To read a selection of these poems, click the names of the nominees! You can also order the issues that this work appeared in, just e-mail us at FINEMADNESS @ COMCAST.NET ! (You can read more poems on our Nelson Bentley Award page.

2004
Bill Yake, Mark Hittinger, Estill Pollock, Tina Kelley, Alice Derry, Donna Henderson

2003
Cal Kinnear, David Axelrod, Mary Quade, Estill Pollock, Paul Guest, Hugh Steinberg

1997
Melinda Mueller, Bill Yake, Mark Levine, Valerie Savior, Barbara Molloy-Olund, Geoffrey Nutter

1996
Anthony McCann (2), Ruth Tobias, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Jean Esteve, Cal Kinnear

1995
Bill Yake, Pattiann Rogers, Albert Goldbarth (2), Caroline Knox, Matt Jasper

1994
Melinda Mueller (Winner), Sigman Byrd, Greg Grummer (2), Gary Duehr, Carlo Levy

1993
James Grabill, Albert Goldbarth, Mark Svenvold, Michael Morse, Molly Tenenbaum, Nelson Bentley

1992
Pattiann Rogers (2), Tess Gallagher (2), Melinda Mueller, Alice Derry

1991
Beth Bentley, Caroline Knox, Jacques Servin, David Young, John Glenday, Jean Esteve

1990
William Stafford, Elton Glaser, Tony Esolen (2), Hillel Schwarz, David Kirby

1989
David Kirby, Melinda Mueller, Walter Pavlich, Andrei Codrescu, Tony Esolen, Belle Randall, Catharine Sasanov

1988
Stacey Sollfrey, Elton Glaser, Steve Klepeter, Pattiann Rogers, Marc Hudson, Stuart Friebert

1986
Joanne Warwick, Sibyl James, Ivan Arguilles, William Stafford, David Hopes, Kaija Berleman

Melinda Mueller

THE DIOCESE OF RAIN

Matins

Before there's any light to see by, the dusky disquisitions
begin along the coast, whereby the evergreen and gothic trees
have been raised up. The varied thrush lives nowhere else.
It lauds the coming day in minor notes, first one and then
a pause, and then another, lower. The rain falls in between.

It's winter. Dawn gleams briefly
like an abalone shell, then pale sun
is concealed, a pearl in a cloudy mantle.

The morning paper's missed the porch
again. The news is sodden, the news
is baptized. The news is unrepentant.

It forecasts rain. The pale sun is concealed.

Fact: The whole of the West but here
is distinguished by less
than twenty inches of rain a year.

Fact: The Middle East's one spot
lacking oil is where God led
His Chosen People. If we've not

the summer conflagration of poppies
on dry hills, we're granted,
in bare December, berries
of rain loading down the branches.

Hope presents itself, a virtue, at your door, dripping wet.
It makes its pitch and leaves damp footprints on the carpet.

The footprints ascend into heaven,
like Hope itself, by gradual evaporation.

The afternoon;'s a camera obscura, enormous,
the world inverted in every lens of rain sliding
on the window-glass. Here's an hour for love
of grief, which ever comes into your arms.
No one will know. The afternoon's
a confessional of whispers. Will you
forgive me? Won't you ever forgive me?

Thus Husley, on Newton in the downpour
of his genius: "As a man, he was
a failure. As a monster, he was superb."
Newton dissected light, then measured
with a caliper the rainbow on his study wall.

Also Darwin, in another rainy place:
...twiners entwining twiners—tresses
liike hair—beautiful lepidoptera—
silence—hosannas—silence well-exemplified...."
He contracted there some sickness, and
an insight, each to last him all his life.

So here the summer evenings, dove-
colored and fragrant, could make you
love the rain for beauty's sake.

Listen. On the roof. Lau
da te   do mi
num   Laudate
Dominum
Om nes   gen tes
Al le leu ia   Rain
does not fall in the vernacular.

