Winners 2007 competition 1. Kid have you rehabilitated yourself: Eleanor Margolies 2. Song Of The Deaf Child: Merryn Williams 3. Inventions: Bill Greenwell 4. Firewall: Joan Hewitt 5. Grand Central Station: David Grubb 6. Photographing the Baby: Tom Collingridge 7. To be supplied 8. Authenticity: Aidan Blake 9. Thoughts For A Husband In A Minefield: AlisonWhite
Twelve hundred poems is a considerable number and while it is a lot to read and not many of them are all that good, it is still somewhat cheering to realise how many people find poetry a natural recourse.
People write poetry because nothing else will do. There comes a point at which other ways of talking are inadequate. We become aware that somewhere inside that potentially infinite permutation of words there is a shape that will somehow answer to our sense of events if only we can get the sounds and meanings to agree, that somehow words might ring an echo to experience that is always too much, always beyond our means.
There is no hierarchy in human experience. It is not that poets have a keener quality of experience, it is only that they have a keener ear for language. There are a vast number of poems in which one hears the human voice and responds to it. The poems need not be good, in fact they are often rather poor as poems, nevertheless they are people’s lives, the one just as valuable, just as substantial as the other. Poets do not feel more keenly, they only write and hear more keenly. The bad poem, like the good poem, is full of sorrow and delight and loss and resignation. The bad poem, just like the good poem, is full of love and doubt and fear. All this is obvious from a simple reading. Nor are the bad poems lying about their experiences. They are true to experience but not to language.
Not hearing language clearly they move blindly and hopefully among the clutter of obvious phrases and formulations. They grab what lies nearest: a rhyme, a rhythm, a phrase, anything that refers to the experience that has fired them into poetry. But good poems do not refer, they embody, enact, present. We come upon them afresh, as though our own experience were suddenly before us, changed somehow, yet authentic and startling.
Poetry is the most natural of literary forms. It is somewhere between a cry and a dance, and what being does not cry or dance? The child in its high chair rocks to the rhythm of a song and cries out when it sees or wants something. In poetry cry and dance are made articulate, shaped in the air out of words so we can lose ourselves in the shape. And the shape has somehow to retain its strangeness and familiarity, the way it suddenly first hoves into sight and hearing. Poetry is news that stays news, said Ezra Pound, and I think – in fact I am certain – that he must be right.
Not newfangled, not new like a novelty, not new as in the latest craze, or as a new life-form. It is only new in that we perceive it as new, never quite comfortable or taken for granted. When the shape is right it can be approached in all conditions and in any light. It holds the air perfectly just at the point of bursting, and it is because we understand it to be always on the point of bursting that we apprehend it as new.
Once we get beyond cliché we discover that the prosaic is simply the triumph of intention over adventure. The good poem will always be pressing at the edge of knowledge. It will always be a little in danger of not quite knowing what it is saying. It discovers its saying as it goes, that is why composing it is an act of acute concentration. So the wonderfully dextrous rhyme is not quite enough to dazzle us with its skill, the fine control of rhythm, metaphor and diction is not quite the end of the story.
The best poems here were, for me, those that spoke and sang clearly yet intriguingly. Their clarity was human, their concern was for lives and how they are led or foiled, but their shape was dictated by some instinct beyond that which could be circumscribed or summarised. They knew they weren’t enough so they took a chance and danced an extra step into the realm of the vaguely known or guessed at. That dance step was as elegant as it needed to be. It had a quality that might best be described as grace, since grace is more than elegance. There is something fortuitous about it, like something that need not have happened. The best poems are those that need not have happened exactly as they did. They took a chance on a shape that was beyond the call of duty. It is like stepping into the air and staying aloft. The heart aches in the air. In language it is the best air you are going to get. It is worth its weight in life.
The prizes I have given reflect the views I have expressed. There were some forty odd good poems at the end all vying or attention. The forty, with some effort, became twenty; the twenty fourteen, and the fourteen then, until finally, after much agonising, there were just nine.
Some poets had several good poems and I wish I could reward them somehow – I always feel this – with some special commendation or a publication. If it were poets I were picking rather than poems they might well win since they clearly know what they are about. Work by most of them is included in my top fourteen, by some in the nine.