In January 2014, the Academy of American Poets helped launch the New York State Poetry Unites contest for the best short essay about a favorite poem. Participants were invited to write a 600-word essay about their favorite poem and its importance in their lives. Four winners were featured in short film profiles that were screened at a celebration that kicked off Poets Forum in New York City in October 2014.
Poetry Unites
Winner: Marita Boulos
I live within a few blocks from the Canadian border and the bridge that connects New York State and Vermont. It is a small village, but a busy thoroughfare, which is exactly what attracted me to this scenic spot on Lake Champlain. My move up to North Country from the bustling downstate metropolitan area was the forty-second one in my lifetime, but only the first move I personally had initiated. I was a recent widow, with children just out of college settling into their careers.
Winner: Rosanna Oh
Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” changed my life because it was the first poem I wanted to forget. It insinuated itself so deeply into my life that I tried to drown it out with mind-numbing pop music. I binged on Korean soap operas. But the sonnet assumed a life of its own. Wherever I walked, it traveled with me, foot by foot. The words had a liquid cadence, pulsing to the rhythm of my everyday routine—during lunch, while I did homework. I thought the poem had a heart.
Winner: Matthew Powers
I rise at 3:15 in the morning and peek into the bassinette. Our twins, Logan and Declan, lay in swaddled sleep. They were born at twenty-six weeks and five days, almost a trimester premature, at Crouse hospital in Syracuse, New York, and have spent months in the neonatal intensive-care unit. They are “baby burritos.” Normally this cannibalistic metaphor would disgust me, but I can’t help but think of the twins as delicious because they’re mine. I lift Logan up, cradle him in the crook of my left arm, adjust his knit hat.
Winner: Paul White
In the early 1980s I bought a book in New York City by the poet David Ignatow. I swear I remember sliding the spine, out from among the other books, and seeing its shiny, red, black, and white cover. The poems were short, and they used a simple language in free verse. They were mental snapshots, what I would come to know as an emotional autobiography, catching moments of feeling in pictures, like dreams do.
