How to Win an International Poetry Competition in 20 Minutes

A step-by-step guide

Minutes 0-2:

You know you’re rolling with the intelligentsia when you start submitting to poetry competitions via Instagram adverts. Two things attracted me to SMPLE magazine’s contest one morning in December: the $100 prize and the 20 minutes remaining until the submission deadline. The top of the podium was inevitable and with stats like that, I could briefly boast the same hourly rate as a FTSE 100 CFO.

Minutes 3-5:

The prompt ‘Resurgence’ called for applications that 'explore the themes of recovery, revival or rebirth.' That morning I was listening to Lili Anolik's notorious investigative podcast 'Once Upon a Time at Bennington College’ which exposes the mid-80s culture of the institution that turned out Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, and Jonathon Lethem.

As the competition’s advert appeared on my phone, Brixton Smith Start - lead singer of The Fall and Bennington-relevant interviewee - was waxing lyrical about her decision to have an abortion in ‘83. Coming out of a coked-up frenzy, she had decided to send the baby “back to Babyland” for someone else to claim. I found this turn of phrase pretty crass and then immediately became paranoid that that specific baby was waiting around for me. It writes itself.

Minutes 6-10:

Know your audience. This an American magazine so much of the heavy lifting has been done by the subject matter which ticks off both the war on drugs and the Roe vs Wade aftermath. The backbone of the submission can be built on low-hanging references for our hypothetical liberal-arts-majoring judge.

We’ll name-drop Brix in the title so that said reader can sling their vintage album onto their thrifted record player before immersing themselves in the text. Then we’ll set Dead Babyland in a lake on the sole expectation that they will wee themselves with giggles at a damned/damned pun before taking a pensive minute to dwell on how powerfully this evokes Dante’s Inferno. An aborted baby happens to be ‘Less than Zero’ so a shoddy Easton Ellis reference around stanza three will sustain the pretensions of everybody involved. With these boxes checked, the remainder is filler.

Minutes 11-13:

The next step is to churn out some words that vaguely relate to abortion, pregnancy, or natural remedies (mornings after, ginseng, primrose oil) and some vaguely sciencey lexis to pad it out. I’m not sure what ‘dolomite-like’ is like, or what a meniscus is but one thing is for certain: they’ll eat it up. A quick Google search of ‘primrose oil for pregnancy’ shows that I was incorrect about it’s abortive qualities. The inverse is true. The National Institute of Health reports that primrose oil will ‘hasten cervical ripening’ (we’re all poets here) which leads me to a critical time-saving tip: never fact-check.

Minutes 14-16:

This lack of proofreading backfired in the final stanza, which opens: “I can just tell that I’m going to get with that broken-winged, coke-septumed, burned-away, spidery little 80s baby one day.” The typo is unfortunate. At various points the draft read “get that baby’” and “get stuck with that baby.” Somewhere down the line, the phrases had a collision. I do not think a premonition that I’m going to “get with” an unborn baby is very gold medal-worthy, but it was clearly forgivable.

Minutes 17-20:

Now although the subject matter can be left in its first-draft form, a prize-worthy poem requires a vigorous final pruning. Get rid of all the rhymes (this should have been obvious from the start, they’re far too clever for that) and check the final piece against George Orwell’s 6 rules for good writing:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. 
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do. 
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active. 
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. 
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. 

(George Orwell, ‘Politics and The English Language’, 1946)

And once you have made sure all of them are broken (we require something outright barbarous for this) you’re ready to submit.

A Note on The Text:

Full credit must go to the Christchurch finalists for coming up with this concept in relation to the W. H. Auden Poetry Prize. That being said you all still have maintenance loans so we’ll share the honour but not the winnings.

AI Imagines Dead Baby Lake

Letters to the editors regarding the 03/01/2024 publication of ‘Looking for a third’:

“Sublime. The Mundaneum could write ‘Play’ but Beckett couldn’t write ‘Looking for a Third.’ Just saying.”

“If the hot water situation in the script is real rather than imagined, please know that I will be away this weekend and would be very happy to set you up in my teeny tiny guest room thereby letting you have the run of the flat and, more importantly, all the hot water you want.”

“It’s interesting how you chose to keep my initials but change them around. It made me think of this quote by the French surrealist André Breton. where he says that he abhors any writing that tries to obscure reality and wants novels to reflect reality by leaving the door swinging open. So you were doing the same thing, at least to me. Leaving the door swinging back and forth.”

We thank our readers for their undying generosity of spirit. That being said, offers of working utilities will be better appreciated than comparisons to Beckett or the French Surrealist André Breton.