Brilliant conversation. I'm in the midst of adjudicating Cinnamon Press's pamphlet competition and looking at this poem I was wondering if I'd lost the plot and could no longer 'read' poetry. The judges' description of the poem is just not what I was reading at all. Yes - flat, 'clever' without it leading anywhere or becoming illuminating, metaphors that couldn't sustain their weight and virtue signalling... but from 21,000 poems I'm still wondering why!
Yes me too, I find it baffling. I don't know the other judges' work, but Ian Duhig is a wonderful poet and a very experienced one too. I'm v. interested by what Katie Beswick says below about a possible angle from which this sort of style might feel like a bit of a corrective. (Though I would say that there are plenty of poets writing in a fairly sweeping / ambitious style but also with a decent mastery of basic technique.)
A highlight of TFP is how you handle these conversation format articles. Other magazines do it (TPR) but nowhere near as well. This was thoughtful and stimulating; I certainly got more out of it than I did the poem on first reading (and I hadn’t felt inclined to reread it).
I also feel national comps in the UK should have separate international categories if they’re going to allow international submissions. We don’t see poets from the UK winning major US awards, etc. There’s definitely a disparity in opportunity & also in how UK writers are received elsewhere vs. how US & other writers are received here. I can’t help but feel this speaks to a culture of insecurity/uncertainty in ourselves in comparison to the bulldozing confidence of other cultures in themselves.
Absolutely Naush! I said much the same thing in a reply somewhere here. US style poetry is so culturally dominant now in the Anglophone world and it absolutely doesn’t work the other way. I totally agree that the refusal to limit it feels like a weird kind of cultural cringe (though is probably actually just about maximising the cash). Thanks for commenting!
Thank you Victoria and Hilary. I've been getting more and more anxious about my inability to make head or tail of a lot of modern poetry, such as some of the poems in the Poetry Society's quarterly Poetry Review. I'm just a poetry lover, not a poet or critic, but I do have some experience - nearly a thousand poetry books collected over sixty years. A poem may be 'difficult' but rewarding after close reading - and especially if learnt by heart. I wouldn't enjoy learning Boswell's poem by heart!
I think this notion of “flatness” is a useful one. Too many bad poems are flat. The most obvious faults have been edited out (workshopped out?) but what we’re left with is merely blameless, inert. Shouldn’t a poem sing?
I know just what you mean about poems that have been edited/workshopped out of obvious weaknesses but not into any real strengths. What struck me about this one is that it contained so many obvious clichés, redundancies and inconsistencies which are the sorts of thing a teacher or editor would generally pick up on. I mean, they're the kind of thing you would comment on to help strengthen a piece of writing regardless of whether you particularly liked the style/tone/form/subject. Maybe that gives it a kind of authenticity of a kind, but it just made me cross.
I was bewildered from the beginning of the poem and less and less convinced by anything the poet drew from the ladybird conceit. Totally agree, head in hands emoji, re our national poetry prize - there were 4 UK based poets on the long list whose work I know and respect over years. It is obvs no longer ‘our’ poetry comp so call it something else.
Yes I think I speak for both Hilary and myself that we are sorry that for space reasons we had to cut a discussion touching on both the worldwide remit and that we both felt there were several much better poems in the shortlist.
Thank you for this thoughtful and attentive reading of a bad poem. I’ve been thinking about the furore over Imogen Wade’s poem two years ago and wondering why this poem wasn’t getting more of a critical drubbing (young female poets easier to criticise than older male ones? dunno).
Well I, for one, initially felt rather overwhelmed by the judges’ comments on ‘The Gathering’. The mismatch between the poem they purport to describe, and the actual poem in front of me, was bewildering. I thought it must be a failure of understanding on my part. That might prevent people from commenting. Besides, it’s early days yet!
Yes there's always the simple explanation: the poem is very hard to follow and people don't want to look stupid by saying that they couldn't follow it. Especially when someone has just told you how clever and profound it is. Works on most people most of the time!
