The Golden Envelope
First, I would like to say thank you to all the poets who entered our How To Handle Explosives Contest. There were many fine entries to comb through in our quest for a weeks worth of explosive poetics. Kathleen Cassen Mickelson, Amy Corbin, and myself (Constance Brewer) were the judges for this contest. Our standards were high and the poets of EDP rose to the challenge.
From our perspective, a major deciding factor in our choice of poems was completeness. By that I mean the poem was fully realized and felt finished. It could stand on its own, as it was. Many entries were good, but would have benefited from further revision. There were many poems needing just one more run through and tweaking, and they would have been there. This contest was a one shot deal, so if a poem was interesting, yet did not have the polish of a honed piece, it did not move on.
The second factor in choosing our Explosive Week winners had to do with content. Did the poem tell a story, raise questions, hold our attention and make us think about it after it was done? Did the poem make us go, “Wow, that was interesting, I have to read that one again.”? Language was important. Did the poem do everything it could to draw the reader in? We felt the seven poems chosen for Explosives Week met all the criteria we were looking for. We hope you enjoy reading the winning poems of our first ever EDP contest. Let us know if you would like to see more contests of this sort in the future at EDP.
The How To Handle Explosives Week competition winners, in no particular order:
Manic by Jody Costa
Cubicle Thinking by Rewa Zeinati
The Optimist by Theodore E. Hovey
Independence By A.S. Andrews
Something Unchancy by Catherine Edmunds
Rocket’s Red Glare by Kip
The Hurt of Man by Mandy Pannett
Many Congratulations to each of you.
And you can look forward to reading those poems in early July.
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5 Responses to “Editor’s View • How to Handle Explosives Week Winners”
« IN JUNE • by D. T. Kastn | Home | ATOMIC SUNSET, 1992 • by John Impey »
June 23rd, 2011 at 12:17 pm
[...] judge and fellow editor Constance Brewer announced the winners of our first EDP Competition today. I had nothing to do with the judging – indeed I [...]
June 23rd, 2011 at 10:38 pm
[...] Day Poets announced the winners of their How to Handle Explosives Week Contest today, and my poem “Independence” is one of them! It will be published sometime in [...]
June 24th, 2011 at 8:41 am
Of course I have not read the winning poems yet, but find your criteria for choice advice to follow in general. Thanks for publishing it.
July 1st, 2011 at 12:04 am
[...] April and May. And, just in case you missed it, on June 23, EDP editor Constance Brewer wrote about how we chose the poems that won. We hope you enjoy our winners’ work and their answers to our interview questions as much as [...]
August 6th, 2011 at 1:44 pm
FYI…in the title above, the word “Explosives” should not be spelled with an apostrophe as it’s not a possessive noun. That’s a really common error but it is not one I should find in a literary publication.