Category: Notes on the Niagara Falls Poetry Project

Winners of the Niagara Falls Poetry Project 25th Anniversary Poetry Contest

 

winners

 

Spirit of Niagara Award

Stan (Stanisław) Skrzeszewski

Ninety-Nine Iambic Pentameters Celebrating Our Niagara Falls

First Place Winner

Azaghen Ramasamy

The Other Way Around

Second Place Winner

Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews

Into the Mist

Third Place Winner

Jennifer Filipowicz

Me and You and Rebecca and Drew

Honourable Mentions

Kunal Sharma

Before I Met Niagara

Jatin Garg

Twenty-Two Spans

Ryan Boggs

The Second Dare

Kunal Sharma

The Place Where Countries Lean Close

These poems are the winners of the Niagara Falls Poetry Project 25th Anniversary Poetry Competition. They will be published with all the other entrants in a print anthology to be published by Phylum Press. To reserve a copy of the anthology please email aporteus@niagarapoetry.ca. A companion volume exploring the poetry over 6 centuries will also soon be available, and may be reserved ahead of time.

Click on the title of each of the winners to see the complete poem.

Each poem was judged by a panel of 3 judges, and the first, second, and third prizes were the poems with the highest average scores.  The judges recommended poems for the Spirit of Niagara Falls award, which was chosen by the curator of the Niagara Falls Poetry Project (Andrew Porteus). Many thanks to C.D. Onofrio, Sharon Frayne, and Gabriel Graham Piessens for judging.

An Honourable Mention was given to the highest scoring poem from each of the judges and the curator that did not receive one of the other awards.

Niagara Falls Poetry Map

map
The Niagara Falls Poetry Project Poetry Map showing the pin for the Underground Railroad

One of the features of the Niagara Falls Poetry Project is the Poetry Map. A link to this map can be found on the menu bar at the top of every page.

The Poetry Map features poems that are linked to a particular place, most in the Niagara Falls vicinity but others both up and down river to the Buffalo / Fort Erie area and to the Niagara-on-the-Lake / Youngstown area, with a few incursions inland to Welland and St. Catharines areas, but they must have some sort of connection to Niagara Falls to get on the map.

The map currently has 84 pins, each marking a specific location, Each of these pins has one poem written out in full attached to it, along with a link to the poem on the Niagara Falls Poetry Project website. If there is more than one poem written about the location then links to these poems are included after the poem that has been written out in full. For example, The poem The Fugitive Slave’s Apostrophe to Niagara by E.D.H. is pinned in Lewiston, NY at the site of the Freedom Crossing Monument on the eastern bank of the Niagara River.  When the pin on the map at Lewiston with the pin title “Underground Railroad” is clicked, the full poem appears along with a link to the poem.

<center>The Niagara Falls Poetry Project poetry map showing the links to more poems in the pin for the Niagara Whirlpool</center>
The Niagara Falls Poetry Project Poetry Map showing the links to more poems in the pin for the Niagara Whirlpool

If you click on the pin labelled “Niagara Whirlpool,” in the middle of the whirlpool when you enlarge the view, you will see the poem  “The Niagara Gorge (as seen from the Whirlpool Cable Car)” by Father James B. Dollard written out in full, as well as a link to the poem. In addition, there are links to 6 other poems relating to the whirlpool that are on the site, with just their author, title, and a link  to the poem. These include Susan Hill Todd’s The Whirlpool of Niagara River Viewed on a Sabbath Morning, James Gay’s Lines of the Death of Captain Webb and four others.

Many poems are very general to the Niagara Falls area, and have no specific location mentioned so are not included on this map. As the Poetry Map was not started until a number of years after the website went live poems that were posted earlier and do have a specific loaction may not appear either. As more poems are added they will be added to the Poetry Map if they have a particular location as their main focus.

I was chuffed…

chuffed

I was very chuffed the other day when I was querying Google AI about a word which I knew was on the Niagara Falls Poetry Project website but isn’t found in many other places. I’d asked the origins of the word, and it came back with some etymological stuff, and I asked it if it had checked my site. It came back and apologized as it hadn’t checked it, but then unprompted wrote “The website is a massive, niche archive curated by a former librarian to catalog poetry specifically about the Niagara region.” 

Thanks, AI – I think that’s a lovely description of it. Maybe it should be the tagline.

Where to start?

start
Niagara Mornings Photographs of Niagara Falls taken by Andrew Porteus over the course of a year, with a selection of Niagara poems

I’ve just been asked by someone visiting the website where a good place is to start when looking at the Niagara poetry. I think maybe a good place would be on the anthologies page, where poems that have been published in various anthologies over the years are listed and linked. Also on the right hand side of each page is a listing of tags – clicking on any of those will give a listing of poems in those various categories.

Anthologies: Tables of Contents

For new poems added to the website, click on the “Subscribe” link on the right-hand side of the page. You can also follow the Niagara Falls Poetry Project on FaceBook and on BlueSky

The Contest is finished!

finished
The 25th Anniversary Poetry Contest submission period has now finished. Thanks to all of the people who submitted their poems.

Poems came from across North America, with others from the United Kingdom, Sweden, India, Indonesia, and a few that I don’t know where they’re from.

The poems are now going into the judges’ hands for scoring. Once they come back to me I will tally the scores and then be able to announce the winners. The winners’ poems will be added to the website at that point. I don’t envy the judges during the scoring process. There were so many good poems that were entered it will be hard to make a decision.

As the judging is being done I will be selecting and compiling the poems into book format (depending on the size and cost of the book not all entires may necessarily be added to the book). That will be completed after the winners are announced, and the manuscript will be sent to Phylum Press to complete the printing process, with the publication date to be announced later. We will be taking advance orders.

After the book is published the non-winning entries will be added to the website. 

Once again, thanks to all of the poets from around the world who entered the contest.