2011 College Poetry Contest

For undergraduates enrolled full time in an American or Canadian college.

$500 First Prize
$100 Second Prize

Winners will be announced and published in the Winter issue of The Lyric.

Poems must be original and unpublished, 39 lines or less, written in English in traditional forms, preferable with regular scansion and rhyme.

The following information must appear on
each poem:

Student’s name and complete address
College’s name and complete address

Contestants should retain copies of all poems.

ENTRIES MUST BE POSTMARKED NOT LATER THAN DECEMBER 1, 2011
AND SENT TO:

College Poetry Contest
c/o Tanya Cimonetti
1393 Spear Street
So. Burlington
VT 05403

201o College Poetry Contest Winner

CHORES BY THE RIVER OUSE*
        For Virginia Woolf (1941)

What words are lost to lines of wash on stone,
flung wet against the crags to make cloth clean,
while stories tatter in her mind, unsewn?

A woman’s hours are rarely hers alone
to contemplate and translate what life means.
What words are lost to lines of wash on stone?

Some stories bubble up like blood from bone
to circulate through consciousness and stream,
while others clot in jagged thought, unsewn.

A writer needs a place that’s all her own,
a tranquil space where she can learn to glean
the words she’s lost to lines of wash on stone.

A pittance in her pocket sets the tone
for how she lives and whom she dares to dream
alive through stories in her mind, unsewn.

She pockets river rock, hard chaperones,
to hold her down as madness intervenes.
What words are lost to the heavy cost of stone.
Her stories sink within her mind—unsewn.

Angela Masterson Jones, Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, FL