One of ours awarded second place in the November IBPC

A big round of virtual applause to Forum poet Guy Kettelhack (GuyBlakeKett), whose poem “Bird Painter” was chosen as second place winner in the delayed November 2007 InterBoard Poetry Competition. Judge E. Ethelbert Miller was led by Guy’s lines to a meditation on generational love and blindness: “If we could see with their eyes, we would understand the beauty of birds. We would discover our own wings.” Bravo!

The other winning poems Miller chose were:

• In first place, “First Born” by Ellen Kombiyil, a “celebratory and wonderful” poem that draws its readers, of any sex, to want to participate in the baby-making it describes. Miller’s response: “If you’re a man you might want to exchange your body for one that is female.”
• In third place, “The Gravity of it Beautiful” by Melanie G. Firth, a poem about silences and hesitations that drew Miller in with its title and one-word first line, then “The punctuation kept stopping me in unexpected places,” and finally “I was a sucker for love” -- now that’s an effective word-construction!

We are still awaiting the February and March IBPC results from judge Fleda Brown, and we’ll be back to report just as soon as we hear from her.

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