CV2's Two Day Poem Contest
In which I do not try to win.
(Almost) every year, over the last weekend in April, I participate in Contemporary Verse 2’s Two Day Poem Contest and attempt, with hundreds of other poets across the country, to compose a poem including all ten in the list of ordinary and esoteric words emailed out by CV2 at midnight (Winnipeg time) on the Saturday morning.
This year’s words:
agglomerate
shell
milquetoast
notwithstanding
tangerine
sable
quadruple
zip
hypocorism
moon
A better-that-usual list, in my opinion. I don’t generally like to read or write poems that include thesaurus words, and even while I relish the challenge of breaking this rule once a year, I have been known to complain, poetically, about the particular words CV2 chooses. This year, I felt the words were friendly.
I started my poem yesterday morning, in bed, on my phone. Sometimes it takes the pressure off to draft a poem in the body of an email that I send to Dylan or myself. Almost immediately, I had to admit I was writing an Aunt Rachel poem and thus officially squandering my chances of winning the contest. Contest judges do not like Aunt Rachel poems, and I can hardly blame them. They require context.
Context which many of you, my subscribers, possess in spades, having followed Aunt Rachel’s adventures for years now. (For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, here is a short interview I did with Funicular Magazine about the Aunt Rachel extended universe, and here is where you can buy a chapbook containing Aunt Rachel’s origins. There are many newer Aunt Rachel poems scattered throughout the Import Cookies archive.)
Sunday mornings like this one are the real reason I offer paid subscriptions to this Substack. I find myself high on composition, eager to share a new thing, but aware that posting it too publically on the internet will scupper (there’s a thesaurus word, maybe) my chances of publishing it anywhere else. So far, the privacy of limiting the availability of the post to paid subscribers seems to offer sufficient protection.
So what did I write, with those ten words? Another poem in which Aunt Rachel and Susan express their disappointment in Lucy’s love life: