The Back Room Poets
§ a poetry circle · est. 1994 in Providence · online since June 1999 §
For five years a handful of us met on the first Tuesday of every month in the back room of Harkness Books, among the boxes of paperbacks nobody had priced yet. We read our poems out loud, drank Mr. Harkness's terrible coffee, and told each other the truth as kindly as we could. In May Mr. Harkness retired and the store closed. We did not want to stop.
So here we are, in a different kind of back room. Some of the old circle still lives around Providence, and since June we have been joined by poets from Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Ohio, Oregon and Nova Scotia who found us through a friend of a friend. We share poems by e-mail through the month and hold a small contest, which we call, with no originality at all, the Poem of the Month.
You do not need to be a member to enter. You do not need to have been published, or to have studied anything. You need a poem.
— Miriam Estabrook, keeper of the back room
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September's Contest: "Keys"
Take the word however you like: house keys, piano keys, the Florida Keys, the key of a map, the key to a problem, the key to somebody's heart (if you must). Our judge this month is June Tillotson, whose August poem is below.
Poems are due by midnight, Thursday, September 30. Results go up in the first week of October, along with the October theme.
How the Poem of the Month works
- One poem per person per month, thirty lines or fewer, on that month's theme.
- It must be your own poem, and it must not have appeared anywhere else (a poem read aloud at your church supper is fine).
- Paste it into the body of an e-mail to [email protected] with your name and your state or province. No attachments, please; half of us are on old machines.
- I take the names off and send the poems to the judge, who reads them without knowing whose they are.
- The judge is always the winner from the month before, and so does not enter that month. I judged the first one myself in July, and have not entered since.
- The judge picks one winner and may name up to two honorable mentions. There is no prize but the honor, a place on this page, and the job of judging next month.
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August's Poems: "Water"
Fourteen poems entered. Judged by Desmond Reyes, July's winner.
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POEM OF THE MONTH
What the River Kept
June Tillotson, Georgia
My father lost his watch to the river
the summer he was nine,
leaning too far off the railroad trestle
to see what the older boys could see.
He told it every June for sixty years:
the flash of it, the little sound,
how the water closed like a drawer.
He never said it was his father's watch.
My aunt told me that at the funeral,
the way you'd hand somebody a coat.
Last week I drove out to the trestle.
It's fenced now. The river's lower.
I stood a long time where the boys stood
and understood that there are things
you do not go down after.
You keep telling them instead,
until the telling is what you have,
still ticking, somewhere under all that brown.
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From the judge: I read this one four times before I read anything else, and then went back to it after every other poem like checking a stove. The drawer. The coat. Nothing in it is louder than it needs to be, and the last line put the watch back in my hand. — Desmond
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HONORABLE MENTION
Well
Harold Pike, Connecticut
My grandmother dropped a penny down the well
and tipped her head to listen for it land,
and said, that's how deep your wish goes.
I have dropped a thousand pennies since,
in fountains, in the mall, in a hotel lobby
with a plastic pond and plastic fish,
and I have never heard one land.
Either my wishes have no bottom
or I stopped waiting long enough to know.
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HONORABLE MENTION
Tide Chart
Lucy Furtado, Massachusetts
Taped to the refrigerator in my mother's kitchen,
the little table of highs and lows,
though she hasn't been out in a boat since '82.
She says she likes to know
what the water's doing without her.
I think of that in my own kitchen now,
clear across the state from any tide,
calling her twice a day
to see how she's doing,
high at six, low around noon,
her voice coming in,
her voice going out.
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The Laurel Roll: July's winners, and every winner to come.
The circle also trades poems for comment all month long. If you'd like to be on the list, write to me and tell me a little about yourself and what you read. We are gentle, but we are honest. That was always the deal in the back room.
[email protected]
  
readers since June 1999
Last updated September 5, 1999
All poems © 1999 by their authors and used here with their permission.
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