The State of the Art

HBVICW introduction to Focus: Foetry be Damned: A Few Contest Winners Rochelle Ratner, Focus Editor In 1 968, when I first began seriously to publish poetry, there was only one poetry book contest that 1 was aware of: The Yale Series ofYounger Poets. This was the penultimate mark; it was what every young poet dreamed of. To quote from the Yale University Press website, the series champions the most promising new American poets. Awarded since 1919, the Yale Younger Poets prize is the oldest annual literary award in the United States. Past winners include Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, William Meredith, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, John Hollander, James Tate, and Carolyn Forché. James Wright and Hugh Seidman, two previous winners I have the utmost respect for, aren't even on this list. Judges, such as W. H. Auden, Robert Fitzgerald, or Stanley Kunitz, served for years, and were often teachers as well. It was to be expected that they sometimes chose former students. No one protested; we simply read and respected the writing. Then the MFA programs began to flourish. Paul Carroll began the Big Table contest in the late 1960s, publishing first books by Bill Knott, Andrei Codrescu, Kathleen Norris, and a few other poets before it came to an abrupt end. The University of Pittsburgh Press started a contest in the early 1980s that is still active today. The Academy of American Poets established the Walt Whitman Award for first books. In 1978, the National Poetry Series, under the sponsorship of James Michener, was founded, publishing five books a year. As I recall, there were only one or two of these five selected from an open competition, permitting the "judge" to select whomever they wanted for the other three or four (though these days they claim all five books are selected in open competition). Another sign of the times is that in its early years these National Poetry Series books were all published by major New York houses; these days, independent and university presses have filled the gap left behind when some of the larger houses withdrew. And that was about the extent of poetry book contests. Until the 1990s. These interconnections have always existed, and will continue to exist. Zoo Press, one of the major resources for poetry book contests, lists 1 12 contests for full-length books, plus another twenty-one chapbook contests (and some, such as the National Poetry Series, are for more than one book). These days the majority of smaller presses read manuscripts from new writers only through their contests (even though they might publish runners-up or other books which didn't win the contest itself)· And the majority of these contests require a "reading fee"—usually fifteen to twenty-five dollars. Whereas the contest winners twenty years ago quickly became household names, today I can't even tell you the name ofthe latest Yale Younger Poets winner, and even looking at a list of recent winners, there are few names I recognize. Talking with representatives from many of the smaller presses, I've learned it's not uncommon tö get upwards ofeight hundred submissions for a book contest. Who, what, why, when, where? It almost seems a lottery. Or is it? I came up with the idea for this focus when I was looking over a large pile of new poetry books, selecting a few to assign for review. As I was typing a list, I realized that several were contest winners , as were two other books I'd recently assigned. For two years, I served as one ofthe screeners for the Marsh Hawk Press contest, so the concept ofwinners and losers was in the forefront of my mind. Mark Wallace's review of Susan Wheeler's Ledger, published by the University of Iowa Press, was not originally solicited for this focus, but seemed to find its place here. All the other prizewinning books reviewed are from small, independent presses, many of which appeared in the past few years, and might be unfamiliar to all but the recent MFA program graduates racing to publish their own first collections. Contests have come under a hell ofa lot offlack in literary circles of...