The T.S. Eliot Prize

 I set the Virgin box to record last night's edition of The Verb because it was the readings by the poets shortlisted for the big £25k T.S. Eliot Prize for the best collection of last year which is held, I'm fairly sure, in the Royal Festival Hall. And I listened to it earlier this evening.

It was an opportunity to take a crash course in the new poetry of 2021, most of which I'd missed, in the intrepid hope of dragging myself up to date and finding something to admire. I had my doubts from the beginning because I've long found Ian MacMillan's boundless enthusiasm a bit like poetry's answer to Boris Johnson, before he became forlorn, when although Philip Larkin's attitude towards many of his contemporary rivals was unnecessarily scathing, I tend to think that some scepticism is healthy.

The introduction to the programme warned listeners of some 'very strong language'. One would hope so, given that it was going to be 'poetry', that many-splendored thing that regards itself as worthy of the 'deep listening' that Ian credited the poets and audience with doing. But that's not what it meant. It meant those commonplace four-letter words, more often identified as having Anglo-Saxon origin rather than French or Catullus, that they are less shocked by but we in these islands need parental guidance about. I'm sure Larkin intended a few more 'sharp tender' shocks with his sparing use of them 60 years ago but it's playground vocabulary now. It's more likely to be some of us from the generation that bought the Sex Pistols album that find it a bit unnecessary. In poems, at least.

The first poet on was Jack Uunderwood. Okay, I can see one having to use poems like his in a poetry magazine if there weren't poems available that did a bit more with language but Ian was intent on persuading us how the poets had all taken on board his own show's 'rules for writing' and how, as such, they were very much extending the language in their use of it as a vital tool to 'examine what it is to be human', 'to explore the inner and the outer' or 'to go beyond difference'. They aren't quotes from him. I've just provided examples of the sort of thing that passes for poetry appreciation when actually what we heard were for the most part vague, under-developed lines shuffled together and read by their authors in that slightly distracted way that poets (these days) seem to think they have to.

I listened on but by the fourth poet I knew they had no chance. They were precious. Even if somebody any good had turned up I was already set against them. Somebody quite good did turn up, Michael Symmons Roberts, but even he couldn't save the event since he was on next to last and on last was the winner, Joelle Taylor, whose poem of protest didn't say anything one could object to but was simply bad poetry and went on too long.

As far as I could tell, it all sounded like free verse. So meaningful are they that submitting their profoundness to the discipline of any sort of scansion or rhyme scheme would have been like a prison, perhaps the sort of prison that a libertarian tennis player might find himself in, had it not occurred to them that embracing some sort of discipline might make their poems more interesting, more admirable and a bit more like 'art', like the way that paintings don't go beyond the canvas they are painted on and music has staves and clefs to define it.

 

It's not for me to say it's no good. The applause for Joelle made it obvious that the audience adored her performance. Poetry has been a different thing, mutating with fashions over the centuries, in different periods, and I struggle with Spenser, Dryden, maybe even Pope, possibly these days Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg. But if the T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist represents the best of what happened in 2021, it isn't for me and I'm not convinced it would be for T.S. Eliot either.

Tony Blackburn's Sounds of the 60's this morning had its usual quota of at least half a dozen masterpieces. That's how old I am and I have to be glad I am because I can't see much that the poetry being written now is doing for me that the pop music of then still does.