Editor Interview: The Reuben Rose Memorial Poetry Competition

Poems from all over

We are a sister project, or sibling project, of the annual poetry anthology Voices Israel, and our winning poems are hosted in a supplement to that anthology. We admire Voices Israel for persisting through more than half a century, and we also admire the Israel Association of Writers in English, which publishes the literary journal "arc."

Our panel of judges turns over every year, and they judge the poems without seeing the authors' names, so we couldn't easily play favorites if we tried.

As a publication, we're supplementary to the annual Voices Israel anthology, but editorially we're entirely independent. We have the advantage of coupling with a good-sized publication without the disadvantage of editorial uniformity.

Read the submission guidelines. Take seriously the part about broad eligibility. We're under the aegis of Voices Israel but poems for the competition don't need to involve any matters touching on Israel or on religion. We'll gladly consider poems about love in Paraguay, or about public transportation in Boston, or about the atmospheric pressure on Mars.

The ideal submission combines an interesting topic, an original approach, an elegant structure, and a freedom from overused phrasing.

Most often, they run past the maximum length. This year (2025) we upped the maximum from 41 lines to 60 (including epigraph, dedication, etc. etc.). We hope there will be fewer overruns now.

All we need to know is your name, your e-mail address, and (in case we need to send you an award certificate) your postal address. We care how well your poem is written, not who you are.

We choose judges whose evaluations we trust. I can't tell you for certain whether or not, if they take a quick dislike to a poem, they read all the way to the end.

Normally each poem is ranked on a scale of 1 to 10 by each of our three judges, and the winners are those with the highest totals. If there are tied scores, we may go through some kind of runoff procedure, which may vary from year to year but is kept as objective as possible. And we may run a quick check to eliminate poems that have previously been published.

This is by no means a fulltime job for me, and I'm much more an administrator than an editor. But my typical work includes such tasks as downloading entries and regularizing their formatting for the judges (so that the judges aren't influenced by differences in fonts, or by illustrations, or whatever), and writing to submitters to advise them to correct and re-submit their work if it's violated our guidelines, and sometimes asking for tiny adjustments in the winning poems (tweaking the punctuation, correcting the grammar, nothing major).

We edit very little, often zero, and we don't implement edits without the author's permission.

No, we grant the awards ourselves.

We charge an entry fee that is intended to cover costs. But it we wind up with a shortfall, the Voices Israel Group of Poets in English makes it up.

We announce the competition through many Facebook groups and a few LinkedIn groups, it is publicized in the newsletter of the Voices Israel Group of Poets in English, and we e-mail an announcement to the previous year's entrants. The winning poems are published together with the annual Voices Israel anthology and are read out at an award ceremony on Zoom.