Turning Silence into Poetry: Festival Awards, 2009

    If you’re looking for a place to submit your poetry, be ready by February 27th, the due date for the Festival Literary Awards. Zoe Van Slooten and Grace Campbell
were ready for the 2009 contest, and as a result of their winning entries, their work has been published in the magazine as well as on its website. The contest is hosted by Grand Rapids’ most beloved arts magazine, On-the-Town, and it promises superb poetry for all age divisions every year, along with a great way to connect to the greater writing community.
    The competition had been happening alongside the annual Festival of the Arts weekend in downtown Grand Rapids for decades before it partnered with On-the-Town magazine. The contest’s gone through decades of evolution to become what it is today. It went through times that encouraged a predetermined subject matter, but the entries were lower during that time. As a result, the rules have been relaxed, and the contest now receives a great diversity of themes for judging, from poems about paintings to poems about the world waking up again. There are awards for fiction and non-fiction as well, if that’s your genre.
    The winners for this year include Zoe in the children’s category and Grace in the youth division. Zoe’s poem is called “The Silence,” and it begins with the approach of night in a forest, with a quietude settling all around. The poem speaks of “A silence that isn’t awkward or disliked / a silence that people would like to be in.” It has an essence of an eerie, beautiful obscurity. Grace’s poem, “Spring,” is built on a soft, sturdy rhythm. It’s simple, and written in a rhyme pattern that’s uncommon, but which makes it work all the better. The poem captures small, pretty details and ties them up into something that is altogether beautiful: “a soft drumming, / my mother humming, /warmth is coming, / soon.
    However, fresh poetry is not the only encouraging aspect of the Festival Literary Awards. The best thing about the awards is that they tie poetry and art together. They introduce the community that reads On-the-Town to the writing community, as well as introducing starting writers to local names they should know. They bring together a group of people that can appreciate the work that the other does to the fullest extent. Poetry is generally not considered a genre of art. But it is art, in its own way, and bringing it to other artists to enjoy and cherish is one of the the ways to make it grow and become a thriving part of our community culture. That is, in my opinion, what makes these awards so great: their ability to share the wonder that words can portray to more than just the poets who read poems anyway, but to a whole group of thinkers and painters and other people who like to be different.
    This competition has spent years evolving into what it is today: a respected acknowledgement of poetic talent and hard work. It’s nowhere near done, though. The Festival Literary Awards will continue to change and improve. One thing is certain, however: they will continue to provide an aspiration for poems and for the young poets who write them. As for Zoe and Grace, they’ve both said they like writing and want to continue with it. And that is the best thing about this contest: the curiosity for poetry that it awakens in all of us.