Carolyn Moore, Workshop Leader, “Confessions of a Contest Junkie”
In the past fifteen years, 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."
On selecting contests to enter:
"One reason I have reached the ratio of getting on the honor roll (that is a cash prize, honorable mention, or finalist designation) for one in every four contests I enter is because I have learned where I have my better chances. For instance, I personally tend to do better in a 'blind' contest than one requiring name and data on the same page as the work, better in contests for individual poems than in ones for 'suites' of poems, etc. Also, I know which big name final judges probably won't like my work (even if I like theirs)."
On selecting poems to submit:
"Many contests announce that they seek 'the best single poem' yet take all three (or four or five or ten) of a poet's poems and staple them together under a single entry number. Too often this results in the weakest poem in the batch ruining the chances of the strongest. I've served on many screening committees in which someone has said something along these lines, 'Anyone who could write such drivel as that third poem in this batch isn't worthy of being a prizewinner.' Since most poetry contests I polled about eight years ago use the 'lump' system, poets should take care to only send their strongest work, even if it means they are sending only two poems for the price of three."
Carolyn notes that her friend Betty Buckley Finnegan, treasurer of the Portland Branch of the National League of American Pen Women, has devised a system to ensure that each poem is judged on its own terms. The judge divides the entries into two stacks and alphabetizes the poems in each by their titles, so that the multiple submissions by entrants are scattered throughout the two piles. Finnegan observes:
"Of course those doing the first cut on the stack without names might come to recognize the style or presentation of the entries. However, this method certainly minimizes prejudice against poets who send more than one poem and whose work clearly shows varying levels of competence."
Summer 2002
