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Ode on a Grecian Vacation Challenge (10 Days Only)

10 DAYS ONLY

February 6 to February 16, 2025
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Ode on a Grecian Vacation Challenge

Midwinter is hard for all of us. We have to return to work after the holidays and it’s still cold, windy, and maybe even snowing, depending on where you live in the world. Maybe you’re lucky and you have vacation days, but maybe you don’t, and you’re just daydreaming of warmer seasons, with all the beach trips, sunshine, and summer flings you can imagine as you stare at the walls of your cubicle or the palm trees you’ve added as the lock screen of your phone.

It’s easy to fall prey to the negativity that surrounds us when the end of winter feels so far away, so we at Frontier are giving you a little push.

For this ten-day challenge, we want to see your odes—if you need a brushup, odes are poems that praise or celebrate something, anything, that is good, or that you feel is worth a little good karma. Your actual Grecian vacation might be a fantasy, but there are probably lots of other good things you’d like to give a little extra love, and we want to read all about them.

Everyone knows Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” but here are some more modern examples if you’re looking for inspiration:

“Ode to Fetty Wap (written after strip club)” | The Poetry Foundation

“Ode to the Electric Fish that Eat Only the…” | The Poetry Foundation

“Ode to Autocorrect” | The Poetry Foundation

Guidelines:

  • The challenge will open on February 6, 2025, and close on February 16, 2025.
  • We will have three winners chosen by our editorial staff. The first-place winner will receive $500 (and publication), with the second- and third-place winners receiving $200 and $100 (and publication), respectively.
  • Submissions are open to new and emerging writers (that is, for this challenge, poets with no more than one full-length work of poetry previously published or forthcoming at the time of submission).
  • Do not include any identifying information in the body of your document.
  • Send up to three poems per submission. Simply, all three poems must be odes.
  • Please submit previously unpublished poems only.
  • We welcome simultaneous submissions, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
  • You may submit multiple times, but each submission (of up to three odes) requires a separate $20 fee.
  • Please provide a brief cover letter that includes a short, third-person bio with your publication history, as well as any applicable content warnings to safeguard our reading staff.
  • Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing primarily in English. Code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
  • If you haven’t already, please verify your email address with Submittable for more consistent communication.
  • We will not accept AI-generated work for this challenge. Such work will be automatically disqualified.
  • If you have any questions, please visit our FAQ page first. If you don’t find the answer to your question, you can send an email to contact (at) frontierpoetry (dot) com.

Editorial Feedback Option:

This option costs $59 and will provide you with two pages of detailed and actionable feedback on one poem in your submission, including suggestions for future submissions. The $149 option will provide you with three letters from three different editors. Our guest editors are paid a significant portion of the fee and all are astute and professional poets. Please note, the time frame for editorial letters is eight to twelve weeks from the close of the challenge.

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Note on What We Look For

We do not hold preference for any particular style or topic—we simply seek the best poems we can find. Send us work that is blister, that is color, that strikes hot the urge to live and be. For a sense of what we are looking for, read through our previously published poems or What We Look For. We warmly and sincerely invite all voices, and especially those that have been historically marginalized and silenced to submit work.

We also encourage you to submit your poetry for free to our New Voices, open year-round. We pay our emerging NV poets $50 per poem, published every Friday. New Voices is the beating heart of Frontier, and we hope to read your work soon. Thank you so much for supporting the community of new and emerging poets.

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