Judging poetry
means choosing
which
baby contest baby
gets
first
place.
It’s like
evicting
a soul
who’s still
settling in.
“Clarity and coherence”
are not easy standards,
staring into
private darkness
exorcising rot
miming genius
or
wordifying
to sound
like you’re the origin
of
human
experience
and all
commensurate
metaphors.
“Evocative imagery”
calls on poetic
licence for the writer.
Funny:
in contests,
readers
still steer.
What right do I have
to judge if your
details and diction
evoke
enough?
“Literary devices
and figurative language”
leave me longing for a poem
so subtly
armatured
that I can’t help but
hear ghosts,
feel angels,
and smell bones
as if I’ve never
sensed before.
And please, please,
young poet,
don’t obscure
what is already hidden
in the labyrinth.
Go ahead: expose;
make fresh
revelation
for initiated
overthought
stress-addled
hopefuls
like
me.

— Heather Burton ©2019
Addendum:
I’m a teacher of language arts. My students are 6 to 16. Included in my job mandate is this line: Students will listen, speak, read, write, view and represent to explore thoughts, ideas, feelings and experiences.
Judging poetry and other forms of creative expression, which is implicit in teaching the arts of language in a formal school setting and explicit in the evaluation of my teacherhood, is problematic at best and painful at its worst.
The on-switch for Judging Poetry was being invited to adjudicate a poetry contest for first-year university students. I was eager to accept — I could capture a sense of what my younger writers might create someday.
On my initial pass over the contest entries, I was dismayed. The mediocrity of the diction and the mundanity of the themes/topics/impressions left me wondering what to say. (Boyfriends still engender that much angst?)
Rightly, and as repeatedly happens with my own students’ work, I shook myself back to center: creative writing is an offering of self, and self is inherently sacred.
This is not to say sloppy verbiage gets praise or that I’ll find something personally meaningful in a text.
This is also not to say that flattery or good job stickers are the order of the day.
It is to say this:
Laying down words — poetic, prosaic or otherwise — for the purpose of expressing self is an act worthy of respect. If done with even a speck of sincerity (because we all remember the de/motivation of marks) it is also an act of courage.
From that footing, I could detect not just promise in the poems I judged, but craft on its way.
Sure, it took creative composing on my part to respond to each entry honestly. I think it matters to writers to know they are read and not to be lied to.
I hope to “meet” those young poets someday after they have taken my (and others’) questions and suggestions, juggled them a bit to test their utility and practised up their language arts.
The general bits of feedback I gave?
- Keep steeping in artistic words.
- Tell less, show more.
- Make poetic choices (reading material, people-watching and other acts of high absorbability, listening intently, music, stillness, writing as therapy, relentless learning, meditation/prayer, etc.)
- Paint with words. Try thinking cinematically.
- Read your work aloud.
- Be honest.
- Hear your voice. Honor and develop it.
- Above all, keep writing.
Thanks for reading,
Heather

