By Sean Frederick Forbes, PhD

Assistant Professor-in-Residence

Director, Creative Writing Program

UConn English Department

As my fellow judges and I read through the submission packets for this year’s UConn ECE Wallace Stevens Poetry Contest, we were impressed by the varying subjects and topics that students chose to write about. What the three of us discovered was that many of the poems moved us to think about why one chooses to write poetry and what does one hope to convey in poetic verse? We considered why poetry, if not the written word in all genres, matters as we continue to live through a devastating global pandemic. As I write this, I’m reminded of the last two lines of the poem “The Summer Day” by the late Mary Oliver, in which the speaker invites the reader to ponder this direct and undemanding, yet highly philosophical, question: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” If one is a writer, especially a poet, the theme of “Finding Joy, Finding Beauty, Finding Purpose” might very well be an earnest and awe-inspiring response. It’s a theme that best conveys how I’d like to introduce the first, second, and third prize-winning poems, respectively.

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Charlotte Watts’ “After ‘Chinese Satellite’ by Phoebe Bridgers” is an ekphrastic, usually a poem that describes, or is inspired by, or speaks to another work of art, typically visual art, but here we have a poem based on a song by a 2021 Grammy-nominated musician. A reader’s first impulse might be to listen to Bridgers’ song, but the splendor of this poem is in engaging with the images and phrases, and also the myriad narratives Watts creates throughout in lines such as: “maybe I would sleep easier if / there were ufos over my street.”

Zara Williamson’s “To Find God in Me” is a spoken word poem that acts as a homily for a speaker who confronts and analyzes how body image, the mother/daughter relationship, and religion affect a teenage girl’s life. Williamson uses the pivotal refrain “But Momma says” three times in the poem to convey that despite any misunderstandings, tensions, and upheavals that the speaker may have in her teenage life, her mother listens to understand, thus allowing the speaker to write confidently with lines such as: “I talk to the sky sometimes / I imagine She listens with her ears open as my heart / Loud as my voice ringing in the Church bathroom.”

A reader will find joy, beauty, and purpose in these three poems since the personalities and voices of each speaker convey so acutely what it means to live and write in the 21^st century.