Five Forward poems under the microscope

Helena Nelson and Hilary Menos discuss the five poems shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (Written)

Menos: My first response when I read these five poems was astonishment. What has happened to the Forward? Are these really the best five poems out of everything on offer? Perhaps the Forward Prize requirements have changed. There’s a lot of information on the new website about fighting, campaigning, healing and facilitating … not so much about quality.

I asked a few TFP reviewers their opinions. Their views were anything but encouraging. Some of them were downright disparaging. One also questioned how a poem that was placed in the 2022 NPC could be eligible for the 2024 Forwards – I still haven't discovered an answer to that. Would we have published any of the five, if they’d been submitted to The Friday Poem? I thought maybe two would get through. I asked Helena Nelson what she thought.

Nelson: Interesting choices! If it were up to me, I think either two or three, but I have some reservations about them all and I might ask for tweaks. I've placed them in reverse order of preference, starting with ‘A Craft Talk on the Praxis of an August Evening’ by Derek Chan. Have a look at it here, on the Forward site. I didn’t hate it, but it was my least favourite. What do you think of it?

Menos: I think the Chan poem has a reader-respect issue. I don't think the poet has fully considered what's being said (and how) from the reader’s point of view, and for me that means he isn't treating the reader with respect. There are loads of ways to disrespect the reader. Wilful obscurity, high falutin references, trying to be ‘cool’, insulting the intelligence. Reading this poem's like being given a series of clues personal to the poet to which we have no answers — it leaves me cold. Words like “praxis” and “Ithaca”, in particular, strike me as pretentious.

Nelson: Maybe that's true about pretentious language, but not necessarily. Sometimes a poet uses complex word choice because they’re having fun, and it can be fun to go along with that. I’ve learned a lot of new words from reading poetry. Yes, I also found “praxis” a bit irksome, and as for “Ithaca”, there's a lot of Ithaca around. But I might argue that such words mean the poet respects his reader enough to think they won't be fazed by challenging vocabulary. I’d say ‘A Craft Talk on the Praxis of an August Evening’ is essentially a playful title, and ‘practice’ wouldn’t perform the same job. Did T.S. Eliot respect his reader when he wrote The Waste Land?

Menos: I don’t think Eliot respected ALL his readers. Only the ones he thought would get his references. Or the ones who just enjoyed the sound of the words without bothering too much about the sense (I count myself among this number). I think he was pretty elitist. Reading Eliot for meaning ends up a bit like doing a cryptic crossword. Reading him for sound is more pleasurable.

Anyway, how many people actually know what “praxis” means? I know the word from the novel by Fay Weldon, but I have to look it up every time I come across it. I belong to the school of thought that says don’t use a long word where a short one will do, or a complicated word where a simple one will work. Yes, the English language is wide and varied and there’s a use for every word — none should be denied their place in the sun — but the word “praxis” came out of academia and probably belongs there. I’m not fazed by it, but it makes me think a certain set of things about the person who uses it. Maybe it’s an academic who isn’t prepared to chance his or her language being more accessible to the laity. Maybe someone who wants to sound academic. Probably someone who wants to filter out some readers for not being smart enough or sufficiently well-read. To me, it feels excluding and divisive.

Nelson: “Praxis” has annoyed you! You didn’t find it playful, or faintly amusing like me. I smile at the idea of an August Evening demonstrating its artistic method. However, there are other things I like less. Neither your reaction nor mine is the last word, of course. They're just responses. But what do you want from a poem in general?

Menos: What do I want from a poem? I want a poem to form a kind of bridge between me as a reader and the poet as writer. I want to fully engage with a poem, and feel the poet has been fully engaged in the writing of it.

Nelson: That sounds reasonable. But let me play devil's advocate. The bridge was there for all five Forward poems. You just didn’t like the look of it so you didn’t fully engage. Nonetheless, each of the poets was absolutely engaged in writing them.

Menos: Oh this is tricky. One has to examine one’s prejudices. Re the Derek Chan poem, mine are above. He’s not extending a bridge, he’s emitting a dog-whistle, and only a certain number of people will connect to it. Right from the start I’m on edge. “Ithaca” confirms my prejudice. 

