Okay children, let’s get back to the main topic.
Thursday is National Poetry Day. What are YOU doing to celebrate? I’ll be at the Southbank Centre, where from 4-6pm I’ll be Poetry Butchering again, as I did in June, wielding a deft and painless blade over the poems people bring me. I think you just sign up on the day, so if you want to try it out, come along. Clore Ballroom.
And in the meantime. You could say there are three Forward Prizes this year. There’s the one in which the festivities are split into two events, one last night in gritty (I mean ‘super-trendy’) Brick Lane, where the poets read, and one tonight at the Southbank Centre, where the poems will be read by Ac-Tors, and the winners will be announced. There’s the one in which a poem on the shortlist turned out to be by someone who was outed as a plagiarist, and he withdrew his poem from the competition (although swearing it is all original), and the chair of judges Jeanette Winterson made a silly remark. And finally, there’s the one where a pretty amazing shortlist has been brought together by a serious panel of judges, and three people are about to receive a really serious career boost.
Oh. sorry, career boost, that’s four. I know. And the thing is, if you accept the idea of a ‘best’ collection, first collection, or poem, every book on this list is good enough to win. Clearly competitions serve a function and it is a good function, of bringing readers to books etc; but not all great books even make it onto shortlists. How can they?
So last night was the poets’ event, where all the shortlisted poets read from their books for five minutes each at Rough Trade East, compered by the good-humoured performance poet and DJ Mr Gee. This is new; there’s never been an open event for the Forward Prize, and Susannah Herbert, whose first year this is as director, says it is an Experiment. I get the feeling her entire project is to bring the proverbial ‘new audiences’ in, and the setting – a giant, warehouse-like record shop pretty much made of whitewashed concrete, with a slightly ad hoc performance area – definitely felt like a departure. It was a bit of a scrabble, even aside from the seating question. I arrived a bit late, half an hour after the stated start time, and had missed the entire first half. Which was one poet longer than the second half. Someone told me they started even before the time advertised. I didn’t feel like the target audience, and nor do I feel like the target audience for tonight – and I’m not sure I really mind that, but it’s worth asking, if the goal is to raise the Forward’s profile to a TS Eliotish level, whether a record shop in Brick Lane is the best way to do it? I’ll just say a couple of the poets looked a bit incongruous, and my left foot started to fall asleep from standing on the concrete. The talk was all of tonight: ‘So, how do you feel about someone else reading your poem? Do you know who it’s going to be?’ And unlike the TS Eliot, these prizes are not judged by the reading, so there were no judges present.
(The judges, by the way, are: actor/director Samuel West. journalist David Hill, and poets Paul Farley and Sheenagh Pugh. Chaired by Jeanette Winterson. So, for context for the discussions, the prizes are judged by majority non-poets.)
I’ll miss tonight’s event, as it’s the start of Poetic Technique term, so won’t hear the thespian readings for myself. The debate is raging all over Facebook, and there were two articles in last night’s Evening Standard, and, well, it’s got people talking. (But has it got people talking about actors, not poems?) Personally I think actors is fine, for the audience that has paid and wants to see actors – but for an award ceremony? It seems to me if you’re a writer, the one place you really get to shine would be the event where you’re awarded a prize for having written the thing all by yourself. Especially for your first collection. Especially as performing one’s own poems is embedded into poetry culture; as with the layer between Inner and Outer, the membrane between Page and Stage is unstable and permeable. This seems like an attempt to ‘bring poetry to the masses’ by turning it slightly into something else.
Anyway, we’ll see. I’m openminded. Maybe they’ll all sell far more books than ever before and all get onto telly. And I’m told te actors are all doing it for next to nothing; I think they genuinely do love poetry, and want to have that connection. So we’ll see. I keep saying that.
