O Sport, you are Honour!

Victoria Moul and Hilary Menos on the challenges of running the National Poetry Competition

Hilary: Nell Nelson and I have been discussing how difficult it is to run something like the National Poetry Competition. She and I both regularly receive newsletters brandishing noteworthy poems that we find underwhelming. We discuss them with each other, and with friends; I’m sure you do too, Victoria. A huge amount of this kind of interaction must go on. Modest poets sitting at home baffled by the high rating of such and such a poem. What DO we agree on? There’s no universal accord. We split into ‘schools’ of thought. Many of us join reading groups that thrash things out and agree (up to a point) by establishing a group norm.

I think it is possible to articulate a reasonable (and reasoned) middle ground. But you can only defend it intelligently with regard to the particular. Particular poems, that is. And someone will always disagree. One can generalise about what makes a good poem, but there’s always one that breaks whatever rules you lay down. It’s easier to say what makes a bad poem (usually it’s using a poetry technique self-evidently badly, or mistakenly). And you can generalise about what makes a good poem for you. But when I do this, I end up using terms like ‘ambition’, ‘technique, ‘connection’, ‘a little machine for remembering itself’ – others might disagree. And, again, there’s always one that breaks the rules.

Say ten poems are agreed to be pretty good. What makes one the ‘best’? Would ten readers agree? Probably not. The same goes for collections. In 2010, when Anne Stevenson chaired the T S Eliot panel (the other two judges were Bernadine Evaristo and Michael Symmons Roberts), the three unanimously agreed that Derek Walcott’s collection White Egrets was far and away the best. Not everyone thought they were right. Arguably, there’s no single outstanding poetry collection most years. Perhaps every decade?

Victoria: Yes, for collections the more interesting judgements are generally retrospective. Almost no-one ever gets these things right at the time and it’s all a bit arbitrary – plenty of years, as you say, have no really outstanding collections and then you get years in which several appeared together but only one of those (at best) will get that year’s prize.

Honestly, I think a lot of this is common sense. Everyone knows competitions of any kind and in any sphere are a blunt tool. I’ve sat on loads of committees professionally, and probably you have too, and anyone who has knows that the larger the committee the less chance of appointing or giving the prize to someone genuinely interesting – there’s always a convergence to the mean as everyone exercises their personal veto over a colleague’s eccentric favourite. And the typical appointment committee begins with some agreement about what they’re looking for – a person to do X or fill role Y. It’s not obvious that the average poetry competition begins even with that.

Personally, I think the more interesting competitions are the ones with a single judge. Then at least you know you are getting one person’s honest opinion and not the result of a series of grumpy compromises. If you rate that poet or critic, you will take their choices seriously, and if you don’t, you won’t. It also makes more sense for those considering entering, as you have a much clearer steer.

This year’s National Poetry Competition, moreover, had three very different poets as judges. I know Ian Duhig’s work (which I think is excellent, and which I’ve read and loved for a long time) much better than that of Denise Saul or Susannah Dickey but whichever individual judge you happen to know best it’s obvious that they write very differently. Such a diverse cast of judges is, I suspect, always likely to produce an unsatisfactory outcome, unless they did something mechanical like, for instance, each choosing a single favourite poem and agreeing that those three would have one of the top three spots regardless of the discussion, and then just arguing about the final order.

When I think about the committees I’ve been on in which my favourite candidate missed out, or there was a strong runner-up, in all those cases I made a point of doing what I could to support that person’s career afterwards – recommending them for other jobs, acting as a back-up referee, and in a couple of cases contributing to other projects of theirs. I had the same experience myself early in my own career, for which I was grateful. For an early career academic, getting onto shortlists, even if you don’t get the prize or the job or the grant, is one of the main ways of people finding out what you are doing, and I’m sure there are similar scenarios in many other sectors. I think ideally that’s how we should think about competitions – hopefully they are a mechanism by which readers and editors and publishers might encounter some interesting new voices and go on to do something with that by publishing them and reading them and writing about them. The most interesting poems are generally unlikely to be the winning one, and much more likely to be somewhere down the shortlist, but that’s OK.

So I don’t think anyone realistically expects competitions, especially very big competitions with several judges, to work well. Of course it’s a different matter if you feel that the winning poem is actively bad as I did feel this year – that’s a bit like if someone incompetent gets the job and it does create bad feeling and undermines faith in the whole process. But even so, there were several poems I liked better farther down, and I know there were for you too.

