. In some stories

we hear voices begging for the story to end.

For the quick spit of a trigger. How our bodies

are sorted by orifices. How election stories are

rigged for this. In the back alley I watch a kid

dressed as batman roll a cigarette. Old women

on a wraparound porch burn holes in their playing

cards. One for every scar on their shoulders, one

more because now it feels good. We pine for

the story in which the dream never ends,

where we finally learn to fly without making love

to the telephone line. The newspaper describes

the city bus on its side in Augusta, its only living

passenger still drunk behind the wheel, hacking up

dragons. Mothers keep giving birth and their children

keep going first. In the future I will buy a house

with a lawn the size of Kansas. I’ll build an ark

big enough to drown in. The new weather pattern:

send out exquisite falcons until we all disappear.

 

Edict with Burnt Mattress

I’ve been drinking saline again. My eyes are laughing

dolphins. Some nights undress themselves like Amsterdam.

Some nights there’s only an empty cauldron left for us

to witch over. Here kitty kitty, here dead rabbit. I am this close

to creating a name for the moment the lozenge sleeps

in the throat. What are we to do with the wooden spoon of time

in which your lover stops loving you but never tells you?

Hallelujah. Fall backwards. This abandoned hotel hosts miniature hotels

and I am walking on my elbows. Call it a disappearing

act. There is cold hard cash in the way a knuckle spits blood, becomes

one with wallpaper. When I’m done you’ll know. Pretend

to smile. Some bodies are a pincushion for failed desire. As I draw

an outline of your face on the mirror I understand how you could float

without drowning. Maybe the Dutch word for excellent, keep going

was in my hands the whole time. Maybe it felt like red fur.

 

Salvation Party

There are years we lose to people
we didn’t realize we never loved. I want to write down each
of my memories and inflate balloons
around them, send them off to god. My dead uncle in #2
pencil, wrapped in alligator latex,
floating like a planet into black dust. If you were to make me
describe the time my father took thumbtacks
from the refrigerator and glued them to the wooden paddle,
I’d want the balloon to be the shade
of a whale’s eye or the white fist of a fire, something worth
putting your lips on until near explosion.
Or the time the soccer coach had us all over for a slumber party
and what happened in the Vegas
of his desires left scars on the insides of our mouths. Let that
balloon be 24 karat gold, something pure
as a whistle, something like a dryer sheet you inhale over & over
until the idea of clean becomes more
than clean. Water balloons for the friends I keep promising
to call back. Grenades with chocolates
inside them for all my ex-lovers. I want balloons to rise
in the night like exotic jellyfish, to be bright
as a child entering this world, still flawless, covered in blood.

 

X

This is the future of the future of growing
old: a coal train splitting out the stomach
of a planet. I am painting a horizon
with my fingernails. I am the size of evening,
crumpled purple, the nowhere if nowhere
is bright. Maybe heaven is on a map
we don’t have. Small X in the corner. Because I am
out of ideas. Because you could live a thousand
years, each mattering less and less like the children
piling up at our feet. This is a butcher’s parade,
a flower in the mouth of a rabid dog
dissolving into a revolver aimed at your heart.
I once sent a baseball through a car window. Imagine
the glass-blood hand of the man who picked it up,
his boyhood grin, his thirsty grip. If the stars
are sleeping wolves, rattle your bell. Open an eye.

 

Tarot Fight

Days disappear down the hallway
of a magician’s black hat. We crawl out

of one womb simply to enter the closing fist
of another. There are poppies in Belgium

whose only task is to be as red as the holy
skull of the sun, then die. Give me loud rain.

Give me a number longer than my name.
The imagination has become a thirty second

download, a graphic on the plastic jacket
of a game that never ends. Wake up, kid,

you’re it. The tree that doesn’t turn into a fort
leads to divorce. The girl whose moonlit hair

without anyone there to smoke rings through it
is the reason our language tastes like rot.

When the rivers on the seer’s face host volcanoes
for eyes, get up and run. This was always about you.

 


Philip Schaefer’s debut collection of poems Bad Summon (University of Utah Press, 2017) won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, and he’s the author of three chapbooks, two co-written with friend and poet Jeff Whitney. He won the 2016 Meridian Editor’s Prize in poetry and has work out or due out in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Thrush Poetry Journal, Guernica, The Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill, Bat City Review, The Adroit Journal, Baltimore Review, diode, and Passages North among others. He tends bar in Missoula, MT.

Judge Alex Lemon writes of Schaefer’s “Five Poems”: There’s so much to love in this submission of wonderfully pitched poems: among them, the twinning of assertion and the sadly-strange in the superb “Salvation Party,” and the ecstatic suckerpunch of their closing lines, like “to be bright / as a child entering this world, still flawless and covered in blood” or “get up and run. This was always about you.” These poems risk and hazard and play, unfolding and/or wormholing their poetic worlds, deftly accreting emotion-packed images. These are dazzling poems.

For more information on Grist‘s ProForma contest and how to submit, here’s our contest page.

