Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest 2023
Congratulations to the winners of our 2023 humor poetry contest!
Second Prize $500
Ellie Black, On Being the Glamorous Blonde Villain from All Those Nineties Kids’ Movies
Honorable Mention $100
- Matt DG, The Hallmark Boyfriends
- K. E. Flann, The Unexpected Poetry of NextDoor Digest
- Taliesin Gore, Unnatural Theology
- Stella-Ann Harris, pov: you’re a cater waiter at the metaverse conference
- Patrick Heneghan, Nintendhoe
- Rob Holtom, Shakespeare Writes Clickbait
- Mark Jackett, We Named Her Karma
- C. E. Janecek, Helicopter Tiddies
- Riley McNutt, Ode to a Stamp
- Ashlen Renner, the time i brought a pie to a gun fight
Thanks to everyone who entered our 22nd annual Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest. Surrounded by my 200 Barbies and their irrepressible thoughts of death, I was cheered, impressed, and pleasantly disgusted by the 250 shortlisted poems that first-round screener Lauren Singer selected from our 6,304 entrants (our most ever).
The difference between winners and almost-winners often came down to the originality of the subject matter. There were numerous entertaining poems about the absurdities of workplace culture, parenting fails, sex comedy, and religious satire. Social media is almost too easy to parody these days, as its puffery about banal topics and its random thematic juxtapositions already resemble humor poetry techniques. Poems that took on these topics—of which there are several in the winners' circle—had to go to the next level with their emotional and prosodic complexity. Parodies of modern lyrics had an advantage over retreads of the classics.
On vacation in Boston while I did my first pass through the shortlist, I took a junket to the Museum of Bad Art at the Dorchester Brewing Company. The galleries feature a rotating selection from their 800-plus curiosities found in thrift shops, tag sales, and curbside trash. The guiding principles of MOBA struck me as an excellent statement of the Wergle Flomp aesthetic:
"The work must have been created by someone seriously attempting to make an artistic statement—one that has gone horribly awry in either its concept or execution. Poor technique does not ensure a painting's acceptance into the collection unless the lack of drawing ability, perspective, or sense of color results in a compelling image. Other works exhibit the artist's technical command, but suffer from questionable decision making."
Our Winners
First-prize winner Beth Ann Fennelly is a Serious Poet. The Mississippi Poet Laureate, NEA grant, Fulbright fellowship kind of serious. "Epistle to My Lord Concerning My Sons' Future Spouses" proves that she's also a great satirist. Her targets are passive-aggressive piety and the kind of Southern sweetness that says "Bless your heart" to mean "Drop dead." With sybaritic imagery and delicate hypocrisy, the praying mother in this poem nurtures her sons with one hand and claws back their autonomy with the other.
Ellie Black's second-prize poem, "On Being the Glamorous Blonde Villain from All Those Nineties Kids' Movies", nails a familiar movie trope with great wit and economy of language, while also critiquing how we indoctrinate the next generation into mistrusting independent women. I love the kind of pop-culture poem that goes beyond the first-level pleasure of accurate description, to the deeper level of political analysis, yet without losing its light touch.
In Josh Baumgart's third-prize "A Sex Therapist's 50 Ways to Please Your Lover (Paul Simon)", awkward topics become joyful and playful, thanks to his pithy rhymes. Wouldn't you rather try to "blow out his back, Jack" before taking the original song's advice to "get yourself free"? Lauren commented: "THIS HITS ALL MY BUTTONS! As a sex therapist, poet, and Paul Simon fan—I love this."
Honorable mentions found both humor and poignancy in such unusual scenarios as carrying a pie through a crime scene, a lab rat's theology (in blank verse, no less), being the boyfriend who loses the girl in a Hallmark movie, and clickbait written by Shakespeare. We laughed, we cried, we peed a little.
Our next contest is now open through April 1, 2024, with a top prize of $2,000 and total prizes of $3,750. You're going to need that money to buy books when the GOP turns all the libraries into juvenile detention centers. Entry remains free, so give us the best worst poems you've got!
The judges would like to commend these finalists:
- Asnia Asim, "The Squeaky Bathroom Door"
- Andrew Bliss, "I should have swallowed"
- Kevin Broccoli, "Carly"
- Florence Campbell-Gray, "Excerpts from Act 3"
- Henry Crawford, "The Clown Car Memorandum"
- Michele Herman, "Possessing Pronouns"
- Lori Jakiela, "The Lady in 38 C"
- Dana Kinsey, "Very Very Canterbury"
- Rick Lupert, "Things I Text to My Wife When She's Away"
- Mollie O'Leary, "Public Service Announcement"
- Hannah Owens, "Ode to the Form"
- Gary Percesepe, "The Doorbell"
- Sherry Shahan, "Joining My Mother for Breakfast"
- Miles Wilson, "Why God Must Permit Everything"
See our press release about the winners of this contest. See the current contest guidelines.
Contest Judges
Lauren Singer
Lauren Singer is an assistant judge of our Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest and North Street Book Prize, and a past judge of our Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest. She is a native New Yorker living in Western Massachusetts. Her poetry has been published in Nerve House, Bareback, Feel the Word, Read This, Kosmosis, One Night Stanzas, and other literary magazines across the country. An attendee of the New York State Summer Writer's Institute, she is a graduate of Bard College at Simon's Rock and received her MSW at the University of Chicago in 2015. She has self-published three chapbooks and received an honorable mention in the 2011 Wergle Flomp contest. In addition to her creative interests, Lauren works as a sex and relationship therapist and runs a private practice out of Northampton, MA. Her book-length poetry manuscript, Raised Ranch, will be published by Game Over Books in April of 2025. She prides herself on her wealth of useless pop culture knowledge, namely of nineties R&B lyrics, and she can pretty much quote "The X-Files".
Contest Judges
Jendi Reiter
Jendi Reiter is vice president of Winning Writers, editor of The Best Free Literary Contests, and oversees the Winning Writers literary contests. Jendi is the author of the short story collection An Incomplete List of My Wishes (Sunshot Press, 2018), the novel Two Natures (Saddle Road Press, 2016), the poetry collections Made Man (Little Red Tree Publishing, 2022), Bullies in Love (Little Red Tree Publishing, 2015), and A Talent for Sadness (Turning Point Books, 2003), and the award-winning poetry chapbooks Swallow (Amsterdam Press, 2009) and Barbie at 50 (Cervena Barva Press, 2010). Awards include a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists' Grant for Poetry, the 2016 New Letters Prize for Fiction, the 2016 Rainbow Award for Best Gay Contemporary Fiction, the 2015 Wag's Revue Poetry Prize, the 2013 Little Red Tree International Poetry Prize, the 2012 Betsy Colquitt Award for Poetry from Descant magazine, the 2011 James Knudsen Editor's Prize in Fiction from Bayou Magazine, the 2011 OSA Enizagam Award for Fiction, the 2010 Anderbo Poetry Prize, and second prize in the 2010 Iowa Review Awards for Fiction. Jendi's work has appeared in Poetry, The New Criterion, Mudfish, Passages North, Cutthroat, Best American Poetry 1990, and many other publications. See their interviews in RoundPier and Lammergeier.
Photo by Ezra Autumn Wilde
