For over forty years the Illinois Association of Teachers of English (IATE) has sponsored statewide poetry and prose competitions for Illinois grade, middle, and high school students.

Beginning with the 2004/2005 school year, I have partnered with IATE to cosponsor this writing competition. Since then, our welcome affiliation has continued to support Illinois students' creative work.

My particular focus is the student poetry contest. A list of this year's winning student-poets, their poems, their schools, and their nominating teachers can be found below. In addition, students' first place poems appear annually in the fall issue of IATE's Illinois English Bulletin.

From this year's fine group of winning poems, I have chosen several to receive notice as Poems of Special Merit. This award recognizes work that exhibits an appealing blend of craft and content, work that shows the poet rising above the mundane to establish, as Emerson says, "an original relationship to the universe."

IATE, Bradley University, and I team together to sponsor this award as our way to recognize exceptional student writing and to encourage students to pursue the pleasures and challenges of the literary life.

All students earning Poems of Special Merit recognition receive award certificates.

2008 / 2009 Poems of Special Merit

Of Poetry, This World, and Those Others

Poetry gives us the world whole. The poem may do so by means of big ideas or by virtue of minute particulars, but the result is the same. Readers see this world’s complexities and beauties and tragedies in full relief, as if the poet carved away its muddled surface and left only the revelation.

This quality Robert Graves referred to as poetry's "stored magic," the poetic act of prestidigitation and the readerly act of participation as both audience and able assistant. Readers accept that the poet is up to something, and they become willing accomplices. They understand the poet will not lift her candle to light upon the particulars of what is but will instead drop a curtain over the familiar to show us what might be. In this imagined realm poet and readers meet in the shared pleasure of surprise.

This other-worldly magic often inheres in the very making of the poem. It’s not so much a matter of tricking as of conjuring – a fresh world imagined to show us our tired world anew.

In various and manifest ways that is just what happens in this year’s Poems of Special Merit. Meghan Creighton’s subtle “What the Elephant Perhaps Feels” limns the line between our limited human perceptions and the “hyper realm beyond / our sense of touch.” The poem’s underpinning is the conjectural “if” – and everything we readers know for certain is called into question by what we don’t know. The poem’s roots and tendrils are epistemological, testing the limits of what we humans are capable of knowing and of how we come to know it.

This same conjectural impulse powers Tommy Hebson’s whimsical “If You Give a Penguin a Popsicle: Nermeroff Imitation,” where the poem’s launching point is revealed in its title. A wacky universe spills delightfully from this imagined first cause as if issuing from the mind of a creator who foresees how one act leads ineluctably to another. The satisfying of one “want’ occasions another need that must be answered, no matter how bizarre or problematic. This discomfiting state is all too familiar to any home remodeler who buys a new couch and finds now she must also have new carpet, paint, and lighting – world without end, amen.

In the hands of the painter at work in Jessica’s Hoffman’s “A World Beyond,” the new realm’s initiating first cause is simply the flush of color and the “flick of the paint brush.” Here, through motion and color, the artist creates and thus discovers simultaneously. Variously, a “koi” pond, exotic “dragons,” and mother with child “emerge” through the artist’s interaction with the canvas. As with Tommy Hebson’s poem, this creative whirlwind circles back upon itself in perpetual play, ending as it began and thus beginning again.

Caitlyn Christine Strader’s “A Night of Fun” reminds us that although the imagined world may be enthralling it need not always be benevolent. As if in dream become “horrifying nightmare,” the speaker experiences an ironic “night of fun / at the circus” harassed by a bevy of clowns. These manic Bozos prey upon the teenaged-speaker by employing the typical flower petal squirt gun or oversized floppy red shoes in less than welcoming manner. The result blends humor and terror so characteristic of clownish behavior – whether it occurs in dream or in the schoolyard – and reminds one not to trust appearances in friend or foe.

When the world is too much with us, as the poet suggests, we weary of it and of ourselves. We turn to the other-world and often paradoxically discover there what we labored to escape, now revealed in full measure we once were blind to.

~Kevin Stein

Here's a list of recipients of Special Merit awards, their schools, and their nominating teachers. Winning poems can be viewed by clicking the students' names.

Megan Creighton , “What the Elephant Perhaps Feels ” / Twelth Grade / Teacher, Glen Brown/ Lyons Township High School ( LaGrange, IL)

Tommy Hebson , “If You Give a Penguin a Popsicle: Numeroff Imitation” / Ninth Grade / Teacher, Amy Birtman/ Lake Forest High School (Lake Forest, IL)

Jessica Hoffen , “A World Beyond ” / Eight Grade / Teacher, Heather Corral/ Northbrook Junior High School (Northbrook, IL)

Caitlyn Christine Strader , “A Night of Fun ” / Eleventh Grade / Teacher, Lee Roll/ Oakland High School (Oakland, IL)

This yearly contest is open to all Illinois grade, middle, and high school students. To be eligible, student work must be submitted by a teacher who is a member of the Illinois Association of Teachers of English. For contest guidelines and deadlines, please email IATE officials Professor Jan Neuleib (jneuleib@ilstu.edu) or Ms. Martha Frieburg (mfrieb@ilstu.edu), or write IATE at Illinois State University / Campus Box 4240 / English Department IATE / Normal, IL 71770.

Please click here to view previous year winners:
2004/2005 IATE Poetry Contest winners
2005/2006 IATE Poetry Contest winners
2006/2007 IATE Poetry Contest winners
2007/2008 IATE Poetry Contest winners

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