The 2020 Competition winning poem is

“Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center” by Victoria Korth

Korth photo smaller.jpg

Victoria Korth lives in Rochester NY where she has a psychiatric practice caring for the chronically mentally ill. Poems have appeared in Broad River Review, Ocean State Review, LEON Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, Barrow Street and the Montreal Poetry Prize longlist anthology. The author of Cord Color (Finishing Line Press), she is working to publish her first full length manuscript. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.

“Among my many poems about childhood attending to my father’s mental illness, there are few that acknowledge my profession as a psychiatrist. Writing about it is hard. In the ruin of the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center, I found a correlative which could stand for much I wanted to say, a shape for all the emotions raised by his illness.. As physicians we are meant to heal, but we ourselves are often helpless, angry, and frightened. How can we be more than an observer? How can we shake off the paralysis that the past sometimes seems to impose on us? How can we step forward and speak with the whole self?

“Some traditional poems helped me address complexity. Coleridge’s ‘Lime Tree Bower’ and Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ are poems in which the speaker enters a physical place that triggers either a set of memories or an imaginative journey. Eavan Boland is also an influence, especially her masterful ability to move through the personal to the historical, authentically. Then there’s Seamus Heaney, whose “Mint” opens from an everyday herb to a large, breathtaking truth.

“Aesthetic pleasure is important.  When deeply moved we feel more whole. When more whole we are more human. When more human we are healed, although we may be dying or mad. Pleasure is invited through metre, the relation of stressed to unstressed syllables, and sound, music in the service of meaning. Such pleasure is, perhaps, the healing factor in poetry.”

 
 

Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center

One needs to be a little lost to find it
on a Dutchess County knoll. Building 85
still stands. Look it up. Or better, go yourself.
Its lower story windows broken, boarded,
but the other thirteen floors appear intact enough 
to taunt the empty village outside its gates 
with State employment. Our lives, that “campus” 
and my journeying, have crossed: first as a child, 
and later as a doctor who made some kinds of work done there 
my habit, my profession, and today, when heading home 
from Danbury in the snow, with no one quite expecting me.
I turned off at Wingdale, followed ditches lined with cow vetch 
dropping on the downside of a sudden rise. There: 
bakery, laundry, low-slung dorms, brick housing 
for unlicensed pharmacists, a minor stadium, and, hidden 
in the trees, burial ground with rotting gate and lettered arch—
patients abandoned to the place—every inch dissolving, 
stripped of flashing, grizzling with mineral ooze. 
And over it all, like speaking eye, the glass high-rise, lobotomy 
suite, insulin tubs and narrow beds for the electrically changed. 
As my father was, strapped down in ’74,
having been there months and shrugging his way 
beneath the gaping fence. He told us once he was tired 
of trading cigarettes for whiskey in the tunnel 
between the dorms, where sex was sold, and coke 
and heroin. Said he’d aimed for Armonk, IBM’s mainframe 
where he’d been a salesman, been okay, planned to show up 
like Santa in a limo, got as far as Ureles Liquor, collapsed 
beside the tracks, was brought back in, sent upstairs. 
No wonder he made us stay at the sticky picnic table 
in the shade when my mother took us there to see him. 
No wonder he was afraid to look the orderlies in the eye, 
or so I remember seeing, though it may be 
I imagined what I saw, eyes alive with what he didn’t tell, 
what I felt and what I’ve tried to know so well
it would unknow itself, unwind to nothing, disappear, 
why I am unprepared for this cold fear
and rage—could I tear that grim museum
off the map, would that tear him, tear me in two—
no child should ever be there, or have been, no one. 

View the PDF version of “Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center.”

 
 

Short Film Celebrating “Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center”

Directed and Produced by Pascale Théorêt-Groulx

 
 
 

Comments from Yusef Komunyakaa, 2020 Prize Judge

 

 The speaker of “Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center” is believable because one senses that the poem was written out of need, out of empathic reckoning. Though the first line reads, “One has to be a little lost to find it,” the second line places the reader solidly in a physical space where one is invested and grounded, even if on the edge of a lyrical limbo. This narrator, an intimate witness, immediately becomes a guide, and empathy and inquiry reside in the same register. The poem’s tone worked its way under my skin.  In fact, it is paramount that the speaker’s language is of the real world as she stands in a place where harsh realities have come to pass. The emotional realm may seem almost hidden in plain sight, unembellished.

The title of the poem locates us in “Harlem Valley,” which, from the sounds of it, conjures green pastures; yet, the mere existence of the Psychiatric Center corrupts the valley. Though here we are asked to become (as if avoiding the personal pronoun “I”) a collaborator through the “speaking eye” simile – the seer, the observer: “Building 85/still stands. Look it up. Or, better, go yourself.” We are invited into the physical architecture, and through accretion the reader enters a psychology of place before we learn: “Its lower story windows broken, boarded…”

The naming of places and things embodies the poem’s emotional architecture. And this made thing breathes naturally. Yet, until a certain emotional juncture, there seems to be a looking without seeing. Is it shame? Or, perhaps knowing the fear of being sent “upstairs” to the ‘’glass high-rise…”  For a moment, a glimpse of brutal reality, one that is deeply personal, becomes a shared revelation – one that the speaker wishes could be undone. And it is at this moment, the reader becomes not only a spectator, but fully initiated in the psyche of the poem where one almost sees through the speaker’s eyes. We know a truth enables this desire to “tear that grim museum / off the map,” and with the gesture – an attempt at erasing the loved one’s suffering – one, too, would have to erase oneself. Is the gesture a wish to protect the father or the speaker? This selfless moment makes both the speaker and reader desperately human. 

 

2020 Competition Shortlist

 

We Are One

by Hilary Walker

Off-World Ghazal

by Stuart Barnes

 

Love Notes from Island Lockdown

by Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné

Don’t Look

by Sonia Farmer

Boy with Thunderfoils

by Michael Lavers

Timore

by Sauda Salim

 

alive in the second world

by Lindsay Sears

What Gets Noticed

by Yvonne Blomer

Gramarye

by Gregory Leadbetter

Maybe

by Caitlin Heiligmann

 

Brother in Flight

by Sadiqa de Meijer

Triptych

by Esther Ottaway

 

After Walden

by Sara Moore Wagner

Brexit Haiku

by Umit Singh Dhuga

Darkness Passional

by Brian Sneeden

Dye

by Suphil Lee Park

 

Where the Gnarled Claw Grew

by Michelle Porter

To Find, To Be

by Nehassaiu deGannes

Still & Quiet Things

by Rebecca O’Connor

 

Canadian Currents

by Laura Bourbonnais

Easter

by Thomas Joseph Mealey

 

Hold Harmless

by Mirande Bissell

Half-Asleep in Daddy’s War

by Brooke McKinney

 

Lament for a Daughter

by Jena Woodhouse

Bird Feeder

by Toma M. Ray

The Door

by Jeff Bien

 

Category Error

by Luke Hankins

Midas

by Naro Alonzo

The Square

by Diane Fahey

 

Bookend to a Flood

by Damen O’Brien

Elegy for a Tiler

by Davide Angelo

One Way or Another

by Marian Kaplun Shapiro

 

Jaani…

by Maithreyi Karnoor

At the Met to Get Wrecked

by Shane Neilson

Birthday Poem

by April Freely

Secateurs

by Mark Fiddes

 

Massgirl

by Anjuli Raza Kolb

Tomato Plant Survival Song

by Kathryn Simmonds

First Time at The Airport

by Dianty Ningrum

 
 

Double America

by Safiya Sinclair

 
 
 

2020 Prize Judge

 

Yusef Komunyakaa’s books of poetry include Taboo, Dien Cai Dau, Thieves of Paradise, Neon Vernacular, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, Pleasure Dome, Talking Dirty to the Gods, Warhorses, The Chameleon Couch, Testimony, The Emperor of Water Clocks, and Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth (forthcoming 2020). His honours include the William Faulkner Prize (Université Rennes, France), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award. His plays, performance art, and libretti include The Deacons, Wakonda’s Dream, Saturnalia, Testimony, Gilgamesh: A Verse Play, and Somewhere Near Here (Bright Darkness). He is Distinguished Senior Poet and Global Professor at New York University.

 
 
 

2020 Jury

Jordan Abel is a Nisga’a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Un/inhabited, and Injun (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize). Abel’s latest project NISHGA (forthcoming from McClelland & Stewart in 2020) is a deeply personal and autobiographical book that attempts to address the complications of contemporary Indigenous existence and the often invisible intergenerational impact of residential schools. Abel recently completed a PhD at Simon Fraser University, and is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta.

Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Times, Paris Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017). Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches at Purdue University and in the low residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson.

