Comments from Maurice
Riordan on Judging the
Kent and Sussex Open
Poetry Competition, 2004
The Big Brown Box in the hall could be a long overdue Christmas hamper – a treasure trove of goodies ready to be broached and explored. In fact, I know the first stage, once I open it, will be a melancholy one – the brisk, if patient, sifting away of all those entries from people who need to spend more time reading poems than writing them. Almost at a glance one picks up on a clanging archaism or arm-twisting inversion, or on some clichéd encrustation that has long been attached to romantic yearnings, religious fervour, political outrage, or to the raw emotions of births and deaths.
Even so, I believe it’s good practice for a competition judge to do this for him/herself. For one thing, it is a reminder that the ingredients of poems are much the same for everyone. The distinctions arise in the quality of the writing. But also, I find not every poem on my long list is perfectly attuned to contemporary idiom. Working in short bursts over a week, I extract approximately 100 poems from the total entry of 1724. One of them makes a decent go at rhyming couplets, that most unforgiving of forms to the ear. And another contains solecisms, is in bold print, and has every line centred. These are poems I suspect a ‘sifter’ might have shied away from – and I am glad they have made it to the later stages of my deliberations.
This solitary process of ‘panning’ I find rewarding in itself. Eventually I end up with a very small pile of 10/11 poems that are pure delight. And I feel very possessive about them. For a few days at least they are mine alone. I don’t have to tell anyone, not just yet. I am loath to assign them an order.
That final stage of decision-making is not however an agonizing one. I accept that it’s now a matter of personal taste, of my own preferences and no doubt prejudices. In fact, the poems that are going to get the prizes have already announced themselves, and their order -- though I interrogate it -- remains unshakeable. They are poems that create their own fictional worlds securely but without fuss. I trust the human experience that lies behind them and nourishes the life of their language. It gives them those all-important qualities of freshness, suppleness, surprise, economy. They are poems too that leave a space for me as a reader. Each tells me a story but does not tell me its meaning; each is personal but it does not make claims for its subjective intensity; neither does it insist on its privacy. So every time I re-read these poems, I am invited in and my imagination is set to work, so to speak, on the margins.
I’m not at all sure of the geographical location of ‘The Alde at Snape’, the poem which is third in my line-up. France? East Anglia (which it is)? But what matters here is its liminal geography, between the living and the dead, the subtle evocation of the underworld in proximity to the everyday one. This is a flawless piece of writing that negotiates beautifully between landscape and dreamscape, and accomplishes among other things an estranging shift in time. It is very much my kind of poem.
I’m not that keen at first on the title of second poem on my list, ‘This in Remembrance’. But then I see this is its moment of acknowledging emotion. Everything else here, in a poem about tending to the dying, is coolly worded. It avoids highly charged language and puts its trust rightly in detail and physical gesture. I admire its literalness (‘I can see/ a sheep on the hill, I watch it graze), the calm accumulation of actions without commentary. The effect is bleakly sacramental.
The winning poem surprises me in all sorts of ways. One I should mention is that it does something I don’t approve of: it works primarily in the register of childhood, but then towards the close, it uses words that imply an adult perspective. This should spoil the poem, I think – but it doesn’t. It breaks a rule, or what I take to be a rule, and gets away with it. And, on every reading, the poem reinvents itself and draws me fully into its fictional presence. I’m absorbed into the childhood immediacy of its school room setting, I receive the shock of the incident it describes, and I join in the moment of emotional awakening it records. This was the poem I felt that most created its world. The reader becomes the poem, and experiences one of those small miracles of the supreme fiction of which poetry is capable.
Maurice Riordan
16 March 2004