The English Association Fellows' Poetry Prize 2010

Abstract

An acquaintance of mine who had never heard of such a thing laughed out loud when I said I was judging a poetry competition. I suspect he had caught an imaginary glimpse of fey nature-lovers poking each other's eyes out with quill pens. In fact, judging by the number of competitions there are these days, poetry is a cutthroat business, every bit as competitive as capitalism itself. Doubtless we are generating our own equivalents to the spivs and usurers of the City. But, for all that one may have doubts about the value of competitions in the arts, or worries about their effect on the ethos of creativity, the people who win them are generally in favour of them, and they can give rise to decent works of art. The baptistery doors in Florence are not a bad precedent. Even without any realistic ambitions to win them, poets can make practical use of competitions. Recently, while going through a phase of experimenting with the sonnet, I trawled the – mainly American – online competition announcements, in particular looking for those with given themes, and then wrote sonnets to submit to them. I won neither prizes nor plaudits, but my forthcoming collection An Ordinary Dog (Carcanet, 2011) contains sonnets that were originally written on such given themes as string theory and the David Lynch film Mulholland Drive – matters to which I had not previously paid much attention. Like a random commission for which the cheque is never in the post, this seems as good a way as any of generating work.