Greatest Living Poet

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In 1959, after visiting Boris Pasternak at his Russian dacha, he smuggled a poem by the Nobel laureate out of the Soviet Union and had it published in London's Daily Mail. He claimed that Pasternak had given him a second poem but that he lost it during a night of revelry in Berlin.

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Jim,

Pure ambition on my part!

How it works -- I was asked to be a part of the
committee. I said yes. These various Illinois
magazines send in their nominations for best
fiction/poetry/etc., and each member of the committee
gets sent a box full of magazines, each marked with
the nominated poems & stories. Each judge then
individually gives a score for 1 to 5 for the
nominated pieces, send those rankings in. Maybe a
hundred or so pieces, maybe more. The administrator
averages out the scores, then there is a spreadsheet
that is sent out to the committee with the rankings by
all three judges, which contains all pieces that have
an average score of three or higher -- looking at that
spreadsheet now, there was a total of 21 of those.
The finalists.

So, next there's a conference call, where all the
poems and stories that averaged a 3 or higher are
discussed, to narrow down to 10 or 12 or whatever it
was. Each magazine can only have a max of 2 winners.
Mandorla nominated four pieces, one of which was a
short story which tied for the second highest score
(another short story received the highest overall
score). I hadn't heard of the guy, but I thought the
story was pretty killer, gave it a five. There was
another poem by a guy whose work I know barely, that I
thought was pretty strong. I gave it a 4, and it
averaged a 3 (one judge didn't like it at all, and a
single vote of 'no' disqualifies a poem/story for an
award).

Then there were the two Kent poems, both of which
received above average scores from all three judges
(three or higher). One of these, the Ange Mlinko, I
gave a 4: you really get the sense of how different
Kent's aesthetic is when you're forced to read a
hundred or so interchangeable poems. The other one,
"Poem for an Anthology (Poems for the Mind)", I gave a
3, because I thought it was ok, but nothing
spectacular (the other judges liked it better). I
told the other judges and the person running the thing
that I knew Kent Johnson, was friends with him, and
that I could withdraw myself from the discussion. It
was kind of a moot point, as the other two judges
thought that both of Kent's poems were award worthy,
but that the only real question was which poem to give
it to (since Mandorla could only get 2 prizes, and we
had already chosen one piece). So we debated the
merits of the two pieces, and decided that the Ange
Mlinko one was one of the very few poems we'd read
that successfully placed poetry itself in a larger
context and still succeeded as poetry. Either other
judge (both of whom hadn't heard of KJ) could've voted
'no' on either of Kent's poems, and he would've gotten
squilch -- but both gave both of his poems above
average scores independently, and in the case of the
second poem, higher scores than I did.

Another poem that won an award is by an person whose
blog I have read occasionaly, Robert Archembeau. I
think the only other writer I'd heard of who got an
award was Mark Strand. Everyone else was unfamiliar
to me.

I've had poems published in Mandorla, Rhino and Spoon
River, of the magazines that got awards. Or, maybe
Spoon River and/or Rhino didn't get awards, but they
made the list of 21 finalists that I have the
spreadsheet for.

So: Kent was nominated by the magazine, and with the
other two judges liking both of his poems, would've
received an award regardless if I was on the committee
or not. All I basically did was enter the debate over
which of the two poems to give the award to, and
argued (successfully) for the Mlinko poem.

So: is the Foetry site still running? Is this a new
topic? Feel free to post this email if so.

It's an obvious point, but unless it's a contest
featuring high school students, I'm guessing that
someone like me who has edited a magazine or two, is
on a listserv or two, who has a blog and who isn't
completely socially retarded will be familiar with
some of the people involved.

This was my first time being on a committee like this,
and I think it's a pretty good system -- you're sent a
shitload of stuff, you rank it independently, send it
in, the administrator averages the scores, and then
you talk it out over the phone, and each individual
judge can nix a piece with a simple 'no.'

Sleeping easier at night,

TT

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