Patrick Raneses, FCRH 2020, publishes with the Academy of American Poets
Author: Patrick Raneses
Patrick Raneses is a 2020 graduate of Fordham University. After winning the 2019 Academy of American Poets Prize, his poem "Pondlight" has been published on poetry.org, a website produced by the Academy of American Poets.
Fordham's Creative Writing department notified students in December 2019 about its annual prizes, and I encourage all students to submit their work for the Margaret Lamb/Writing to the Right Margins Prizes (which I somehow also won), the Bernice Kilduff White & John J. White Creative Writing Prize, The Reid Family Prize, and the Academy of American Poets Prize. The Academy of American Poets Prize has existed since the 1950s as the University and College Poetry Prize program, of which the Academy sponsors in collaboration with a large number of colleges across the country.
The piece I submitted, "Pondlight," and a couple other poems I submitted alongside of it, were all written during my time in poet Katy Lederer's Luminous Details course in Fall 2019, a graduate class I managed to slip into that was particularly focused on workshopping imagery. The particular piece I wrote was actually meant to be a throwaway poem: I wrote it for an ekphrastic poetry exercise (ekphrastic art being artwork about other works of art) when I took a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was too tired to look at anymore artwork, instead opting to write from my memory about this pot my dad filled with water in my backyard. I didn't think much of the poem but my professor gave it some positive feedback by the end of the class so I threw it into my submission. They announced the award winners around March, a little before lockdown really began, and the piece ended up winning one of the prizes.
Patrick Raneses, FCRH 2020
A practical message to aspiring submitters: trust both your own and others' instincts about your work; in cases when you're able to submit multiple pieces like this award, choose a mix of pieces which you might consider your own favorites alongside the pieces other people seem to prefer. You might win one hundred bucks (or hopefully more) because of someone else's opinion.
In July, months after Fordham University announced the prizewinners and certainly enough time and Coronavirus and racial unrest for me to forget about the prize, the Academy of American Poets sent me an email asking if I could sign a contract that would allow them to publish the poem on poets.org. Another two months passed and the other day they notified me that the poem was published on their website.
While winning, being published, and earning a little bit of cash is certainly nice, I think the most I've gained from this experience is seeing the unexpected lifespan of a piece of art and the strange and often beautiful ways it can follow me around. This is a poem I lazily wrote at the beginning of the semester in the Astor Court courtyard of the Met as my mind wandered with the koi fish at the bottom of the fake pond. Didn't think about it again until I needed to submit a final portfolio with enough pieces. Submitted it for an award because I was able to submit multiple pieces for an award. Won it, and then forgot about it--really up until now, where I'm living back at home, so far from the New York where I initially wrote it. Yet, I'm able to walk out to my backyard and see that very pot filled with water that I wrote about almost a year ago, occupied now with manic goldfish and baby tadpoles. Art always is occupied with the unexpected, and can often be unexpected in the most pleasantly unexpected of ways.