WESTPORT — A youth poetry contest, with entries on a “green” theme, is being sponsored by the Westport Garden Club.
The contest, open to local students from kindergartners to ninth graders, is co-sponsored by the Westport Arts Advisory Committee, Westport Poet Laureate Jessica Noyes McEntee and the Westport Library. Students in public and private schools are eligible, as well as those who are home schooled and in special education, English as a second language and general education programs.
Theme is: “I Spy With My Little Eye, Something Green Outside — Celebrating Our Green World.”
Entries must be submitted by Jan. 5.
Guidelines for poems include: Entries must be typed and titled, and include the entrant’s name, address, age, grade and school on the back of the entry and a preferred email address.
Poems do not have to rhyme, according to contest organizers, and may be traditional verse, acrostics, blank verse, cinquains, diamond poems, limericks or haiku. The contest theme should not be used as the title of any entries, organizers say.
Entries will be judged according to the following criteria: Title, 10 percent; content, 40 percent; creativity, 30 percent, and style, 20 percent.
Poems should be submitted by the Jan. 5 deadline via email to: westportctgardenclub@gmail.com.
Poems selected by a local committee will be submitted to the New England Garden Clubs for another round of judging. The region’s final selections will then be submitted for National Garden Club Awards, where winning entries will be compiled into a booklet.
To see an anthology of entries from the club’s 2023 contest, including a poem by Westporter Owen Cloherty, click here.
Locally, poets will be invited to read from their work at a library event, open to the public, to celebrate poetry in April 2024.
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