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:
Quote:
Because prizes are a normative standard for success, they collected data on prizes — every prize since 1918 worth $10,000 or more in 2022 dollars. They recorded who won, what their gender and race were, where they earned their degrees, and who served as judges. Then they published what they found in a series of essays. What did they find?
They found that writers “with an elite degree (Ivy League, Stanford, University of Chicago) are nine times more likely to win than those without one. And more specifically, those who attended Harvard are 17 times more likely to win.” They found that half of the prize-winners with an MFA “went to just four schools: [University of] Iowa, Columbia, NYU, or UC Irvine.” Iowa has special clout: its alumni “are 49 times more likely to win compared to writers who earned their MFA at any other program since 2000.”
|
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?