My Contest - Craig Cornish's Blog

The Poems You Never Wrote contest winners will be posted shortly after this blog is. I'm sure others that have run contests, or at least those who are discerning, will concur that the first criteria is, "Were the rules followed". If not, why have them at all. I'm tough (& fair) with some things and lenient with others. I won't even read one that broke a rule, like some didn't use the title, some were double spaced, some were centered, some were centered & also double spaced, some weren't within 6-20 lines and some were posted before Oct. 6th. The October 5th ones I did read, and a couple were truly excellent but...not fair to others that Johnny and Jill can come in after curfew and you can't? Unless I want a specific form, I totally focus on content, and not if you followed the form you listed. I'm not a punctuation and grammar nut, this isn't English 101, it's "AP Creativity". Ironically, John's recent tongue-in-cheek about contest judging touched on one thing I do and that's "printing out" the poems. which is one of the reasons I don't want longer than approx. 20 lines, in addition to my (& others) short attention span, because I don't want to use all my ink and paper. So, after poems have followed the rules, have creative content etc. and moved to round two - I print them all out and cut them into individual poems. I then sort them into top 3, next 3, etc. and put them aside for a few hours and go back to them and resort them and then put them aside until the next day and go through the same procedure again. It's then that I think the cream rises to the top of what ever subjective milk I have shaken. BTW, whoever wrote the October 5th poems that begin "I dare you to give up" (LOVED!) and "a passing thought" (also excellent), you both can be very proud of those writes! Thank you to all who took the time and mental energy to contribute.