Poetry in practice
A regular feature in which practicing poets give Magma readers hands-on advice about poetry matters. First, Mario Petrucci writes on winning competitions.
Most poets who offer advice want you to be just like them
only not quite so good.
Adrian Mitchell
Judging competitions isn’t easy. Nor is trying to write about how to win them. Well – if I knew that, I’d win ‘em all myself, wouldn’t I? I’m chary, too, of that tendency in talking about such things to slide into rosetinted generalisations or banal observation. Forgive, if I submit to either. And please accept these comments as tentative suggestions. They are not ‘rules’. If they come across as such I would be the first to confess that rules are what you must push against – and sometimes through – in order to achieve your best ends. Quite often, the winning entry doesn’t fit the pattern. Then again, quite often it does. After all, shouldn’t any assessment of ‘how to win competitions’ simply be an account of what makes good writing? Having said that, competitions create their ownkind of echo chamber in literature. And it does help, to a certain extent, to try to put yourself in a judge’s place. Imagine sipping your sixteenth cup of coffee in the 2 a.m. gloom of your study as you plough through the leaning white tower of entries rising from the centre of your carpet. What would you hope for? Competence, skill, dexterity? Brilliance? As your ear quickly attunes to those crackling qualities, wouldn’t you yearn to be moved as well – for something to sound deeper, beyond, that little anvil in your head? Something with the aroma of freshly-baked bread that brings what Don Marquis calls “the suddenly kindled light of the never before said”? Wouldn’t the ideal entry jolt your heart back to life (Clear!!!) with that same shock the Queen delivers in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland when she declares “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards”?
Not asking much, eh? So, what happens to all those entries of passion and realism which – sadly – fall short of their chosen medium? I think you know already. As a judge, you want to applaud them for their candour and courage. After all, great metaphor is rarely that far removed from reality – or should we say, isn’t reality always on the verge of metaphor? But realism or feeling are, in themselves, neither good nor bad in a poem. We would not say “Water is good” or “Water is bad”. It depends on whether the water is in your glass at the end of a hot day, or swamping your carburettor on a February morning. Much depends, also, on the ‘Form’ the water takes. I doubt you would want steam in your summer glass. This isn’t the place to go into the details of what Form is all about; but, certainly, it involves some kind of attention to the way the lines break, to rhythm (if not metre), to patterns of sound (including rhyme) – and that’s just the start. What’s important in this context is that a judge only has your single entry in front of them and hence needs to feel a strong sense that you kind of know what you’re doing. Some element of Form – of structure – helps to contain, channel or highlight the emotion. Form steadies experience. Expertly used, Form helps to emboss the entry and make it stand out; used badly, however, it blurs and interrupts – can even feel at times like a species of misproofing. Likewise, be wary of allowing content to overwhelm Form. Messages, pushed too hard, can burst a blood vessel. Kill the messenger. Poetry – at its best – seeks to express without duress.
Where longer entries are involved, it can help to hold sway with a single extended idea. That is, for the entry to have a metaphorical backbone running through (and supporting) it. Naturally, there are many other ways of holding a judge’s time-constrained interest through a longer piece. One way not to do it, however, is to fall into overgeneralisation. For instance, I have noticed a tendency in competitions to bid for universality by making every noun plural, every brushstroke broad. I can’t help wondering about weddings whose “bridesmaids blushed” (eh? – all of them? in unison?) or busy sea-routes which are perfectly clear except for “white dots of ships on the horizon” (what? – all yachts? – not a single ferry in the middle distance?). Those plurals often feel to me like a writer distorting plural reality in order to forge a poetic plural. Beware, too, of creating worlds that are either hermetically bleak or else hung with skies that are forever blue, whose soporiferous bees endlessly buzz but never ever sting. Sorry – neither of those is a world I know. Notably, in almost every competition I judge, the majority of entries address death and loss. That’s fine. Really, it is. But just consider, then, the effect of genuine humour, or celebration. As a judge, it hits with all the rare fizz of champagne.
