Method, sources and corrections
Where the facts come from and how they are checked.
Our method Where the facts come from
Contest facts come only from each contest's own page: deadline, fee, prize, judge, eligibility, requirements, fee waivers, rights and results. Listing sites and aggregators are used only to find contests, never as sources. A deadline is shown exactly as printed, with its year; a time and time zone appear only where the contest prints them. We assume no time zone, show no countdown, and never label a contest open or closed. Contests whose printed deadline had passed by our check are left off. We don't rate contests or say whether one is worth entering.
Form rules are quoted from the poets.org glossary. Example poems come only from Project Gutenberg ebooks whose own front matter shows the poem was first published before 1931, which puts it in the public domain in the US; the ebook number and that evidence are shown with each example. An example illustrates a form but never establishes a rule. No in-copyright poem appears, not even a line.
U.S. Poets Laureate come from the Library of Congress through its published JSON interface; we never request the Library's HTML pages. State poets laureate come from each state's own official page, and a name is shown only when one quote names both the person and the post. A state with no such quote says so, and one with no official page we could read is marked not found.
Every quote is re-checked word for word before each build by a script that identifies itself as TaleOfTheMuseSourceCheck with a link to this page, follows each site's robots.txt, waits at least 3 seconds between requests to one site and treats a refusal as final. The same rules governed our research. Last check: October 31, 2026, 99 pages, 541 quotes. The contest calendar is rechecked weekly.
A worked example
The villanelle is a highly structured poem made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain, with two repeating rhymes and two refrains.
Our reading written by Tale of the Muse
This line from the glossary is what the villanelle page rests on: five tercets and a quatrain, two repeating rhymes, two refrains. The rule comes from the glossary line itself, which is why every form page leads with its quoted rules and shows any example poem separately, labeled with its public-domain evidence.
Our explanation of the quote above. It adds no facts of its own.
Publishers' terms
Each quote is only the short excerpt a fact needs. Where a publisher lists a terms or legal page we read, it is linked here.
- Academy of American Poets (poets.org): poets.org
- California Arts Council: arts.ca.gov
- Library of Congress: www.loc.gov
- Project Gutenberg: www.gutenberg.org
Corrections
If something here differs from a contest's, library's or state's own page, tell us below with a link to that page. We correct against those pages only.
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