The TS Eliot Prize - there were apparently 123 eligible books this year. I'd like to see the longlist of the other 113 - it would be far more refreshing. What's set in? Acclaim fatigue. Heaney and Walcott, with their Nobels, don't need the attention or the money. Either, of course, has a book good enough to win such a prize. As do all of the other eight on this list. It seems sad the big news angle is that one of the poets is a "recovering heroin addict"! Most poets I know are recovering from, or entering into, one addiction or another, at any given time, or facing some life crisis - as are we all. That is the media's fault, the media that has managed to almost kill poetry dead in the UK with its stop-start attention. Is it good that Annie Freud and Fiona Sampson and Pascale Petit - three of the best poets now writing in England - are noted? Yes. I think most exciting is the presence of Brian Turner here - a poet not widely known in the UK, yet. Turner is arguably the most important "War poet" of this decade. Of the others on the list, none is weak. Robin Robertson is a poet's poet. Armitage is a crowd pleaser. Willets is a big debut. Haynes is increasingly a formalist maestro. All could win, if they could get from under the famous shadow. Turner's winning the prize would be most appropriate as a summation of the 00s, if nothing else. Walcott's White Egrets is one of the greatest late works in the high modernist style since Yeats. Too close to call. But - where are the Salt books? Where is the breakthrough of the performance poets, the avant-garde, the youth wave? In those other 113, lies the future of British poetry, unless in Britain, poetry's future is endlessly repressed, always to return as the angry margin.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?
Comments
It looks like yet another tedious round-up of the usual suspects to me. And people wonder why the British public has lost all interest in contemporary poetry.
Best wishes from Simon