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Bridport Prize 20042004 Poetry Judge - Paul Farley Picture the scene: with the first cup of coffee of the day, I've wandered, still in shorts and T-shirt, into the spare room. There are four thousand poems stacked in boxes on the floor. It's raining: this is the wettest August anyone can remember. I roll a cigarette, then take up a handful from the box I'm working on. I used to imagine - perhaps like you - that judging a poetry competition involved a study, a desk, a pool of lamplight, in-trays, organisation. At the very least, I pictured the judge fully clothed. It isn't always like that. I'm writing my judge's report in medias res, on the eve of making my final decisions. I hope this sheds some light on the difficult business of single-handedly selecting thirteen poems from four thousand (I'm down to twenty-five, and struggling). Reading individual poems in a competition like the Bridport alters the experience of reading. This democracy of anonymity also places an industrial stress test on a poem's individuality. Soon after the first boxful arrived here in North Lancashire from Dorset, I began to miss the pleasures of reading the longer poem, the sequence; I missed the slow lyric accumulation of a collection, the evidence of growth or change you sometimes detect when looking at a known writer's latest book. I was aware - much more keenly than when I've judged other competitions in the later, sifted stages as part of a panel - how much of a context the single, anonymous poem has to generate for itself in all the noise. I began to fear for the quieter, less insistent work. However, the rewards of reading like this are plenty, and the good poem is still able to mug you. Blurbless and undressed, so to speak, you take the work as you find it. Every now and then, a poem has simply declared itself, already cooking on gas and electricity, formally best equipped for the job, surprising, memorable - in terms of the way some phrasing or syntax stayed in the mind, as well as the use of a striking image or simile - and sometimes rhetorically or idiomatically inventive. I've been cheered by the amount of work that draws from the well of English as it is variously spoken, and - even more exciting - work that can manage this while being allusive, and aware of deeper resources. Other things I'd like to report: the judge should never, ever, listen to music while working (I wasted a morning sifting through one batch with a combination of Christian Fennesz and James Brown, spoiling all the papers in the process: I went back and did them again); end rhyme seems to be going through something of a lean period, while the sestina is very much in the ascendant; acrostics just aren't funny any more, if they ever were; and paper cuts can bleed for ages, especially on that flap of skin between the thumb and forefinger. Of course, drink should never be taken while judging, though I admit I was tempted to test the Gothic custom of debate, as reported by Sterne in Tristam Shandy, of looking at everything twice, once drunk and once sober: 'Drunk - that their councils might not want vigour; - and sober - that they might not want discretion.' I've enjoyed being judge and jury a great deal. There's a
wealth of fine work out there, and I could have awarded many more
prizes, had I been able to. Tomorrow morning, making the final
cut, I hope I can do justice to those poets who are best
responding to the demands of the art, writing in and of their
moment, but also alive to poetry as an archive, a vast resource.
These final twenty-five poems feel as though they've come through
something together: they've bonded, and it's going to be
difficult splitting them up. I've particularly enjoyed selecting
- and, I hope, rewarding - poems that have been made with a
singular vision and élan. It's depressing reading work
that seems to have been written with tick boxes close to hand,
work that pushes all the right buttons. Remember: today's buttons
are tomorrow's sci-fi set consoles. The best poems really push
their own boats out.
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