For the second year running the Costa Book Award, somehow more likeable when named the Whitbread, has awarded its top accolade to a poet.
Jo Shapcott, who’s won the 2010 Costa Book of the Year award for her poetry collection Of Mutability, now joins Christopher Reid, 2009 winner with A Scattering, as yet another poet that, despite critical success, nobody seems to read. And yet the judges, in awarding Shapcott the prize, have according to the press pack lauded Shapcott with the claim that These strong poems are rooted in the poet’s experience of breast cancer but are all about life, hope and play. Fizzing with variety, they are a paean to creativity and make the reader feel that what matters to us all is imagination, humanity and a smile, which seems like an excellent endorsement indeed, and not unworthy of the praise — which in itself can be rightful or otherwise — often placed on the back of novels.
But perfectly honestly, I’ve never heard of Jo Shapcott, or Christopher Reid. I have, though, heard of Colm Toibin and Maggie O’Farrell, the respective winners of the Costa Novel Award for 2009 and 2010. So Shapcott and Reid trumped O’Farrell and Toibin for top book awards but Toibin and O’Farrell seem to top them for actual readability. What’s more, Toibin has just been appointed Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester, implying that Toibin’s critical successes also lead him into the warm bosom of the academic breast.
Shapcott, by contrast, gets the odd gig at the Arvon foundation. Despite being President of the Poetry Society and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire — she has brownie points; Shapcott didn’t attend the ceremony — Shapcott has, at least to my own biased and uneducated mind, far less of a presence in the media, in academia, and with journalists, etc., than some one like Toibin seems to have.
How’s that work? Poetry, it seems, is the Thatcher of the Arts; even if people read it (and some people, given that Shapcott was up for the Costa award, must do) they don’t admit to it, let alone condone it. In fact, I bet you could get more people admitting they voted for Thatcher than confessing they read the odd poem.
It seems odd, particularly when Britain has a thriving poetry scene, and can often be read online — see for example Mark Halliday, who’s arguably one of Britain’s best poets; you don’t see Britain’s most famous contemporary novelists putting their work up in PDFs — so that enjoying it can be free.
Free. And not to mention quick: it makes for perfect tube reading. I for one, though I’m embarassed to admit it, spent the last few months of 2010 carrying the Forward Book of Poetry in my pocket, reading it between tube changes, on buses, waiting to meet friends…EVEN with a pint.
Certain pubs have non-poetry dress codes. But why be embarassed by poetry? All japery aside (and not to say that it’s less skillfully or carefully crafted) poetry, thanks to its brevity, seems sometimes to capture the contemporaneity of things at a closer quarter than its more fashionable counterpart, all hallowed prose.
Take for example William Wall’s rendering of terrorist fear in ‘Job at Heathrow’:
“With the frightened crowd
for whom every new alarum
is an authority
queuing in drifts
between levels
the so-called waiting lounges
of the so-called world
the word is out
there are bombs
in the whiskey
[…]
& the enemy comes on his own feet
to his grave
we are a trifle unsettled
we think about sodoku & the crossword
as though minding minutiae
the universe will look after itself”.
Subjective statement coming up, but I don’t think I’ve read anything in a little while that beats that. And there are plenty of examples, though i’m not going to bog this down ( (this, a get out clause) by using them here.
But why am I embarassed? Why does nobody read poetry? Why don’t we see it a bit more like music, a form in which you can roam pretty quickly from piece to piece — a one page poem could take about 5 minutes to read, not much different from listening to a song — and embrace the form in its adaptability, its brevity, in the ability to delve in and out without much investment at all?
Maybe that’s the problem, that people want emotional investment. Novels give that, after all. Music, sometimes doesn’t. And poetry isn’t music; maybe a five minute song is just nicer, and more worth coming to cold, than a new poem.
I find it sad, though, that poetry’s ignored. Can’t we start a relief fund for poetry?
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The Frivolous Now 
Dennis
January 31, 2011
I do take your point that poetry is not bought in the same quantities as even quite ‘difficult’ fiction, but at the same time it’s not completely obscure, and people do read it. Aside from Poems on the Underground, there are also poems in every issue of the TLS, the LRB, and the Guardian Review section – wide-readership publications which don’t (as a rule) publish prose fiction in the same way.
