Advice for Contests - Craig Cornish's Blog

Many judges, including me, will move beyond poems as read and therefore never revisit them. My advice, especially on a poem that requires some specific elements, is to revisit them the next day to make sure of your intentions relative to the rquirements. Very often, in rereading, you can expose errors or things you may want to change. Note this - if you find something, it's important to delete your entry, edit it and resubmit it into the contest or it is likely to remain in the disgarded section and your edit may never be read in corrected form. Also, in one of my contests do not refer to syllable counters etc--I DON'T CARE-- I will feel the flow regardless of any extracurricular interpretations and it's actually an insult. Flow is rarely achieved by syllable count, nor by precise meter, yet is hindered by (much like an uneven step on a walkway) an unexpected obstruction in flow. I'm not referring to free verse here, where the reader enters at their own risk, yet at the author's welcome. A poem in meter must make the path free of stumble points. Take , for instance, Longfellow - "Listen my children and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere"--It is totally mixed meter, yet it flows. The reason it's important to revisit your write in meter is because we tend to "force" the flow during the writing process but upon revisiting we see/feel/hear the error that was not evident on our first draft. The more fun we have in the process, the easier it is. So much of what we have read over the years has been in some catchy beat--"the moon on the crest of the new fallen snow gave the luster of midday to objects below"---(almost all in anapest) starting with "on the crest" and perfect flow.