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Dark Saddles of Greed: The Poetry ContestbyBarbara Abercrombie
One of my creative writing students, very excited, called me with the news of a heavily advertised poetry contest - huge prizes, no reading fee, and the possibility of being included in an anthology that, according to the ad, was a sold-out, sought after sourcebook for poetic talent. The idea of people seeking poetic talent through a source book was bizarre to say the least. Even the thought of anyone on this planet actually hunting down poets (while a nice idea) was pretty amazing. Add the thousands of dollars offered as prize money and the whole deal sounded suspect. I told my student that before she entered her poems we'd investigate the contest by sending in a poem written by the whole class. We wrote a poem as a group project in five minutes. We had a marvelous time; the poem was terrible. We named it "Estranged Partners" and it included such lines as: "Where did you sleep last night?/I slept on her divan." (Though the guy who came up with the line "I dreamed of dark saddles" was rather proud of it.) The course was being held at the UCLA Extension Writers' Program on campus so we used Beverly Glen, a nearby street, as a pen name. A month or so later we received a letter. "Dear Beverly, It is my pleasure to inform you…" And we learned that the selection committee had certified our poem as a semi-finalist in the contest. Plus, in view of Beverly Glen's talent they wanted to publish "Estranged Partners" in their next anthology. The publisher's list price for the anthology was $69.95 but if we ordered it now we could get a special deal for $49.95. For another twenty dollars our biography could be included. Even acknowledging the huckster quality of the acceptance letter, we thought maybe "Estranged Partners" had been a fluke; we'd had too much fun writing it. We didn't try hard enough. Our poem wasn't that bad. (Maybe the line about dark saddles did have a certain weird flair.) The only real test would be to write such an aggressively bad poem, a poem so awful that you couldn't read it aloud without flinching. The following term we wrote what we all believed to be one of the worst poems ever committed to the English language. It was entitled "The Poet's Pen" and opened with the lines: "My pen is a vein filled/with blue ink." It went from bad to worse a few lines later with: "My pen pulses life's blood./ My pen spurts my emotion/onto the willing paper." We signed ourselves John E. Anderson, Jr., in honor of the building the class was held in. A month later another letter arrived, "Dear John, It is my pleasure to inform you…" This time we would not only be published in the anthology but for $29.95 (plus $3.00 postage) we could get a professional reading on tape of our poem. Our "artistry" (a direct quote from the letter) would not be recorded without our permission. Also available for $38.00 was a walnut finished plaque featuring our poem with two choices of border decoration. In subsequent classes I've discussed the contest and there's always at least one embarrassed student (an intelligent, sophisticated adult, serious about writing poems) who has been caught by this scam. Maybe nothing illegal is going on here, but neither is anything ethical or remotely connected to poetry. To be told that we had "a rare talent," that the terrible, silly poem we wrote as a class experiment showed "artistry," was "a work of art," and was "only one of a few chosen from thousands of poems" (the mind boggles at the thought of this possibly being true) and that we should be "genuinely proud of our accomplishment" is a pack of lies at best. There are thousands of poems in the contest's anthology. An anthology is published four times a year. If you bought copies for your friends and family, had your biography included, bought a tape and a wall plaque, it comes out to be a huge money-making deal for the people who run the contest. But at least they drew the line somewhere. Neither Beverly Glen nor John E. Anderson, Jr., won a cash prize.
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