On receiving the Maverick Award and Contest Culture

Those who know me well also know that I rarely enter poetry contests—for many reasons. When I do, it’s because something about the organization really makes me want to support it, and I soon forget that I even entered it. So, in September 2022 when I received an email from the ruth weiss Foundation that my poem “was it for this” from my manuscript hand-me-down was selected for their Maverick Award, I was quite surprised and, of course, excited and had to sit with it for a bit. The more I thought about the poem and the organization and being a maverick, it began to make sense.

When I was doing an M.A./M.F.A. at New College of California, I saw a flyer somewhere about a reading by ruth weiss at the Black Cat in North Beach. It was 1998 and a friend from the college got me to go. I’d heard of beat poetry accompanied by jazz but had never heard it. I was even surprised that the Black Cat was still around. I walked down the stair to this basement bar and found a dark corner to sip a beer. As the alcohol did its magic the musicality of ruth’s voice and the depth of the stand-up bass poured through me, took me to places her words stirred up in my mind. Years later when my husband composed music to my poetry and we performed together, it’s to the alchemy of that night that I return. After the reading, I spoke with ruth’s manager/agent seated next to me. He spoke of all the places ruth read and tours of Europe, and I began to see how one becomes an poet by just creating ones work and the possibilities will open. A year later, I found ruth’s book Single Out and read it, inspired by how much meaning and richly ambiguity in so few words. I saw her read just once more—at the Art House in Berkeley where I was able to speak to her after and she signed her book.

Watching the film ruth weiss, the Beat Goddess gave me a much deeper understanding of ruth’s life, the historic struggles she faced, and the breakthroughs her maverick tenacity and poetic spirit led to.  Coming from a family that too fled Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, I feel her story in my bones. I also closely sense ruth’s fingers punching the keys of her old Royal typewriter because it is the same typewriter that I typed my poetry on in high school, a Royal typewriter my mother bought in Chicago where she grew up. I feel the award is a gift to reconsider my work in the longer lineage that it has come.

I was also so please that the ruth weiss Foundation honors the work of all the finalists, publishing their poems on such a well-designed website. This is what I feel awards should be about—recognizing a company of poets. With so much of the literary world being about “contest-culture,” I’m very pleased to be honored by an organization that goes beyond competition to community.

So what do I have against poetry contests? It’s not difficult to intuit the basics: hierarchy, the idea of one winner, the discouragement of all others, the preference for certain kinds of poems, the fees to enter, etc. Having long served on the Northern Californian Book Awards, I also know that some committee members will favor books that have already won an award for our award—rather than judging the work itself. As for competition, sometimes it is needed to get writers to up their game, but there’s enough competition just to get published. And a publication often creates a community, not just one single winner. On the other hand, contests and awards do wonders to publicize books, writers, and poets. We at the NCBA think of our task in nominating books in several categories as creating a reading list for anybody who’s interested in a book of poetry or a novel or creative nonfiction or translation. For small and micro publishers, contests are a way to earn much needed funds. Contests for books help fund the design and printing of winning books. This is what American publishers must do since they have little government funding.

Contest-culture is what we are entrenched in—so I’m pleased to have received one award in my life—in honor of a poet I so respected, from an organization that honors all nominees—and now I can go on.