Best of the Literary Contest Insider Interviews
In June 2013, our Literary Contest Insider database concludes its 12-year run. Our free e-newsletter and database of The Best Free Literary Contests will remain active.
As a fitting way to wrap up this series, we would like to share some of our favorite excerpts from those interviews. We have updated the guidelines links and information for their contests in the introduction to each excerpt; keep in mind that when you visit the page to read the full interview, the contest information there may be out of date because these interviews were conducted in previous years. For this roundup feature, we have limited our selection to contests that are still active as of 2013.
Carolyn Moore, Contest Workshop Leader (Summer 2002)
Carolyn Moore has won over 60 awards and honors for her writing, including the Roberts Writing Award for Poetry from the H.G. Roberts Foundation and the Literature and Belief Writing Award for Poetry. She has judged for the Portland Pen Poetry Contest, the Alsop Review Poetry Contest and youth contests for Eureka (California) schools, as well as high school poetry, fiction and nonfiction contests for the Humboldt County (California) branch of the National League of American Pen Women. Read some of her work here.
Moore's workshop, "Confessions of a Contest Junkie," teaches poets about how poetry contests judge submissions and how to identify scams. She is now completing a collection of poetry for which she won the C. Hamilton Bailey Fellowship in Poetry for Literary Arts, Inc. She lives and writes on her family farm in Tigard, Oregon. We thank her for sharing her insights.
On poetry contest scams:
"Ever since a frail man in his eighties told me he chose buying the anthology in which his poem would appear instead of getting his prescription medications for that month, I have been on a local mission to warn the most vulnerable people about such scams. During my university teaching years, I sometimes had my beginning creative writing classes submit 'soup can' poems to suspect contests. Students brought in labels from items in their cupboards. We snipped out interesting phrases, then shaped them into as many as six nonsensical poems. You will not be surprised to learn that we always had one poem 'accepted' by the scams. Nor will you be surprised to learn it was always the shortest as well as the skinniest poem we submitted.
"I did not understand the skinny component until I won a prize in what I thought was a legitimate contest and received as my $100 prize a $15 check and a huge anthology of dreadful verse 'valued at $85.' It was then that I saw the importance of the skinny poem to such endeavors. These poems were stacked like cordwood to squeeze an extra column of bad verse onto the page. Yep: more suckers taking up less paper."
On multi-tiered judging:
"For many years I helped with a short story contest that receives hundreds (sometimes over a thousand) short story entries from around the world. Like many huge contests run by universities, students served as the first readers. Thus a writer has two or three hurdles to clear before his or her story gets into the hands of the final judge.
"Often students reject a wonderful story because they 'can't relate to it.' Often students fall for a cliched story because they don't have enough life experience to know what's stale yet. A teacher or an editor has seen such elements hundreds of times, but if these teachers and editors are not screeners, then cliched works slip through. In such a multi-tiered contest, the final judge often receives a bad batch from which to select a winner. I hated seeing stories that students weeded out of our contest win other contests run by literary magazines that used seasoned judges throughout the whole judging process. To win a multi-tiered contest such as the one I've described, your work must be sappy or glitzy enough to dazzle inexperienced readers but then have enough savvy to win over the final judge(s).
"I was once a final judge for a poetry contest for which I refused to pick a winner from the twenty poems sent me. The blue-haired ladies running the contest were upset since they had already announced me as the final judge and didn't want to explain why they needed a substitute. Here's how we compromised: I asked to read the 300+ poems they had screened out. The 20 they had sent me were chiefly greeting card verses that reinforced views (and meters) they cherished. The discard pile was full of risky and quirky poems. I chose all three winners and most honorable mention poets from the discard pile! The ladies were shocked at my First Prize poem, and I never expected to hear from them again. I doubt that I would have, but that First Prize winner went on to win a prestigious poetry fellowship. The disgruntled ladies decided I was a decent judge after all, and they asked me to judge once again."
Susan Kan, Editor of Perugia Press (Fall 2002)
Perugia Press was founded in Western Massachusetts in 1997 to publish poetry by women. The Perugia Press Prize for a First or Second Book by a Woman accepts entries August 1-November 15, with a $1,000 prize and publication.
