#micropoem14 competition
“‘Tis moonlight, summer moonlight”
Emily Jane Brontë
Poetry in 140 characters? What would Brontë have made of tweet poems?
Following the success of last year’s micropoetry competition, the Centre for New Writing and the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at The University of Manchester ran a micropoem14competition.
The competition, which was themed around the ‘English Summer’, took place between Monday 7 and Monday 14 July 2014 on Twitter and participants were asked to simply tweet their micropoem with the hashtag #micropoem14.
Approximately 150 micropoems were received and judged by the Centre for New Writing’s John McAuliffe, Janet Rogerson and Eleanor Ward.
1st Prize
LA Billing, @ZosLeon
Sailed sheets
Smoke over lawns
Old iron and Greensleeves
Bikes by the corner shop door.
Now a tin hat of ashes fills with rain
2nd Prize
Josephine Corcoran, @And_OtherPoems
‘Picnic’
When it rains
we wear our tartan rugs like capes
shake crumbs of DNA in fields
while workers take the queen
our jam
Joint 3rd Prize
Therese Lawlor-Wright, @Therese_LW
Waterlily, dragonfly, ripples on the pool,
revelations on a bench – nature school.
John North, @_JohnNorth_
Today English Summer is a glass of cider
sitting on a stone rising from a stream
by a rockpool built on an old 44 pence OS map.
Published online
Prizes for the best three poems include tickets to one of the Centre for New Writing’s autumn “Literature Live” events, as well as a signed Jeanette Winterson book and vouchers.
The winning micropoems will be published on the Manchester Review.
Special mentions
The judges enjoyed reading through the entries and found it very hard to whittle them down to a shortlist, but they felt that the winning poems chosen managed to achieve the most in the very small space that a tweet allows. They all managed the difficult trick of picturing very clearly and with feeling a particular place and time.
In addition to the winning entries, our judges found it hard to leave out the lovely lyrical touches of micropoems by @KayLBuckley, @6thae, @MariaTaylor_, @wordbranch, @xanstand,@JonnyDRodgers and @RoyMarshall2 and also the wit of @leftsceptic.
Read the competition’s micropoems by filtering #micropoem14 on Twitter.
About the judges
Our judging panel was made up of poet and co-director of the Centre for New Writing John McAuliffe, along with Janet Rogerson and Eleanor Ward.
Further information
Visit the Centre for New Writing website: