CONTEST

I am judging a poetry contest. I’m not going to say which one. And I didn’t know I was judging it until after the deadline so it wasn’t like I could say hey I’m judging so you should send your manuscript in. I was a little glad I was judging it. I mean it was flattering. But then of course then the giant box of manuscripts arrived the drycleaners where I receive packages. Uhnnnh.  I don’t have to tell you that I work really hard. You work hard too. I know that. I’m still cleaning up this and that from the work I didn’t finish before I got here (MacDowell) which is to say I’m not yet working on a novel or some incredible piece of prose. And I’m not putting a new manuscript of poems together which seemed so easy when it was all on my computer or hard drive and now its scattered on scraps in the nice black boxes from the container store I store my poem scraps in. It’s in notebooks. So I could spend the month organizing scraps and notebooks hauling that baby, the new manuscript of poems out of chaos and into the light but I’m sufficiently superstitious that I think that when something different happens (and yes it’s modest of me to refer to losing my computer and hard drive and three netflix DVDs as just “something different”) you should probably make a different plan. I’ve not made that plan yet but I will and meanwhile I’m finishing up a little business, editing a long interview with another poet, and when I finish that then doing something on Friday night, well then I will begin something new. I’m dying for the gust of new, the leap into the unknown - beginning a new project and you know I’m only here at MacDowell for a few more weeks so the only thing between me and that leap is that giant box of manuscripts sitting there from the poetry contest. What if I just stuck my hand in with my eyes closed and acted like it was a fishbowl and my MacDowell studio was a stage and I was a spokes model in an orange evening gown and a big hairdo with a blindfold across my eyes and gracefully I’ pull a poetry manuscript out from the box on the floor and the audience grows silent and I beam my famous smile and say and the winner is: and surely it would be some pretty good poet who deserved it right. I don’t think this is a slush pile. Or what if it is. What if everything is. I mean ultimately. Do you believe in excellence. Think of some of the terrible people who win contests and get big grants. Are those great poets. Well sometimes they are. But often they are not. How does this happen. Surely the judges read all the submissions, hey?

 

What about some of those places poets aspire to publish in. Poetry magazine, the New Yorker, what else. The Nation? Conjunctions? Chicago Review. Granta. What is Granta? A British grain that helps with constipation? How about American Poetry Review. That should move things along. More importantly what about all the truly little poetry magazines in the world, the funky ones, the cool ones, experimental ones, the one offs. Bi-lingual journals. Webzines. Throw all of them up in the air. Who chooses what goes into any these journals. Do editors read the poems really. Or do they get someone to help them who’s hot. What would you do. I take my responsibility very seriously the editor might say. But does it matter. Do we care. Does the editor have good taste. Which editor. I’m just suggesting that whatever the editor thinks and feels, whatever the judges do there’s still such a high percentage of randomness (or corruption) in the mix that what if she or he instead just picked every eighth one or cut the pile in half and then cut that in half and then asked a perfect stranger walking down the hall to pick one from that pile and another from this. The idea of “knowing” is so massively influential in these decisions, these realms – either knowing the poets personally, knowing someone that recommended them, or knowing that THIS kind of poetry sucks and this kind is what MATTERS…something deep in me that really wants do my own writing (that most random thing of all) thinks the fishbowl method is probably good and fair. I am leaning over the weightiness of this decision. In my beautiful dress, in my blind blind mind. I wonder what we will do.