Sonnet Competitions
The Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, which ran under the aegis of The Formalist until that journal ceased to publish, is now associated with Measure, a successor journal published by the University of Evansville, Indiana. First Prize: $1000; entry fee $3 per sonnet. Final judge: Frederick Turner. This one doesn’t seem very international-friendly (postal entries only, with payment in $US only) but enjoys high prestige among American formalist poets. The 2008 competition closes November 15 and the Final Judge is Timothy Steele. The winner for 2007 was Michael Juster, with No — his third Nemerov win — and shortlisted (top ten) poets included Anna Evans, one of our selection panelists.
The Open Poetry Competition is a new enterprise. First Prize: £1400 (around US $2800). The 2007 contest was judged throughout by a panel which included prestigious British poet Don Paterson. Postal and online entries and payment. They report a substantial entry (despite the relatively high entry fees), but this competition will not run again until 2010. The winner of the inaugural competition was Julie Kane — another of her sonnets appeared in our Issue 3, and she has now joined the selection panel. The anthology of the shortlisted 100 sonnets from this competition has now been published and is available from the site at the link above. 14 by 14 editor Peter Bloxsom and panel member David Anthony have sonnets included in the anthology.
The concept of 14 by 14 is simple: we hope to find and publish, every two months, fourteen good contemporary sonnets by fourteen different authors.
Four centuries after Sidney and Shakespeare, the sonnet in English is alive and well, with traditionalist and modernist poets alike appreciating the seemingly inexhaustible scope of the fourteen-line form. As Don Paterson put it in the introduction to his anthology 101 Sonnets (1999):
The sonnet might be one of the greatest achievements of human ingenuity... it isn’t some arbitrary construct that poets pit themselves against out of a perverse sense of craftsmanlike duty — it’s a box for their dreams, and represents one of the most characteristic shapes human thought can take.
Paterson’s anthology is recommended, as is the sonnet essay here, by Anna Evans.
We have a leaning towards sonnets that fall recognisably within the tradition — namely sonnets in meter, with rhyme, but we’ll also look at unrhymed sonnets and new takes on the form.
We publish online only, although conceivably we might want to do a print anthology at some stage in the future. The sonnets we publish are selected by an international panel of Australian, American and British writers and editors.
Sonnet authors can submit online or by email.
Selection panel: David Anthony, Robert Crawford (2006 Nemerov winner), Anna Evans, Rhina P. Espaillat (twice Nemerov winner), Julie Kane (Open Sonnet Competion winner), and Paul Stevens. Editor: Peter Bloxsom