Caitlin Doyle (Poetry ’08) has recently won the Frost Farm Poetry Prize! Caitlin’s winning poem “Wish” was selected by contest judge Deborah Warren from a pool of over 750 entries, the largest in the competition’s history. About the poem, Warren says, “This poem is a masterpiece masquerading (with its incantatory beat and simple language) as a Mother Goose rhyme. It’s also that rare poem where the form is integral to the story.”
Warren continues:
“Each of the first four trimeter couplets expresses one of the speaker’s wishes. Each line begins with ‘I told him I needed’ and the final three couplets look back on the wishes with wrenching regret. Following each little couplet is a parenthesis: one tetrameter line explaining why the wish, although granted, ironically failed. The parentheses play on the idiom ‘wishing for the moon.’ They rhyme, and — taken by themselves—collectively make a poem in their own right. On the other hand, if you do remove these parentheses, the seven trimeter couplets themselves make up an unrhymed sonnet—with a conventional volta between the octave and the sestet. It’s the poem’s tone that is so sad. The deceptively nursery-rhymish repetitions (“I told him” in the octave; “Now I have” in the sestet) only emphasize the speaker’s desolation.”
To see the official contest announcement and read Caitlin’s winning poem, visit this link: http://www.frostfarmpoetry.org/prize-1/
As the winner of the 2017 Frost Farm Prize, Caitlin will receive an honorarium and she will also be the featured reader at The Hyla Brook Reading Series at the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, NH, on Friday, June 16.
Congratulations, Caitlin!
Following her graduation from our MFA program as the George Starbuck Fellow in Poetry, Caitlin has received a number of awards, fellowships, Writer-In-Residence teaching posts, and publication credits. Her recent honors include a Yaddo Colony fellowship and a Writer-In-Residence fellowship at the James Merrill House in Stonington, CT. Her work has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in The New Criterion, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Golden Shovel Anthology (University of Arkansas Press), the Poetry Foundation’s “Poem of the Day” series, the PBS NewsHour Poetry Series, and others.
