Well, I'm glad to see you got that off your chest, Rose. http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif

Lo

The reason it would be disappointing is because it smacks of favoratism and, therefore, has the potential to tarnish the contest. TNC prize is supposed to be blind-judged. One would assume that it is. But when sites like foetry exist and discussion threads like the one we had a while back about The Best American Poetry being populated by an editor's students, one wonders.

M

Glad you're keeping abreast of the latest developments, Lo.
Mary

I find this juggernaut of breast jokes offensive. Can't we get back to sanctimonious comments about the judging process by people who have absolutely no concept of how it operates, or who won, or how condensed the form/metrical verse universe is, and how virtually impossible it is to find an established poet/judge for form-related contests who has not had at least some contact with many of the entrants.

I agree, Michael. I think the people griping are all just a bunch of chronic knockers trying to milk the situation for all that they can. If they didn't have their hands full nursing this grudge, they'd be busy nursing another.

Lo



[This message has been edited by Laura Heidy-Halberstein (edited January 12, 2008).]

Happily complying with Michael's request:

I'm not at all sure The New Criterion contest purports to be judged blind. The contest requirements, as I recall, don't ask for two separate title pages, one with and one without the poet's name, as most other contests do. To me, it really appears that the judges want to know whose manuscript is whose.

In addition, at TNC there is no particular statement of contest ethics made (as Tupelo Press has been forced to make after the recent flap, and as other presses do because they adhere to CLMP guidelines).

In some contests, it's common practice to invite last year's finalists to re-enter the same manuscript and to give them priority in this year's contest. This is not made public, but it's done. Yet another reason to doubt that everyone entering a contest has a truly equal chance.

Will this stop me from entering? I'm not sure yet, but I have started paying more attention to open reading periods.

If I read this aright--and we want to complain--isn't the broader issue that Brown (whose work I don't know but will for the sake of argument will assume is good) had to enter a contest to get a second book. Yes, I know it's quite common, but I can't think it's good for the art for poets to have to scramble for a publisher at significant expense every time they get a manuscript together.

Which is a bit far afield from this discussion, granted, but then, I suspect that the contest system itself is the trouble. I've gone on about this before, but from the standpoint of a publisher, if there's a toss-up between two books, and you only have the money to do one the next year, it makes perfect sense to keep one of them on the backburner for a time. Get rid of the contests and just look at manuscripts, you don't get the contest money, and lists might get smaller, but it might even put the onus on the publishers to sell some books and to put in some long-term investments with writers. Entry fees make everything weird, and it's not a case of one contest in particular, but contests in general.

But we've been through this before.

Quincy

A retired editor with whom I am closely associated has always maintained that grants should go to publishers and not to writers. That way we all benefit.

For what it's worth, I just received my copy of last year's New Criterion prize winner - Foiled Again, by J. Allyn Rosser (whom I don't know at all, but her first collection won the Samuel French Morse prize, the second the Crab Orchard, and she has a Pushcart, an NEA fellowship, etc. - clearly not chopped liver) - and at first glance it's impressive, probing, ambitious writing.

Yes, impressive, probing and ambitious. Not, however, one hundred percent metrical, and so very different from the other Criterion-winner books I own. This teaches me something about the looseness of meaning in the phrase "pays particular attention to form."