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This contest welcomes published
and unpublished work. Your poem may have up to 250 lines.
The judges' essays from previous
years will tell you all you need to know about our pet
peeves. Ageism, sexism, classism, fat-phobia, love poems to cars and
Cheez Whiz, drunk Santas, the road not taken, tourist jokes about
"natives"? Quoth the judges, "Nevermore!" This
year, we add a word of advice for authors whose poems avoided the
obvious pitfalls but drove around in circles after that.
A good premise is just the
beginning. The poem has to develop the initial joke, not merely present
it and repeat it. See, for example, our honorable mention winner Art
Rosch's "The
Savior, Just in Time", which starts with a ridiculously
blasphemous scene worthy of Monty Python, and builds it up to a punch
line with a clever theological reference. Another winning strategy is
for the characters to undergo an emotional shift, as in Anna Cranage
Conathan's honorable mention poem "Out
of Sync at the Kitchen Sink", where a wife and mother's
exhaustion with her emotional labors pushes her to express her real
desire with a masculine brashness.
If it's a list poem, like our
first-prize winner Cathy Bryant's "Sexual
Positions for Those No Longer Young", the listed items
should grow in absurdity and employ a variety of sounds, images, and
feeling-tones. Bryant's poem met the all-important Winning Writers
editors' test: Will we be quoting catchphrases from this poem across
the breakfast table for years to come? "Darling, darling, let's
try—Servicing the Caravan,/Polishing the Bevelled Edge, The Newt,/The
Plumber's Lunch Break, The Mothy Woollen..." The title
notwithstanding, this poem wasn't so much a joke about sexual decline
in middle age, as a tender tribute to the private language that gets
created in a long-term partnership.
Similarly, a top-quality parody
doesn't rely solely on the humorous mismatch between the original text
and the new topic. Nor does it borrow a familiar song or poem simply as
a structure to hang its hat on, without engaging the two texts in any
meaningful dialogue.
Our second-prize winner Susan
White's "English
Teacher's Daughter", a perfectly singable parody of
Loretta Lynn's country song "Coal
Miner's Daughter", presents grammatical rules through
the unfolding narrative of rural kids in tattered clothes, enjoying the
freedom of the outdoors, but never forgetting "when to say that
and when to say which". The poem keeps the original song's spirit
of "poor but proud", while turning the words around to poke
fun at the type of pride to which poets are prone. We may have maxed
out our credit cards on grad school, but gol-durnit, we know the
difference between "less" and "fewer"!
Meanwhile, Kevin Riel's
honorable mention poem "Against
the Campaign to Stomp Out 'Awesome'" got points for
choosing a target (Robert Hass's "Meditation
at Lagunitas") that was atypical yet known to the
judges, and double extra points for using parody to ask some serious
questions about poetry and elitism. Robert Frost parodies usually make
us groan because there aren't many fresh ways to re-word the
well-trodden syntax of "The Road Not Taken" or "Stopping
By Woods on a Snowy Evening". Christopher Greathouse's "Problem
6" smartly bypassed this problem by transporting the
characters and setting of the latter poem into a whole different genre,
the exam question fact pattern, whose voice and grammar are quite far
from Frost's measured rhymes—13.7 miles away, in fact.
All the Wergle Flomp winning
poems and judges' comments going back to 2002 are available for reading
in our website
archives.
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