2025 Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry
The 2025 contest is now complete. Thanks to all who entered! The winner and honorable mentions have been notified.
The Trustees of the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, NH, are pleased to announce that the winner of the 15th Annual Frost Farm Prize for metrical poetry is Christopher Childers of Los Angeles, California, for his poem “Lalage.”
The 2025 Frost Farm Prize judge, Maryann Corbett, selected the winning poem after reading 673 anonymous entries. She had this to say about the winning poem:
“One of the best games a poem can play is to revel in the pure sounds of language and the fun the human tongue can have with it. This poem grabs that ball and runs. The title ‘Lalage’ seems to come from Greek and to mean ‘prattle,’ and on first reading I saw it as a parent-to-infant exchange. But it could certainly also be lover-to-beloved, and I now prefer that reading: two grown-ups who ‘aren’t unique [but] are extreme’ in their use of gabble, babble, cluck, squawk—loving noises that ‘[bubble] up from the pure inane’ in which the lovers express themselves to each other. I’ve confessed often that I’m a sucker for love poems, and I fall completely for the narrator’s expressed desire for ‘decades more to kneel beside / your spring and gulp down emptiness.’ Eschewing grown-up punctuation and capitalization suits the message, and it prompts me to remember that Cummings, the great non-capitalizer, also wrote movingly about love.”
Childers received $1,000 and will be a featured reader at The Hyla Brook Reading Series at the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, NH on Friday, Aug. 15, 2025. The reading kicks off the 10th Annual Frost Farm Poetry Conference (Aug. 15-17, 2025).
Childers had this reaction to winning the Frost Farm Prize: “It's a huge honor and thrill to be recognized by the Frost Farm Prize and to lodge my name next to so many poets I admire on the list of previous winners,” Childers said. “I've always loved Robert Frost in both narrative and lyrical modes and have learned so much about the expressive possibilities of English meter from teaching and memorizing his poems.”
Christopher Childers is the author of The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse (Penguin Classics), a Times Literary Supplement and Australian Book Review Best Book of 2024. His work has appeared in The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, Smartish Pace, Literary Matters and Best American Poetry. Childers holds a BA in Classics from UNC Chapel Hill and an MFA in Poetry from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He is a recent transplant to Los Angeles, where he teaches Latin.
Lalage
lovely enchanting language, sugar-cane
-- George Herbert
I bleat and blurt you coo and yap
grammar evaporates in gabble
my mature blessing is to scrap
the sound of sense for baby babble
we aren’t unique we are extreme
clucking and squawking at each fart
you chitter in a childish stream
that nourishes my childish heart
an age and wisdom quenching gush
bubbling up from the pure inane
the earth unclenches and grows lush
the wind swoons in the sugar cane
though the gray hairs are undispersed
and obligations undenied
this lilt is life I only thirst
for decades more to kneel beside
your spring and gulp down emptiness
that hugs me while I disappear
and parrot your absurd largesse
with nothings of my own my dear
—Christopher Childers
_____
In addition to selecting the winner, Maryann Corbett chose Five Honorable Mentions.
Honorable Mentions (ordered by judge):
"Gordian" by Christopher Childers of Los Angeles, CA
"Alien" by Marijane Osborn of Davis, CA
"Looking Back" by Sally Thomas of Lincolnton, NC
"Alfius in Tallarook" by Alice Allan of Melbourne, Australia
"Winged Genie Fertilizing a Date Tree" by Alison Talbott of Prairie Village, KS
Previous Frost Farm Prize Winners
2024 Sarah Spivey of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma for her poem, “The Dispossession.” —Judge Mike Juster
2023 Brian Brodeur of Richmond, Indiana for “After Visiting a Former Student in a Psychiatric Unit” — Judge Alfred Nicol
2022 Jean L. Kreiling of Plymouth, Massachusetts for “Antiphon“ — Judge Allison Joseph
2021 Nicolas Friedman of Syracuse, New York for “Storylines” — Judge Aaron Poochigian
2021 Michael Levers of Provo, Utah for “The Counterweight” — Judge Aaron Poochigian
2020 Jennifer Michael of Sewanee, Tennessee for “Forty Trochees” — Judge Rachel Hadas
2019 David Southward of Milwaukee, Wisconsin for “Mary’s Visit” — Judge Bruce Bennet
2018 Susan de Sola of the Netherlands, for “Buddy” — Judge Melissa Balmain
2017 Caitlin Doyle of Cincinnati, Ohio, for "Wishes" --Judge Deborah Warren
2016 James Najarien of Auburndale, Massachussets for "Dark Ages" -- Judge David Rothman
2015 Kevin Durkin of Santa Monica, California for "Meteor Crater" - Judge Joshua Mehigan
2014 Rob Wright of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for "Meetings with my Father" - Judge Rhina Espaillat
2013 Caki Wilkinson of Sewanee, Tennessee, for "Arts and Crafts" - Judge Catherine Tufariello
2012 Richard Meyer of Mankato, Minnesota, for, "Fieldstone" - Judge Richard Wakefield
2011 Sharon Fish Mooney of Coshocton, Ohio for "Dimly Burning Wicks" - Judge Bill Baer
About the Frost Farm’s Hyla Brook Poets
The Frost Farm was home to the poet and his family from 1900-1909. The Hyla Brook Poets, a 501(c)(3), started in 2008 as a monthly poetry workshop. In March 2009, the Hyla Brook Reading Series launched with readings by emerging poets as well as luminaries such as Maxine Kumin, David Ferry, Linda Pastan, and Sharon Olds. The Frost Farm Prize was introduced in 2010, followed by the inaugural Frost Farm Poetry Conference in 2015.
