Passage Prize winners, 2022

Out of hundreds of submissions to the Passage Prize, a solid double-digit number of them could be described as “good” and still a double-digit number as “excellent.” Because I felt bad about silently rejecting the amount of work I saw here, I actually graded the upper third or so of the poems—anything I felt was basically competent.

If you did not get a grade, I was not sure what you were trying to do and could not evaluate your work as a poem. If your poem was marked “D” I thought it showed a reasonable understanding of what a poem is, and you should not necessarily give up writing poetry. Grades proceed all the way from “D” to “A” and “AA.”

The five finalists here are selected at utterly random whim from the “AA” category. I told Lomez that if there were not three poems in the submissions that I would not feel proud to have written myself, I would actually lobby him to withhold the prize—and let the money wrap around till next year. Fortunately we did not have to have this beef.

In the end I selected five instead of three—because five is a more beautiful number. Do you want to read some poems, my friends? Does everyone in here know how to read poetry?

If you really want to enjoy a poem, try reading it not silently but instead out loud, or at least subvocalize as much as you can without alarming the other hoboes on the bus. Breathe, just slightly, between each line of verse—that’s what the linebreak means. Once you have learned to read poetry out loud, which is not hard, you can go back to reading it silently.

The winners

Please note that most or all of these names are pseudonyms. The judges did not pick the pseudonyms. If they are lame, we cannot be held responsible. I wrote this essay before filling in the names, which have just been released.

The first-place winner:

The Aged Mathematician
[by “T.J. Snodgrass”]

Ghosts and Gaussian noise remain to me,
A creaking involution, but I see,
And have seen, proportion. Though some degree
Is lost, I—no, that’s not it. I’ve forgot.
I fear that all desirous inquiry
Falls to discourse on a round; cordoned thought,
Violence—the quick of my mind is still.
One more proof, or moment, or harmony
For the spheres, something vital to be taught.
Where did I trespass? What did I fulfill?
Outside, I hear the calling of a friend,
Long dead, in the bark of a stricken dog.

I feel this poem would not seem out of place in, say, Robert Lowell’s Notebooks. It is so good that it is possible to think very hard about all the things it is succeeding about, and keep coming up with things after a while.

First of all, the form. Birders refer to a certain kind of avian as a “little brown bird.” There is a certain kind of poem which is basically a sonnet. It has basically this number of lines of basically this length, it either has a rhyme scheme or doesn’t, in which case it is a blank sonnet. This poem is a little brown sonnet. That’s fine.

I sometimes rhyme occasionally but never use rhyme schemes. I am just not sure I am good enough. Nonoccasional rhyme makes enormous demands on the author. The only real risk in a poem is that the poem will suck. Almost all poems suck. Rhyme makes it much easier to suck. That’s why I don’t rhyme.

Another way to say this is that rhyme makes enormous demands on your prosody. The prosody of any two lines that rhyme also interlocks. This can have a very good effect or a very bad effect. A rhymed line which does not sound like natural speech will have a terrible effect that can only work in a comic capacity.

The safest way to have a very good effect is for the flow of every line in the poem to be different. Look at the poem again—no two lines have the same pattern of prosody. Yet each sounds like completely natural speech.

Moreover, in this species of little brown sonnet, the poem ends with a couplet which is blank—or rather, which locks into the scheme only through the awful, awful rhyme between “taught” and “dog.” This blank couplet is the perfect place for a savage and biting ending.

Now let’s get to the content of the poem. It’s important to note that this poem, so far as I can tell, means nothing at all. It has no actual logical content. This is not how I myself always roll, but that’s fine. It’s a poem.

The way this poem works is by convincing you that the speaker somehow knows, in this incredibly deep and convincing way, what it means to be (a) old and also (b) a mathematician. (For me, anyway. Who knows what it did to your sad ass.)

It is not clear how the math terminology does not feel picked out of a dictionary. I’m going to skip over how exactly this spell worked on me, because I don’t understand it and I don’t have hours to try to parse it.

