Publish and be damned!

[keats]

First prize and/or monetary gain by the author sounds good credentials to me for not letting a poem into a competition. Sounds simple, but...........yep there is always a but! lol

Neil

[Bob Pacey]

Are you under fifty Marty gees mate you have had a hard life.


Look at Heather she is only 39 so that pulls the average down.



Bob In hiding.

[Robyn]

I couldn't agree with you more David, and I think the art of gentle persuasion is a good place to start... querying entry rules and explaining to organisers the effect their rules are having on those who actually produce the material.
Regards
Robyn

[David J Delaney]

G'day David, I've enjoyed reading this post & must say, because of the restrictions placed by quite a number of comps (not just bush poetry comps) you'll hardly read any of my late poems on any web site, I'm not a prolific writer so 'save' most my poems for certain comps. Also, like Heather I won't enter a comp where I have to pay for my poem to be published in an anthology they will profit from.

[David Campbell]

Coincidentally, I received an email this morning from an organiser telling me that a story of mine had been short-listed in his competition. It hadn't won a prize of any sort, but he wanted to know if I had any objection to it being circulated among the members of his writing group. Here's my reply:

"Yes, I do have an objection to my story being circulated among your members. You see, quite a few other competitions do exactly what yours does and say entries cannot ever have been 'published in any form'. I would like to enter the story elsewhere and it might be argued that circulating it among your members constitutes 'publication'. So there's a risk, albeit small, that I could be disqualified. See the problem? What does 'published in any form' mean? It's a catch-all phrase that could mean anything, and it may well be keeping potential entries out of your competition. Worth thinking about. Why not change it to something like: 'Entries should not have been previously published for the financial gain of the author.' Much fairer and clearer."

It'll be interesting to see his response.

Cheers
David

[Glenny Palmer]

What I see as an even worse scenario eventuating from these clearly counter-productive rules is:
that the quality of ‘prize winning’ poems in said competitions will naturally dilute, & further dilute, until their anthologies…& heaven forbid, our craft… have little or no appeal or real credibility. Who will be inspired to purchase anthologies full of the poets’ ‘less than best’ works? And what reputation within literary & corporate circles, & the general public, will we earn for our craft, from such publications?

I understand the organisers’ intention to foster new works, & in a perfect world that would be bonza. But the reality is that a driving enthusiasm to craft a particular poem rarely seizes the writer…. because a certain closing date is looming. (I know that my creative processes certainly don’t spring to life because of that circumstance.)

While I applaud the effort & commitment of many of our competition organisers I am sad to say that my personal view is that several (previously) highly prestigious competitions are losing that hard won prestige through imposing these restrictions…(and…through rigidly sticking with the same judge year in & year out. I still believe that at least 2 judges should be engaged.)

I heartily agree that ‘not published for profit’ is the way to go.

Cheeers
Glenny …….(PS. Having to pay to be published is called ‘Vanity Publishing’ & in my Tutorial I warn against becoming involved in same. It is simply slick operators taking financial advantage of the poet’s yearning to share his/her work.)

[Stephen Whiteside]

What if I "publish" a poem on my blog, and then received a CAL payment for it five years later, because a school teacher has chosen to photocopy it for classroom use? Does that mean the poem has been "published for profit"?

What about the poems on my blog for which I have not received a CAL payment, but could potentially in the future? Have they been "published for profit"?

[Neville Briggs]

GLENNY ! You're back. Happy Birthday for last month , when you turned .. my lips are sealed

That's the trouble with rules, they tend not to fix things, just create rule breakers and create an ever increasing complexity of defining and and interpreting.

I think Glenny's suggestion of having judging panels is a very good suggestion. After all we have judging panels in the performance comps and in those performance comps, both the participants and the performance pieces are often recycled and well known before hand.
They don't need rules about previous exposure. Do they ?

Long live the antinomian revolution.

[David Campbell]

Stephen: I think the respective answers are probably "yes" and "no". You've now profited from the first, albeit belatedly, even though it wasn't originally published with that intent. But there has been no financial gain related to the other poems on the blog.

Heather and Glenny: Excellent points.

As a PS to yesterday's post about my reply to the short story competition organiser, I've received his answer. Unsurprisingly, it was his view that the publication rule was there to "encourage new work to be submitted". So I've pointed out how unrealistic this becomes if a whole lot of competitions have the same expectation. We have to pick and choose which competitions we enter, depending on material available, and those with overly restrictive rules may well miss out.

Cheers
David

[manfredvijars]

... We have to pick and choose which competitions we enter, depending on material available, and those with overly restrictive rules may well miss out.

And so say all of us!! ...