the poetry is the prize

Well: I’d be lying if I didn’t admit the party is part of the prize, too; but the party is as evanescent – if also as shiny – as the bubbles in a glass, while the record of the award goes on forever (as does, for those who get it, presumably, the prize money – unless they spend it all in one place).

And here endeth the week of prizes: in the UK poetry world, the week of the first alliterative Picador Poetry Prize, and the TS Eliot Prize with its two big evenings in a row, and then the surprise award of the Costa Best Book Prize to a poetry collection – for the second year in a row.

As you can imagine, there is lots being said in all quarters about all three of these. (In fact, in the course of it all I seem to recall having seen something about a forthcoming book of essays by Fiona Sampson, via Chatto, wherein she takes to task the UK poetry world for a lack of argumentative discourse?? Can that really be right? Maybe she means something else.)

We’ve gone straight from the heady delights of the party for the TS Eliots into a fracas about the Choices and Recommendations for their summer number. If I were among the Chosen and Recommended, you’d have heard about it, so you know I’m not. Facebook is abuzz with the usual talk of how small and incestuous the poetry world is, how narrow the band of people who ever seem to get these prizes, the exclusion of the smaller presses (and in particular Salt, which indeed would appear to have a very poor run of luck with the selectors.) Then someone says, well they all seem to be friends, and someone else says you can’t help knowing everyone if you’ve been doing it awhile. Then someone says well it’s always the same three publishers, they’re excluding the small presses, and someone else points to the one small-press book on the list, and then someone else says yes but that publisher used to be an editor at Big Press Central, and then people start bleating on about innovative poetry, and the next thing you know we never landed on the moon at all and the whole thing was a great big -

But then, the critical issue is really the use of that highly suspect word, BEST, which we all, everywhere, fall for every time. “The best poetry collection of 2010.” THE best. What can that even conceivably mean? We all heard (well, okay, those of us who were there) heard Anne Stevenson stand there and talk about the books they LOVED that just couldn’t be crammed into the list, because they aren’t elephants and it isn’t a Volkswagen. I have been advising crestfallen friends all week that there is no such thing as BEST, and that we are in excellent company. For my money (tho it is not quite the same as Mrs Eliot’s, I grant you) there were hardly two books in the year 2010 that could have topped Ian Duhig’s Pandorama or Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s Heavenly Questions – but even that is two books, not one, and they are incredibly different from each other, and I’m glad I don’t have to give all my money to one of them – and that’s aside from all the others I got a lot out of.

But the fact remains that Richard Meier, the winner of the Picador prize, will start life with a much better chance of getting a TS Eliot prize than (say) your average small press poet has had. So that is a great prize. But aside from this chance – just getting your work out there, to be published by a good publisher, is the best prize there is for a poet.

And even better than that – as I keep telling yet other friends who haven’t got a book out – is the ability to keep writing. Nobody can take your work away from you. You keep doing it, keep making it better, hardening it into a compressed, dazzling thing. The minute you start to feel hard done by, imagining conspiracies any bigger than what is inherent in human nature – or changing your work to be more like what you think might win, or courting particular publishers for any reason other than that they seem a good fit for you, or even thinking about it all very much – you begin to change your molecular makeup, and it compromises your art.

I know: I’m saying you should expect nothing, and be happy with it. Well, call me Pollyanna.

One friend keeps talking about a Salon des Refusés. I’d love it, as long as I got to go to both.

You can buy Me and the Dead here.

The great thing about the TS Eliot Prize reading – every year, ten shortlisted poets for eight minutes each in one evening – is the opportunity to hear people you might never otherwise get to hear, or bother to go hear, and to engage all at once with ten influential books – or, put another way, about £120-worth of books – you might not have afforded either. All the ten were books I’ve either read or heard and wondered about. It’s a wonderful event, and should be supported and encouraged, no matter what your particular take on the judging policies or whatever. This year it moved from the Purcell Room into the Queen Elizabeth Hall, which was almost sold out, and I’m told this will be its permanent home. Until it grows to fill Wembley, presumably.

