John Blair is the winner of the 2019 Julia Darling Memorial Poetry Prize for his poem, The Shape of things To Come. He will receive $1000,a two year subscription to Duotrope, and publication in The Ocotillo Review Volume 4.1. Contest judge, Natalia Treviño had the following comments after selecting the winner:
I’ve selected breathtaking poem, The Shape of Things to Come as the winning poem, feeling it is most worthy of the Julia Darling poetry prize, though this was not an easy decision. It is a poem that faces the question we all may have had when we first learned of the magnitude and destruction that can be caused by nuclear energy: what were the scientists thinking? Didn’t they know? Why did they allow this? And the poem delivers quite an answer.
The poem is painfully universal in its subject and it is also brave. Who among us has not been shaped in some way by the mere knowledge of the atomic bomb, an invention that altered all of human history, that threatens our place in the cosmos? This poet not only has the courage to take on this subject but also has the skill to do so with a masterful control over a complex tone that buttressed by glasslike phrasing, offering clarity and even judgement on one of the darkest subjects in our human history: the moment when Hungarian-American physicist, Leo Szilard envisioned his tragic contribution to human technological advancement, his morbid masterpiece: the nuclear chain reactor. Poets, with little thought of material gain, will go the page to contemplate the micro and macro levels of the physical and spiritual elements of the universe so as to simply provide themselves and their readers with an attempt of understanding of these, and so I deeply applaud this poet for challenging with this moment in history that did change everything, our consciousness and world-view, and giving us his daring take on its broader spiritual meaning.
The poem is spiritually wise. While the human spirit may long to be hopeful, we must reconcile so much death, destruction, and grief, so much power to destroy one another, and at the apex of horror is this man-made weapon that says none of us matter in its wake and that exists because one of us thought to touch and split apart what is held together by the deepest of forces, to divide the smallest sub-particles imaginable to form a devastating chain reaction, and so how to contemplate this but by examining, like a nuclear reaction how one small moment changed “the shape of things to come,” and so we begin with “a drop of rain,” to dilute the magnitude of the haunting topic in the epigraph, taking us quickly inward, to that first thought in Szilard’s head on “the nature of indivisibility,” a term that evokes language from our patriotic Pledge of Allegiance that is also juxtaposed with the larger context of this poem, divisibility of matter, of creation, dividing what should not be divided, resulting in Szilard’s invention, which “divides here from now/ God from reason.” This is not the only appearance of God in this poem, but first, the poem continues to clearly render a sense of serene devastation at the magnitude of this moment when the idea for nuclear reaction came to him. The poet takes a stand, unequivocal, telling us God, at the genesis of this idea, “in all his burning & unreasonable glory/ loves him/ just not enough.” Some believe God is with us fighting against the chaos. Others think God or some creator created the death and horror intentionally, as Frost suggests in “Design.” In that spirit of questioning, there is wisdom here with the poet arguing there is love from Mr. G upstairs, but not enough to keep this man from pursuing his unstoppable intellect.
And finally, this poem is delicate and masterful in its construction on all levels, splitting poetic lines, intact phrases in surprising places, to echo the theme of split and great chasms, breaking the poem’s own indivisibility by creating what appear to be fault lines within the text of the poem, cracking its topography across the page. These unsettling breaks also function as caesura, pauses, shapely breaths that fracture syntax and our expectations for word placement. But this shape, content, and mastery of tone is not all of that makes this poem stand apart. There is not one extra word, or one imprecise moment in the poem. Yes, the poem is dense, but its density is filtered with the light of these fault lines literally slowing us down, so we can take in the dense, scientific acuity in the poem, examining how one drop of rain is “not just one/ drop in and of itself but one drop becoming/ two an exquisite parting charged/ with all the simple art of mitosis of fission.” Yes, this is a scientifically-sound poem, at least to this English major, but the poet understands the science is a vehicle to understand, not an end to itself, and so the poem humanizes the experience comparing this moment to the recognizable, inevitable “as any moment stretched/ to breaking . . . to drop/ like a lie from a lip like a child/ every child from grace.” Yes, there is a terse tenderness here, one that does not settle on self-righteous blame, but holds the wholeness of this grim discovery.
John Blair‘s seventh book Playful Song Called Beautiful was the 2015 winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize & his eighth book The Art of Forgetting is forthcoming next year from Measure Books. He is a University Distinguished Professor at Texas State University, where he directs the undergraduate creative writing program.
