National Poetry Competition
 

You can read the winning entries here.

This year's winners I think are much better than last year's and the year before that and the year before that and so on. Still, when you have three people judging, the final poem will likely be no more than pleasant.

Congratulations for making the long list, Walter. Given the sort of poems that won, I don't know how much chance you had with what you entered, but sometimes it is good to throw the dart, blindfolded, and see what happens.

Susan

Thanks, Susan. I had a 0% chance of winning having submitted a poem of limerick stanzas with ott rhymes -- the exact opposite sort of thing that wins. However, I started this thread because I was pleasantly surprised at the winning entries (the 2015 ones were terrible). I don't think the winning poem is a great one, but it is decent, and the third place poem is loosely iambic and rhymes. There were apparently 12,000 poems entered, so one would assume there'd be a greater variety of form.

I'm not sure what kind of reputation the contest has in the UK. Maybe it is not as big of a deal as I assumed.

Congrats, Walter!

Well done, Walter. Trust me, it's a very big deal indeed.

Well thank you, both.

Walter,

Congratulations. Your stuff here is consistently fresh and exciting, in part because it's often the type of work readers don't see in contests like this.

Well done, Walter. I haven't won anything there or thirty years, since the great Wendy was a judge.