Find your best words: AVBOB poetry competition entries open in August

THE AVBOB Poetry Project’s competition opens for submissions on August 1, and Peter Anderson, an associate professor of English at the University of Cape Town, shares a poem that demonstrates the importance of mystery and understatement to any creative enterprise.

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Anderson’s lifelong interest in creative writing has led him to release four poetry collections thus far.

Johan Myburg, PR manager for AVBOV Poetry, posed the question to poets, “When writing a poem, do you feel you have to record everything you think and feel about a particular topic, so that your readers will know exactly how they ought to think and feel about it too?”

He explained that while giving your reader all possible information can be a good strategy for getting your first thoughts onto the page, very often, strong poems work because of what they do not say, effectively leaving readers with unanswered questions – a poem opens a door onto a great mystery and leaves readers there.

Anderson’s poem, Cutting, refuses to fill in the gaps in the information it provides readers.

Cutting

It is my best knife and my favourite.

The knife of my hand.

It is the knife he gave to me

and I paid so that it would not come between us.

Now it has come between us

and I remember him by it who never thought

he would be remembered by a knife

alloyed with so much carbon

it grows a lichen of oxide like a stone.

I chop mint and parsley

and he is dead whom I loved.

Myburg calls attention to the first stanza, which he explains places readers in familiar territory, as the speaker’s knife is utterly familiar to him, so much so that it feels like an extension of his body.

“But then, in the second stanza, things become more complicated. First, we are introduced to a second, unnamed person – the man who gave this knife to the speaker. But was it a gift? We discover that the knife was in fact paid for by its current owner, ‘so that it would not come between us’. We know almost nothing about their relationship, only that they shared this experience,” said Myburg.

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Readers then learn of a separation between the men, but the circumstances of which are left unanswered. What readers do know, however, is that the man who gave the speaker the knife is now only accessible to the speaker through memory.

“At first, it seems that the mystery is finally solved in the poem’s last line, where we learn that the man who gave the knife has died. But, in fact, the mystery has only deepened. How does it feel to hold a familiar object that was given to one by someone no longer alive? All we know is that death has divided these two men,” said Myburg.

He adds that calling the poem Cutting turns the attention to the things that separate us from one another, just as mint and parsley can be cut, so too can the dead and the living.

“What survives is love and memory. That is the revelation we are offered at the poem’s end, but it only tells us so much. We have been led into the mystery of handling things that remind us of the dead and, specifically, of our own personal dead. That is all the information we need,” concludes Myburg’s analysis.

The AVBOV Poetry project offers a task to poets – write about something you find deeply, persistently mysterious, and see if you can lead the reader into this mystery, while leaving something unexplained at the poem’s end.

The 2026 AVBOB Poetry Competition opens for submissions on August 1. Visit the AVBOB Poetry website at www.avbobpoetry.co.za and read some of the prize-winning poems from previous years as you prepare to find your own best words.

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