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Bridport Prize 2002
Poetry Judge - Jo Shapcott
Jo is one of Britain's leading poets. She has twice won the National Poetry Competition and won the Forward Prize for her collection, My Life Asleep, in 1999. Electrocuting the Baby won a Commonwealth Prize. Phrase Book and My Life Asleep were both Poetry Book Society Choices. She was Northern Arts Literary Fellow at the Universities of Newcastle and Durham in 1998-2000 and the first Visiting Professor of Poetry at Newcastle in 20002001 when she gave the inaugural Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures.
2002 Report
The Bridport competition is unusual in that only one judge selects the winning poems. Expecting this to pile on the difficulty of the process - no-one to share the reading with, no-one to phone for chatting over the poems along the way - I was very surprised. It's true that the work of a solo judge is just as hard, perhaps harder than the work of a panel: a lone responsibility for reading the thousands of poems as carefully as possible, with no back up or fail safe, the lack of other readers to talk through the enthusiasms, mysteries and doubts which arrive as certainly as the boxes of poems. But the great pleasure which arose, particularly towards the end of the judging process when the strong poems were starting to emerge from the pile, was the fact that I would be the one to have pulled these startling, varied, wonderful poems out of the hat. And there would be no arguing over the choice, no compromise decisions. But the glad truth is that the best poems chose themselves, and my job - which, after all, was as much to be co-editor of an anthology as anything else - was to help shape the book you now have in your hands
Over the summer, when I was reading through the boxes of poems which were arriving, at one stage, almost weekly, I found myself hunting out the thoughts of other poets about what a poem should be, should do, should make happen. It's not that this was ever a matter of doubt for me: it's a mystery solved, or at least addressed, every time I try to write a poem myself. And perhaps one of the reasons I write at all. But the experience of reading thousands of poems in a matter of weeks is overwhelming - in a good way, because it inevitably forces you to question yourself, to sharpen up your ideas about the art. Of course, the voices I turned to didn't agree. But I tried to balance the urge to find poems which would fulfill Franz Kafka's desire for reading which would 'wake us up with a blow to the head,' would be 'the axe which smashes the frozen sea within us' with Wallace Steven's quietly resonating dictum, 'Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.' And it's with the help of some more of these fellow-judges in my head - still not necessarily agreeing - that I'm reporting on this year's entries.
Many entrants had a vague sense that the poet should be 'a pulse in the rhythmic flow of generations' - in the words of Octavio Paz in his 1990 Nobel Lecture. And quite right. This was good to see. But all too often it resulted in an effort to reproduce traditional forms and metres without a proper understanding of them, an ear for them or much sign of either considered thought about why the specific sound and shape of a poem had been chosen or the deft, intuitive feel for it. There were lots of lovely exceptions, of course, and a particularly curious feature of the year's entries was the high number of pretty skillfully wrought villanelles and sestinas. It was as if a rash had suddenly broken out - but an interesting one.
There were epidemics of subject matter, too, especially in the sphere of public poetry: the Queen Mum, the Queen's jubilee, and, in overwhelming numbers, September 11th. One of the privileges of judging a major poetry competition like this one is that the reading gives you a snapshot of the things that are bothering people. It's as if the emotional temper of the nation had been preserved on a photographic plate: a true and deep record of a point in time. As well as the public and political events that captured the imaginations of the entrants this year, there were private concerns: many people wrote about loss and loneliness - the deaths of loved ones, an individual diagnosis of cancer, homelessness, the isolation caused by mental turmoil and ill health. I was very moved by many of these poems and found that at their best, they fulfilled Charles Simic's ambition for the good poem, 'To corner the reader and make him or her imagine and think differently.'
Emily Dickinson once famously wrote about her own experience as a reader: ' If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that it is poetry.' The summer of 2002 wasn't a hot one but I'm sure I took some extra chills from the poems that emerged to haunt my imagination and to find their place in this anthology. Read, relish and wrap up warm.
 | The Bridport Prize is a fundraiser for Bridport Arts Centre, charity no 1069780 |