I definitely thought, ‘I’m too stupid’ to follow this’, seeing the judges’ comments - despite my English degree, love of poetry, own recent writing & publishing of poetry, work as an English teacher, and long involvement with poetry education in schools! So glad to see it wasn’t just me.
Very interesting question Jo which I hadn't thought about. Hilary may have something to say about that. On this one, I have noticed very little explicit criticism but a lot of quite marked silence / failure to comment, which I suppose is eloquent in itself.
It was an unusual winner, and perhaps showed a coming fashion for more elephantine baggy lines – as Axe seemed to, too.
There's a lot in the final quatrain that illuminates the method, and shows us that we are perhaps looking for a tight fugue within a jazz piece, or photorealism within the kind of painting we saw between the blurring of impressionism and the eggbox plane exaggerating of Juan Gris.
the ravenous reticence
that remains of language when language fails and meaning’s
odometer is broken, when punctuation alone hovers aloft—
stars we can finally reach, once love’s last light is spoken.
There's a lot in "ravenous reticence" that is rather good about when "language fails" and that applies to a longer baggier line. If we compress it down – as per workshopping, as many in these comments have said is being defied here – then that is surely a bunch of ravenous would-be editors-for-succintness. Or even editors for etymology followthrough, or for playing tetris with phrases when there are other ways to do poems. Reticence can be an enemy, as some of these editorial "just one more rewrite" positions can.
If we use an odometer to include, rewrite or exclude words then that is only an apparent test for meaning, the next line implies. And then "broken" leads quite nicely and by rhyme into another meaning for "punctuation" – punctuating, picking holes in things. When this "hovers aloft", well, then it's a threat that too much editing and tightening or building to a breakthrough line (a rag and bone shop of the heart) isn't a foolproof editing technique of universal good.
I'm glad the poem didn't end on "punctuation alone hovers aloft", which in another poet it so easily could have done. The last line has a touch of "hid his face amid a crowd of stars" but makes it blah blah, which is a nice bit of froideur cool. There's a hint too of everything being not so in our control or present, with the idea from physics that the visible universe is only the planets whose light has travelled to us over a million years, from celestial bodies that in fact died in the time the light reached us.
I quite like the politics in the poem, and don't find them cynical. There is a sense of trauma from being part of something one tries to forget, and I find it genuine. The poem moves through the seasons with age-old attempts at rephrasing each season's affect and effect. But it keeps rolling back to summer, like an REM eye twitch. I'm not sure if there's a specific genocide it is thinking of, from a particular summer. But it has that feel, of common knowledge that we individually and collectively move past (it speaks to me of COVID denial, for example, that strange period of abeyance and time off like a school summer holiday).
I'd like to see it as part of a larger collection. It has some of the feeling of the cut up decade that followed the first blossoming of New York School poems, say in Rodefer or even Spicer. It has some of the feeling of Writers Forum books, and a little of the Leave Books period of the poets from Buffalo who were post-Language like Jena Osman and Lisa Jarnot.
By contrast, I find the two runner-up poems much less interesting: playing with repetition that constantly attempts to picture things, or wrestle with etymology and define one or two keywords. Myself, in the winner, I don't need to settle on ladybirds. I'm quite happy to have miniaturised wrong scale animals on the ceiling like anything from Dali to de Chirico and look at the larger play of planes and palette. It's more a delirium and about brushwork more than image.
The kneejerk thing about it being too arty in some of these comments doesn't happen when discussing the Turner prize except by people who don't go to galleries or don't try to make art. The fact that some are doing in the name of a less arty True Poetry is a bit dispiriting.
I still think it's possible to write long-line 'elaphantine' verse which is both more comprehensible and better structured than this one was. The poet might also have learnt how to be political while avoiding virtue-signaling if he was to check out a true master of the form, e.g. 'Dresden' by Ciaran Carson.