Hilary: Let’s talk briefly about the stated criteria of the three National Poetry Competition judges this year. Denise Saul said: “I am looking for ambitious and memorable poems that carry a degree of vocal authority.” Did ‘The Gathering’ carry vocal authority?

Victoria: Ah now that’s an interesting clause because perhaps the only thing I could say about ‘The Gathering’ is that, yes, perhaps it does have something like ‘vocal authority’. I don’t think you can deny that it does have a distinctive voice. It’s a voice I find pretentious, cynical and sloppy but it is a voice : I mean, I feel like I’d recognise another poem if not precisely by the same author, at least in the same mode. I think the other two winners had something like vocal authority too, in their way. I liked both the runner-up poems better, without loving either. The third poem was perhaps the least distinctive voice-wise. I thought it was well done, but quite like a lot of other poems at the moment.

Hilary: Susannah Dickey said: “I’ll be looking for poems that sit uneasily with the very language they’re crafted from, poems that are frisson-ridden and dynamic. I want to read poems that feel like a collaboration between the poet’s intent and their acquiescence to that which remains uncontrollable. Poetry can do things other forms of literature can’t, for various reasons, and I’m always drawn to writing that leans into that complicated freedom.” What does she mean by this?

Victoria: Well it’s rather a pretentious way of putting it, isn’t it, but she’s saying either just that she wants poems that do things that prose doesn’t (reasonable, but a rather minimum requirement) or that she’s interested in poems about poetry: what poetry distinctively can do, and the limits of what it can do. On the one hand, this is something that younger poets often fall into writing about, sometimes one feels out of a kind of faute de mieux – it’s tempting to write grandly about the limits of language if you haven’t had much life experience yet and don’t have much else to write about. That sounds mean but I think anyone who reads a lot of, say, first collections knows what I’m getting at: this is default ‘clever young person’ stuff. On the other hand, pretty much all the greatest poems are indeed, at least in part, about the power of art and its limits: Keats’s Grecian Urn, Horace Odes 3.13, many of the hymns in the Rig Veda, multiple passages in Homer, pretty much all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Malherbe’s ode to Bellegarde, etc etc. So fair enough, in a way. Let’s aim high.

The problem is that poems explicitly about poetry (or art/language more generally) are hard to pull off, and also – and I think this is important – they are, aside from the rare, famous exceptions, generally more interesting to professional poets than they are to ordinary readers of poetry. I think the National Poetry Competition, which is run by the Poetry Society with its mission of poetry for all, should ideally try to keep the non-expert punter, the ‘reads a few new poems a year’ sort of reader, in mind.

Hilary: Ian Duhig didn’t lay out what he was looking for, but after the event he did say that each of the winning poems is “good in its own particular way”, adding that a judge has to work out how the poem achieves what it sets out to do. So I think he’s saying that the measure of a ‘good’ poem is how well it succeeds in what it sets out to do. But how do you know what a poem sets out to do, unless the poet tells you (and does so before it wins a competition and has had a pile of judges crawling all over it)? Perhaps what the author of ‘The Gathering’ set out to do was to write in a muddled way about feeling muddled. In which case it has succeeded, in a way. But is this a project worthy of pursuit?

Victoria: Ian Duhig’s comment sounds bland, but I think it’s wise, and probably all you can really say in the face of such a vast open competition. (No doubt he has judged a few competitions in his time!) I think he just means that different poems will have been written within, as it were, different traditions and ought to be judged accordingly. That sounds meaningless but it’s not if you assume broad and generous expertise in the one doing the judging. You wouldn’t assess an imagist epigram by the criteria of a decent sonnet, that sort of thing. You read the poem and you think about what sort of broad school or tradition it’s coming from and you judge it in that context. If I’m asked to assess a grant application from a theologian, I don’t criticise it for not adopting a linguist’s methodology.

