Reflections on Our Most Popular Found Poetry Contest Yet Back in March, we invited you to enter our Fourth Annual Found Poetry Student Contest, and 971 of you did, sending in verse that was so interesting and intricate that it's taken us more than a month to read, reread, discuss and winnow it. We are happy to announce that we've finally settled on 12 winners, and will publish one each weekday, in the order in which they were received, beginning on May 28. On the last day we will also post a list of runners-up. This year not only did we get the most submissions we've ever had, we are also convinced that the poetry you posted is the best we've read so far. As four-time judge Shannon Doyne put it: In this challenge, one that can draw from anything from the universe of NYTimes.com, it is very easy to create something slapdash and fragmentary, like dissonant voices in a crowded gallery, or maybe like a ransom note with its torn-out letters. The truth is, assembling these poems can be more fun than reading them. But every year that we hold this contest, I find that more and more of the found poems read like originals. Source materials disappear and the unexpected emerges in images that, in the best work, might even startle their creator. This takes time. Anyone can find the strangest phrases or the most "poetic" words in an article, pop them on lines, and call it a "found poem." But the close reading, the care it takes to get inside the original writer's syntax, and then take it apart - all of that comes through in the well-considered poems we've chosen as the best. So thank you teachers and thank you students. We love how this challenge, like our Summer Reading Contest, gives us insight into what young people notice and care about in The Times, from gun violence and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to the art of naming dogs and why you shouldn't stretch before you exercise. We were especially happy that many seem to have taken us up on our suggestion to find poetry in the science section, so that scattered between entries drawn from breaking news, there were also many on topics like the human brain, dragonflies, the "God particle," and the origins of the universe. We end with a comment that a teacher named Kelly Nolan left for us in the blog after her students had finished. We couldn't have summed up better ourselves just what we hoped for when we first invented this contest: I just want to say that as a high school English teacher, I have thoroughly enjoyed having all of my students read New York Times articles and create their own poems from your texts. They've learned so much from reading the articles. During the writing of the poems, we've talked about everything from tone to the emotional weight of word choice and all the common poetic devices in between. They "get it" much better when it's their own creation. Thanks! The Found Poem Contest judging panel: Tanya Abrams, Amanda Christy Brown, Shannon Doyne, Michael Gonchar, Annissa Hambouz, Katherine Schulten and Daniel Slotnik.