Poetry Contest 2023!

The template allows us to credit the source, and b/c lines from other works are often used as titles, and b/c we're using a single line or phrase and not using a longer passage without citation, I'm not in the least worried about the issue.

Just a few novel titles that do this:

Of Mice and Men (from a Robert Burns poem)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (from a John Donne poem)
The Sound and the Fury (from Macbeth)
No Country for Old Men (from a Yeats poem)

And Angelou's "I Know Why a Caged Bird Sings" comes from a poem called "Sympathy."

A collage poem, or found poem, is comprised of many lines taken from other works, reformed into a new work: poetryinvoice.ca/teach/lesson-plans/cento-or-collage-poem


HOWEVER! If you're concerned about a living poet or poet's estate taking issue with your use of a line, consider doing what is suggested here: 

Example: "the course of love never did run smooth" after A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare


And if you find somewhere in copyright info that using a line like this requires written permission from the author, publisher, or estate holder, (if you are in doubt at all) choose a different poem/story/song. Perhaps one old enough to be in the public domain.

Here's another link on borrowed titles: thewhynot100.blogspot.com/2014/06/74-classic-book-titles-borrowed-from.html

(I'll add the link to borrowed titles to the announcement)

This makes me a little confused about the prompt. I thought I was going to take a whole stanza or two from a source, use a short phrase from it as a title, and write a response to it in a way that only makes sense if the reader has the original stanza in front of them, so I'd have to include it as an epigraph thingy.

Instead, do I take a single line or short phrase as a title and then write solely around that? Do I respond to that line or the whole source piece? For example, let's say you choose a specific line about having heart, and it's from a war poem; do you write about having heart, maybe taking it out of context and repurposing it to your own needs, or do you write specifically about having heart in war because that's what the whole piece is about?

So basically: how long is the quote we're responding to, and are we being inspired by the one quote out of context or the larger piece it comes from?

Your original idea you mention here totally works. Any of the methods you mention actually would count toward the prompt. It's up to you how you go about it. Choose one of the lines/phrases for the title and quote the stanzas as an epigraph. Or choose a line for the title and let the link do the work of the epigraph for you. 

And the meaning of the line you quote can be what the line/stanza means to you personally, not necessarily counting the theme of the poem as a whole or purely how the poet/author may have intended it. The glory of poetry, after all, is that the same line may resonate differently with different readers with different experiences.

So elaborating on the Shakespeare example I use in the announcement: a poem I wrote with the title "the course of love never did run smooth" would most likely not be about fairy royalty messing with the love lives of mortals, but how the course of love has gone terribly in my personal life.

So really, this is one of the broadest, widest open prompts we've ever used during a contest. I think the key is not to overthink and let the heart do the interpreting. 

Hi,

Color me signed up. My favorite poet is Rudyard Kipling. So I can re-read his collection again for insights.
Thanks for the idea challenge.

Ed

Your changing seasons poem was so good though.

Okay....here goes nothing.
I'm in.