In past years I’ve posted info on the Rattle Poetry Prize numbers here, so I might as well keep that up, even though I haven’t had time for a real post. We got all the submissions logged in last week, so by the timing of last year’s post, we’re ahead of schedule.  Here are the numbers:

750 hardcopy entries
924 email entries
1,674 total entries

For the first time, emailed entries have surpassed hardcopy entries, which finally catches up to the general trend — we’ve been getting more regular submissions by email than hardcopy for years. The total is less than 100 more than last year, but last year was a big year. Here’s the growth rate:

Year / #entries / %change
2006 / 805 / –
2007 / 991 / +23%
2008 / 1160 / +17%
2009 / 1593 / +37%
2010 / 1674 / +5%

I wonder if we’re hitting the glass ceiling when it comes to people entering poetry contests.  Every year there are always more new entrants than there are repeaters — probably 1/3 submit every year and form a baseline, just less than another 1/3 submit more than once but not every year, and just more than 1/3 are names we’ve never seen before.  The fact is, no matter how nice the contest is, it’s no fun to enter over and over again and never win, and the vast majority, of course, won’t win.  So you have to expect a lot of attrition.  That means you have to rely on fresh blood, so to speak, just to maintain the same volume year after year.

1,674 entries x 3.8 poems/entry = 6,361 estimated total poems

And Megan’s already read them all. My job this week is to catch up.  Odds of any one poem making the top 11 on a random draw are 1 in 578.  In other words 0.17%, which once again pretty much mirrors the odds of any single poem from a regular submission getting into Rattle.  Of course, it’s never a random draw, it’s an emotional/intellectual/aesthetic decision.   What one poem moves us the most.  But if it were random, there’s the math.

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About 18 years ago or maybe it was last month I read at the World Stage at Leimert Park in Los Angeles, as part of their Wednesday night poetry workshop, led by Jawanza Dumisani.  If you’re ever in LA, stop by 4344 Degnan Blvd at 7:30 p.m. and you won’t be disappointed.  The format is one I’ve never seen before — it’s an open mic workshop, where poets go on stage to read one poem, which the audience then critiques cold.  Some of the poets had copies to pass out, but not nearly enough for the 35 or 40 people in attendance, so the result is a very interesting test of the effectiveness of a poem read aloud. That lasts for about an hour, and then they turn to a featured reader (in this case myself).

Someone there is gracious enough to record the featured readings, though I’m embarrassed to say that at this point I’ve forgotten the man’s name.  He handed me a CD as I rushed out the door (I had to pitch at my softball game a few blocks over at 9:30…we beat the dreaded Los Logartos 22-8 and I struck out 6, which is pretty good for slow-pitch softball, I have to say).  Anyway, I finally got a chance to listen to the CD, and it’s probably the best audio of a reading I have, so I thought I should post it, even though I’m sure everyone’s sick of the poems from American Fractal by now.

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Born June 17th, 2010
8 pounds, 7 ounces

She’s so beautiful it makes blogging about poetry seem pretty pointless.  But I’ll try to get over it.  For Megan’s birth story, see the baby blog.

One of my few regrets is playing first base as a kid.  Back in T-ball, when no one could catch, I got it stuck in my head that first base was the most important position on the field — if the first baseman doesn’t catch the ball, you don’t win the game.  By the time you’re 10, everyone can catch, so it’s no big deal, but I stubbornly stayed at first base anyway, right through my sophomore year in high school.

In the back of my head I knew it was stupid not to move somewhere more important, but I couldn’t help myself — and I think that’s when I developed my nemesis complex.  Growing up, I always had to have a nemesis, someone I secretly loved to loath — or maybe lovingly loathed — not quite the Newman to my Seinfeld, because there was a wellspring of admiration beneath all the mean things I thought about them.

A nemesis had to follow a few simple criteria:

1. They had to be a direct rival.
2. They had to be plausibly better than me.
3. They had to be aware of — yet utterly indifferent to — my existence.

My first nemesis was Jason Collins — one of the cooler kids, a tall power-hitter who really did belong at first base.  Even his name sounded like a real ballplayer.  He was the starter on our town’s Little League All-Star team, and I was his back-up.  I only saw him once since then, when I faced him as a pitcher in high school, and struck him out looking at a 2-2 cutter on the inside corner.  I’m sure he doesn’t remember me or that at bat.  But I do.

Next was Ben Giesselman, a fellow-nerd and first baseman at a rival high school.  In 5th grade we were the only two kids in town to have perfect scores on some standardized test.  Then in 9th grade we were 2 of 4 to win scholarships based on our PSAT scores.  I just Googled him, and I’m not surprised to see that he’s as much a nemesis as ever — apparently he has a B.S. in Molecular Biology and does research on photodynamic therapy at my alma mater, the University of Rochester.  If I didn’t bail on science to become your lowly poetry editor, that could be me.  He even has a buzz-cut in the wedding photo he uses for his Facebook profile…

By the time I reached college I switched to short-stop and became an English major.  I thought I was done with nemesii, until I met Lean Forward Guy.  I can’t remember his name, but he always leaned forward in his chair in the lecture hall, like he wanted a head start on absorbing all that knowledge.  I hated it, so I always called him Lean Forward Guy.  I wasn’t sure why I secretly loathed him — he cared more about literature than creative writing, and really wasn’t much of a poet.  But he got A’s and we argued in class, and there was something about him that always got on my nerves.  Then one day I needed a substitute player for my softball team, and he offered to fill in, but only if he could play — you guessed it — first base.

Now I live in Movie City, USA.  My least favorite director in the entire world has to be Michael Bay.  Let’s just say, as a literary person, I like a plot.  I hate quick cuts.  Even the best Hollywood explosions look fake.  I sat through three hours of Pearl Harbor.  And so on.  Michael Bay might be the Bizarro-Tim.  He owns two houses to my none, and drives a Ferrari while I walk to work.  He majored in English, but his product is loud and shallow and popular.  What’s the polar opposite of American Fractal, if is isn’t Coyote Ugly?  But I can’t really hate him — he seems like a nice guy, and he’s an animal lover…apparently he donated his Bar Mitzvah money to a shelter. So what if he’s hell-bent on remaking every classic horror movie for no good reason?

So in my softball league last week, who do we play against?  Michael Bay.  And what position does he play?  Yup.

It got me thinking:  Maybe there is something to this first base thing.

If I had to pick a nemesis in poetry — and I have — it’s Ted Genoways at Virginia Quarterly Review.  He’s a friend of a friend, and a few years ago that friend forwarded me a glowing profile of Genoways, praising all he’d done “at the tender age of 31.” And of course I thought, “What about all I’ve done at the tender age of 27!?”  Ted earns twice my salary, works with a budget ten times as large, sends writers overseas on assignment, and does it all in an office on a hill with a bearskin rug, apparently.  He’s a frequent contributor to Mother Jones.  I hear his car runs on biodeisel.  He excels at magazine design, has an uncanny vision, and is the kind of literary insider who actually wins awards, from book prizes to Pushcarts, and now a damn Guggenheim Fellowship.  As a nemesis, he’s more than worthy.

So the only question is — what position does he play?  I’ve only met Genoways once, and very briefly, at the AWP Conference several years ago, but one thing stands out immediately.  He’s huge.  He must be 6-6 and 250 pounds.  His hand is a catcher’s mitt.  I don’t know if he ever plays baseball, but at that size, there are only two positions he could play — pitcher or first base.  So I ask, which is it, Genoways?

Let me guess…