By request, here’s an update on the Rattle Poetry Prize, though it’s not much of an update.

We’ve read each of the submissions, all 4,500 or so poems, and have a pile of several hundred possible winners that we’re going to re-read over the next few days. We have our first group meeting to talk about the poems we like most on Saturday. I doubt we’ll have a winner at that point, though — it will take at least another week, and more reading. As anyone who’s done anything like this knows, it’s easy to sort the good from the bad — much more difficult to choose the best from what’s left. The line becomes much more fine, much more subjective.

Even when we do have the winners, we won’t be announcing them immediately. First we’ll be contacting the winners directly, to make sure that the poems are still elligible, and in the meantime, deciding which, if any, additional poems we’d like to publish. The goal for announcing the winners is still September 15th, but if we can do it any sooner, we will.

Also of note, the final tally on submissions has grown from 991 to 1052. I mis-labeled about 30 of the email submissions, and so didn’t count them at first, which when corrected bumped the total up to 1021. Then on 8/15, a full two weeks after the deadline, we received a bundle of entries that had been postmarked 8/1. First Class/Priority is supposed to take 3-5 days, and we received nothing from about 8/6-8/14, so this bundle was a mystery. But since we hadn’t yet finished reading everything anyway, it didn’t make a difference to us; those entries were just added to the bottom of the pile.

That’s all I can think to say. If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask in the comments.