It’s like watching the popcorn pop. Yesterday Alice Oswald surprised everybody – well, okay, the poetry world – by withdrawing her book from the TS Eliot Prize shortlist in protest at the prize’s new sponsors, a hedge-fund investment company called Aurum (not to be confused with Aurum Press).
She said:
I’m uncomfortable about the fact that Aurum Funds, an investment company which exclusively manages funds of hedge funds, is sponsoring the administration of the Eliot Prize; I think poetry should be questioning not endorsing such institutions and for that reason I’m withdrawing from the Eliot shortlist.
This was a bit of a poetry bomb. The Poetry Book Society, which administers the UK’s most prestigious poetry prize, has just recently been celebrating the fact that it had found a new sponsor for it, after losing all its Arts Council funding from April 2012. Aurum had agreed to sponsor only the management of the prize for three years; not the PBS itself. This means that the prize may remain as the sole legacy of the PBS, which was founded by TS Eliot and, I think, Stephen Spender. The prize money , famously, comes from Mrs Valerie Eliot, who makes an increasingly frail, grand entrance to award the cheques.
It’s bad news for the other shortlisted poets, who may – as has been pointed out – really need the prize money, or who may not ever get another chance at this most prestigious award (Oswald has already won it once). (Looking at this shortlist, though, I suspect that won’t be very many of these poets. I’m sure I’ve seen most of them read at the TS Eliot readings before, and not that long ago. It is a first time for John Burnside, whose book is apparently wonderful.)
The rest of the shortlist is:
John Burnside, poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, Leontia Flynn, David Harsent, John Kinsella, Esther Morgan, Daljit Nagra, Sean O’Brien and Bernard O’Donoghue.
Or, rather: that’s who the shortlist was. Because today John Kinsella has stepped down as well. (His book is also apparently wonderful; I have it at home and it’s atop the pile. But then, Oswald’s book is also apparently wonderful, and I have in fact been dying to read it. But alas, etc.)
It’s potentially embarrassing for the judges, as well – fine, upstanding people. With two writers gone, and the PBS confirms that they will not be replaced on the shortlist as there isn’t time to do it fairly, the others are under some very public moral pressure and are likely to be searching their consciences now.
Of course, this act of conscience is a brave thing to do. (If it had been done by William Blake, what would we be saying?) If there was a poet who would do it, maybe it always would have been Alice Oswald. The most local of poets, most meticulous and smallscale observer of tiny things, tiny patterns – she is a limelight-eschewer who seems to embody a different set of values and references – slightly out of time, in some ways – to the rest of us. There is something of the first principles about her: this seems so perfectly in character for her, now she’s done it it seems to have been inevitable.
And if there was another writer on the shortlist who would be the next to resign, it would have been John Kinsella.
But is it what everyone on the shortlist should do? Are hedge funds really any worse than any other corporate sponsor? Is all major corporate money tainted? Should controversial corporations should be banned from funding the arts, or are we just grateful for the money? Do we think ‘corporate social responsibility’ is a con, or does it count as really giving something back?
Does working within the dominant system mean just playing ball with any old body? To what extent is it practical or right to impose limits? Where do we draw the line?
Historically of course artists have always taken the money from wherever they could get it. It’s a splinter of Graham Greene’s ‘chip of ice in the heart’. A hedge-fund funder seems no worse than, say, the Medici. Poets used to bow and scrape and write fawning accolades for pompous illiterate patrons. And there was a book published the other year, I seem to recall, exposing how the entire French intelligentsia looked the other way when the Nazis occupied them. Was that different?
As has been pointed out also, on this one we are all in it together. Aurum with its evil investments apparently funds many pensions, pensions for good people, in the public sector and for other worthy, peaceful institutions. If you want money, you kind of have to go where the money is.