SKETCH FROM THE TRANSITIVE VALLEY

...scientific thought consists in following as
closely as may be the actual and entangled
lines of force as they pulse through things.

Ernest Fenollosa

Wind blow seeding grass sends hay scent wafts with air through valley.

Valley funnels day breeze upstream points east breathes hay-scent air lifts moisture.

Chill makes droplet holds pollen seeds droplet grows chill.

Drop pulls earth pulls drop drops itself.

Drop wets man watches wet horse grazes damp grass grows seed.

Drops join one another wet soil grows grass blooms itself.

Seeds seed grass greens valley holds me/man/horse/soil/grass swells all.

All swallow one drinks pollen discolors eyelid blinks itself.

THE TWITTERING MACHINE

I.

Machines fiddle around. Afterwards there are no expectations—without footing, falling is unremarked.

A machine designed by machines brooks no interference. So far, it cannot stop fidgeting.

A contraption of intricate concerns and pennies hammered into fins, the machine goes on and on with no political consequence, running from spindles of miniature breath.


II.

Frozen bright without praise or imitation, rather omniscient and silly but lit by flagpoles luminescent from the belly up, the machine is wired like spaghetti.

Around it truck fenders slam and spin, galoshes jostle in front-loaded washers, chevy doors clink glasses together in some sort of toast. Ambassadors grill each other, expressionless.

Nimbus blue, the red freighter (sailing under the accidental flag of America) burns. The toy is hung on its own hinge, chance and wind revolve it.

The gunman aims, toy ducks, the colorful regardlessness of blood.


III.

In this world, an accordion gives up more dimension than drama for a little tune. Sighs. Weather, knowing exactly nothing, rolls on defying no odds.

Although riffs play out event after event, regardless of expectation, any tune the machine can play clatters around inside glassine envelopes, sensitive to initial conditions. Being this different is adequate.

Elsewhere, mathematics is the recollection of statistical imperfection. The machine, occasionally out of plumb, is distinguished with gyroscopes.


IV.

What chatters in the bush, unmotivated? A flat blank bird says all the machine needs to know.

Perhaps believing karma some form of mechanical consequence, the artist delights in confetti as well, at least, as mason bees. Slinkies—alone— descend the staircase, thin on desire.

Without intention, what are prayer flags? A blank slate, neutrinos write on the sky without intervention. When mountains begin to wear hats, we forget to tell them apart. Soon they are alone without invitations to the dance.


V.

Cooks, red-blooded and stripped of history, recombine ingredients of salads, cold soups, cloved meats, forever. Fruit chatters in boxes.

No one thinks of anything but sheen on water, postcards. In this virtual nursery of color the lyricist breaks his contract for a sequel.

Everyone is sitting in a jukebox of John Cage favorites. When our eyes are pitched shut the machine is in no way diminished.

Pattiann Rogers

SHRINE

I call this a sacred place, thus build
high arches and leaf-filled alcoves
of rooted hardwood around it, yew,
lingonberry, a floor of black oak
leaves, white sand in humus, lichen
shreds, half hickory shells, paper pea
wings and twig splinters, sucking
ants, fungus beetles moving like shards
of rotting woodbark with legs.

And I arrange shadows here, easing
into themselves and back out again
between flat flowers of torn light,
chickadee-flight fragments of sun
that shift with wind.

I add bushtits prying and gleaning
in the brush, and the passing-through
of one rattle box moth, the zing
and chip of scritching rodent with seed,
a clinking of early spring peepers
signaling like the ritual bells
of rain monks, and a fragrance of putrid
fish heads, mud moss, river-rotting
logs and turtle moisture lingering
like incense rising up from the hollow.

I fix in this place one cross: latitude
against longitude. A second cross: morning
at juncture with moonset. And a third: March
bisected by testimony.

All of this I construct to denote
and contain the sacred that then must dwell here,
possessing of itself alone neither name
nor description nor chorus nor scent, nor ever
any prayer, nor ever any plea.


























