On poetry competitions

and the poems that don't win

Working through submissions

I’ve just finished judging the annual Ware Poets Competition - a totally lovely job. And an intense one! Lovely because it’s such a privilege to spend weeks reading poems, especially ones that you know have been carefully crafted and treasured by their creators, and intense because it can also be quite overwhelming to work through binder after binder knowing that you’re handling treasures [Judging tip: take regular breaks. Too many poems in one go and you risk becoming jaded and a bit blurry. If your attention wanes you risk missing something quiet and beautiful.]

The winning and commended poems have now been announced and I can’t wait to celebrate them at the prize night in July. They are fantastic pieces - moving, clever, contemplative, intimate, funny, socially and environmentally engaged, formally exciting - and it was a joy to read them and discover new favourites.

I’ve written about each of the winners for the competition anthology, which will be launched in July but alongside that piece on what makes a winning poem (and particularly what makes Zain Rishi’s 1^st prize piece, ‘Saag Field, Splinter’ so fantastic - watch out for him¹) I also wanted to write something here on competitions and prizes more generally - my small input on thing for look for and consider when entering, and also on what happens when you don’t win.

I’m not the first person to write about this of course. Here on Substack,

Katie Hale

has written a number of great pieces on prize poems, and the question of what makes a good individual prize entry, and whether there is some kind of magic formula for success, is a topic that has been debated for as long as there have been prizes. I don’t believe there are winning topics (although it is possible to notice trends and patterns), but there are a few characteristics that help a poem to stand out. This isn’t definitive, but these are things I would try and ask myself.

Firstly, let’s start with the more obvious stuff

Openings: the poems I loved all made a fantastic first (and second) impression. When there is a line limit, and when your work is being read alongside hundreds or thousands of other poems, it really helps to start strong. That doesn’t mean things have to be perfect or too neat. But I wanted my attention to be snagged on an intriguing opening stanza, a playful use of language, an arresting or surprising image or phrase. And of course a good title never hurts. One poet who always nails this is Hera Lindsay Bird. Her ‘Ways of Making Love’ is a masterclass in a great title backed up by an even better list poem. Caroline Bird also completely gets the power of a great early hook. Her poetry picks you up and spins you from the title and doesn’t let go until the very end. In both there is often a play or a joke at work and the tension between title and first line is an integral part of this dynamic.

Although different in tone, Zaffar Kunial’s work also takes hold from the first line. In his poem ‘Foxglove Country’, for instance, he treats words as the organic, shifting (and shifty) things that they are. There is a precision of thought and language right from the title and opening line. Another poem that quickly and gently breaks itself apart is ‘Fricatives’ by Eric Yip. Once again, language - and all that it contains - is tangible and alive. Both poems have quiet openings. They are as much about hiding as announcing, but in hiding and sounding and listening they immediately invite the same close attention from the reader.

Form and space. Line breaks, stanza lengths, formatting, and the role of negative and white space are not just a vessel for the subject matter but are the subject and content and body. I love poems that break a word or idea apart across a line break or stanza, or use white space or multiple clauses within sentences to engender a different kind of breath and attention. A beautiful recent example is ‘Almost Back Where We Left Now’ by Joe Carrick-Varty, which appears in the latest Poetry Review. Those spaces - voids between what should be and what is - contain so much. Another recent love is ‘Stony Song’ by Anthony Vahni Capildeo. It’s quick, precise and playful in word and space.

Structure and scheme. When lines and stanzas are uneven in length, I want there to be a reason why. Similarly, if there is rhyme, I want it to feel deliberate and contemporary. Words that feel squeezed into a form are immediately dulled. When it’s done right, it’s a marvel. My favourite example of this might be ‘Dynamic Positioning’ by Juliana Spahr. Here, the process of form (its dynamic positioning in relation to its subject matter), and the slow disintegration of the poetic system, is integral to the poem itself.

Finally, two elements that are little harder to pin down. Often, the poems that stayed with me were not perfect. But they were reaching for something exciting, they were attempting something - a conversation, a disruption, an embodiment of an idea or concept - that let me know that these poems were alive and connected to a mind at work. And often, this working would somehow be visible in the poem - failure and implication and vulnerability were present in the punctuation, refrain, broken line, or even in more overt moments of reflection or self-assessment. The poet felt within their subject as well as/or rather than observing it from a distance. A poet who does this brilliantly is Nick Makoha. In ‘Codex’, for instance, the speed and ambition and skill of the falling is matched by the poet’s vulnerability as he ‘suffers the shame of asking’. The sonnet form becomes a law in itself and yet it remains a space of voids and questions. Look at the final lines too:

       What shape does the soil take when roots vanish? The visible

        making itself known by the invisible. Rain falls through the trees

        and the dark brick of our old lives is the pitch of the moment

When you end your poem, end it on ‘the pitch of the moment’. Don’t summarise or explain what you mean. Don’t tie it all up in too neat a bow. I want a reason to go back and start again, just like I did with ‘Codex’.

Bet on yourself

I have one final piece of advice, but it’s one I’m a little less sure of: When choosing which prize to enter, or which poems to enter, don’t try to ‘play’ the system. Or, don’t enter what you think a particular judge will want to read. Bet on yourself, not on the judge.

It might be tempting to try and shape a poem around a judge’s own poetic interests, or even to choose a batch that you think will most ‘fit’ with their personal taste. If you find yourself doing this, remember that 300 other people are probably doing the same thing. For instance, for this most recent prize, I would estimate that nearly 40% of entries were bird-related. I get it. I love birds too. But at certain points I wondered whether some writers had sent in their bird work specifically because of my last book - that they were trying to ‘play’ the system and cater to their idea of what I would like.

Years ago, when I was just starting to put my first book together, I entered a competition judged by the brilliant Andrew McMillan. Before submitting, I’d wondered whether Andrew would like the poem - a dramatic monologue about Charlotte Brontë’s acute pregnancy sickness - as it felt different in style and subject from his collection, Physical. I wasn’t particularly confident about my own writing at that point, and I remember considering if I should adapt it for the prize; perhaps I should play around with spacing and capitalisation to make it more stylistically in keeping with Andrew’s approach to white space. Luckily, I ignored those thoughts and stuck with the poem I had. It ended up winning the competition, which felt like a massive affirmation that what I was writing about, and how I was writing it, was okay. I remember at the prize reading, Andrew made a point of saying that the poems he was drawn to were ones that felt the most different to his own writing. Years later, I see what he means. In the case of prize judging (which, although pleasurable, is not the same as reading for pleasure), surprise and unfamiliarity can be a really good thing. Send in a poem that you love and are proud of regardless not because of who the judge is.

Of course, this survey is both (hopefully) useful and completely meaningless. I’m certainly not offering rules. But even if these were rules, plenty of brilliant poems would break them. Keep writing bird poems: I want to read them! Keep playing around with rhyme. Leave yourself out your poems. Bending and breaking rules and traditions is what poetry does best, and what I say counts for nothing.

It also might feel like you’re already abiding by all of the things I’ve just mentioned. If you’re on substack reading essays about poetry, chances are you’re doing it right without my help. So why didn’t your poem get placed? Why do you keep missing out on the top spots?

Love the poems that don’t make it

Every time I’ve judged or been involved in the judging or sifting of a prize, I’ve had to turn away poems that I’ve loved. During my most recent judging process (in fact, right up until the last two days) I had ninety poems in my shortlist. These had been whittled down from over 1000 entries, and they were all poems I adored, and that I felt deserved celebrating and commending. But in the end I could only choose twenty. I don’t know who these poems belonged to, otherwise I’d get in touch and tell their authors how close they came and how much I admired their writing. In every prize, big or small, there is fantastic work that deserves to be celebrated more than it is.

Often, these poems (and indeed others that didn’t even make the ninety) felt part of a bigger project or concept, like they were a beautiful note in a bigger piece of music I couldn’t yet hear. I was excited by what else these anonymous writers were doing, and again, wished there might be some way of understanding the accumulative power of their writing and catching that song. I can identify with this myself. I always get quite anxious reading brief snippets from Lapwing because I feel like the book is at its best as a whole, rather than broken down as stand alone pieces, and I worry that people won’t get it or like it. I also LOVE sequences and long poems more generally, and gravitate towards ‘concept’ collections where an idea or problem is sustained and interrogated at length and in depth. Many of my favourite collections wouldn’t fit easily into individual poem competitions. So if you feel like this might be you, keep doing what you’re doing. And send your work out in big batches to big magazines and talk about your concept and guiding obsessions and take proud ownership of them.

1. For a taste of his work, here’s another poem of Zain’s, published in Propel: https://www.propelmagazine.co.uk/zain-rishi-leaving-the-city