Instead of a helpful critique of a rejected manuscript, a poet is more apt to get something like this for the trouble of having submitted to a contest:

Okay. But is this an invitation, maybe one of hundreds, to submit to a new contest? Will this new contest cost the poet another 30 bucks? If that poet's work was 'terrific', why wasn't it published? What were the editors really looking for?

My own first book-length publication of poetry, Ohio Seduction (Bizzaro, 1975), was solicited by an editor after he heard me read from a draft of it. I love that book, in part because it was so easy to publish. I was fortunate: the editor had some sort of reaction to the poems he heard and decided that manuscript met his unstated criteria. That experience might have ended very differently if I had submitted it blindly to a contest. I doubt I could get that manuscript published in 2017. (Saying so makes me feel even more aware of the instability of and the significant role of context in evaluation – so I'm even more hopeful about the influence of the work found in these pages by Theune and Broad.)

While offering so much, the contemporary American poetry scene, a scene that is very difficult to comprehend and getting more difficult to understand as the years roll by, is replete with dissatisfactions. Throughout my career, I have felt such dissatisfactions – especially those involving the assessment of poems – and in my scholarly work I have attempted to address many of them.