In the May/June 2011 Poets & Writers, there's a feature on writing contests. Editor Kevin Larimer (all credit to him for asking the right questions) interviews four poetry first book contest administrators, Stephanie G'Schwind (director of the Center for Literary Publishing and editor of Colorado Review), Michael Collier (director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference), Camille Rankine (program and communications coordinator at Cave Canem Foundation), and Beth Harrison (associate director of the Academy of American Poets and administrator of the Walt Whitman Award), discussing issues of fairness, impartiality, process, revenues, and results. (Full Disclosure: I've been published in Colorado Review and consider G'Schwind an excellent editor; and I know Collier from Bread Loaf).
The contest model means a poet submitting a manuscript with a fee of around $25, and being part of a pool of anywhere from a few hundred to more than a thousand manuscripts judged "blindly"--we'll see soon what that means in poetry contest parlance. The winner gets about a thousand dollars along with publication, and publicity in cloistered academic poetry circles. The 999 losers print out another copy of the manuscript and write another check to yet another contest, never giving up hope.
Poetry contests are about the only remaining way to publish a first poetry book. And that's one way poetry is being killed in this country, reduced to consensus-by-committee, stripped of individual vision, yielding vast parchments of conformity and mediocrity, worth only as means of boosting resumes and securing academic jobs. Our poetry is haunted today by a blind adherence to lack of ambition--and the poetry contest model is part of the problem.
Is this the best way to discover new poetry talent in the country? What happens to editorial judgment, consistent aesthetic vision, commitment to particular values, building a movement, advocating for a particular style, and creating a critical mass of new writing if the contest model is allegedly based in "impartiality" and "blindness"--in other words, pretends to be the exemplar of democracy, egalitarianism, and disavowal of values? Has institutionalization gone too far? Would we all be better off--far-fetched as it sounds--if the contest model were eliminated and consistent editorial judgment were allowed to enter into the process of first book publication again?
The contest model wasn't always predominant, but along with the explosive growth in MFA programs and the institutionalization of literary writing under the academy's auspices, small publishers who used to read submissions (without a fee, without a contest) have become almost completely extinct; a few remain, but they're so overwhelmed with commitments to long-term authors that new poets can't look to them as a viable option; they're a drop in the bucket, drowned by the overwhelming scale of the contest phenomenon.
Publishing new writing by way of contests implies a certain metaphysical attitude--the model privileges randomness, divisibility, fragmentation, unknowability, and nondeterminism, perfected and ground through a process of rationalization to the presumed opposite of these conditions. Something that starts out fluid and yielding is supposed to gel into a final judgment. The contradictions are rife. Victory in a poetry contest is never unequivocal--hence the (sometimes inordinately) long lists of runners-up, finalists, and honorable mentions, as though any of these could easily have been the victor. There is a victor, and yet there isn't. The illusion must be perpetuated that everyone always has an equal shot at winning the contest. All books are potentially publishable.
Much of Larimer's interview focuses on the mechanics of judging contests, from the point of view of these four administrators. How do the contests get the submissions, who screens them, how is impartiality ensured, etc. However, the way the questions are framed presumes the fairness of the system, delving instead into the nitty-gritty. This serves to sideline the larger political and philosophical implications of the idea of publishing books by contest. Discussing tactics, or occasionally strategy, but not philosophy, is a way to defuse the angst and enhance existing legitimacy for the benefit of the system.
For instance, Harrison tells Larimer: "The Academy [of American Poets] has on staff three part-timers who are MFA candidates at Columbia University; they do a first screening of manuscripts.... If none of the screeners is particularly moved by a manuscript, but the person who's submitting has a ton of publication credits, it moves along to the judge anyway." Not all of them allow screeners to read publication credits. G'Schwind adds: "They [the screeners] each get between a hundred and fifty and two hundred manuscripts. I always have three screening judges and I just divide the pile up."
So the crucial work of initial screening of manuscripts is outsourced to lowly MFA candidates, themselves desperately trying to get a book published, preempting and anticipating what the judge might like or not like. Notice how a philosophical/aesthetic question has been broken down into a procedural one. Contests go out of their way to emphasize the fairness of their procedures, which is a convenient way out of the bigger issue. The reality is that only a certain sensibility will get through in a given contest.
Typically there are two types of aesthetics (following the MFA division of poetry into two major camps): the narrative/formally uninventive/epiphany-based confessional or memoiristic short poem, and the experimental/avant-garde/language poetry camp, which takes its inspiration from deconstruction and makes a fetish of the insensibility of ordinary language. A judge from one camp is never going to pick a book from another camp; it just doesn't happen. The screeners know it, and hopefully the submitters know it too (unless they're really stupid). Already a great deal of self-screening has taken place, and rapidly amplifies during the early stages of screening.
