Poetry Slam Dunk
Since the prestigious Keene competition was established in UT’s College of Liberal Arts in 2006, no undergraduate student has ever placed—let alone won. But that all changed this spring when senior Katherine Noble took home the top prize of $50,000 for her collection of poems, “Like Electrical Fire Across the Silence.”
“The judges were impressed by her audacious combination of spirituality with sexuality, by her wide range of literary reference, and her bold experimentation with the form of the prose poem,” says Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, chair of the Department of English and the award selection committee.
Read “Orpheus After,” a poem from Noble’s prize-winning collection, below.
Orpheus After
By Katherine Noble
I wake before morning.
It’s the weighted month of winter,
when night falls like a dead tree
and lingers like the loud silence that follows.
Nothing sings tonight.
There are no crickets purring
in the black bones of oaks. The moon
grins at no one with its perfect yellow teeth.
I remember my heart and make a small noise
turning over. It’s too dark to see if I’m lonely.
I think of the whale-mouthed
piano of my childhood, where I played
the simple melodies from Bach’s minuets
in the luxury of summer afternoons. Never
using the black keys. Of how the piano sat
for so long after those fresh days,
and the extravagant song held in its wooden lungs
each night in the soundless, empty room. It is the silence
that has followed me most strictly, but from somewhere
behind dawn, I hear faint music again.
It may just be the sun keening
against the dead cold. Or perhaps the sound of the widow
across the hall brushing out her braid.
Or the sad hum of your shadow, which follows me everywhere
but can never be seen.
Or maybe I am only remembering
the way the peaches outside the window sing
in May morning as they ripen—and oh,
how they sing in their untouched flesh weeks later
as they begin to rot. And to all of this I say,
music nonetheless.
Photo by jjpacres via Flickr Creative Commons.
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