2014 Book Spine Poetry Final Winners: Judge's Review

Here is Ed Maranan's review of the winners in our 2014 Book Spine Poetry Contest. Mr. Maranan judged the final round of the contest. 

I generally agree with the choices and comments of the previous judges who chose the monthly winners in this competition. What a challenge it must have been, reading the earnest entries and having to select the final monthly winners! Choosing titles of books from hundreds or thousands of possible choices and stringing them together to create a poetic composition is not as easy as it seems. There could be several ways of putting together the titles, and while each one may be able to tell a story or reveal a theme, there is always one that stands out for its logic, clarity, and even an element of surprise. Another consideration is the length of the composition. Because the titles represent disparate works and are complete unto themselves, there must be a neat way of stringing them together to make them appear integral, without using connectives. Each title represents an idea, an image, an event, an action, etc., and it would be unwieldy to be putting so many of these together to make a coherent whole. 

I think the ideal construction of the book spine poem is one that uses less number of titles, not more, brevity being the soul of poetic writ, to paraphrase an aphorism. As one of the filter judges pointed out, the book spine poem lends itself to the haiku form; indeed, in both haiku or senryu forms which have three lines (the one dealing mainly with a meditation on nature and the seasons, and the other on the human condition), or in other variations of the short poem such as the triple or tercet (three lines, like the haiku), quatrain (four lines) or the cinquain (five lines). I would stop at five lines of the book spine poem, but there’s no rule that says you cannot use a whole shelf of books to string together your poem, using your creativity and imagination! But even a couplet or a two-line poem can be effective as a book spine poem, with the downside though that it could be too convenient and predictable. For instance, these titles from Max Brook and Francis Fukuyama form an ominous pair:

World War Z
The End of History?

Having said that, I think it is only fair that the finals judge should choose the top three winners from among the first placers in the three monthly compositions, unless there is a compelling reason to make a ‘deep selection’ and put in contention in the second and third placers – or even the fourth and fifth placers – but I see that there is no need for these, although the gap separating all the monthly winners from one another is hardly a yawning one. With a little finessing of some of the finalist entries, they stood a chance of making it to the top. For instance, second placer Michael Rosenthal’s compact four-line composition in the January competition poses a strong challenge  to first placer Nicole Memphin’s ‘epic’ eight-liner (which could even be split into two book spine poems, a tercet (unrhymed 3-line poem) and a quatrain (four-line poem). In Michael’s case – well, in fact as with many book spine poems! – one could propose alternative constructions, on reasonable grounds. 

Here is Michael’s piece:

In the Country of Men
Seeking the Heart of Wisdom
Atlas Shrugged
And a Hard Rain Fell

Now here is another way to string together the four titles:

Atlas Shrugged
And a Hard Rain Fell
In the Country of Men
Seeking the Heart of Wisdom

What is the basis for this? I think the ideal situation would be for the book spine composer to have read the book, or be familiar with the contents of the book whose title they are appropriating. Of course, this should not be a compulsory requirement, or you’re likely to miss the deadline! But it would be terrific if the composer at least knew the theme or premise of the book whose title is being used. (In fact, you can look up the plot summaries of even the longest books in Google or Wikipedia, but don’t make this a habit or libraries will be put out of business!) In this instance, Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand’s iconic manifesto on the primacy of individualism, and has had a huge impact on the amorality (some call it greed and viciousness) of capitalism. As a reviewer has put it, the book “depicts a world where corporate CEOs and one-percenters are the selfless heroes upon which our society depends.” (I got this from Wikipedia.) Atlas, of course, is the mythical Greek god always represented as carrying the world on his shoulders, thus symbolizing the burden of responsibility. The alternative construction proposed shows the logic of events when we shirk individual responsibility towards society: a hard rain falls upon (or hard times befall) people who are seeking wisdom, e.g., solutions to problems.

