The deadline for the Rattle Poetry Prize has passed, mailmen have finally taken a break, and for the first time in months we didn’t receive any entries today. Everything has been logged, subscriptions added, and the unidentified packets of poems are ready to read.

Finally tally on entries for 2007: 991
Estimated number of poems: 4,460

So we fell just 9 entries short of my personal goal, but this is still a 23% increase over what we received last year, and that ain’t bad.

I’m sure some of you are curious as to what’s going on now. Well, as we’ve made clear in our guidelines and in our code of ethics, the judges are myself, Alan Fox, and Megan O’Reilly. As we speak, Megan is making a nest out of packets of paper, scoring each poem on a scale of 1-10, and then sorting each entry in order of their highest individual scores. I’ve already started trailing behind her, giving each poem my own score, averaging the two scores, and then re-ranking them. When that’s all done, we’ll take the top 200 or so poems, and re-read them again, as a group, with Alan, to decide the winner.

As usual, Alan is our control group — Megan and I will have read thousands of poems, and read the best poems at least twice each, but Alan will be reading them for the first time. We think it’s important that each poem be seen with a few personal perspectives, but also a few contextual perspectives. As little as any editor wants to admit it, where and when you read a poem can have just as much influence on your reaction as how good the poem actually is. Anyone who’s hated a movie the first time they saw it, only to love it later, knows what I mean. Not only is your mood a factor, but so is what you’ve been reading before and after — if you read a hundred poems that aren’t very good, something that’s just decent suddenly looks like gold.

Anyway, Alan just left for a bit of a vacation up north (where he’ll be interviewing Marvin Bell for an upcoming issue). By the time he gets back in about 10 days, hopefully we’ll be ready to go over the best poems as a group, and pick a winner by the end of the month. We won’t be announcing the winners, though, until we can get a hold of each of them, so that we can be sure the poems are still available, and there aren’t any ethical problems. We aim to announced the winners to the world on September 15th. Good luck! (Not that you need it.)

Taking a break from logging submissions earlier today, I posted 4 great new poems to our audio archives, including one of my all-time favorite poems, Dorianne Laux’s “Fast Gas.” Also include are poems by Carol V. Davis, Patricia Fargnoli, and Harry Newman. Click here to give them a listen.