He’s not extending a bridge, he’s emitting a dog-whistle, and only a certain number of people will connect to it

Nelson: The language is (deliberately, I think) over the top: if you start with "ache" and "bruise" you know you’re in for something intense. To enjoy this poem, you have to savour that. But for me, it’s not my thing. I notice the fish are singing and the bees might have been. The last line reads like an epiphany but I don’t understand it, so no catharsis for me. I worry about the green toothpaste. There are things I like (the wings that "begin / and end in water" and "the way colour stands / inside colour, all of it dying.") But it’s too intense for my taste, and ultimately confusing. I think personifying the lake is a step too far. I wouldn’t want to publish it, but I might say "send more poems".... 

Menos: I think there’s a contract between writer and reader. As a reader I offer my time and attention. I’ll take a punt, read the first few lines, see how we go. Maybe even commit to reading a poem the whole way through — I’m generous (or foolish) that way. I think the writer should appreciate my generosity, and work to earn my continued attention. I need a reward (and not just the self-righteous glow of being a poetry reader). If a poem’s slight, or dull, or pretentious, or incomprehensible, I’m not going to bother.

Nelson: Sounds to me like you might not get to the end of reading this poem, then. But what you say squares with my HappenStance manifesto – where I suggest that each poem demands "Read me with absolute attention and care". At the same time, it promises: "I will repay", i.e. that your effort will be worth it. If you think the effort wasn’t worth it, you feel cheated. However, the reader may default and fail to read with full attention, especially if something puts them off in the first four lines. Reading well’s hard work. You can only fit so much of it into a life. 

Menos: Surely when the reader "defaults” and reads with less than full attention it’s just as likely to be because the poem hasn’t managed to catch and keep their full attention, i.e. the poem’s to blame, not the reader?

Nelson: Certainly. But how can you be sure which it is? There’s a sort of poem blindness that afflicts editors when they read loads of poems at speed. They miss stuff. I know this because I’ve done it. And when a whole set of competition judges praise something that leaves me unstirred, I'm even more disposed to think it might be my fault.

Menos: If I feel I've turned my full attention to a poem (I get that reading lots of poetry at speed can make one miss stuff but one can choose to focus) and I still don’t get it, then I have to think it’s a failing in the poem. Unless I get nothing from any poems, in which case I have to conclude that it’s a failing in me. 

Nelson: You're a confident reader, then. I’m full of uncertainty. But generally if I can’t decide, I just move on. Or back. To something I know and like. 

Menos: So what was your next least best?

Nelson: Number four out of five, for me, was: ‘On hearing the seismologist say there could be an 8.5R earthquake near Athens’ by Vasiliki Albedo. You can read it here, on the Forward site. The first thing that irked me was the “balletic lavender”? My lavender stalks are not balletic. That word put me off at the start and it illustrates a thing that contemporary poems often do which I’m henceforth going to call balletic-lavenderism. Instead of cutting adjectives and focussing on verbs and nouns, they stick in an unlikely adjective and make a feature of it. But I’m too literalist: “My mother was delivering / my brother and about to / forever split town”. Delivering as in delivering a baby? Or delivering him where? Even "split town". troubles me. Then “Yesterday chopping lettuce” is dropped oh so casually (but not casually) into the tight heart of the text. The juxtaposition, for me, is too obvious. Soon the gorse comes to life and “declares its blooms alive”, like the lake in the Derek Chan poem which “cannot believe its own blue". Surreal personifications don’t do much for me, though they’re fashionable (too fashionable). I wouldn’t publish this one either, though I'm inclined to feel the experience is authentic.

The first thing that irked me was the “balletic lavender”? My lavender stalks are not balletic. That word put me off at the start and it illustrates a thing that contemporary poems often do which I’m henceforth going to call balletic-lavenderism

Menos: One of our reviewers said, about these first two poems, “There’s a hint of surrealism in both, as in loads of contemporary poetry, but a sort of surrealism-lite (sub-surrealism) which doesn’t seem to know what it’s there for. Aragon or Desnos it is not.” Personally I don’t mind “balletic”. In fact, if I think about it I can see the lavender stems as very thin ballet dancer’s legs and the lavender flowers as the ballet shoes. It’s rather beautiful. Including one’s cats in a poem is much more likely to put me off, and particularly one called Sparky, which just makes me think of Old Sparky, the electric chair. Which is distracting.