If every National Poetry Competition winner had to be as good as a master of the form, I think there would never be a winner. "Dresden" is a narrative poem, and this poem isn't trying to be a narrative poem. This is like saying Ashbery's Flow Chart should learn from the master Larkin's Whitsun Weddings
Thanks for your spirited defence Ira! I still think it’s just rubbish (and I do personally find it irredeemably cycnical) but it’s good to have several enthusiastic cases for the defence.
I was just assuming that everyone has heard enough from me. I don’t think it’s a good poem in any meaningful respect for all the reasons I laid out. Nothing you said changed my mind because I don’t agree that any of the devices are effective. But I am genuinely interested to hear from those who like it and why they do so I appreciated your post.
Thank you for giving this poem time and space for in-depth analysis - especially when not well loved! I'm somewhat counsel for the defence on this - though please forgive the adversarial sound to this, Hilary!
I enjoy poems that throw me a few googlies in terms of words or references I don't know (in moderation!), though accepting I may be nerdy and nearly alone in this. 'Diapause' is great as a word and idea that I thought spot on (once I knew what it meant...)
On the national/international thing - UK poets can submit to US publications and comps and do so, as often some stipend per poem is attached. Wow! So unless we stipulate not, I think they're entitled to submit this side of things.
Subjectively, I really enjoy the long-lined, loping 'range-iness' of much N American poetry. I feel they have (Karen Solie, Jorie Graham, Tony Hoagland, Carl Phillips, Henri Cole etc.) a more relaxed, freer sense of rhythm that captures a more wry, ironic, conversational tone, often, while being quite conceptual - ideas and thought led. Us Brits still, by comparison, sound and feel a bit terrified of anything too intellectual, and the 'clever-clever' I've read levelled at this poem typifies that aversion.
I love it that he tackles the big stuff - even if not always totally 'on it' - and actually won for it!
Thank you for sending me back to the poem and for throwing light on elements that clearly by-passed me.
On the international question, I think comparing the US and the UK on this point is a false equivalency because the US style in Anglophone poetry is now massively dominant — much more so (in the UK) than even a couple of decades ago. A hundred years ago, when the UK was the dominant voice in Anglophone poetry I think there would be no harm at all in opening up this competition to worldwide Anglophone writing, and indeed a lot of benefit to it. But US cultural colonialism in literature as in other areas is now so marked that I think it would be good to see the UK Poetry Society, which receives significant public funding from Arts Council England and no doubt also makes quite a lot of money from this competition, work to promote specifically British poetry and poets. I think the competition should be for British citizens and/or for people resident in the UK only. I appreciate a lot of people will disagree, and I do think it’s important to note that this a separate point from whether this particular poem, which happens to be by an American poet, is any good.
I don't know many English poets who show the US influence, despite the US hegemony. Think having it international gets in more cash, simply put. Can't blame them for 'crowdfunding'' in dire times. It's a tax we pay or not, for enjoying the game, I think. On the 'ballast' thing, 'unearned', I'm not sure more more needs saying about Gaza. We all carry the freight of the tragedy still unfolding there. Irish Famine may be unfamiliar to some, but still is a huge trigger that needs little elaboration or embellishment. I think he even gets in the boats, which is surely enough of 'out there's for a collection or mo
Thanks Ken. I have no problem with (indeed enjoy) a poem using unusual words if they do so correctly and the word seems to have earned its place, which I didn’t feel was the case here. I know what you mean about an anti-intellectual UK attitude compared to a tolerance for high-seriousness which is more typical of the States (and also of France — I have thought about this quite a bit as I read a lot of French poetry these days, much of which makes anything in English look down-to-earth by comparison). But personally I think an ambitious, widely-ranging, intellectually adventurous poem — of which of course we do have plenty even in a fairly mainstream and strictly English version of the tradition, in Bunting, or Hill, or someone like Toby Martinez de las Rivas — can and should still make sense if you are prepared to spend time with it, whereas in this case I felt it didn’t. Some things became clearer on the third or fourth careful read, but other things just became more and more blurred. I agree with you about the potential strengths of that long, rangy US-style more conversational line (I always think of it, in a classicists way, as the US version of the hexameter as it was used more loosely in satires and epistles, the ‘conversation’ poems). But again, I just didn’t think this was a good example of it. Let me come back to the international point in a second comment because this is getting long!
