Literary Lightning Strikes Twice
In the span of a single week two Oxnard-area poets have received poetry prizes. Gabrielle LeMay was awarded the Durrell Prize. Please read about her in the blog. In addition, the Ventura County Poetry Project is pleased to share the good news that poet Elaine Alarcon has been recognized for winning the Woody Barlow Poetry Contest.
The Woody Barlow Poetry Contest is an annual competition that celebrates the art of poetry and honors the memory of Woody Barlow, a renowned poet and longtime resident of Eureka Springs, Arkansas.
Alarcon’s poem will be published in the literary journal, eMerge, as well as in the ECHO Anthology. She has also received a nomination for the Pushcart Prize. Charles Templeton, eMerge Editor Emeritus, is the creator and sponsor of this fellowship. Here is his description of his goals: “Woody Barlow’s poetry has taught me that language can be both beautiful and powerful, and that it has the potential to heal, to connect, and to inspire. Through this poetry contest, I hope to continue Woody’s legacy by providing a platform for new and diverse voices to be heard and celebrated, just as Woody did throughout his life.”
Woody Barlow who passed in 2023 was also an invaluable member of the Board of Directors for The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow which opened its doors in 2000 and has since hosted over 1700 writers from 48 states and 13 countries. They sponsor a variety of fellowships to nurture creativity.
Alarcon’s poem, “In the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden,” whose name serves as both title and opening line, is a kind of beatitude to the beauty and inspiration of the California landscape. The garden is situated in a canyon in the Santa Ynez range and is dedicated to the preservation and study of native plants in a natural environment. By coincidence, local Santa Barbara publishers, Gunpowder Press, have just published an anthology of poems based on the botanic garden entitled Out of the Ground. In this neck of the woods, we can say with certainty that there are many poets out there, lost and found both, beneath redwoods or the span of great oaks, writing in their small notebooks. We are lucky that Elaine is one of them.
In the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden orange poppies blaze through the meadow and peace enters my feet, then slips into my bloodstream flowing upward to the sun. There are no words for this absolution, no words for blessing. I am votive to wind, to bird calls in the canyons, to the cactus flowers in whose yellow cups tipsy insects tumble among their pistils, and to the giant boulders strewn under the oaks, Samurai guarding the path. And to the lost ant crawling over the labeled rings of a halved sequoia trunk — a sapling in 1150 — then crossing its rings to the Magna Carta in 1215, searching fruitlessly for its kind in 1542 when Juan Carrillo explored the Channel Islands, the ant inching forward to the Declaration of Independence and rings tightly yoked by violence together, death by drought in 2000. Brave ant! Unaware of its long rite of passage across eons, this initiate finally disappears over the edge of the trunk into the leafy shadows at last, beatitude of home.