Award Winners
Lyric Poetry Award - 2025
Guion Pratt
Poem With Misremembered Vermeer
Here is the line
where a colony
of purple-tooth
bracket fungi clashes
against a flank
of false turkey tails
across the surface
of the felled oak
by the creek. Deep
in the heartwood,
the war beneath
the war: tendrils
of hyphae test
the border they make
with their bodies
urgent as knees
touching under
a table. Everywhere
I’ve lived already
had a fence
around it when I
moved in. It was never
in question whose property
the spruce tree was
though its branches reached over
to shade the neighbors’
trampoline. They’ve gone
back to Jakarta until next summer
as they do each fall
but said to come jump
all we want. Said nothing
about the motorcycle
parked in the unlocked
shed. Sometimes, you
want to go somewhere
you can’t go, so you go
home and lie
down. Tonight,
I wanted the wine
in your cup. I mean,
to be it. Most days
what I want
is want, lucky me,
easy to come by
in this life. I want
a painting with good
exits, one
where the gambler hides
the ace behind
his back or the maid
pours milk into
the family bowl,
her eyes fixed on something
just out of frame.
Richard Siken on Guion Pratt
A lyric poem is not an argument or an explanation, not a meditation on a theme, not a story. A lyric poem is music and image. “Poem with Misremembered Vermeer” succeeds at both, and more. There’s a sleight of hand being performed: If there is an argument here, the evidence is detail. If this is a meditation, it’s hard to say what moves. The lines are short and measured, crisp, and yet the sentences flex and twist with an unexpected muscularity. The distance traveled in the poem’s short span is astoundingly vast. The associative leaps are smooth and surprising. A lyric poem can do anything but it is, fundamentally, a song, an experience. I am thoroughly enthralled by this poem. As soon as I finish, I want to start reading it.
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Guion Pratt is a poet and translator from Charlottesville, Virginia. He is the recipient of an Anne Williams Burrus/Academy of American Poets Prize and holds an MFA from the University of Virginia, where he was a Poe/Faulkner Fellow.