FreeFall Magazine Archives

DG judged the FreeFall poetry contest this year. The winners were just announced in the current issue (which also contains the interview Gabrielle Volke did with dg plus a short Gabrielle wrote). Some of the poetry entries were very good indeed.

First place went to Catherine Owen for “Reincarnation Redux.” Second place went to Mark Sampson for “On Choosing a Mattress.” Third place went to Leslie Timmins for “Caravaggio to his Critics.” And honourable mentions went to Leslie Timmins again for “What is Served” and Catherine Owen (again) for “Solace/No Solace.” DG read the poems blind and did not know the names of the winners til the announcement was made. (You can listen to the first and second place poems read by their authors here.)

Here are dg’s comments as they appeared in the magazine. FreeFall is edited by Micheline Maylor—you may remember her poem “Bird at the University” published earlier on these pages.

Good writing, poetry or prose, dares to make large statements, to teach us about life, to parse existence and tell what is valuable and what is not. The top three poems I read for the contest all made this leap into the oracular. They were also all clearly aware of being inside a tradition of art; they spoke knowingly to and of other works.

First place goes to “Reincarnation Redux” which I adored because of its subversive (it uses the word) anti-sentimentality over the death of a loved one who, the poet imagines, has been reincarnated as a fly. The poem takes a sly, knowing jab at Jack Gilbert famous poems mourning his dead wife which are lauded in America but are also a bit self-pitying and, yes, sentimental. (In the one mentioned here, the poet imagines his wife coming back as the neighbour’s Dalmatian.) This poem sweeps away bushels of easy literary emotions and stock stances. It renders a lot of other poems impossible and thus is incredibly refreshing (also very funny).

My vision, I console myself, if it’s not as faithful or warm as Gilbert’s
has, nonetheless, a numerical advantage; even in wintertime one finds that flies
are quite populous, cleaning their delicate subversive limbs on windowsills.

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Micheline Maylor comes from Windsor, Ontario, but lives in Calgary where she writes poetry, teaches writing at Mount Royal University and edits FreeFall Magazine. Some of these names may be familiar to you. Apparently, Micheline is quite good at getting dg to do things. He is judging a fiction contest for FreeFall and Micheline’s student Gabrielle Volke recently interviewed dg for an essay she is writing and the resulting dialogue appeared on Numéro Cinq and will appear in FreeFall. Micheline Maylor is also an accomplished poet. Her first collection Full Depth: The Raymond Knister Poems was published in 2007. (Raymond Knister was an early 20th century Ontario poet, story writer and novelist, something of a cult figure in Canadian literary circles for his early promise and the tragic way he died. His daughter used to live in Waterford, dg’s hometown, and he chatted with her there in the drugstore, oh, maybe three or four years ago now.) It’s a pleasure to be able to introduce you to Micheline and print one of her new poems, a kind of memento mori, a stern vision of death, in Numéro Cinq.

Bird at the University

By Micheline Maylor

Four months, it takes, for the sinew
to release bones from skeleton.
A whole semester.

From August, I walk back and forth past the bird
one hundred and twenty-two times.

I think of me and you, us,
while this elegant architecture called bird
disintegrates.

He’s belly-up, beak to the north,
wings splayed to the poles.
In two days, his eyes are sockets,
in four days, his under-feathers scatter to the east.
The gentle wind detonates
a downy bomb on still, green grass
only a few stray flight-feathers cling to the skeleton
in the mud beside the late pansies.

November snow covers everything.
Stray footprints press him tighter to the earth.

Much exists in my lexicon that was not there yesterday,
last week, last month, last year.
In this new normal, grief accumulates
with that first rime
with that first staying snow.

Yet, like the bird,
I learn to relax,
wings open,
to all these elements.

—By Micheline Maylor