This year, I am again a co-recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Lyric Poetry Prize!
You may read the poem here.
The judge had to comment:
Matthew Melnicki's 'Untitled'.
The best thing about the poem, to my mind, is simply that it is surprising.
It doesn't bother with anything needless and instead launches, quite
economically, into a figure that it manages to develop both from line to
line and in a kind of spiral of effects. The movement into a looser rhyme
works here, as do the progressively less tethered images and phrases (I like
'swivel circumstance', 'accolades come crinkled', etc.), to create a kind of
swirl that's restrained into shape by some very nice alliterative sound-play
and internal rhyme. I'm not entirely sold on the penultimate sentence ('to
bleakly transcend' may be rhythmically demanded, but doesn't feel quite
right, and the dream-interpretation link seems a bit easy) or the ultimate
one. But the need to turn the pace is clearly sensed--and done with a bit
of panache.
posted by M.Melnicki 4:52 PM
