`All in the Mind` - SaveAs Writers' International Writing Competition 2023.  PETRUCCI Oct 2023.

HMN.  MMMM.  AH, NO.

Those are the kinds of small sounds I was irritating myself with, locked up for days with all of your poems.  Ah, competitions!  Are they poetry's equivalent to the Big Mac: packaged and immediate, forgotten as soon as consumed?  Competitions once stood on the sidelines of poetry; now, with poetry presses disappearing into the free-market maw like so many hot-cakes, competitions are important.  So, here I am, on the inside, attempting to influence them.

The first stage of adjudication is the least worrying, rejecting poems on the basis of some obvious flaw.  Usually, the poet isn't fully aware, or in control, of what they're saying and how they're saying it.  Even then, a tic develops under my left eye whenever a beautiful line surfaces, in spite of itself.  The best poems are fully alive - they call you back, again and again.  They have that something that swoops down from nowhere to smack you in the chops.

Things to mostly avoid… forgetting that your poetry has to sound different from mundane speech, though modern poetry shouldn’t sound overly ‘poetic’ or artificial either; speaking via concepts/ abstracts with no ‘real world’ anywhere; presenting what seems like the notes for a poem rather than the finished article; being hell-bent on getting every factual detail of the important story, or moral, across at all costs, as if the reader must surely find it all as interesting as we do!

So, the poem needs to be a work of art, an engaging and resilient thread of communication between writer and reader, using imagery and sound that have a profound impact.  That said, so much also depends on the subject, style and form of the poem, and the preferences and prejudices of the judge.  Even the impact of a well-written poem varies with the judge’s mood.  To make matters worse - poems are all so different.  One poem has a sweet tooth, another has a morbid fear of heights.  This said, we all know a cheesy dessert when we taste one, or a dodgy bridge when we walk across it.  So, maybe a judge is useful, after all.  Hmn.

What I can say is that all the entered poems were given time and room to speak to me.  I was encouraged by the act of faith they all - in one way or another - represent.  If you share my enjoyment and admiration of the winners, I'm immensely pleased.  If you're one of those I've excluded, and you know deep in your heart that your poem deserved better - well, you may well be right.  As for the winners, I selected them partly because they speak for themselves.  I'd like to think that you’re all out there somewhere, reading the poems and making small irritating noises….  Hmn.  Mmmm.  Ah, yes.