Nelson: I'm betting it’s the real name of a real cat, an unfortunate name so far as your connotations are concerned. I’ve never heard of Old Sparky, the electric chair. But I have heard of Sparky’s magic piano. Me, I don’t mind the cats. I respond to the issue of what happens to them all when a disaster happens and all the fuss is only about humans. When humans are fleeing and starving, what happens to dogs?

Menos: Mostly they cope, I guess, or not, much like us.

Nelson: I think they die. Slowly. There’s a lot on social media about this.

Menos: But back to the poem. What is it actually about? I find it confusing. I can’t see a clear meaning.

Nelson: Human vulnerability? Knowing about the possible earthquake but sitting tight, like the slug at the heart of the lettuce before it gets sliced in two. Life on the edge. Life and death. Being just like the cats at the end of the day. About evoking that moment of being fully alive and holding it balanced against risk, or fundamental change? Maybe.

Menos: Okay, I can see that. But I still think there are problems — the meaning of “delivering”, and the confusion over exactly what is blue. And the whole thing feels a bit flat — I’m not sure the poet earns the “dancing” ending — it’s a weak bridge! I’d probably go back to the poet and say we’ll take it as long as you fix some of these issues.

Nelson: On reflection, I think the mum was delivering the brother because it’s a split family. She’s doing the weekly drop-off, although this time she’s not coming back. I just didn’t get that at first, though I think “forever” is deliberately dropped in. In fact, I believe there are numerous deliberate ‘poetic’ techniques at play:  symbolism, juxtaposition, assonance, consonance, enjambment: “I let / water carry its mass / into the drain’s dark" — that's good . Even the long thin shape feels deliberate to me. But I agree there’s confusion about what exactly is blue at the end, and I don’t find the ending satisfying. I just don’t like it well enough to take it, in fact. I don’t believe tinkering would change that.

Menos: Okay, there’s some poetic technique. But that doesn’t mean the poet is using these techniques well, or effectively, to frame or enhance the content. I'm not convinced they are.

Nelson: Accepted. But the judgement about whether techniques are well used is also subjective. In the olden days our competition judges were those whose judgement most poetry readers believed upheld a tacitly agreed standard. That places a lot on the shoulders of the 2024 judges. Because these days, competition decisions are often disputed and the tacitly agreed benchmark may not exist.

Menos: I don’t agree that judgement about whether a poet uses techniques well is subjective. There are good line breaks and poor line breaks …

Nelson: Woah! That is subjective. Loads of poets break lines in disruptive places. Is it skilled or hamfisted to disrupt natural phrasing?  Is the only deciding factor whether you do it deliberately or by accident? For example, in the second stanza of ‘the only other dark-skinned girl’ (my third-place-listed poem) Tife Kusora breaks two lines on the word “and”. For me, it works the first time but not so well the second. However, if the poet had moved the second “and” to the start of the following line, there would have been two lines beginning with “and”. Three “ands”. Perhaps that's why she didn't.

Loads of poets break lines in disruptive places. Is it skilled or hamfisted to disrupt natural phrasing?

Menos: There’s repetition that does the job the poet wants it to do, and repetition that doesn’t (does Lisa Kelly want the heavy repetition in ‘I wanted to show you a donkey’ to make her readers laugh? That’s what — to my surprise — happened when I read her poem aloud to a table of Friday Poem people. There’s symbolism that’s so heavy handed it risks parody. Juxtaposition can be far too obvious (as in Vasiliki Albedo’s poem). If you over-use alliteration, a poem can sound more like a tongue-twister. A good poet uses the appropriate techniques to achieve a particular effect. If it’s done well, it works. No?

Nelson: Well, what works for me, may not work for you. That’s why you have more than one judge.

