The 2013 Frost Farm Prize
Metrical Poetry Contest Open for Entries
The Trustees of the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, NH, and the Hyla Brook Poets invite submissions for their 3rd Annual The Frost Farm Prize for metrical poetry. The winner will walk away with $1,000, publication in Evansville Review and an invitation, with honorarium, to read as part of The Hyla Brook Reading Series at the Robert Frost Farm in Derry in the summer of 2013. This year’s judge is prize-winning poet, translator Catherine Tufariello.
Last year’s winner was Richard Meyer of Mankato, Minnesota, for his poem, "Fieldstone." The poem will appear in the 2012 edition of The Evansville Review. “The writing of metrical verse – the use of rhyme and/or meter – is a precise and challenging craft and we want to celebrate this art form with The Frost Farm Prize,” said Robert W. Crawford, co-founder of the Hyla Brook Poets and a Frost Farm Trustee. Submission guidelines are available at: http://on.fb.me/QYGrHj.
Complete Frost Farm Prize Guidelines:
Poems must be original, unpublished and metrical (any metrical form). No translations. There is no limit to the number of poems entered by an individual, but an entry fee of $5 U.S. per poem must accompany the submission (entry fees from outside the United States must be paid in cash or by check drawn on a U.S. bank). You are welcome to submit a poem sequence (a crown of sonnets for example) but each poem will be judged individually -- please send in an entry fee for each poem in the sequence. Make checks payable to the "Trustees of the Robert Frost Farm." Please type the author's name, address, phone number and e-mail address on the back of each entry. Entries will be submitted to the judge anonymously.
Deadline: Postmarked by April 1, 2013
Send entries to:
Robert Crawford
The Frost Farm Prize
280 Candia Rd.
Chester, NH 03036
Enclose a SASE for notification of the contest results. These are the complete guidelines. For more information, please see http://on.fb.me/QYGrHj or visit and “like” the Hyla Brook Poets Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/HylaBrookPoets
Second Annual Frost Farm Prize Winner Announced
The Trustees of the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, NH, and the Hyla Brook Poets are pleased to announce the winner of the Second Annual Frost Farm Prize for metrical poetry is Richard Meyer of Mankato, Minnesota, for his poem, "Fieldstone."
The prize was judged by poet and literary critic Richard Wakefield. Meyer receives $1,000 and will read at The Hyla Brook Reading Series at the Robert Frost Farm in June 2012. His winning poem will be published in The Evansville Review.
Commenting about this year’s entries, Wakefield said, “The entries showed an enormous range of style and subject, but ‘Fieldstone,’ with its sharp focus and unfussy mastery of form, stood out. In it, a speaker looks at his land and sees himself reflected, realizes that his ‘mastery’ of the land is in fact a compromise; in making the soil do as he wants it to do he in turn is shaped by it. The poem also sounds good. Its music arises from the subject and form acting on one another, beginning and ending with enjambed couplets that are separated by a series of end-stopped lines, in the same way that the smooth flow of the speaker's inner life is sometimes broken, or reshaped, by the demands of the outer world.”
Meyer, a former English and humanities teacher, lives in the home his father built in Mankato, a city at the bend of the Minnesota River. His poems have appeared in various print and online publications, including Able Muse, 14, SCR, The Classical Outlook, and The Flea.
“The Frost Farm Prize for metrical poetry continues to grow with more than 550 entries this year from the United States and as far away as Israel and Australia," said Robert W. Crawford, co-founder of the Hyla Brook Poets and a Frost Farm Trustee. "The quality of the work was outstanding - I don't envy the difficult job Richard Wakefield, our judge, must have had selecting a winner. We look forward to hosting Richard Meyer at the Frost Farm during the Hyla Brook Reading Series in June and Richard Wakefield in July, when he gives a talk on Robert Frost during the Literary Series."
Wakefield read all the anonymous entries and, in addition to selecting the winner, chose three poems for special recognition as honorable mentions. This year, all three honorable mentions, "Permanent,” “Hunter,” and “In Snow," were from the same poet: Nicholas Friedman of Ithaca, NY.
About the Frost Farm’s Hyla Brook Poets
The Frost Farm was home to the poet and his family from 1900-1911. Robert Crawford and Bill Gleed started The Hyla Brook Poets group in 2008. In addition to a monthly workshop, the group organizes the monthly Hyla Brook Reading Series held from May through September in Frost’s barn. The Series features emerging poets as well as luminaries such as Maxine Kumin, David Ferry, Wesley McNair, and Rhina Espaillat.
To hear about next year’s contest or for more information on the Hyla Brook Reading Series, join the Hyla Brook Poets Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/HylaBrookPoets