Toehold
winning poem by Margot Wizansky
Every day you make the choice to live
on the slippery ledge, where you almost always
fail to find a toehold, mesmerized as you are
by the gelid clarity of water or the far-off blow
of some blue-green radiance, the steely whistle
of work and money, the softer mist of love,
everything draws you–the cold burn seizing
anyone who stands up in the boat. Paddle
through the irresistible archway. Take a piece
of the iceberg to chill your cocktail. It can
roll over you. Virtue will carry you only so far
and help never comes fast enough.
The judge, Lynn Emanuel’s, comments...
“Toehold is both an accessible and chillingly mysterious poem. In a landscape at once literal and symbolic, an unnamed protagonist lives on a slippery ledge. Because the poem, mainly five to six beat iambic lines, is packed with quick trochees and enjambments, each of its lines becomes a little precipice. The cadence rushes forward, only occasionally obstructed or momentarily dammed by the images, complex and beautiful. Virtue will carry you only so far/ and help never comes fast enough proclaims the end of the poem. It is as though the very cadence of these lines is the virtue that carries the reader and the helpless protagonist, you, to whatever fate the quickness of this wonderfully disquieting poem brings to them. This is a poetry of odd and compelling effect.”
Margot Wizansky's Bio
Twelve years ago, in the twilight of a long career as a social worker, Margot Wizansky joined Barbara Helfgott Hyett’s Workshops for Publishing Poets. She has since had poems published in a number of journals such as Antigonish Review, Kalliope, Poetry East, American Journal of Nursing, Lumina, Inkwell, and in several anthologies, including Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge, and Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease. In 2007, she placed in both Northwest Cultural Council’s competition and in American Literary Review’s competition. She was a finalist in Inkwell’s competition, 2008, and won the Writers @ Work Fellowship Competition, 2008, and studied with Kim Addonizio, the competition’s judge.She edited two anthologies of poems, Mercy of Tides: Poems for a Beach House, 2003, and Rough Places Plain: Poems of the Mountains, 2006.
She is currently circulating a poetry manuscript and oral history: Don’t Look Them In The Eye: Love, Life, and Jim Crow, the story of a grandson of slaves, son of sharecroppers, told in his words and my poems. |
Margot will receive the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award, in the form of roundtrip
travel and lodging as a participating guest of Carlow’s MFA residency at the
Innisfree International College and Convention Centre (St. Angela’s College) Lough Gill,
in Sligo, Ireland, in the heart of Yeats’ country, June 18-28, 2010; publication in
Voices from the Attic; and a reading at Carlow University in Pittsburgh.
For more information, please contact Ellie Wymard, PhD, at 412-578-6346.
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