Milestones Poetry Competition 2017

The following prizes will be awarded:

The prize-giving will take place at the Milestone Society ASGM, Long Compton, Warwickshire, on October 7th 2017

The fee to enter is £5. If multiple poems are entered in the same submission, £10 will be charged for 3 poems and then £3 for each subsequent poem.

Poems must be no more than 40 lines.

Brian Patten was born in Liverpool in 1946 and is one of the UK’s most distinctive and popular poets. When he was fifteen he began publishing underdog, a little mag which featured the early work of both Adrian Henri and Roger McGough along with other local and later international poets. His books include Selected Poems (Penguin Books) and Collected Love Poems (Harper-Perennial). He has also written books for children as well as writing for the theatre and radio. His poems are translated into many European languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of both Liverpool University and John Moores University, and has been honoured with the Freedom of the City of Liverpool.

I’m looking forward to being involved with the Milestones competition, though I see no point in trying to define what kind of poem I’ll be looking out for. I’d rather be surprised. Once, when he had a touch of poetic indigestion, A. E. Housman said, ‘I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.’ But people keep on trying, and poetry keeps on changing.  Bob Dylan said: ‘I consider myself a poet first and a musician second.’ That great thief, TS Elliot, said: ‘Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.’ The craftsman  Robert Frost said, ‘There are three things that a poem must reach: the eye, the ear, and what we may call the heart or the mind. It is most important of all to reach the heart of the reader.’ Our present laureate Carol Ann Duffy said, ‘Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning.’ Then there was the great French urchin across the English Channel, Arthur Rimbaud. Central to his poetic vision was the notion that the sacred cows of traditional verse, such as the concept of what was and what was not poetic, needed to be challenged. So, all in all, trying to explain what poetry is and is not is like trying to explain the workings of a sundial to a bat.