Don't know what a 'sifter' is? Read this blog first.
Tip # 4
Polish your poetry…but not too much
First, let’s talk about length. There’s nothing wrong with submitting a long poem (provided that it’s within the line limit) but there is something wrong with submitting a poem which feels longer than it should be. It’s a bad sign when I think a poem is over and then I scroll down to find that there is still considerably more poem.
I see a lot of poems which top the max line limit and which also have extremely long lines. In these cases, it’s obvious that the poet has submitted a poem which in reality is much longer than the limit allows, but they’ve shoehorned it in as hard as they can anyway. I’ll be frank. When I open a file and see a poem like that, I don’t want to read it. Remember that I have 200 more of these to read today, so don’t test my patience and get on my bad side right away. If your poem is too long for the line limit, submit a different poem, or enter a different competition with a longer line limit. Don’t work against yourself.
"...there’s almost always dead weight that can be cut."
Better yet, edit it. In these cases, there’s almost always dead weight that can be cut. So, get the scissors out. What don’t you need in the poem? What can you condense? Don’t say in 20 words what you could say in 2. Brook no redundancies. Make the turns of phrase tighter, make the images sharper and more direct. Jettison everything that you don’t absolutely need and importantly, don’t allow mistakes (like misplaced commas or apostrophes) through to the final draft. The thing that makes poems feel long isn’t the length, it all the unnecessary flabby bits.
If you’re not sure how to edit, then it’s always a good idea to subject your poem to the ‘drawer test’. Put it in a drawer and don’t look at it for at least two weeks. When you open the drawer again, you’ll be able to see problems in the poem that you couldn’t see before.
"One of the reasons why I reject poems is because they’re too workshopped. "
This all sounds straightforward, but here’s the catch…don’t go too far. One of the reasons why I reject poems is because they’re too workshopped. A sifter can tell when a poem has gone through the workshopping process one too many times, because these poems all have the same lifeless feel. Everything that made the first draft of the poem unique and exciting has been buffed out along with its weaknesses, and the poem has become generic. Those poems are ‘good’ I suppose, but so what? There are hundreds of other ‘good’ poems just like them.
So, my tip here is leave some rough edges. Polish your poem, but make sure that it retains a bit of character which makes it stand out from the rest.
Cat Woodward
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