Which Poem to Submit? A Judge's 5-Question Test
A contest judge's five-question test for deciding which poem to submit, with two sample poems scored side by side and the tie-breakers that settle a close call.
Every month, somewhere in the world, a poet sits with two printed poems side by side on a desk, deadline tomorrow, and picks the wrong one. I know because the wrong one arrives in my scoring queue, and it almost always has the same fingerprints: it is clearly the poet's favorite. Deciding which poem to submit is a genuinely different skill from writing, and most poets never learn it, because nobody tells them the central secret. Your favorite poem and your strongest contest poem are usually not the same poem, and there is a five-question test that tells them apart in about ten minutes. I use a version of it myself. Here it is, with the reasoning behind every question.
Why Your Favorite Poem Is Usually the Wrong Pick
You love a poem for what it cost you. The night you wrote it, the person hiding inside it, the breakthrough it marked in your own writing. All of that is real, and none of it travels. A judge receives only the words, stripped of the whole private museum you walk through when you reread it. The favorite poem is beloved partly for reasons that live in you, not on the page, which means you are the one reader on earth least qualified to evaluate it.
The strongest contest poem is different. It carries its entire meaning in its own luggage. A stranger with no context, no goodwill, and two hundred other entries to read can board it at line one and feel everything you packed. That property, call it self-sufficiency, is what the five questions measure.
Your favorite poem is a letter to your own memory. The right contest poem is a letter a stranger opens and thinks: how did you get into mine?
Which Poem to Submit: The Five-Question Test
Take your candidate poems, read each one cold, and score each question honestly as yes or no. The poem with more yeses goes in the envelope. It is rarely close.
- Does it work without me standing next to it? If any line needs the backstory explained, the poem fails a contest read, because in a contest, nobody is standing next to it. Test this by giving it to a reader who knows nothing and asking them to tell you what happened in the poem. If their answer is a shrug, you have your answer too.
- Does it start before line four? Not the words, the poem. Many good pieces spend their opening stanza clearing their throat. If the first arresting image or claim arrives at line five, a judge deciding between hope and duty has already decided. The poem that begins immediately beats the poem that begins eventually.
- Can you point to the exact line where it turns? Every memorable poem has a moment where it swerves, deepens, or reverses, what sonnet writers call the volta. If you cannot underline yours, the poem is a description, not an event, and descriptions place lower than events in every pile I have ever scored.
- Does it end on an image or an explanation? Read only your last two lines. If they translate the poem into a message, the ending will cost you points with any judge alive. If they leave a picture burning, you are holding a contender.
- Does it fit this particular room? A poem can pass the first four questions and still be wrong for the contest in front of you. Check the theme, check the length rules, and read what this contest has actually rewarded before. Ten minutes with the past winners tells you whether your quiet elegy or your loud praise poem matches the taste of the table.
The Test in Action: Two Poems, One Envelope
Here are two short poems I wrote to demonstrate, imagining a poet torn between them for a contest with an open theme. First, the favorite, written the week the poet's daughter left for university:
The house is quiet now you're gone away.
Your room still holds the shape of all our years.
I sit inside the silence every day
and fill the empty spaces with my tears.
Second, the afterthought, drafted quickly a month later:
I still buy the wrong milk. Two percent,
the kind you drank, the kind I never liked.
It goes off quietly beside my own.
Some weeks I pour it out. Some weeks I don't.
Run the test. Poem one needs the backstory (question one: no), opens on an empty summary line (two: no), never turns (three: no), and ends by explaining its own sadness (four: no). Poem two works cold, opens inside a specific act, turns on that small confession in the final line, and ends on a choice rather than a message. Four yeses against zero. Yet I would bet real money on which one the poet loves more, because poem one contains the actual goodbye and poem two only contains milk. The judge, though, will cry over the milk. Judges always cry over the milk. The theme of love wins contests most reliably when it arrives disguised as groceries.
The Submission That Taught Me This the Hard Way
Years ago I had two poems and one entry fee. Poem A was about my grandfather's death, written in the raw month after it. Poem B was about repainting his boat, written a year later, almost as an exercise. I submitted A, because how could I not, and it vanished without a ripple. On a whim I sent B to a smaller prize the next season, and it placed. The note from the judge singled out the exact image I had considered too small to matter: the old paint color still showing through the new one at the waterline. Poem A held my grief. Poem B held a boat the reader could grieve over. It took me an embarrassing number of years to understand that this was not a fluke but a law.
Breaking Ties When Two Poems Both Pass
Sometimes the test produces a draw. Two poems, four yeses each, one slot. These tie-breakers settle it, in order:
- The read-aloud winner. Read both to an empty room. One of them will feel better in your mouth. Sound is scored everywhere, even when the rubric does not name it.
- The riskier poem. Final rounds reward nerve. If one poem is safer and one is stranger, send the stranger one to a contest with multiple judging rounds.
- The shorter poem, if quality is equal. A tight fourteen lines beats a loose thirty in a crowded field, because it can be reread on the spot, and rereads win arguments at the final table.
- The one you can defend line by line. Go through each poem and justify every single line's existence. The poem with fewer passengers wins.
One more tie-breaker exists, and it is unscientific but real: send the poem you are slightly afraid of. Fear on the writer's side of the page has a strange habit of turning into electricity on the reader's side. The safe twin will still be there next month, and most contests run monthly anyway, so a tie is really just a two-month schedule.
What If Nothing Passes the Test?
Then you have learned something worth more than an entry fee: your best poem is not written yet, or more likely, it is written and just needs its throat-clearing removed and its ending trusted. Take the candidate with the most yeses and repair the noes, they are all fixable in an evening except question one, which usually asks for surgery. And keep the rhythm of a deadline in your life anyway. A monthly contest window, like Writory's 1st to the 25th with results and a full five-criteria score on the 30th, does something private deadlines never manage: it makes choosing, finishing, and letting go a habit instead of a crisis, alongside poets doing the same thing in more than fifty countries.
Choose Like a Judge, Love Like a Poet
Keep loving your favorite poem. Frame it, read it at family dinners, let it hold what it holds. Just stop asking it to compete, because contests are not a ranking of what poems mean to their writers, and thank goodness, since nobody can judge that. They are a ranking of what poems do to strangers. Pick the piece that does the most with the least help from you, run it through the five questions one final time, and put it in front of a real score. Then watch closely, because the results will teach you the deepest version of this lesson: the poem you almost did not send is so often the one that comes back with a ribbon on it.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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