Welcome to the Newcastle Poetry Prize newsletter.

We are asked many questions about the competition but the real experts are our judges -- poets themselves. They have complete authority over the selection of the winners so we thought you'd like to hear some of their thoughts on what makes a great poem.

The Competition: Hunter Writers Centre invites any Australian (including those living overseas) to enter a poem up to 200 lines. More than $20,000 in prizes will be awarded and 30 poems published in the 2016 anthology.  For submission details, please see our website. The prize is awarded by the University of Newcastle. The prize to a poet under 36 years is awarded by the Harri Jones family in memory of their father.

I like poems that tell me a story and are hyper lucid. I also like them to slide into the hypnagogic logic -- like when you’re falling asleep, half awake, half asleep.

Things make perfect sense in a dream. I like that sense of heightened reality that you get in a poem.  It kind of imbues it with this sense of otherworldness, that you don’t have to live in the literal all the time. The evocation of the other side, the nonrational, but perfectly valid.

I think it's quite hard to do this...There's one poet, Linda Godfrey, who has done a brilliant job of capturing a sense of conversation between two people. She has this interesting dialogue but you can’t place why it's so funny. I see it as deconstructed language, she’s pulled things apart and put them together and they coalesced into something delightful.

I think the thing I love is the concision – the abilty to load up every word with a number of jobs to do, a number of engines which speed it along, amplify the meaning and where you have an allusion of words and sense. There’s a lot of ambiguity in a poem which I really like. This means words do a lot a more work (in poetry) than in prose.

Poems drag out homophones, look alikes, slide off a poetic reference . . . it's where language is working as hard as it possibly can for you. You have something happening where you have a keener sense of what language can do.  If it reads well, you get a high-end synesthesia. It translates into sense and motion. I like things acutely observed in the world -- so unlikely but illuminating. I like that so much: words that explain how life works.

The English poet Jean Sprackland has a wonderful poem in Tilt:  She watches as a role of silk on a mercer's counter unspools itself on to the floor.  It’s like it has a life of its own. She has a love poem called Birthday Poem that captures this and that’s what life is like.  It looks beautiful as it flahes off.  She catches the joy of this fleetingness. I love the joyfulness in poetry, people who tell you how happy they are, not just how miserable they are.

I don’t want the long sort of snot of misery on the sleeve… this morning I was reading this old Welsh poem, The Rattlebag, by Dafydd Ap Gwilyn – this famous poem about the penis.  It’s very funny! He says, “it’s too much trouble, I consider you the vilest of rolling pins."

I like a bit of mischief in my poetry.  That’s fun. 

Read all about Carol Jenkins here

Sam was recently interviewed on ABC radio. Here are highlights from his interview:

I was very lucky to be born to a family of established writers. I was able to look at the legacy of established writers. The NPP is a chance for emerging and established poets to hone their skills and be judged by their peers.

I write poetry every day. Every day I write about something different. Poetry has become a career for me and the work varies: I write poetic essays for journals or receive commissions to write poems for literary journals such as Lifted Brow and Overland and Cordite or the Saturday papers.

I think in the near future I believe we will see a lot of the young prose writers turn to poetry in their work because when they are recognised as prose writers it can become a great launching platform for their poetry.

I’m looking forward to judging the Newcastle Poetry Prize and following the poets who enter throughout their career after the competition is over.

Don’t overthink it, writing poetry should be fun. Find words that excite you – in your dictionary, in your thesaurus, in all your reading. Good luck!

Beginning poets must allow the poem to be their guide, and while we should never relinquish control, we need to loosen our grip, see what happens, and then adjust, tighten, change, reassess, stand back, look away, come close, and cut, cut, cut, cut.

I love poems that surprise and delight me as I read, explore, question, and rethink how I see the world because of a poet's startling use of metaphor, simile, syntax and sense of rhythm. There are complex and strange things at work within the best poems that operate as a kind of spell-making. Some of these include:

* the way a poet has judiciously and cleverly aligned vowel sounds with consonants
* embedding half-rhymes for a word/words even two-sentences distant can be hugely influential on a reader's 'ear'
* where the lines are broken/passed over, or ended
* the use of original, compelling imagery

As you can see, even from this short list, it's simply not enough to just describe something/someone/throw in a bit of scenery, hope that a line-break has been made well, and then send the poem out.

What binds the various parts of a poem together is a fierce attention to the inner music of the language we manipulate; reading WIDELY and constantly; and practising what we learn as we read, honing technique and craft until we can shape and refine and bring a poem to life.

I'm looking forward to reading work by new, emerging and established poets in this year's NPP anthology.

From John Jenkins, a Melbourne-based poet who teaches at the University of Melbourne and La Trobe University:

Personally speaking, and from my own direct involvement and experience, I know that entering the competition has substantially helped with my own development and consolidation as a writer, stimulating me to write pieces that would have never been contemplated without its existence and example.

Over the years, I have encouraged many of my writing students to buy NPP annual anthologies, to haul themselves up on their own self-confidence and enter the prize, and doing so has often – and often very noticeably – helped lift the standard of student work, as well as providing them many keen insights into human creativity.

The NPP emphasizes the importance of locally based arts, too. As well as having a national reach, while generating work of international standard; it firmly places Newcastle as a hub of excellence. Thus the NPP helps decentralize the arts, at the same time as it fosters and re-distributes very fine work across the writing landscape.

The NPP is highly participatory; and moreover, in an eclectic, inclusive and highly democratic way.  It encourages people to take part in cultural life, directly and at first hand, rather than culture be displaced from a distance, or relegated to something tangential, or merely passively consumed, or pre-digested in advance, often by impersonal over-generalized and non-specific commercial ‘culture industries’.

Finally, long may the NPP explore and reveal the enchanted, and enchanting, inner life of poetry; and help to celebrate the music and magic of language itself, which is a possession belonging to all.

Newcastle Poetry Prize anthologies are available from our online shop. These are a terrific resource if you're a poet and want to read the poems selected by judges in the past. Plus we have Completely Surrounded: 30 Years of The Newcastle Poetry Prize, which makes a terrific gift for the poetry lovers in your life. Buy here! Poetry is timeless, so anthologies from ten years ago are still engaging and a wonderful record of the best of Australian poets.