Filed Under: Contest Tagged With: Contest, Philip Schaefer, Poetry, Proforma

ProForma 2017: “Bedroom” by Brian Clifton

April 4, 2018 By Grist Journal

The man
sat across
my bed.
His head
pushed
against the mattress.

Cupped in the mattress,
the man
pushed
fabric across
my body. His head
on mine in bed.

Back then, a bed
was a mattress,
and my head
was a man
and a cross.
I pushed

when he pushed.
On the bed,
my hand across
his torso’s mattress,
which cupped a man
like a head

in hands or a head
pushed
against a man.
My bed
was a mattress
which, across,

I stretched as a cross.
My head
also a mattress
pushed
in by bodies. A bed
is like a man,

a man snuffed across
his bed—his head
pushed deep in the mattress.

 


Brian Clifton co-edits Bear Review. His work can be found in: The Journal, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Guernica, Salt Hill, and other such magazines. He is a first year doctoral student at the University of North Texas.

Judge Alex Lemon writes of Clifton’s “Bedroom”: “Bedroom” is a gorgeous sestina. It takes full advantage of the fugue of the form, spinning us through its stanzas. In an ebb and flow of iteration and emotive space, it tightrope-walks the razor edge that sits between pleasure and pain.

For more information on Grist‘s ProForma contest and how to submit, here’s our contest page.

Filed Under: Contest Tagged With: Brian Clifton, Contest, Poetry, Proforma

Announcing the Winners of the 2017 Pro Forma Contest

July 17, 2017 By Grist Journal

Announcing the Winners of the 2017 Pro Forma Contest

We are very pleased to announce the winners of our third annual ProForma Contest!

  • First Place: Eric Dovigi, “Here Is a List of Words I Prefer”
  • Second Place: Philip Schaefer, “Five Poems”
  • Third Place: Brian Clifton, “Bedroom”

See below for what judge Alex Lemon had to say about each of our winners:

 

First Place and winner of $1200: Eric Dovigi, “Here Is a List of Words I Prefer”

Eric Dovigi lives in Flagstaff, Arizona. His work can be found online at: Grist, Hobart, Waxwing, Sourland Mountain Review, Universidad de Madrid’s JACLR, and elsewhere.

Judge Alex Lemon writes of Dovigi’s “Here Is a List of Words I Prefer”: From beginning to end, “Here is a list of words I prefer” is an expression of full-throated joy: it is a lyrical exploration/ explosion with manifold pleasures. Electric in its deepening, expressive movements—from “yelwe orca crustacean grass burgundy” to “I’m a google search away from a final cynicism,” to the delightful, intellectually vibrant, and emotionally palpable—it is a piece of writing humorous and wise and human. Its graceful modulation of tone allows it a splendored use of both text and image. The suppleness of mind behind it makes the writing leap and plumb, to be beautiful and strange and confess while always, always celebrating.

***

Second Place: Philip Schaefer, “Five Poems”

Philip Schaefer’s debut collection of poems Bad Summon (University of Utah Press, 2017) won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, and he’s the author of three chapbooks, two co-written with friend and poet Jeff Whitney. He won the 2016 Meridian Editor’s Prize in poetry and has work out or due out in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Thrush Poetry Journal, Guernica, The Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill, Bat City Review, The Adroit Journal, Baltimore Review, diode, and Passages North among others. He tends bar in Missoula, MT.

Judge Alex Lemon writes of Schaefer’s “Five Poems”: There’s so much to love in this submission of wonderfully pitched poems: among them, the twinning of assertion and the sadly-strange in the superb “Salvation Party,” and the ecstatic suckerpunch of their closing lines, like “to be bright / as a child entering this world, still flawless and covered in blood” or “get up and run. This was always about you.” These poems risk and hazard and play, unfolding and/or wormholing their poetic worlds, deftly accreting emotion-packed images. These are dazzling poems.

***

Third Place: Brian Clifton, “Bedroom”

Brian Clifton co-edits Bear Review. His work can be found in: The Journal, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Guernica, Salt Hill, and other such magazines. He is a first year doctoral student at the University of North Texas.

Judge Alex Lemon writes of Clifton’s “Bedroom”: “Bedroom” is a gorgeous sestina. It takes full advantage of the fugue of the form, spinning us through its stanzas. In an ebb and flow of iteration and emotive space, it tightrope-walks the razor edge that sits between pleasure and pain.

 

 

 

***

Congratulations also to this year’s finalists and semi-finalists!

Finalists:
Kayleb Rae Candrilli
M.E. MacFarland
Nawal Nader-French
Julianne Neely
Jess Richards
Zachary Vickers
Summar West

Semi-Finalists:
Sheila Arndt
Stacey Balkun
Brandi George
Margaux Griffith
Laura Grothaus
Caitlin Scarano
Ann Stewart McBee
Mary White
Brenna Womer
Mary Wysong-Haeri

***

The three winners will be published in Grist’s Issue Eleven in February 2018. To pre-order Issue Eleven, head over to our Submittable page.

Filed Under: Contest, News Tagged With: Alex Lemon, Brian Clifton, Contest, Eric Dovigi, Philip Schaefer, Proforma

Announcing the Winners of the 2016 ProForma Contest

August 9, 2016 By Grist Journal

Announcing the Winners of the 2016 ProForma Contest

We are very pleased to announce the winners of our second annual ProForma Contest!