Albert Goldbarth

SECTIONED OUT:
poem (with a real letter inside and a quote from Paul Johnson's The Birth of the Modern)

"Since 1939 the electromagnetic signals encoding 'The Howdy Doody Show,' 'Mister Ed,'
and every other TV program ever broadcast have been hurtling toward the distant stars
at the speed of light, and by now have arrived at 1,000 stars."
in Newsweek

Caroline Knox

CANZONE

I came in the open door, which was the color of the sky,
and walked in half-darkness to what looked like an open
fire, but it wasn't a fire—it was the sky
in a prolific sunset, an apostrophe of sky.
Then I took off my shades, a distorting form of curtain,
and looked out the window beyond at the sky.
But I might as well have been on the Isle of Skye.
I could hardly see as far as the door
without my contact lenses, which I'd lost. The door
was open, but I couldn't see it: a sky
that wasn't even there, a hypothetical window
in my mind. That's what it was like, a window.

Who is responsible for cleaning this window,
I railed grumpily, "lowing at the sky."
In the twilit dust, it was as if the window
were wearing shades: the Ptolemaic window
of the passé universe, vertiginously open.
Thank God for Copernicus, who was a window
of reason. Ptolemy and his ilk were a window
of received texts. But they were a curtain-
raiser to modern thought, at any rate. The curtain
is up for good now, and the Andersen Window
of high technology has come in the door;
and if you ask me, more power to the door.

It had been raining in through the window and the door.
Luckily for us we had gotten the window-
seat treated with Scotchgard. At length the door-
knob rattled, and my aunt was at the door.
"Oh, eyewash," said that worthy, when consulted on the sky
problem. "You couldn't hit the broad side of a barn door.
Where did you have your lenses last?" From the door,
flashes in the sky worked dully in the open
curtains, and I flung the sashes open.
I hadn't seen the Aurora Borealis since up in good old Door
County, Wisconsin (where Jeremiah Curtin
grew up, in part), back in the Sixties. A theater curtain,

these northerly phenomena were a theater curtain,
as if there were a gel on the spotlight at the door.
But soft lenses, made of fancy plastic, are a shower curtain
between your retina and reality, fortunately. A curtain
of faith and/or grief, a nimbus around the window
of relative objectivity. But when the curtain
is drawn, there you are, shaking, with nothing to curtain
you, if you lose your lenses. When you find them, the sky
comes back to you as through a mirror or a sky-
light. Over these musings, however, let us draw a curtain.
With my eyes wide open and with (I hope) an open
mind, I drizzle saline solution in my open

and somewhat sanguine eyes, propped open.
Then I sit down and actually begin to read Curtain,
a late Agatha Christie, following with The Open Door,
by the amazing Ruth Gordon, and then open-
ly and with intensity, The Picture of Dor-
ian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, which is open
to page 89: "Dorian Gray listened, open-
eyed and wondering." I open another window.
All this in the spacy time sense of The Rear Window,
which my aunt had long ago taken me to the open-
ing of. Or the dizzy space sense in The Big Sky,
by A. B. Guthrie, who sees everything in terms of the sky.

"Mackerel sky," goes the adage, "mackerel sky:
Never long wet, Never long dry." An eye-open-
er, as well as a cliché, like the Iron Curtain.
Later, of course, I find the damned lenses behind the window-
seat, the one I keep coming back to by the door.

























Matt Jasper

RELATIONSHIP

I am to the window as the window is to the man who has turned to face it.

It follows that I will not jump from the window
and that the window will not jump from me.

This is our agreement.

























Olena Kalytiak Davis

THE OUTLINE I INHABIT

1. IMAGINE WHAT PAIN SAYS

In the ghost-making fog the phone rings.

Sure, I'm unnerved, but I listen.
I strain for meaning. So when I hang up,
everything's sore. When I hang up,
I have to write down everything
that hurts.

Imagine what Pain says:
I'll keep in touch.

