Enter Your Weirdest Poem: The Unusual Poems Contests Reward
A contest judge argues for submitting your strangest work, explains the difference between earned weirdness and random weirdness, and gives a five-question audit to run before you hit send.
The poem that won our contest last spring was about a funeral for a snail. Fourteen lines, a child officiating, a matchbox coffin, the whole neighborhood of one backyard in attendance. I scored roughly two hundred entries that month, and I can still recite its closing image. I could not tell you a single line from the forty competent poems about sunsets that surrounded it. That is the whole secret of the unusual poems contests remember: judges are drowning in competence and starving for surprise.
So here is my contrarian advice, the advice I give at workshops and watch poets refuse to take. Do not enter your most polished poem. Enter your weirdest one, the one you almost did not show anybody. In unusual poems, contests find their winners far more often than the submission numbers would suggest, and I want to show you why, and also where this strategy goes wrong, because there is a kind of weird that fails every time.
The Unusual Poems Contests Remember, and Why Judges Forget the Rest
Picture the judge's evening honestly. She is forty poems deep. She has read six poems about grandmothers' hands, five about the ocean as a metaphor for feelings, four that end with the speaker realizing something at a window. None of these are bad. Most are technically cleaner than the snail funeral was. But scoring is a comparative act performed by a tired human, and the fortieth well-made sunset cannot compete with the first matchbox coffin.
This is not a flaw in judging. It mirrors how readers work everywhere. Memory is the real scoreboard, and memory files things by difference, not by polish. When two poems earn similar marks on craft, the one the judge can still see two days later wins the tiebreak, and the tiebreak is where contests are decided.
Judges do not remember the best poem in the stack. They remember the only one of its kind.
The safe poem strategy assumes judging is subtractive, that the winner is the poem with the fewest flaws. Ask any working judge. We are not subtracting. We are waiting, sometimes for hours, to feel something we have not felt that day.
The Two Kinds of Weird
Now the correction, because I have also scored plenty of strange poems that failed, and they fail in one predictable way. There are two kinds of weird, and only one of them wins.
Earned weirdness is a strange doorway into a real feeling. The snail funeral was never about the snail. It was about a child rehearsing grief at a size she could carry, and every odd detail served that truth. The strangeness was a lens, and the lens was pointed at something human.
Random weirdness is strangeness pointed at nothing. Surreal images stacked for effect, non sequiturs standing in for depth, obscurity worn as a costume. These poems mistake confusion for mystery. A judge feels the difference within five lines, because earned weirdness makes us lean in and random weirdness makes us shrug. Mystery makes the reader want answers. Confusion makes the reader want dinner.
The test is simple: can you say, in one plain sentence, what your strange poem is actually about underneath? "The snail funeral is about a child practicing for real loss." If you cannot produce that sentence, the poem is not weird, it is unfinished.
A Worked Example: Making a Safe Poem Strange
Watch the move in miniature. Here is a perfectly acceptable, perfectly forgettable stanza of the kind I read every single month:
"After you left, the house felt empty. / I wandered from room to room, / touching the things you used to touch, / missing you more with every step."
Every word is clear, and nothing is alive. Now the same emotional situation, approached through one committed strange choice, the house itself as the abandoned party:
"The house keeps setting your place at dinner. / I have spoken to it twice. / At night I hear the hallway / practicing your footsteps, getting them wrong."
Same loss. Same rooms. But the second version gives the judge an image she has not met before, and notice that the weirdness is disciplined: one conceit, followed all the way through, in service of an emotion anyone can enter. That last move, letting a familiar feeling arrive through an unfamiliar image, is what our glossary calls defamiliarization, and it is cousin to the concrete imagery work that separates finalists from the field. If your strange poems refuse line breaks entirely, that is fine too: the prose poem has been a home for the gloriously odd for a century and a half.
The Weirdness Audit: Five Questions Before You Submit
Run your strange poem through this sequence tonight, in order, before you enter it anywhere.
- Name the true subject in one sentence. If the sentence starts with "it's sort of about," revise until it does not. Earned weirdness always knows what it carries.
- Count your conceits. One central strangeness, fully committed to, beats five decorative ones. If the hallway practices footsteps and the fridge writes letters and the lawn is an ocean, cut two.
- Check the entry point. The first three lines must give the reader one solid thing to stand on: a scene, a speaker, a situation. Strange poems earn their flights by establishing the ground first.
- Read it to one honest person. Ask only, "what is this about?" If they land anywhere near your one-sentence answer, the weirdness is transmitting. If they stare, the poem knows something it has not said.
- Confirm the feeling is common even if the furniture is not. Snail funerals are rare. Rehearsing grief is universal. The stranger the surface, the more universal the floor beneath it needs to be.
The Entry That Taught Me to Say This Out Loud
A few seasons ago one poet entered twice in the same month, which the rules allowed. Poem one was her workshop poem: a tidy, competent piece about autumn as a season of letting go. Poem two, she confessed later, was entered almost as a dare to herself: a poem in which she interviews her own anxiety as if it were a disgraced politician, complete with evasive answers and a scandal it refuses to discuss.
The autumn poem scored in the middle of the pack, where every autumn poem scores. The interview poem took third place, and two judges independently flagged it as the entry they kept thinking about. When I wrote to congratulate her, she told me the winning poem had lived in her drafts folder for a year because it "didn't seem like a contest poem." I have thought about that phrase ever since. The poems poets withhold as too strange are so often the exact poems judges are waiting for, and nobody tells them, so I am telling you.
What the Safe Poem Costs You
Let me be fair to the safe poem. It will not embarrass you. It will score respectably. Nobody ever lost points for a clean sonnet about the sea. But respectable scores are the most expensive result in poetry, because they teach you nothing and change nothing. A strange poem that places teaches you what your real voice can do. A strange poem that crashes teaches you where your control runs out. Both lessons are worth more than another quiet seventy-something.
- Safe poems compete against the largest possible field: everyone else's safe poems.
- Strange poems compete in a field of one, which is the only field where being yourself is a strategy.
- And judges, remember, are readers first. We came to the stack hoping to be surprised. Refusing to surprise us is not caution. It is a missed appointment.
Enter the One You Are Scared Of
Here is the assignment, and I mean it as an assignment. Open your drafts folder and find the poem you have never submitted anywhere, the one that feels too odd, too specific, too much like the inside of your own head. Run the five-question audit. Fix what the audit catches. Then send it into the world before the doubt regenerates.
If you want a low-stakes place to run the experiment, Writory's monthly contest scores every entry across five criteria, creativity among them, so your strange poem gets a number instead of a silence, and you will see precisely whether the weirdness landed. Enter the strange one this month and let a stranger tell you what your dare was worth.
The snail gets a funeral. The safe poem gets a shrug. Choose accordingly.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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