Poetry, the works do: Eliot Prize reading 2012

Right! I’ve managed to get my content management system problem sorted out just in time for last night’s TS Eliot Prize reading, which is as any fule kno the Poetry Event of the Year. From its humble beginnings (when I started going it was in the Bloomsbury Theatre and getting rather squished in the foyer; & I think it started out in the very bijoux Voice Box) it moved to the Southbank Centre. It’s moved up the ranks there, reaching the Royal Festival Hall this year. I think we can start thinking about a Second International Poetry Incarnation, folks: there were between 1,700 and 2,000 paying audience members  there last night, which is not only more people – it’s more than usual per poet, with the withdrawal of Alice Oswald and then John Kinsella.

More and more this event reminds me – where National Poetry Day Live is like the annual poetry school fête – of the annual works do, where you see all your colleagues together in one place, and listen the updates from the senior management team, before getting sloshed with your mates and absorb the information.

Ian McMillan hosted it for the second year, and did a superb job. Conversational, professional, likeable, amusing, informed compering. Which is what you want. Hurrah.

And full marks to Chris Holifield and all the team at the Poetry Book Society. They, very few in number, have organised and thrown this big event – and will be doing another tonight – with the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, in the form of a hole where their Arts Council funding would have been, come April. Talk about Negative Capability.

The hardest part of this roundup post is always writing about the poets themselves. What struck me most hugely last night was the massive multiplicity of responses: how what I thought was bland someone else found rich; the one I loved someone else found gimmicky or boring; the one I was left cold by someone else loved; the one I thought was warm, someone else found too cerebral; and then I went to someone’s house afterwards and spouted a load of rubbish, conveniently forgetting all this! Grrr.

Coming clean, I’d been looking forward to Alice Oswald. Then my anticipation was for John Burnside, whose book I’ve not read, and Leontia Flynn, ditto. In the event, it was Burnside’s reading at the start of the second half that really started to make the event come alive for me.

In setting the tone – talking slightly heartsinkingly about the ‘theme running through’ all the books, ‘that the everyday can have great, great significance’, and ‘things that are common to all of us’ – Ian McMillan neatly summed up the first half.

Esther Morgan demonstrated this everydayness, in everyday language, reading around a central theme that ‘life is what happens while you’re waiting for something to happen’: the plates on the shelf, ‘the sun moving across the kitchen’, the cat who ‘wore his yellow gaze like a mask’, ‘in her later years my grandmother…’

Bernard O’Donoghue read a sweet poem about Abraham Lincoln’s funeral, about oral history, oral tradition, and how families pass stories down. He read a touching elegy for a Marxist economist friend, who died in 2007, on the shortest and darkest day of the year – a nice conceit, the thing that brought it alive.

David Harsent frightened me a little with some alarming goddess imagery, mainly about an old unkempt woman I think – something about a little blue tap on her – well, I think he said ‘arsehole’? – or ‘rectum’? Something very alarming anyway – which you could see when she bent down while watering the flowers? Then there was, ‘Her breasts were honeycombs, and her womb a hive’, which just sounded all wrong coming from a man in black trousers and jacket, looking  like an older Hugh Grant.

(It reminded me of the time I was trying to persuade Mlle Baroque to like a picture I’d acquired, repeating the giver’s rhapsody, ‘It’s like a young girl’s dream…’ and she replied: ‘It’s not like any dream I’ve ever had’.)

John Burnside opened the second half reading from his book Black Cat Bone, a poem called ‘From the Chinese’: ‘May, and already it’s autumn’.

Bang. In.

He’d given a longish intro about his father buying feathers for fishing flies, which came by mail order in Jiffy bags, and he’d get all excited looking at the feathers, thinking about the flies they were going to be, and the fish… there was an image of the fishing flies lying darkly under the water,  more than the sum of their parts, but the parts themselves having been more than themselves because of the sum – and his father’s joy on contemplating their shadowy forms. Well, I like that kind of thing.

The poem ‘Faith’ (interesting after Esther’s ‘Grace’) he asked us to consider as a B movie – ‘definitely a B movie, for sure’ – starring someone like Anthony Perkins.

Hyena: ‘the face a grey velour’

Then, about how everyone seems to be writing an Ars Poetica, he says: ‘I don’t really hold with that kind of stuff – I tend to rely on late-night TV for my inspiration’. Quickfire.

Leontia Flynn read a five-minute poem inspired by packing up to move house, and finding how obsolete half her possessions already were, a sort of freeform riff on new technology, new technology-based behaviour, the state of the world and change and how things stay the same, and how they don’t…

But it wasn’t really freeform, since it had some great rhymes in it. I forgot, while she was reading, to take notes – but I remember ‘hunky dory’ at the end of a line – Leontia was almost the only poet who read with audible line breaks – and I just sat and held my breath… ages, maybe six or seven lines, and the tone of the narrative even moved on, becoming more serious… and the rhyme word came: ‘our story’.

