Many competition use filters so the high profile judges don't need to go into poetry overload reading every last poem about Kitty's Demise or The Day My Mother Died or My First Day at School (See Roger McGough, A million-billion-willion miles from home...) or the Fading Tulip.
Of course it depends how good the eye is of the filter judge and what percentage they have to filter to.
What Acumen complains about is that it is not always stated that filter judges are used or who they are.
POETRY COMPETITIONS:
The Bridport poetry competition organiser states:
'Our final filter judges are Jon Wyatt for short stories and Candy Neubert for poems, we have not hidden this information. There are several more readers who do the initial sifting. It would be unfair to list them - already our filter judges are given a difficult time by some writers. This is why we do not give out names on general enquiries.'
I am confident that our judging system is fair and professional.
The following competitions have judges who read all the entries or which state exactly how the winners are chosen (and by whom):
TROUBADOUR POETRY PRIZE
TORBAY OPEN POETRY COMPETITION
PETERLOO COMPETITION
WARE POETRY OPEN COMPETITION
VER POETS OPEN COMPETITION
FROGMORE PRIZE
YORKSHIRE OPEN POETRY COMPETITION
KENT and SUSSEX POETRY SOCIETY COMPETITION
LEDBURY POETRY COMPETITION
JOSHUA FOUNDATION POETRY COMPETITION
Blinking Eye and Poetry Business filter in house.
The Poetry Business sending only 20 to the external judge out of 500/700 entries. I'm not sure I would want to condone that level of filtering.
What about the Irish competitions?
The Sean O'Faolain Short Story Prize judge, Nuala Ní Chonchúir reads every entry (so send in early)
Fish writing competitions are filtered but they don't say how heavily. As are the RTE competitions, Francis MacManus and P.J O'Connor.
What about Over the Edge. The judge is Celeste Augé but are they filtered?
Strokestown, Patrick Kavanagh Award, Feile Filiochta and Padraig Fallon have named judges but don't say one way or the other.
I think it would be a good idea for all competitions to state if they use filter judges and how much they filter. Any comments?
2 comments:
I think even if there's complete transparency it's still a tricky area - how do you deal with reading fatigue, for instance? Although I suppose transparency on that issue, e.g. whether or not the filter judges have a certain routine, how often they take breaks and so on, would be useful.
In conclusion: I don't know.
An interesting question too is: what difference would it make if we knew? There is the approach that says, Well, if the judge is X, let me see what X writes and if I like X's writing/if my stuff is similar, maybe I stand a greater chance. However, this is not a surefire way of winning - there isn't one! It might be that X likes stuff that is very different from his/her own work. It might be that one of the filter readers likes your work and because of that, you get sent with the smaller pile to the final judge and you are taken more seriously than if you had shown up in the initial 1000 entries.
Competitions are subjective, whichever way you look at it - it's always someone's opinion!
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