I’ve been watching the fish in the aquarium.
It’s an oblong box and it sits in the corner of the living room,
full of brooding water. I hate it.
I think that they would hate it too
if they knew the alternatives, or even
that there were any alternatives.
But they don’t,
do they darling?

misterF,

You could put them out to the sea, where other fishies could eat them up, re-cycle them, so to speak...away from their brooding [I love the term] water.

Peter

Good to see your name on the board Stephen. I enjoyed the read here.


Les

Ani DiFranco - Little Plastic Castle

In a coffee shop in a city
Which is every coffee shop in every city
On a day which is every day
I picked up a magazine
Which is every magazine
Read a story, and then forgot it right away

They say goldfish have no memory
I guess their lives are much like mine
And the little plastic castle
Is a surprise every time
And it's hard to say if they're happy
But they don't seem much to mind

Get ready to hear me blow my own trumpet.

This little poem has just been placed first in a competition. The judge said:

"Good poetry is often paradoxical. It can be direct, but also oblique. It can show and at the same time hide. It can state and suggest.

Stephen Fryer’s poem, ‘Fish’, succeeds in all these areas:
• it speaks directly about one thing in order to point to another
• it describes one situation but another is masked
• it states the narrator’s specific feeling towards the aquarium which suggests so much about the narrator’s relationship with ‘darling'."

What do you think. Leaving my immodesty aside, do you agree with the judge?

Stephen,

A well-deserved flap of the fin.

Peter

Stephen,

First of all, congratulations! You have long deserved to be able to call yourself a prize-winning poet.

As for whether we agree with this particular judge, that's a trick question. Agree with placing you first? Like those fish, we don't know the alternatives. Whom or what were you competing with? What were the parameters?

I admit to being surprised, pleasantly, that your little poem which shuns reliance on most of the better known poetic devices was lucky enough to encounter such a perceptive judge.

I wouldn't disagreee with the qualities he or she found in it. You would no doubt agree they are not an exhaustive list of poetic merit criteria .

One essential prize-winning quality your poem does have, which the judge didn't mention, was that espoused by T.S.Eliot (I think it was) when he wrote something to the effect that "The first duty of a poem is to be memorable". He didn't mean capable of being easily memorised. He meant fresh or unusual or striking in a memorable way. Yours is certainly that.

So, winners are grinners. And as a card someone once sent me when I passed my degree course said: "Run! Before they change their minds".

Cheers,

Ian

Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 11/09/2021 06:03PM by IanAKB.