Sudbury teen writes her way to 2nd in national poetry contest

She hasn't been a teenager all that long, but Sudbury's Hannah Watson is an old soul when it comes to poetry.

Hannah's poem “How do you write poetry?” just won second place in the Junior Category of the Jessamy Stursberg Poetry Contest for Canadian Youth, a competition run by the League of Canadian Poets during National Youth Arts Week (May 1-7).

While the $350 grant for the achievement was nice, her true award comes from the writing itself, she told NorthernLife.ca.

“Writing is peace in my busy life, a way to express what I can't say out loud, a way to live a 1,000 different lives and feel a 1,000 different experiences,” Watson said.

Not all of her work is serious, though, and she is more then happy to write on the silly side of things.

“My earliest poems were usually funny ones, inspired by Shel Silverstein (author of classics like The Giving Tree), and include works like 'A Gown for a Cow,' a rhyming poem about a cow searching for a dress and 'Ice Cream Dream,' about building the world's largest sundae.”

She also received a year-long student membership in the Canadian League of Poets, an organization founded in 1966 to promote the growth of Canada's poetic arts.

Here's Hannah's award-winning poem:

How do you write poetry?

Sometimes when no one’s looking,
I disappear.
I trace my way along a road of black ink,
engraved into a crisp sheet of notebook paper.
I wind through
an array of colourful stalls and shops
where protagonists and antagonists
offer me jewel-studded verbs,
hand-painted adjectives
and nouns in little velvet pouches.
Overwhelmed,
I write a new path
into a shimmering garden.
As I amble through the brambles and branches,
fat lipped flowers
hiss ideas through
soft, colourful teeth.
As a swarm of grammar flies buzz towards me,
I lift my pen
and the plot twists again.
I dance away
to a skyscraper forest,
bathed in the fluorescent glow
of flickering streetlamps.
Blaring car horns seem to scream;
‘Check your spelling!’
‘Check your spelling!’
And I sit on a lonely park bench,
watching a metaphorical spider
spin a web of similes.
Then the sky roars
and showering from above,
fat droplets
of words.
Words of all kind,
Words of all shape, size and colour.
Bursting on the clammy pavement
like liquid glass.
words ringing in my ears,
seeping into my skin.

I write some more.

A list of the top three contestants in both the junior and senior categories, along with their work and biographies, can be accessed at poets.ca/blog/.