The Kathleen Grattan Award for original collection of poems or a long poem

Just read in my New Zealand Society of Authors email newsletter about this interesting new(ish) award that may interest fellow poets:

Auckland poet Kathleen Grattan, a journalist and former editor of the New Zealand Woman's Weekly, died in 1990. A member of the Titirangi Poets, her work was published in Landfall and other volumes including Premier Poets, a collection from the World Poetry Society. Her daughter Jocelyn Grattan, who also worked for the New Zealand Woman's Weekly, shared her mother's love of literature. She has generously left Landfall a bequest with which to establish an award in memory of Kathleen Grattan.

About the Competition

The award is for an original collection of poems or a long poem by a New Zealand or Pacific resident or citizen. Entries will be accepted from 1 May each year. The closing date will be 31 July each year and the winner will be announced in the November issue of Landfall. The announcement will be made in the November issue of Landfall. The winner will receive $16,000 and a year's subscription to Landfall.

For full details visit http://www.otago.ac.nz/press/landfall/grattanaward.html

Interviews on Tim Jones's blog/Sonnet competition

Interviews on Tim's blog

Tim Jones has kicked off a wee series of interviews with other writers with an interview with poet and novelist Helen Lowe. (He has some others lined up, including one with me about My Iron Spine.) Helen Lowe is a writer I hadn't come across before typesetting JAAM 26, which has poems and a story by her in it. Her Her first young adult novel, Thornspell, has just been published by Knopf in the USA.


Sonnet competition

I'm not much of a poetry-competition enterer – I guess because there's only one winner in a competition, whereas if you send your poems to magazines (which I actually do quite infrequently as well, though I aim to do this more often), everyone who gets something accepted is a winner.

But you might be different. You might want to enter the Wellington Sonnet Competition 2008. If so, you'll find the following info most useful:

Poet and biographer Harry Ricketts is to judge the Wellington Sonnet Competition 2008. “Any fourteen-line of poem about Wellington will qualify,” he says, “because the sonnet is a still evolving form that I find fascinating. Poems submitted to the competition need not have a traditional rhyming scheme, although formal sonnets will also be welcome.”

The New Zealand Society of Authors is running the competition, sponsored by New Zealand Post, in aid of the Wellington Writers Walk. For a $10 entry fee, (plus $5 for each additional poem submitted), people will be in to win a $1000 first prize, $500 second prize, $250 third prize or one of the 10 highly commended prizes of $50. The closing date is 22 September 2008 and entrants can download forms and conditions from http://www.authors.org.nz/.

Harry Ricketts is an Associate Professor in the School of English, Film and Theatre and Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. Born in London and educated at Oxford University, he has lived in England, Malaysia, Hong Kong and New Zealand. He is the author of eight collections of poems and the internationally acclaimed biography of Rudyard Kipling, The Unforgiving Minute, published in England by Chatto and Windus in 1999 and in the USA in 2000. He has published various essays and critical writings and edited collections of work by other poets. He is currently working on a composite biography of a dozen World War One poets and is co-editor of the quarterly review journal New Zealand Books.

My judge's report on the Junior Open Section of the 2008 Poetry Society Competition

A month or so back I judged the Junior Open section of the 2008 New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition. I've just noticed that they've put my judge's report up on the website, along with a list of the winners (it's the first time I've seen their actual names - all the judging was blind).

If you are curious, you can have a look at it here: http://www.poetrysociety.org.nz/openjunior

Poetry competition judging/What I like in poems

Hello again. It's been a whole week since I've posted, and a very busy week at that. One of the major reasons I haven't been blogging, or indeed even reading blogs, is because I have been finishing judging the Junior Open (age 17 and under) section of the NZ Poetry Society International Poetry Competition, and writing the judge's report.

I've found it a really valuable experience. First of all, I enjoyed reading the poetry and was surprised at how good some of it was. I say in my report that I was expecting imagination and promise, but I wasn't expecting poetry that was just actually really good. But I think that all the winning poems are good by 'grown-up' standards.

The other thing that was really interesting was that judging the poems and writing the report made me really think about what attracts me to individual poems. I didn't come to the poems with set criteria, and neither do I when I'm selecting work for JAAM magazine, but I have noticed that there are things that make a poem work well for me, and it was really interesting to figure this out.

• I like poems to resonate with me and connect with me, which usually means it makes me feel something. Sometimes that’s a feeling of recognition (‘Yes, I’ve felt like that’), or sometimes a feeling of understanding (‘Now I understand what that feels like’). Sometimes it might just make me laugh, or think about things in a new way.
• I like poems to surprise me. I don’t like to know where the poem is going – like I’ve read it before.
• I enjoy unexpected metaphors and similes.
• I enjoy poems with interesting ideas or new ways of looking at things.
• I like poems in which all the words seem right and necessary. Where the words flow smoothly and the poem isn’t overwritten.
• I also like poems to sound lovely when I read them outloud. That usually means that that the rhythm 'flows' and isn't clunky - even 'free' verse has rhythm, it just isn't 'regular'. I've also grown to like subtle alliteration and assonance.
• I like poems that end in the right place. This depends very much on the poem: sometimes ending with a twist or a bang is nice, but sometimes a quieter ending is right. (I often find that the way to fix an ending that isn’t working is to just cut it out altogether).

So now my first experience of judging a poetry competition is over, and I think it has gone rather well.