When I read the poem, I thought I must be a real idiot, unable to get anything out of it. I admire your efforts immensely. I cannot see how on earth the judges saw what they mention in their comments at all.
One little detail: I hated 'ending/impending' which, to my mind, seems to imply that the etymology of 'impending' is 'imp' + 'ending'!
Would it be too catty to add I'm almost glad the poem I sent in didn't even get long-listed?
Thanks for commenting. For my part, I think that sort of incantatory style with lots of internal rhyme of the ending/impending sort, which often sort of hints at, almost briefly creates, meanings & associations that are sidelong to the main 'meaning' of the poem and etymologically invalid, *can* work, I mean I don't dislike it in itself. You hear it a lot in some kinds of performance poetry / hiphop. It is often a bit superficial as an effect but in the most expert hands it is pretty amazing & can be extremely moving (I would point to Souleymane Diamanka here, but he is writing in French). But this poem isn't in any case committed to that style at all, we get only very brief glimpses of it.
A good point regarding fake etymology. I don't know Souleymane Diamanka's work, I'll try it, thanks. I find Valérie Rouzeau's work irritating however! A favourite of mine is Christian Bobin, poetic fragments in prose, almost religious in feel. Another generation. Bonnes Fêtes de Pâques !
Yes Rouzeau uses a lot of word-play too but to very different effect. I do like her work, and often find her endings unexpectedly moving, but it is sort of relentlessly arch in a way I can appreciate is not for everyone. I'm actually publishing translations of both these poets in the near future. Both very challenging to translate! I have read some Bobin but not loads, I'll keep an eye out. Aside from Diamanka, I think Gérard Bocholier is probably my favourite living French poet -- very different style though, more like Chappuis or Reverdy and people like that.
“… you don’t speak punctuation anyway, it’s only written” and from that point on all I could think of was Victor Borge and his phonetic punctuation zinging and thwipping around the room (and across the ceiling) — which is great, because I *love* that piece of his, have done since I was a kid, cracks me up every time. Unlike The Gathering, which has only utterly pissed me off every time I’ve read it. Or tried to read it, I’m not actually sure I’ve yet got all the way to the end in one reading. I think there *might* be a good, or at least interesting poem hiding in there somewhere, but a piece of work that still very obviously needs so much more, well, *work* shouldn’t be winning a National anything. Great piece of close-reading criticism, thank you 🙏
well after reading The Gathering and The Axe I didn't gave much patience with Badminton. To start with I wrestled with the indent and then the capital letters. I know capitalisation at the beginning of the line was normal in the old days but here I kept wondering about whether it signalled the start of a new sentence I got confused about ChristopherWill momentarily thing it was his surname. It was to mind a high school type of interaction but I didn't get the sense of what it was trying to tell me .
hi I'm glad you found it too long , over complicated difficult to follow and offered a zero emotional experience. To be honest I thought the Axe poem was better but again very dense and complicated. I think there is a theme here complicated poems are better than ones that convey a simple emotional truth
Yes I didn't love the Axe poem either tbh -- it felt a little bit 'exercise-y' to me -- but I did think it was a lot better than this in multiple dimensions.
I know you didn’t ask me, Katie, and this isn’t even an answer to the question you did ask, but I liked ‘The Visitors’ by Kate Wakeling (one of the seven Commended).
Yes, I liked ‘The Visitors’ a lot. At once simple in its language and imagery, and with plenty to ponder on in terms of meaning.
I’m not saying I would select it as the best poem in English of the year, but I think it had a lot of merits, especially for a poem that’s going to be read by a non-poetry reading public.
Phew! Someone else has noticed that the emperor is starkers!
Brilliant conversation. I'm in the midst of adjudicating Cinnamon Press's pamphlet competition and looking at this poem I was wondering if I'd lost the plot and could no longer 'read' poetry. The judges' description of the poem is just not what I was reading at all. Yes - flat, 'clever' without it leading anywhere or becoming illuminating, metaphors that couldn't sustain their weight and virtue signalling... but from 21,000 poems I'm still wondering why!