But -
This is the moment! Alice Oswald says poets should ‘question’ these organisations, and all over the world people are questioning – and interrogating – them. There are tents. There are resigning priests. There are protests and popup libraries. There’s a marquee outside St Paul’s Cathedral right now with the a sign saying ‘University’ on it. The ‘Occupy’ movement has taken on a meaning that goes beyond tents and policemen. There are emails doing the rounds calling on us to take a stand this Christmas, to buy less (duh), buy local, buy small-scale. Lots of us, including me, have ticked ‘Like’ on a Facebook page called ‘Occupy Poetry’.
What would Occupying Poetry look like?
Well… Maybe like this. It would certainly start with not being desperate for a prize. It would have to start with occupying yourself, that is, inhabiting yourself fully. He is freest over whom no man has power – and power is exploited desire. I think it would have to consist of demonstrating that poetry exists without the big money men, that people can do it for themselves. Occupying Poetry would reject what Michael Horovitz calls ‘the Enter-Prize culture’ – and it might support small presses and the amazing abundance of poetry in the UK today, possibly in small marquees, or possibly church halls in Clerkenwell.
What would I do? Well, I’ve long ago given up thinking that I’d behave better than anyone else in a real emergency. I’m not as free from the shackles of desire as Alice Oswald apparently is, so I might not have stepped down, had Egg Printing Explained had the great fortune to have been shortlisted. I might not have thought of it – being a pragmatist, and liking to work with people instead of against them – and even if I had thought of it, I might have kept my head down, being desperate for the money to keep myself going, having lost my job… and if I were on the shortlist now, I think I’d be in a state of some turmoil, examining my own motives and beliefs, and the ramifications, as hard as I could.
The Guardian cites other writers who have refused prizes. Oswald and Kinsella haven’t done anything new. But right now, whatever it might mean for the Poetry Book Society or anyone else, this act is resonant. It is the moment to Occupy: the story must have its characters and forward motion.
We will watch and see what happens.
{ 22 comments }
Dear Katy
Good on Alice and John for showing some real moral fibre – a quality usually conspicuous by its absence within the British Poetry Establishment in general. My stepson has requested an Alice Oswald volume for Christmas. This is a boy who has never hitherto manifested the slightest interest in poetry.
Best wishes from Simon
Well, I know one of the poets personally – though not closely at present. Though not on the breadline, I can imagine they’d find the prize money useful. Not sure what emotions they’d feel. (Tempted to join the two refuseniks? Glad that the odds are increasingly in their favour? Concerned they’d be seen as a less deserving winner?)
Maybe it is good publicity for all the poets – in a contest which does not normally receive that much attention from the wider world. What wish recent shennanigans in another poetry organisation, poetic voices are getting their fifteen minutes in the spotlight.
The alternative, perhaps, would be to stay put, as a group, and agree together that whoever wins gives the money (or most of it) to the equivalent of (John Berger’s) Black Panthers? If they can’t do that, I think she is quite right to stand up to the hedge funders: no matter how poor poets might be, they still have political choices to make, as we all do.
(very nice post btw KEB)
To use the West of Scotland vernacular: gaun yersel, Alice!
You say she seems to exist “out of time” – I agree with that, but I prefer to think of her as existing “two foot to the left*”. And that also describes, I think, what you say about “Occupy Poetry” and the Occupy movement in general – they point towards ways to exist that are contemporary and, well, abnormal – seeking a new path to achieve a society/poetry to live in/discover.
* or right, this isn’t a political placement in *that* sense.
PS I’m not a fan of prizes anyway. How many did Alice’s beloved Thomas Wyatt win, for example? I blame Alfred Nobel for all this prize madness…
PPS I very much liked your piece of Christopher Logue. I meant to say there but didn’t. It also makes me feel bad for never actually having bought any of his books the thousands of times I’ve held them in my hands in bookshops over the years.
I’m with David… poetry prizes dominate talk of poetry so much that I’d happily ban the lot. A “necessary evil” we are always told… but we have so much evil to deal with already.
You write a good post as ever but your “rest of us” somewhere in the middle rang less true for me. Is there really “a rest of us”? Sometimes I wonder if any of us have anything in common with any other… and not just in poetry.
