What place sets your heart on fire? International poetry competition
Holland Park Press Ltd publishes literary fiction and poetry, placing special emphasis on bringing the work of Dutch authors to the English language market.
This year they are running a poetry competition and the subject is a neighbourhood that’s important to you. It could be the place you grew up in, the area you live in now, or a neighbourhood which influenced your life in a particular way. It could well be a place you visited on holiday, or city that made a big impression on you, or equally well a place that has blighted your life ever since. It could be a house, a café, school or a park, a neighbourhood, a motorway, railway station, any place that defines the neighbourhood.
Two prizes of £100 plus publication will be awarded, one for a poem written in English and one for a poem written in Dutch.
The organisers say:
We want to be moved by your poem, exciting by its images, we love to see wonderful use of language and striking metaphors. Above all the poem about the place that defines you should be written from the heart and you should feel it had to be put on paper.
They also offer a few inspiring examples.
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 by William Wordsworth
Earth hath not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
From The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot:
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
From The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin:
At first, I didn’t notice what a noise
The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what’s happening in the shade,
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
I took for porters larking with the mails,
And went on reading.
From Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas:
To begin at the beginning:
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless
and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched,
courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the
sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea.
Plenty of time to get the creative juices flowing as, although they are accepting entries now, the deadline is December 31st 2013
Click HERE for more information
Quite pleased with the photograph at the top – for once I took it myself. A wintery dawn (had to be winter otherwise I wouldn’t be up to see it) from a window in my house.
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