Judges, Editors and Poetry Manuscripts: Some Musings

I have been wondering how much poetry collections these days are being structured around the habits of readers of book contest entries. Someone commented some months ago, that much of the poetry published today does not come out of these contests. This is quite true. But I suspect that many first books these days are published through contests. It occurred to me recently that reading poems to judge a contest is vastly different from reading poems as an editor of a series.

I find myself almost compelled to read entire manuscripts when they are submitted for a series before I make a decision about publishing or not, whereas I don’t feel that compulsion when I am judging contests.
The reason may have everything to do with the nature of these two practices. With the contest, I am basically eliminating manuscripts until I come across one that grabs me. I don’t have to explain my decision. I don’t even have to have a reason for my decision. I don’t have to write a rejection letter. If I kind of like a manuscript but feel it is just not up to scratch at the moment, and could use some prudent editing, this means nothing to me, the judge. That is still a failed manuscript. I have no relationship with the poets in the contest. I have no right to suggest changes. I can only say, “This one wins,” or “This one loses.”
Here is the basic logic: Typically, when I am judging a contest, I am faced with up to a hundred entries. I quickly arrive at the conclusion that ninety-nine of these will not be a “winner” for some reason or the other. I expect, then, that in this pile of one hundred manuscripts, there is going to be one, maybe two or three that will strike me from the first poems as strikingly commendable. This is an act of faith, but it usually has validity. I therefore carry in my head a basic system that goes like this: I am reading the manuscript in the order in which it has been sent to me. Each poem I read in order will either commend the manuscript to me or cause me to have doubts about the manuscript. When I encounter a good poem, this only means that I should go on read—the manuscript has not been eliminated as yet. It is like a knock out contest. You lose one, you are pretty much dead in the water, out of the running, gone from the game, knocked out. Which is why reading the whole manuscript is often pointless. For seventy percent of the manuscripts, I know as soon as I come across a poem or three that might just not be strong enough. I can put that manuscript aside. The deeper I get into a manuscript, the better are its chances of make it to the playoffs—the finalists list.
As an editor, my relationship to manuscripts is quite different. I already know that as a editor, I am not looking at “edited” manuscripts but that I am now going to decide whether with some editing, a manuscript will be made ready for publication. For that reason, an encounter with several weak poems is not enough to dissuade me from reading on. After all, if the rest of the work is good, my job as editor would be to say to the poet, “Loved your manuscript, but there are some really awful poems scattered here and there. I suggest we lose them.” I can do that. I can also think about the order of the poems, about what I could do to help the poet tighten the collection. There are things that will lead to a rejection that is summary and that may not involve reading the whole manuscript. One is the number of submissions. Many publishers have so many poetry book submissions that they are forced to think like I do when I am a judge—that most of these collections are going to be bad. Hence, some editors find themselves acting like judges of contests. They are waiting for the first awful poem, and they are ready to lose the manuscript because there are hundreds more to read and to find a gem among. The second, of course, is the pressure of having to justify the decision, and this is especially true when you know you have to communicate something to the poet who has sent the work.
The problem with being an editor is that you want to develop a relationship of sorts with the writer with the hope that even if one manuscript is flawed, another better one will emerge. The editor, therefore, in liking a manuscript is compelled to write a proper rejection that does the dangerous thing of explaining why a manuscript was not selected. Judges of contests have no such pressures and no such problems. So where an editor may feel compelled to read through a manuscript that he or she is not likely to want to publish, a judge has no such pressures.
A judge, therefore, is going to have to read a manuscript in a different way. For instance, any sensible poet would have to know that only the best poems in the book must be at the front of the book. A couple of weaker poems and the whole thing is jeopardized. You will note that this has nothing to do with the content and structure of the overall manuscript for instance. In collections that are trying to create some kind of narrative arc that demands some exposition and development which makes one poem fitting at the beginning and another not, this issue becomes a problem. A wise poet will reorder the manuscript. Front-load all the good poems and then pray that by the time the judge gets to the less glorious ones, he or she would have been seduced by the stronger poems.
Of course, the real challenge is to define what is good. It often occurs to me that poems that allow for some kind of lyrical bent and an engagement by the reader will get good points, as long as it has all the formalist qualities, the allusion range and the quality that says that these poems may have been in Poetry or the New Yorker. It does not matter if this is a valid notion of “good”. It only matters that it works as some kind of marker—as just the kind of poem that would ward off elimination. Needless to say, a manuscript that is organized around these considerations may be a cleverly organized manuscript, but it may actually be a rhythmically and structurally predictable work of assured skill but no spark.
Contest manuscripts, therefore, can lack a structural intelligence because, at the end of the day, it does not really need that quality to stay in the running. It needs a highlight reel of genius moments. How they are linked to each other does not matter because the reader, the judge, is reading to eliminate and is rarely going to pay as much attention to structure and movement as, I suspect, the editor would.
So, I am quite interested in the idea that perhaps the proliferation of contests is shaping much of what is produced as early or first manuscripts, and this thing that is produced may indeed represent a uniquely new form.
I can’t imagine, though, that we will do away with the contests. That would be grossly unfair and unwise for poets and lovers of poetry. The contests can generate money, they can give poets a chance to be published who would never have had that chance. They are important, and I am grateful for them. It may well be that other judges are far more conscientious. If they are, it is usually because few of them actually judge the whole contest. Often of the hundred or so submitted, the judge will see fifteen—the other eighty-five would have been eliminated by overworked and quite tired graduate students, sub-editors, interns, etc. By the time the poems get to the judge, the dross has been pruned out and the judge can carefully read all the manuscripts. Of course, I doubt this.
There is no effective way to resolve this, and one has to wonder if anything does need to be resolved. Perhaps this development may be ushering another kind of book that we will come to admire. Or it may well be that the change I am proposing to have happened has not really happened.
Perhaps others have seen this.