Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Traditional Verse

Welcome to the eighth annual Margaret Reid Poetry Contest sponsored by Tom Howard Books. First prize is $3,000. A total of $5,550 in prizes will be awarded.

Deadline:  June 30, 2011 (postmark dates)

What to Submit
Poetry in traditional verse forms. Your entry should be your own original work. You may submit the same poem simultaneously to this contest and to others, and you may submit poems that have been published or won prizes elsewhere, as long as you own the online publication rights.

What are traditional verse forms? By traditional verse, we mean any form of poetry that has been in circulation for 50 years or more. The poems you submit should follow some kind of formal or informal pattern. This pattern might involve rhyme, meter, length of line, repetition, or some other pattern, strict or loose. Forms that qualify include free verse (as exemplified by such poets as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Walt Whitman, Stephen Spender), "sprung" verse (Gerard Manley Hopkins), narrative verse (Alfred Noyes), satirical verse (e.e. cummings: "my sweet old etcetera"; Dorothy Parker), nonsense verse (Edward Lear), lyric verse (Tennyson), romantic verse (Wordsworth), religious verse (James Russell Lowell), children's verse (A.A. Milne), comic verse and parodies (W.S. Gilbert, A.P. Herbert), sonnets, haiku, ghazals, ballads, odes, villanelles, sestinas, songs, hymns, etc. For your reference, this Glossary of Poetic Termsdescribes many forms. You may also enjoy sites for traditional and exotic forms of poetry found on our resource pages.
 
Entry fee: $7 for every 25 lines you submit.  Prizes: $3,000, $1,000, $400, $250, $150