2023 Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry
The 2023 contest is now complete. Thanks to all who entered! The winner and honorable mentions have been notified.
The Trustees of the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, NH, are pleased to announce that the winner of the 13th Annual Frost Farm Prize for metrical poetry is Brian Brodeur of Richmond Indiana, for his poem, “After Visiting a Former Student in a Psychiatric Unit.”
The 2023 Frost Farm Prize judge, Alfred Nicol, selected the winning poem after reading 918 anonymous entries. He had this to say about the winning poem:
I chose Brian Brodeur’s “After Visiting a Former Student in a Psychiatric Unit” for the sheer force of its emotional impact. A reader might be forgiven for failing to notice the poem’s flawless use of terza rima, stunned by the near-halucinogenic effect of Brodeur’s metaphor and the incantatory power of his phrasing. Snapping back and forth between scenes focused on the student in the title and scenes focused on the painter Arshile Gorky, the poem puts its readers on shaky footing. Then it opens a trap door under us.
Brodeur receives $1,000 and will be a featured reader at The Hyla Brook Reading Series at the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, NH on Friday, Aug. 18, 2023. The reading kicks off the 8th Annual Frost Farm Poetry Conference (Aug. 18-20, 2023).
Brodeur responded this way about winning the prize: “I'm thrilled to be among the poets who have won this prestigious prize, with its prestigious eponym. Frost has been such an abiding, sometimes overbearing, influence. What a pleasure to be even distantly associated with him, and to be invited to the Frost Farm Conference, which I've been meaning to attend for years.”
Brian Brodeur is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Some Problems with Autobiography (2023), which won the 2022 New Criterion Prize. New poems and literary criticism appear in Hopkins Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Criterion, and The Writer’s Chronicle. Brian lives with his wife and daughter in the Whitewater River Valley. He teaches creative writing and American literature at Indiana University East.
AFTER VISITING A FORMER STUDENT IN A PSYCHIATRIC UNIT
I walk the clinic’s “Prayer Trail” flower beds
before my drive home. Though my student seemed
marooned by her mood-stabilizer meds,
she smiled (and I smiled back) until she screamed—
the room, she swore, was burning. When Breton
asked Gorky over dinner if he dreamed
in colors, Gorky stared and crunched a crouton.
What did he see, Breton asked, in his oils?
Gorky grabbed an artichoke left on
his plate and said, “You see leaves, I see owls.”
I saw my student painting a birdfeeder
she must’ve made: Q-tips she dabbed in bowls
of pigment, drool strung like a fishing leader
from her mouth held open as her weak neck shook.
I told her once that even the best reader
may find a mirror in an open book.
Others find a window. The class became
too quiet. Most students flashed a vacant look.
She raised a shy hand and I called her name.
Then she said a line I still repeat today:
a window and a mirror are the same.
This morning, her face drained to a chalky gray,
she showed her wrist. She looked a decade older,
her pupils inky as a polished Steinway.
Before he ended it, Gorky grew bolder—
pacing again from house to barn that spring,
a coil of hemp rope hanging from his shoulder.
He wanted his wife to see him struggling.
To stop him, she waved over their youngest daughter:
“Help Daddy—look, he’s making you a swing.”
—Brian Brodeur
_____
In addition to selecting the winner, Alfred Nicol chose the following Honorable Mentions:
Honoarable Mentions (in alphabetical order)
Meredith Bergmann of Acton, MA for “The Witch of Grove Street.”
Judge’s Comment:
Meredith Bergmann’s “The Witch of Grove Street” tells a fully-realized short story in six envelope-rhymed quartrains. The poet includes herself among a group of school-children who weaponized language, at first sharpening their epithets against each other and then turning them on a neighborhood woman. The distortions of memory make of that woman’s face a gnarled winter mulberry, the very image the poet now finds in her own mirror. Bergmann’s adept use of metaphor in the closing line shows that her language has lost none of its edge, even when wielded against herself.
Len Krisak of Newton, MA for “Moesian.”
Judge’s Comment:
Len Krisak’s “Moesian” takes as its subject the banishment of Ovid from Rome by decree of the Emperor Augustus. Krisak pointedly defines the word relegatio as “the banning / of the Princeps’ crypto-foes,” and emphasizes that Ovid’s feeling of isolation arises from the impossibility of having his verse understood by those who cannot speak his language. The contemporary reader is likely to find in this sophisticated, masterful verse a veiled allusion to the cancel culture of today, a subject which, however timely, might be treated heavy-handedly by a lesser talent.
Richard Smith of Washington, D.C. for “Beyond Where Words Can Go.”
Judge’s Comment:
Richard Smith’s “Beyond Where Words Can Go,” tells of a romance set in a monastery in Dorsetshire, A.D. 1519. Using the sonnet as a stanza-form, Smith’s narrative voice and style sound entirely natural, as he claims for poetry every narrative technique a writer of fiction or screenwriter might employ. The effect is akin to watching a tight-rope walker stroll leisurely across a canyon.
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Previous Frost Farm Prize Winners
2022 Jean L. Kreiling of Plymouth, Massachusetts for “Antiphon“ — Judge Allison Joseph
2021 Nicolas Friedman of Syracuse, New York for “Storylines” — Judge Aaron Poochigian
2021 Michael Levers of Provo, Utah for “The Counterweight” — Judge Aaron Poochigian
2020 Jennifer Michael of Sewanee, Tennessee for “Forty Trochees” — Judge Rachel Hadas
2019 David Southward of Milwaukee, Wisconsin for “Mary’s Visit” — Judge Bruce Bennet
2018 Susan de Sola of the Netherlands, for “Buddy” — Judge Melissa Balmain
2017 Caitlin Doyle of Cincinnati, Ohio, for "Wishes" --Judge Deborah Warren
2016 James Najarien of Auburndale, Massachussets for "Dark Ages" -- Judge David Rothman
2015 Kevin Durkin of Santa Monica, California for "Meteor Crater" - Judge Joshua Mehigan
2014 Rob Wright of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for "Meetings with my Father" - Judge Rhina Espaillat
2013 Caki Wilkinson of Sewanee, Tennessee, for "Arts and Crafts" - Judge Catherine Tufariello
2012 Richard Meyer of Mankato, Minnesota, for, "Fieldstone" - Judge Richard Wakefield
2011 Sharon Fish Mooney of Coshocton, Ohio for "Dimly Burning Wicks" - Judge Bill Baer
About the Frost Farm’s Hyla Brook Poets
The Frost Farm was home to the poet and his family from 1900-1909. The Hyla Brook Poets, a 501(c)(3), started in 2008 as a monthly poetry workshop. In March 2009, the Hyla Brook Reading Series launched with readings by emerging poets as well as luminaries such as Maxine Kumin, David Ferry, Linda Pastan, and Sharon Olds. The Frost Farm Prize was introduced in 2010, followed by the inaugural Frost Farm Poetry Conference in 2015.
