Nancy White, Administrator of the Word Works Washington Prize
Jendi Reiter conducted this exclusive email interview with Nancy White, administrator of the Word Works Washington Prize. Established in 1981 as an individual-poems contest, the 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. This year, both paper and electronic submissions will be accepted.
The anthology Winners: A Retrospective of the Washington Prize was published December 1999 as part of The Word Works' 25th-anniversary celebration. This anthology of poetry by Washington Prize winners, readers, and judges includes anecdotal material about winning or judging the prize since the competition was started in 1981. Entrants are encouraged to study this book as a guide to winning the prize. Also see their FAQ page for more information on the judging process.
Nancy White's first poetry collection Sun, Moon, Salt won the 1992 Washington Prize and was reissued in 2010, and her collection Detour was published by Tamarack Editions in 2010. She began working as a Washington Prize administrator in 2008 and was elected president of The Word Works in 2010. She currently teaches English at Adirondack Community College in New York. She was also an English teacher at St. Ann's School in Brooklyn Heights when Jendi was a student there in the 1980s. Read an interview with her about her poetry career in Pif Magazine.
Q: What is the animating vision of The Word Works? What needs are they trying to address in the poetry publishing world?
A: Like most poetry presses, we aim to find the best books we can and get them into print, and like other poetry contests that result in book publication, we provide a channel that is equally available to established and new poets. That good old "blind" reading process is mysterious but effective!
We're also trying to take good care of our writers, new and backlist, and even of the writers who submit their work to the prize. For instance, we've started offering feedback to semi-finalists and finalists, and the responses to those letters have been overwhelmingly positive. More than one rejected author has written to let us know that our comments helped them revise the manuscript, which was accepted by the next place they sent it. That's tremendously gratifying. I can't stand the thought of the hundreds of hours of careful reading that go into the prize process just sitting there, unused!
Q: As administrator, what is your role in the process of selecting, editing, and publishing a winning book?
A: In 2008 I was eased into the process by serving as the fifth judge on the final panel. That was a real eye-opener—seeing how thoroughly the finalist manuscripts were discussed. We read aloud from each one, did endless compare-and-contrast alignments, and looked at each one as its own stand-alone self. Then we chose Richard Carr's Ace as the winner, and when I was allowed to be the one to call and tell him he'd won, I was hooked. He was so stunned, he actually had to hang up and call back later. I was offered the chance to serve as his editor, and working with Richard on the book itself was the next revelation. Less messy than midwifery, but just as gratifying.
After that, I ran the entire process that resulted in the selection of Frannie Lindsay's 2009 winner, Mayweed. I found the readers, recruited an assistant to set up the database for keeping all author information stored but secret, routed the manuscripts safely through the layers of readers, stored up all the feedback, lined up the judges, and scheduled our judging retreat. And then—again—that heady phone call to the winner and the exciting, laborious process of production and promotion.
Q: Who are the typical first and second readers and final judges for the Washington Prize? What is their background and career level (e.g. graduate students, professors, first-book authors, more established authors)?
A: Our typical readers are publishing poets. Not all of them have books out yet, but most have at least a chapbook and some have several books. I've started recruiting former Washington Prize winners to join in, which links the new Word Works authors to an even larger community. One of our readers, George Drew, just won the X.J. Kennedy Prize and will be published by Texas Review Press next year. Quite a number have won other prizes.
Q: What are the pros and cons of this screening system?
A: The most obvious pro is that every poet gets committed and experienced readers, regardless of the poet's fame or publishing history or age. Period. Because readers have different tastes and styles, there's going to be a bit of a match-up lottery, and that's the danger. What if a brilliant book of prose-poems is sent to a reader who can't abide the form? To be honest, I glance into each manuscript before directing it to a reader. If I find one that's especially experimental, I try to direct it to the readers who do a lot of reading in that field and appreciate that side of today's poetry. If the poems are formalist, I route the manuscript differently. But the readers and judges do their level best not to have any set agenda except quality, to look at each manuscript on its own merits, no matter what the style may be.
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: Repeated rejection is par for the course when sending around a poetry manuscript. In part, it reflects a competitive environment, but it can also be a clue that the author needs to revise the manuscript. Have you seen revised and resubmitted manuscripts do better in the Washington Prize the next time around? Have you seen any revisions that made the book worse?
A: I have seen revised manuscripts come back through the prize process and it's always so moving to see how courageously people re-work their poems, their sequence, even the overarching theme that unifies the collection. I can't think of a manuscript that has been dis-improved, though I know I've done it to my own work at times, and had to backtrack! Finding a publisher can be such a long, patience-testing process. It can take years. The only thing worse than suffering through it is giving up.
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.
Q: In an age of bite-size media—Twitter poems, YouTube videos, poetry e-newsletters, and the like—what (if anything) still makes the printed full-length collection an effective way to deliver poetry to an audience? What will ensure its future survival?
A: I love bringing up the subject of e-books and watching a room full of poets wince, watch all their lips curl! We are going to be the last paper addicts on the planet. There is a role for web-style-linking of poems, but the linear arrangement of a set, a declaration of start and finish, with an evolution in between, is a specific kind of gift to the reader. The poet takes a stand: this title, these poems, this order, and the publisher adds to the mix: this cover, this font...and so on.
Also, I love the book as object and the presence of each poem as it stands on a page of paper, its relationship to top and bottom and margins, the moment of turning the page. None of that exists in cyberspace, nor the feel of the pages in your hands. When I see books produced by a place like Ugly Duckling Presse or a chapbook from Slapering Hol, I can't imagine giving up paper-based production.
Q: If one of your students asked you, "Why do we have to read poetry?", what would you say?
A: Oh, they do ask it! I reply, "Because it's the best writing there is." (Not that I'm biased...) My students, coming straight from public schools where poetry is probably that short unit they do at the end of the year when the standardized testing is over, often haven't experienced the real joy of poetry, just the decode-this-baffling-morsel approach to traditional verse. It's my delight to remind them of the pleasure in language, their own ability to feel the texture of words, to hear and to shape the music in language. I start out by presenting poems as springboards for generating their own writing, and once they realize they don't have to write an essay about every poem they meet, they're hooked.
I like to quote Denise Duhamel, who says that since there's no money in poetry, it remains the pure art form. Poets can't be corrupted since no one is willing to pay us to sell out.
Q: Which favorite authors of yours (classic or contemporary) deserve wider recognition, and what can aspiring poets learn from them?
A: Jane Cooper! Her patience with the slow evolution required to create—to publish—only the highest quality work is something we can all learn from, and her work is one kind of absolute perfection. But there are many today who are writing fresh, exceptional work. The energy right now for poetry is at an all-time high in many ways. Ironically, that doesn't mean we have all the readers we need (and deserve!). We should be reading (and buying) voraciously the many voices striving to achieve new uses of language, new forms of truth: Amy Lemmon, Rick Bursky, Judy Halbeski, Eleni Sikelianos, Kimiko Hahn, and many others, and the fierce and fabulous older generation—Heather McHugh, Albert Goldbarth, Lucille Clifton. Everyone who likes poetry at all these days would be able to take a minute and come up with a list of 20, 50, even 100 poets they love—and I think that says a lot about our time.
Winter 2010-2011
