I want to quote the first two paragraphs of what Doug wrote:

>>I'm troubled fairly quickly as I find that both a number of the winners &
a number of the judges are poets I admire very much; & I can well see that
certain of the latter would be likely to choose works by certain of the
former for the very good reason that their poetics are so close. I don't
think one can choose a judge & then expect that person to choose a kind of
poetry s/he has no truck with.<<

>>And there's that question of what a small poetry press might publish; one
of the recent books from NeWest was by a student of mine (not a poetry
student but) whose work I came to admire & so invited hi so submit a ms to
the press (there were 2 other readers who did not know him, but still). The
other, Meredith Quartermain's, was a work I was more than happy to have come
to us because I already admired her work. Would I (or any editor) look for
work I did NOT admire?<<

This made me remember why I decided very consciously to stop playing the
first-book contest lottery which has become in the US one of, if not the
primary means by which first books of poetry get published. It's not that I
think contests are entirely random in the way that lotteries are, but there
is an arbitrariness about them, especially when you do not know who the
judge is, precisely because of what Doug says about a judge having her or
his own biases. Editors have biases too, of course, but they are more likely
to be thinking in terms of their house's entire list, no matter how big or
small a press the house might be; contests tend to be one-time deals; the
house that runs the contest is a lot less likely to be interested in your
second book because what they are focused on is the next contest. And so it
felt to me that I was more likely to get a better reading--I almost wrote
"fairer," but that's not what I really mean, since I don't want to imply
that contests, by their nature, are unfair--from a press that was not
running a contest than from a contest judge. (I of course need to think more
about what I mean by "better," but I am going to leave the undefined for
now.)

And it turns out I was right. My manuscript was a semi-finalist in the Walt
Whitman contest a few years ago, which encouraged me and made me think that
winning a contest was just over the horizon. I was wrong. Several years and
more than a few hundred dollars in entry fees later, I was still without a
first book. Then I started thinking through what I just told you, started
submitting only to presses that did not run contests, and my first book was
accepted by a very nice small press in New Jersey, CavanKerry Press, and it
will be out some time next year. I won't get the kind of publicity that a
contest-win would have given me, and unless the book gets very, very good
reviews in the right places it will not boost my career the way a
contest-win would have, but I feel like I can think long term with this
publisher in a way that I wouldn't be able to with a contest
publisher--there is of course no guarantee that they will publish my next
book; but there is a clause in my contract that they want first crack at it
when it's ready--and that is more important to me than the publicity or the
short term boost. And I am kind of looking forward to the challenge of
promoting my own book and doing it more or less on my own terms. CavanKerry
is very small.

The only part of the process that has been frustrating has been trying to
find people who are willing to write blurbs and/or the foreword that is
standard in CavanKerry books. I am not and have not really ever been part of
the poetry scene and so my connections in that regard are either
non-existent or from such a long time ago that the people they are with
barely remember me.

There's more to say on this, but I need to go.

Richard