Poetry Masterclass: Judges' comments

Let's see some reviewers’ comments on award-winning poems before we know just how good our poems are.

What They Look Out For In Poetry Contests

As a home for emerging authors & established voices together, we are looking for poems that express both traditional excellence in craft and a willing fearlessness in content and form. For us, the frontier of poetry is a place where voices—of all colors, ages, orientations, identities— are made equal by a shared belief in the power of language to confront the dark, the vast, the unexplored.

We’ve put together a brief & non-exclusive list of certain craft features we expect good poetry to exhibit:

A thought-out sense of pattern and form. The play of establishing and breaking rhythms is essential—whether it’s within a free-verse block of text, an innovated sonnet, or a good prose poem; we want poetry that is conscious of its own structure & the reasons for it.

Strong body talk. Great poems activate the body of the reader consistently and powerfully. The reader’s body is going to be making the first opinions about your poem, and if you don’t convince his guts, or her wrists, or the small of their back, to join you on the ride, you’ve lost before you begun.

Strong identity as an object of sound. This point dovetails with the body talk: poetry is poetry because of its sonic focus & unique delivery of language sounds. Good poems are slow melting joy in the reader’s mouth, and a surefire way of getting the attention of a reader’s body is by aural seduction.

A unique point of view. The literary world needs fresh voices from fresh places in order to stay relevant and powerful. Unique POVs can be from any culture or any place, just as long as they appreciate and recognize the broadness of where literature is headed. We often look for POVs different from our own and different from what would have filled up the anthologies we read in high school.

A generous view of itself. Often poems will get stuck on an author’s navel-gazing or self-seriousness. Feels clunky and stiff. The poem should be willing to laugh at itself or be open to defeat & vulnerability.

No lazy cynicism. Too much of contemporary poetry wants to employ cynicism as a way to feel fresh. We’ve seen it a lot in submissions, and we don’t think it has a place in mature poetry. Be dark, be bloody, be honest about the brokenness of the world, but don’t be spiritually, intellectually or aesthetically shallow just to show that you’re “edgy”; no shock-jock poetry please;

Democratic language. Poetry should be readable and enjoyable for more than just academics; poetry is as much for working folks as it is for the universities. This means that poets should know what they are doing with their language choices and who they may be excluding.

Judges’ Comments In A Poetry Contest

From the Judges (1):  "One of the poems is a neutron star of a poem compressed inside the restraining machinery of a sestina. it's a dark allegory of six boys in a field, but I did not realize it was a sestina until a second reading, when I started to work out what the boys were up to, and what part the far from passive field was playing in these coming-of-age rituals with their compelling rhythm and mantra-like repetitions. The form is a perfect container for the interlinked themes: an interrogation of unchecked masculinity and our destructive relationship with each other and with the natural world. The barbaric impulses enacted are interwoven to offer us a somber and precisely wrought fable for out times. That farm animals are involved is significant and points to a visionary eco-poem and still I thought I had not quite got to the bottom of it. As the weeks passed, it would haunt me like a recurring dream. Reading it aloud at our judging meeting. I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise. The poem's mnemonic force and seriousness drew it to the top of the pile, to become our winner." 

From the Judges (2):  "Looking back through the notes I'd made to myself on one of the poems on my first reading, I see I've written a huge tick on it, and then written "I love this" at the side. This is a quite remarkable poem, heartbreaking and affirming in equal high language ("the slightest touch of grace") and plain insight which cuts through everything ("tell the one who detests the queerness in you"). As we were making our poem. full of an aching, a yearning and yet stillness too, as though standing at a high window, and looking outwards."