Yale UCL Poetry Competition 2014
Winners 2014
Joint first place:
Emily van Blankenstein (UCL Medicine) and Nicholas Taylor (UCL Civil Engineering)
a) Emily van Blankenstein – Morning
Morning
My body knows to wake before the alarm,
Pull her in closer; pray to god I die first.
I’m jerked from solemnity by stirring in my arms,
She smiles before her eyes open and my sun rises.
Drag out the last seconds,
Until reluctantly we melt from soft paradise.
Michael Simons
Co-Director
10 York Street, New Haven, CT 06510-3221 / 203 785 7000 / michael.simons@yale.edu
b) Nicholas Taylor – Cliffs of Moher
Cliffs of Moher
It’s lucky that you came today, for I’ll not long be here.
The sea will never let me be; I live in constant fear
That soon I may be swallowed up into his milky sphere.
I was a great hill, once ago, of ancient shales and slates
Deposited while dinosaurs still tramped their wild estates.
When in my turbid youth I lay, the jousting of the plates,
And mountains tumbling from the sky, flung spoils on top of me.
They surged and ebbed, till I became a layer-cake of history.
Now each day’s the sea’s birthday, and he cuts a slice of me.
For the sea loves celebration, but he has no memory,
And he thinks each day his birthday, and his joy knows no degree,
And he rushes to embrace the land, and yearns to set it free.
So the sea will never let me rest; I live in constant dread.
He gnaws and scratches at my feet, to topple down my head,
Insisting that I lie beside him in his foamy bed.
Yet thanks to him my skin is fresh, and I have come to be
A sight so rare that my admirers cross the world to see;
But if you think that is my gift, you misunderstand me.
Flies climb and circle round my face, lice scuttle on my head,
And tiny plankton at my feet search my wrinkles to be fed.
This itchy torment is my wealth; its value can’t be said.
But still the sea won’t leave me be, I live at constant risk
That soon I may be shivered down and scattered on his disc.
It’s lucky that you came today, for I’ll not long persist.
Michael Simons
Co-Director
10 York Street, New Haven, CT 06510-3221 / 203 785 7000 / michael.simons@yale.edu
Joint second place:
Hana Tsuruhara (UCL Medicine), Antonio Seccomandi (UCL Engineering) and Jacob
Izenberg (Yale Medicine)
a) Hana Tsuruhara – Banana
Banana
Appearance: Yellow
The waxy, smooth, unique peel.
Disctinctive, obvious, colourful to see.
Looks are everything.
Universally agreed.
Yet on the inside: white.
Moist texture, honey taste, green smell.
What it’s remembered for.
What it’s wanted for.
What it’s hated for.
The inside swings the votes
Asian on the outside, British within.
Look like one, feel like another.
Judged as one, judge as another.
Such a banana.
Michael Simons
Co-Director
10 York Street, New Haven, CT 06510-3221 / 203 785 7000 / michael.simons@yale.edu
b) Antonio Seccomandi – Kanon
Kanon
A young land without iron or grain
Hosting gods in the fire and rain
Nurtured Actaeon and the hound at his chain.
All was a song and Truth its refrain.
Time ran in circles, like Techne and its master
Yet the dog grew fearless and hungrier and faster.
Led his steps up an untrodden trail
To the virgin shrouded inside Maya’s veil.
Diana took his hand and whispered in his ear:
“I will tell you who you are, and why you are here.”
He gazed in her eyes and there saw a deer.
Techne hunted him through the woods and the wild
Ridding it of chimeras and idols, forever exiled.
Actaeon came to a field of canes, bent by the rising storm
Where he found himself again, and regained his human form.
“We have unleashed Truth, and disenchanted the Universe” he talks
“And remained the only conscience left under the Sun.
The seed of the highest dignity planted into fragile stalks
Masters of Creation, or beasts on the run.”
He petted Techne and whispered:
“I am Kanon. A cane in the wind
And measure of all things.”
Between the lines…
The poem tries to benefit from the richness of symbolisms offered by the Ovidian myth
of Acteon’s metamorphosis to harmonize into a personal synthesis the thoughts of
different philosophers about the relationship between mankind and science. The first
stanza sketches a prosperous primitive world, at the dawn of society, the beginning of
which was attributed by Rousseau to the discoveries of iron and grain. Then,
Science/Techne was a mere instrument for survival in a pantheistic world (v.2). This era
was characterized by a circular conception of time, history and human progress (e.g.
Gold-Silver-Bronze-Ironages) as opposed to the modern linear one (v.5). The world was
explained through the creative and romantic joint efforts of early philosophy, art and
Michael Simons
Co-Director
10 York Street, New Haven, CT 06510-3221 / 203 785 7000 / michael.simons@yale.edu
mythology, the best example of this spirit is embodied in Kallimakos’ “Aitiai”. There was
no discontinuity between reality and Truth (v.4). The second and third stanzas allude to
the natural progress of science, that peaking in the last two centuries, helped mankind
to unveil deeper truths about the world and about us (v.6-10). To my mind some of our
greatest discoveries, for example about the Universe or the evolutionism have not been
completely metabolized by our collective conscience yet, which now, as Bergson said,
needs a “Supplement of Soul”/un supplément d’àme. Sometimes scientific truths were
not enough to fill the void left in our hearts by the millenary “Aitiai”. Weber called this
“the disenchantment of the world” (v.13). This, I believe, strongly shook our
selfawareness, especially when it categorized us indistinctly into the realm of the
objects of science’s study. And so Actaeon becomes a deer (v.11), losing control of
science that turns against him (v.12). He re-establishes his control over it only after
regaining awareness of his intrinsic human dignity (v. 14-15). In the field of canes he is
struck by Pascal’s analogy of men like thinking canes in the storm. In spite of the fragility
compared to the overwhelming forces of the Universe, Man is the only creature of
conscience “under the Sun”, so rightfully above all else. Not in the sense that we have
the right to abuse of Creation. In the sense that we must reflect more on where we
want to go before we set the goals of science, and not let science decide them by itself,
and this reflection must be in a spirit of full awareness of our dignity. Where the
meaning of things is not ontologically given (or at least not a satisfying one) it must be
humanly created. This is the premise for a good use of the otherwise possibly dangerous
tool of science. Actaeon, therefore, is finally aware that he is a cane in the wind for his
fragile yet extraordinary nature and because etymologically, as the humanistic tradition
proposed, he is the unit of measure of all Creation, the Kanon.
Michael Simons
Co-Director
10 York Street, New Haven, CT 06510-3221 / 203 785 7000 / michael.simons@yale.edu
c) Jacob Izenberg – Essex County
Essex County
I went up to Eagle Rock
to get myself a bird’s-eye view
of Essex, saw the interstates,
the hoods they savagely plunge through,
and the interlacing Jersey Vines
hanging languidly above the tracks
that deftly weave financiers home
and deftly weave financiers back,
saw prim Llewelyn Park prance down
the hills, lapped by the ghetto tide--the same tide that’s invisible
to the square jaws gliding deftly by,
saw jetliners line up for Newark
winging on the august smoke
Cast shadows on the Passaic,
whose mills are mostly burned-out broke,
and while I saw great ships’
crates flirt with the copper queen,
I saw hard-times suck sooty rust
from deep inside all iron things.
Michael Simons
Co-Director
10 York Street, New Haven, CT 06510-3221 / 203 785 7000 / michael.simons@yale.edu