Q: Perugia exclusively publishes poetry by women, and the contest is also for women only. Why do you see the need for a women-only press, since women seem to be well-represented among famous contemporary poets and contributors to leading literary magazines?
A: That women are well-represented is a misconception. For example, MobyLives.com just published a study about the number of women published in The New Yorker in the last year. The research shows that this year, only 24% of the writers for the magazine have been women. Of those, most are staff writers. Rarely are women writers represented in the high-profile feature articles at the beginning of the magazine. And some weeks, not a single woman appears in the whole magazine. And this is one of the most elite journals to publish poetry.
Furthermore, the July/August issue of Poets and Writers has a short piece addressing the issue of awards. According to their research, 22 out of 38 finalists for book awards were male. All but one of the winners and nominees for the 2002 Pulitzer Prizes in fiction and poetry are male. That's not to say that women haven't come a long way since Emily Dickinson. I like to think that most literary journals and presses do make a point to balance who they publish between men and woman. But, basically there's plenty of room and need for a press that publishes only women. I tend to read more women poets, though not exclusively.
Q: Is Perugia looking for poetic voices that are distinctively female, and/or poetry about the female experience (broadly defined)? What does that mean to you?
A: I strongly believe that the more we listen to women's interpretations, the better off we'll be. I am looking for well-crafted, musical, fresh voices that tell compelling stories. If you read the books I've published, I think you'll see that the voices I'm drawn to are writing about women's experiences, but not in a heavy handed or apologetic way. Women will love these books, and so will men. I don't think any man would read one of these books and dismiss it as irrelevant to him. The world will improve, I believe, with the sound of more women's voices.
(LCI Editor's Note: Sadly, not much has changed about these statistics in 10 years. For more on this theme, check out the organization VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, which works to address gendered disparities in publishing.)
Don Williams, Editor of New Millennium Writings (Summer 2003)
Founded in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1996, this attractive journal runs two contests per year for poetry, fiction, flash fiction, and essays, offering $1,000 in each genre. Their deadlines are June 17 (often extended to July 31) and November 17 (often extended to January 31).
Q: What, for you, makes a contest entry or submission stand out? What do you look for in terms of formal mastery, style, imagery or "sense of life"?
A: I look for something that sings me a story or philosophy or vision. Even if it's a vision of despair it has to sing. The crisp, clear image that moves the story or poem along and makes it resonate to deeper meanings is always compelling to me. At the same time, economy of language is important. Every image, every metaphor, every line of dialogue should move the story or poem and its theme forward in a compelling way.
Q: In perusing writers' guidelines for literary journals, I often see warnings like "no religious poetry" or "no sci-fi and fantasy." Such editors are most likely trying to avoid sentimental Hallmark verse or genre cliches, but the prevalence of these warnings, I feel, tends to ghetto-ize literature into "sophisticated" realism/cynicism as opposed to "escapist" spiritual or magical work. NMW is unafraid to smudge that line! I'd be interested in your thoughts on genre and the stereotyping thereof.
A: I try not to stereotype, period. Someone said, "Grant the writer his donnée," meaning his or her basic approach or assumption, then judge their words on the merits. I never turn something down because it's spiritual or "genre" or "escapist." We've published several stories and poems over the years that could be described as "science-fiction" or mystery or even police procedural or religious to some extent or other. I think editors who draw the line at such things are foolish. It means they would have turned down much of Hopkins, much of Eliot, H.G. Wells, Orwell, Bradbury, Tolkien, the Book of Job, maybe even Homer and Euripides. Let me add, there seems to be a bias in certain quarters against anything affirmative of human warmth and fellowship and notions of redemption and transcendence or any sense of mystery, wonder or awe at the universe. Yet in society at large these earthy, organic strands are everywhere pulling us back to acknowledge a mystery in the cosmos that the latest findings in particle physics and cosmology only strengthen. So, yes, NMW is open to all sorts of literary exploration and expression. The universe is certainly a lively and brilliant and many-faceted place. For any of us to have existence at all is so fantastic it's like winning 500 million lotteries in a row. Our own existence—maybe the universe as a whole—is that unlikely. Let's celebrate it.
