We are happy to announce that this year's winner of the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award is "Goliath," a poem by Heidi Poon from Charlottesville, Virginia. It was chosen from among 89 poems submitted by 48 poets from 19 states.
>> Read the Poem
The entries were read by poet Jan Beatty, with the final judging by poet Maggie Anderson. The Dobler contest is open to any woman writer over the age of 40 living in the U.S. who has not published a full-length book of poetry, fiction, or nonfiction.
The Dobler Award winner participated in the MFA June residency in Carlow, Ireland, with all expenses paid. Heidi participated in seminars, workshops and tours, including Bloomsday in Dublin! She also studied with renowned Irish poet, Mark Roper.
The finalists are Roberta Hatcher, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Christian Hutchins, Albany, California; Jen Karetnick, Miami Shores, Florida; Deborah Kossman, Haverton, Pennsylvania; Margaret Wizansky, Brookline, Massachusetts; Sandra Vrana, Buckhannon, West Virginia.
Comments from the Judge
The final judge for the Pat Dobler Prize was Maggie Anderson. Anderson is the author of four books of poems, most recently Windfall: New and Selected Poems (2000). Anderson has received prestigious fellowships for her poetry, including the MacDowell Colony and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is currently the director and a member of the faculty in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Kent State University, where she directs the Wick Poetry Center and edits the Wick Poetry Series of the Kent State University Press.
Anderson had the following praise for "Goliath" by Heidi Poon:
…“An eerie and exhilarating atmosphere is created in the first five or six lines of the poem that quickly pulls me in. I feel I am participating in the action of the poem, not knowing exactly where I am going, but led by a confident, compelling whisper…In this poem, Goliath is large and threatening (he hits the speaker ‘in the pinpoint of [the] heart’ and is yelling about different colored dogs). But it seems unlikely that the speaker will be defeated.
The poem shifts, at this point, to a more introspective voice: ‘Isn’t that how/you improve your lot? To believe you are only afraid/and only ugly…’
By the final lines, the personal struggle of the first half of the poem has transformed into a more public performance where no one is going for help and no one has failed to notice the wild goings-on in the darkened field. I love this poem for its pluck, and its strangeness. I refuse to believe –despite the lines ‘I was higher than…” – that this is a poem about a drug trip. It is about far more than that. It’s about the hands we are dealt and what it takes to get beyond them. Through image and music and the persistence of mystery, “Goliath” makes us relive both the rock bottom conditions and the daring, sure-footed escapes. |