CAConrad received a 2019 Creative Capital grant to complete their nationwide (Soma)tic poetry ritual titled, "Resurrect Extinct Vibration." They also received a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, as well as The Believer Magazine Book Award and The Gil Ott Book Award. The author of 9 books of poetry and essays, While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books) won the 2018 Lambda Book Award. They teach regularly at Columbia University in New York City, and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Please view their books and the documentary The Book of Conrad from Delinquent Films online.

Wendy Cope was born in Erith, Kent UK. After reading history at Oxford, she worked as a primary school teacher in London until the publication of her first book, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, in 1986. Since then she has been freelance. Her fifth collection of poems, Anecdotal Evidence, was published in 2018. She has also written for children and edited several anthologies. She was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2010. 

Susan Elmslie’s second poetry collection, Museum of Kindness (Brick, 2017), was shortlisted for the Quebec Writers’ Federation A.M. Klein Poetry Prize and the League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her first collection, I, Nadja, and Other Poems (Brick, 2006), won the Klein Prize and was shortlisted for the McAuslan First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in many Canadian magazines, anthologies, and in a prize-winning chapbook, When Your Body Takes to Trembling (Cranberry Tree, 1996). Her work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and she has been a resident at the Banff Centre for the Arts and at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland.

Steven Heighton’s most recent poetry collection, The Waking Comes Late, received the 2016 Governor General’s Award. In 2019 he was a finalist for The Moth Prize, based in Ireland, for "Christmas Work Detail, Samos." His poetry and fiction have received four gold National Magazine Awards and have appeared in the London Review of Books, Poetry, Tin House, Best American Poetry, Zoetrope, TLR, Agni, The Walrus, London Magazine, New England Review, and several editions of Best Canadian Poetry. He also writes fiction, most recently the novel The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep. An earlier novel, Afterlands, was a NYTBR editors’ choice and was cited on year-end lists in the USA, the UK, and Canada. Heighton is also a translator and occasional fiction reviewer for the NYTBR.

John Leonard was born in the UK and came to Australia in 1991. He completed a PhD at the University of Queensland and was poetry editor of Overland (Melbourne) from 2003 to 2007. He has six collections of poetry, the most recent being Wordfall. His poetry has been translated into French, Croatian, Spanish and Chinese and published in those versions.

Eli MacLaren teaches poetry, Canadian literature, and the history of books and publishing in the Department of English at McGill University. He is the author of Dominion and Agency: Copyright and the Structuring of the Canadian Book Trade, 1867–1918 (University of Toronto Press, 2011) and Little Resilience: The Ryerson Poetry Chap-Books (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020).  He has served on the organizing committee of the Montreal Prize since 2019 and joined the jury as its provisional eleventh member to deal with the flood of entries in 2020.

Marilène Phipps was born and grew up in Haiti. She is a recipient of the NAACP’s Award of Excellence for outstanding commitment in advancing the culture and causes for communities of color. Phipps has held fellowships at the Guggenheim Foundation, Harvard’s Bunting Institute, and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. Her collection, The Company of Heaven, won the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her poetry won the 1993 Grolier prize, and her collection, Crossroads and Unholy Water, won the 2000 Crab Orchard Poetry Prize. Her memoir, Unseen Worlds, was released in 2019 by Calumet Editions. Her new novel, House of Fossils, will be released by Calumet Editions on 30 March 2020.

Sridala Swami is a poet, essayist and photographer. Her first collection of poems, A Reluctant Survivor (2007), was published by the Sahitya Akademi / National Academy of Letters (India). Swami has written four books for children, published by Pratham Books in 2009 and 2012. She was the 2011 Charles Wallace writer-in-residence at the University of Stirling, Scotland, and was a Fellow of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, 2013. Swami’s second collection of poetry, Escape Artist, published by the Aleph Book Company (2014), is the first book to appear under the aegis of the Jehangir Sabavala Foundation (JSF).

Gillian Sze is the author of multiple poetry collections, including Peeling Rambutan, Redrafting Winter, and Panicle, which were finalists for the Quebec Writers’ Federation A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. She studied Creative Writing and English Literature at Concordia University and received a Ph.D. in Études anglaises from Université de Montréal. Her first picture book, The Night is Deep and Wide, is a bedtime poem and will be published by Orca Book in 2021. Originally from Winnipeg, she now resides in Montreal where she teaches creative writing and literature.