SCANSION . . . .about the 2009 SENIOR POETs LAUREATE CONTEST

Welcome to GOLDEN WORDS, the online anthology featuring the winners of the 17th Annual National SENIOR POETs LAUREATE poetry competition for American poets age 50 and older. In these pages you will meet the National Senior Poet Laureate, Senior Poets Laureate from forty-two states and one foreign country, and nineteen Honor Scroll Winners whose winning poems passed the 1st Round of judging but did not proceed to the Final Rounds.

Also included are two International Honor Scroll and one International “Diploet” Award winners (Diploet means Diplomatic Ambassador of Good Will) and four “Golden Pen” Award honorees (two for living poets and two for deceased poets).

We also added two special Awards in categories that have not appeared in GOLDEN WORDS anthologies until now: Amy Kitchener's Scribe's Scroll Award and the White Buffalo Native American Poet Laureate Award. While neither is part of the Senior Poets' Laureate competition, the submissions which earned these special awards of recognition were discovered among poems that had been entered in the SPL contest.

A third Special Amy Kitchener certificate of recognition patriotically dubbed the Americana Award went to webmaster Al Baker for his short wry free verse about why people come to the United States.

This year's golden poems once again prove the truth of the well-worn saying about seniors: We are getting older, and we're also definitely getting better. We hope you enjoy exploring GOLDEN WORDS, which is appearing in electronic format for the second time since its inception in 1994 as an anthology featuring the best of contemporary senior American poets.

Between editing my first strictly online GOLDEN WORDS publication last year, and this edition in September 2009, the city of Springfield, Missouri finally bought my flood-ravaged property. I lived out of boxes until favorable spring weather enabled me to cross the country in a loaded U-Haul driven by my son Ted in May.

Yvonne Nunn served as Contest Administrator and Al Baker served as Webmaster. Through their hard work, which relieved me of duties I could not perform and also be moving, two lives were saved: mine and that of the Senior Poets Laureate contest. Thanks, Yvonne and Al, and all poets whose interest and participation made this literary event so great.

The Monarch butterfly joins the Swallowtail butterfly as symbols of the laureate poems and motto of the Senior Poets Laureate Poetry Competition, Thoughts are Things sent down to Earth on Wings of Men's own Pens, and where our purpose is summed up in the mission statement on our masthead, We turn Scribblers into Scribes. To witness the beauty of pupation and transformation, as symbolized by our popular salutation among poets around the world, May the Muse be with You, we invite all potential human monarchs and swallowtails to visit the spectacular poetry-in-motion-through-photography website of William Zittrich at   www.wyllz.com

The new headquarters of the sponsor of the National Annual Senior Poets Laureate Poetry Competition for American poets age 50 and older is on the Monterey Peninsula in California, home of the world-famous Butterfly Tree where hundreds of thousands of monarch butterflies congregate each fall before continuing their annual migration to Mexico.

I returned to the central coast of California, where I was first initiated into entering regional and national poetry contests by being named the Monterey Peninsula Herald's 1965 Poet Laureate runner up. Details preceding my farewell to Missouri as “The Last Indian on the Trail of Tears” also appear on this website under the links on the Home Page: WEEPING WATERS and FUNGUS AMUNGUS.

To navigate through the rest of this SCANSION Section, which fills you in about the contest and those who participated, scroll down to the links at the bottom of each page and click the one of your choice.

Wanda Sue Parrott, Editor