Winners of WIZ’s 2011 Spring Poetry Runoff Contest Announced

It’s been a privilege and delight for Wilderness Interface Zone to host a spectacular flourish of spring poetry during this year’s Spring Poetry Runoff.   In the kick-off post, I called for a show of green language, of creative élan and prospect-opening words.   I asked for poetry that contained the recombinant stuff of fertile, world-making expression that gets into others’ consciousness and gives rise to new thoughts or that perhaps resurrects a memory.   This year’s Spring Poetry Runoff Contest entries did all that and more.   Among the poets’ overall accomplishments is the intertwining of song and dance that erupted on WIZ in response to the call for spring verse €”a sight that not only was worth seeing but also that was my deep pleasure to join.   It was a good crowd to work with and reminds me of a recent experience watching violet-green swallows mixing it up over beaver ponds. Not only do the birds snatch up insects, each bird for itself, but obviously, they’re flying together and enjoying it, tumbling above and below each other, every bird forming its flight off its comrades’, wheeling, barrel rolling, one bird drawing up short of collision to let another flyer pass under then swooping out of its hover into a long, twinkling glide that weaves right back into a living fabric of free-flight.

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