Forward Prize for Poetry 2007

Tom Chivers
posted 2 October 2007

Artistic conservatism and rampant favouritism – just two of the criticisms frequently levelled at Britain’s major poetry prizes. But for the last few years the Forward Prize has been bucking the trend, becoming increasingly representative of a diverse, forward-looking poetry scene. It has become to verse-making what the Mercury Prize is to contemporary music: The Forward not only awards excellence and recognises poets at the top of their game, but scopes out the talent of the future.

Every year, the Forward gives readers, writers, critics and publishers alike the chance to take stock. What has the last year’s worth of new poetry brought us, and what impact, if any, has poetry had on the cultural landscape?

There’s convincing evidence contemporary poetry is on the move. For starters, there has not been so much media interest in poets for years. The Forward Prize itself generated significant column inches and has propelled Luke Kennard – at 26, the youngest ever nominee for the Best Collection category – into the limelight. I can’t think of a single major British newspaper that hasn’t talked up poetry in the last few months – and not just the obligatory one paragraph review tucked inside the books pages, but with fully-formed features.

Much of the excitement is generated by a buoyant spoken word (or ‘live literature’) scene, particularly though not exclusively in London. This is where literature meets performance, nudging up against music and live arts. Audiences are young, diverse and growing month by month. My touring initiative Generation Txt, for instance, was greeted with real enthusiasm by Richard Morrison of The Times who applauds ‘this poetry renaissance’ and notes how ‘old-fashioned channels and media are being bypassed or subverted by quick-witted youngsters who have grasped the potency and potential of the internet far faster than their seniors.’

Maybe that’s it. Maybe poetry is just another beneficiary of the MySpace / Facebook phenomenon – it only seems to move fast in new and exciting directions. Maybe it’s all just a marketing ploy like the pantomime promotion of performance poet Murray Lachlan Young in the mid-90s, and the aggressive, cynical marketing of poetry as ‘the new rock ‘n’ roll’.

Whilst today’s talented newcomers are hardly made from the rock star mould, there has been a palpable shift in the way we perceive poets and poetry. In Britain poetry has long been regarded with suspicious eyes, struggling to establish itself. Compare this with how poets and poetry are perceived elsewhere, such as in many countries of North Africa, the Middle East and across South Asia, where major poets take on the role of national spokesperson without the need for a state-sponsored Laureateship programme. Or consider foreign students and tourists brimming round Bankside’s reconstructed Globe Theatre, keen to visit the workplace of our ‘national poet’. But in Britain, home not only to Shakespeare but also Keats, Shelley and Donne, the British all too often push poetry into the margins.

Perhaps this is no surprise. The traditional place of the established poet is academia, arguably one of the most insular professional settings. A number of this year’s Forward Prize nominees are attached to leading British universities (O’Brien, Boland, Burnside; Daljit Nagra teaches in a secondary school). An academic post provides poets with a degree of financial security along with a unique creative freedom. And with the current explosion of creative writing degrees nationwide, positions for teaching posts are more readily available than ever before.

But over the last ten years – encouraged by increased government funding of the arts, along with an inevitable degree of instrumentalism – poets have also been earning a wage by turning their backs on conventional university teaching. Eleanor Rees, whose debut Andraste’s Hair is nominated in the Best First Collection category, describes herself as a ‘poet in the community’. It’s a label that sums up how she makes a living, a combination of education work, outreach, artistic commissions and collaborations. But Rees also sees herself as the inheritor of a much older Bardic tradition: ‘Poets should have a role as the people who do the imaginative work of the community’. Her work in youth clubs and further education settings in Liverpool in no way contradicts her poetry; they are intrinsically linked, and often feed into each other.

The poet’s updated role is changing perceptions fast, challenging often unfair but sometimes justified criticisms that poetry is elitist; an artform for the few. The selection of the guitarist of a major British rock band (Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood) as a judge for this year’s Forward Prize seems the ultimate nod to this attitudinal shift. And there are other shifts taking place, not least in the melding of performance, mainstream and avant-garde poetries. Are the ‘turf wars’ giving way to a new generation of writers?

The story goes something like this. In post-war Britain, two principal modes of writing developed. One, initially associated with The Movement, was conservative in style and broadly popular with poetry’s general readership. The other drew both from the English Modernism of Eliot and Bunting and from European and American avant-garde poetries, and tended to be more radical and politically engaged. Tensions between the two finally boiled over in the late 1970s when open warfare broke out over control of the Poetry Society (as described by Peter Barry in Poetry Wars). The ‘conservatives’ won; the ‘radicals’ were booted out, and for the next two decades there was an uneasy standoff.

Of course, both camps mythologise the facts; but the reality is that many of our best poets have drawn from both traditions, and are not concerned with factions or producing ‘fusion poetry’ or ‘the third way’. But what is increasingly apparent is that British poets in their 20s and 30s (Kennard, Challenger, Rees and Nagra, for instance) are under far less pressure to write from within a grouping. Influences are more various, more contradictory; creating a poetry that is experimental but not deliberately obscure, that works with and without form, a poetry that ‘[wobbles] on the balance beam between associative and dissociative … absurdist and cerebral’ (Tony Hoagland). Now that’s exciting.

What’s also exciting is the impact of performance poetry, once considered an unwelcome intrusion with its crude political posturing and plodding rhyme schemes. It’s come a long way since the days of Attila the Stockbroker and John Cooper Clarke. I have met performance poets who still refuse to read any poetry at all, but this phenomenon is thankfully vanishing. Gaps are closing. Last year’s Forward Prize saw nominations for popular performers Tim Turnbull and Tim Wells, both published by Donut Press. Jacob Sam La Rose’s Communion was a PBS Pamphlet Choice. And I’m keeping tabs on the results of Freeverse, an initiative to promote Black and Asian poets who are traditionally underrepresented on the page.

What performance poetry brings is an understanding of the poem not merely as the result of an individual’s private struggle with language, but as a shared, social product. It is more fluid in meaning, and – if delivered well – a more compelling work of sound. Perhaps this is also why performance poets have often sought to reach across artforms. Collaboration between poets and musicians is a growing subsection of ‘live literature’. Think of the success of poet and performer Scroobius Pip who, with producer Dan Le Sac, penned one of the alternative music hits of 2007. For those interested in literature’s relationship to other artforms, look out for London Word Festival, taking place in March.

If I am painting an overwhelmingly positive picture of the contemporary poetry scene, it’s because I believe it to be true. I have never agreed with broadcaster Daisy Goodwin – she of BBC Two’s ‘Essential Poems (To Fall In Love With)’ fame – who complains that poetry is becoming ‘like Morris dancing: really interesting to people who do it, and incomprehensible and slightly annoying to people who don’t’.

No. The poetry scene I know is busy, lively and optimistic. It’s led by passionate activists – risk-taking independent presses; industrious events promoters; and, of course, the poets themselves. Institutions such as the Poetry Society are opening up, engaging with increasingly diverse new audiences, and maintaining reputations for excellence. The internet will continue to play a vital role, alongside traditional methods, in disseminating work and finding new audiences. Enlightened publishers are taking advantage of the new marketing and distribution possibilities of the digital age, bypassing the bureaucracy and narrow-mindedness of high-street bookshop chains.

So is the future promising? Let’s just say, if I had to pick one artform to be part of in 2008, it would most definitely be poetry.

Tom Chivers is a poet and director of Penned in the Margins.