So what is going through the minds of the poor MFA screeners? They're guessing the sensibility that will most please the judge. There can be little question of independent assertion of aesthetic judgment, since the screener is neither qualified nor willing to exercise such judgment. Does the manuscript look like something the judge and the contest would feel authorized to endorse? The screener cannot be deeply engaged with the manuscript if he's looking at two hundred manuscripts! What he can do, with speed and efficiency, is to get a general feel for appearance, sifting out the ones least likely to get the screener in trouble for being "outlandish" or "inappropriate," given the biases of the judge and the contest's recent winners.
It's also interesting--but what else do we expect in the politically correct academy?--that diversity in judges is broken down by gender and geography. The administrators of the contests are keen to emphasize such diversity, as though this were the main question about the quality of first poetry books. Note the shifting logic: from evading the question of what kind of poetry is being published to the number of manuscripts handled by screeners to diversity of judges by politically correct criteria!
Rankine elaborates: "We tend to alternate between a man and a woman every year, and I think we do choose judges who have name recognition and will draw a lot of submissions." Similarly, Collier: "I rely a lot on Bread Loaf faculty, which is very diverse; they represent, I think a pretty good cross section of what's going on in contemporary American literary culture." The Bread Loaf faculty has its recurrent stars, returning year after year, a highly select coterie advancing each other's causes (these are the poetry superstars who give each other awards of huge sums of money, for which there is no nomination process). Bread Loaf has in place a sophisticated multi-layered screening process, so anyone not fully beholden to reigning aesthetics is unlikely to make it to a waiter's position--let alone faculty member! Gender and geographic diversity is a red herring in this sense. In fact, the article includes a sidebar, "The Anatomy of Awards," where the 129 book contest winners announced the previous year in Poets & Writers are broken down by gender, age, genre, education, residence, and ethnic background. What's amazing is that decomposing it in this census-like manner seems like the most natural thing to an academic.
What kind of money is involved? The Walt Whitman Award, according to Harrison, gets 1,245 entries at $25 a shot: that's $31,125. Thirty thousand dollars is a lot of money. The publishers justify the costs as going toward "administrative costs," including paying screeners and judges. For much less than thirty thousand dollars a publisher could solicit books from poets already being published in the best literary journals, or keep an eye out for burgeoning talent and encourage and promote them to put together a book. The way it used to work, before contests took over. Any amount of money, even $50,000, can be justified as being eaten up in administrative costs; costs will expand in relation to the amount being collected, which in turn is dependent on brand-name judges drawing in large numbers of submissions. Collier says that "the screeners and the judges cost almost ten thousand." That's a great deal of money to pay one's fellow Bread Loaf judges--the money stays in the house, within the circle, so to speak.
The most interesting part of the interview revolves around conflicts of interest. In the mid-2000s, Foetry.com exposed a number of egregious conflicts of interest. For example, Jorie Graham awarded the Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series award to her husband and Harvard colleague, Peter Sacks (see here for some of her indiscretions involving conflict of interest). At some level, the work of those who are regular conference-goers and part of the higher echelons of the MFA system is well-known to each other. There is only a slight leap involved from master and apprentice to judge and winning contestant.
I adore and admire Tony Hoagland, both as a poet and as a person, and have had occasion for many wonderful conversations with him, but in 2008 he picked Matthew Dickman for the American Poetry Review/Honickman prize--leading to the explosive rise in Dickman's career. Hoagland is an excellent poet, Dickman a mediocre one; more to the point, Hoagland regularly teaches at Bread Loaf, where Dickman is a frequent attendee. Surely Hoagland recognized Dickman's poetry when he came across the manuscript passed on to him? Perhaps Hoagland would have picked him anyway--but this raises the larger issue of contests serving as seamless ways to satisfy judges' preferences. What should Hoagland have done when he recognized Dickman's writing? Out of the apparent chaos of randomness in contests, order is being retrieved, in ways that accord with the traditional method--except that the new method comes dressed with the paraphernalia of democracy, almost the connotations of a lottery, which it most definitely is not.
There was a time, around 2005 to 2008, when I used to regularly scrutinize the results of poetry book awards in Poets & Writers, and just googling the names of the judge and the winner typically revealed some obvious connection--a common MFA program was the most recurrent flag. I gave up this exercise, and I suspect, based on Larimer's interview, that contests are more careful these days about permitting such obvious connections into the open. They must have tightened up the appearance of conflict of interest, so that just googling two people doesn't necessarily yield an instant relationship. Still, pursuing the old habit, I checked at random a book award in the new issue of Poets & Writers--Lory Bedikian, winner of the 2010 Philip Levine prize from Cal State Fresno--and found out that both she and judge Brian Turner attended the University of Oregon MFA program. Do the two know each other? Just coincidence? It would be enlightening to get a response from them.
Larimer and the four publishers reduce the issue of conflict of interest to adopting the CLMP (Council of Literary Magazines and Presses) Code of Ethics. Collier says: "We're very clear with the judges and the screeners that if they recognize the manuscript or if they have a relationship with the writer, we ask them to not advance it." One fails to understand, despite the vast documentation of overt corruption, how Collier can say even about the past: "By and large...the system ran pretty well without any real, let's say, policing, or scrutiny. But now it's just more explicit and it's tightened things up, and I think that's really good."
