Submitted by Catherine Chandler on Tue, 03/31/2009 - 07:55.
Dear Fellow Poets,
In choosing the finalists from the sixty-one sonnets submitted to me for this year’s bake-off, I relied on the wisdom of poets, the expertise of scholars and, of course, my own gut feelings, what I call the “goose-bump factor,” which may or may not be wise, but there it is.
My decision matrix was based on the following four main criteria (weights in brackets), all of which had sub-criteria as well:
(A) craft, sound, mechanics, images, mood (2)
(B) true to the spirit of the sonnet (3)
(C) universality/transcendence (2)
(D) goose-bumps (3)