Ten Tips for Entering Poetry Competitions
You can use them to enter the Spelt Single Poem Competition.
You have just three days left to enter the Spelt Poetry Competition. This year’s judge is Gregory Leadbetter . We can’t wait to read your poems!
1st prize: £300
2nd prize: £200
3rd prize: £100
Closing date 31st July 2024
Just £12 for up to three poems.
To find out more about the competition, read previous year’s winners,and enter your poem/s, click on this button:
To help you get your entry written, proofed and entered before the competition closes, here are ten top tips for entering poetry competitions.
Don’t talk yourself out of entering by imagining you don’t have a chance against imagined better writers. Other writers who are putting less effort in are definitely entering and not even considering whether they are good enough. Pick, proof, enter. Don’t overthink.
Follow the guidelines. It sounds obvious, but it’s easy to get lazy and assume all rules and regs are the same. They are not. Paying attention to what the comp organisers are asking of you could be the difference between a win and a disqualification.
There is no such thing as a ready made competition winning poem. Do not look at your work and think ‘none of these poems are competition winners’. There is no magic formula, no content that is certain to secure a win. Come to your work with authenticity and dedication, a willingness to find interesting ways to look at ordinary subjects, and that will go a long way.
Proofing tip: Come to your work as if you are someone who has never met you. Can you understand what is happening in your poem, or are there parts that can only be understood if you are privy to the inside of your head? How might you lay the breadcrumbs or signposts for the reader to understand your poem?
In his poem ‘Making Strange’ Seamus Heaney asks us to ‘Go beyond what’s reliable’. This is a good mantra to carry with you when you come to edit. Make the familiar unfamiliar.
You don’t necessarily need a system. You’ll hear lots of talk of spreadsheets and records, but really all you need to know is when you’ve submitted, what you’ve submitted and where you’ve submitted in order to avoid simultaneous submissions. Don’t be put off submitting if all you have is a notebook and pencil for your submission process.
Don’t try to guess what the judges are looking for. Just because you know the style or content of the work they write, it doesn’t mean they’ll be looking for that sort of style or content. Your own voice has value, your own style has value. A decent judge will be open to all styles and content. Sing your own song.
Titles are always challenging. One thing to remember is that a title is not a label, it is a doorway into your poem. Don’t leave it as an afterthought. Make it work for the poem.
Try not to leave it until the last minute to enter. Leaving it to the last minute means risking crashes in technology, problems uploading documents and files etc. Try to give yourself at least one day to bypass the panic.
Don’t be afraid of form. Often, a structured form really stands out from piles and piles of free verse. Don’t trick yourself into thinking these structures are old fashioned. Keep it contemporary, think about content, think about how a specific structure might enhance the content.
And because I love Heaney, and love this poem in particular, I want to share it with you.
Seamus Heaney Making Strange I stood between them, the one with his traveled intelligence and tawny containment, his speech like the twang of a bowstring, and another, unshorn and bewildered in the tubs of his Wellingtons, smiling at me for help, faced with this stranger I’d brought him. Then a cunning middle voice came out of the field across the road saying, ‘Be adept and be dialect, tell of this wind coming past the zinc hut, call me sweetbriar after the rain or snowberries cooled in the fog. But love the cut of this traveled one and call me also the cornfield of Boaz. Go beyond what’s reliable in all that keeps pleading and pleading, these eyes and puddles and stones, and recollect how bold you were when I visited you first with departures you cannot go back on.’ A chaffinch flicked from an ash and next thing I found myself driving the stranger through my own country, adept at dialect, reciting my pride in all that I knew, that began to make strange at the same recitation.
Good luck with your entries!