Katie, well done: thoughtful, temperate, probably a slow-burner but more provocative eventually than a lot of the knee-jerk responses I’ve seen today. I (perhaps self indulgently) think of myself as an old lefty, but gesture politics should raise eyebrows AND questions. I think you raise the right ones.
Is Aurum particularly egregious? Where do our publishers bank? Where do WE bank our fabulous earnings from poetry? Or is this a reminder that ours is perhaps the least implicated of the arts – pen, paper, memory, audience if we’re lucky… All we need.
Congrats on this!
‘And there was a book published the other year, I seem to recall, exposing how the entire French intelligentsia looked the other way when the Nazis occupied them. Was that different?’
Not at all Katy. Reports are coming in all the time about Cameron’s goose-stepping army of hedge-fund managers locking up, torturing and killing vast numbers of (pre)occupied lesser beings while the UK intelligentsia look altogether elsewhere. I hear Oswald has already been taken in for questioning.
Mark, you do realise these are rhetorical questions, based on conversations I’ve been hearing/having. Right? There’s a lot of fuzziness in public discourse.
Of course I do Katy. That trusty nano-implant (the excellent Mark2 defuzzer/derhetoricizer) in your ear has been transmitting perfectly, coming in loud and clear
I apologise if this comes as an unhelpful tangent, but there seems to be an implied need for a distinction (or perhaps a spectrum) relating to the cleanliness of money. The dichotomy I’m getting here is that public money is clean and private money is dirty. Or maybe it is poetic/unpoetic rather than clean/dirty.
Is there anybody reading this who has worked in the depths of both the public and private sectors? Did one paycheque feel cleaner or more poetic than the other? Could there be a league table of cleanliness for poetry awards in which the money-route was carefully scrutinised? Is there a big cleanliness gap between an Eric Gregory and a Costa?
I still have mixed feelings about Oswald’s move, but it does seem that she has brilliantly given a demonstration of what “if you’re just out to make money, then poetry isn’t for you” looks like in its most extreme.
With the idea that “poetry should question” things like Hedge Fund Companies, there is the rather grand assumption that writing poetry subscribes you to a certain basic list of principles. I feel terribly uncomfortable when someone makes an assumption about me, and even more uncomfortable when I realise that they are probably right.
Thanks for posting this Katy – even after the longest of days at work you always get me thinking.
‘I still have mixed feelings about Oswald’s move, but it does seem that she has brilliantly given a demonstration of what “if you’re just out to make money, then poetry isn’t for you” looks like in its most extreme.’
But then it isn’t primarily about money, is it? The money from such awards is nice certainly, but hardly life-changing. It’s more about recognition, the sense that your work has been rated by people who have something of a clue about such matters. Personally I’d find it very hard to turn that down.
Forgive me, but I must clarify my last (rather glib) statement re the money. The money would be far more than ‘nice’ and certainly life-changing (for me anyway) in that it would ease our financial burdens for the immediate future (six months to a year say). What I meant was that, while the money would be helpful in the short term, the recognition would have more lasting implications. So it seems to me anyway.
You do make me stand up straighter. I believe I just heard my mother bust a button.
xxoo
‘the sense that your work has been rated by people who have something of a clue about such matters.’
Who has a clue? Judges of poetry competitions? Give me a break!
Steven, ‘the sense that your work has been rated by people who have something of a clue’ doesn’t necessarily mean that they DO (that’s why I used such a qualified phrase). But as far as I can see many of these comps, including the TS Eliot, are judged by poets/critics that I respect (even if you don’t). Of course, the likes of Dennis O’Driscoll and Stephen Knight (or George Szirtes, who judged the National) may not be capable of your own distinctive and highly developed sense of what is pure, uncorrupted, passionate, edgy, groundbreaking, etc. But I imagine they do their best.
In my disreputable past, before they were banned from sports sponsorship and the like, I played many snooker tournaments – and took home a few silver plates – that were sponsored by tobacco companies. But then, I’m not a hypocrite. I was a smoker too, and accepted those freebie goodies bags with no qualms whatsoever.