Robert Stewart, Editor of New Letters (Spring 2007)
Established in 1934 as The University Review under the auspices of the University of Kansas City (now part of the University of Missouri system), the journal adopted its current name in 1971. Authors published in this venerable magazine have included May Sarton, J.D. Salinger, Marianne Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Tess Gallagher and Richard Wright. The companion radio program New Letters on the Air celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, making it the longest continuously-running broadcast of a national literary radio series, with more than 1,200 episodes. Listen to the latest installments via streaming audio or order CDs and cassettes of past broadcasts here.
Since 1986, New Letters has offered three prestigious annual literary awards, each with a $1,500 prize and a deadline of May 18: the New Letters Prize for Poetry, the Dorothy Churchill Cappon Prize for the Essay, and the Alexander Patterson Cappon Prize for Fiction. Past winners and judges are listed on their website.
Q: How would you describe New Letters' mission and aesthetic sensibility, as distinct from those of other literary journals in your region and nationwide?
A: Although I would like to leave that question to readers, critics, and the auspices of history, I don't trust any of them to see the magazine clearly enough. Even in-house readers of manuscripts seem prejudiced toward literary journals; they often will write a comment such as, "great story, wild, but probably not for New Letters." I am always shocked. I have to show such a reader the experimental short fiction we have run by Lance Olsen or Charlotte Holmes; I show that reader the peculiar essay styles from the magazine of Andrei Codrescu or Alyce Miller; I have to show the reader the disturbingly blunt images of prose writers such as Gail Waldstein (infant autopsies) and Lauren Slater (sexual predators). I could go on describing what I hope are the far ranges of literary style and content the magazine opens up to, but let me focus in on what I, as editor, care about.
I get pleasure from publishing the kind of short stories, poems, essays and art that our readers do not expect to see in the magazine. What is a typical New Letters story? Is it "What Does God Care About Your Dignity, Victor Travesty?" by Thomas E. Kennedy, about a crime boss who confronts God in a warehouse? Is it the poem "Ella," by Gary Gildner, about killing a dog? Every piece of writing that succeeds as literary art finds its own way to beauty. The "aesthetic" of this magazine values language used with freshness and authenticity. I read much poetry and prose both in other publications and in manuscript that values cleverness, smugness, inconsequence. I appreciate lots of styles, even traditional narrative, but I do not appreciate the use of conventional, mass-media jargon, and word games without serious purpose.
Q: What new direction have you brought, or do you hope to bring, to the journal since you've become editor?
A: I have started, I think, to bring to New Letters a clearer sense of the spiritual value of great literary art; second, I hope to move the magazine to confront more clearly social and political concerns of our time. By the latter, I don't mean the week-to-week pettiness of who's out front in a campaign. In recent issues, we have, however, published powerful essays and stories about the Indonesian tsunami, homeless people in Bogotá, more philosophically based essays on politics, and engaging scholarly essays, such as Scott Donaldson's on reviving the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson.
Art makes its impact, often, by indirection, and I do not intend for the magazine to become an ideological rag for anyone. I am interested in what one of my own editor's notes describes as "the disinterested search for truth," which is where literary art shines.
Q: Does New Letters place more emphasis on representing the mainstream of contemporary American writing, or discovering the avant-garde? How would you define those terms? What relevance, if any, do they have for writers today?
A: Robert Frost said that the study of literature is one of the few areas in life where one is asked to exercise taste and judgment. My taste runs toward fiction, poetry, and essays that care about the emotional and spiritual dilemmas of human beings. That statement will suggest to some readers here that we want conventional sentiment, which is out of the question. We want eccentric and innovative writing. However, I notice a tremendous amount of published writing in journals that falls more toward the so-called lyric essay, language poetry, or postmodern fiction. The truth is, I like all of that in principle; but I need to see how it matters on a human level. If it seems like mere typographic game playing, or word games, I respond less well to it.