Menos: Yes, let’s talk about the judges. Chair of judges 2024 was Craig Charles. Initially three other judges were announced — Vanessa Kisuule, Alycia Pirmohamed and Daniel Sluman, then at some point Jane Clarke (a Carcanet poet) was added to the panel. Craig Charles is, according to his Forward bio, an “English actor, presenter and poet, best known for playing Dave Lister in science fiction sitcom Red Dwarf and Lloyd Mullany in soap opera Coronation Street. He presented the gladiator style game show Robot Wars from 1998 – 2004 and narrated the comedy endurance show Takeshi’s Castle. He currently presents The Craig Charles House Party and Craig Charles Funk and Soul on BBC Radio 2 and the afternoon show on BBC 6 Music.” Actually, according to Wikipedia, he "first appeared on television as a performance poet", and "won a national competition run by The Guardian newspaper for a poem he wrote when he was 12". At one time, he was "resident poet" on BBC 2's Riverside and BBC1's Pebble Mill at One". He was doing performance poetry on TV in 1983, no less! Who knew? Have you read any of his poetry?

Nelson: Er ... no. I only know him as Lister in Red Dwarf. 

Menos: You can find two of his poems at https://www.craigcharles.co.uk/Poems/poems.htm. Enjoy!

Nelson: Okay. I've read them now. Oh dear. But he's the chair. The chair doesn't have to be a top-ranking poet. And the poems you sent me to read could be funny in performance – well the first one, anyway. But hell, he's an actor, an entertainer. He's not there as a leading paper-poetry bard. He's meant to lead the group, make it fun, present the awards event with pizzazz. Smart without being super-literary. People outside poetry will at least have heard of him. Isn't that why they're paying him?

Menos: Let’s get back to your third choice, the Tife Kusoro poem. It's here, on the Forward site. Is it trying to shock? What “little fragrant bottles”? There’s no such thing as a baby butterfly. Doesn’t this matter? And the proverb … what’s her point?

Nelson: I think the proverb shows how threat creates an extreme response. And the business with the scab reminds me of some literary place (can’t recall where) where a poet in prison chews up their poems and eats them. And of course there are gold fillings, used to keep a little wealth safe inside the body. Persecuted peoples carry their gold inside them. And yes, it deliberately creates an ‘ugh’ response, and the combination of scabs, toilets and shit makes it instantly arresting, though it’s about much more than that. If performing this to an audience, you’d get a nice shudder out of them early on. I’ve never seen the little fragrance bottles either but I bet they existed. These days it’s hard to buy toilet paper in the UK that isn’t scented.

I believe the bit about eating scabs is true. But I find it harder to credit that a child said “we eat our dying to keep it alive we eat our language”. Who would say “we eat our language”? Maybe the point is that this is what she meant, whatever she actually put into words. Year 5: she’s about eight years old. Would it make more sense if you knew the embedded metaphor of her first language? I do believe that girls this age preface their assertions with “in my house” or “in our house”. She first peels “a piece of land off her elbow” and then she puts “the past in her mouth”. Two concepts, one scab. 

But as for the point about feeling like a misfit, it’s universal. I can believe her mother said that if England was a house, then they were the toilet. It’s good and angry, and she probably had every right to be. I’m a white reader. Is the poem meant for a white reader, who hasn’t felt like this? More colonial guilt? The title drives home the point that the majority in the UK was (and is) white. Why is the baby butterfly saved “before its tree is first destroyed”? Isn’t it the other way around: the butterfly is saved first before the tree is destroyed? I don’t love this poem exactly but it makes me think and it’s vivid. 

Menos: I found the scab business mildly disgusting, though I think perhaps that’s the point. When I saw she’d used the scab to represent ‘land’ and the ‘past’ that rather lost me. One thing at a time is probably enough when it comes to symbols. The poem as a whole struck me as rather slight. Bridge? Not for me. One of our reviewers observed: “This does the ‘title as first line’ thing and is essentially a series of similes and metaphors some of which are good but some less so."