Added to that, while Toibin may have been made Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester, that didn’t attract anything like the media coverage that surrounded the appointment of the Oxford Professor of Poetry.
Switch on the telly and if it’s not Tom Paulin being baffled by popular culture, it’s Simon Armitage banging on about his indie band. Meanwhile, last Sunday 2,000 people turned up at the Festival Hall to hear the readings for this year’s TS Eliot Prize – the shortlist for which included, alongside Armitage, two Nobel Prize winners.
So I think you’ve hit on the strangeness of the real question. It’s not ‘Where has all the poetry gone?’ – it’s still there – but ‘Why don’t we talk about it?’
–Read any poems lately?
–[Coughs. Shifty eyes] Nah, mate. Just a Colm Toibin novel & some Antonio Negri.
MATT.
February 3, 2011
There were a few extenuating circumstances concerning the Professor of Poetry election, to be fair (quite the saga, that one)… I’m also not sure how far I take the publishing of poetry in the two literary papers and the Guardian to be a sign of rude health, and I’d certainly argue that both Paulin and Armitage excite more interest from the public as examples of poets than for their poetry (the TV appearances you cite both feature them talking about other things rather than verse, after all). The Eliot Prize figure is encouraging, though.
To me it seems that new poetry has a pretty low public profile and an even lower readership. A quick flick through the Amazon Poetry bestsellers list is quite depressing (if what you’re looking for is evidence of a vibrant audience for new work; see http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/bestsellers/books/275117/ref=pd_ts_pg_1?ie=UTF8&pg=1). Very few new collections, a lot of anthologies of the usual suspects, various novelty books, a lot of classics from course lists. Mind you, also The Prince and Down And Out In Paris And London, so there’s a chance some bigshot poetry is hiding miscategorised elsewhere. Book 100 on the list (as I write this) has a sales rank of 11,379 – so if you took all the books on the list as poetry (far from the case, but could to counteract other possible miscategorisations), that would indicate that of the top 10,000, less than 1% would be poetry.
To me it seems that poetry got squeezed pretty hard in the later 20th century by experimental fiction on one hand and the popular lyric on the other. Certainly not a financially viable form any more (not that it ever really was, although there were a few poets who did pretty well in the nineteenth century). Survives largely based on institutional support (taught in schools and universities, beneficiary of high-cultural snobbery) and as a result of devoted subcultural followings. I’d love to say this seems unfair, but I don’t read enough contemporary verse to feel I can really comment. Would be really great if someone could post a list of some exciting recent collections on here… could be fun to read and discuss a few.
MATT.
February 3, 2011
On the larger point, about why poetry isn’t seen as a short, dip-in-and-out sort of form, it’s interesting looking back over the recent Costa/Whitbread winners that a very large number of them seem to be either connected sequences about personal tragedy or translations or collections self-consciously dealing with big themes (the body, war, death (again)). Highish entry requirements all. Also possibly an indication that good poetry is expected to be profound? I sometimes think most modern poets don’t really care about being accessible, or find accessibility inimical to the kind of poetry they want to write. A song might have cryptic lyrics, but you can kind of ignore them and concentrate on the music. It’s hard to enjoy most poems without comprehending the complexities of the language, knowing how to create the rhythms from the lines in your head, being comfortable with mood rather than plot and, often, without having access to a relatively complex set of cultural references in order to unlock the meanings of certain lines. Poets often make poetry hard work (possibly necessarily?). That people’s first exposure is generally forced reading in schools doesn’t help too much either. I wonder if there might be some mileage in going back to the common Romantic period habit of using prose notes as a counterpoint to untangle and justify allusions – often used very effectively (and humorously). Certainly fun to be had there.
Dennis
February 4, 2011
We should have start a book glub then (or reading group, or whatever). Once a month. In a pub. Work our way through some of those collections which were nominated for the Eliot Prize.
MATT.
February 4, 2011
I’d be interested in something like that, and the Eliot Prize collections seem like a good shout, as does a pub location.
Chris
February 10, 2011
Count me in! That sounds wicked.
Interesting that the amazon bestsellers list contained Jo Shapcott’s book twice…