New Letters has published a great deal of writing by people clearly thought of as among the avant-garde today, including Debra Di Blasi, William J. Cobb, and Lance Olsen. I grab it when it's fresh, exciting, and makes an authentic claim on the human experience. I published a long poem once that I did not understand at all on a literal level. I just knew it was engaging me in a sparkling and surprising way. I took a chance and published it, and the poem has since won two national awards.
Robert B. Gentry & Mary Sue Koeppel, Editors of Writecorner Press (Spring 2009)
This writers' resource website offers the Writecorner Press Annual Poetry Award ($500 top prize, deadline March 31; suspended for 2013) for unpublished poems up to 40 lines, and the E.M. Koeppel Short Fiction Award ($1,100 top prize, regular deadline April 30, extended to May 15 for 2013) for unpublished stories up to 3,000 words. Winners and runners-up are published online. Student entrants to the fiction prize are also eligible for the $500 P.L. Titus Scholarship. Authors published through Writecorner's contests have included Lones Seiber, Gregg Cusick, Sallie Bingham, A. Molotkov, Ellaraine Lockie, Ellen LaFleche and Allison Joseph.
Q: Do you see a trend away from print publishing and toward online distribution of poetry and literary fiction? What would be the pros and cons of such a shift, for writers and publishers?
A: Because of the fluctuating nature of both print and online publishing, we think it is too early to state with certainty a trend away from print to online publishing. In our own experience, however, we see an increasing number of writers with extensive print credentials submitting to our short fiction and poetry contests. Check our site for previous contest winners and you will find writers who have made impressive marks in print publishing. On our Fresh and Ripe page, you will also find writers who have scored high in print publishing and whom we published by invitation.
Pros of online publishing:
* Offers many publishing venues and niches for writers. Writecorner and a number of other e-presses take any fine writing on any theme in any style.
* There are e-presses that regularly get copious hits; thus the potential for large readerships is great. Writecorner gets thousands of hits per month. It is likely that our readership well exceeds the 100-500 subscribers of the average, small, print literary journal.
* Long shelf life for many online publications. Writecorner contest winners, our reviews, published fiction and nonfiction remain on our site permanently. Noted Cormac McCarthy scholar Dianne Luce said that this was a major reason that she submitted her review of McCarthy's play The Sunset Limited to Writecorner.
* Less expensive to develop and maintain than print publishing. However, there are considerable costs in maintaining an e-press. Writecorner's expenses include those for website creation and maintenance, web hosting, tech support, advertising, judging, contest awards, etc.
Cons of online publishing:
* Periodic updating of software and hardware entails considerable cost in money, time and effort. In time, web programs have to be revised or discarded. In the latter case, a site would have to be on hiatus until its operators install and learn a new program—the longer the hiatus, the greater chance the site will lose its publishing edge.
* In many cases, contest fees are necessary to pay for awards and site expenses. (Writecorner accepts no commercial advertising because we believe it detracts from the seriousness of our site.)
* Writecorner editors get no salary or financial remuneration. We suspect this is the situation with many editors of nonprofit e-presses.
* Websites are proliferating and include a number that lack high standards and publish pieces of little value for discerning readers.
Q: Do you think writers (or their university employers) still prefer to see publication in a traditional print journal? What can electronic publishers do to make this option more attractive and prestigious?
A: We both have had years of teaching and administrative experience at the college and university level and suspect that the bias toward print will stay until a new generation of department heads and scholars accepts the e-world of creativity and criticism. But already college and university faculty who obviously are not biased toward print-only publishing enter our short fiction and poetry contests. Also faculty send us reviews to publish on our Review of Books pages. As well, several fine presses send us their books for review on our site. So there is a growing measure of acceptance.
To make the option more attractive and prestigious, we e-publishers should maintain high standards for the works we publish and for the entire content and appearance of the sites. This is the major reason we do not accept advertising on our site, and why we carefully select the sites to which we link.
Also, awarding a good deal of money for top prizes helps establish credibility. Publicizing our award winners in a respected journal brings recognition. Moreover, we nominate our outstanding writers for national awards like the Pushcart Prize.
