On 22nd May the results of the Stafford Litfest poetry competition will be announced. I was honoured to be given the opportunity to judge the entries. Many people have approached me asking what  the process was? I have entered numerous  competitions myself and am acutely aware that once the envelope has been sent, or send button pressed, entries seem to disappear into a void.  I am pleased to be able to explain what happened during this competition.

Firstly, all entries were anonymised before they were sent through to me by the organisers. All I received was the poem, and a number against it for identification purposes. I had no idea who had entered or the authorship of any entry.

I was faced with almost ninety entries for the adult competition on two themes, “education” and “theatre”. I conducted an initial read through of all entries for two reasons, to understand the split in submissions for each theme, and to glean a feel for the overall standard. The submissions favoured the education theme numerically.  However the interpretation of the theme was pleasingly diverse. The standard was uniformly high. There was not a single weak entry. I deliberately did not try and look for winners at this stage.

I then had to consider more profound matters. What was going to identify the best poems? What does best mean? Why might one poem be better than another? Who am I to say?

I reflected on my favourite poems, and poets. I do not have a favourite genre or era, my only criteria is a simple one. Is the poem any good? I don’t like everything that my favourite poets have written, nor do I understand fully every line of every poem, that is part of the attraction. Invariably there is something in a favourite poem that I don’t like. And yet you know a good poem when you see one.

So I determined to look out for two main things, firstly, a quirk, any quirk, that set a poem apart, that made it memorable,  secondly, memorable imagery, and, or, language. This made my job much easier.

Two weeks later I revisited  and reread every poem. I needed to find a first second and third and two commended poems, five in total.  As I went through them all I made a note of the entry number of each poem which fitted my criteria. I did not have a target number of poems for my contenders. To my surprise, once I had completed the list of contenders, I found that I had a shortlist of exactly ten.  That meant that I only had  to halve it to create a winners list.

I then reread my top ten and put a tick against each poem which stood out from the ten, miraculously I had double ticked three and single ticked two. I had my five. Once again fortunately, of those top three, two were about the thematically underrepresented theatre, and one was on education, so both themes were represented.

So all entries were formally read at least twice, the contenders at least another three times.  Informally they were revisited more than that.

The winning poem unquestionably met my winning criteria best of all the entries.

If you want to find out who the winning poets and their poems were you will need to come along to the Stafford Gatehouse piano bar between 3.30 and 5.30pm on Sunday 22May 2022 whereupon the results will be announced. I will then post them subsequently on here.