Calloway Song, Winner of the 18th Annual Writer’s Digest Poetry Awards

One of my favorite things to do each year is choosing the winner of the Writer’s Digest Poetry Awards. In 2023, there were more than 900 entries covering a range of forms, subjects, issues, and themes. In the end, I selected Calloway Song’s “Songs of Gideon” for the First Place Prize of $1,000, publication in Writer’s Digest, and a 20–minute consultation with yours truly.

Calloway Song is a writer and poet from the Bay Area—who is pursuing a BA in linguistics from Duke University. For me, his poem “Songs of Gideon” feels like an earnest attempt to wrestle with the paradox of trying to reason one’s way to faith. The slashes help break up ideas and language and force me to consider each separately and together. As with many great poems, I leave it with more questions than answers.

Here’s a quick Q&A with poet Calloway Song:

What are you currently up to?

My frequency of writing can likely be graphed as a wave function. Some days, I will write enough poems to fill up half a notebook (most of which I end up salvaging). Most other days, I just try to appreciate the things I write. Life is too short to put yourself down all the time.

How long have you been writing?

Poetry-wise, I started writing more “seriously” around five years ago, in my junior year of high school. Poetry was one of the places where I got to make English whatever I wanted it to be.

What inspired “Songs of Gideon”?

The poem didn’t even have a title at first. The poem was titled months later after it was written. “Songs of Gideon” came from a place of religious doubt and existentialism, and a lot of foundational structures, which I had built my beliefs upon, were falling apart.

The Book of Job touches upon the seemingly absurd suffering of the human experience. Ecclesiastes (Kohelet) discusses the vanity of work and the eventuality of all “things.” The Song of Solomon relates to human love and the longing for another.

These books were historically categorized as “wisdom literature.” Night after night, I tried to search for a definite answer from these scriptures. Something tangible that could finally dispel every question I ever had.

I ended up leaving with 20 more questions, hence why this poem can feel vague and disjointed at times, especially with the slashes in between phrases. It was written by someone who had—and still has—many vague and disjointed foundational beliefs.

The title “Songs of Gideon” is a reference to the song “Visions of Gideon” by Sufjan Stevens, which elicits this sense of longing, for the divine or another. I relate my journey to it in many ways, longing to find and connect with a higher power. As for the “songs,” see them more as a mating call of some bird to an empty forest or reaching your hand into the void, only to hope a fingertip reaches back.

The world is absurd at times, and this is all I know for certain: Love the people who need to be loved—I am tired of sadness, and the things I can change nothing of but write. But I know I am not the only one.

If you could pass on one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?

Littlewood’s law says miracles happen on average once a month.

Go be stubborn like the miracle writer you are.

“Songs of Gideon” by Calloway Song