Poetry Without Paper Winners 2016 – Gloucester Lyceum & Sawyer Free Library

POETRY WITHOUT PAPER 2016

On behalf of the Gloucester Lyceum and the Sawyer Free Library, I want to welcome you to the Awards Ceremony for the thirteenth annual Poetry Without Paper competition. As usual, we received many strong entries, and our task as judges in sifting through them, re-reading the best of them, drawing fine distinctions, and eventually choosing the winners was both challenging and rewarding.

In a number of these program booklets over the years, we have sampled some well-known poets’ definitions of poetry — nothing you’d find in a dictionary, but rather something pithy or quirky, like Carl Sandburg’s “Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.” This time I’d like to share a description I discovered recently from an author famous for his essays and journals, Walden in particular, but not so much for his poetry, though he wrote a good deal of it — Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau calls poetry “the mysticism of mankind” and continues: “The expressions of the poet cannot be analyzed. His sentence is one word, whose syllables are words. There are indeed no words quite worthy to be set to his music. But what matter if we do not hear the words always, if we hear the music?”

This description, though a little more expansive than the clever one-liners we’ve shared in the past, still brings a fancy of its own in describing a genre of writing that can be elusive — hard to get a grip on, or to explain. Yet, as Thoreau suggests — much more eloquently — we know a good poem when we encounter it. And even in poems written by students of elementary, middle, or high school age, we may well find examples of that haunting “music” that we hear even when we may not grasp all of its individual “words.”

We are happy this evening once again to welcome Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken to our ceremony. She has written poetry of her own and participated in one of our “Gloucester Reads Poetry” programs several years ago. PWP is one of her many enthusiasms. Later in the year the winning poets will be invited to appear on John Ronan’s local cable program “The Writer’s Block.” They will also share cash prizes and each receive a book of poetry. I would like to thank and congratulate all the students who took part in this year’s contest, and their teachers and parents as well. I also want to thank my fellow judges, Jill Carter and Sage Walcott — both fine poets in their own right — who for the fifth year now have brought their enthusiasm and good judgment to the process of selecting the winning poems. And finally, for their various contributions to the success of the contest, I want to single out Helen Freeman, Kristen Jaques, Lewis Parsons, Carol Ackermann, Head Children’s Librarian Christy Rosso, Assistant SFL Director Beth Pocock, and finally, for her support and encouragement, Library Director Deborah Kelsey.

Richard M. Sloane
Head Poetry Judge

POETRY WITHOUT PAPER POETRY CONTEST, 2016