How to Do Well in Poetry Contests
In brief: Contests are not lotteries. Judges score real qualities you can practise, and understanding how scoring works changes how you choose and polish a poem.
Poetry contests feel mysterious from the outside: you send a poem into silence and a result comes back weeks later. But most contests are more transparent than they seem. Judges work with criteria, they read quickly on a first pass and slowly on a second, and the poems that survive share qualities you can deliberately build. This lesson is about competing well without writing to a formula.
We will use a concrete example throughout. Writory runs a monthly international contest where every poem is scored on five criteria: creativity, emotion, structure, language and theme. Every entrant sees their score, all participants receive certificates, and winners get cash prizes plus free entry the next month. Because the rubric is public and the feedback is real, it is a useful lens for understanding what judges anywhere tend to reward.
Understand What Judges Actually Score
Most serious contests judge some version of the same five things. Creativity: does the poem offer a fresh angle rather than a familiar sentiment in familiar clothes? Emotion: does it make the reader feel something specific, earned by images rather than announced by adjectives? Structure: do the stanzas, line breaks and pacing serve the poem? Language: is the word choice precise, the sound alive, the grammar controlled? Theme: does the poem engage the contest theme genuinely rather than mentioning it once and drifting away?
The practical consequence is that a poem which is brilliant in one dimension and weak in two others usually loses to a poem that is strong in all five. Judges reading fifty poems in a sitting are looking for reasons to advance a poem and reasons to set it down. A clumsy line break or a cliché in the second stanza is a reason to set it down.
It helps to know what makes tired judges stop reading, because the list is short and consistent. Clichés head it: shattered hearts, tears like rain, souls that soar. Then abstraction without anchor, poems built entirely from words like pain, hope and eternity with nothing to see or touch. Then forced rhyme, where you can feel a line bending its meaning to reach a sound, and finally the moralising ending that tells the reader what to conclude. None of these breaks a rule. Each simply signals, to a reader with fifty poems left, that this one has stopped rewarding attention.
When a contest publishes scores, as Writory does, treat your numbers as a map. A lower structure score with high language and emotion scores tells you exactly what to study next month. Feedback like this is rare in the poetry world, so use it when you can get it.
Take the Theme Seriously, Then Come at It Sideways
Themed contests receive hundreds of poems that approach the theme head-on. If the theme is “home,” judges will read a wall of front doors, mothers' kitchens and childhood streets. These poems are not bad, but they blur together. The poems that stand out honour the theme from an unexpected angle: home as a language you are forgetting, home as the smell of a hospital ward, home as a border checkpoint at 3 a.m.
Sideways does not mean off-topic. A judge scoring theme wants to see the theme genuinely explored, so the connection must be clear by the end even if the opening surprises. A good test: could someone who never saw the theme guess it from your poem alone? If yes, your engagement is deep. If the theme only appears in the title, you are decorating, not exploring.
Win the First Pass
In large contests, poems get a fast first reading. Titles, opening lines and overall visual shape decide whether the second, slower reading happens with warmth or with duty. Your title should do work: not “Untitled,” not a label like “Sadness,” but a phrase that adds a layer the poem repays. Your first two lines should establish a voice and a concrete world. Abstract openings, throat-clearing and weather reports are the most common casualties of a first pass.
Endings matter almost as much, because judges comparing their shortlist reread final lines. An ending that merely stops, or that explains the poem back to the reader, drops a poem out of contention. An ending that lands an image and trusts the silence after it is what separates finalists from winners.
Length discipline helps too. If the limit is 30 lines, a controlled 18-line poem often beats a padded 30-line one. Judges feel padding immediately, even if they could not point to the exact soft lines.
Treat Every Result as Data, Not a Verdict
Even excellent poems lose. Judging involves taste, and a shortlist of ten strong poems can only produce a few winners. What you control is the trend line: are your poems getting closer, are your scores rising, are the same weaknesses recurring? A contest that gives every entrant a score and a certificate, the way Writory does, makes this trend visible. A silent rejection from a journal does not, so contests with feedback are especially valuable early in a writing life.
Enter regularly rather than occasionally. Monthly deadlines create a rhythm of drafting, editing and letting go that improves your writing faster than waiting for the perfect poem. And read the winning poems every cycle. Not to imitate them, but to calibrate: winners show you the current standard, and standards are learnable.
Try It This Week
Run a full contest cycle in miniature before the next real deadline. On day one, take any published theme and write ten sideways angles in ten minutes, without judging them. Circle the one that makes you slightly nervous and draft it the same day, badly if necessary.
On day three, score the draft from 1 to 10 on creativity, emotion, structure, language and theme, with one honest sentence beside each number, then revise only the weakest dimension. On day five, read the poem aloud, work the title and first two lines until a stranger would keep reading, and check that the ending lands an image rather than an explanation.
On day seven, enter it somewhere real with a deadline that month, Writory's contest or any venue you trust, then log it and let it go. The point is not this one poem. It is discovering that the whole cycle fits inside seven days, because once you know that, monthly deadlines stop being a source of panic and become the metronome your writing improves against.
Head-on vs sideways on the theme “journeys”
Head-on: “I packed my bags and left my town,
the road stretched long, the sun went down.”
Sideways: “My grandmother never left her village,
but every night she sailed the radio,
turning the dial like a captain's wheel.”
The head-on lines are competent and forgettable, made of stock images. The sideways lines explore the theme through a person who never travels, which is exactly the fresh angle judges score as creativity.
A contest-day checklist
1. Does my title add something the poem repays?
2. Do the first two lines give a voice and a concrete image?
3. Would a stranger guess the theme without being told?
4. Is every line pulling weight, or am I padding toward the limit?
5. Does the ending land an image instead of an explanation?
6. Have I met every rule: lines, anonymity, deadline, format?
Questions 1, 2 and 5 target the fast first reading, where most poems are quietly eliminated.
Exercises
- Take a published theme from any past contest and list ten head-on approaches, then ten sideways ones. Draft the sideways idea that scares you a little.
- Score one of your own poems honestly from 1 to 10 on creativity, emotion, structure, language and theme. Revise the lowest-scoring dimension only, then rescore.
- Rewrite the title and first two lines of an existing poem three different ways. Ask a reader which version they would keep reading, and why.
- Read three winning poems from any contest and write one sentence per poem naming the specific thing you believe won it.
Key takeaways
- Judges reward poems that are strong across all criteria, not brilliant in just one.
- Approach themes sideways: honour the theme through an angle nobody else will take.
- Titles, opening lines and endings decide the fast first pass, so polish them hardest.
- A controlled short poem beats a padded long one, whatever the line limit allows.
- Treat scores and results as data, enter regularly, and read winners to calibrate.
Related lessons
Part of Publishing & Contests in the free Writory Academy: about 9 minutes, Intermediate level, with a quiz that counts toward a signed certificate on the Certificate Track. By the Writory editorial team. Updated July 2026.