Not long ago I was a judge, one of three, in an annual poetry competition, the Hippocrates Prize. It was the first time in my life that I had been the judge in a competition of any kind and I found it surprisingly difficult, even painful. Normally decisive, if not necessarily judicious, in my literary judgment, I became timid, hesitant, fearful, and vacillating. It was an interesting and salutary experience.
Unusually something of practical importance rested on my judgment (conjointly with that of the other judges, of course): The winner in each of two categories, the first for a poem of fewer than fifty lines written by anyone who had ever worked in the National Health Service in Great Britain, the second for a poem written in English by anyone who worked in healthcare anywhere in the world, would receive a prize worth slightly in excess of $7,500. The winners would be elated, but the losers would be correspondingly disappointed and even downcast, not so much by the dashing of their financial hopes as by the lack of recognition or rejection of their work. I guessed that they would recover quickly enough from their chagrin, however. Their self-esteem would be equal to the task: Lord, what fools these judges be! At any rate, that was what I told myself when a book of mine came near to winning a prize but another was preferred.
I was confronted by my own lack of poetic education and knowledge.