  • First Place: Nicholas Gulig, “Denizen”
  • Second Place: Cameron McGill, “This Dream”
  • Third Place: Iliana Rocha, “Tabloid for Judy Garland”

See below for what judge Hadara Bar-Nadav had to say about each of our winners:

 

First Place and winner of $750: Nicholas Gulig, “Denizen”

nick pic

Nicholas Gulig is a Thai-American poet from Wisconsin. The author of two books of poetry, “North of Order” (YesYes Books) and “Book of Lake” (CutBank), he currently lives in Fort Atkinson and teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Judge Hadara Bar-Nadav writes of Gulig’s “Denizen”: C.D. Wright claims “Poetry is nothing if not equipped for crisis. Sharp and penetrating, it cuts through every fear by which we are secretly governed, brings each to the light of the page and names it.” And I can’t help but think she could be speaking of “Denizen,” a wonderfully daring and ambitious poem that charges forth into the political landscape, bringing with it palpable fear and longing and language itself, as it questions how a writer can write about war and destruction and terror while actually doing that writing.

The muscular sound and syntax of this long sequence jostles us, pulls us uneasily into its fragmented, tension-filled world via sinewy phrases (“the noise became the violence of its occurrence” or “Of narrative and nationality, a state of pure emergency.”) “Denizen” captures the warp of war and narrative, of a speaker who writes poems in a café and reads “what lived and died on my computer,” as so many of us do: war is what happens elsewhere until it doesn’t. Form effectively energizes the content, a live-wire pulse that shape-shifts in this hybrid sequence of lineated poems, fragmented bursts, and prose.

Though the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings and the various wars and military action it sparked seem to be the impetus, “Denizen” also considers what it is to be a global citizen in the information age. How do we mediate the distance between the person at a computer watching the war on the news and the person who is in a war zone? How do we mediate language when one is writing about war that happens elsewhere but is intimately felt? “Language is a residue. / I cling,” states the speaker, and the words “residue” and “cling” are at once hopeful and tenuous.   Of course, writing about war is problematic in many ways, but also necessary. The speaker in “Denizen” is undeniably culpable (“Here I am: a variance, a violence”) and asks us to consider our own part, too. “Denizen” is challenging, breathless, innovative, and stunning. This is a necessary work in a difficult time.

***

Second Place: Cameron McGill, “This Dream”

CameronB&W

Cameron McGill is a second-year MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Idaho. He is originally from Champaign, IL. He received his BA in Political Science from the University of Illinois. Cameron is Poetry Editor for the journal Fugue. His work has been published in Poetry East, Measure and Split-Lip.

Judge Hadara Bar-Nadav writes of McGill’s “This Dream”: I was immediately struck by the precision and elegance of the form, a mark of craft that is evident from the very first line. Rich specifics supercharge the poem, delicious place names that build a world for the reader and are also notable for their delightful sonic quality (as in “Ruins in Antrim”). Deft syntax also energizes these lines as in the heartbreakingly short sentence: “Little joy,” which is wonderfully ambiguous (how wonderful that there is joy, how tragic that there is little of it). And the last stanza is a stunner: the ghostly aching of loss rendered in concrete imagery, as in “your tenor from the empty living room” and “you subtract your dance from the dark.” The last line is equally surprising and fresh: all the well-wrought imagery, the words, the world, get it wrong; the beloved cannot be reproduced or returned. A dazzling ending for a dazzling poem.

***

Third Place: Iliana Rocha, “Tabloid for Judy Garland”

IMG_3969-1 (1)

Iliana Rocha earned her PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University. Her work has been featured in the Best New Poets 2014 anthology, as well as Bennington Review, Blackbird, and Third Coast. Karankawa, her debut collection, won the 2014 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is available through the University of Pittsburgh Press. She is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma where she teaches creative writing.

Judge Hadara Bar-Nadav writes of Rocha’s “Tabloid for Judy Garland”: This whole series of poems is wonderfully inventive and fresh, but “Tabloid for Judy Garland” is particularly powerful and balances innovation, tone, diction, and content in evocative ways. I was immediately struck by how absence is articulated through brackets, a kind of self-erasure that mirrors the self-erasure via drugs and alcohol hinted at in “her liver singing ruin, ruin.” This ruptured villanelle captures glimpses, glimmerings, and fracturings of a life all at once, from the “rainbow folded in half” to a woman in red, “skeletal & amphetamine.” Visceral imagery, diction, syntax, and sound work hand in hand in such well-wrought lines as “Voice of limping menthol bell…”. The “we” in the poem is also a resonant and heartbreaking choice; the “we” who “star in opposite directions” are strangers at last and loss lingers on.

***

The three winners will be published in Grist’s Tenth Anniversary Issue in February 2017. To pre-order Issue Ten, head over to our Submittable page.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Cameron McGill, Contest, Grist, Hadara Bar-Nadav, Iliana Rocha, Nicholas Gulig, Proforma

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