poem

Paul Farley Judge’s Report

Judging a poetry competition comes with its own unique anxieties – let’s call the general condition Pythiaphobia – including fear of flicking past an obvious masterpiece, fear of the hostile acrostic, fear of awarding first prize to a close relative and, of course, fear of leaving a sheaf of poems on the bus. You do start to go poem-blind. You’re acutely aware of how a different judge would favour a different selection, and how it’s probably even more capricious than that; how any single judge might present a slightly different permutation from one day to the next. But having to work to a deadline, award prizes and see your choices enjoy the imprimatur of an excellent and highly regarded magazine does sharpen what is essentially an exercise of instinct, taste, reflection and comparison. You end up with a kind of de facto review; a review without words.

Until they invented the Judge’s Report! I should say that the general standard of the hundreds of poems I saw this year was high, encouragingly so, and it was difficult work drawing up a shortlist. I did what I always do when adjudicating a competition: I re-read the poems in different places (well, I find this makes a difference), I shuffled the deck and read things in fresh sequences, I slept on poems I was undecided about and went back in the morning. Slowly, eventually, I got down to 20 poems, and then things got really tough. Nearly everybody says this, and they say it because it’s nearly always the case: when you know a dozen or so very fine pieces of work are going to receive nothing, and nobody will ever know how close they came but you, it’s a struggle. At this point, I was feeling more executioner than judge or jury.

The work presented a huge, varied field, and a kind of problem. What did I value? We might know less about this than we like to think. Formally and thematically, the poems that slowly gathered into my shortlist often confounded whatever it was I thought I was looking for. The final seven poems all turned out to have very different things going for them, and going on, which just goes to show.

Mostly, it was the poems that simply stuck – page stoppers, as opposed to page turners, surely a power any poet would desire of their work – and possessed a coherence and colour all of their own that could be reliably re-activated; more than this, poems I looked forward to re-reading; poems that seemed to come bundled with their own fuzzy force fields and histories, that could be re-approached, inhabited, and never entirely exhausted of possibility and pleasure.

Qualities such as rhyme and formal shape facilitate memory, but memorizability alone isn’t enough. I like it when a recalled phrase or line can kick-start a poem’s overall motion and contours independently of having the page in front of you; but allied to richer, more networked connections and internal echoes, a poem really begins to insist on itself. I couldn’t help keeping these kinds of poems in play: they almost self-selected.

And then there were three: ‘Admission’ seems to deploy a voice with the same clip and slickness as its arriviste subject, its build-ups and take-downs wrapping around each other; it also struck me as being driven and necessary. Between its epigraph and its Black Country glosses, ‘Sow’ wallows in its own demotic texture, and fashions a voice that is indomitable, defiant and proud. If I describe it as a ‘chewy’ poem, I mean that as a compliment: it is chewy from start to finish, an absolute delight. The winner this year, ‘Edison Peña Runs the Six Miles’, became the poem I returned to most often in the final stages. Whether it’s the simple gravitational force between movement and stillness, its little loop of chthonic footage, its nested-ness and shifts in perspective and imaginative scale, even the buried resonance of a man called Edison trapped in the dark, or just the idea of an Orpheus jogging in Hades... I couldn’t say. Something of all these things lend the poem a lovely elasticity, approaching the shape and movement of thought itself.