One minute ago I will have posted the winners of the 2008 Rattle Poetry Prize.  (I’m writing this before I go to bed on Sunday night, which should explain the unusual verb tense — what is that, pluperfect?)

As I type this, Megan is wading waist-deep in SASEs, which she’s filling with notifications to all of those who didn’t win.  It’s quite a sight.  Each letter is sealed with a bit of regret — I never win anything; I know what it feels like to get the thin envelope in the mail and not even bother reading it.

I don’t think it’s possible to judge a contest honestly without worrying that you’ve made the wrong choice — worrying that you may have missed an amazing poem because you were too tired, or your brain too numbed from the dull poems that happened to precede it.  There’s always the temptation to read through the large stack of poems left over at random, and see if you might come across something good you missed.  And I always give in.

But one thing is certain.  I read the 50-odd semi-finalist entries at least a dozen times each, and Joseph Fasano’s winning poem was the only one that became more enjoyable and moving each time.  That’s a rare thing.  And when we got down the the final three, Alan read each of them aloud in his raspy baritone (think Garrison Keillor, only Alan doesn’t mangle with melodrama), and immediately the decision became unanimous.

More assurance that there’s rhyme to our reason (or reason to our rhyme?):  Two of the honorable mentions, Ted Gilley and Hilary Melton, already have poems appearing in the December issue of Rattle, and another, Douglas Goetsch earned an honorable mention in 2006.

As we were reading these poems, we had no idea who the authors were — we even made a game of guessing gender before we unveiled the winners to ourselves, and performed pitifully.  That we chose the work of poets we’re already publishing demonstrates that, as subjective as our tastes may be, at least those tastes are consistent.  We can pick the needles out of the haystack.  So while I’m sure another team of editors might have chosen differently, I’m confident that we selected the best eleven poems we received, according to our own proclivities.

First off, know that we always keep our promises.  Yesterday afternoon, with Rafael Nadal grunting in the background, we narrowed our 40 “quarter-finalists” down to 19 “semi-finalists” for the Rattle Poetry Prize, so we’re right on schedule to announce the winners on September 15th.  We’d hoped to choose the winner at that meeting, but this year the decision is proving difficult, with no clear-cut favorite, as there has been in years past.  I’ve read through each poem 6 times now, with reads 7 and 8 coming later today.  It’s nearing the point where I could recited them on command, but we’re still unsure which we like best.

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Angie Ledbetter is picking editors’ brains in seven parts over at Roses & Thorns (the blog of Rose & Thorn magazine), and I’m one of the lab rats.  Others include editors from Hayden’s Ferry and Monkeybicycle, Reb Livingston of No Tell Motel, and our old friend (from e.4) John Amen–nine of us in total.

I don’t know how much general readers will be interested in what we have to say, but I personally can’t wait for the subsequent installments.  I’ve never been particularly social with other editors–I avoid book conferences as much as possible, where most mingling takes place, and I didn’t rise through the ranks of other staffs to get here…I kind of came out of left field.  So the truth is, I have no idea what other editors think, and I can only assume our experiences are similar.  I can’t wait to see whether or not that’s really the case.  And I’ve seen the questions coming up: there are some interesting ones.

(I’m definitely going to win the award for worst metaphor.  I’ve already got a nominee in “plague cart” and I’m sure there are more to come.  For some reason, every time I do an interview the metaphor machine whirs to life and I start spewing out the kitchy half-formed comparisons that litter my quotes like lawn art.  See, there I go again.  I don’t really talk like this.)

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On Saturday, I posted the list of book received for review from August, and I’m really hoping someone wants to review John Kinsella’s Divine Comedy.  It’s such a beautiful, thick, expensive book, and the longer it sits on myself the longer I feel like I’m smothering a puppy.  (Damn, maybe I do really talk like this…)

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The cowboy/western issue is closed, but if you’re a kind of desert writer, you should send some work to Phantom Seed.  The call for submissions is here.  I really love collections of poetry that have a cohessive topical focus–themed issues like Runes, themed journals like Alimentum, themed anthologies like Between the Heartbeats.  Phantom Seed fits the bill, and Ruth Nolan is one of those few editors I’ve socialized with, being somewhat local.  I can vouch for her.

