POETRY

Get Spacefaring here.

One of the poems from Spacefaring, ‘The Volume Knob,’ won a prize in a poetry contest organized by Ulysses, a writing software company. Ulysses awarded me my first such victory in 15 years, after countless submissions to traditional literary contests and legacy publications. I’ll feel grateful to them forever.

Here’s the poem with the judges’ interpretation:

The Volume Knob

I seized the knob & yanked it to the left
until it stopped.
At first, the room felt dead.

I feared the booming din had turned me deaf—
but
then
Love's music
bloomed into my head,
the softest music, yet the most profound,
richer than every auditory sound,
& for the soul more solid than the ground.
Today, I'm glad I turned
the volume
down.

Ulysses Judges’ interpretation:

Confucius once said: “If what one has to say is not better than silence, then one should keep silent.” Silence in our world full of noise, is also the main topic of the poem The Volume Knob by Ellen Fishbein. It talks in free verses rhyming just partially about the discovery of silence by turning the volume knob down. We’re used to living in a noisy environment, in a noisy world: Roads full of traffic, airplanes humming in the sky, shopping malls that are pumped full of music and commercials, the earphones of the person sitting next to us on the Underground. In this world this poem claims silence to be “the softest music, yet the most profound, richer than every auditory sound, & for the soul more solid than the ground.” It simply puts this elementary experience in a very emotive form and thus is one of our favorites.