I was recently invited to judge poems for a contest sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society. The contest is the Travis Tuck Jordan Poetry Award for young students from the third to fifth grade. Years past, I might have turned this opportunity down (then again, maybe I wouldn't have!), but I'm awfully glad I accepted the challenge for this year's award contest.
The organizers sent me a sheaf of 22 poems ranging in subject from "nature" to "where I'm from" to "what if" and "places." (I'm guessing the teachers of these young writers have had their Kenneth Koch rose where'd you get that red training, given these types of prompts.) My job is to select a first, second and third place poem along with three notable mentions.
Anyway, when I asked the organizer whether the contest might have some editorial standards in place for me to judge by, I of course was thinking about all the juried contests and publications I've submitted to over the years. Then I thought again, Why would a third grader need an editorial guideline, and what would that possibly mean to an 8 year old kid? The organizer replied that he'd be grateful if I could just explain why I chose the winning poems.
What would constitute an award-winning poem from these kid poets? Knowledge of forms? Ha! Use of irony? Sorry the poet who slings emotional detachment at 10 years old. How about facility with metaphors and other figures? Come on! or Kumon! Or maybe "depth of feeling." Seriously? Or poetic subject. God help me and the fifth grade kid who writes about death or love renounced or alienation . . . or THE SELF.
Then I thought about what really makes a poem a poem, things like sound and rhythm, things like the materiality, plasticity of language. What I should be looking for in the batch of poems I received in the mail the other day is FUN WITH WORDS.
Or put another way, the writer's awareness that she's working with words, that words are shapeable and palpable and alive, that only in poems can we approach language as anything other than a useful technology for expressing our thoughts and feelings. What I should be looking for in these poems is each writer's willingness to push words around for effect.
Don't get me wrong here. The poems I read all express their writers' thoughts and feelings . . . and kudos to all for summoning the courage to lay out their hearts on paper! But the best of these poems--the so-called "winners"--go a step further. They mess around with words.
So if I have criteria for judging a poetry awards contest, that would be it: the best poems are little language experiments; their writers may or may not make meaning through them, but they definitely are having FUN WITH WORDS.