In this and in its breathless rush and ‘thingy’ texture, it made me think of ‘Autumn Journal’. But afterwards a friend said they hadn’t liked it at all – ‘All over the place! What is she doing?’

And it had the line break:

Human beings can’t stand too much reality
Television…

Okay, I know I’m easily pleased, but I really want to read this poem now. It felt refreshing as hell, and clever, and fun, and full of STUFF – like life – like my life – and tons of references just dropped in and not explained, fail, fail again, but used in the internet FAIL sense (I might recall), and Ulysses…

By contrast, Daljit Nagra had opened the evening with two poems: a Romeo & Juliet tale of two Indian lovers from different castes, based on a joke about names which he explained at length before reading the poem (it was amusing), and a longer, expository one about Shakespeare’s Globe and globalisation. I just can’t help thinking the hammed-up accents take something away a bit from what may be happening in the language itself… McMillan introduced this poetry as doing something new with language, reinventing it, going beyond the boring corporate-speak cookie-cutter language of today – and I’m just not seeing it. The language itself was no more interesting than anyone else’s.

Then the second one. Black History of something. If we’re on about ethnicity, I will say that the description of Sam Wanamaker’s Globe Theatre as ‘an American’s thatched throwback to the King of the Canon’ got me between the eyes and the identity crisis. Whew.

‘Now we’re bound to the wheels of global power’…

and I’m sure I heard an image that resolved into the phrase ‘sweetness and light’.

I  remember when ‘Look! We Have Coming to Dover!’ was fresh and surprising and did seem to add something – playing as it did with DH Lawrence, and Daljit’s immersion in English literature, not just pastiche accents; I seem to recall a good version of Hardy, too, at one point? I might have to read the poem on the page, to check my response.

But one of the people I was with loved Daljit’s reading the most. It’s just impossible to say what has meaning for people, and this is what we all need to remember as we go about, arguing the toss… Many of the books I’ve loved most I’ve read extra-carefully, purely because I was reviewing them and didn’t at first see what was in them.

Sean O’Brien arrived on stage sporting a Poetry Beard to rival even Sir Geoffrey Hill’s.

This was following my favourite intro of the night from Mr McMillan: ‘Sean O’Brien comes every day to the White Page of Art’, and I’m afraid the Portal of Declamation did open… Like Harsent, he has a garden of portent (I’m guessing the line breaks here):

The garden. The garden of course has gone
under the stone. and I cannot complain.
Half a century gone…

But there was an intro to a poem saying it was about his first memory, and a person called Josie, whom the infant narrator sees – but how old is the child? Is he a baby or a five-year-old? There is a lot of high abstract significance. But what’s happening? WHO IS JOSIE?

And finally, Carol Ann Duffy, the CEO of our little corporation, or more like somehow our mum. She’s grown into this Laureate role since I last saw her read. She began with a topical – and still apposite – poem. Pleasure. Relax. She’s in complete command.

Then: ‘When I was younger, and starting out writing, I somehow never imagined that I would become the kind of poet who writes protest poems about the Post Office’. Laughter. A wonderful poem in protest against the PO’s new dictum – I hadn’t heard it – that, as of later this year, we shouldn’t write counties on envelopes any more. Just post codes. We don’t need the counties. Well, it’s a relatively light poem, a list poem about writing to people in different counties, but as we know, CAD knows how to use a list. Before she had finished, tears had pricked the Baroque eyes, thinking about the counties. Wonderful.

Reminded me of David Hockney’s campaign against the closure of the small post offices.

Sean had ended with an elegy about his mother, which (his mother only comes in as a person about 2/3 through it) is also a political poem, about her generation who lived through the War, and a different kind of life. The counties poem led straight on from this – via the GCSE one. I was moved by Sean’s poem, too.

Carol Ann, without any ingratiating at all, and barely even a smile, established a complete rapport with the room, I think. (I say room…) I was astounded by her reading, she was tremendous. And finished with an elegy to her mother, which was ineffably sad and made me call my mother when I got home. She was a big surprise of the evening.

And then it was over, and we were all spilled back out into our little clusters, all saying, ‘what did you think, no, what did YOU think, really!!!’ and out into the night… I didn’t buy books, alas, as am not in that position at the moment, as I never tire of telling anyone. But I learned a lot – had some ideas overthrown and some new ones planted, saw and heard new things, was delighted and provoked and spurred, took pages of notes, and then went away and talked a load of nonsense (I’ve barely been out of the house since last Tuesday, & I think it’s showing). I never really know what I think till I’ve tried to write it down.

Anyway, one thing I do know is that it is a tight thing. Whether or not you think this selection represents all of UK poetry, a fair spectrum across whatever angle – style, practice, publisher, race, gender, publisher size, age, whatever – or the Enter-Prize culture itself (as Michael Horovitz calls it) – or Alice Oswald’s decision (& Ian McMillan did get an applause for Aurum, at one point, as well as Mrs Eliot) – I can see that the judges are going to have some tight corners to get out of in their decision-making.

Result tonight.