Random thoughts. Is competing important? Can you be content competing with just yourself or can you only be motivated by trying to convince yourself you're better than others?

I think it's less about "competing" and more about comparing your work with the work of other writers you admire, friends or other authors, and learning to bring what you appreciate into your own works when you can. If you read someone who embraces a lot of wordplay and you find it refreshing, try to incorporate some word play in your next few poems. If you read someone and you find yourself admiring their ability to be succinct, try trimming some fat off your next poem. So on and so forth.

Some of the best visual artists I've seen experiment with many styles. I've seen painters who are also good at sketching, sculptures who are great at painting, on and on. Writing is the same.

If slam poetry is your thing, let slam poetry be your thing. Don't be afraid to explore though. Write 30 haikus in 30 days. Learn to write a persuasive essay. Write a surrealist prose poem. Write a short story about a childhood memory. Do them often. Figure out what makes each easy. Figure out what makes each one difficult. Figure out what makes each one special. Bring what you figure back to your slam poems. See how they grow.

Give up spoken word poetry for a year.

Try new things.

Write a poem when your completely exhausted, in the dark of your basement with no sound and low light. Tuck it away in a drawer and ignore it for two weeks. Wake up early one Sunday morning, make a cup of coffee, sit out back and listen to the birds and rewrite the same poem from scratch. Tuck it away in a drawer and forget about it for two weeks. Pull both out. Compare them. What do you like about each? What do you dislike?

Make five copies of a poem. Give them to five different people and have them read it to you out loud. How does each one sound different? Do they focus on and enunciate different words? Do they have a different rythym than what you had when your first wrote it? Do you like what you hear? Do you dislike it? Why?

Embrace your poetry. It's a part of you. Who you are.

Throw your ego away. They're just words on paper.

No

Thank you yellowoftops for bringing a two-month old post to my attention. I appreciate your comments and those of rd95.

How do you improve your poetry if you don't compete in any some sort of way?

You improve your poetry, as rd95 implies below, by doing it, sharing it, living it.

Competing is fine if you do it for fun, but all judges (of all competitions from the Nobel Prize to the Oscars to the poetry slam down the street) have their own sets of biases drawn from their own educations and the professors whose words they hung on. Our biases lead us to like some things and reject other things. Is there an objective basis for choosing a winner? Is there a rubric?

I don't know.

I've been a judge in a literary competition. I've been on a hiring committee. The process is pretty much the same.

I made somebody feel something once with poetry, so I'll try and answer my best. You'll have to ask lil and _refugee_ to get real answers.

I don't compete. One of the major reasons I don't compete, is that there aren't a lot of competitions I would care to win. And I don't mean that in a sour grapes way, though I probably couldn't win them anyway. I'm judging this by the previous winners of a lot of contests that I hear announced as 'won' on the radio.

This is the lyric poetry winner from last year from poetry society.

Light my face and light the flesh of my flesh,

Light each my eyes and light inside my sight,

Light the light that makes me light in the bones,

And in my hands, light, and in my loins, light,

And light your light before and behind me,

Above and beneath me, light to my right

And light to left, light to my enemies

Who in the moral dark will use my light

Against me, light the dull swords of my ribs,

The thick fist within, light the blood-hot rooms

Pulsing there, light the gates when they swing wide

To the stranger, light more light on my tongue,

In the light, light more light, in the black, light,

and when it's time to snuff this wick—light that light.

It's not terrible. It reminds me of Muslim prayer. That's neat. But it's pretty gimmicky, and I don't learn anything from it. Content wise it's a lot like the Lord's prayer:

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Honestly, was the author not Muslim, and already famous (Phillip Metres),I doubt it would have gotten much attention. This happens all the time in poetry. Recently there was a famous case of a white man who got into the Best American Poetry Anthology only after using a Chinese pen-name. Instead, it gets this crazy academic nonsense: "With admirable conviction and panache, "Devotional (after a Muslim Prayer)" answers affirmatively all of the intuitive and rather vital questions that plague a lyric poem. Yes, the poem is a sonnet and yes it enacts the work of sacred speech and yes by combining the two the poem is enhanced by paradox, sacred light in a secular bottle."

But I'm a layman. I don't like post-70s Jazz either, but for the same reason. When you get so into the craft and science of saying something, you have more trouble saying it naturally. So Jazz doesn't connect with most people, because they can't hear it. But the point of art (for me) is to convey a message through something you've created. These kinds of poems don't connect with me, and so it's either because I can't hear them, or because they have failed in their attempt to convey a message. I think most people give jazz and poetry deference when the piece is popular, because clearly they're missing something that everyone else is hearing, but I approach it from a more 'it does or it doesn't for me' space. I might look stupid to some, but some look stupid to me, so it's balanced.