I couldn't agree more, Richard. The important thing is to get the work out
there, whether it's whole books or individual poems in poetry magazines.
joanna
----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Jeffrey Newman" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2005 11:38 AM
Subject: Re: Poetry Book Publishing/Contests (was RE: Cummings)
>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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