Winning rhymes
Poetry competition Winners
Judge Alison Chisholm highlights the winning entries from our Open Rhymed Poetry Competition
The rhymed poetry competition entries confirmed the suggestion that many poets are happiest working in rhyme, often in association with metre. Invited to submit work in traditional or original patterns of rhyme, most opted for the tried and loved rhyming couplets and ballad stanzas, or set forms such as sonnets and villanelles. A few branched out and came up with their own patterns of rhyme – some simple, some intricate – which held a special fascination.
Whenever a competition is open as to its subject matter, the ideas that fuel the content help to make entries memorable. Humour was popular, and a host of funny poems, invoking a gentle smile or an outloud-guffaw, made for highly entertaining reading sessions. There were sad and sentimental poems, too, political, descriptive and opinion-based pieces, poems rooted in literature or history, and poems of elation and despair.
One upsetting phenomenon emerged during the adjudication. Too many poems which had the quality to be winners were rejected owing to errors of presentation, such as typos and incorrect punctuation. These could have been put right in a moment if the writer had been more vigilant during final revisions. Printing the work out, even if it is to be submitted online, reveals little flaws that can slip by when you are reading from the screen. It hurts to have to abandon a good poem when it’s obvious that one or two words with mis-spellings had just slipped through; but adjudicators have the obligation to judge the material placed before them. Identifying and correcting typos cannot be done. Poems lose their chance because a mistake went unnoticed.