In The Guardian, on Saturday, Don Paterson wrote about how older poet-editors need to speak with poets in their 20s, to keep up with the new poetic styles - agreed. He also discussed the roots of the new Picador Poetry Prize. He was careful to position the prize in the lineage of the Yale series of poets. While it is in that lineage, there are far more recent and obvious precedents, and it is telling that these were rather notably overlooked. The first is the Crashaw Prize, which Salt has successfully run the last few years. But, more to the point, there is the general American experience of publishing, where almost every debut collection at every credible poetry publisher is adjudicated on in a prize setting. I just wanted to mention this, because while the nascent Picador Prize may wish to bask in the glow of the Yale series, it really is the nothing new. A fine venture from one of the major places to find mainstream, excellent BILP - British-Irish Lyric Poetry - but not an original endeavour in the least. Then again, as Paterson has been wont to argue, The New in Poetry is rather besides the point, and Tradition is equally valuable.
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
In my more than twenty years experience, far from welcoming new and struggling poets, the British Poetry Establishment usually goes out of its way to suppress and silence them. The reason for this is that they are a classic vested interest, forever scratching each others' backs and covering their own arses.
Best wishes from Simon
Forgive my constant moaning on this subject on behalf of Anglophone poets living outside of Anglophone countries. Whatever commercial considerations publishers may have when they restrict entry in this way, it clearly reduces the notion of who poets worth reading might be to those who easily fit into a simple category in terms of identity.
Political science has a word for this: Nationalism.
I hope that if the Faber New Poets scheme returns, it will be an open submission process where anyone can enter. It doesn't seem very fair to use scouts that seem to favour MA courses and poetry publications that not many young poets are featured in.