New Budding Poets of YWPS!

7/19/2022

Our New Budding Poets (from left): Ambrose Wong, Roderick Yuen, Horace Chan, Edgar Tsang

[19 Jul] Hong Kong Budding Poets (English) Award (HKBPA) 2021/22, the most prestigious poetry prize for students of Hong Kong, released their lists of awardees earlier and to our delight, four of our talented poets made it into the shortlist with the following awards:

Primary Section
Gold Prize – Ambrose Wong 6D
Silver Prize – Roderick Yuen 5A
Honourable Mention – Horace Chan 6A
Honourable Mention – Edgar Tsang 6B
Poet of the School – Ambrose Wong 6D

The awarded poems above will be published in the anthology of HKBPA.

This honour is particularly precious as it is already 4 years ago (2018) that we last had an awardee in this contest and 10 year ago (2012) that we had multi-awardees there! You may read the awarded pieces here, along with the pieces previously awarded.

An online award ceremony was held this evening to honour all the prize-winners. Ambrose Wong, being the Gold Award recipient, was invited to perform his poem, "An Amazing Party", too.

Let's congratulate our budding poets and we hope more and more outstanding writers will be discovered in the near future.

Dr H C Lee

5 Comments

6A02 Horace Chan

7/20/2022 09:32:05 pm

When I first knew about the competition-the Hong Kong Budding Poets (English) Award 2021/22, of course- I was like, “Oh, it’s just a poem! What could it possibly do to me?” So I only cared about the rhymes and wrote just a normal “child lying to mum” story(my topic was about honesty). I even made the title of the first draft “ The Liar’s Punishment”. Overall I didn’t treat it very seriously and I wasn’t creative. But it turns out that I was wrong about the competition. When I looked at it again, my title was too common and the content was not even special. And last but not least, I thought about my attitude towards it. Then I knew why I thought I didn’t do well. All because I lacked creativity and good attitude. So I redrafted it.
So guys, here is some advice for being a better poetry writer: be creative and also, have a good attitude towards writing each poem. They are very important for writing an excellent one.

6D23 Ambrose Wong

7/20/2022 09:45:26 pm

Actually, I kind of thought of the elements of creativity first. Art, music, architecture, writing, cooking, technology, etc, can all be creative. Like music, for example, Mozart was supposed to be a classical-period-piano-composer. In the poem, I pondered that maybe Mozart can compose not classical, but something related to things more modernly (So I decided that pop music should replace the classical music). Personally, I think that to improve one’s poem-writing-skills, listing out every point that you can think of the topic is predominant. This will improve the organisation of the poem, like which main idea is in which stanza. Secondly, you may add decent amounts of figurative language, for example: personification, onomatopoeia, similes, alliterations, etc, making the poem more lively. And lastly, this is a feature that I like, which is the main thing which got my poem ‘An Amazing Party’ to claim the championship, is to add an acrostic feature. You may say this to the readers first, or keep it secret, like my piece.

Edgar Tsang

7/20/2022 10:25:02 pm

Here, I would like to thank Dr. Lee for giving me the chance to participate in this fabulous competition.
Actually, when I was thinking about how to write this poem, I first started with "who", "when", "where" and "why". "Who" is who the characters might be. In my poem, the main characters are the Earth, humans, Truth and Lies. “When" is when the poem happened. My poem was at the time when Earth was just formed. "Where" is where the poem took place. My poem’s setting was on Earth. "Why" is for three things. Firstly, why did the poem start like this? Secondly, why should the poem end this way? Thirdly, why did the characters behave in this manner? So, "When, where, why and who" do not just apply to stories, they work on poems too!
As for how to be a better poetry writer, I would use the word OAR to sum it up. "O" is to be observant. Observance is the key to creativity. You can make use of what you observed in similes and metaphors. Therefore, your poem will not be dry and dull. "A" is for associate. You must associate every single stanza with each other like interlocking rings. So, readers will be able to follow the things going on in your poem easily. "R" is for review. Once you have finished your first draft, do not think that you have completed the task. You should review, review and review to make sure your poem is perfectly written and finalized.

Observance
Associate
Review -----OAR

5A Roderick Yuen

7/21/2022 04:17:02 pm

When I first saw the titles for this year’s Budding Poet Award, I was torn. All three of them seemed attractive. In the end, I chose “creativity” as I had a special bond with creativity which helped me create myriads of exciting odysseys in my mind. Then, I began with thinking about items that could represent creativity – such as wings (creativity can let you soar), unpredictable wind (you never know where creativity takes you) and scintillations (like sparks, creativity seemingly comes out of nowhere). I started formulating a thread-like “plot” to link these ideas and ultimately came up with the persona having a dreamlike trance and ultimately reincarnating as a creature who had transcended its physical body because of creativity. I feel that the plot took the poem to another level, not just being a confused mixture of ideas but rather a river where the ideas could merge and flow like liquids.

I’m honored to be a recipient of this prestigious Budding Poet Award. I’d like to thank Dr Lee for his support and comments for me to redraft my poems. He taught me to convey messages in a more subtle way rather than “direct teaching.” Direct teaching is like spoon-feeding. Feeding the ideas to the reader’s mouth discourages them from thinking further or developing their own reading of the poem. I’d also like to thank all the other teachers who have taught me poems, drama, solo verse, and writing since I first became a Ying Wa Boy.

If you are interested in joining this competition, here’s my advice: Don’t rush into it. Take a while to observe anything, even trivial, around you as you live life as usual. The best inspiration comes when you’re not looking for it at all. I would also advise making a mind-map of separate ideas, and then creating a story to merge them. Use figurative language such as similes, metaphor, alliteration, et cetera. Do use your own figurative language instead of cliches (e.g. as happy as a clam) to truly express your own grasp of the poem’s topic. Do review your poem multiple times as the first draft is never flawless. Last but not least, while this isn’t directly related to the competition, I strongly recommend you to think and feel the hidden meanings of objects. For example, when you see something as small as a lone falling leaf, try to come up in some ways that it is symbolically significant. It can represent solitude, desolation, leaving family… just to name a few. If one feels that a falling leaf (just an example, it can be anything seemingly “minor” and “meaningless”) doesn’t mean anything, then his grasp on the symbolic reach of things won’t be enough for him to make a brilliant, thought-provoking poem.

I hope this post increased your interest in writing poems.

Roderick Yuen

Yiding Song (AKA Vincent)

7/24/2022 12:38:48 am

Well done guys!!!! Awesome poems! Super glad for you all and I hope you enjoyed the ceremony too (despite it being online).

Ambrose's gimmick is really nice and I think revealing it at the end definitely worked. The content of the poem explores creativity with some subtlety and I honestly had a lot of fun trying to guess what it would end up getting at. But the last line binds it together with the form with such a twist. Really neat!

I love Roderick's phrase "unseeing eyes", which for me distills the introspective energy that overflows the poem. The images are rich and beautiful - and the poem is like a synaesthetic whirlwind. I guess this kinda parallels the idea of creativity hiding everywhere. There's just so much symbolism to unpack.

In my opinion it's super hard to write a good narrative poem (I tend to write a static picture rather than capturing change), but Horace succeeds in it with a bouncy, rhythmic manner. The whole poem feels like a cantabile, reflecting a sly sense of mischief. I love the light twist on an otherwise heavy topic.

I admit I had to read Edgar's poem twice to understand it 😜 Approaching the topic from a grand scale, in space and in time, is definitely interesting and sorta reduces our human troubles to childish nuisance. For me, the personification of Lies and Truth suggests that they are just human constructs. Really interesting conceptually.

New Budding Poets of YWPS!

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