Risk Taking in Poetry: How Far to Push a Contest Poem
Bold poems win contests and bold poems bomb them. A judge explains the difference: five types of poetic risk, where the gimmick line sits, and a seven-step method for pushing a poem exactly far enough.
Two poems arrived in the same judging cycle last spring, and both took the same gamble: each one was written as a set of instructions. The first, a mother's directions for reheating dinner, left for a son who never comes home, placed second overall. The second, formatted as furniture assembly steps about a divorce, scored near the bottom. Same risk, opposite outcomes. This is the part of risk taking in poetry that nobody teaches: courage is not the skill. Calibration is the skill. Anyone can push a poem. The contest poets who win know how far.
I have spent years scoring poems that pushed too little, and almost as many scoring poems that pushed past the point where the poem could hold the weight. What follows is the map I wish someone had handed me.
Risk Taking in Poetry Is a Dial, Not a Switch
Poets talk about risk as if it were binary: safe poem or brave poem. Judges experience it as a dial with positions, and every position past a certain point costs you readers faster than it gains you admiration. The instruction-poem about reheated dinner sat at exactly the right position: the form was strange enough to make me lean in, and every strange choice paid rent. "Cover the plate with the blue cloth, not foil, you always burn your fingers on foil" is an assembly instruction and a whole childhood at once.
The divorce poem cranked the dial two clicks further. Numbered steps, exploded-diagram references, a parts list of hearts and screws. The form stopped serving the feeling and started performing cleverness, and by step four I was admiring the mechanism instead of feeling anything. That is the failure mode of ambitious poems, and it has a name in my scoring notes: the gimmick line. Not a line in the poem, a line in the sand.
A risk the poem needs is a voice. A risk the poem merely survives is a gimmick.
The Five Kinds of Risk, Ranked by Payoff
Not all risks are priced the same. After years of scoring, here is how the categories tend to pay out, from most reliable to most dangerous.
- Image risk. The metaphor nobody else would reach for. Highest payoff, lowest cost, because a failed image wastes one line while a successful one can carry the whole poem. Push here first and hardest.
- Tonal risk. Comedy inside elegy, tenderness inside rage. Pays off enormously because judges read hundreds of single-tone poems. Costs you only when the second tone arrives with no warning and no return.
- Syntax risk. The long sentence that refuses to end, the fragment, the line break that cuts a word in half. Moderate payoff, moderate cost. It must be audibly deliberate; accidental-looking syntax risk reads as error.
- Formal risk. The poem as recipe, transcript, field notes, voicemail. High payoff, high cost, and the whole bet rides on one question: does the borrowed form add meaning the content could not carry alone?
- Subject risk. The taboo topic. Lowest reliable payoff, because subject alone impresses nobody who reads at volume. A dangerous subject handled conventionally is a safe poem in a leather jacket.
Hopkins, writing in the 1870s and safely public domain, shows what maximum syntax risk looks like when a poet has the technique to fund it:
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon
He breaks "kingdom" across a line ending. Editors thought he was unpublishable. He was also right, because the fractured word enacts the falcon's swerve. That is the test every risk must pass: it enacts something, or it decorates something. If you want to see how much meaning a line break alone can carry before you gamble on bigger moves, study enjambment until it stops feeling like a trick and starts feeling like timing.
A Worked Example: One Metaphor, Three Dial Positions
Watch a single image move through three risk levels. Position one, the safe setting:
After the diagnosis, my father grew quiet,
like a house settling into its foundations.
Fine. Forgettable. Position two, the calculated risk:
After the diagnosis, my father spoke
the way a house speaks: only at night,
only in creaks, only to say
I am still standing, stop checking on me.
The metaphor now does work. It gets extended, it earns a voice, and the last line risks a small tonal joke inside grief that lands because it sounds exactly like a proud, frightened father. This is the version I would score highest. Position three, past the gimmick line:
My father the house, my father the load-bearing wall,
my father the cracked lintel, the sump, the fuse box,
my father the mortgage no one can refinance,
my father the inspection we keep postponing.
Each phrase is clever. Together they suffocate. The metaphor has stopped revealing the father and started inventorying the poet's wit, and by line three a judge is reading a list, not a man. The skill of metaphor at contest level is knowing that extension multiplies power only until the vehicle becomes the subject. Then it divides.
The Risk Budget: Seven Steps to Calibrate Before You Submit
Here is the method I give poets who ask how far to push. It works because it forces the risks to justify themselves individually instead of hiding in the crowd.
- List every risk in the draft. Strange image, odd form, tonal swerve, broken syntax, hard subject. Most drafts contain three to six. Name each one in a margin note.
- Make each risk state its job. One sentence: "This line break enacts the hesitation." If the honest sentence is "this looks interesting," the risk is decoration.
- Keep one flagship risk. The single boldest move gets protected and, usually, pushed further than you dared in draft one. Underfunded risks fail more often than overfunded ones.
- Demote the competing risks. Two flagship risks split the reader's attention and read as noise. Quiet the others so the big one can be heard.
- Anchor the strangeness. For every disorienting move, give the reader one plain, physical, human handhold within two lines. Hopkins anchors his fractured syntax with a falcon you can see.
- Run the stranger test. Give the poem to someone who does not love you and ask one question only: where did you stop feeling and start noticing? That spot is your gimmick line. Pull back to just before it.
- Read it aloud once as the skeptic. Perform the poem in the voice of your most unimpressed reader. Any line you cannot say without flinching is either the poem's best line or its most self-indulgent one. Decide which, on your feet.
The Voicemail Poem
The submission that taught me steps three and five arrived two winters ago: a poem formatted as nine voicemails to a dead brother, timestamps and all. Draft logic said it should have collapsed under its own device. It did not, and the reason was one anchoring choice: voicemail seven was just the sound of the caller not hanging up, rendered as a single line of held silence. Eight messages of speech, one of breath. The poet had demoted every other trick, no wordplay, no fractured syntax, plain sentences all the way through, and spent the entire risk budget on the form itself. It took first place that month, and three of us on the panel quoted voicemail seven to each other for weeks.
The same device with clever language layered on top would have died. One flagship risk, fully funded, everything else quiet. That is what calculated means.
Push Until It Enacts, Then Stop
Contest scoring makes this concrete in a way workshops never do. When you submit to a monthly contest like Writory's, the five-part score breakdown shows creativity and structure as separate numbers, and calibrated risk is the only strategy that raises both at once: the flagship risk lifts creativity, the anchoring and demotion lift structure. Reckless poems spike one and crater the other. Safe poems flatline both.
So push. Push the image past comfortable, push the form until it means something, and then perform the hardest act of nerve in the whole business: stop one click before clever. The dial position you are looking for is always the same one, in every poem, at every level of ambition. It is the last setting at which the reader is still feeling the poem instead of watching you write it.
Risk is not how much you dare on the page. It is how much the poem can carry without putting the weight down.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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