On the other hand, as I have mentioned, Nicole might be telling two stories instead of one in her eight-liner: 

Last Night I Dreamed of Peace
Looking Back
The First Escape
Before We Were Free
A Hero of Our Time
Jumped
Fences
Shaking the Foundation

This is rather long for a spine poem, I think, although as I have mentioned, it is quite all right to string together as many titles of books you want for as long as there is thematic logic and narrative coherence (and even syntactical sense) in the composition. I would rather that these eight titles to be distributed in two spine poems, but requiring a strategic re-positioning of the line ‘The first escape’:

1.
Last night I dreamed of peace
Looking back
Before We Were Free

2.
A hero of our time
Jumped
Fences
Shaking the foundation
The first escape

The very first top placer in the competition in the December edition, Javier Agnir, rightfully copped first prize for his piece that looks as if it had been deliberately and freely composed by a poet, rather than disparate themes strung together from the spines of different books:

In the Country of Men
Things Fall Apart
Funny How Things Change
As I Lay Dying

Although we sense and we understand the flow of ideas through these titles, there is that one pesky problem of tense. ‘Fall’ and ‘Change’ are in the present tense, while ‘Lay’ was in the past tense – as it should be, because this is supposed to be a line from a dead person (Addie Bundren in Faulkner’s novel, “who, after dying, expresses her thoughts from the coffin.”) But poetic license is used here, so this is possible. The beauty of this piece is that it can have several permutations (to repeat, a characteristic of book spine poetry). One might be the following: 

Funny How Things Change
In the Country of Men
Things Fall Apart
As I Lay Dying

Or reversing the order:

Things fall apart

As I lay dying

Funny how things change

In the country of men

This is not saying, however, that the two alternative constructions are superior to the winning piece. It is simply a matter of choosing which aspect of the poetic statement to focus on. You could even split this quatrain into two couplets to make separate expressions that sound like aphoristic graffiti:

Things Fall Apart
In The Country Of Men    

(which could convey the sense of being a ‘feminist statement’), or this:

Funny How Things Change

As I Lay Dying

In the case of the first prize winner for February, the tandem of Celia Diaz and Nicole Mempin, the piece is the second longest among all the monthly finalists, with seven titles used. 

In Defense of Women
It's Not Easy Being Mean
Cycle and Hatred
Blood and Rage
Ice Cream and Sadness
Maiden of Pain
A Woman's Life

However, the picture I saw of the books piled up to form a poem is missing the title Cycle and Hatred. Might as well, because the line seems to me superfluous or unnecessary, to ‘blood and rage’ doing enough to describe the reason for women being ‘mean’. Let’s look at the poem as a six-liner then:

In Defense of Women
It's Not Easy Being Mean
Blood and Rage
Ice Cream and Sadness
Maiden of Pain
A Woman's Life

It seems to work, except that the element of ‘Ice Cream’, generally regarded as a positive thing by women (as in the case of chocolates!) appears out of place, unless we take it to mean as a mere consolation or palliative in a woman’s life of sadness and pain. Fair enough.

So therein lies the fun of composing book spine poetry! All right, so we come now to a decision as to the final ranking of the top placers in the three-month competition, with a vigorous nod of appreciation to the earlier judges who chose the monthly winners, and much applause to the composers or constructors of all the qualifying entries.

Here they are, then, the top three in the monthly competitions, and how I thought they ranked comparatively in effectively delivering their poetic message: 

First prize:   JAVIER AGNIR

Second prize: CELIA DIAZ and NICOLE MEMPIN

Third prize: NICOLE MEMPHIN

I would like to award a joint third prize to MICHAEL ROSENTHAL, second placer in the January competition, for his quatrain that uses the title In the Country of Men which we also find in the composition of Javier Agnir. And finally, I would like to award a special prize to MIKHAELA ONG who copped fourth place in the February competition, because her piece exhibits many desirable attributes of a book spine poem (those qualities already discussed by the previous judges): brevity in terms of overall length, economy of words, visual impact, and universality of the theme. In Mikhaela’s composition, there is the shock of recognition about the perceived state of the world at present (especially with global warming and climate change), and the last three words are so familiar to us, though in a different context – not the bang of the gavel in an auction, but the whimper at the end of the world, as the poet T.S. Eliot would tell us:

A world undone
Embracing defeat
Going, going
Gone

Ed Maranan is a poet, fictionist, playwright, essayist, translator, and author of four poetry books and more than 20 children's books. He has won several literary awards from the Carlos Palanca Memorial Foundation, including membership in the Palanca Hall of Fame, as well as the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino, and the Unyon ng mga Manunulat ng Pilipinas. He taught Political Science and Philippine Studies at the University of the Philippines, and served as Information Officer of the Philippine Embassy in London. He writes an occasional column on arts and culture for The Philippine Star, and is an active member of PEN Philippines, UMPIL, and the Baguio Writers Group.