Poetry

Poetry contests reward compression: line breaks, metre, a turn in the final stanza. A sonnet, a sequence, a page of free verse can all stand alone as an entry. This tag gathers competitions where the poem itself is the whole submission, with nothing else to carry it.

The Clevedon Poetry Award and the Hastings Poetry Competition both judge a single poem on its own terms, not a manuscript, not a story arc, not a cast of characters. That is what separates them from the Novels and Short Stories tags: a poem has to hold a reader from the first line to the last without plot or dialogue to lean on. Entries here serve poets who work in short forms and want their lines read closely.