Poetry Competition Commended | ‘Skating Along a Found Line’ By Jamie Stedmond
For Poetry Day Ireland 2018, HeadStuff.org launched a brand new poetry competition to celebrate this fantastic day of poetic activity around the country. This year the theme of the day was ‘Surprises’. For our competition we chose the theme ‘Surprise Encounters’
Our esteemed panel of judges for this year’s poetry competition were Colm Keegan and Erin Fornoff. Erin noted that they were ‘looking for surprising poems, and poems that arrest and compel and leave an emotional legacy. National Poetry Day is a great way to show that poetry is a fibre in everyone’s life, and speaks to truth that everyone shares.’
We at HeadStuff were humbled by the response to the competition with the sheer numbers of those who submitted their work. The judges were deeply impressed by the high quality of submissions. it was an incredibly difficult decision to pick three winners and thirteen commended poems.
Over the next few days we will publish the three placed poems and thirteen commended ones. We would like to congratulate all the poets on their achievement.
We would also like to thank everyone who took the time to submit to the competition. We received a high number of submissions of really high quality so please do keep watching the HeadStuff poetry section for more details on future submission information. Finally we would like to thank University College Cork, Poetry Ireland and Anam Cara Writer’s and Artist’s Retreat for their support.
Read All Winning and Commended Poems Here
Skating Along a Found Line
By Jamie Stedmond
Tom Schaar sails through the air like grace itself.
He moves along smooth concrete like birdsong leaps
from a warbling throat. Or, like how Nyjah Huston
pops, flips, shimmies and spins his board
with precision previously unseen in this dimension –
landing like a feather falling. Like any given foot. So casual.
Skateboarding is a special kind of dancing;
dance-steps being uniquely metered poetry.
Push/kick magic, rough-rolling sound, light
feet swung round… something I’d forgotten about until
I had deadlines to face – now I binge-watch hours
of X-Games footage. One online commentator summed it up best:
lung small evolution weak wait fit shape suggestion argument rush –
context doesn’t help, we just surf-roll along the line; with bird-bones, fly.
The first HeadStuff poetry competition was kindly judged anonymously by Colm Keegan and Erin Fornoff.
HeadStuff are extremely grateful to University College Cork, Poetry Ireland, and Anam Cara Writer’s and Artist’s Retreat for their generous support of the competition.
Photo by Jase Daniels on Unsplash