Timothy Monaghan, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of The Ledge Magazine and Press (Fall 2009)
This independent literary publisher, based in Bellport, NY, offers three annual contests, each with a top prize of $1,000: The Ledge Fiction Awards for unpublished short stories (deadline February 28), The Ledge Poetry Awards for unpublished poems (April 30), and The Ledge Poetry Chapbook Competition (October 31). Recent chapbook winners include Moira Egan, Michael Colonnese, and John Popielaski. The Ledge Poetry & Fiction Magazine celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2008.
Q: From sampling your past winners, I notice that you appreciate formal poetry, particularly contemporary variations on the sonnet, as well as the narrative free verse that predominates in today's journals. Do you have any advice to help writers work with rhyme and meter in a way that sounds natural to modern ears?
A: I've gained a special appreciation for formal poetry over the years. In my earlier days of publishing The Ledge, I'd say about 90% of the poems I published were free verse. Lately, I've been receiving an impressive number of exceptional formal poems, and I'm sure my predilection for publishing such poems in recent issues and chapbooks has done well to attract more of these submissions, as the market for formal poetry is rather limited compared to free verse, especially on the small press scale. I admire the ambition of formal poets who transcend tradition with a more modern approach or interpretation while remaining true to the form itself. I am looking for formal poems that employ energetic word selection or imaginative passages, poems that utilize slant rhyme and off rhyme. Formal poetry doesn't have to be academic or stuffy, but can be just as visceral as the most provocative free verse poem. I don't want to read formal poems that simply plug words in a structure to meet the rhyme and meter requirements. Bar Napkin Sonnets by Moira Egan, which won The Ledge 2008 Poetry Chapbook Awards, is a great illustration of what I mean by modern interpretation of a classical form. (Read samples here and here.)
Q: Light verse is another genre that, in my opinion, has far too few publication outlets nowadays. Some of your winners appear to skirt the edges of this territory, such as John Popielaski's playful riffs on figures from Sir Gawain to George Washington in O, Captain and Moira Egan's boozy flirtations in Bar Napkin Sonnets. Please share your thoughts about humor in poetry—what makes it effective (or not), and how to find a market for humorous verse.
A: I realize that light verse has a rather negative perception in many literary circles, but I enjoy whimsical musings especially in the context of a 200-page publication of poetry and fiction like The Ledge. I also feel strongly that there is a profound difference between accomplished light verse and the limericks most people imagine when presented with a light verse or humorous poem. I also think humor is an especially effective antidote to the heavier, more serious work we are accustomed to featuring. On the other hand, I try not to accept work that is too campy in nature, or stories or poems with "punchline" endings, and the balance between subtle humor and corny slapstick is one of the greater challenges for a light verse poet. Just because a poem is not serious doesn't mean its language isn't charged, its imagery imaginative, or its subject matter quite relevant to our daily struggles and sufferings. Billy Collins is one of the most humorous and profound contemporary poets I can think of, and an exceptional example of someone who has mastered that challenge.
Ander Monson, Editor of DIAGRAM (Spring 2010)
Published by New Michigan Press since 2000, this distinctive online journal features innovative and genre-bending poetry and prose, alongside "found art" consisting of diagrams from obscure reference works. DIAGRAM offers three annual contests. The Diagram Innovative Fiction Contest (most recent deadline was March 30) offers $1,000 for a story up to 10,000 words. The New Michigan Press/Diagram Chapbook Contest (April 1) offers $1,000 for manuscripts of poetry, prose, or mixed-genre work. The Diagram Hybrid Essay Contest (next deadline October 31) offers $1,000 for essays that are in some way outside the traditional boundaries of the genre, such as a fusion of prose with poetry or audiovisual elements. Finalists from contests are sometimes published. All entries are considered for publication.
Q: As technology advances, how have you seen writers take advantage of the online format to marry the written word to other media? What kinds of cross-genre projects would you like to see more of?
