Porlock's first issue has shown that poetry journals could readily find multiple guest editors who aren't poets. The Robert Siegel Prize, a later addition to this issue, combined elements of The Best American Poems, The Pushcart Prize and The Forward Prizes but wasn’t confined to the US or to the UK and Ireland. Robert Siegel was a poet, novelist and teacher. Prize anthologies utilizing the expertise of poets and the disinterested judgment of representative readers could become the best places to look for contemporary poetry and might persuasively confirm its cultural significance.

 

Print and online magazines were invited to submit up to five poems they published in 2023. Submissions were to be initially divided among eight poets. Each would choose as many as six poems; 48 or fewer would have been sent on to 15 lay judges who'd each select no more than five poems.

Judges and initial readers could choose no poems at all and would recuse themselves if they knew a poet personally or were directly connected to a submitting journal. A poem that couldn't be initially appraised by one reader would be passed on to another. Judge recusals would be noted.The submission period ran from January 1, 2024 to the end of February. Initial readers would have chosen poems over the next 30 days and judges would have made their selections by May 1st.

Issue 1 has links to the websites of readers and judges and would have had links to the texts of selected poems. Poems would have been ranked by how frequently they were chosen.

 

I emailed about 800 individual Siegel Prize invitations to poetry editors and sent three general invitations via the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses to other members. When the submission period ended at the end of February, just 29 journals had sent poems. I closed down the contest and thanked the editors who were willing to participate in it. Eight poets and 15 representative lay readers had volunteered to read poems for what can remain a model for future awards, as Porlock could serve as a model for journals. 

 

I then asked Porlock and Siegel participants and sympathizers to forward an email to potential Whitman’s Audience appraisers.

SJ