More of this Feature • The original Word Hoard challenge • The challenge winner: Lorna Dee Cervantes • Runner-up: Sherman Alexie

Join the Discussion The original challenge: Want to see some of the other poems written in response to the word hoard challenge?

Clearly, Galway’s gauntlet pricked the thought balloon of inspiration: thirty-four Loyal Readers responded to Professor Kinnell’s vocabulary test. And picking a winner was tough, tough, tough: would it be Larry Tilander, who threw out Whitmanesque lines in rhyme royale? Selig, who invoked Skinner’s dog? Vicki Barber, who concludes “goggling the semisoft hypnotic fibs”? Or the bravura Yankeedog, who forced the eight required words into but three lines (“Prog my worm with your vagrant saliva”)?

Two Muselettrists took the plunge: Leonardo Della Rocca titled his effort “Could Be Cary Grant” (“...a button on the bed”), while Marvelous Marj Hahne left us hanging: “Tiptoe on the red metal crest of the Golden Gate Bridge -- un un un.”

But the top two poems IMHO were so evenly matched that I resorted to Form to choose: one poet churned the required vocabulary in absolute order, another wove them as sense dictated. Flipping a metaphor, I went with Sense over Order: Lorna Dee Cervantes. Her poem, “Imagine,” begins “How little you know the poor” -- to launch the poem completely ignoring the assignment is a pure heart move. The piece includes Spanish (“Dímele,” following “dime” and preceding “dive”) -- we’re in the hands of a master, and Lorna wins the latest set of Juliette Torrez’s knockout Kapow chapbooks.

The runner-up? A poet named Sherman Alexie, whose prize is to get his poem printed here. Who knows, maybe this could lead to big things for this talented young poet!

Bob Holman

Next page > Lorna Dee Cervantes > page 1, 2, 3

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