Prizewinners
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Prizewinners |
By David Harrolsson
1. National Poetry Competition 2006
www.nationalpoetrycompetition/prizewinners
This year’s winners are a surprising choice in a number of ways.
At first reading we are surprised by their uniformity of tone. The language comes off the page in a light, conversational, almost, throw-away style.
Of the winning poem The Year the Rice-Crop Failed by Melanie Drane, what remains are the images, both visual and aural: umbrellas like dead birds; carp yellow as yolks; the essentially kinaesthetic images of a building ‘cradling’; and of eyes and lips swollen with salt; galoshes as slippery otters; crows, dark messengers. All summing up a world of large processes, the suddenly discovered fragility of the human position.
Non-dramatic, the tone is chatty, relaxed; images are ordinary, accessible, off-the-shelf. Non-rhetorical, unemphatic.
And yet looked at closely the poem is a fine piece of elf craft: it is fine spun, tensile. Strictly iambic pentameter, yet allowing occasional variations; very finely textured per line with assonance and consonance, as well as coupling lines together with internal echoings.
The rhythm is easy, subsumed by the language quality, so the patterning is also unemphasised. The tonal range is consistent, conversational, acknowledging no mimetic effects.
Overall, it has a subdued, anecdotal structure; personalised. The semantic implications, the effects of the year on the poem’s persona, have a quiet but insistent internal ringing.
These prizewinners are three very gendered pieces.
Dominic McLoughlin’s I do wish someone would ask me to the races with him/her, although having a surface dialogue with sexual ambiguity, quickly asserts gender stereotyping.
The language is rhythmically assertive, mainly mono-syllabic, offset occasionally by unexpected qualifiers: capable fingers, gorgeous spring day. Again the tonal range is a narrow urbane band.
Kevin Saving’s Dog Otter (3rd Prize) is more regularly rhymed, more rhythmically bold. It alternates runs of regular quatrains with pentameters and back: classic vers libre.
Again, the predominant tone is monosyllabic and relaxed, with exotics: rendezvous, arabesques, and, later, underwater and playgrounds allowing us a last line freedom. A tight structure, to some extent mimetic; the dynamic is a mixture of visual imagery: water ‘bulging’, with aural quantities: slicked back hair.
2. The Daily Mirror Poet Laureate
On Friday 17th March The Daily Mirror printed reader’s poems, selected and commented on by Daisy Goodwin and Carol Ann Duffy. Printed were First, Second and Third prizewinners, plus other entries.
The writing styles ranged from semi-doggerel, an almost inadvertent rap (I read today we are a nation without poetry/If so we must be a nation without dignity/Hooked on television that screams reality…), to standard form and free verse. The overall quality displays a lack of awareness of modern poetry, or of general poetic features.
Firt impressions are a lack of verse practice, thrown-off execution, producing lacklustre performances. And yet these writers are in search of something they cannot find in modern verse.
Very few writers cater for the general public. Firstly, the general public is a very fractured body. Secondly, levels of education in poetic form and expression, in practice, vary greatly.
These writers exhibit little of awareness of basic standard form. There are signs of dialect patterns, also of nonsense verse forms. 3rd Prize winner Joyce Stuart, begins: ‘I saw a rabbit in the sky/ Who winked at me as I passed by.’ And ending: ‘But when I saw an elephant in pink/I swore for ever off the drink.’
So, something to amuse; to allow the imagination a room of its own. And here we come to one of the cruxes: people constantly seek out the means for a more rounded self.
Preferred are strong shapes and sentiments, strong rhythms; rhyme, certainly; a common range of subject matter.
The success of Pam Ayres is also apparent here: wit, charm, accessibility, an extension of the self. On another level, the success of Wendy Cope can also be seen in this model.
Wendy Cope is an outstanding writer, combining accessibility, wit, charm but also a very finely tuned sensibility.
3. The Ideal Poem
Writer Cliff Crego made the following available to us from the Dutch Radio News Service:
a poll by Poetry International of its readers and members, came up with a possible pattern for the Ideal Poem, that is, a model that combines all the qualities thought necessary.
The criteria can be listed as follows;
it should rhyme
it should be stirring
it should contain humour
it should give pause for reflection
above all it should be timeless
it should concern itself with the reasons for existence
Eleven Dutch poets were to compose works according to these strictures, for the Dutch National Day of Poetry, 25th January.
Cliff did not publish the responses.