The long lines and conversational structure of ‘The Gathering,’ for instance, draw on a particularly American (though now quite widely diffused) tradition. The combination of the long lines, complex syntax, conversational style and abrupt transitions in diction between high and low remind me of someone like C.K. Williams. As we discussed last week, I don’t think ‘The Gathering’ works as a poem, I don’t think it’s a success, but that’s not the same thing as saying that you can’t write excellent poetry in this style, as Williams did. Obviously it would be unfair to criticise ‘The Gathering’ for being unlike, say, the poetry of Gillian Allnutt, or Wendy Cope, or of Fiona Larkin who won the prize last year – all poets writing in distinct (and themselves different) traditions.

Similarly, a large number of the poems in the prizes-and-commended list contain some surreal elements without being thorough-going surrealist poems. This ‘hint of the surreal’ or ‘surrealism-lite’ is almost ubiquitous in « serious » Anglophone poems at the moment, and I wrote about it a while ago in this piece. To be honest I wish everyone would stop doing it because it is now so incredibly conventional as to be practically obligatory and as a result (in my view) pretty tedious. It’s become just a rhetorical shorthand for « This is a Poem ». But obviously it would be unfair to rule out all the poems that are, unsurprisingly, making use of this dominant contemporary convention just as it would be unfair to criticise a poet in 1645 for writing a sonnet, even if you were sick to the back teeth of the things. The serious judge, whatever they feel about that convention itself, will be on the look-out for the poet who can still do something interesting with it.

So I think Duhig is articulating just what you’d want in a judge, really: I will do my best to understand where your poem is coming from and judge it accordingly. Obviously no single judge is going to be equally experienced in absolutely every possible sub-type of contemporary poetry, but the judges for a large, open competition probably should have as broad an ‘ear’ as possible. I think this does mean that they should have significant editorial experience and, practically speaking, be probably on the older side.

Hilary: If you don’t like what the current judges decide, who else takes on that role? She who chooses the judges wields an enormous amount of power. If it was up to you, who might you appoint to judge the next National Poetry Competition, Victoria?

Victoria: I think it would be fun to have a public vote, to be honest. Let actual readers decide. The practicalities are against it, of course, because someone would still have to draw up some sort of manageable short-list. But I think it would be interesting to see what the British (not American!) public would go for.

Hilary: Though that does run the risk of the person with the most friends, or the largest campaign funds, taking the prize.

Victoria: Good point. Alternatively, I would also like to see a competition like this judged by experienced poets who are paid well for the very significant volume of work and who remain anonymous. That would remove the suspicion that such stints are as much about career-development for the judges as for the entrants.

Failing that, I think it would be interesting to see a competition judged at least in part by people who are keen readers of poetry but aren’t poets themselves. If you look back at, say, the first judges of the Forward Prize for poetry in 1992, they were Stephen Spender (chairing), John Bayley, Margaret Drabble, Mick Imlah and Roger McGough, so a mixture of poets and high-profile non-poets in the form of a prestigious critic (Bayley) and a novelist (Drabble). Perhaps this is less important when judging individual poems, but I think for the collection prizes especially it’s healthy and helpful to have some judges who aren’t part of the immediate and, let’s be honest, pretty tiny and circular economy of poets-teachers-judges-editors.

For the national competition, I think it would also probably be fairer on entrants and readers to have a few different categories each with an appropriate judge, like in swimming: best prose poem, best traditional poem, best ‘freestyle’ poem, best comic poem. You could still choose an overall ‘best’ if you wanted from the collection of winning ones, but then at least you’d have a range of things in the running.

Hilary: Why isn’t the National Poet Laureate judging the National Poetry Competition? Peter and Ann Sansom of The Poetry Business have ideas about what makes a good poem; any magazine editor has such ideas and they are demonstrated in the content of their magazines. They put their money where their mouths are. Literally. Why are they not judging the National Poetry Competition?

In Strictly Come Dancing or Masterchef or the equivalent, the judges have demonstrated universally acclaimed expertise in their area before they are appointed. In the highly competitive area of music, both singing and any kind of instrumentation, nobody could fail to acknowledge the extraordinary skill of certain performers, nor to see that a few of them excel in such a degree as to set them apart. It’s hard to demonstrate equivalent expertise in poetry. This is one of the key issues.

In fact, we can’t define a single thing called ‘poetry’. There are poetries, plural, as university curricula increasingly acknowledge.

There may be some connection with the visual arts, where the idea of what art is has been equally tested since the early twentieth century if not before. But art schools, though they do talk about the visual arts, don’t talk about sculptures as in totally different phenomena. Generally we know what is sculpture, what is painting and what is illustrative work.

