The Victorina Press Poetry Contest 2022

 

It is always an honour to judge a writing award, and this year I have been asked to be one of the judges for the Victorina Press Poetry Contest.
    I’m a real lover of poetry and have a large collection of poetry books, many of which I have owned since I was a teenager. I have also written poetry since I was a child, and I achieved early competition success in my grammar school literary contest at the age of eleven – with a poem about George Best! My debut chapbook, The Collective Nouns for Birds, won the Saboteur Award for poetry in 2020, and my first full length collection, talk to me about when we were perfect, will be published in early 2023 by Victorina Press.

    The 2022 Victorina contest, in collaboration with Voces-Voices Festival 2021, is open for entries until February 28th. Poems should be forty lines or less and written in English or Spanish. There’s a £1000 prize pot and the opportunity for poets to see their work published in an anthology. Everything else you need to know can be found here.
    My fellow judges will be Bethany Rivers, Adan Feinstein and Maria Eugenia Bravo-Calderara, and I’m really looking forward to reading all the entries and discussing the shortlisted poems with them in due course.
    In the meanwhile here are a few of my thoughts about some of the things I look for in a winning poem.
    The Victorina contest has a broad and universal theme: Life, Death and Beyond, which I think everyone would agree is the bread and butter territory of the majority of poets. The main topics covered in the poems I’ve read for previous competitions have largely fallen within that theme: death, marriage, funerals, illness, friendships and adultery. These universal themes will always outnumber the quirky and unusual, but they need to be approached with fresh eyes to be noticed.
    At the start of the judging process it always feels like a daunting challenge: will I find poetry with that indefinable magic, with original language, arresting imagery and adventurous ideas to surprise me? Will I be able to identify the poem that – for me – shone above the rest?
    For a poem to work, the poet needs to communicate with the reader, not just talk to themselves. Beautiful language is meaningless if there are no concrete ideas and no clear message. The best poetry is never overcrowded, the words are reduced to an essential essence that dances to a unique rhythm.
    There needs to be a confident voice, and even if that voice is a delicate one, it needs to have surety.
    But a winning poem needs more than deft technique, originality and a clear message. It has to resonate, demand re-reading, it has to touch the soul and linger in the mind.
    Good luck!