I found the scab business mildly disgusting, though I think perhaps that’s the point

Nelson: Well, I would accept it for publication, though I would suggest just a butterfly and forget the baby. Moving on: my choice for the number two slot is ’I wanted to show you a donkey in the field or I want to show you the donkey in a field’ by Lisa Kelly. Read it here, on the Forward site. It has meaningful form, and the form seems to me to grow organically out of its meaning (at least it did in its original format in The Rialto). Two very long rolling sentences, each constituting a stanza. A contrast between the two halves, each reflecting a slightly different way of saying apparently the same thing. Lots of other poetic techniques: repetition; symbolism; alliteration; italics for emphasis; neologism / playful use of language (“the fieldness of the field”). Deliberately prosy rhythms.

Menos: But what did you think of it?

Nelson: When I first read it, in The Rialto magazine, I liked it. Not head-over-heels in love, but I definitely warmed to its oddness, its originality. However, I don’t think it works well on the Forward website. It won third prize in the 2023 Rialto Nature and Place competition (judge Ian McMillan particularly liked the play on definite and indefinite articles). But there's a snag. The poem has unusually long lines — an A4 publication can accommodate that. You can’t replicate it on the web. Viewing long lines on a smartphone is practically impossible. When the poem first appeared on the Forward website, the Forward designer split the lines in two, a long line followed by a short half-line (both left-justified), creating at least one set of new line-breaks. Perhaps someone pointed out this was a problem because since then the text has been reformatted. Now it's in fully-justified blocks. The width of each block will automatically adjust to suit your screen, which means the lines will break wherever your hand-held gadget (or other device) dictates. To me, it looks nothing like it did on paper, which provokes some interesting questions! The line breaks are not, apparently, where the poet originally placed them. Are we to assume their placing was unimportant because it's a prose piece? Is line-break a key technique here or not? Does justification variation matter? Is this the same poem as it once was? In The Rialto, I liked it effortlessly. In this web format, I think they’ve mangled it. 

Whether it works as a performance piece (out loud) is another matter. I'd say it works better for the eye than the ear. I find it tricky to process the phrase “why you would want your lover to say it this way”. Also, having introduced the hypothetical lover, the poet has to use the pronoun ‘they’ all the way through, which I find clunky, and at one point confusing. The syntax of the first long sentence only just holds together as a single unit for me. But I do like the idea of the enormous difference it makes when you vary tiny details in a statement, as well as how complex the reasoning may be behind your split-second choice. It’s not an obvious big-theme poem but it is about communication and perhaps indirectly about love. And I will remember it. (Alas, we wouldn't publish it in The Friday Poem because the lines are too long to display in their original form.)

Menos: One of our reviewers thinks it’s “just prose”, and if a prose poem, nowhere near Baudelaire. Personally, I liked it when I first read it to myself, but when I read it aloud to a tableful of friends they found it hilarious, which was disconcerting because I didn’t think it was funny and I don’t think that’s the reaction Kelly would have wanted. One started laughing every time I said field. And at the end one of them said, “That was torture”. Bridge? Yes, Okay. But rickety.

Nelson: But we still haven’t talked about my first choice: ‘Ward of One’ by Cindy Juyoung Ok, which I like very much, with a few key reservations. It's here, on the Forward site. Between the Ok and the Kelly, I actually think the donkey poem achieves most fully what it set out to do. I just get more out of the Ok poem. The Tife Kusoro poem works for me; I just don't much like it. But I don’t think I’m meant to like it. It works on its own terms. Derek Chan and Vasiliki Albedo (respect to them both for putting the work out there) are for me read-and-move-on poems.

Menos: Ah, the Ok poem. One of our reviewers said: “... despite my uneasiness around what is (or at least appears to be, uncomfortably straightforward confessional poetry) I thought ‘Ward of One’ was the best. It is better controlled formally and rhetorically than the others and [...] the form serves the poem. We feel real claustrophobia and that the speaker is ‘holding herself’ in, controlling her responses.”

Nelson: Do you agree?

