We are delighted that Cheryl Moskowitz (pictured above) has agreed to judge Poetry Space Competition 2012Chicago born poet, playwright, storyteller and novelist Cheryl Moskowitz will be judging our third annual poetry competition. Cheryl's recent awards include: The Torbay Poetry Competition (2009), Bridport Prize (2010), the Troubadour International Poetry Prize (2010) and 2nd Prize in the International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine (2011) Open Category.
We are thrilled to have Cheryl on board. The competition will be open for entries in November and will close on June 30th 2012.
Entries will be accepted from anywhere in the world. No theme this time. This will be an "open" competition for all poets over 16.
For more about Cheryl go to http://www.cherylmoskowitz.com/
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Ahead of our competition I asked David R.Morgan what inspires him to write? David is an award winning poet with many poems in print. His latest collection Beneath The Dreaming Tree is now available at Poetry Space Bookshop
See the comments below?
For more about Cheryl go to http://www.cherylmoskowitz.com/
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Ahead of our competition I asked David R.Morgan what inspires him to write? David is an award winning poet with many poems in print. His latest collection Beneath The Dreaming Tree is now available at Poetry Space Bookshop
See the comments below?
What does poetry mean to you?
ReplyDeleteThe experiments of Russian film pioneer Lev Kuleshov in the late teens and early 1920’s are touchstones in film. His most famous experiment saw him juxtapose a neutral close-up of actor Ivan Mozhukhin with a shot of a bowl of soup, then the same close up with a dead woman in a coffin, then again with a little girl playing with a doll. Audiences, it is aid, raved at the actors’ sensitive projection of hunger, grief and paternal pride, proving Kuleshov’s theory that two individual shots projected in succession are always integrated into one whole by the viewer, so that A + B = C. The influence of his experiment paved the way for all film grammar to come.
How clever to manufacture emotion with such figurative juxtaposition and how like so much of poetry, where we take the arbitrary as the pre-destined and vice versa. Poetry means everything and I see it everywhere.
David R Morgan
What things inspire you to write?
ReplyDeleteMaking sense of things. Wondering what Dark Matter is; why the galaxies are speeding faster and faster away from each other; why we live and why we die; why pigs aren’t green and grass doesn’t go oink.
Also… bagpipes. The idea is distasteful at best. An awkward arthritic octopus of wind, approximating some parody of breathing,
like a medical apparatus from some Victorian sick-ward. A grotesque poem in three dimensions, a rococo thing-a-me-bob.
Drunk, I once grabbed bagpipes to my chest and right away I had to lean back on my heels, my chin in the air,
my back arched like a bullfighter or flamenco dancer. I became an unheard of contradiction:
an off-balance ball of high-pitched screaming in a peaceful university study area.
Ah, but for all that, I find evidence of the soul in the most unlikely places.
Once in a German restaurant in St. Petersburg, an ancient Bagpiper came to our table and played the old favourites:
"Scotland the brave," “Mull of Kintyre," "Brave heart," and through all the clichés his spirit sounded clearly.
It seemed like the bagpipes hovered in air, and he swayed weightlessly one with them, eyes closed, back in Scotland, in some lost village of his childhood.
For a moment we all floated -the whole restaurant: the patrons, the knives and forks, the Pilsner bier, the sacrificed sausages and sauerkraut on plates.
Everything was pure and eternal, fragilely suspended like a stained-glass window in the one remaining wall, of a bombed out Russian Orthodox Church.
Who have been your greatest inspirations?
ReplyDeleteMy parents, my children and the Minotaur that lives down the bottom of our garden with the ghost of Buster Keaton.
On weekends I help my Dad look for his soul. He says he used to be a wizard of words, or a giant poet (the story varies from telling to telling), and, as was the custom for his kind, he put his soul into an egg (or perhaps a stone) for safe-keeping. He hid the egg (or stone) inside a duck (or in the belly of a sheep, or in a tree stump), and so long as his soul was safe, his body could not be killed or wounded.
"Oh," he says. "I was the greatest terror of the hills. My words ate the hearts of knights," or sometimes, "I lived in my high tower and none dared oppose me, and with the reciting of my poetry I could turn stone to mud and water to boiling blood." Or sometimes "The earth trembled with my every image." He said this almost wistfully.
My Dad is seventy eight (unless he is hundreds of years old as he claims). His skin is covered in dark freckles, liver spots, and moles, and he says that each blemish marks a year he's lived beyond his rightful span. All he wants is to find the egg (or stone) that houses his soul, so that he may break the egg (or crush the stone) and die.
I asked him once, while we looked for his soul in the waste bins at the park, "How could you misplace your soul?"
"I hid it so well, I forgot where it was hidden," he said.
"Seems like a hell of a thing to forget, Dad." I said.
"When you don't have a soul," he said, "It's harder to know which things are important to remember."
We go out every weekend. He's old. I am his only son, although his dementia means that he doesn’t remember who I am. Mum sheds a tear for the husband she has lost to legend. Dad and I are companions for one another. He tells marvellous stories. Although he never did, it is as if he once taught mythology, though he tells the tales of gods and heroes as if he saw it all first-hand.
Once he found a robin's egg on the ground. It must have fallen from a nest. He held the egg in trembling hands, cracked it, and yolk spilled out. No soul. He shook the egg off his hands. Bits of shell fell to the ground. He wiped his hands on his trousers and went on looking, picking up rocks, dropping them in disgust and frustration.
We go out every weekend; we walk the length of the town
and back, but somehow the earth never trembles…only me.
“I burn with desire,” says the Green Man, “I burn with desire,” says he.