What is something you are afraid to write about in your own poems, either because it is too personal, or because you feel it is cliché? Create a character—a swarthy bum, a baker, a dog—and write a narrative poem in which your character addresses this topic. Let the fact that the poem isn’t really about you be freeing.

Memorious, the six-year-old online literary journal, is open for poetry entries to its annual art song contest. One poet will have her work set to music by composer Luke Gullickson and performed at an event in Chicago, cosponsored by local group Singers on New Ground (SONG). The winning poem, along with a recording of the musical adaptation, will also be published in Memorious.

"The last quarter-century has seen an explosion of American composers writing art songs for our own time and nation," writes SONG director Eric Malmquist in an introduction to the genre of the art song—technically a poem set to music for voice and piano. "Composers are still setting poetry to music, but many are also setting non-poetic works, including newspaper columns, recipes, listings from 'missed connections' on Craigslist, and crazed writings found on a Chicago bus."

Inspired? Poets can submit via e-mail three to six poems, each of no more than thirty lines, or one long poem of no more than one hundred lines along with a brief bio (there is no entry fee). The deadline is February 12.

For more about the project, entry guidelines, and an audio-visual experience of the winning poem from last year—"Blackwater" by Jill McDonough with musical composition by Randall West—visit the Memorious blog.

Choose three people who you know well and write a detailed character description of each one. Now change the gender, name, and a few physical traits of each one. Begin a story with all three characters standing in the rain outside of a house on fire.

The keepers of Robert Frost's family farm in Derry, New Hampshire, where the poet lived from 1900 to 1911, have opened their inaugural formal poetry contest. Sponsored by the trustees of the Robert Frost Farm and the Hyla Brook Poets, a workshop group that holds a reading series at the historic site, the competition is calling for poems written in meter—any metrical form is welcome.

One winner will receive one thousand dollars and an invitation to read in the Hyla Brook series at the Frost Farm, a program that has hosted poets such as Maxine Kumin, Rhina Espaillat, and Wesley McNair. Serving as judge will be William Baer, former editor of the no-longer-published poetry journal the Formalist.

The entry fee is five dollars a poem, and writers may submit as many works as they like—via snail mail—by April 1. Complete guidelines are posted on the Robert Frost Farm Web site.

In the video below, a short film by Doug Williams interprets Frost's poem "Into My Own," originally published as "Into Mine Own" in New England Magazine during the time Frost lived at the Derry farm, in 1909.