How to Judge a Poetry Contest With the Theme “Love in the Time of Alexa”
How to judge these poems?
Here’s how:
On the morning of April 1st
I shall run out and buy
An Amazon Echo
Get her up and running
Ask Alexa to read
A poem a day
Out loud
(she likes things out loud)
Ask her to let the day’s poem wash over her
Without flooding her already streaming audio
And then ask her
How it feels
Does it sing to her?
Does it quiver the core of her cortex?
Does it make her want to read and re-read?
(she likes to say things again and again)
And how about sound and sense?
Is the aurality of the poem consistent with its apparent meaning?
Or is it ironically at odds with meaning?
Or is the sound of the poem all just a heap of clunk?
And what about the other senses?
Is there an evocative taste or smell?
(Alexa evidently can detect neither)
And what of figurative language?
Is there an unexpected zeugma?
Or a memorable metaplesis?
(she likes cozying up to words
that sound kind of scientific)
And how about formal considerations, Alexa?
Is the poem villanelle enough?
Do the rhyme and the feet
Keep to the beat?
(she tends to be on the formal side)
And of course
There are other considerations
Like will the poem
Interrupt her daily starting-up of my coffee pot
Or intrude on her playing of my morning wake-up tune
Or get in the way of her reminding me to call my mother once a week
(With any luck, Alexa will have only indifferent feelings for my mother)
And well, after all that
Picking the winning poem
Which will be submitted just under the wire, as it were
On day 30.5
Of National Poetry Month
Will be easy
For as surely as she will be mine
It
Will be hers
Copyright © David G. Lott 2018
Lucky to have a judge like this. The poem is amazing.
Fun! Thank you, our poem judge…