The Numbers Game #4

Snake Oil, Honest Men and Basic Decency…

I am reminded this morning that realising you’re being lied to is a hard task on a difficult day. Most people don’t look past their own basic needs. Many have no extra mental capacity to do so, and add the countless stresses of daily life to the mix and it is easy to see how the Bad People get away with all the many and dangerous things that they do. Real heroes do the job despite the hardship.

This morning, my brain reminded me of that time I was asked to go and hear a presentation at the Gym by a company trying to get people to buy into what was, in essence, a pyramid scheme. I remember Googling the company in the half-time presentation break and my first hit being how they were being investigated in several countries for poor business practice. It was a surreal experience.

I bet you’re wondering what this line of discussion has to do with poetry.

More than a week after a VERY well-known publisher announced a shortlist for its latest contest, I finally received notification this week that both my efforts had been unsuccessful. It would also have been useful to know, as I knew the publisher had chosen a longlist of 50 titles to present to their guest judge, if I had been part of that number or not. They had everyone’s email address, after all.

I am increasingly not that bothered that my work doesn’t make shortlists. What makes me angrier is the dismissive nature ALL entries are treated with in certain spaces. If you are using ACTUAL SOFTWARE that is meant to do the job of bulk emailing people to tell them they have not been successful, WHY do we end up being left to wait until the successful people hear first?

How hard is it to manage the submission process with kindness and care?

This rejection was even worse: I had the magazine delivered to me a month ago. There’s remiss, and there’s taking the piss, I’ll let you decide which one it is, and it came on the back of me that same day complaining about being left hanging on social media. I know enough about confirmation bias not to assume I’d hit a nerve somewhere, because this shit is SO common now it is devaluing the process.

It’s been this way for me for eight years. There have been some improvements: the Bridport uses stats and percentages in a way that clearly makes successful entrants happy. Mslexia sends a long-form rejection mail with a set of notes from the judging poet. In the main though, the majority of us only know we’ve succeeded when it happens: often that can take half a year to materialise.

Trying to teach new poets to cope with this has become incredibly important.

I am about to send 5 emails to the finalists in the Ways of Seeing contest ahead of tomorrow’s announcement: 3 will have been placed slightly further ahead than 2 others, and one will have been declared, in my mind alone, the ‘best’. The reality is, of course, that society dictates there has to be an order. Telling everybody they are a winner is, I am consistently told, not teaching the correct mindset.

After eight years of using failure as fuel to propel me forward, and having literally exhausted myself mentally this year as a consequence of this, I have become tired of staying silent. I see Tiny Empires with the time and money to not care about how their actions can damage other people’s hopes and dreams, and I will never allow this to destroy my own determination to create a truly fair poetry ecosphere.

If we have to push change one stanza at a time going forward, then so be it.