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There’s something else I was going to mention, but it’s completely slipped my mind…

Entries to the contest have finally all been logged. Here are the totals:

683 hardcopy entries
477 email entries
1,160 Total Entries in 2008

My target goal was 1,200 entries, so we fell a bit short, but with the economy in the tank, I can’t help but be pleased. Last year we received 991 entries, so this total represents a 17% increase. 2007 saw a 23% increase over 2006, and I assume we’ll keep seeing this law of diminishing returns play itself out in the future, so next year I’ll be hoping for 1,350 or so.

Since we’re only allowing 4 poems per entry, instead of 5, the total number of poems we have to read has contracted a bit from the 4,460 last year:

1,160 entries x 3.8 ppe* = 4408 estimated total poems

This means that the prize money will be divided between the top 0.25% of poems. That sounds bad, doesn’t it? But in the regular section of Rattle, we publish about 1 out of every 500 poems we receive, or 0.20%. So, believe it or not, your odds of earning an honorable mention or winning the Rattle Poetry Prize are actually better than they are of having a regular submission published. Assuming that the collective quality of these poems are equal — and I think they are.

That’s a very surprising fact — I wouldn’t have guess that, until I thought to do the math. So there’s really no reason not to enter, especially if you were planning on submitting or subscribing at any point in the year.

While we’re talking math, it’s interesting to break down the amount of money we’re making on the contest. The perception seems to exist in some places that poetry contest rake in the dough. It might be the poetry.com vanity scam that fuels the rumor, and probably does make a lot of money in the process. But the numbers are plain for anyone to see:

$16 x 1,160 entries = $18,560

Not a bad payday! But let’s see where that money goes.

First of all, every entry comes with a one year subscription (2 issues). Each 200-page issue costs 2 dollars and change to print (depending on a few variables). At bulk rate, each issue costs 80 cents to ship. So rounding everything prettily, $6 from each entry immediately goes toward the subscription. So this is really what we have to work with:

$10 x 1,160 entries = $11,600

Then, of course, with a $5k prize and ten $100 honorable mentions, $6,000 goes straight to the winners:

$11,600 - $6,000 = $5,600

Still enough to buy a nice Rattle-red moped or maybe a new HDTV for the office.

Ah, but what about advertising? We placed print ads for the contest in Poets & Writers and APR. We put a banner up at Poetry Daily for two months, and we always run a small Google Adwords campaign. We sent postcards to thousands of individuals, and flyers to hundreds of institutions. I’m not going to break it all down, but you can see what a half-page full-color ad in Poets & Writers costs.

When we’re done adding up the costs, we might be left with a shade more than $1,000 in profits. And that’s before we pay the rent. Let’s say between Megan and myself, we work on the contest 40 hours per week for the months of July and August. That’s 320 total man-hours. The Federal Minimum Wage just increased to $6.55/hr., so even at that sub-living-wage, we’re supposed to make $2,096.00. Shucks.

The moral of the story is, if you want to make it big, don’t bother starting up a poetry contest. This truly is a labor of love, and we couldn’t do it without our charitable support.

Of course our goal with the Rattle Poetry Prize isn’t to make money. Our goal is to spread the love of poetry. The kind of poetry that’s meaningful and accessible, without sacrificing complexity. The kind that anyone can enjoy, but no one should live without.

About 20% of the entries were from familiar faces — old subscribers or poets we’ve already published. But the rest are people we’ve never heard from before, and that means we’re exposing about 1,000 new eyes to Rattle. And that’s the math that really matters.

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* Poems Per Entry (ppe): To estimate the number of poems per entry, I collected a random sample of 20 entries, and took the average.

Judging is a lonely job in which a man is, as near as may be, an island entire.
–Abe Fortas, Supreme Court Justice (resigned in disrepute in 1969)

I assume everyone’s heard the urban legend about the college admissions coordinator, who, maybe drunk or stoned or just sick of his life, decides that it’s too difficult to choose which applicants should fill the last few spots. Honors societies and alumni grants and GPAs to the nearest ten-thousandth decimal place swirl senseless in his head. So, late at night, he crosses the half-empty quad, climbs the library most austere stairwell in that illustrious hall, and dumps his bucket of applications over the railing. Paper packets flutter out of sight like so many hopes and dreams. He takes the elevator down to the first floor — those lucky bastards who floated farthest down get to attend the University of Wherever-You-Didn’t-Make-the-Cut.

That’s just an urban legend — we assume. But sometimes it seems like poetry contests must be judged in this way. Surely the winner’s poem couldn’t have been better than yours! Surely the editors couldn’t have read every word of the 10,000 poems that were submitted in the space of 4 weeks. Surely there was a balcony, or at least a few ignorant interns involved.