Something about the tone of age reminded me greatly of the best memoir of old age I know, Knut Hamsun’s On Overgrown Paths. For you kids out there, what sucks about being middle-aged is actually that it doesn’t suck—but you can already tell it will. (Actually your body is already falling apart—you just haven’t felt it yet.)

But really how this poem works is that after this very murky, but recondite and poetic, body, strapped with rhyme, it comes in blazing with this incredibly cold real ending, containing a sense of loss and despair that is not at all exclusive to mathematicians, or old people, or old mathematicians. The shift of perspective from abstract to concrete is not even slightly abrupt or uncomfortable; it feels, somehow, natural.

By being so adeptly poetic, atmospheric and indirect, by being almost too much but not quite too much, the poem has earned its sharp, direct and concrete ending. This is an old but effective trick that, in this poem, doesn’t even look like a trick.

Second place:

A Summer’s Confession
[by “Elliott”]

The stairs down out into the street become
a silent warzone between
Tremors in my mind of different futures.
None are beautiful and all degrees of slavery.

I am weak and cannot write beauty today, Lord.

The clinician patronizes my anger
as misplaced fear and denial of my subliminal
concession to our emerging biosecurity state.

He is right that I am afraid, Lord.

Fearful of an alienation so sophisticated
and omnipresent that all the Being ruminating
under your design is raped into checkpoints
and access.

So many shackled jesters outline the perimeter.
Sycophantic and immiserated in their obedience,
with words of cruelty as their final great anesthetization against Christ’s love.

They perish in hatred of their own kin and I am at loss to understand, Lord.

I pray for Mercy, Lord, because I am still hurtling through
your world with nearly nothing to say.

All lyrical progeny,
All acceptance of suffering as love,
becomes the gurgling moans of a maimed horse,
running over plains of rock in an endless
want of death or respite from this torture.

This is a religious poem. In fact… I believe it’s actually a Christian poem. Dear reader, you may not be religious, but you have to deal with that. (Lots of great people are atheists, including me, but you really can’t trust anyone who is actually anti-religious.)

This voice does not actually remind me of any poet in particular. But this is a poem of prayer—an extremely rare and difficult form. One of course must think vaguely of Christopher Smart—or even the KJV itself. These are not contemporary examples and this poem could not be mistaken for either. But as a poem of prayer it has this tone.

Now, whether or not you have ever prayed (I really haven’t, I’m afraid), there are two essential qualities a prayer has to have. It needs to be humble and it needs to be sincere.

A poem too must be sincere. Or it usually should be. But actually there is nothing less humble than a poem. This conflict is why the forms diverge too easily, and why it is hard to write a great poem that is also an address to the divine. It needs to have a kind of—glorious humility. (Note again that it earns its ending—no poem is above this.)

Maybe you don’t find that in this poem. I do and that’s why I gave it second place. Fuck you, all you New York art-hoes. Maybe you need to find Jesus. No—seriously.

Third place:

Men Only Want
[by “Noble Red”]

The neurons of Nietzsche, the muscles of Mishima,
A full-scale reproduction of Christ the Redeemer,
A basin to wash in, ideally with taps,
An illustrated guide to the Bronze Age Collapse.

A house in the country, an ancestral home,
A weekend in Paris, a fortnight in Rome,
A hike up a mountain with amiable porters,
A garden overflowing with our sons and our daughters.

Gothic architecture, but nothing too solemn,
Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns,
The kind of inspiration that comes from above,
The kind of girl who comes from Russia with love.

Rhetorical questions, philosophical debates,
The right to free assembly, and to lift heavy weights,
An honourable cause, an improbable mission,
The Complete Works of Shakespeare—Johnson edition.

Breakfast at midnight, cocktails at noon,
A cruise in the Baltic, a walk on the moon,
Two hundred and ninety-nine Spartans to lead,
A Lotus Elan, and something decent to read.

