Winners chosen in the December InterBoard Poetry Competition

IBPC judge E. Ethelbert Miller didn’t select any of the poems submitted from our Poetry Forum as winners in last month’s competition, but the poems he did select are lovely and wintry, full of imaginary leaps and chills and ghostly images in darkness:

• In first place, “Ruth in Ward 3A Imagines Herself as a Tree” by Brenda Levy Tate, a poem he admired for its title and “how it works with the sonnet structure” and for its closing couplet.
• In second place, “Northland Solstice” by Eric Linden, a poem that captures the winter landscape of Alaska in all its chilly beauty.
• In third place, “Crossing at Night” by Maryann Corbett, a ghostly nighttime encounter he found “haunting in a mystical sense.”

Miller also chose three elegies for honorable mention, without comment: “My Mother’s Bones” by Laurie Byro, “Mersey Mersey Me” by Christopher T. George, and “Time Gone Cold” by Linda Balboni.

You may well ask, what ever happened to our November IBPC entries? We have just heard from the IBPC editors that the monthly competition process suffered some big delays in October and November, not many of the participating boards entered poems for November, and so they went ahead with the December competition while deciding what to do with the November poems. They have now decided to send those poems to E. Ethelbert Miller for judging as originally planned (just a couple of months late).

In the meantime, they’re going ahead with the January competition, which will be judged by Fleda Brown. As always, we are relying on you, dear readers, to keep the nominations coming! Whenever you see a great poem posted on our Forum, no matter where it is, come to the InterBoard Poetry Competition folder and nominate it! There are so many postings on the Forum that your Poetry Guides need your help to sift out the worthy entries at the end of each month. We’ll be back in a few days with the January 2008 entries.

Related resources:
About the IBPC
Requirements for IBPC nominees
Anthology of the monthly IBPC winning poems
Archive of poems entered in the IBPC from our Poetry Forum