In 1975, Moss Rich sent a satirical poem about the Harold Wilson government in Britain to a political columnist at The Times in London. He was surprised to see that they published it and even more so to receive a cheque for 'two and a half or three guineas' in payment for the piece. Moss said, ‘From then on, I began taking poetry seriously,’ although in light of his wicked sense of humour, it might be fair to say not too seriously.
Humour has the power to break ice and pretension, to bring people together and to highlight an emperor’s lack of clothes. As Moss demonstrated, humour can be persuasive: a means of revealing the ridiculousness of a situation, exposing faulty lines of reason, or of smuggling non-conformist opinion into the field of debate. Humour can be literature’s Trojan horse - and it has never been needed more than now.
Fee: £3 per poem, or £10 for four poems submitted together
up to 30 lines in length
Deadline: September 7th 2012
Link here
Judges:
Brendan Cleary (Chair)
John Davies (Director, Pighog Press)
Charlotte Gann
also Milly Rich, Moss Rich's widow and Shula Rich, their daughter
prizes: First £1000, Second £250, and Third £100.
Poems that in the judges’ opinion have special merit may be included in a Prize anthology.
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