Ladies and gentlemen, and fellow poets ... the winner of the largest cash prize ever awarded to an amateur poet ... Our Poet of the Year for 2006 ... the Grand Prize winner of $20,000 cash and a $10,000.00 book publishing contract is ... [your name here]
"Dear [your last name]
There is great news, and I want to be the first person to tell you.
You have been honored for this year's Poet of the Year competition 2006. [Your name], you will also be honored with two separate and very special awards for your poetic achievement at special ceremonies throughout the weekend ...
Your talent and dedication to poetry makes you an obvious choice ... we want you to share this momentous occasion with us in Las Vegas, Nevada, July 20-23, 2006 for the 20th Anniversary International Society of Poets Convention and Symposium ...
It's hard to guess how many people received this direct mail invitation, but as you read this, somewhere between 1,500 and 4,000 self-described poets and guests who were convinced by this mailing to part with a $595 registration fee ($475 for guests), are converging on the Strip to celebrate Literature and Big Prizes.
Simple math will tell you there's money to be made in poetry, when you know how to pitch it. Lending this enterprise a veneer of literary worth is a crew of genuinely impressive academic lights—for those few who know the names, Grace Cavalieri, Fleda Brown and W.D. Snodgrass are an impressive crew; and certainly anyone serious about writing would benefit from the talks and workshops these luminaries can provide.
But a fine-tooth comb will find little mention of such endeavors in the Society's mailings, or at its Poetry.com website. Instead, you'll find the promise of Big Prizes, especially the glowing honor of being named Poet of the Year, an announcement that will be made by none of the literary heavy hitters; following in the footsteps of past celebrity presenters Bob Eubanks, Montel Williams and Mickey Rooney, the charismatic American Idol winner Ruben Studdard will announce the recipient of this hotly contested honor.
And the contest is indeed heated, more so than most attendees first understand when they receive the Society's invitation. The complaints of past contenders for the Society's awards litter the Internet, to be found in personal blogs, at consumer sites like ripoffreport.com and at dozens of specialized writer's sites and forums.
The prizes are real, all critics concede, and the winning entries seem legitimately of a higher esthetic quality than most of the work of the 5.1 million poets the Society claims are represented in its online database at Poetry.com. Whether one chooses to pay $65 to own the contest's commemorative book or not, the Society does publish every entered poem that they declare a finalist.
Which seems to be every one of them. Net-connected poets once made a game of trying to win a rejection letter from the organization with successively worse poetry, but the submissions quickly devolved into gibberish of undivinable pronunciation, as the honors continued to pour in. Soon, it just wasn't fun any more.
The Society does enforce a stricture against poems over 20 lines. By placing a special value on brevity, the Society can showcase up to 3,000 poets in a volume—weighty tomes, with titles to match: With Flute and Drum and Pen; A l'ombre du crepuscule; Waves of Wonder.
Poetry.com's FAQ assures site visitors that their volumes can be "found in bookstores" (though their longer answer is that you can "find" it by giving the ISBN at the Special Order desk). Google can find no trace of any of these volumes' existence on the net; no sale, new or used; not a review.
In 2003, when the Society stopped publicly posting titles and publishing dates, there were 196 of these anthologies listed, produced within a six-year span—about a volume every 11 days.
The Society's direct mail solicitations are carefully honed for the part-time poet's vulnerable spot, the dream that drives them—the dream of fame, of money, of recognition or even simply of their peer's respect.
Another celebrated attendee, David Wagoner, a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, might be surprised to learn that the AAP, at its own website, recounts Barbara Walters' 1998 exposé of the Society's never-ending quest for talent. In one 20/20 segment, an entire second-grade classroom submitted their poems, and every child achieved "semifinalist" status in the competition.
As it was then, it remains. Attendees at each year's gathering includes a good share of children, at the full $595 registration fee for each young competitor. Guardians for "young poet" competitors are granted a discount, so that the sum for a child and two parents totals $1,145. That, plus travel and hotel, buys a slim chance at one of the five $1,000 prizes earmarked for kids, and which the Society, in its direct mail solicitations, calls "scholarships."
The Society estimates 1,500 competing attendees this year. Assuming a matching number of guests at $475 each, the Society's "take" for the event could be more than $1.5 million, versus total prize money of $40,000.
Representatives of the Society did not respond to telephone calls before press time.
But Vegas seems just the place for this poets' convention; we provide better odds, and care more about talent.