I remember very clearly the moment when I decided to opt out of the contest
game pretty much for good, even though it took me a couple of more tries at
winning one to act on that decision: I was talking to a colleague about
another colleague who had won in the not too distant past one of the big
first-book contests. This colleague had spent ten years submitting her
manuscript and had, as I remember it, passed up opportunities to publish
with non-contest publishers because she wanted the boost that winning would
give to her career. She had her reasons for taking this stance, and they
were, for her, good ones; were I in her position, I might have done the same
thing, but when my colleague asked me if I was thinking along the same
lines--i.e., trying to hook one of the bigger prizes--which I had been
doing, the whole enterprise felt to me so terribly empty. I suddenly
realized that what I cared about was having readers and it didn't matter to
me if I started with three of them, to pick a random number. What I wanted
was a chance to build whatever poetic career I would have slowly, book by
book, letting whatever reputation I might eventually attain, and I am not
assuming that I will attain any, build that slowly as well. It suddenly
occurred to me that an awful lot of the people who have won contests were
the poetry world's versions of one-hit wonders, and I wondered myself how
much the contest game had to do with creating that phenomenon. And I decided
right then that a one hit wonder was precisely what I did not want to be.
(Whether I will ever have any sort of a hit is a whole other question that
is of course largely out of my hands.)
Richard
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