It may also influence a judge (though, really, it ought not to) when an entrant weighs in with several outstanding pieces. It’s equally true, though, that you’ll more than likely do yourself no good at all by yoking a large number of weak entries to a strong one. A judge is, after all, only human: she just can’t help but notice all those identically-metred poems in exactly the same font on massively overwatermarked paper. By the way, ordinary crisp typeface is always best. With reasonably-sized font and decent spacing. Remember, the judge is probably suffering the night of a thousand cuts. They so want to do the right thing. But their prime imperative is, sadly, to discard. Try to make that job just a little harder for them.
And it is, I must say, amazing what tiny things can turn you off as a judge. Your sensibility gets so inflamed through the sheer bulk of what you have to get through. Take, for instance, the innocent (but tell-tale) closing exclamation mark. It has all the flavour of a worn-out Romantic convention, one in which the knuckle-to-brow author seems startled to have actually got through to the end of the poem. It is disproportionately irritating when it crops up three entries running. Only indulge “!” when the poem itself has worked you up into a shout. Better still, leave it out! Another kind of chafing occurs when you sense (even mistakenly) that an entrant slips in something on one of your pet subjects in the peculiar belief that you will thus view it more kindly. Bizarre.
Next, it should go without saying that all writing should aspire to be, in some way, fresh. Yet it always has to be said – and nowhere more than in competitions. There is one trick of the trade I can share here. I call it ‘The Separation of Parts’. Astute writers know certain words tend to get glued together. In lazy writing, characters are always ‘writing furiously’ or ‘murmuring softly’. Generalisations are forever ‘sweeping’. It’s as though the constituent words have fused to create a single compound phrase. Cooped up together far too long, they have ended up at each others’ throats. Take an axe to them! Let characters murmur unexpectedly, or let them simply… murmur. Before you enter competitions see if you can get help in
scouring out any inappropriate generalisations. Save those merging words from mutual extinction in the banal.
Short stories can be even trickier to judge than poems. The compass of a poem is often so tightly circumscribed by its Form and language that any misgivings you may have about it, like misplaced stars in a constellation, tremble quickly into view. The controlling factors within prose, however, are often more discursive and loosely bound; they orbit one another more freely; the Writer (as well as the judge) may therefore need to squint into a short story’s particular sector of sky at some considerable length before being able to gauge its patterns and efficacy. There’s usually a passing cloud or two, as well, to contend with. It can be much tougher, therefore, to guess what will take a particular judge’s fancy. And short stories, as with poetry and pop music, tend to overwork certain subjects and tropes. One wonders, for example, just how much more mileage can be eked out of stories about fallen angels. Such subjects can be difficult to get off the ground, can easily descend to yawns-with-wings. Moreover, while no issue is per se taboo, certain story lines have to be approached with profound care. Subjects as serious as rape, domestic violence and child abuse need to be out there in the literature; but not gratuitously, carelessly, or merely as part of some new ‘shock’ genotype for short prose.
By way of closing comment, I should confess I’m rather uncertain about competitions. All that business of creating the (few) winners and (many) losers; all the rigmarole of ‘being the judge’; that danger of assessing the competition’s success by the metric tonne or the pointsize of the winning name. I hope I’ve held at bay any temptation to offer ‘benefits of experience’, or to slip into any “Look – this is what makes a really good entry, okay?” routine. I try to remind myself that judging competitions is not so much about what you’re
hoping to find, but about what finds you. Thankfully, it is usually nothing like you at all, and at least every bit as good.
COMPETITIONS: TEN SUREFIRE WAYS TO LOSE
(a light-hearted look at the kinds of things one judge has seen…)
1. Present your entry on pinkish foolscap paper.
2. Write, beautifully, in purplish ink.
3. Use highlighter pen for important words.
4. Wherever possible, sneak in a 41st line.
5. Ensure, through multiple entries, that judges will see the ‘full scope’ of your oeuvre.
6. Dedicate your entry to the judge.
7. Dedicate your entry to Seamus Heaney.
8. Begin every title with ‘Ode’.
9. If footnotes are used, make sure they form the bulk of your entry.
10. Always use competitions to expend your spare yellow ink-jet cartridges.
Page(s) 45-48
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