ECE Wallace Stevens Poetry Contest
By Sean Frederick Forbes, PhD and Luisana Duarte Armendáriz Director and Graduate Assistant Director, Creative Writing Program
The theme of this year’s UConn ECE Summer Magazine “Beyond the Credits” is most fitting since it highlights the many opportunities available to student creative writers outside of the classroom. When I was a first-year college student in 1998 at Queens College, The City University of New York, I learned about the various creative writing contests, with generous cash prizes, and while I was terrified of submitting my poetry and prose for consideration, this process taught me the importance of professional development. While one may feel deeply vulnerable about submitting creative writing to contests, there’s a thrill that comes with organizing a five-page packet of poetry, sending it off, and the long, nervous waiting period for the winners to be announced. I often tell my undergraduate students to strongly consider submitting their writing to various contests that they are eligible for, and as my maternal grandmother used to tell me, “It’s like playing the lottery; there’s always a chance that you may actually win.”
This year the UConn ECE Wallace Stevens poetry contest received fifty-four poetry packets. My fellow judges, Luisana Duarte Armendáriz and Shelby Kreiger—both PhD candidates in English at UConn and are creative writers—and I selected three poetry packets by Iris Hida, Logan Roen, and Minh Ho as the first, second, and third prize winners respectively. On a Thursday afternoon in mid-February, Luisana, Shelby, and I held a Zoom meeting to discuss and select the winners, and after an hour of careful deliberating, the three of us were moved by the subjects and topics presented in all the submissions. There were three poetry packets that stood out to us the most due to the original language, tone, and voice expressed in the poems.
Iris Hida’s poem “The Freedom I Held Does Not Compare to the Spring: A Golden Shovel” employs an original poetic form that was invented in 2010 by Terrance Hayes as an homage Gwendolyn Brooks’s famous 1959 poem “We Real Cool.” The subtitle of Hida’s poem is taken from a quote by the Albanian poet Genc Leka who was executed in 1977 and serves as the last word in each line of the poem. This poetic form requires skill, concentration, and to make new meaning of the Leka’s quote. Hida uses the couplet form to allow the narrative of the poem to breathe, and the white space in between each stanza allows for the delivery of rich imagery such as “Silent, / pursed lips that curl when you / taste the citrus.”
Logan Roen’s poem “chicken noodle” relies heavily on monostich, a term derived from the ancient Greek, and a challenging yet rewarding poetic form in that the simple and direct language offers the reader intense brevity since there isn’t much room for elaboration in each line, thus the impact of the poem holds great emotional or philosophical weight. Roen uses lower case letters throughout to break from traditional grammar to create a more conversational and colloquial tone. The reader must consider how the title informs and relates to the narrative expressed in lines such as “and yet I’ve been told this is just soup. An occasionally aesthetic assortment / of the obscure and the obscene. i suppose time is the broth.”
Luisana notes that Minh Ho’s poem “organic mosaic” is, quintessentially, a memento mori poem. The line “and it is fleeting, for we are organic” encompasses the realist, yet appreciative tone that Ho manages to capture in a recounting of the decomposition process that humans go through in their daily lives. Addressing “the reader” directly, the first-person narrator offers a list of organic material humans shed and gives a double and profound meaning to the line “the world we inhabit is human made.” While the lines in this poem may seem morose at times, they also speak of a delicate balance in nature and remind us that we are dust and we all must go “back to the source.”
IRIS
Iris Hida is a senior at Rockville High School. This past summer she was at the Kelly Writers House Summer Workshop for Young Writers at the University of Pennsylvania and a mentee in the 2024 Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship program. She will be attending Harvard University in the fall.
The Freedom I Held Does Not Compare to the Spring: A Golden Shovel
“How long do you moan and be silent, you miserable heart… This spring didn’t even bloom for you” -Genc Leka, January 1971
My father bleeds history, tells me how verses burgundy paper with long
ballads for change—how do I feel their past agony? Where you
hold hands with grief, moan at your own words and
suppress your spirit. Be still at the round table. Silent,
pursed lips that curl when you taste the citrus. That miserable
burn at the lick of the sickle’s heart.
LOGAN
Logan Roen is a senior at New Canaan High School, where he is Co-President of Spectator Literary Magazine. He has wanted to be a writer since he was 7, drafting his first piece of fiction in second grade. He plans to attend film school in the fall to study screenwriting.
Chicken noodle
and she splits open, right down the middle.
i feel it, too, the meat of my body turning into unholy epithelial
layers flaking out, tasting the surplus of tainted oxygen.
what i feel, you feel, so you feel this, too. feel it. Explode.
her disintegration, is it dramatic to you? now that nothing is how it belongs?
and yet i’ve been told this is just soup. an occasionally aesthetic assortment
of the obscure and the obscene. i suppose time is the broth?
i marinade with you, and you marinade with me,
and i love you, and you hate me,
and then comes the spoon.
MINH
Minh Ho is a high school senior from Stamford, Connecticut. In the fall, they will major in political science. They are passionate about education and the way words can connect people from all walks of life. Their free time is spent drawing, listening to music, and finding new ways to describe the clouds. Writing has always been a meaningful part of their life, and they enjoy discussing different works with friends.
Organic Mosaic
i regret to inform the reader that they are shedding copious amounts of organic material.
dust? dead pieces of skin, formerly attached to you.
hair? your shower drain is graced by what once held to your scalp.
nails? hundreds, nay, thousands of clippings have (hopefully) made it to your trash.
the world we inhabit is human-made,
full of bright glass screens and plastic toys.
but even the greatest inventors are always leaving traces of who they are.
a fingerprint here, a footfall there.
the quietest person you know leaves a fleeting part of themself everywhere.
And it is fleeting, for we are organic.
forged metal may not decompose, and lord knows our plastic won’t,
but our traces will, the dead skin and hair and nails
our organic material will break down
day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute…
our bodies fall apart, and the nutrients used to make us, they return to the earth
we may try to halt the process, but it happens nonetheless.
organic material relinquishes its bond with us beings,
and goes back to the source.