Philadelphia Native Wins Top Prize In Poetry Contest
By John Ostapkovich
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- A Philadelphia native, now from South Jersey, has won a top prize for poetry, and much of it is based on the old neighborhood.
44- year-old David Livewell, a medical editor by trade, is a poet at heart, "branded by Philadelphia" in his youth in Kensington.
The North Catholic and LaSalle grad has now won the T.S. Elliot Prize for Poetry, beating more than 400 other contenders.
It's good for a $2,000 award and, perhaps more importantly, publication later this year of his book Shackamaxon, with over half of the 60 poems set in the city.
"Once you're branded by Philadelphia, I think that that mark is always on you and poetry deals so much with memory," said Livewell. "I mean you're constantly re-ordering the past and bringing it to bear on the present."
More than a novel, he says his poetic approach suits his vision.
"I like the crystallization of poetry," said Livewell. "I like its brevity and the fact that you can hone in on different images and speak in different voice in a way that you couldn't fiction."
Prior to the book coming out, read a few of his Philadelphia-related poems below.
SHEET METAL SHEARS
With shears from half a lifetime knocking tin, He sliced the news while slowly losing touch.
Too weak to read, he stacked a plastic bin.
"You can't believe that paper weighs this much!"
His nurse had said the dying watch their hands.
At work once more, he looked to certainties:
Blades on a whetstone, wrist-tight copper bands, Lines on his palms like prints of barren trees,
The blurred tattoo of his name, a German fist Picking a fight he knew he might not win.
Slight things. The way those shears had missed the weight of the morning paper he was in.
PANES OF GOLD
After Robert Frost's "A Peck of Gold"
Grime always dulling the rows of squares,
Except when fading dusk light flares,
And we are nightly in Fishtown told
Panes of the shut-down mill are gold.
Too far down the block to prove,
The gilded glass with the sun will move,
And we are nightly in Fishtown told
Panes of the mill have turned to gold.
Such is life when you're blue-collar:
Bright beacons pale your last dollar,
And we are nightly in Fishtown told
"We flaunt our pains in life like gold."
STICKBALL AT ST. MIKE'S
We strained to follow hits to the top story.
The traceries were triples, grounders strikes.
A homer had to clear the slated pitch.
Like Michael's sword, our broomstick swung at strikes, as the church tower's shadow draped each pitch and evening dimmed Good Friday's stained-glass story.
All but the dusk was fair. Then, black as pitch, The sky obscured our vision and His story of a thrust spear and jagged lightning strikes.
A final pitch, three strikes…. That game is history.
