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Bridport Prize 20052005 Poetry Judge - Andrew Motion I read 100 poems from the 4,000 plus submitted for the prize. They came with a warning that it had been 'quite hard to find 100 poems of good enough quality' - and I have to say, I can see what this means. Although there's no doubting the sincerity of the entries, they do pose a number of questions. Are people writing rather than reading poems (or aren't they reading enough)? Is too much credit given to 'spontaneous overflow' and not enough to the hard work of revising? Is too little thought given to audience? Is there a general retreat from the opportunities offered by traditional form? I'd say the answer to all these things was: emphatically yes. The task of choosing winning poems was made harder by a striking (but not entirely unexpected) recurrence of certain subjects: love, death, sick relatives, 'what I saw on my holidays', children, the beauties of Nature. It meant there was precious little surprise in the reading - surprise being the element Elizabeth Bishop memorably identified as the one she looked for most eagerly when judging competitions. In other words, I wished I'd found more evidence of people stretching their imaginations, and transforming experience, rather than (often perfectly decently) reporting on it. One other thing: the poems received over the internet seemed (even) less revised than the ones sent by post. Is there something about the immediacy of the medium which actually encourages a lack of 'work'? Again, the answer is probably yes.
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