Yes me too, I find it baffling. I don't know the other judges' work, but Ian Duhig is a wonderful poet and a very experienced one too. I'm v. interested by what Katie Beswick says below about a possible angle from which this sort of style might feel like a bit of a corrective. (Though I would say that there are plenty of poets writing in a fairly sweeping / ambitious style but also with a decent mastery of basic technique.)
A highlight of TFP is how you handle these conversation format articles. Other magazines do it (TPR) but nowhere near as well. This was thoughtful and stimulating; I certainly got more out of it than I did the poem on first reading (and I hadn’t felt inclined to reread it).
I also feel national comps in the UK should have separate international categories if they’re going to allow international submissions. We don’t see poets from the UK winning major US awards, etc. There’s definitely a disparity in opportunity & also in how UK writers are received elsewhere vs. how US & other writers are received here. I can’t help but feel this speaks to a culture of insecurity/uncertainty in ourselves in comparison to the bulldozing confidence of other cultures in themselves.
Absolutely Naush! I said much the same thing in a reply somewhere here. US style poetry is so culturally dominant now in the Anglophone world and it absolutely doesn’t work the other way. I totally agree that the refusal to limit it feels like a weird kind of cultural cringe (though is probably actually just about maximising the cash). Thanks for commenting!
Thank you Victoria and Hilary. I've been getting more and more anxious about my inability to make head or tail of a lot of modern poetry, such as some of the poems in the Poetry Society's quarterly Poetry Review. I'm just a poetry lover, not a poet or critic, but I do have some experience - nearly a thousand poetry books collected over sixty years. A poem may be 'difficult' but rewarding after close reading - and especially if learnt by heart. I wouldn't enjoy learning Boswell's poem by heart!
I think this notion of “flatness” is a useful one. Too many bad poems are flat. The most obvious faults have been edited out (workshopped out?) but what we’re left with is merely blameless, inert. Shouldn’t a poem sing?
I know just what you mean about poems that have been edited/workshopped out of obvious weaknesses but not into any real strengths. What struck me about this one is that it contained so many obvious clichés, redundancies and inconsistencies which are the sorts of thing a teacher or editor would generally pick up on. I mean, they're the kind of thing you would comment on to help strengthen a piece of writing regardless of whether you particularly liked the style/tone/form/subject. Maybe that gives it a kind of authenticity of a kind, but it just made me cross.
Utterly brilliant. Whether we like this particular poem or not, think we can learn a lot by the way you attend to it and what you take it to task for.
I was bewildered from the beginning of the poem and less and less convinced by anything the poet drew from the ladybird conceit. Totally agree, head in hands emoji, re our national poetry prize - there were 4 UK based poets on the long list whose work I know and respect over years. It is obvs no longer ‘our’ poetry comp so call it something else.
Yes I think I speak for both Hilary and myself that we are sorry that for space reasons we had to cut a discussion touching on both the worldwide remit and that we both felt there were several much better poems in the shortlist.
Thank you for this thoughtful and attentive reading of a bad poem. I’ve been thinking about the furore over Imogen Wade’s poem two years ago and wondering why this poem wasn’t getting more of a critical drubbing (young female poets easier to criticise than older male ones? dunno).
Well I, for one, initially felt rather overwhelmed by the judges’ comments on ‘The Gathering’. The mismatch between the poem they purport to describe, and the actual poem in front of me, was bewildering. I thought it must be a failure of understanding on my part. That might prevent people from commenting. Besides, it’s early days yet!
Yes there's always the simple explanation: the poem is very hard to follow and people don't want to look stupid by saying that they couldn't follow it. Especially when someone has just told you how clever and profound it is. Works on most people most of the time!
I definitely thought, ‘I’m too stupid’ to follow this’, seeing the judges’ comments - despite my English degree, love of poetry, own recent writing & publishing of poetry, work as an English teacher, and long involvement with poetry education in schools! So glad to see it wasn’t just me.
