Wergle Flomp - a Cautionary Tale About Poetry Competition Sites

Are you an aspiring poet? Want to see your name in print? Long before the internet, there were vanity publishers and poetry contests, which aim to make you feel good and then spend some money to see yourself in print. There are plenty of them on the internet, of course, and that's frustrating for some people who really do want to get serious exposure for their work, and hate being duped by the vanities. So, what do they do? Complain? Get steamed? Of course not! Winningwriters.com has come up with a contest where those who treat the situation with a sense of humor can show their stuff, even if it was, ahem, not quite the serious entry.

The "Wergle Flomp" poetry contest is for people who have submitted "humorous" poetry to vanity contests, venting their spleen by creating parodies, over-the-top imitations, and other poems that make light of their frustration, or use not-so-serious competitions for not-so-serious ends. It's also to draw attention to their site, of course, where one of their intents is to raise consciousness about the realities of the poetry contest world, and encourage aspiring poets not to go down the path of disillusionment. In the case of poetry.com, a favorite of the entrants, the site apparently not only sells the poets their own work, but organizes "fake" award ceremonies at, of course, significant cost to the attendee.

Click on this link to see past winners of this devious contest. You'll be surprised, there is some serious talent here! You may not even "get" the jokes that some of the poems represent unless you've done some serious literary work in college. Sometimes, though, you'll just laugh out loud, as with last year's "The Diet Song of J. Anna Prufroski" (you did study T.S. Eliot in school, didn't you?)

The winner last year, "How to Write Poetry," is a "wonderful" poem, lauded by the judge as in the style of the Romantics, borrowing from the likes of Bukowski, with plenty of sordid detail and wasted lives, everyday innocents and - wait! - plagiarism of a well-written rejection letter as the author's whiskey-besotted next oeuvre. The author, who won $1,190 for his masterpiece, is apparently a regular in the Bloomington, Indiana poetry scene, and, to pay the rent, a security guard at a refrigerator factory (it's true, they say!). That in itself is poetry, I think.

Just remember, there are plenty of people who get a smile from the platitudes generated by vanity poetry sites, and there's no need to burst their balloons. Who's to say what poetry's bad or good? What is art, after all? But if you have a few cynical friends, with goatees and listening to bebop, send them a couple of the winning poems and let them laugh their dry, sardonic laughs.