Sarah Boyes
posted 5 October 2007

People say looking forwards is a good thing, and they’re right. But it’s also important to look where you going, and if that happens to be backwards, then maybe looking there isn’t such a bad idea.

I arrived at the Forward Prize winner announcements, held this year at the October Gallery in London, a fashionable fifteen minutes late. The tardiness wasn’t due to any inherent coolness; more with getting partially lost en route and then hiding close by to see if I could spot which evening wanderers were going to the event. Having dimissed two men in smart dark suits for a woman looped with scarves, I was secretly pleased when the suit turned up in the queue, making a crack about yoga. My theory that the notion of ‘looking like’ a poet is nothing more than a conservative idea for the conceptually comfortable scored its first point. Well, more or less.

Held in a light and airy downstairs gallery, the invitation-only two-hour event was in full glittery swing when I entered, a grinning waiter handing out glasses of red and white wine, and what looked like cranberry juice. Asked the dreaded question, ‘and do you have a plus one?’ I braced myself for the sympathetic smile. This didn’t stop me doing the looking-at-my-pretend-watch-then-the-door routine for several minutes whilst trying to look both approachable and not nearly as uncomfortable as I felt.

Who were these people? The poets were easy to spot – not because of their tortured stares, but their large name tags, which helpfully noted what prize they’d been short-listed for – and I got the distinctly creepy feeling that everybody knew each other. Hanging out at the table where discounted Forward Prize books were being sold brought little joy but at least ensured free bookmarks. Saying hello to people proved much more fruitful, as I latched onto one woman and talked to poets, freelance arts administrators and editors. And rather than reverently stepping round the idea of rhyme and rhythm (shock!) together on the page, this seemed a group who approached poetry as a fact of life, and a bit like a good friend - something to take the piss out of once in a while. The schmoozing went on for a while before I happened across of the judges (a performance poet), who was giving off the whiff of wanting a cigarette nearly as much as I was.

Hearing how judges judge prizes is always intriguing, but it sometimes seems better to have silent faith in the process and simply trust the result. Superficial debates about critical standards proliferate the arts, and until a public discourse can be framed that doesn’t deduce thorough-going relativity from fundamental disagreement, it seems pre-emptive to whinge. Needless to say, the conversation and cigarette proved so engrossing I managed to miss the introduction to the (delayed) announcement and spent the next ten minutes being too short to see what was going on.

Strange that one of the winners commanded a clap from what seemed like only half of the room; that one couldn’t be present and that the winner of the Best Collection category – Sean O’Brien – looks a bit like my dad. And where was the bookie’s favourite, Mr Kennard, perhaps he ‘looked like’ a mass-murderer and so got by alone (aha!). Talking to people elsewhere about the event, a fair amount of cynicism was thrown at the point – and fairness – of the Forward. ‘Inward-looking’ was one description, and ‘just a money-making scam’ raised its predictably-facile head. But resoundingly, the consensus was that the Forward isn’t as forward-looking as the contemporary poetry scene itself, and may soon have to start looking over its shoulder, having missed the unconventional and the strange, those ‘nonpoet’ looking poets, the new.