I confess: I have not been especially diligent these past few days. I’m in the process of making some fairly radical renovations to my regular routine, and as a result I am still disoriented by my own erratic progress. I decided to focus on a handful of manageable variables in the short term, and from there I’ll try build a more holistic regimen. I’ve executed those initial operations reasonably well, at least, so I’m hopeful that the rest of my work will fall into place organically as I go.
This week I have two objectives: I need to sift through my extant poems and determine which ones will fit in the collection, and I need to compile a list of contests (first book and otherwise) to which I might send the volume. It feels presumptuous to swing for the fences with a full-blown contest submission right out of the gates (more or less; I realized just the other day how long I’ve been working toward this), but just about every poet I’ve spoken to and every resource I’ve consulted has pointed me in this direction. In any case, rigorous, merciless scrutiny has confirmed that I have a sizeable cluster of poems that cohere in a dynamic, provocative way, so I’m well past the point of no return in that regard. Swing for the fences I must.
Perhaps the most important understanding I arrived at this week emerged after I assembled my list of open contests; I’ll get to that revelation in a moment. The process of compiling contest information probably warrants a post unto itself, as it involves a variety of involutions I didn’t really expect. I wanted to collect the usual data (deadlines, page length requirements, entry fees, judging formats, and the like), and that’s easy enough to do. There are several folks on the web who’ve already collected much of that information, and their generous legwork spares me the needless recap. What was more significant to me, however, was getting a sense of the complexion of each contest, and that involved a far more circuitous search.
The most prestigious contests are the easiest to research and appallingly daunting–few things will chasten poetic pride and presumption like reading a chronicle of contest winners that consists entirely of books you admire by writers you revere. I wanted to see who the winners were, to skim sample poems, to read the work of contest judges when I could find it. I’m not fool enough to imagine I could identify some quality inherent to all winning entries, but I thought I could at least get a sense of the kinds of integrity that could hold a collection together, the kinds of aesthetic sensibilities that are in play. To be candid, I also wanted a little reassurance, a sense that verse like mine still has a place in the maelstrom of current work. Happily, I came away with the conviction that it does.
Some of the contests, however, require much more careful scrutiny. Many have been obliged to close down, change publishers, or limit their work to odd- or even-numbered years, a product no doubt of these hard times. Still others have clear conditions of entry: some are limited to women, or GLBT poets, or writers hailing from certain locales. Some contest guidelines sent up red flags (in terms of inflated entry fees or conditions imposed upon the winners), and there were others with winners whose names I could not hunt down who had (ostensibly) authored works I could not discover. Working out the rules of the road was an illuminating and frustrating experience, one that took me the better part of the past three days.
At present, I have a list of 68 total contests to consider; over the next couple of days I’m going to winnow that list down to a much more manageable size. Don’t ask me how–that’s another subject for another day.
That important understanding I mentioned above, however, emerged when a student stopped by my office and asked if she could see the list, which I had just printed out. She seemed bewildered, so I asked if I had done something wrong. “What are the prizes for winning the contests?” she quite reasonably inquired.
I hadn’t created a column for prizes on my resource list, and that tells me that my head is in exactly the right place.