My favourite poem in the TS Eliot Prize readings was Simon Armitage’s poem about the sperm whale.  (I think it’s a prose poem; I haven’t got the book, unfortunately. But I do recall how it struck me, earlier in the year when I first saw it, how much like a Salt book it looks.) It was funny, clever, witty, and ultimately very serious in a way that didn’t push itself on you.

The Personage of the evening was Seamus Heaney, looking alarmingly frail and small; his hands trembled visibly, constantly, from the stage. He read beautifully and clearly but without a lot of strength, and then took a very long time to traverse a third of the stage, to the top of the steps, where he had to steady himself before beginning the descent… I know  lots of people were very moved by it.

And I have to say, the ceremony itself, the following night, was a bit of a tonic! There was a thing in the paper the other day saying that 52% of people have gone without heating at least some of the time to save money this winter, despite it being the coldest ever. I am one of those people. Right now my thermostat is at 14 or 15ºC, & that’s only because it’s ON. So after months of dark, cold weekends spent in isolation at my desk (though with Radio 3), I have to say I felt I did deserve a couple of hours in the atrium of the Wallace Collection – where everything is beautiful, light warm and pink – being served white wine and delicate little canapés, talking to delightful amusing people.

A word here for the Poetry Book Society. They are a very small team, a few people – and their server had crashed, again, that day, and had been all panic stations unable even to send out the necessary emails – and there they were, all dressed up in ties and so on, completely smart and unruffled (especially as none were wearing ruffles) and as if they’d spent the afternoon sprucing themselves up for the party. Full marks.

I was standing there with a friend, and then a slight movement parted the crowd right next to us – “Excuse me, excuse me, we’re coming through” – and there a path opened, and steered through it came a thin, immaculate, frail, apparently not quite with it, very elegant woman in a red dress, with perfectly manicured nails, and fluffy white coiffed hair, and blue, blue eyes… Mrs Eliot. She was two feet away! I stood there, my friend stood there, and when they had passed she looked at me with huge round eyes.

WOW! she said.

I said, “Yeah – did you go all shivery all over?”

“I did!” she said.

Very strange: to be the living embodiment of TS Eliot. A repository; a relic, literally; this is how the concept of the godhead came into being. The divine right of kings. Very odd.

Heaney wasn’t present at the ceremony. I heard from someone that he had flown to St Lucia to be with Derek Walcott – such a lovely thought – also quite moving. It just can’t be good being old.

And then, even before all of this had turned from hangover into reminiscence, came news that Jo Shapcott had won the Costa! It is pointed out somewhere by Philip Hensher that poetry isn’t in fact doing so badly – children’s books do a lot worse than poetry in the Costa. And then someone says and it wasn’t even by a man! And not by a man with a dead wife, either. Then someone goes, But it’s about her cancer. So it’s still about an ill woman. Then someone else says, Well death has an allure. (This is undeniable, in the poetry world at least.) Then someone else says we must clearly all append “-cott” to our names, to win a prize next year: as in, Walcott, Shapcott, Evans-Bushcott.

I might do that.

So congratulations to all! And now, back to the poetry. I’m hard at work on Issue 6 of Horizon Review.

I met a very interesting poet at the Picador event, Rachael Boast. She has a book coming out with them later this spring called Sidereal, and I looked her up.

Here’s the first half of her poem Cabin Fever:

When night and the key to the door
descend together to the bottom
of a bottle of Laphroaig,
have your good ear ready
until the firth is a salty chorale
of octaves, suggesting
rain mural, the moon‘s meadow,
or Collect for the day that never was
quite how you‘d hoped,
but better – beyond hope,
distilled from some deeper resource
of things as they are, just as they are;

Read the rest

I love that: “a salty chorale.” That took me by surprise.