Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

As much as the first cuckoo ever was, the (almost) annual brouhaha over the choice of winner of the UK’s National Poetry Competition (NPC) is a sure indicator that spring has sprung.

The week before last, Hilary Menos, poet and editor of The Friday Poem, and Victoria Moul, poet–critic, chewed over and pretty much spat out the poem by the splendidly-named winner, Partridge Boswell, here; as did many poets, both good and not-so-good, on social media. I found the poem to be neither as bad as has largely been made out nor especially deserving of being plucked out as the best of 21,000 poems. However, I wasn’t privy to reading the rest of them, so what do I know? I can only surmise that it’s a thankless task which somebody has to do.

This Friday just gone, Hilary and Victoria, discussed more generally, here, the challenges of judging competitions. Victoria acknowledged the truth that, ‘Everyone knows competitions of any kind and in any sphere are a blunt tool.’ They are indeed; but really, as we all know, a poetry competition is principally a money-making exercise upon which the financial health of the organising outfit usually depends, so they are intrinsically vital for the flourishing of high-quality published poetry.

The issue, if it is one, that none of the top three poems was written by a British poet, is, for me, wholly unimportant. I’m not at all convinced by Victoria’s insistence that she, ‘would like to see the National Poetry Competition restrict its entry criteria to British citizens and/or those living in the UK and make a serious attempt to help readers see and appreciate what is distinctive about British poetry’, given that the globe has never been as closely linked as it is now. Using the UK’s most prestigious poem competition as a means to discern some sort of set of British poetic values seems to me as futile as the coalition government’s witless introduction just over a decade ago of the requirement that ‘British values’ in general – as itemised in guidance here – be taught in schools. Aside from the fact that many serious and good poets rarely or never enter competitions, it would be rather ‘Little Britain’, wouldn’t it? Has the Man Booker Prize been devalued or enhanced by the widening of its eligibility from novels in English by British and Commonwealth writers to novels in English by writers of any nationality as long as they have been published in the UK or Ireland? Surely the more internationalist readers become, the better that is for their general outlook on life and for the health of a diverse, tolerant and culturally-enriched society?

Moul’s additional argument that, ‘In literary matters as in others, America is, we might say, a rather dominant and aggressive colonial power’ is more than a little insulting to the thousands of American poets who, presumably more so than the average American citizens, oppose their government’s warmongering foreign policy within their poems, pronouncements and protests, as many of their predecessors did during (and since) the Vietnam War. American poets, like British poets and poets everywhere, tend to be among the most compassionate citizens within any society. Beyond D’Annuzio, Marinetti and Campbell, how many well-known right-wing poets have there ever been? I can’t think of any contemporary ones. In the current political climate here in the UK, restricting the NPC would play into the hands of far-right politicians and voters who, I strongly suspect, are, in the main, highly unlikely ever to be able to recognise a good poem, let alone articulate why it is good or, moreover, how it is distinctively British.

British poetry is diverse in many kinds of ways, and I’m very glad that it is; attempting to nail down any common features would be well-nigh impossible. Even decades ago to argue, perhaps, that a certain emotional restraint and traditional forms were broadly more common features of British poetry than in its American counterpart would have been undermined by the poetries of those many poets influenced by Modernism and all shades of Post-Modernism. Even a poet such as Philip Larkin, often misleadingly described (including by himself in his later, heavy-drinking years) as an archetypal Little Englander, was open to, and very clearly influenced by, the work of French Symbolist poets throughout his career, as much as he was by, say, Hardy. And would he have written a poem like ‘This Be the Verse’ without the liberating impact of the poems of Allen Ginsberg and the other Beats, as later filtered into British poetry by the Children of Albion crowd, the Mersey poets et al?

As for evaluating an individual poem, it shouldn’t be too hard to come to a consensus about how this should be done, or should it? When he chaired the Booker Prize panel in 1977, Larkin outlined, in his winner-announcing address, his own process in considering any of the novels he had had to read:

I found myself asking four questions: Could I read it? If I could read it, did I believe it? If I believed it, did I care about it? And if I cared about it, what was the quality of my caring, and would it last?

(From ‘The Booker Prize 1977’, collected in Required Writing, Faber, 1983.) Those questions, as Larkin implied, could, and would, equally apply if he were reading a poem. Unconsciously, don’t we all go through that or a very similar kind of process? Sometimes, though, I wonder if enough importance is attached to Larkin’s second question. What Larkin also implied, and elsewhere stated unequivocally, was that a poem without emotion, and incapable of arousing something other than indifference or hostility in the reader, wasn’t worth reading. If it were up to me, the four questions might be amended/updated as follows:

1) Could I read it?
2) If I could read it, did I believe it?
3) If I believed it, was its impact conveyed without the sledgehammer emotional approach of a sad-backstory act on Britain’s Got Talent?
4) If so, did I care enough about the poem to want to read it again?

Then again, it’s all too easy to over-think these things, and better, maybe, just to trust one’s instinct.