Experimenting with poetry, part 2

It has been some time since I posted the first part of my socio-poetic experiment, attempting to analyse the poetry that appeals to the contemporary online market.  I have now expanded my 'research' sufficiently to update my findings.  Once more, I note that this is purely subjective, with no scientific or statistical validity.

The first expansion of the scope of my experiment has been to include online magazines and reviews, as well as online competitions.  The second and possibly more significant expansion has been to probe the trends in the UK, as well as in the USA.  In expanding like this, I have had a handful of publication successes (more on that below).

My two main sources of input for my entirely subjective conclusions have been: 1) comparisons of winning or published work with work that I know was not successful, such as that which I submitted myself; and 2) where available, published feedback from judges or editors, although this is too rarely available and tends to be fairly generic in nature.

I will jump straight into my impressions at this stage.  These may, of course, change or continue to develop over time.

1. For the United States, I have strengthened a couple of my original opinions.

• The predominant point of view taken in competitively successful poems is first person. I have little way of knowing, of course, if this use of 'I' is mostly truthfully autobiographical, or if first person is simply used as a technique to make the content appear more intimate or more real.
• Whereas I noted last time the overwhelming use of grammatically standard prose, formatted into the appearance of poetry, I would now take this idea further.  Beyond the prose poem, it seems to me that online poetry has been largely taken over by flash fiction.  Given the preference for the use of the first person, this often leads to the surface appearance of a textually complex journal entry, sometimes confessional but more likely describing an event or another person seen though the author's eyes.  I have come to think of this as 'reality poetry', if narrative in form; or as 'show-and-tell poetry', if it is more condensed as a scene or character sketch.  
• (At this point, I should note that these principles often do not hold true for poetry that reaches mainstream book form, of the sort that you might find on the very limited poetry shelf of an actual brick-and-mortar bookshop.  In these cases, the publishers or editors seem to work with different criteria, but I am not attempting to analyse those here.)
• Another apparent ingredient for success is the shock of the new or the weird. A weirdness in language use or a weirdness in turn of events, for example, seems sometimes to be enough to merit publication.  There seems occasionally to be the view that if the narrative of a poem is wrapped in unfamiliar packaging, such as in phrasing, contextual positioning, or metaphor, then the whole work must have intrinsic value.
• Beyond general online poetry competitions and generic online poetry publications, where an unfriendly characterisation of many successful entries may be 'soap opera in poetic form', successful submissions to topic-based online publications, such as for politics, which is currently a hot theme, also tend to follow the principles above: first person, vers libre-cum-flash fiction, with an element of weird.

2. For the United Kingdom, I have started to form separate opinions.

• Successful entries in general online poetry competitions tend to be thematically diverse, encompassing wider social issues more often than in the USA.  It is notable that the one success that I have had in an open UK competition was political in content, whereas in the USA (so far), this theme has only been taken up in places that are specifically looking for it.
• There is more of a focus on what you might call poetic stylistics.  While free verse remains very much in pole position, some winners that I have seen in general poetry competitions have taken quite strict forms in terms of rhythm or, less frequently, rhyme.  One open competition that I entered was even won by a sonnet, which I could not see happening in the current poetic climate in the USA, other than in a competition specifically for classical forms.  
• Within this, however, the preference for a first person point of view seems to be similar to that in the USA.
• The key point in the UK seems to be uniqueness: a unique point of view or a previously unconsidered setting in history or society, for example.  This is similar to, but different from, the weirdness that seems to be sought in the USA. Within the terms of this comparison, I would describe uniqueness as having less of a shock factor than weirdness, and more of a sense of exploration and discovery.

3. Finally, I have to appraise critically my own sense of what is 'good poetry'.

• I have had four pieces published online in just over a year: one in the UK and three in the USA. Links to these are here (UK), here (two poems in one link), and here.  (Note the use of the first person in all four published pieces.)  This is not a huge number, so I obviously have some way to go in being able to craft something that is successful. However, ...
• I have submitted poems that I know to be inconsistent in quality.  Let's say that I mentally grade my poems as A, B, C, or Fail.  Contrary to the popular and predictable notion that you should only ever submit your best work, I have experimented by submitting poems from all four of these grades.  Unsurprisingly, all the poems in my self-defined grade of Fail have failed.  More surprisingly, all the poems in my self-defined grade of A have also failed.  Of my four publication successes, three have been from my own grade B, and one has been from my own grade C.  (I won't reveal which one of the above I consider to merit only C.)
• This leads me to conclude that my own sense of quality for a poem is somewhat out of whack with that of many judges and editors.  So the big question remains: do I try to work to their (probably more professional) standards, or do I try to remain truthful to my own educated but fallible sense of quality?

Based on all this fluff and supposition, there are a couple of hypotheses that I will take forward as I continue with this project:

Hypothesis 1, if you will, is that my style is overly 'poetic' for the US market.  Part of my next step may be to experiment with a style that you might term the 'flash fiction poem'.

Hypothesis 2 is that my content is insufficiently unique for the UK market.  This is less easy to test as a hypothesis, because conjuring uniqueness in poetry is not a simple act.  Heck, you might even consider it to be art!

However, what is life without a challenge?  Onward....