A Grand Forks resident took top honours in a poetry contest that honours poet Robert Service.
Terry Hynes’ The Greenhorn was selected as the winner of Up Here magazine’s 2012 Robert Service Poetry Contest; he pocketed $750 as a result.
Hynes said that Service, who is often referred to as The Bard of the Yukon, is one of his favourite poets and authors and someone he models himself after.
“I’ve read most of his stuff, I have most of his books so I had written a number of poems over the years, most of them a long time ago and never published – I did it for my own use,” Hynes explained.
The Greenhorn was one such work and Hynes said he had to cut it down from the original 1,000 words. He also said that he received notification that he was shortlisted but was still surprised to see that he took first place.
“Last month (August), they contacted me and asked for photos, a bio and stuff like that – basically all the shortlisted people were doing this and then the publication date was Sept. 1 and I assumed that the winner would’ve been notified before the publication date so I never heard anything and waited and waited for my mail and (the first week of September) it came,” he said.
Hynes opened up the magazine to feelings of trepidation and was surprised to see not only did he take top spot with The Greenhorn but another poem he submitted, Lake LeBarge Revisited, received an honourable mention.
There were a few things that inspired Hynes’ The Greenhorn but Service’s works were the main catalyst.
“The inspiration was in some parts, an old joke I heard years ago but in other parts it was Service himself: The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill, The Shooting of Dan McGrew, The Cremation of Sam McGee, a lot his poems have a little bit of a twist to them, so that’s what I tried to put into The Greenhorn in the ending there,” said Hynes.
He said that there was more of a twist in the longer version but his submission still retained that even though he had to shorten it for publication.
“If you never read the longer version obviously the short version worked because it got me into first place,” Hynes quipped.
Click here to read his poem.