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The Bridport Prize 2007Poetry Report - Don Paterson I'm making my final cut in the bar of a very large boat, in the North Channel of the Irish Sea, in something the captain alleges is a 'light swell'. This thing seemed like the, uh, Titanic when we were in Belfast, but now feels like a rubber duck in a bathtub. The sea reduces everything to a cork, and there's a brutal democracy to all this that sits perfectly, I suppose, with the brutal anonymity of the Poetry Competition. Which is more than I can say for my breakfast. Okay: while all must sink or swim by their own seaworthiness, etc., some of the fleet were scuttled in port. I'm fortunate to have had Candy Neubert sift the entries down to a vaguely manageable number of a few hundred. Competitions where the judge reads the entire entry sound much fairer, but they aren't. Apart from the fact that any system that has more than one judge is going to be far more reliable, the snow-blindness and poem-happy hysteria induced by reading three thousand poems in two days has produced some very bizarre results over the years. Some of them from me. (I recall one occasion where I almost gave the big money to a poem called 'To My Dog Benjy* Who Died Under a Landrover Aged Three Years', or something like it. The asterisk led me to a footnote which read 'Benjy was a cocker spaniel'. 'Harrowing in its simplicity', I'd written in the margin, before falling into a coma at the desk. ) You feel grateful, in the end, for the wrong things, like nice typing. But you're also able to make some very clear decisions on what's a poem and what isn't. Not here: there are almost no entries I can cheerfully mark up with a NAH, and set to one side. No bits of pot pourri fell from the sheets, and no cats were drawn in the margin. I read nothing in copperplate fonts, crayon or blood, and for the first time I felt safe enough not to check for acrostic death threats. Angels, are usual, were overrepresented - which suggests they must have been epidemic in the entry as a whole. At least the ones I saw had a sense of humour. But all these poems insist on being read, and most re-read. This'll take ages. The only thing you can do in these circumstances is harden up your critical criteria. So I've decided that I want a poem with an interesting argument or point to make, or a compelling story to tell. That rules out a fair few. Lots of poems here sound like poems, and often very beautifully - but they don't make the shape of poems, and they have no great imaginative or dramatic proposition that makes me excited about the prospect of reading them again. Others have no real structural armature, and are really just bunch of fine images strung together, with no sense that the constituent parts are in the service of a greater whole. And too many afforded me no surprise - which is the reader's only test that the writer has themselves been surprised or excited or moved in the actual making of the poem, and not just in the idea or event that inspired it. (All this 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' stuff was always rubbish, even for Wordsworth.) Okay. That gets it down to about fifty. Now we have to be brutal. Time for the 'technical merit' score. There are three things that I really wish poems would not withhold or muddle or fail to signpost, through incompetence or misjudgement: these are literal context (how the hell was I meant to know that it was a conversation between two elephants in a dinghy), dramatis personae (how the hell was I meant to know 'you' was your mother when she'd been 'she' in the last stanza), and chronological sequence (how the hell was I meant to know the bit in the Mongolian restaurant took place ten years ago, etc.). Now that's not to say these things aren't often artfully blurred. They are; Wallace Stevens, say, is a lexicon of this kind of effect. But if they are, the blur or the discontinuity has to be sufficiently well advertised for us to enjoy the confusion. So often, though, the reader is forced to expend all the energy fighting their way toward literal sense and temporal sequence that they should be spending on the deeper, elusive truth the poem is - hopefully - trying to communicate. Too often we fudge what the poem is about, forgetting that the reader has understand this before they can get on with the business of what the poem means. Okay, that knocks out a few. I've got about twenty now. Now it's time for … personal whim. Above a certain level of competence, i.e. where you can no longer point to a poem's faults - all you can see are distinct individual merits. This means that you're no longer comparing like with like; you're comparing apples with bananas, and it all very much depends what you're in the mood for. There's no way round this, and this is where it all becomes deeply unscientific - but who would have it any other way? I've sat on too many panels where the winner has been a poem everyone likes, but no-one really loves. I'd rather a poem win that at least one person has a genuine enthusiasm for. That'll be me, today. Okay. The poems I have in the final pile all have a sense of having built their own little imaginative planet, with its own consistent logic and physical laws, its own customs and protocols. I … buy them. None of them feel like their authors were trying to 'get a poem past me'. There's one poem here I feel strongly must make the final three, but that I defy anyone to like; but it's impossible to get out of your head, and seems written with as much grace and craft and unsentimentality as one might ever write about such a dreadful thing. All these poems feel … felt. None of this helps me make the unkindest cut, the final three. This is pretty much down to how the planets are aligned today, and I'd come up with a different result next week; but we're verbs, not nouns, and that's how it has to be. And if your poem isn't here - remember that anyone who submits 'A Disused Shed' or 'Birches' to a poetry competition stands a good chance of seeing it sink without trace. The truly original most often turns up the guise of the very familiar, and the poetry competition is the hardest place to spot it. So if you did - rest assured it will find its readers. In the meantime, blame one very seasick guy. Don Paterson October 2007
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