One of ours takes third place in the March IBPC

Big congratulations are due to Forum poet Greg McNeill (animalinside)! In his first foray representing the About Poetry Forum in the monthly InterBoard Poetry Competition, his poem “The Soul’s Active Ingredients” has been awarded third place by judge Fleda Brown, who was impressed by its “affecting unpretentiousness” and the way its sound “pulls off its abstractions” — “Who would think that a poem could get away with ‘interface / with the soul’s active ingredients’ without floating into space? Yet when I get here, I’m nodding my head, listening to the drum, and it’s okay.” The other winning poems chosen by Brown in the March competition were:

• In first place, “Carol for the Brokenhearted” by Brenda Levy Tate, a poem that is “beautifully controlled by its four-stress lines—it is a carol, after all—but within the lines, many wonderfully strange turns,” dark without being maudlin, “smart and polished.”
• In second place, “Bitch” by Carla Martin-Wood, which “lives up to its fierce title” with “pure energy, no blunder of language in the way between us.”

Brown also made honorable mention, without comment, of five more poems: “Remembering a City I Never Knew” by Don Schaeffer, “Corn Shy” by Kathleen Vibbert, “Love Through a Plate Glass Window” by Dave Rowley, “Bo-Peep Tunnel” by David Phillips and “The Season of Science” by M. E. Silverman — intriguing collection of titles, isn’t it?

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