A Few Words From Our Award Winners

In case any of the writers are curious about their fellow authors who will be represented in the anthology with them, I thought I might post some of the biographical information that is coming in. I'll start with our very first 1st place winner followed by the first person to respond to the request for info, who happens to be the 3rd place winner of this year.

Poet: Bill Donovan
Poem: Palmistry
Award: 2002, 1st Place 

"I was born eastern South Dakota, graduated from Northern State University, Aberdeen, SD. I taught on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation at Eagle Butte, SD for 33 years, retiring in 1996 at which time I moved to my present home right outside of Rapid City.  I have been very content with retirement and recommend it highly.

About Poem: The setting for ""Palmistry"" is Progresso, Mexico.  Other than that it is self-explanatory.

About the contest: I was very pleased to receive a 1st place prize. There was some money attached to that and I remember thinking I must use it for something special which I am sure I did but don't remember what!"

Poet: Bradley Soule
Poem: The Graves at Hiawatha Asylum
Award: 2014, 3rd Place

"In terms of a bio, I was born and raised in Vermont but have now made South Dakota my home. My wife Jennifer was born and raised here. We retired and returned after careers in psychiatry (me) and college teaching (my wife). Poetry has long been a part of our lives and we now devote full time to this.

In terms of the asylum, we have both written on this topic. We were living in Canton when we learned of it and were impelled to study it by our respective professional backgrounds. We undertook consultation with the Indian Studies department at USD to assure that our work would offend no one. Both of us have worked for the federal government in mental health, which (we feel) gave us our own legitimate interests in a federal insane asylum that had operated in what had become our home town. Our scholarly work (prose) was published in the South Dakota Medical Journal and Indian Country Today."

Denise's Note: Throughout the years there have been a few winners who I knew outside of the poetry world through friends, family or other activities in town. The majority, however, have been like Bradley Soule, someone I knew nothing about other than the poem written. Bill was somewhere in between. He's one of those people you think you know because of the familiarity of seeing each other at multiple poetry readings. When a regular stops coming, eventually someone asks "Remember so and so? Whatever happened to that guy? I haven't seen whatshername in a long time; does she still live around here?" Turns out with Bill we could have answered that question easily. He's one of the few people with the same phone number that he gave for contact info back in 2002.

2011 High Plains Writers Poetry Contest---Winners

Here are the winning poems for 2011.

First place:

Cells
by Anonymous

car lights his headlights he skids all over the ice
we sit and talk about the nature of radiohead
and working for 8.50 an hour and how
our bosses all suck
it seems honest
 when you think about it.
i stop and stare and try not to pay attention
when my stomach crawls to my throat
this mornings breakfast screaming let me go
i couldn't sleep off the vicodin
the tax returns were missing again
the lines i keep imagining on my face
  are back and then
the inside of my mouth
is covered in sores
i'm scared to look too closely at my body
i see cancer cells and i smell burning hair and
i think i am rapidly depleting more each day
i think i am falling apart sometimes
like those weird dreams
where you lose all your teeth
i was mad at the fact that everything i was told to care about meant honestly nothing to me
a gpa, a resume, a transcript, a car, new clothes, a long line of people
to get into the show.
seems like everything the world has come to offer us
just takes us farther from human experience
and it has this way of making things that are obvious,
super complex.
we decided to brave the cold, and climbed out the kitchen window
she had jammed all the doors shut
because “they were slamming too much.”
I broke a glass on the way out, and left the pieces lying all over the floor
i am so goddamn bored.
the frozen streetlights melted into ice, colliding with the darkness
that kept us alive. we walked, eyes wide, i slipped at least twice-
i thought i could feel neurons exploding like stars a billion miles away firing
off their last breath and dying. after that i didn’t eat for a day, two, three
it became such an easy, technical way- to escape reality

Now I've come to laugh
at the cold dawn moments of
waking up to snow falling and
clumps of hair clogging the sink
i've come to laugh
at the sunken skin and bruised hips
i've come to laugh, i swear i have
at all the things
that should
scare me
back.

Second place:

Name Her Remembered

A false taste of spring rests

heavy and clean in the back of

my mouth today.

It is December, so

I know the scent of wildflowers,

of insects hatching in droves

on her golden prairie,

is only a lie.

I have a feeling she would have loved

today with its blue skies

and soft air creeping quietly to

dusk, clouds purpling to black bruises

against the Christmas night.

There are names for what she was.

Unci.

Ina.

Wastelakapi.

Words only, not enough to tell,

never enough to tell

what the trembling

pound of buffalo hide beaten white

with drumming told,

the sob of the men’s voices as

they sang her home.

She is the last, they said,

she will be forgotten in long slow stages

by the young

who have no true notion

of their loss.

She will return sighing

to her golden prairie,

waning

like the bittersweet tang

of spring in winter.

Stacey Potter

December 9, 2010

Dedicated in honor to Cynthia, Edna, and Louise,

and to my own grandmothers, Arvadell and Evelyn Elizabeth

Third place:

Karen Foster

Nitroglycerin

A Lakota student takes nitroglycerin pills when heart pains encompass her. “Like beating wings,” she says. “I live a strange lifestyle.” Not much younger than she, I listen in the silent space to my heartbeat. I nod when she challenges me with whippings she enduring by nuns at the boarding school, her eyes caressing the floor of the once army barrack’s room that serves as a classroom. The dense air welcomes ghosts. She lacks the memory of the offense, forced to lean over, to brace her moist palms on the nun’s desk, her behind becoming naked as the nun pulls down her panties. The dark eyes of the boys grow wider as they look askant at the horror played out on the pine floor in front of that makeshift altar, before television, before vibrations filled our minds with oblivion, before alcohol became escape, while other young girls, frozen in fear like does before a slaughter, kneel in rows beside them, the hems of their uniforms in arcs like crescent moons. The silence becomes like flour. I reach over to touch her hand, but the air between us lengthens. Nothing but shadows. My body becomes amorphous, fused with the Anglos of centuries. I too suffered whippings, but in woodsheds alone with my father, for speaking out of turn, for sassing back. The student and I talk about fiction, and I tell her that a woman in prison who calls up her sister for money and gets some, that alone is not a story. “Her story begins in Brazil, goes to Columbia, then Mexico,” she says. I agree with her that this imaginary cousin must change on this journey: “Yes, I’m sure she does, Theresa.” Her Lakota name, Wicaka.* “Like a shiny Christmas ball,” she says.

tells the truth 

2011 High Plains Writers Poetry Contest---Winners

Friday night April 22, 2011 we had our spring poetry reading at the Rapid City Public Library. We had very good attendance and heard some very good poetry. If you have not attended one of our readings, watch this space for the announcement of our next reading.

High Plains Writers announced the winners of the 2011 poetry contest.

1^st Place: Anonymous for the poem Cells

2^nd Place: Stacy Potter for the poem Name her Remembered

3^rd Place: Karen Foster for the poem Nitroglycerin

Honorable Mentions to:

                Mike Foster for the poem Early Morning Detail

                Bernice Landers for the poem Hank

                Robert Furrow for the poem Little Man

The Rapid City Public Library will host the podcast of the poetry reading from April 22 here.