Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Traditional Verse

This year will be the third annual Margaret Reid Poetry Contest sponsored by Tom Howard Books. First prize is $1,000. A total of $3,500 in prizes will be awarded (up from $2,000 in 2005). Winning entries will be published. Click here to read about the past winners.

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 anthology and 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 Terms describes many forms. You may also enjoy sites for traditional and exotic forms of poetry found on our resource pages.

Entry Fee
The reading fee is $6 for every 25 lines you submit. If you submit a sonnet of 14 lines and a haiku of 3 lines, totaling 17 lines, the fee would be $6. If you submit two villanelles of 19 lines each, totaling 38 lines, the fee would be $12. Exclude your poem titles and any blank lines from your line count. There is no limit on the number of lines or number of poems you may submit.

Deadline June 30, 2006. Your entry must be postmarked or submitted online by this date.