A: There's a lot of work still to be done in this direction. I don't think most writers tend to be very good at this by nature, but younger writers, those who grew up with more transparent and accessible technologies available to them, are working increasingly in between the lines of what traditional publishing has historically (or, well, at least in the last twenty years) allowed. I certainly hope to see work that marries more than just prose and poetry, which often consists of poetry fragments inserted in prose, not usually to an interesting effect. I love work that uses found or received forms and really does something with the form besides just aping or subverting the form. Form's great, but it's a starting point, something to compress and create interesting language. And obviously we're interested in work that's diagrammatic or visual in some way, not just deploying visuals as illustrations.
Scott McCloud, in his seminal book Understanding Comics, lays out some of the ways in which image can interact with text (not the only ways, but some of the most obvious). I'd strongly encourage writers messing around with visuals to read at least that section, and probably the whole book. Both images and text need to be active and making meaning in texts. Which is what we're hoping to see. And I think we will see it. Though any kind of experiment is welcome for this reader. And for this writer. As a writer I hope to keep pushing in this direction, too. It's either that or get bored and die.
Q: You are a successful author in your own right, with books from several of the top literary presses. How have your experiences as an editor and contest judge informed your own writing and publishing strategies, and vice versa?
A: I can say that in my experience as a writer, it's been both harder to get my work published when it's stranger (because you have to find the right editors or readers), and sometimes easier, too: stranger work usually cuts through slush piles, at least if any readers there are paying attention. Sometimes it gets you rejected more quickly when you stand out, but not always. Not that writing something strange or hybrid makes it necessarily good, of course. But I've had pretty good luck entering contests, for instance, partly because I think my work has at times seemed a little bit different than what other writers were doing. But any writer thinks that: otherwise why write?
I will say that I used to enter contests and tailor my work to the judge of the contest, which is, I think, a mistake. Judges don't necessarily like work that is similar to their own. In fact as a judge I'm often much harder on work that seems to me to be exploring the same territory that I am as a writer, in the way that I hold myself to a higher standard than I think editors or readers might hold me. So don't feel obliged to send funny poems to Billy Collins, for instance. Lots of funny people like depressing or emotionally heterogenous work.
Nancy White, Administrator of the Word Works Washington Prize (Winter 2010-11)
Established in 1981 as an individual-poems contest, the Word Works Washington Prize became an annual book-length poetry manuscript prize in 1988. Winners have included Enid Shomer, Fred Marchant, John Surowiecki, Frannie Lindsay, and Brad Richard. The next submission period for this $1,500 award will be January 15-March 1.
Q: Please share your thoughts about some recent winning entries and why they stood out from the rest.
A: Those final manuscripts have several things in common. The manuscript is in some way highly cohesive; it has no "weak links" among the poems; and it is both truly interesting and truly well crafted. There is no self-indulgence left in the book. I have to say that one of the reasons I love The Word Works is because it doesn't have one style, one school, one strain of voice...You get Carrie Bennett's biography of water, very experimental, then John Surowiecki's gritty working-class tales sparked with sly, refined humor. Carr's Ace is a novel-in-verse that works through micro-sonnets, but then Lindsay's Mayweed is a classic themed collection that still has the "umph" to reach beyond its core of universal grief.
When we were judging the year that Mayweed won, one of the judges asked about the three top manuscripts, which we were debating, "Which book would you turn to in a time of need?" That became the deciding factor in 2009. This year's winner, Motion Studies by Brad Richard, was such a tour de force that we couldn't turn away! This will sound corny, but there's a quality in a manuscript that does stand out when it is just completely itself. A fully realized book will shout at you: ready.
Q: How can writers become more discerning about whom to ask for feedback, and how to use it? What are some warning signs of over-revision?
A: One great thing about grad school is that you can meet a few people who become your lifelong correspondents and critics. Wherever you find them, you need colleagues who can both critique and fully support your work, and their faith in your ability is just as important as their willingness to question and advise.
When I was in grad school, Tom Lux gave us a great piece of advice about workshops. "Take all that feedback like a big boiling pot of pasta, and pour it into a colander...and let it sit a while. Get all your emotionality about the criticism out, like the boiling water draining away. Then take a look and see what makes sense to you." Something like that. You can't take every piece of advice and just hack away at your work with it, trying to please each reader. Ideas about change have to be integrated meaningfully into what you're trying to do, obviously. But if a number of readers have questioned your title or have told you your line breaks are bland or your sequence is confusing, then you need to give it some serious thought.
