InterBoard Poetry Competition Poems of the Year

We’ve just passed another anniversary of the InterBoard Poetry Competition—it may be difficult to believe, but our Forum has been participating in this monthly competition for nine years, now! This is the time of year when we look back over all the winning poems from the past year and ask a distinguished judge to choose the IPBC Poems of the Year. Xeufei Jin, Chinese poet who writes in English and professor of English at Boston University, was asked to select the best of the poems that were awarded first, second, or third place from April 2008 through March 2009. All three of the poems he chose came from the same forum—Desert Moon Review, and two were written by the same poet, whose name should be familiar to many of our own Forum poets—Laurie Byro. (These facts make it necessary to remind everyone up front that, like the monthly competition, this judging is done anonymously, with the judge being given only the poems and not the names of the poets or the boards from which they were submitted.) Interestingly, all the Poems of the Year placed second in their original monthly competitions. We’ve added Jin’s commentary to the winning poems, which are definitely worth rereading:

• First Place: “A Fall from Grace,” by S. Thomas Summers
• Second Place: “Living in the Body of a Firefly,” by Laurie Byro
• Third Place: “Virginia Sings Back To the Stones In Her Pockets,” by Laurie Byro

We should soon have the results of the May IBPC—sad to say, our Forum had no entries this month. If you wish to participate in the June competition, it’s up to you to keep the IBPC nominations coming! Please, please, whenever you see a great poem posted on our Forum, no matter where it is, get over to the InterBoard Poetry Competition folder right away to nominate it. And be sure to notify the poet whose work you are putting forward, so that he or she can post the required permission and information before Poetry Guide Margy Snyder selects the next month’s entries.

More on the IBPC:
General information
Requirements for IBPC nominees
Anthology of the monthly IBPC winning poems
Archive of poems entered in the IBPC from our Poetry Forum
Background information and reading links for current IBPC judge Duncan Mercredi