Victoria: Well I don’t really agree that there’s no such thing as poetry, I think most readers have a pretty clear intuitive sense of what is and isn’t a poem, though of course there will be edge cases and disagreement around the margins. Arguing about the definition and the role of various defining elements of historical and cultural context is fun for students and academics but I don’t think most people who love reading or saying poems are really that interested in that. But I take your point of course about the different traditions (or « poetries ») and I would be in favour of separate categories with expert judges for each, as I mentioned above, just because I think that would boost confidence and would also much better reflect what is actually read and written. People love reading and writing comic poems, for instance, and to do it well is highly skilled and quite rightly highly valued by readers, but they never win a big prize.

Hilary: Apart from this, the logistics of running a poetry competition that generates over 20,000 entries are challenging.

Victoria: On the whole I feel a lot of sympathy for the judges, despite my irritation with their top choice this year. The National Poetry Competition received over 21,000 entries and apparently does not use any kind of initial sifting system, so the three of them must, I suppose, have read a minimum of 7,000 poems each. (Assuming that they started by just dividing the pile into three in this way, and only all read some sort of longlist or shortlist.) That’s a big ask even for a very experienced reader – say, someone who’s edited a major magazine for many years. I hope they are paid pretty well for it, but even so, it’s a sacrifice – I think it must be difficult to write much poetry of your own while doing that, for example. So while I think they screwed up here and the whole thing is rather embarrassing, I don’t envy them the task at all.

Hilary: Why IS the National Poetry Competition open to poets of any nationality?

Victoria: This is the first time that none of the top three poems have been by a British poet: two are American and one is from Australia. I do think this is worth noting. I don’t know if the entrance rules actually changed at some point, but if you look at the list of past winners they were all British between the start of the prize in 1978 and 2005 when an international entrant (Melanie Drane from North Carolina) won it for the first time. And even after that, the majority of winners have been British poets.

As you say, it’s the ‘National’ Poetry Competition, not an international one, and it’s run by the UK Poetry Society, a charitable foundation which receives government funding in the form of a substantial Arts Council England grant (£361,083 in 2025). That’s not huge money in most sectors, but for UK arts funding it is substantial. The published accounts don’t break the elements down that much so it’s hard to tell but you have to pay to enter the competition, and I think it’s fair to assume that keeping it open to international entrants makes the Society a fair amount of money.

Hilary: Do you think it should be limited to British poets, then?

Victoria: If we were having this discussion 100 years ago, when British poetry was by far the dominant voice in worldwide Anglophone poetry, then it would probably be a good thing for the flagship national competition to be open to anyone writing in English anywhere in the world. But that is very far from the situation today. The US tradition and characteristically American forms and styles have become very dominant in UK poetry, especially in magazines like Poetry Review, and especially so over the last couple of decades. It’s getting harder and harder for new readers, looking at the most fashionable magazines, to have any sense of the quite distinct British and Irish tradition in poetry – as exemplified, in fact, by someone like Ian Duhig himself. Increasingly, for instance, you see young British poets and critics repeating platitudes that only apply to American poetry (about a sharp and politicised distinction between “formal” and “free” verse for instance, a distinction which has never been a meaningful one in the same way in the British or Irish traditions as it is in the States). Equally, I see a lot of British poets making a rather half-hearted stab at forms and cadences downstream from American poets like Whitman or O’Hara, which don’t sound convincing because they don’t have any feel for or roots in the tradition from which it emerges.

In literary matters as in others, America is, we might say, a rather dominant and aggressive colonial power. I don’t know why we can’t be honest about that and react accordingly. I 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.

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Note on the title: “O Sport, you are Honour” (“Ô Sport, tu es l’Honneur !”) is from ‘Ode to Sport’ by Pierre de Coubertin, father of the modern Olympic Games.

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Victoria Moul is a scholar, poet and translator living in Paris. She writes weekly about poetry and translation on her substack, Horace & friends.

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Hilary Menos is Editor of The Friday Poem.

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Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem has 3500-plus subscribers with over 23,500 views in the last 30 days. It’s run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers. As well as exploring our Substack, it’s worth visiting The Friday Poem website where you can browse our Archive of more than 700 posts dating back to early 2021.

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