Then there’s the sad addendum, where CJ Allen has removed his poem from the shortlist for Best Poem, after admitting that he had plagiarised six poems from Matthew Welton – see preceding ruckus for info. I’m not sure he thought at the time that what he was doing was plagiarism – see again preceding ruckus – and he seems depressed now, as well he might be. Withdrawing was clearly the right thing to do. Jeanette Winterson, the Chair of the judges, issued a statement saying the job of the judges is to find good poems, not to find plagiarists, which has got everybody talking all over again! We’ve all got so much to talk about! And none of it is the poems! You can read CJ Allen’s poem in the Forward anthology, though, and I note it’s set in 2019. Maybe he’ll be rehabilitated and it can be read again by then. He swears it is all original work, but that’s the whole problem: nobody can tell. It would have been read out by Juliet Stevenson.
So, like, the books. The wonderful books. It’s a really varied list, especially the first collections. I’d hate to be having to try and choose, especially knowing that someone who wrote a fine book was going to miss out on that career boost which they equally deserve.
It’s hard even to quote. Some of the most exciting things in these books are cumulative., and I guess that’s a bit of a thread running through them. Michael Symmons Roberts’ metaphysical Drysalter, for example, is a subtly structured collection with repetitions and echoes in their titles, words and themes, womven around a double meaning in the book’s title. Dan O’Brien’s stark War Reporter builds its effect with the quotidian language of emails from the war photographer Paul Watson. Steve Ely’s Oswald’s Book of Hours is what I’ll (instead of psycho-geography) call psycho-history, full of voices and sequences and long poems that pull eras together and sift through the layers of time that sit on a place. (It also lies close to the terrain of a recent sequence I wrote, so I found it very exciting to read.) Marianne Burton’s ‘Meditations on the Hours’ anchor her book; Rebecca Goss’ Her Loss, a spare, conversational excavation of the grief, gets momentum from condensed ordinariness. Emily Berry’s Dear Boy is witty, savvy, technically assured. Glyn Maxwell’s Pluto is metaphysical, charged, personal, Plutovian. Metaphysics seems to be a theme here too – these books are concerned with the membrane between the inner and the outer, and the way things seem to see between. Jacob Polley’s Havocs is full of formal invention, and has echoes of both the mystical and the historical. Sinead Morrissey’s Parallax gives voice to voices past and present, creates poems out of the quotidian. Hannah Lowe’s poems to her father (whose gambling nickname was ‘Chick’) and Adam White’s lush paean to workers both show us how daily reality shines.
So in some ways they’re not all that different after all! At the heart of them all, of course, words.
‘I have discovered the meaning of life and it is curatorial’, writes Emily Berry.
‘No one ever got the hanging of a door right/first time round’, writes Adam White. ’Thats what makes it beautiful/ to go back to…’
Jacob Polley says: ‘What walls and gables, wonders still of workmanship./ Whoever’s stronghold this was, havoc’s jumbled it…’
‘Hard to remember, now there is nothing here, / that there was once nothing here’, writes Glyn Maxwell.
‘Before there was a man on the pavement/ there was a man falling’, writes Hannah Lowe. ‘There were/ nineteen floors of glass and concrete/ and a baby in the penthouse/ screaming.’
‘… moon in its birdbath, wind in the grass – ‘ says Marianne Burton – ‘something is getting up, filing its iron nails’.
Rebecca Goss: ‘On the wall, petunias,/ painted in Walberswick’.
Dan O’Brien: ‘Blood is scattered like what it is, or jewels/ around the body of a seal’.
Michael Symmons Roberts: ‘Then one day the world drops into your hands/ like a bruised fruit, a-buzz with what you take/ for wasps…’
Steve Ely: ‘conies creep under doilied blackthorns/ and from the king-cup meadow, the hot fitch prowls…’
Sinéad Morrissey: ‘…and I clutched my lemonade and was convinced.’
*****
And I’d just like to award one prize right now, to the two smallest presses represented in this list, the inimitable CB Editions, and Doíre Press, who publish Adam White. Endpapers! Canary yellow and pure orange respectively. Glorious.
I promise to write some much shorter posts very soon.