The warning signs of over-revision—that's a great question. I think too many sections in a book is one sign. We're addicted to sections these days! Each poet needs to learn his or her own signs, I think. Too much truncation? Too much expansion? Leaps that are based on intellectual conceits and not on elements closer to the bone? The desire to explain?
You have to learn to feel it in your own work when it's losing its juice, its drive. There's an awful rush to get published these days, but the willingness to STOP, to sit still until you are clear about what you are doing, until you can trust your own ear again, is critical to producing fine, fine work.
David Bright, Editor of Gemini Magazine (Winter 2011-12)
Launched in 2009, this online literary journal publishes original poetry, fiction, and artwork by emerging talents. They offer three annual contests with a top prize of $1,000: the Gemini Magazine Poetry Open, deadline January 3; the Gemini Magazine Short Story Contest, deadline March 31; and the Gemini Magazine Flash Fiction Contest, deadline August 31. See an overview of the contest judging process here.
Q: The tagline on Gemini's website reads "fiction, poetry, a little craziness & more". What's good craziness in art?
A: Good craziness in art is where you shake off the straitjacket and reveal your true creativity. A great visual example is our November 2011 body art cover. Naked, screaming, arms thrown up in the air, Susan Olmetti seems to be exulting in the joy of life. The bright pastel colors and wild design emphasize this spirit of freedom and excitement. It should be the same with writing, like in "The Lazarus Dream", our 2011 Poetry Open winner. David Mohan punctuates his narrative with vivid, unexpected imagery like "a wildcat's screech", "goon-swamp of the rain country", "raw frog" and "nails as long as a village magician's". In this instance, a little craziness, or as Mohan puts it, "an attempt at imaginative empathy", is just the right touch to show compassion for those who experienced war or other psychological trauma. In the poem "Daffodil" (April 2011), Fred Longworth effectively inserts a little craziness in the form of a talking daffodil. The narrator is trying to write a poem about genocide when the flower appears and warns him he "can do nothing to stop the massacre." In "A Knife or a Blade", which won Honorable Mention in our recent Flash Fiction Contest, Geoffrey Uhl shows us some scary but fun craziness when thugs on a train knock a man down and clean his teeth with a toothpick.
A church sign on our July 2009 cover shouts:
IT'S TIME TO
BE SET FREE
COME FIND NEW LIFE
I think that is good advice for writers of all levels and styles. Don't stagnate. Continue to open up. But after you do that, of course, don't forget to edit.
Q: Please describe some of your favorite authors, books, and/or writing websites, and suggest what contest entrants could learn from them.
A: If I were banished to a desert island, here's some of the people I would bring with me: Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe (his poem "The Bells" is so alarming!), Chekhov, Richard Yates, Richard Ford (The Sportswriter, Rock Springs), Wallace Stevens, Alexander Pope, Knut Hamsun (Hunger), Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Maya Angelou (poem: "Phenomenal Woman"), Martha Gellhorn, William Burroughs (The Yage Letters), Langston Hughes, James Baldwin. To me, they all display uncommon originality as well as simplicity, directness and a certain, indefinable force in their writing. In his essay, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain", Hughes stated that "no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself." So, contest entrants, don't be afraid of sounding improper or different. Just be yourselves. After that: edit, and then edit some more. In Kafka's "The Legend of the Doorkeeper" (a passage in The Trial), a man comes to a door and waits the rest of his life for the imposing doorkeeper to let him in. Just before he dies, he asks the doorkeeper why no one else ever came to the door. The doorkeeper bellows into his ear: "No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended for you. I am now going to shut it." For a writer, that door is originality. We should all take Hughes and Kafka's advice—don't be afraid of being yourself, don't be afraid to push through that door.
There are many great writing websites out there. In addition to Winning Writers, two that come to mind are WOW! Women on Writing (useful to men also) and My Little Corner by Sandra Seamans. Both have plenty of market information and writing tips/thoughts, and are fun to read.
