T.S. Eliot’s poetry reads like a broken mirror reflecting a thousand voices. His most famous works—“The Waste Land,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—are fractured, layered, and endlessly allusive. This contest challenges you to craft a piece that embraces that fragmentation: tell a story through the scraps, the symbols, and the silences.

 

We're not looking for linear plot. We're looking for mood, dissonance, and hidden meaning. Use structure as substance. Use collage as clarity. Let your form mirror your theme—whether that’s emotional collapse, cultural decay, or personal estrangement.​ The best entries will feel like ruins that still echo, broken things that still bleed.​ 

 

Structure = story. Don’t just break your piece for aesthetic — break it to reflect the internal fracture of your speaker or world. Use form as metaphor.

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• Mix the ancient with the personal. Eliot layered Greek myths with modern exhaustion. You can do the same — reference a biblical passage, a fairy tale, or a song lyric and reframe it through your speaker’s collapse.

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• Let repetition wear different masks. Repeat a phrase in three different tones. Let a sentence reappear distorted. Echo something once meaningful — now hollow.

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• Use white space like silence. Fragmented writing isn’t just about what’s said — it’s about what’s withheld. Give your piece room to breathe or shudder.

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• Make the reader work — but reward them. It’s okay if your meaning isn’t obvious at first. Give readers clues, imagery, and emotional truth to hold onto as they piece things together.

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• Tone can shift mid-line. Despair and irony. Reverence and disgust. These can live together in one sentence, even in one breath.

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• End with a fragment that feels complete. Your piece doesn’t need to resolve — but it should resonate. Leave the reader with an echo, an image, or a line that haunts them.​​