Boots on your feet and a watch on your wrist,
Delving into Plato, and getting the gist,
Finding out about the Albigensian Heresy,
Invading the stage at a concert by Morrissey.

The play of the light on a favourite street,
A glass of red wine, and a plate of red meat,
Family, friends, tribe, city and nation,
A place in the sun, Western Civilisation.

The laughter of children, a solar eclipse,
The aroma of coffee, a kiss on the lips,
A superlative other for placing your trust in,
“Men only want one thing, and it’s disgusting.”

Yes. This is light verse—light verse. Light verse too can be great. John Updike is of course more known for his novels, but he wrote a ton of light verse. It was great. This poem would not be at all out of place in an anthology of Updike.

What makes this light verse? Everything. Its rhythm is light (but sound), its content is light (but sound), its tone is light (but sound). Meters this regular with rhyme this tight invariably produce a nursery-rhyme sound, which the poem can work with or against.

If you work through the prosody of this poem you will see that it both uses and works against the prosodic symmetry of the rhymes. Each line does this in a different way, and the effect is always good.

(By far the worst form of Passage Prize submission was the nascent genre that Lomez and I nicknamed the “wignat nursery rhyme.” No example of this form will be given.)

Fourth place:

After Edvard Munch, Kyss IV, 1902
[by “J.G. Amato”]

Is this what the Stoics meant
by living in the grain of nature:
lover and loved, their one embrace
inked on a field of corporate beige:
their bodies, the negative space,
their flesh one with their universe
grained like Norwegian wood:
atom on atom ad infinitum,
their faces blank: sap once ran
in the sulcus where they touch—
affection’s asymptote—
and one kiss blurs the integers
that moment cut in wood,
caught in cellulose yet not,
unity of tongue and groove?

This is a lovely little brown blank sonnet. The prosody, as with all of these winners, is absolutely top-notch. As with the first-place sonnet, no two lines have the same flow.

What is remarkable about this poem (which some will prefer to the first-place sonnet) is its clarity. It eschews the kind of deep obscurity the other uses. It is actually a stream of clear ideas (even if you don’t know what a “sulcus” is—no, kids, it’s not a Roman sex toy) which are broad and resonant, but not even particularly ambiguous.

This poem, though technically more or less perfect, was demoted to fourth place because it doesn’t take any particularly dangerous risks. Not that it really needs to.

Fifth place:

Minerva
[by “Peter Yoonsuk Paik”]

The face of the broken statue freezes the eye,
As it searches for the unseen presence
Intimated by its beauty, the shape of something whole
That carries the light from spirit to stone.
Here, wisdom unfolds and briefly blooms
In a glance, restoring the virginity of expectation
As our sight strives to fathom the constellation
Of fire and iron conceived inside the shattered dome.

The silent flight of our vision gives body to our breath
And makes firm the sinew that binds the soul to its sight.
Flying toward the curtain of stars burned out
By prophecies yet to be recalled, the doubts
That rouse one from dreams fill the wings
Of our patience like the wind, while fugitive time
Sways like a lone ladder breaking through
The rising waters engulfing the horizon.

Her eyes meet us at the threshold of another sky,
Where, launching ourselves beyond the ceiling of our hopes,
We soar past our desire and glimpse the shadow
Of the soul as we shoot between aim and sun,
The shadow that, drawing into itself, condenses into a ball
Of coal to be ignited by the light of her gaze.

Man. This is just a really nice poem. While I am not a huge Rilke fan, not at least compared to some, I would not be at all surprised if I found it in a Rilke anthology.

Except that the prosody is top-notch, as is true of all the finalists, there is honestly nothing critical I can say about this poem. At a certain level that is a limitation, since it means the poem may not be risky enough.

On the other hand, nothing at all says a poem has to be a nonstop sequence of quadruple axels. This one certainly isn’t—it’s just nicely done for what it is.