Very interesting question Jo which I hadn't thought about. Hilary may have something to say about that. On this one, I have noticed very little explicit criticism but a lot of quite marked silence / failure to comment, which I suppose is eloquent in itself.
It was an unusual winner, and perhaps showed a coming fashion for more elephantine baggy lines – as Axe seemed to, too.
There's a lot in the final quatrain that illuminates the method, and shows us that we are perhaps looking for a tight fugue within a jazz piece, or photorealism within the kind of painting we saw between the blurring of impressionism and the eggbox plane exaggerating of Juan Gris.
the ravenous reticence
that remains of language when language fails and meaning’s
odometer is broken, when punctuation alone hovers aloft—
stars we can finally reach, once love’s last light is spoken.
There's a lot in "ravenous reticence" that is rather good about when "language fails" and that applies to a longer baggier line. If we compress it down – as per workshopping, as many in these comments have said is being defied here – then that is surely a bunch of ravenous would-be editors-for-succintness. Or even editors for etymology followthrough, or for playing tetris with phrases when there are other ways to do poems. Reticence can be an enemy, as some of these editorial "just one more rewrite" positions can.
If we use an odometer to include, rewrite or exclude words then that is only an apparent test for meaning, the next line implies. And then "broken" leads quite nicely and by rhyme into another meaning for "punctuation" – punctuating, picking holes in things. When this "hovers aloft", well, then it's a threat that too much editing and tightening or building to a breakthrough line (a rag and bone shop of the heart) isn't a foolproof editing technique of universal good.
I'm glad the poem didn't end on "punctuation alone hovers aloft", which in another poet it so easily could have done. The last line has a touch of "hid his face amid a crowd of stars" but makes it blah blah, which is a nice bit of froideur cool. There's a hint too of everything being not so in our control or present, with the idea from physics that the visible universe is only the planets whose light has travelled to us over a million years, from celestial bodies that in fact died in the time the light reached us.
I quite like the politics in the poem, and don't find them cynical. There is a sense of trauma from being part of something one tries to forget, and I find it genuine. The poem moves through the seasons with age-old attempts at rephrasing each season's affect and effect. But it keeps rolling back to summer, like an REM eye twitch. I'm not sure if there's a specific genocide it is thinking of, from a particular summer. But it has that feel, of common knowledge that we individually and collectively move past (it speaks to me of COVID denial, for example, that strange period of abeyance and time off like a school summer holiday).
I'd like to see it as part of a larger collection. It has some of the feeling of the cut up decade that followed the first blossoming of New York School poems, say in Rodefer or even Spicer. It has some of the feeling of Writers Forum books, and a little of the Leave Books period of the poets from Buffalo who were post-Language like Jena Osman and Lisa Jarnot.
By contrast, I find the two runner-up poems much less interesting: playing with repetition that constantly attempts to picture things, or wrestle with etymology and define one or two keywords. Myself, in the winner, I don't need to settle on ladybirds. I'm quite happy to have miniaturised wrong scale animals on the ceiling like anything from Dali to de Chirico and look at the larger play of planes and palette. It's more a delirium and about brushwork more than image.
The kneejerk thing about it being too arty in some of these comments doesn't happen when discussing the Turner prize except by people who don't go to galleries or don't try to make art. The fact that some are doing in the name of a less arty True Poetry is a bit dispiriting.
I still think it's possible to write long-line 'elaphantine' verse which is both more comprehensible and better structured than this one was. The poet might also have learnt how to be political while avoiding virtue-signaling if he was to check out a true master of the form, e.g. 'Dresden' by Ciaran Carson.
If every National Poetry Competition winner had to be as good as a master of the form, I think there would never be a winner. "Dresden" is a narrative poem, and this poem isn't trying to be a narrative poem. This is like saying Ashbery's Flow Chart should learn from the master Larkin's Whitsun Weddings
Thanks for your spirited defence Ira! I still think it’s just rubbish (and I do personally find it irredeemably cycnical) but it’s good to have several enthusiastic cases for the defence.