Well, I don’t want to fuel any urban legends, so here’s the whole truth about what we’re doing with your poems, now that the deadline has passed:

The first task is to log all of the entries. This means entering everyone’s name, address, and subscription information into the database, along with a unique number. We write that number on your coversheet, and on the upper corner of the first poem, stapling all the poems together, so that they can only be identified by their number. We’ve got everyone’s information in the database, and two separate piles: coversheets, and poems. Email entries are printed out and sorted in the same way, so we can’t even tell how the entries came in.

(Our old printer used a rare kind of ink — colored waxen blocks that had a unique feel — so we used to be able tell which entries we’d printed out ourselves. But that printer died last fall, and our new beast of a machine is a more standard laserjet, which ends up camouflaging the source.)

This first step is a bigger task than you might think. We’ve been logging entries continuously, since they started coming in this spring, but 50% or more procrastinators wait until the last week. Megan and I spent 8 hours today just on email entries from Thursday and Friday — Megan handling the subscriptions in the database, and myself replying with acknowledgments and printing the packets. We didn’t touch this week’s hardcopy entries, which stack about 3 feet high, and will keep rolling in for the next few days.

Once we do get everything organized and randomized, we take the five-foot stack of poems home. Megan reads first, rating every poem on a scale of 1-10, and then writing the highest score for each entry on the first page. A score of 10 here means “Prufrock” or “Howl” or “Song” — among the best handful of poems ever written. I don’t think we’ve ever been submitted a 10, contest or otherwise…it’s hard to think of more than a dozen poems in the world I’d score that high.

The first two RPP winners, and a handful of honorable mentions, have been 9’s — what we consider truly great poems, that we wouldn’t want to live without knowing. 8’s are still very good, among the best couple dozen we’ll publish in a year. 7 we’d want to publish. 6 we might consider. 5 doesn’t make us cringe. 4 does. 3 and 2 you can imagine. 1 is so bad that it’s almost good — but only almost.

As you might guess, the vast majority entries are in the 4-6 range.

By the way, I’m never going to reveal how we scored you, so don’t ask. It’s not that I don’t think you deserve to know; I don’t think it can do any good — it’s just a number, nothing constructive about it. But more, the natural inclination is to take our opinion too seriously. We’re not any kind of authority, we’re just fans of poetry who read a lot. I don’t think there is an authority on poetry, but even if there were, we’d have no claim to it. Honestly, I think that’s most of Rattle’s charm, and why our issues are so damn readable.

So Megan scores everything, and then I sort them out. Starting with the highest ranking packet, I work my way down, until it no longer seems to make any sense to keep reading. Usually that’s meant reading down through the 5’s. It’d be nice to say I read everything, but that would be stupid — we only have 6 weeks to read thousands of poems and choose a winner. The best poems deserve several close readings, and the truth is, that time would be wasted elsewhere. A good analogy is the standard optical microscope — Megan’s reading is the coarse adjustment, which first makes sense of what we’re looking at. Then I come in with the fine adjustment and try to make the image as clear as possible.

So after I’ve read the better half once or twice, I give the poems my own score, and average the two. The packets are then re-sorted according to their new scores, and we take the best 50 or so to Alan, for the finest of adjustments, so to speak. We’ll spend a weekend reading all of them out loud, talking about them, trying to figure out which we think is the best.

There’s a big difference between winning the first prize of $5,000 and receiving a $100 honorable mention, so in a lot of ways, this last step is the most nerve-wracking and difficult. There’s no way to get around taking it very seriously.

I think the three different minds, three different opinions coming from different quantitative contexts (Megan having read every poem, myself having read half, and Alan having read a comparative handful) is the ideal situation. If you haven’t edited a big project, you might not understand, but reading so many samples, it’s easy to feel muddled and indecisive — they all start to look too similar. On the other hand, reading too few, you have nothing to compare you opinion against. Good is good, but how good is it?

Once we do decide who wins, I start making phone calls — the only calls to strangers that are ever fun for me.

Anyway, this has become a long post, but I’ve entered contests before, and I’ve always been curious as to what’s really going on. Now you know. I think we’ve got a system that’s as fine-tuned and precise as possible. If we didn’t, I don’t think we’d be able to announce the winners just 6 weeks from yesterday.