poem
COMPETITION 2009 Don Paterson: Judge's Report
There’s no better way of taking the pulse and temperature of contemporary poetry than judging a competition. Competition poems display poetry in its most self-conscious aspect, true; but precisely because they do, they handily exaggerate the fashions and trends you’d otherwise have a much harder time defining.
The happiest thing to report is that surrealism, in all its gloriously demented forms, is rampant at the moment. The ‘British resistance to experiment’ that one hears about in one’s occasional and often miserable encounters with the blogosphere is a myth. To say much of this work is experimental is also to say a lot of it just doesn’t come off, but it fails for all the right reasons: ambition, not timidity. Some of the more deranged poems were just neurotic and defensive, and seemed a way of making the poet appear sophisticated while absolving them of any responsibly to make sense. But many more poems were terrifically entertaining, and really did seem to capture the random irruptions of madness and competing narratives that seem to define the age – and, in their own mad way, begin to make some sense of them.
You may be interested to hear, though, that the ‘competition poem’ has gotten a lot longer in the past ten years – by about a half a page. Indeed about half the poems entered seem to involve a page-turn (and sometimes two). I would be less dismayed to report this, of course, if these poems had all been riveting affairs, but too often they read like sonnets in a fat suit. The trouble with going over the page is that there has to be some sense of narrative or argumentative development to keep the reader’s interest; even the most brilliant and astonishing lines get boring – if you feel they’re just stacking up, and not taking you somewhere. Generally speaking, there seemed too much energy put into the detail, and not enough in the poem’s structure or thesis.
More than anything else, though, I was struck by how wonderfully competent and literate most of the entries were. This may or may not be a golden age for poetry – who would know – but it certainly isn’t a naive one; its poets are in dialogue with their own tradition, and understand the sheer craft and graft that it takes to write a successful poem. They do tend to write poems for other poets, but then so did the Elizabethans.
Almost all of the shortlisted poets were represented in my final pile by multiple entries, which at least reassured me I was homing in on folk who could repeat the trick. I hope it’s not going to frustrate the commended poets or take the shine off the winners to say that there’s no reason why the final seven poems should be in this order. I liked them all almost equally, and had to more or less invent reasons for taking one over another; two days later and I’d have placed them all differently. But surely no one would want to hear that you had hard-and-fast criteria for judging poetry. With poems above a certain level of technical expertise, preferences and feelings have to come into play – and your preferences and feelings change from one day to the next.
These seven poems are intelligent, musically expert, and understand that the reader’s mind must be diverted and entertained before it can be informed, enlightened or blown. The three top poems all had touches I just found irresistible: ‘Moyle’ has wonderful control of its wry and sad tone, and I would have killed to have written that line about the ‘dolorous carousel’. ‘Fodder’ is sly and smart and funny, and reads as Irish as hell, in a very good way (though I have no idea if its author is). The winner, ‘Letter to My Optician’, kept me engaged and charmed from one line to the next, and while I was reading it I forgot I was judging a poetry competition, which is – when you’re sitting page-blind at 2am, with another 250 poems to go – pretty much the best trick a competition poem can pull.
