Poetry as a Profession?
 

Very interesting! Thanks, John.

That's an interesting read, John; thanks for posting it. I was struck by these two paragraphs, introducing Spar/Young/Grossman's methodology and subsequent conclusions:

I understand looking at poetry prizes as a marker of poetic success, especially since the data seems to have been relatively available. But I think that there are many poets writing and publishing -- achieving professional "success" of one stripe or another -- who are not winning poetry prizes because they are not entering poetry contests at all. I find it somewhat baffling that the discussion of privilege and lack of privilege so often centers around race to the exclusion of class. (I don't mean that race doesn't matter; I mean that class also matters and is often completely ignored.)

I make a regular practice of submitting poems for publication and have had some modest success with that, having placed about twenty poems since I really started tackling it seriously two years ago. Some of those have even paid me. But the overwhelming majority of my submissions are to outlets which do not charge submission fees. We're a single-income family; I've got three young kids to feed and clothe; my own "pocket money" is $25/mo which is less than it often costs to enter a single poetry contest (and as a Canadian poet the gap is even wider because of our relatively poor currency compared to the USD, Euro, or British Pound). Sometimes I will pay $3 or $4 or $5 to submit to a journal where I think I've got a pretty good chance. But $20 or $30 or more for a contest? Forget it.

I think it's a reasonable conclusion that there's some... I can't think of the word I want... some self-reinforcement in the cycle of winners coming from elite universities and MFA programs, which (arguably?) increases the prestige of those programs, which draws more writers, which creates more winners, and round and round we go. But maybe if you have enough personal wealth or family support to go to Harvard or enroll at the Iowa Writers Workshop... then you have enough money to enter as many contests as you please, as well.

What do you think? Is my reading off-base here?

Christine, I wholeheartedly agree that economic class (if that's what you mean by "class") is very, very important; in fact, I strongly suspect that a lot of the focus on race is actually a proxy for economic class. But the reason that this very imperfect proxy is the best available approximation for economic class is that it's very hard to gather data on that without contacting people and convincing them to participate in a very nosy survey.

Yes, economic class is what I meant. And I think you're right, too, about race being as proxy -- certainly there are deep parallels in many parts of the world. But both race and economic class are more nuanced than we'd often like to believe -- than it would be convenient to believe -- especially when we start looking at layers of what we might call "competing intersectionalities". Who is more privileged: the rich black woman or the poor white man? The gay doctor or the straight janitor? People are complex and live in complex societies and we can only get so reductive before we stop talking about reality at all.

I've noticed that the writing of many award winners has a similar distinguished feel, and haven't come across much (any?) that I'd call jarring in any way.

Rewarding poets might have a similar dynamic as you'd find in a hiring manager. With something so subjective you need visual markers to justify your choice, Ivy league schools being a pretty obvious marker.

In the same vein, I think you're going to get some level of conformity in the actual writing too, because committees won't want to make unusual choices.

I've absolutely found writing I loved this way (George Seferis, Czesław Miłosz, Wislawa Szymborska come to mind). But I've also found great writing locally that'd never win an award because it's too outside the norm.

Christine, here is a tip about fees for book contests. It may or may not help you, depending on whether you live in an area that has arts councils that give small grants to local artists. Many book contests have significant fees in the 25-35 dollar range, and entering those book contests can be one of the few ways to get a poetry book published, outside of vanity presses. When I lived in Minnesota, it was relatively easy to apply for small grants for artists, so for each of my three full-length poetry manuscripts and one chapbook manuscript, I applied for about $300 to fund entry into enough contests to give my book a decent chance. Several times I won none of them, but both of my first two books and my chapbook were published as a result of entering a contest whose entry was funded by those small grants. I learned that the scattershot approach was a waste of time, so after the first time, I entered fewer contests, but made sure that I entered only those that had actually published a formalist poetry book in the past.

I consider it to be a waste of time, too, to enter contests for individual poems, unless the contest is specifically geared toward formal poems of the kind I write. Do not be lured into entering contests based on liking the work of the final judge, who will probably see only a handful of the finalists' works. All of the other manuscripts will probably be screened out by students or interns whose tastes may have nothing in common with yours.

Susan

"To be a poet is a condition, not a profession," Frost said. Can I get a grant to look into that?

Susan, that is a great point about grants -- thank you. I am a registered artist with the Canada Council for the Arts, which is our national grant body, though I haven't actually applied for anything yet. But they do cover things like workshop fees and even childcare for the same, so I'll have to dig around and see if submission fees would also qualify. I'm slowly inching my way toward a first chapbook right now, so I will definitely keep it in mind as an option!

As far as single-poem contests go, the only one I ever do is the Rattle poetry prize... the prize itself is a moonshot but the fee extends my subscription by another 3 issues so that's good enough for me!

It's po-biz and you win some and lose some, and I don't think an article that anaylzes all prize winning poems since 1918 and focuses only on major awards has the slightest relationship to today's situation or to the people posting on the sphere. (When it focuses on writing since 2000 it is more meaningful.) Cast a much larger net (contests with a $250 prize, for example) and limit it to the last five or ten years, and I think you might prove something.

Another problem I have with some of the comments here is that they apparently assume that the judge, or judges, know who the writer is, and the writer's background. That may be true for a few major awards, like the National Book Award, but in 99%+ of the cases the judges do not know the entrants. I've entered hundreds of competitions, from book awards to single poems, won a few and chalked up enough "almosts" to give me material for a poem about being a perennial runner-up, and I don't believe there was one of them where the identity of the entrants was known to the judges. The article analyzes the creme de la creme de la creme. That's not my world.