Northampton, MA (PRWEB) March 04, 2015
It’s the final month to enter the 14th annual Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers. This year’s deadline is April 1. There’s no fee to enter. Winning Writers editor Jendi Reiter is the final judge, assisted by Lauren Singer. The winners will share $ 2,000 in prizes, including a top prize of $ 1,000, and their entries will be published on WinningWriters.com.
This contest welcomes published and unpublished work. Poems may be of any length. Enter the contest online at https://www.winningwriters.com/wergle.
Jendi Reiter is the author of Bullies in Love (Little Red Tree Publishing, 2015), Barbie at 50 (Cervena Barva Press, 2010), Swallow (Amsterdam Press, 2009), and A Talent for Sadness (Turning Point Books, 2003). Awards include a 2010 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists’ Grant for Poetry, the 2013 Little Red Tree International Poetry Prize, the 2012 Betsy Colquitt Award for Poetry from Descant magazine, the 2011 James Knudsen Editor’s Prize in Fiction from Bayou Magazine, the 2011 OSA Enizagam Award for Fiction, the 2010 Anderbo Poetry Prize, and second prize in the 2010 Iowa Review Awards for Fiction.
Top prizewinner Simon Hendrie won our 2014 contest with his highly quotable poem “What Will You Say When Your Child Asks: ‘Why Didn’t You Invest in Eastern Poland?'” Starting with an unintentionally comical headline from a financial advertorial, the poem takes the scenario to a higher level of absurdity, with a dead-on parody of the thriller genre starring a sinister nine-year-old and his cowed papa. This poem was pitch-perfect, no longer than it needed to be, and on a topic we don’t often see in this contest.
Nancy Pagh’s found-poem “What I Sometimes Think Other Poets’ Book Blurbs Must Say About Me” came in such a close runner-up that we added a Second Prize to our original set of prizes in 2014. With winsome humility, Pagh collects flowery squibs from other writers’ back covers and turns them into negative statements about how her poetry falls short. Stripped of attribution, the blurbs in their original positive format sound generic and even nonsensical. It’s in keeping with the Wergle Flomp contest’s original mission of puncturing inflated praise from vanity contests. We commend her for finding a fresh angle on poems about the poetry business, a subject that’s too often treated in a cutesy and predictable way.
In all, our 2014 contest received over 4,400 entries. Read the winning poems.
Winning Writers was founded in 2001 by Adam Cohen and Jendi Reiter to provide expert literary contest information and resources to the public. In addition to the Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest, we sponsor the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest, the North Street Book Prize for Self-Published Books, and the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Learn more at WinningWriters.com and join our 42,000 followers on Twitter at @winningwriters.