You may have noticed that this blog won another award the other day – Blogger Forum listed it as a Top Ten Weekly weblog for Thanksgiving week. What that means in practice is that this was one of the top ten Blogspot sites identified as a search item by Google during the week. In practice, I get to post the mini-banner you will find beneath my copyright notice on the left-hand column.

 

It’s third award of this sort this blog has received in 15 months – it was the Blog of the Day back in December 2002 & was listed among Technorati’s “Top 50 interesting recent blogs” earlier this year. Given that Technorati tracks, as of today, 1,282,605 weblogs, all of this strikes me as reasonably improbable. This is, after all, not just a Silliman among the poets or post-avants vs. the quietude kind of thing, but really poetry amidst all of the other possible topics out in the universe. &, as Spicer admonishes, No one listens to poetry. And, has been noted elsewhere, “Silliman’s Blog” is perhaps the most uncool title one could conceivably give to a weblog.

 

All of this had me thinking about prizes & awards when the November/December issue of Poets & Writers crested at the top of the upstairs bathroom reading pile which, in addition to Kevin Larimer’s great article on literary correspondences – there are new volumes of letters forthcoming between William Carlos Williams & Kenneth Burke; between Williams & Zukofsky (with LZ critiquing WCW’s poems, rather than other way around); & between Robert Duncan & Denise Levertov – has a series of articles on contests & prizes by Matthew Zapruder, Diana Wagman & Ian Pounds. Zapruder’s in particular is worth reading.

 

But it was the statistics that dotted these articles as editorial “call-outs” that caught my imagination even more deeply. Here are a few. As best I can tell, the numbers apply just to the United States & the source for all is Poets & Writers Magazine, which has been publishing grant, contest & award data for 31 years.

 

·         Amount of money awarded by sponsors of literary contests (2003): $8,896,857

·         Amount of money awarded by sponsors of literary contests (2002): $6,757,101

 

 

·         Number of creative writers who won literary contests in 2003: 1,019

·         Number of those who are poets: 506

·         Number of those who are translators: 21

 

 

·         Number of literary magazines, small presses, and other organizations that sponsored contests (2003): 349

·         Number of literary magazines, small presses, and other organizations that sponsored contests (2002): 256

 

 

·         Number of books published as a result of literary contests in 2003: 121

·         Number of those published as a result of “first-book” contests: 29

·         Number of those first books that are collections of poetry: 22

 

 

·         Percentage of 1,000 readers who believe the judge of a literary contest should be allowed to give an award to a former student: 41

·         Highest amount of money most readers would pay to enter a literary contest that awards a $1,000 prize and publication of a book: $10

·         When deciding which first-book contest to enter, the most important consideration for 35 percent of 1,000 readers polled: Publisher

·         Percentage of 1,000 readers who consider the judge to be the most important factor: 9

 

With nearly $9 million on the table – the average award for the more than 1,000 winning creative writers last year was $8,731 – literary prizes are themselves a nice little cottage industry these days. Given the flat-to-negative state of the economy since Bush took office, the fact that the amount of prize money awarded rose by 31 percent in 2003, while the number of small presses, literary mags & sundry arts organizations sponsoring them increased by 36 percent, it’s worth thinking the implications of this out a little further.

 

The cover of the current Poets & Writers lists its contests feature with the following teaser – “Does the Best Writer Always Win?” With over 1,000 different winners this past year – I’m included as a recipient of an NEA fellowship – that word “best” transcends being merely problematic & becomes something genuinely ludicrous. Best at what, for what, for whom, etc.? As Zapruder takes pains to note, the economics of fee-charging contests are such that many (tho not all) are actually fund-raisers for their respective sponsors. If you are giving away, say, $2,000 in prizes ($1,000 for first, $500 for second, etc.) and maybe paying a judge another $1,000 for his or her efforts at picking a winner, you can do okay if you receive 500 applications each with $10 attached. And some prizes receive well over 1,000 applications. At one level, literary contests that charge an entry fee are not terribly different from the numerous School o’ Quietude summer writing workshops that are a social realm unto themselves, offering false hopes for a little cash.

 

I like social validation as much as the next person, maybe more. Yet I have to wonder what it means when more than 500 poets are winning prizes in any given year. Maybe I would think differently about this if a reasonable percentage of these writers were from the various post-avant traditions, but the reality remains that the School o’ Quietude controls a percentage of those funds quite disproportionate to the amount of poetry it produces, let alone poetry that will last, say, one decade beyond the life of the poet (which is when the School of Quietude tends to gets real quiet). But even if this disparity were not the case, the rationale underlying the process & proliferation of awards would warrant some skeptical scrutiny.

 

One principle reason to give an award is bring attention to its winner, to alert the wider community to a standard of excellence. But the ability to do this is increasingly impaired simply by the clutter of awards. Some awards, for reasons that have less to do with quality than longevity or social positioning, manage to stand out – the Pulitzers, for example, offer little money & a list of winners that is for the most part laughable, but get covered by every newspaper in the country, precisely because the awards are centered on newspaper journalism. Now the National Book Critics Circle Award is attempting the same process – but what they really represent are the advertising dollars publishers spend with newspapers. The National Book Award is not much different. The politics of the Nobel Prize may be somewhat different, but that doesn’t make it any less political. And just as there have been any number of genuinely bad movies to have the Oscar for best picture (Rocky? Out of Africa? Chicago? Shakespeare in Love?), every poetry prize list you can think of has its cringers, awards that just make one shudder. Zapruder makes some excellent points about the decline of the Yale Younger Poets award, trapped amidst this proliferating clutter & its own increasingly reactionary choices. It has been the Poets You Never Need to Read award for far too many decades to recover now. One can only imagine what the aspirants to the Alberta Prize, the James Dickey Prize or the Lyric Recovery Award anticipate they will receive beyond the modest sums of cash each offers.

 

Beyond the politics & clutter of it all, many literary competitions suffer from at least two additional fatal problems, both institutional in nature. The first is the definition of qualifying genre, which has nothing whatsoever to do with what is happening in literature, but which is perceived by some groups (almost always groups) as needed in order to know which category to consider a work. I’ve sometimes thought it would be fun to submit Tjanting to a contest calling for works “under 30 lines.” It certainly is that, even if it is over 100 pages long. The second problem is the nature of the screening process – most judges aren’t asked to view all submissions to a given contest, but only a set of predetermined “finalists.” Zapruder recounts the story of W.H. Auden, John Ashbery & Frank O’Hara that led to the publication of Some Trees in the Yale series as an instance of this problem. One could spin that story as an instance of a judge awarding a prize to a friend & abrogating the selection process altogether, yet what that story points out is that the knowledge of someone’s work that comes with a literary friendship is often – always? – a better indicator of lasting value than what can be seen from a stack of “blind” manuscripts. In such circumstances, the judging process can never be better than the screening process itself, yet very few organizations – the Pew is an exception worth noting – put much energy into assuring that the screeners are as qualified as the judges themselves.

 

Finally, the most serious problem that such awards pose are the ways in which they seduce younger authors in particular to produce “award-winning” manuscripts, be these of single poems or book-length collections. I certainly went through a stage in college of trying to figure out what it would take to win a prize, say, at UC Berkeley. Indeed, after friends counseled me to submit only my shortest poems to one contest there, I won the Joan Lee Yang Award. The judge was somebody I’d never heard of before – Robert Grenier – and it turned out to be one way to start a lifelong friendship. But what kind of poet would I have become had I spent my time & energy instead trying to figure out how to win the Yale Younger Poets Award, which still had some vestige of credibility back in the late 1960s? I shudder to imagine that fate.