Plans & Prospects 2023

College News
Stallworthy
Poetry Prize
The annual competition was set up
in memory of the late Professor Jon
Stallworthy (1935-2014), poet and
Fellow of Wolfson College, and is open
to any student currently enrolled in
postgraduate studies at the University of
Oxford. The funding for the prize was
provided by generous donations from
Jon Stallworthy’s many friends
and admirers.
The prize is awarded for the best poem
in English verse not exceeding 40 lines
in length, in 2023 on the subject of
‘Disgrace’. The value of the prize is
£1,000, and entrants are permitted
to submit up to three poems. The
judges for this year’s award included
the Oxford Professor of Poetry, Alice
Oswald.
The award ceremony took place in
the Leonard Wolfson Auditorium on
18 January where the winning poem,
‘Trente et Quarante’, by Jennifer Kim
was announced along with the runnerup
Paul Norris (Brasenose). The other
shortlisted poets were Eliza Browning
(St Hugh’s), Jordan Maly-Preuss
(Merton) and Eira Elisabeth Murphy
(Mansfield).
Trente et Quarante
After Lucian Freud’s The Big Man (1976),
painted to repay his gambling debts.
In Monaco, I’m afraid
you’ve lost the grand tableau again
and fled to our narrow suite above the tabac.
The Big Man who came brawling upstairs
neck tight in a howling ring
leans now in your weary armchair, waiting to be made whole.
Out of the corner, in drunk atonement, you pull your tricks:
palette knife, hog bristle,
eight tubes of lightfast oil.
If you asked, I could tell you how you will make me.
Sink his dark suit into the room
until every wrinkle struggles away.
Burn the impossible mirror white.
Suppose his flesh in peach and vermilion
worked up in crests that knuckle under your brush.
Last, where the light lands pale and arrogant, mark it –
pitch his forehead in Cremnitz, tumble it down his jowls,
whorl in opal the moon atop his chin.
I am your long apology,
your loss lured into the gorgeous.
Your expert hand slips varnish over my cadmium skin.
Rouge gagne et la couleur:
The game is fixed for you now
as you strike out your due on my angled face.
How spare, how silent the room must be to hear
the panting of your bristle against linen
every hue belonging to him before I can become myself.
Credit: John Cairns
About the winner:
Jennifer Kim is an MSt student in the History of Art and Visual Culture at
Exeter College. Her dissertation research focuses on twentieth-century British
portraiture and the nature of debt. She graduated summa cum laude with an
undergraduate degree in Anthropology from Harvard University in 2017. Her
work has previously been published in the Harvard Advocate.
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