Anne Silver Award

Cece Peri

Cece Peri's clever Shakespearean sonnet grappling with two contradictory theories on dreams receives our first Anne Silver Award.

Cece Peri holds a doctorate in psychology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She is a research writer for a clinical research organization. Her work has appeared in various journals, including the San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly. She has taken two poetry workshops through the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. This is her first poetry award.

Benefactor Dan Polier donated the $67 prize, a sum Speechless settled on because it provides two cheap dinners, two movie tickets and a little gas money.

See below for the next Anne Silver Contest deadline and rules for entry.

Cece Peri
 

FREUD OR CRICK?

Old Freud believed that dreams fulfilled a wish,
unleashing repressed fantasies of sex,
or sagas of us following our bliss,
with loads of lessons hidden in subtext --
a primer I should sift through and decode
so that my fragile ego won't implode.
But crafty Crick envisioned housekeepers
collecting the minutia of the day
to be stuffed into one venting sweeper
and summarily jettisoned away.
In that case, I should snub what dreams contain
and never even think of them again.

Yet, no matter how I brood: Crick or Freud?
each morning I wake clueless and annoyed.

The Anne Silver Award, commemorating the late Los Angeles poet, acknowledges witty poems in form. Any type of formal poem may be submitted. The next deadline is Friday, August 11. There is no readers' fee. Charles Harper Webb will judge. Email entries to the Editor.

Speechless Spring 2007
Copyright © 2007 Published by Tebot Bach