Free to enter by April 1st 2022:
|
Sponsored by Winning Writers
|
Happy new year! Our 21st annual Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest will once again offer $3,500 in prizes, with a first prize of $2,000 and a second prize of $500. The top 12 poems will be published online. The winner will also receive a two-year gift certificate from our co-sponsor, Duotrope (a $100 value).
There's no fee to enter. Jendi Reiter will judge, assisted by Lauren Singer. This contest welcomes published and unpublished work. Your poem may have up to 250 lines. One poem only, please. Submit online by April 1.
This contest is recommended by Reedsy.
Submit your humor poem
Koss, winner of the 20th Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest, with Marcus Bales (second prize) and J. Clark Hubbard (third prize)
The winners of the 20th Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest, with remarks from judges Jendi Reiter and Lauren Singer
Well...that was a year. Our 20th annual Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest came at a time when many of us were wondering, is there anything left to smile about? Will we die from a white supremacist insurrection, a gender-reveal-party wildfire, or someone coughing on us at the supermarket? Here at Winning Writers, your silly poems—from 5,688 poets—brought us some welcome relief from the sorrow and strangeness of a not-quite-post-COVID America.
Our courageous first-round screener Lauren Singer selected 294 shortlisted entries for final judge Jendi Reiter. In a year full of surprises, one unexpected feature of the 2021 contest was discovering fresh and funny poems about topics that we thought were all played out. Not only the pandemic staples of Zoom etiquette bloopers and toilet-paper shortages but popular Wergle topics like Internet dating and Santa Claus (two themes ripe for a mash-up, honestly!) could still be treated with originality by our poetic masters of mockery.
Our Winners
You can always score points with me by satirizing the mental health profession. (Lauren is a therapist and she approved this poem.) "My Therapist Sez", a prose-poem by Koss, is a riotous tour through therapists with absurdly poor boundaries: one who tells clients about her spiritual orgasms, another with a "frantic animal pit stench" who wants sympathy about his divorce. The saga is deepened by undertones of loneliness and pain from a traumatic love affair that the speaker's self-absorbed counselors aren't helping her process. The poem is full of over-the-top yet relatable moments that begin in humor and end in outrage that better care isn't available to many people.
Second-prize winner "Corvid 19" by Marcus Bales accomplishes two impossible tasks in one. I swore "Raven parodies—Nevermore!" several years ago, but this madcap poem won me over with its incessantly clever rhymes and political timeliness. Plus, it's a pandemic poem whose title is a wonderful joke.
It wouldn't be a Wergle Flomp contest without blasphemy. Third-prize winner "God!" by J. Clark Hubbard is a "character-building poem for one reader, NOW with 4,897,760,256 possible deities!" What if our universe was created by a random role-playing gamer? It's a good explanation for the year we just had.
Our honorable mentions covered such topics as the saintly Dr. Fauci, lawnmower races, pretentious food critics, and right-wing conspiracy nuts.
Our new contest is open through April 1, 2022, with a top prize of $2,000. Assuming that US currency is worth anything after the climate apocalypse. Otherwise, we'll pay you in toilet paper (two-ply, of course).
See our press release about the winners of our 20th contest.
Read all of the top poems.
Learn more about our current contest open now.
© 2001-2021 Winning Writers. All rights reserved except for fair use.
Winning Writers
351 Pleasant Street Suite B PMB 222
Northampton, MA 01060-3998
| | | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment