Writing Reflections: The Hunt of Grief

Happy Saturday, Vocalites! I’m back with another Writing Reflections. Last week, I focused on a piece that did not win a challenge, so I thought that this week I would focus on a piece that actually did place in a challenge. Yes, my darlings, I have actually placed in challenges before—fives times, in fact. Not many times, but they are still achievements that I am proud of, and I would like to take the time to see why one of those pieces might have been deemed worthy of praise by the Vocal gods.

I’m going to focus on the most recent of my accomplishments, my Honorable Mention in the Poetry of the Hunt Challenge. For those who do not remember this challenge—it was last September through last October—here is the exact wording of the prompt:

Write a poem about the hunt and what it means to capture (or miss) the thing you seek.

Every hunt is a story. The chase, the near miss, the moment of capture, or the emptiness of coming back with nothing. What we pursue says as much as how we pursue it, and the outcome can change us either way.

Your poem might take the shape of an actual hunt through forest or field, or it might live in metaphor—a search for love, for meaning, for something lost. Focus on the tension between seeking and finding, the pull between desire and fulfillment.

--Vocal, "Poetry of the Hunt Challenge"

For this challenge, I entered only one poem. That is my typical modus operandi for challenges, although I’m learning to break out of that pattern thanks to the guidance of the award-winning Paul Stewart. Regardless, for this challenge, I only felt the need to write one poem, and it was mostly because I was only in the mood to write one poem related to “hunting” at the time, and it was not because it had anything to do with hunting at all.

You see, this was still fresh after my mother died last July—something that my readers know that I am still processing through my writing—and almost all of my writing was focused on that at the time. The entry for this challenge was no different. It was called “The Hunt of Grief”.

For your convenience, I am going to include both the link to the poem and the text of the poem itself here, so you can go to the original poem if you want or just read it here.

Lost in the forest—searching, searching, but

All I can see are trees surrounding me

Dense foliage thick with the scent of pine and

The rushing of green and brown as I run

Searching, searching, always searching, but I

Cannot find you among the blurring trees

* * *

My heart races, adrenaline pulsing

Through my veins as I grow more desperate

You have left no tracks behind, no scent or

Sign of where you’ve gone, but I will find you

I will hunt you down, I will locate you

I will bring you with me back to our home

And then everything will be all right

* * *

A light beams far away, a flash of you

I race toward it, my legs are burning

Faster, faster I run, closer I get

Light surrounds me, your image closes in

I can almost touch you, the light burns me—

* * *

Then I wake up and find that you’re still dead.

--Stephanie Hoogstad, "The Hunt of Grief"

The tension in this poem is palpable, mostly thanks to such devices as repetition. They create a rhythm, something that pulls the poem along at a much more rapid pace than if I had only said things once. The mirroring effect that I create by having two clauses on multiple lines also increases the tension that the reader feels as the narrator chases after the person who, we only find out at the end, is actually dead. That twist reveal, then, is the greatest strength of the poem; it goes from the object of the narrator’s hunt just being something missing, something desired, to something completely unobtainable, something that the reader could not have known at the beginning of the poem lest the hunt have felt fruitless for its entirety.

These tactics, I believe, are what ensured that the poem at least placed in the challenge. Mind you, I did not consciously do any of this. I know, that sounds ridiculous, right? Don’t writers slave over every piece to make sure that it is absolutely perfect? Well, here’s a secret I’m going to tell you about my poems, which might be why I don’t place in challenges very often: I go by feeling rather than what technically sounds good. If it feels good to me, if it sounds good to me, then I use it, and I very rarely change it in editing unless I notice a major error. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s what feels right to me. And “The Hunt of Grief” certainly felt right to me—and, apparently, the Vocal judges agreed.

Why did the poem not place higher than Honorable Mention? That, unfortunately, will truly remain a mystery. There were many, many fine entries into the challenge. Who’s to say what makes one better than another? At the end of the day, it’s all very subjective, and we have to remember that as we prepare our entries into these challenges. We may have a very fine poem, story, or essay, but it might just not fit the tastes of the Vocal judges at the time. You know what they say: you can’t please everybody.

What do you think? Do you have a poem/story/essay that won a Vocal Challenge? Why do you think it won? Conversely, why do you think one of your entries did not win? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

If there any of my previous works that you would like examined in this series, feel free to leave your thoughts on that in the comments as well!