2. THE ENTRIRE NONEXISTENT CONVERSATION

In the ghost-making fog I lose the outline
I inhabit so well. I get so stoned
I have to sit with my imagianry head
between my fantastic knees. I get so stoned
I get so stoned I forget the entire
nonexistent conversation.

3. THE ENTIRE NONEXISTENT CONVERSATION

Did I tell you I think I'm in love
with a certain type of cloud? Did I tell you
that now I'm dreaming soleley
in Yup'ik? Did I mention which syllables
I'm starting to distort?

4. A DULL HUM

It must have been too much.
I must have blown an eardrum.
Because first there was all that dreadful
music and now there's nothing,
a dull hum.

My brain sounds
like an old refrigerator.
First, all that vibrating.
Now, a lone drone
on the left side.

5. NOT DELINEATING

Walking down Chief Eddie Hoffman Highway.

I'm not thinking about composition.
I'm not delineating anything.

6. DE-COMPOSING

Walking down Chief Eddie Hoffman Highway.

I'm feeling terrifically heavy.
I'm feeling as well grounded as the dead.

























Jean Esteve

A DECLARATION OF FAITH

Where prayers are effective,
springs gush forth and sequined fishes
swim over sand. Where crying works,
fishes swim over the sand to paupers, handing out hooks,
where crying works and prayers are heard.

Where Americans care
and drive to their fellowships,
trees shoot up out of slash to protect them,
shading them gently. Gently shaded
from cancerous sunlight, new possums are born
from tire treads, where Americans care.

When we meet together
to sing, holding hands in a circle,
fish-full streetpeople leap from the shadows to join us
and sweet baby possums play at our feet.


























Cal Kinnear

LII

He was so beautiful, with his pale translucent skin of
shadowy fish moving in clear water, and you could see as
he moved all the way to his fluent, graceful bones. His
smile was a kiss sent floating through the darkened hall
brushing a cheek here, an eyelid there, and his eyes
whispered to them in the undeniable language of their
dreams, It's you I mean, this is for you. And who in town
didn't know it, Spit and image of his mother, they
winked, they smirked. The old turtle has a butterfly, a
hummingbird for a son. Our father would not, No son of
mine! Not if my life depended! would not enter the
theater with its thousand-candled chandelier and its
rococco ornament of gilt plaster and maroon velvet to see
him dance, but our mother slipped away in her fox stole
and peacock plume at every stolen chance to sit in the
back rows where he would know she was sitting and
sighing, and he tipped the pop-up top hat in that certain
way and sailed it into the wings, smoothed out of the kid
leather gloves one finger at a time with the most delicate
flaunt of his hips, and didn't she know it was always her
he meant.
























Mark Levine

ISLAND LIFE

The noise approached us in a cube
with velvety forest bells hanging from a nail
and the noise was troubled by the scurrying of mice
and the noise was like. And the noise was like

The army of bounty hunters with rope
and calculus; like the bird-like demise of a dirty ancient tongue.
It hurt our ears; and dulled by love we burnt
our soiled drapery one night in a dream, a dream

Altered, bilingual, depending: depending on the grandeur
of the gust hiding in our family war; depending on the sea.
In one hand I read a book called "I Remember Copper,"
swiveling my star from side to side. And in the other hand I.

I see my mother coming. That's a joke.
I see a people peeled like fresh envelopes.
Of course, the noise abandoned us; and ever since I've stroked it
like a horses's leg, waiting to rain. Others stayed behind

Enjoying island life, vines and so forth, magnesium.
You must speak up to have your skin heard
inside the bristling cube. You must wear hot shoes
and speak up and speak with a universal stick.

Geoffrey Nutter

8:16

The tree is at a fixed point.
The chair is fixed.
But the two become a helix with the cardinal there.
And when the sun moves and the shadows lengthen like a dream, they are a helix.
The chair sits in the shadow of the tree.
The cardinal, first cause, moves into a shadow.
The sun, gamma, climbs.
Gamma, climbing, glares.
The glare is fixed into the trilogy.
Then the three subtract themselves: evening.

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