Creation Chained to a Stunned Repose by Daniel Tobin

The qualifying poem by each of these finalists will be published at Berfrois in the coming two weeks. Each finalist has submitted four more poems to Berfrois, and the winner of the 2015 Berfrois Poetry Prize will be selected on the basis of the finalists’ five-poem portfolios.

Between now and 11:59:59 pm GMT on Sunday December 31, 2014, poets may submit to Berfrois, using its online submission manager, a single, original, poem in English which is not a translation, but may be in any mode or form, up to 300 lines.

My father wrote his share of poems in high school in India. He still recites verses—though never his own—in Punjabi on occasional late evenings. My mother, the daughter of a schoolteacher and at the top of her high school class in a village not far from my father’s, could...

From Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou, 2009 From Poetry: I came to poetry fairly late; that is, I was probably a senior in college before I could read it with anything like enthusiasm. This was a direct result of studying Wittgenstein with James...

The last gasps of the American revolutionary spirit were choked out in the Civil War, when the most conservative form of liberal government ever invented unhinged its jaws and swallowed its antithetical self, the South, whole — only to have to regurgitate some of its bones, of course, every...

Perhaps Rimbaud got the connection between color and language best in his poem “Vowels,” which sets out to illustrate a colored alphabet within a poem. A translation by Paul Schmidt and Peter Bauer goes like this: Black A, white E, red I, green U, blue O — vowels, Some day I will open...