Winners announced for Arts & The Park poetry contests

Winners have been announced for this year’s two Arts & The Park poetry contests, the Spa City Slam and the Paul Tucker Poetry Prize.

The Spa City Slam was a competition of performance poetry that took place May 4 in a big tent at Hill Wheatley Plaza. Little Rock poet Zachary Crow was the winner and took home $300. Crow is the executive director of DeCarcerate, which is an organization dedicated to lowering the population in Arkansas prisons. He has competed in numerous slams in Arkansas and Tennessee and has been a featured poet at Wednesday Night Poetry.

Second place went to Little Rock’s Tru Poet McCoy, who won a cheap bottle of Champagne. The third-place poet was Molly Sroges from Berryville who took home a loaf of white bread and a can of Spam.

The Paul Tucker Poetry Prize was a contest of written poetry and 50 submissions were received from as far away as California and Georgia. Competitors had to have lived in Arkansas at some time in their life and their poems had to have Arkansas as part of the theme. The winner was Emily Parker of Hot Springs who received $1,000 for her poem “Natural State.” Parker, who is employed at Visit Hot Springs, received her B.A. in Theater Arts at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia and an M.F.A. in Directing from the University of New Orleans. She has an extensive background in theater, both professionally and as a teacher. “But poetry will always be where my heart’s blood lies,” she said in a news release. “I was and still am shocked and humbled to have won.”

Second place poet was Haley Crabb of Hot Springs who won $500. The third-place prize of $200 went to Hot Springs Village poet Ken Haley.

The Paul Tucker Poetry Prize honors the late Tucker who was a local neurologist, poet and patron of Hot Springs arts, especially poetry. Financial sponsors included Dennis Magee, John Crawford, Wednesday Night Poetry, and The Hot Springs chapter of Poet’s Roundtable of Arkansas, who also judged the competition.

Arts & The Park was sponsored by the Hot Springs Area Cultural Alliance.

“Natural State” by Emily Parker

This was never my place, rather, I wasn’t born here.

I came here in college, 18 and world wise.

People here seem to know a secret, never revealed,

It lives in the darkest part of the eye.

But me, I had lived in paradise, my heart belonged to Virginia, Larked in louche lassitude in La Louisiane.

And Salzburg, Paris, the White Cliffs of Dover,

Well, everyone has places and wishes and ports of call. But Arkansas? What’s here? What’s there?

The 25th state where “The People Rule,” who knows anything about it at all?

It’s the secret — an echo in the stone.

Never lived any place where I spoke and it spoke back, of home.

Sights here regularly steal my breath, lift and carry me along, Along rivers, mountains, shining shoals, deep forests and hidden caves,

High prairie, delta waters, rich and loamy land, sandy shores, diamond clay, vasty lakes,

Forgotten hollows, the breathing, healing, Grandfather bluffs, and ancient waters.

Ancient, ancient, ancient.

You can lose yourself here like old Rip Van,

The difference being you’re awake with no inclination to depart.

This was never my place.

Until it was.