UC Elliston Fellow Wins 2017 Frost Farm Poetry Prize

“The idea behind Yeats' assertion is that the way to make the raw material of our lives last, is to pack it in something that will preserve it,” she clarified. “Using the tools that have been traditionally used to make that happen, rhyme and meter, is important. I wouldn’t want to throw out those tools.”

“They’re so enormously powerful. They help universalize personal experience in a way that transforms language,” Doyle said.

Deborah Warren, a past winner of the New Criterion and Robert Penn Warren poetry prizes, served as judge for the 7th annual Frost Farm competition. Doyle’s took top honors from more than 750 submissions.

“I had a delightful but difficult job,” Warren wrote. “Too much excellence is not a bad problem for a judge.”

Doyle received $1,000, and “Wish” has been published in the prestigious journal The Yale Review. In addition, the poem has been featured on Poetry Daily. She was also given a scholarship to attend the Frost Farm Poetry Conference back in June, at which she gave the opening reading.

“Robert Frost is one of the first poets who entranced me in childhood, and he has remained a major figure in my reading life,” Doyle explained. “Whenever I teach poetry, I start the first day of class with a focus on his poem ‘Birches,’ which I’ve always regarded as one of the most stirring and masterful poems in the English language.”

“My hope is for students to feel in their bodies the way that the rhythm of the poem mirrors its narrative movements and emotional contours,” she said.

“That poem changed how I saw something as simple as the wind,” Doyle asserted. “The idea that language can shape and change an ordinary experience was really profound to me, and I just knew that I wanted to be involved in making those kinds of things happen, with language, for other people.”

"You write what you’ve read. You write what you’ve loved. And what I’ve always read and always loved are poems in which the sonic quality is really important. Poems that walk a line somewhere between story and song, with some mystery in there as well.”

“A poem that can resonate with people on a surface degree of accessibility, but then have a number of hidden qualities once you enter it.” That, Doyle stated, “has always been my goal.”

She seems to have met it. “Wish,” Warren wrote, is “that rare poem where the form is integral to the story.”

In her commentary, Warren appreciated Doyle’s careful attention to form which, in her view, both illuminated the narrator’s feelings and propelled the poem’s story.

“Each of the first four trimeter couplets expresses one of the speaker’s wishes,” she observed. “Each line begins with ‘I told him I needed’ and the final three couplets look back on the wishes with wrenching regret. Following each little couplet is a parenthesis: one tetrameter line explaining why the wish, although granted, ironically failed.”

“The parentheses play on the idiom ‘wishing for the moon.’ They rhyme, and—taken by themselves—collectively make a poem in their own right,” Warren said, noting that, “the seven trimeter couplets themselves make up an unrhymed sonnet—with a conventional volta between the octave and the sestet.”