Friday from the Archives: “Commencement” the 2016 James Applewhite Poetry Prize poem by Russell Colver with art by Joe Muench in NCLR 2017
Happy National Poetry Month! Our April Poetry Prize contests are both open for submission! This year marks the 15th anniversary for our James Applewhite Poetry Prize contest, celebrating the best written poem by a North Carolina poet. (Our Green Prize contest is back for a fourth year!)
Ten years ago, in 2016, Durham poet Russell Colver won the Applewhite Prize with her poem “Commencement.” James Applewhite himself was the guest final judge that year and about his selection, he remarked, “Commencement” re-imagines the re-beginning of life on Earth after the Biblical flood, and makes us feel this wonder (or danger) of beginning again. The language is self-aware as commentary while presenting a vivid dramatic situation. An action and the significance of it co-exist in these artful stanzas, as a tone of restraint opens out into a wide significance.”
Poets can submit from one to five (if criteria are met) poems to the contest and sometimes more than one makes it through selection rounds. Another of Colvin’s poems, “Acceptable Losses: A Refrigerator Note to My Daughter,” was chosen and published in our NCLR Online 2017 issue.
Here is the beginning of the Prize-winning poem:
“Commencement”
When the day came
for which they had waited,
Noah chose a dove
and in the first silver of dawn
carried her to the ark edge
and released her from his hands.
He had become attached,
during the turbulence
of those first weeks,
to her uneasy shifting
high on a rafter,
luminous in the dim light,
to the way she had watched him
as he tended the others,
as if his repetition of each task
secured her in the ceaseless
random motion of the hold.
Read the rest of the poem on ProQuest. Add the 2017 issue to your collection today!