I hope Alice keeps her savings under the mattress. Otherwise, this looks a bit …
Well, what I say is bollocks to this. If I was on the shortlist, I’d be very pleased indeed. Not that I ever would be. But poetry and patrons go hand in hand. Always have done. Only those who either don’t really need the money (or the exposure) or couldn’t care less about being poor would take this stance. I don’t see why anyone on the shortlist or at the PBS should now feel obliged to do the same or look approving. They wanna step down, fine. Whatever. More chance of winning for those who have their heads screwed on.
I like a good posture. Refusing to play ball with a literary prize because its organizers are being part-funded by evil capitalist widow-makers and poor-house fillers … it’s a newsworthy posture to take, I suppose. It might even generate a few extra book sales thanks to the headlines it generates. I feel sorry for those still left on the shortlist – they’re dammed (in the eyes of less conservative folks) if they stay and johnny-come-latelys if the go.
I’d probably care more about the social politics of the Refusnik situation if I had a dog in this fight. But I have no dog in this fight: none of my work is eligible to be considered for shortlisting, according to the rules and regulations of the prize in question. So, whatever.
Katy, of course you’re right that the question is ‘Where do we draw the lines?’ – and I don’t see any reason why we should all draw them in the same place, or want to. I personally would have no problem if the PBS was sponsored by Holland’s Pies; John Kinsella, as a radical vegan, would probably have dropped out even sooner. Similarly, I suspect if the company involved had been Halliburton (or BAE, or De Beers) instead of a little-known hedge-fund, there would have been an outcry much earlier. The only thing I don’t like about Oswald’s statement is when she talks about what ‘poetry should be doing’, as if poetry as a whole should be doing anything.
Katy, brilliant and thoughtful post. All very thought provoking, and here’s another thought. Felix Dennis sponsors the Best First Collection part of the Forward Prize. That’s the obscenely rich, once-confessed-to-murder Felix Dennis, who also publishes all sorts of non PC stuff.. google him, he’s a rum ‘un…..oh, and he also publishes his own utterly dire ‘poetry’. And then the Poetry Society sends it to all their members as a ‘free gift’ (personally, I’d have prefered a sachet of washing powder – much more use). So anyone on the list for this particular award – what to do? Should anyone nominated for a literary prize only accept the nomination if the sponsor is a really, really nice person/institution/company?
As readers, we know the prize thing is an artifice, a false construction. ‘Best book’? No such thing. And though I respect AO’s decision, it’s strange. The prize money is funded by Mrs E, the wine drunk at the do by the Eliot Estate, the pr too. If she had withdrawn because she doesn’t like the prize culture, I’d understand (but in that case she should have done it earlier). If she had happened to be Jewish – this is the TSE Prize – I’d have more than understood. To go along with the prize culture, but then to pull out because a little-known bank happens to have put money into the admin, seems odd. The prize thing is part of the system whereby poetry, little thing, is assimilated into the overall culture. Which happens to be capitalist, consumerist. To join the game, fine; to then say that you don’t like a particular subclause, also fine. Alice has made a personal decision. To then project her decision onto others, and require they take sides, is just daft.
Fine treatment as ever of this complex topic. This is a time to raise good questions, not to jump to easy answers.
[quote]Occupying Poetry … might support small presses and the amazing abundance of poetry in the UK today, possibly in small marquees, or possibly church halls in Clerkenwell.[/quote]
Hi Katy,
I know you know this, so it’s not a slight on your thoughtful and balanced piece, but I’d like to point out that the PBS actively supports small presses and increasingly as an organisation has been acknowledging and promoting the full diversity of poetry in the UK. As examples of this I might point to any number of things: the promotion of performance poetry audio CDs in conjunction with Apples and Snakes; the Michael Marks Award, which promotes poetry pamphlets; or the space in their bulletin devoted to small presses such as Knives, Forks & Spoons, Flipped Eye or indeed my own. I would also mention that if Occupying Poetry means supporting poetry in church halls in Clerkenwell (Free Verse Book Fair), the PBS ran a stall there! (generously given for free by Charles)
Tom x
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