Timothy Green, Editor of Rattle (Summer 2012)
Founded in 1995, this California-based poetry journal gives two annual awards: the $5,000 Rattle Poetry Prize, deadline August 1; and the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor, a $500 prize for the best use of metaphor in a poem published in Rattle during the year. Read their mission statement here.
Q: Your subtitle is "Poetry for the 21st Century", and your mission statement expresses the wish to liberate poetry from "obscure and esoteric" 20th century trends and return it to the people. Some of those High Modernist trends, one might say, expressed the anxiety that poetry could not be both accessible and innovative. Point us to some counter-examples from Rattle (with links to your site).
A: I'd argue that inaccessibility is just a tarp thrown over the absence of innovation. Anxiety is exactly what drives this—the fear that, once someone does understand what you wrote, they'll be bored. Not that it isn't justified—every writer understands that anxiety. Even as an editor I'm constantly fretting over whether or not we'll be able to find enough unique and interesting material to fill up an issue. Poetry's been living in English for a thousand years; thinking up something that's both genuinely original and intellectual or emotionally useful is a daunting task. And yet it happens all the time; our issues never run short. It's hard to choose examples, because I think every poem that we've ever published is innovative in some way—that's why we published it.
I haven't read everything in the world, but I do read over 100 poems a day, 365 days a year, and when you do that, new ideas might as well be written in neon. They appear like a sunbeam out of the deluge once or twice a week, and are new in all manner of ways. Some are bizarrely gripping, like Patricia Lockwood's eight-page mediation on the word "Popeye". Others just couldn't have been written at any time other than now, like Christopher Crawford's "So Gay", or Heather Bell's "Love Letter to the Gulf Coast Oil Spill". One of my favorite poems tapped into the zeitgeist—I think it was a result of so many Baby Boomers having to care for their aging parents, but for several years we were receiving countless poems about nursing homes. Then Sophia Rivkin appeared with a unique and powerful honesty that did more with the subject than anything else I've seen, in "Conspiracy". All of those are innovative understandings of the human condition. They're rare, but they're there.
Q: To elaborate on the above question: What makes a poem accessible, as opposed to esoteric? Is it form, content, narrative, emotional investment...? Can a poem be experimental yet accessible?
A: That's a good question; it might be important here to clearly define our terms. I've seen many writers and editors shy away from that word, as if it implies a kind of inferiority—the poetics of the lowest common denominator. But when I speak of accessibility, I mean that by its actual definition: the capacity to be understood. To put it another way, a poem is accessible if all of the tools necessary for its use are included within the poem itself. There are no keyholes or passwords or combination locks; the only admission price is a solid grasp of the English language, or barring that maybe just the ability to use a dictionary. If I buy a patio set that comes with 80 hex screws and an Allen wrench, and that's all I need to put the thing together, then that patio set is accessible, even if it takes me all day and a bloody knuckle. If I open up the box and find that I also need a power drill, a miter saw, and a few years of experience as a carpenter, then that patio set is not accessible.
Can a poem be experimental and also accessible? Of course! Try Shane Rhodes' "The Promises Herein Contained", a found poem created from the text of a Canadian treaty with the indigenous people of the First Nations, shaped as the lissajous figure of the harmonics created by the word "said" as seen on audio oscilloscope. Poetry doesn't get much more experimental than that. And yet you need know nothing about Queen Elizabeth or the electrical potentials of vocal utterances to understand and appreciate what's going on in the poem. Anyone who reads the poem aloud will experience the intended effect, a kind of alien disconnect from meaning. A very brief note is included for anyone not familiar with Treaty One. That's the main result of our insistence on accessibility: We don't publish any poems that rely heavily on allusion, unless the all of the alluding can be explained in a brief note. I've always found it interesting (and oxymoronic?) that those who praise the poetry of concision also tend to love footnotes, and pages of exegesis that just defeat the purpose when you think about it. Real density isn't T.S. Eliot; it's Mike White.
See our complete 2002-2013 interviews on our archives page.
Summer 2013
