I just heard about a Poetry Foundation competition that I’m going to compete in. It’s for young poets aged 21-31 (that’s me). They’ve got a reputation for having capital “P” Poetry. This isn’t the duck-art of painting where the judges want pretty winter scenes and loons on lakes. They like gritty guts and sticky words and visual transportation. Every poem on the site (okay I haven’t read every poem on the site) is filled with more goo than a jelly doughnut, and absolutely NO moody teens with hard feelings.
The stuff I’ve been working on is more spoken-word story telling. I don’t wanna mold myself for an audience, but that doesn’t mean I can’t push myself to be more memorable. Notes for approaching: I ought to have a cohesive set of poems. One theme loosely bound.
Two come to mind:
My travel
My anger
I’m leaning towards travel, just because that’s the freshest and comes with the richest imagery. I think that theme could be more malleable. Anger is great for inspiration, but so far it’s only given me dark words.
I cannot exceed 10 pages of poetry. This presents me with a goal! I continue to write everyday but I will have to focus on poetry right now. Application due April 30th but submissions accepted now. Here’s the link.
Eva Moe 
[…] okay. I finished my application to the Poetry Foundation competition a few days ago and that gave me some much needed momentum. I mean, I finished something. I worked […]
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