Ah, Gail, you've touched on the topic I alluded to at the end of post #9, and which I intended to come back to... that of being able to recognise not just the
style of a poet but the actual presentation of the work, ie font, layout etc.
I know from judging several competitions that most people send multiple entries in one go and, though the poems may be very different in content, page after page looks almost identical! Same font and size, same justification, maybe with titles underlined or all in capitals, or whatever... often there's no mistaking that these x number of poems were submitted at the same time by the same person! It's easy-peasy for the judge if the "rule" that we're discussing is in force: just pick the best one and reject the rest.
Whenever I submit three poems to a competition in one envelope I fold one piece of paper in half, leave one unfolded and fold the other into three; use maybe Times New Roman for one, Ariel for another... you get my drift. My three poems look as if they are from three different people. Now, whether this has ever helped or not I don't know but I do it anyway!
**
There is one elderly lady of my acquaintance and I swear I could identify one of her poems out of
thousands, simply for the distinctive way they appear on the page. It's quite hard to be impartial when you know very well whose work you're looking at.
Bill mentioned a judge who disqualified his entry on the grounds that he recognised Bill's poems; it's one thing to have actually
seen the poems before (most comps are for previously unpublished ones anyway), but another to simply recognise a poet by the look of the entry. I don't think a judge can fairly disqualify an entrant on those grounds.
** If my different-looking poems
did happen to fool the judge and more than one was chosen to win, but he or she was later told they were by the same entrant and I was subsequently deprived of one of the prizes, how would I ever know, anyway? There's probably no point at all in resorting to this subterfuge, come to think of it!
Jayne