This year, 441 poets submitted a record total of 1,145 poems, transporting us to physical locations near and fear, as well as to imagined worlds and mental states found on no atlas.

Ultimately, Zócalo poetry editor Colette LaBouff and the editorial staff chose to honor a poem that evokes the complex relationship between the natural and human-made environs of Tucson, Arizona: cloud-brushed mountain peaks, a coyote’s plaintive wail, and a baby quail “nested beneath the aluminum carport.”

We’re thrilled to award the $500 Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize to Charles Jensen, a Wisconsin native who once lived in Tucson and now makes his home in Los Angeles. He will deliver a public reading of his poem at Zócalo’s annual Book Prize award ceremony on May 22 at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Los Angeles. Please see more details on the public reading here.

Jensen is program director of the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and the author of six chapbooks of poems including Breakup/Breakdown and Story Problems. A new collection, Nanopedia, will be published by Tinderbox Editions in summer 2018.

His Zócalo Poetry Prize-winning poem is below, followed by a brief interview.
 

    Tucson

    Dark clouds pull themselves,
    hands first, over the peaks.

    A snake leaves a warning
    in furious cursive on the trail.

    The drooping arms of acacia
    have lost something precious
    and cannot be consoled.

    Further out, a coyote
    chokes up a wail so thin it scratches
    against windows like a fingernail.

    The baby quail nested
    beneath the aluminum carport,

    a false sky

    they can’t see through. They wait
    and wait for rain but it never
    falls. They never see the sun

    but they must know it exists—
    surely they trust one or two
    unseeable things about the world.

We spoke with Jensen about his Midwestern rural upbringing, what turned him on to poetry, and his prize-winning poem, “Tucson.”

The post Charles Jensen Wins Zócalo’s Seventh Annual Poetry Prize appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.