Rafael Jesús González reads a poem about the challenges of judging a writing prize.
Our last episode of season 1 was about awards: how should we think of them? Are they worth caring about? How do you manage your disappointment when you don’t win? One of our guests on the episode, Rafael Jesús González, was the (reluctant) judge of the 2019 Fischer Poetry Prize. Here, he reads his poem about what it was like to select a winner.
Read the text of his poem below:
Judging
for the Fischer Poetry Prize
Winnowing
them down is not easy —
even
to fifty, then forty, thirty —
still
harder twenty, ten & finally one.
".
. . so much hope lies in your hands,"
a
colleague writes, the words carrying
more
meaning than she meant. Each entry
speaks
its own voice, probing reality
with
imagination, with the heart. I read
each
once, twice, thrice, four times,
five
or more, return to it. The voices mingle,
mix,
tangle — a cacophony, a counterpoint.
How
to single out the one voice? One no better
than
the other, just different — there is no best.
Each
opens a door, tears down a wall, says
a
truth I have always known in my bones,
or
a truth I had not known but now I do.
I
look for a honed sense of justice, compassion,
an
openness to beauty that wrenches. I could say
that
I choose for precision of diction, choice
of
metaphor, syntax, but we would all know it
for
the bull scat it would be — I choose by my own
history,
my own memories, joys, pains, betrayals,
awe
— by what I ate last night, drank, smoked,
dreamt.
I choose by what I am most vulnerable to
as
the deadline falls — I cannot tell you how;
there
is no best, only what now moves me most.
The
biggest prize worth having is already theirs:
the
gift of widening the vision, empowering the heart.
-----------Thank you.
~ Rafael Jesús González
Poet Laureate, City of Berkeley,
California
In
this bonus episode, Luis Lopez, poet laureate of Colorado’s
Western Slope, and Rafael Jesús González, poet laureate of
Berkeley, each read a poem and talk about their writing process. And that’s not
all! Rafael Jesús González wrote a poem about judging the
Fischer poetry prize. We think his poem should be prerequisite reading for all judges
and all contest entrants!
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