It's reasonably cynical to engage on no point and double down on calling the shared topic "just rubbish" though
I was just assuming that everyone has heard enough from me. I don’t think it’s a good poem in any meaningful respect for all the reasons I laid out. Nothing you said changed my mind because I don’t agree that any of the devices are effective. But I am genuinely interested to hear from those who like it and why they do so I appreciated your post.
Ok
Thank you for giving this poem time and space for in-depth analysis - especially when not well loved! I'm somewhat counsel for the defence on this - though please forgive the adversarial sound to this, Hilary!
I enjoy poems that throw me a few googlies in terms of words or references I don't know (in moderation!), though accepting I may be nerdy and nearly alone in this. 'Diapause' is great as a word and idea that I thought spot on (once I knew what it meant...)
On the national/international thing - UK poets can submit to US publications and comps and do so, as often some stipend per poem is attached. Wow! So unless we stipulate not, I think they're entitled to submit this side of things.
Subjectively, I really enjoy the long-lined, loping 'range-iness' of much N American poetry. I feel they have (Karen Solie, Jorie Graham, Tony Hoagland, Carl Phillips, Henri Cole etc.) a more relaxed, freer sense of rhythm that captures a more wry, ironic, conversational tone, often, while being quite conceptual - ideas and thought led. Us Brits still, by comparison, sound and feel a bit terrified of anything too intellectual, and the 'clever-clever' I've read levelled at this poem typifies that aversion.
I love it that he tackles the big stuff - even if not always totally 'on it' - and actually won for it!
Thank you for sending me back to the poem and for throwing light on elements that clearly by-passed me.
On the international question, I think comparing the US and the UK on this point is a false equivalency because the US style in Anglophone poetry is now massively dominant — much more so (in the UK) than even a couple of decades ago. A hundred years ago, when the UK was the dominant voice in Anglophone poetry I think there would be no harm at all in opening up this competition to worldwide Anglophone writing, and indeed a lot of benefit to it. But US cultural colonialism in literature as in other areas is now so marked that I think it would be good to see the UK Poetry Society, which receives significant public funding from Arts Council England and no doubt also makes quite a lot of money from this competition, work to promote specifically British poetry and poets. I think the competition should be for British citizens and/or for people resident in the UK only. I appreciate a lot of people will disagree, and I do think it’s important to note that this a separate point from whether this particular poem, which happens to be by an American poet, is any good.
I don't know many English poets who show the US influence, despite the US hegemony. Think having it international gets in more cash, simply put. Can't blame them for 'crowdfunding'' in dire times. It's a tax we pay or not, for enjoying the game, I think. On the 'ballast' thing, 'unearned', I'm not sure more more needs saying about Gaza. We all carry the freight of the tragedy still unfolding there. Irish Famine may be unfamiliar to some, but still is a huge trigger that needs little elaboration or embellishment. I think he even gets in the boats, which is surely enough of 'out there's for a collection or mo
Thanks Ken. I have no problem with (indeed enjoy) a poem using unusual words if they do so correctly and the word seems to have earned its place, which I didn’t feel was the case here. I know what you mean about an anti-intellectual UK attitude compared to a tolerance for high-seriousness which is more typical of the States (and also of France — I have thought about this quite a bit as I read a lot of French poetry these days, much of which makes anything in English look down-to-earth by comparison). But personally I think an ambitious, widely-ranging, intellectually adventurous poem — of which of course we do have plenty even in a fairly mainstream and strictly English version of the tradition, in Bunting, or Hill, or someone like Toby Martinez de las Rivas — can and should still make sense if you are prepared to spend time with it, whereas in this case I felt it didn’t. Some things became clearer on the third or fourth careful read, but other things just became more and more blurred. I agree with you about the potential strengths of that long, rangy US-style more conversational line (I always think of it, in a classicists way, as the US version of the hexameter as it was used more loosely in satires and epistles, the ‘conversation’ poems). But again, I just didn’t think this was a good example of it. Let me come back to the international point in a second comment because this is getting long!
