Ego in Writing: What Blind Judging Taught Me About Art
Blind judging strips the name off the page and shows what ego in writing really costs. A decade of anonymous scoresheets taught one judge hard lessons about vanity, voice, and revision.
The best poem in one of my October stacks a few years back was entry number 214, twelve lines about a woman defrosting a freezer the night after her husband's funeral. No name on it, because there are never names on them. I scored it, praised it, fought for it in the panel discussion, and won. When the identities were unsealed, the poet turned out to be a first-time entrant in her seventies who had never published a word. The runner-up had two collections and a festival circuit. That afternoon taught me more about ego in writing than any craft book I own, and I have been thinking about the lesson ever since: the name on the page and the poem on the page are two different performances, and only one of them can be judged blind.
What Blind Judging Actually Blinds
People assume anonymous judging exists to stop favoritism, and it does. But its deeper function is stranger. Blind judging removes the frame, and poems lean on frames far more than poets admit. A mediocre stanza by a famous name reads as intentional, daring, late-style. The same stanza by an unknown reads as what it is: a mediocre stanza. Take away the byline and every line has to pay its own rent.
What startled me in my first years of judging was discovering how much of my own taste had been frame all along. I had spent my reading life being told what was good before I read it. Blind stacks broke that habit. Number 214 had no reputation to borrow. Its freezer had to be cold on its own.
And here is the uncomfortable mirror: if a reader's ego can be fooled by a frame, a writer's ego builds frames constantly. The impressive epigraph. The name-drop of a poet you want to be associated with. The bio note polished harder than the poem. All of it is scaffolding around the building, and blind judging demolishes scaffolding on contact.
Ego in Writing Has a Sound
After enough anonymous stacks, you learn that ego in writing is not an attitude, it is a set of audible habits. I can usually hear it by line three. The tells are consistent enough that I keep a private list, and here are the loudest entries on it:
- The vocabulary flex: a word chosen because it is rare, not because it is right. "Cerulean" where the sky was just blue, "lachrymose" where someone simply cried.
- The wisdom voice: lines that sound like they want to be tattooed. When every stanza reaches for the universal, no stanza has done the local work that earns it.
- The suffering credential: pain presented as qualification rather than experience, daring the judge to score grief itself instead of the poem about it.
- The unbroken solemnity: not one moment of humor, doubt, or ordinary life, because the poet fears that lightness will cost them gravity. It is the poetic equivalent of never smiling in photographs.
- The protected ending: a final line so abstract it cannot be argued with, which also means it cannot be felt.
Notice what unites these. Each one is the poet turning away from the subject to check their reflection. The reader always feels the head turn.
Ozymandias, Patron Saint of the Byline
The definitive poem about all this was written in 1817. Shelley's traveler finds the shattered statue in the desert, and the pedestal still boasts:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Two lines of pure byline, outliving the works entirely. What gets missed in casual readings of Ozymandias is the joke underneath the moral: the only thing that actually survived the king is a piece of writing, and not his own. The sculptor's mocking hand and the poet's fourteen lines outlast the empire. Ego announced itself in stone and died. Craft observed quietly and lived. Every blind stack I read replays this poem in miniature. The entries that announce themselves crumble by line five. The entries that simply look hard at a freezer, a father, a Tuesday, stand there in the sand, intact.
The name on the page is the first thing a poem must outlive.
A Line Edit: The Performing Draft and the Speaking Draft
Let me make this concrete with my own lines, a before and after of the kind I see monthly. Here is a performing draft, the sort written with one eye on the judge:
I have known the ancient grammar of departure,
the way all leaving conjugates to loss;
I carry my father's absence like a language
only the abandoned learn to speak.
It is not incompetent. It scans, it has a governing metaphor, it would survive a workshop. But every line is generalizing, and the metaphor exists to display the poet's cleverness about grief rather than the grief. Now the speaking draft:
Dad's number is still second in my phone,
under the pizza place, above my dentist.
Three years. I know the area code is dead.
I renewed the contract anyway in March.
Same subject, same length. But the second draft has surrendered its dignity, and dignity is exactly what ego cannot surrender. The pizza place is undignified. Renewing the contract is irrational and specific and true. When I score with a rubric in front of me, the second draft wins on emotion and language both, and it wins because the poet vanished. If the term is unfamiliar, this is close to what we mean by persona work inverted: instead of building a mask, you take one off.
The Blind Read: Five Steps to Judge Your Own Poem Without Your Name on It
You cannot unsee your own byline, but you can approximate the blind stack at your desk. This is the sequence I give poets who ask how judges would read them. Do it tonight with your most recent finished poem.
- Retype it in a plain font, no title page, and print it. Handwriting and favorite fonts carry your identity. The poem should look like it arrived in a stack of two hundred.
- Read it aloud once as a stranger who is slightly busy. Not hostile, just busy, because that is the honest condition of every judge and editor alive. Mark the exact line where your attention flickered. That line is real. Do not negotiate with it.
- Circle every word you are proud of. Now interrogate each circle: is this word serving the poem or serving me? Half of your circles will be flexes. Cut or simplify them and read again.
- Find the most undignified true detail you left out. The pizza place detail. It exists, you censored it, and you know what it is. Put it in and see what happens to the temperature of the poem.
- Score yourself in categories, not overall. An overall feeling protects the ego; categories corner it. Rate your own creativity, emotion, structure, language, and theme separately, the same five-way breakdown Writory sends every entrant each month. You will find you are strong in two and hiding in three, and now you know where the next draft lives.
The Case for Ego, Properly Employed
Now the turn, because I do not believe humility alone writes anything. It took colossal ego for a seventy-something first-timer to decide her freezer poem deserved a stranger's hour. It takes ego to submit at all, to revise for the fortieth time on the conviction that the poem matters, to believe your one ordinary life yields material worth a reader's attention. Dickinson had it. Whitman had it in surplus. Ego is the engine of the enterprise.
The distinction I have arrived at, after all these unsealed envelopes, is between ego as fuel and ego as cargo. Fuel gets burned before the reader arrives: it powers the drafting, the ambition, the nerve. Cargo gets shipped inside the poem, and the reader has to carry it, every flexed word and protected ending and unearned universal. Fuel is invisible in the finished work. Cargo is all too visible, and it is heavy.
So the goal is not to have less ego. The goal is to burn all of it in the writing and ship none of it in the lines.
Keep the Ego, Change Its Job
Entry 214 has become my private test for everything I write. Would this poem survive with no name, no bio, no frame, read by a busy stranger between a poem about the sea and a poem about a grandmother? Most days the answer is no, and the revision starts there. The woman who wrote it, I learned later, had been writing for fifty years and showing no one. I think about that often: half a century of fuel, not one ounce of cargo.
Your poem will eventually be read by someone who does not know you and owes you nothing. That is not the sad fate of writing. That is its entire dignity, the only test that means anything. Take the name off the page yourself, before a judge does it for you, and find out what your lines weigh on their own.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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