Menos: When it comes to long (or longer) poems, like this one, I feel they have to work harder to earn a longer attention span. ‘Ward of One’ is sixteen tercets. It keeps my attention for about six. Then I get the plot, as it were, and the rest of it is just the assault-situation playing out. If you rearrange the tercets into prose it reads to me like prose. There’s very little in terms of poetic technique apart from chopping the prose into stanzas.

Nelson: But it held my attention right through. More effortlessly than the others. I was reading not for the situation resolution, so much as the character of the speaker, and my interest in her tone, her phrasing. There’s resonant imagery, there’s pacing, there’s complexity and depth.

There’s resonant imagery, there’s pacing, there’s complexity and depth

Menos: Right from the start I don’t understand “the love I had tried to inherit”. Who is this man? It’s not her father. It’s a “beloved” man. Is it a partner? The poem suggests that she’s forced to live with him because she has signed (inherited?) the lease on a flat. Why can’t she just leave?

Nelson: I didn’t understand it either, but I didn’t mind. It took it as a metaphorical idea like Shakespeare (“And summer's lease hath all too short a date”). I took the man to be her partner, yes. I felt the lines were rhythmical, a kind of relaxed tetrameter, with four strong stresses each. I tried taking out all the line breaks and I can’t see it could work as a piece of prose. You couldn’t make it into a prose poem, the word groups are too intense and the line-breaks reinforce correct reading where compression makes it challenging. I also think the stanzas usefully advance the narrative i.e. they function as verse paragraphs, which stanzas often don’t. But I’m not arguing that the poem is faultless, just that the structure does work.

Menos: What about the last two lines: “I found my circumstances / betraying the love I had tried to inherit.” Wtf? She may have fashioned a bridge but it doesn’t fasten securely to my side of the canyon, you might say.

Nelson: I think she’s trying to bring the imagery back to the lease metaphor at the start. I also think she’s unsuccessful. One of my key reservations is that I think she’s pushing that image too hard, wanting it to work rather than making it work. 

Menos: I find this poem a bit like the performed poem by Nasim Rebecca Ash, where it starts well and at some point you go oh, that’s what it’s about, it’s assault (again). 

Nelson: Well, yes. That’s one risk of writing out of trauma of some kind, when many other poets are doing something similar. I think it’s about more than assault, though. The title, for example, is really interesting. ‘Ward of One’ makes me think of a patient in a psychiatric ward (metaphorically speaking) and I wonder which of them is stuck there: the speaker or her partner. I think it’s probably her. It’s a relief to me that the language is plain so I can follow the thread with little effort. But she uses ‘so’ as an intensifier twice (“so still”; “so sorry”), and I think even once is not good. The close repetition of "child" also seems more accidental than intentional. But I like the extent to which she allows for an alternative reality, the male character's way of seeing, or the way he experiences things from his gender perspective, or at least from his dysfunctional mental state. (I like “allotted gender” very much.) I also like how she describes what she would do in her head while waiting for his rage to turn into grief (if you wanted the poem shorter, you could cut that but I think you might lose something vital). The imagery appeals to me: “Confined by a lease with a beloved man” and “my body became / a district of our home” (there’s gravitas in the pacing of the language). Personally, I think the metaphor of “lease” and “home” is earned there. As for he “planned aloud to drive the river into my car, but / he meant my car into the river”, it's coolly understated. It lets the reader discover the awfulness rather than brandishing it.

I’m less keen on “my crouching // chest”. The stanza break makes you wait for what’s crouching and for me, “chest” is an anti-climax (my first thought is chests don’t crouch). I guess “chest“ is meant to shock because if you knife somebody there, you kill them. But why would you split “inform // me” across a stanza? I find that cross-stanza enjambment mannered rather than meaningful and I think this poet is better than that. Perhaps she's driven by the mode of her time (it’s fashionable to trip or stall the reader). But altogether, I find the feeling authentic, thought-provoking and layered. Maybe it could usefully cut back length a little, but still it intrigues me, it puzzles me. I have read it many times. I would share it with a friend. I would publish it in a heart-beat.

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Hilary Menos is Editor of The Friday Poem. Helena Nelson is Consulting Editor of The Friday Poem.