When I read the poem, I thought I must be a real idiot, unable to get anything out of it. I admire your efforts immensely. I cannot see how on earth the judges saw what they mention in their comments at all.
One little detail: I hated 'ending/impending' which, to my mind, seems to imply that the etymology of 'impending' is 'imp' + 'ending'!
Would it be too catty to add I'm almost glad the poem I sent in didn't even get long-listed?
Thanks for commenting. For my part, I think that sort of incantatory style with lots of internal rhyme of the ending/impending sort, which often sort of hints at, almost briefly creates, meanings & associations that are sidelong to the main 'meaning' of the poem and etymologically invalid, *can* work, I mean I don't dislike it in itself. You hear it a lot in some kinds of performance poetry / hiphop. It is often a bit superficial as an effect but in the most expert hands it is pretty amazing & can be extremely moving (I would point to Souleymane Diamanka here, but he is writing in French). But this poem isn't in any case committed to that style at all, we get only very brief glimpses of it.
A good point regarding fake etymology. I don't know Souleymane Diamanka's work, I'll try it, thanks. I find Valérie Rouzeau's work irritating however! A favourite of mine is Christian Bobin, poetic fragments in prose, almost religious in feel. Another generation. Bonnes Fêtes de Pâques !
Yes Rouzeau uses a lot of word-play too but to very different effect. I do like her work, and often find her endings unexpectedly moving, but it is sort of relentlessly arch in a way I can appreciate is not for everyone. I'm actually publishing translations of both these poets in the near future. Both very challenging to translate! I have read some Bobin but not loads, I'll keep an eye out. Aside from Diamanka, I think Gérard Bocholier is probably my favourite living French poet -- very different style though, more like Chappuis or Reverdy and people like that.
Thank you for standing up to The Poetry Society!
“… you don’t speak punctuation anyway, it’s only written” and from that point on all I could think of was Victor Borge and his phonetic punctuation zinging and thwipping around the room (and across the ceiling) — which is great, because I *love* that piece of his, have done since I was a kid, cracks me up every time. Unlike The Gathering, which has only utterly pissed me off every time I’ve read it. Or tried to read it, I’m not actually sure I’ve yet got all the way to the end in one reading. I think there *might* be a good, or at least interesting poem hiding in there somewhere, but a piece of work that still very obviously needs so much more, well, *work* shouldn’t be winning a National anything. Great piece of close-reading criticism, thank you 🙏
Thank you Hilary and Victoria. I thorougly enjoyed your conversation, much more than the poem itself! How witty and accurate :-)
well after reading The Gathering and The Axe I didn't gave much patience with Badminton. To start with I wrestled with the indent and then the capital letters. I know capitalisation at the beginning of the line was normal in the old days but here I kept wondering about whether it signalled the start of a new sentence I got confused about ChristopherWill momentarily thing it was his surname. It was to mind a high school type of interaction but I didn't get the sense of what it was trying to tell me .
hi I'm glad you found it too long , over complicated difficult to follow and offered a zero emotional experience. To be honest I thought the Axe poem was better but again very dense and complicated. I think there is a theme here complicated poems are better than ones that convey a simple emotional truth
Yes I didn't love the Axe poem either tbh -- it felt a little bit 'exercise-y' to me -- but I did think it was a lot better than this in multiple dimensions.
What did you think of third place?
I know you didn’t ask me, Katie, and this isn’t even an answer to the question you did ask, but I liked ‘The Visitors’ by Kate Wakeling (one of the seven Commended).
Thank you Hilary. Yes I liked that too. I also really liked the third place poem.
Yes, I liked ‘The Visitors’ a lot. At once simple in its language and imagery, and with plenty to ponder on in terms of meaning.
I’m not saying I would select it as the best poem in English of the year, but I think it had a lot of merits, especially for a poem that’s going to be read by a non-poetry reading public.