Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest 2024
Congratulations to the winners of our 2024 humor poetry contest!
Most Highly Commended
- Caitlin C. Baker, I’d Like to Donate It to the Library
- Christy Hartman, The Ghost Writer
- John Hodgen, So Good
- Jim Landwehr, This Is a Test
- A.J. Layague, The Daring Escape (and Return) of the Three Muscatels
- Hailey Leithauser, Sonnet Ending in Response of a Four-Year-Old Told to Stop Banging His Fork on the Table
- Luisa Muradyan, I’m Living Laughing and Loving
- Connor Paris, This Is Why I Don’t Go to Parties
- Eric Roy, 1976
- Levi Stallings, Ode to Better Writers
- Jennifer Stephenson, Funeral, a Musical
- Tyler Vale, The Hunt
Thanks to everyone who entered our 23rd annual Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest. While normal people do things like "go outside" in the summertime, there's no place I'd rather be than in my Arctic-chilled office at Winning Writers HQ, chuckling over the 288 shortlisted poems that first-round screener Lauren Singer selected from a record 6,846 contestants. There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but thank goodness for a free laugh.
Our entrants creatively mangled many entertaining topics, from the ever-popular travails of hardworking parents, to Biblical satire, the sufferings of the obscure writer (and the questionable merits of the not-so-obscure), and inane television and advertising. Lauren noted an excess of poems about ChatGPT taking over the world. She advises future entrants to reach beyond "the usual pooping, farting, aging, fat-shaming, and poorly executed parodies of 'The Raven' and 'A Visit from St. Nicholas'." The difference between finalists and award-winners came down to the tightness of the poem and whether it had layers of meaning beyond the obvious main joke.
Our Winners
First-prize winner Robert Garnham's "Torquay, 2 – The Other Team, 2" could be a skit performed by the late great John Inman of "Are You Being Served?" The genially befuddled, foppish narrator is trying to understand his straight mate's "culture" by attending a British football match, but the players' salient features, for him, have nothing to do with the sport's inexplicable rules. I'm also the kind of queen who would bring a book and a cuppa tea to a sportsball event, so I can relate.
Abbie Loosemore's second-prize poem, "Gregg's First Pizza Hut", fantasizes about a date with MasterChef television presenter Gregg Wallace, which ends in disappointment for her because he's more excited by restaurant gadgetry than seduction. Whether or not you've watched Wallace enthuse over comestibles, this wry poem will feel familiar to anyone who's tried to seduce a nerd away from his technology.
Speaking of technology, Tim Eberle's third-prize poem "RoboBurger or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tech" also sings the praises of fast-food innovations as a less harmful and more achievable goal for human ingenuity than our typical output of weapons and AI-generated propaganda. This skilled work of formal light verse sustains Seussian meter and clever rhymes over its entire saga of tech-bro hubris.
Honorable mentions explored the lighter side of ghostwriting, Gen-X childhood, boozy ladies of a certain age, Instagram moms, dealing with dumb comments about your disability, and much more. We liked how these poems went beyond silliness to say something insightful about relationships.
Our next contest is now open through April 1, 2025, with a top prize of $2,000. Be the good kind of weird, not the kind who says cat ladies shouldn't be allowed to vote.
The judges would like to commend these finalists:
- Hidayat Adams, "In Quest of Temptress Moon and her Elusive Incarnations as Attempted by B. Atatawadah aka Potato"
- Carol Barrett, "Windfalls"
- Lisa Cowan, "Haikus from Your Kid's Daycare"
- Ben Daggers, "The Vornako Show"
- Sara Dallmayr, "Recollection of Black Beauty"
- Chad Frame, "Two for Tea"
- Anna Frearson, "Ode to the Fanny Fart"
- Mary Haidri, "Revenge of the Horse Girl"
- Scott Hutchison, "Giving My Testimony"
- Simran Kaushik, "Burnt Bread and Broken Barbies"
- Wayne Lee, "The Major Poets"
- Susan L. Lin, "Taco Bell Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire"
- Yessenia Lobo, "Answer to Beth Ann Fennelly's Prayers—Your Son's Fake Spouse" [refers to last year's winning poem]
- Isha Pati, "I, a Red Delicious Apple, Am Sorry for Misleading You"
- Alison Proom, "A Lancashire Lament"
- Richard Raymond III, "To Axcentuate the Positive; Or, Getting Ahead with Salomé"
- Alyson Seeger, "A Couple of Days with a Great Tit"
- Kathryn Simmonds, "Clean"
- Bethany Tap, "On Mimes, Parenting, and Death"
- Louise Walton, "The Mark of a Good Mother"
- Carson Wolfe, "Ode to the Hippies Who Saved Me"
See our press release about the winners of this contest.
See our 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
