Happy the Dwarf

By John Hertz:  Results of the 2020 SF Poetry Ass’n Contest were posted here on September 25th.

I won 3rd Place in the Dwarf category (1-10 lines).

Two Filers’ comments congratulated me by name.  Thanks.

Perhaps you’d like to see my entry.  It’s an unrhymed stanza in 5-7-5-word lines.

That hill – a giant
Green elephant asleep, lost
On his way to Mars.

File 770 reported the Contest’s biographical notes about the winners.  Mine was simply “John Hertz is”.  This was due to no request, coyness, or like that, from me.  No one asked.  If the Contest called for any biography from entrants, I missed it.  However, I’m content.


Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) was the first full-length cel-animated feature film.  In Disney’s telling, Snow White meets dwarfs called Doc, Grumpy, Sleepy, Happy, Bashful, Sneezy, and Dopey.

7 thoughts on “Happy the Dwarf

  1. Added to the Wikipedia article “John Hertz (fan)”. (There’s another notable John Hertz [think Yellow Cab, Hertz Rent-a-Car, and other activities], and a John Herz [political scientist at Princeton, Howard, Harvard, CCNY].)

  2. John Hertz replies by carrier pigeon:

    This poem was unpublished at the time I submitted it to the Contest.

  3. Congratulations! Also, I rather liked your biography, accidental as it may be.

    As someone who hasn’t the slightest idea where to begin with sf poetry, are there any suggested authors, volumes, or anthologies?

  4. Dear Shao Ping,
    All the winning poems of this year’s SFPA contest are posted at https://sfpoetry.com/contests/20contest.html. SFPA also publishes two quarterly journals, Eye to the Telescope, free to read online at https://eyetothetelescope.com/, and StarLine, available by membership or subscription—sample poems from past issues are linked at https://sfpoetry.com/sl/slarchive.html. We also publish two annual anthologies from which awards are selected: the Rhysling Anthology (see https://sfpoetry.com/rhysling.html) and Dwarf Stars (see https://sfpoetry.com/dwarfstars.html). We list members’ speculative poetry books at https://sfpoetry.com/books.html, and post full reviews from StarLine of genre poetry books at https://sfpoetry.com/sl/slreviews.html. SFPA’s Elgin Awards are annual awards for chapbooks and full-length books of speculative poetry; see https://sfpoetry.com/elgin.html.

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