Picador Poetry Prize

http://www.picador.com/Poetry/prize/picadorpoetryprize.aspx

This is interesting. Not because one might as well have a go at it. It's worth taking note if you stand to win one thousand pounds with no risk whatsoever and if they want to pay you it, it would be rude not to let them. The likelihood of me winning it won't be great and I won't be their ideal sort of winner but it's a shot to nothing.

What is more interesting comes in Don Paterson's tips to would-be entrants, If you don't actually read poetry, but fancy having a go anyway, don't.
This is undoubtedly good advice because if you're not the sort of poet they have in mind as a winner, you won't win and their sort of poet has read quite a lot of poetry. They don't want to be shown something new and out of the ordinary, the like of which the world has never seen before. They want to give the prize to someone who can join their club.
Ideally you will be formal in an informal way, you will be playful and post-modern, meaningful in ways that are not quite so easy to pin down. There is this paradox in contemporary poetry that although you need to be renewing the language, seeing the world anew and constantly refreshing it, you also need to be doing it within orthodox constraints, in their way, not too outlandish and don't scare the horses too much. It is a possible reason why the Identity Parade anthology offered a seemingly endless pageant of identikit, creative writing poets suffocating under their welter of directives and closely-observed principles.
Don's advice is good because it should save the judges a lot of time reading and throwing away hopeless entries and the entrants a lot of heartache when they don't win. There will be a lot of poets expecting to win because they inevitably see their own poems as special in the way that we all think our own blood is better than and not to be diluted with anyone else's. Many of the entrants are likely to be highly erudite young guns for who the prize has arrived at just the right time. They will have written their thousands of words on why they write the poems they write, their styles and influences (as I'm told MA Creative Writing students are asked to). It's unlikely to be some talented hick equivalent of Susan Boyle, they want the next Don Paterson, a replacement for Michael Donaghy and a name to add to their stable of poets. But ideally, if the winner isn't going to be a composite, designer poet for the age of this strange pluralist orthodoxy, Don's tips could also suggest that if you've read too much poetry and think you know all about it and want to give it a go, please don't.