G'Schwind, on the other hand, recognizes that there was a big problem, but puts it clearly in the past: "The problem was that judges were picking students...people they knew.... The claim was that students were being picked by the judges. And they were." So there is admission here of corruption--violating the terms of ethics governing contests--in the past. The larger philosophical issue remains: the likelihood that the manuscripts that advance are the kinds that the judge's closest students would be producing anyway. And no formal code of ethics is going to address the issue of narrow boundaries of selection, since this is inherent in the process itself.
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I'm preparing my MS for lots of contests this summer, so I was intrigued by this. I would agree with Shivani that contests are unfair, but is that a terrible thing? I mean, reading and publishing is rather subjective and tricky. I would never, ever, ever "water down" my writing to try to get it published...I would submit the exact same manuscript I have right now to contests and/or presses.
Yes, first books are a problem, huh? Have a look at what the brilliant Nic Sebastian (full disclosure: friend that I admire so! fellow poetry blogger!) did with Jill Alexander Essbaum---she created a "nanopress:" http://foreverwillendonthursday.wordpress.com/about-the-nanopress/
I'm rather grateful to poets who serve as readers for these contests (like Dorianne, above)--it is a large task.
I always think that if we are frustrated by a lack of something in the world, it is up to us to create that...maybe a Shivani Press specializing in poetry is needed? http://thenanopress.wordpress.com/
Yes, Canarium and Ugly Duckling Presse published marvelous first books last year (Rick Snyder's Escape from Combray is my personal pick for the best first book published last year, along with Barbara Freeman's Incivilities, published by Counterpath), but Samuel Amadon's Like a Sea, winner of the Iowa Prize was brilliant, as was Nick Lantz's Bakeless winner, We Don't Know We Don't Know. But you know what? That's just my opinion. And I know that the judges who picked books I didn't particularly like feel passionately different about those books. That's the thing about poetry: there's a lot of it out there. If you read a book and don't like it, put it down and keep looking around and find one you love.
American poetry couldn't be healthier. It may not look the way Anis Shivani wants it to look, but that's the best proof of its health.
Now, if we could just talk about the lack of feedback given to most submitters for literary journals outside of literary contests ("not right for this issue," "maybe next time," "didn't fit."). Journal editors are no doubt deluged with submissions (all these MFAs have to get published somewhere, right?), but such feedback doesn't help writers, and in some ways rests on the assumption that these submitters have had either had writing workshops as part of a formal writing program or can find teachers and mentors elsewhere. This lack of feedback, although certainly a (maybe impossible) demand on editors' time, also perpetuates this mystery of "good" writing and how things get published that is promoted by these contests.
But this is one area in which scholarly academic journals have literary journals beat, and the blind peer-review process functions somewhat better. Here's why I prefer getting rejected from academic rather than literary journals (and both have happened numerous times):
http://professionalraconteur.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-i-prefer-rejection-academic.html
Poetry doesn't pay and competitions are a perfectly acceptable way to have your writing considered and hopefully selected anonymously. Generally speaking the fees for poetry competitions only cover the costs. The fees you mention do seem higher - but it does take time to read and consider a full collection.
I wouldn't be happy to run contests unless the entry fee was maximum £10 in keeping with other poetry contests, and I would be running at a loss doing this. I think most people running contests are.
Writers like competitions as a way of writing to deadlines and polishing their work. They do help. You can't afford too many and have to be selective. I do think there's a place for competitions to publish books but real care needs to be taken to avoid the kinds of criticisms levelled in this article - and that's probably why I don't run these contests although aspiring authors ask me to.
Meanwhile, still waiting for a direct response from Brian Turner and Lory Bedikian as to whether there was a prior relationship/friendship/connection of some sort which helped Lory become the winner of the contest, despite the fact that both judge and winner attended the same MFA program at Oregon, when entries must have been received from all over the country.
The problem with the random glance at two contest players is that there's no behind-the-scenes transparency. While Turner and Bedikan may not know each other, we do know that Philip Levine has, on multiple occasions, chosen his own students as winners of prizes in contests. That's strike one. We also don't know who read manuscripts before they went to the judge. Was it someone who taught both Turner and Bedikan at Oregon and who would have no reason to recuse him/herself because s/he expected to remain anonymous, while padding the finalist pool? We just don't know. That used to be the kind of thing I would do with Foetry: find out the names of those screeners, find out the names of the finalists. It was pretty illuminating.
In this case, two poets are being subject to more scrutiny and suspicion by the previous (and possibly current) bad actions of others. How would the winner feel if she learned she wasn't competing against 500 other poets, but 10 classmates from the U of O? How would the entrants feel?
Incidentally, now the shadiest Foets skip the contests. The New Way is to use taxpayer and/or donor funding to publish your own book and two by the son of the University President, who is also your direct supervisor.
http://www.dacushome.com/Poetry Book Publishers.htm
Thanks to Rachel Dacus for putting this together, and to Adam Deutsch and Jeannine Hall Gailey for mentioning it.
I agree with the others it is an ordeal to post here! It is not on my blog so feel free to comment there!