We headlined our previous poetry challenge with a line from Virginia Woolf: “I have had my vision.” And sure enough, the last sentences of To the Lighthouse provoked more poems than did our other two prompts: D. H. Lawrence’s surprising opening sentence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Maggie Smith’s role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Though the latter inspired the fewest number of poems, Millicent Caliban seemed to speak for the team when she wrote that the late actress “inspired awe and pride: a sense of self.”
Without further ado, Mary Jo Bang is the winner for best poem with “It Was Done”:
It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision of Mary seated on the highest hill, quite possibly the highest hill ever invented, Mary stared at intently by Dante, a loyal Saint Bernard beside him, no snow in sight. Of course, in the picture at rest on the easel, she was and wasn’t Mary. “That’s how art works,” she said to her friend on the bed in the guest room. “You paint a mythic picture and put yourself in it, knowing Narcissus ends in the us that looks into and out of a mirror.” Compared to that, to and from seemed so simple, a never-ending echo of hello and goodbye.
That the “vision” is of Mary—whether the Virgin Mary or the author herself— as observed by Dante, comes as a complete surprise to the reader, even one who is aware that Mary Jo Bang has been translating the Divine Comedy. There follow the speculations regarding art and Narcissus. Terrific.
for the other winners and the three new prompts click here:
https://theamericanscholar.org/what-a-strange-path/
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