Last week, after a summer hiatus, David Lehman returned to run the American Scholar's "Next Line Please" contest. He kicked off the fall season with an invitation to submit the first line for a crowd-sourced sonnet. The only requirement? That the line end with the word "uniform."
He announced the winner today. He's what he writes:
There were so many good entries this week that it was even harder than usual to pick out a winner. I went with Michael C. Rush’s entry: “Our dreams as disparate as our days uniform,” in part because I think we can do interesting things with the antithesis set up between night and day, dreams and actuality. There is an implicit “are” between “days” and “uniform.” But I was also intrigued by the possibility of an invisible apostrophe after “days.” That is, a listener without seeing the poem might think that the word uniform in “days[’] uniform” refers to an item of apparel. It is clear that the primary meaning has to do with sameness (uniformity), but the buried metaphor has a definite appeal.