Threading the Needle, or My Complicated Relationship With Poetry Contests
by Mike Bove
As poets and writers, the reasons we submit to contests are as varied as the reasons we write at all. Over the course of my writing career, such as it is, I’ve submitted to lots of competitions of one kind or another: single-poem contests, book prizes, residencies, the list is long. I’ve been a finalist, semi-finalist, or runner-up dozens of times, and I’ve even been lucky enough to win a few.
The rewards are scant and fleeting, and the effort of submitting, including fees, can be substantial. And all of it is separate from the most important thing: the writing itself. I know this, yet I keep on. My reasons have less to do with being competitive than with the hope that a win will strengthen my own belief in my work’s merit.
Submitting to prizes is an attempt to connect with those whose careers I admire, yes, but more than that I’m chasing validation. There are moments when I think I’m a skilled writer, but often I feel supremely inadequate. I want to have faith that my work is good, and I want to be taken seriously. I’m certain that’s a feeling all writers share.
I spend a lot of time writing, thinking about writing, revising, teaching workshops, and editing a poetry journal. The occasional shortlist or win is affirmation that all the time I give to creative work is worthwhile to someone other than myself. I don't exactly know why I need that, but I do. At least I think I do. The fact is, I’d do the work anyway. Regardless of whether or not I win a prize, I write because it feels good. It scratches a persistent itch I seem to have been born with.
Perhaps strangely, I’m uncomfortable with praise, and when I do occasionally come out on top, the thrill is short lived and followed by awful feelings of selfishness and worry that my ego might over-inflate unless kept in check. I don’t particularly like attention, and I often feel shame at having won something above others, even though that’s the very thing I wanted all along.
Winning a prize won’t erase my insecurities, but I don’t really want those insecurities to go away. They provide necessary fuel to get things done. I just want them to quiet down sometimes, and a win here and there helps. At the same time, I know winning often only means my work struck a judge or committee in a particular way on a particular day when they were in a particular mood. Judging creative work is a blend of the objective and the subjective, and winning contests is like threading a needle in a dark room during an earthquake.
I know as much, too, from having judged several contests. No matter how much I believe what I’m looking for is finely crafted work, and I do believe that, at the center are my own nuanced and sometimes esoteric preferences. Paradoxically, I have to acknowledge them if I’m to judge fairly.
As confusing and personal as my reasons for submitting are, and as much as I sometimes bemoan that contests are a reality of the writing landscape at all, I’ll continue to submit knowing full well that even if I win, there will always be another goal, another prize to aim for later on. Writing well is hard, but confirmation that our work deserves a reader, that we’ve built something skillful, is worth it. Even if that confirmation feels haphazard and slow in coming, it’s still worth it. It has to be. It’s better than nothing, and a lot better than not writing at all.
Mike Bove’s most recent publication is Stone Math (Bottlecap Press), a chapbook of poems written during his residency at Acadia National Park. A novella, A Catalog of Imaginary Houses, is forthcoming from Split/Lip Press in 2027. He is Professor of English at Southern Maine Community College and lives in Portland.
