The Life of Words sponsors an annual poetry competition open to Ontario secondary school students. News about the 2016 competition will be published here. Deadline April 15.
2-June: The Life of Words Anthology 2016 is here! Fifteen excellent poems about words written by Ontario secondary school students. Our thanks go to everyone who participated.
13-May: Announcing the winners of the 2016 Life of Words Poetry Competition!!
- Winner: Leah Kuiack, “Somewhere between Abaft and Abate“
- Runner up: Matthew Emmons, “Lead”
- Runner up: Jade-Marie Mulder, “Propinquity”
Leah, Matthew, and Jade all win–both for themselves and for their schools–copies of The School Bag anthology, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, and a one-year subscription to The New Quarterly. In addition, Leah will receive $100 to spend on books at Indigo.ca.
Honourable mentions:
- Kendrick Tran: “A Poem to my Deer”
- Marshall Abbasi: “Alone”
- Jared J. S. Marshall, “Catalyst”
- Taylor Duquette, “Fuck”
- Abdirahman Farah, “A Briefing”
- Adam Choles, “Fly”
- Abdullah-Al Jubair, “Leaves”
- Michelle Robinson, “In I Alone”
- Anam Asad, “A Word with many Faces”
- Tina Huynh, “My First and Favourite Word”
- Justin Stiver, “Imbue”
- Chloe Cook: “Poem: Dictionary”
We will be publishing all these poems in our Life of Words Anthology 2016 in the next week or to. Check back here.
11-April: Last week to submit a poem! Deadline upcoming this Friday. For those of you still trying to make your poem happen, consider Auden:
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.
5-April: Submissions are beginning to roll in! Ten days to go — if you are still revising, consider Pound: “The poet’s job is to define and yet again define till the detail of surface is in accord with the root in justice.“
22-March: Here is our flyer announcing the competition and its rules [click to biggen or download high quality PDF here]:
