It is approaching that climactic time of year when it begins to look as if nothing else is going to happen and even though more than 10% of the year remains I can decide which poems and books go onto my shortlist of the year's best.
In the meantime, I can summarize the minor awards which have grown up in the wake of this little-known prizegiving.
The prize for the best event usually goes to something that I have attended but this year I didn't go to any Proms, not to Cheltenham for the Literature Festival and missed some other of the things I often include in a year's itinerary. And so, exceptionally, or at least for the first time, my best event was Chic at Glastonbury which I only saw on telly, probably the best way for me to see it, but still found Nile Rodgers quite a moving and exhilarating experience 35 years after he was my favourite pop act.
Of the few new novels that I read, I think Colm Toibin's The Testament of Mary stole it in the end and so now I'm reading The Blackwater Lightship, which so far seems similarly good.
The best CD I bought was John Holloway playing the Biber Mystery Sonatas (Virgin Veritas) although it was not a 2013 release so that category is not limited to new issues.
The poetry shortlists will be here later this evening.
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But I see from Eyewear that there are to be poets invited to Buckingham Palace although nobody seems to know which ones yet. I wonder why that would be. Is the Duke of Edinburgh to be sent abroad on a trade mission promoting British-made verses to spearhead the economic revival based on the export of slim volumes to unleash our new tiger economy. One wouldn't have thought so.
It seems to have caused some consternation about who has received an invite and, more to the point, who hasn't. I remember similar trouble being caused when some kids from junior school were invited to certain birthday parties and others weren't. But some poets do seem genuinely put out by it. I hope it is not in the hope of any such recognition that they ever got involved in the industry because the pleasure of reading and writing poems is all the reward there needs to be and it really ought go no further.
Todd Swift is surely an admirable organizer and energetic publisher, editor and general factotum but he is taking it a bit hard if he thinks he has been left out of a 'defacto Who's Who'. Part of our pluralist culture these days is the admission that there is no canon, no centre and no official reading list and so to even entertain the thought that the guests at the palace are such a thing looks like an admission that deep down there still is.
As with any such choice of names, there will be some missed off who would have been suitable, worthy or would like to have gone. But as I find myself saying increasingly recently, no award, prize or recognition actually makes one's poems any better than they were already. The poetry world does appear to be run more on cliques and groups as much as it ever was and I don't think there's any end to that in sight because it is somehow inevitable.
Whereas it is a good thing that The Echo Chamber is back for another brief run in the Poetry Please slot. All too brief, I suspect, as it would be nice if it were a permanent feature, a magazine of the airwaves bringing more poets to such an audience. This week it was Michael Longley and Roy Fisher. Poets like these are established figures not because they are 'mainstream' or 'safe' or 'establishment' but because they are any good. I doubt if they would be upset if they weren't invited to a reception to fleetingly be in the same room as royalty.
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But all of our precious institutions are under attack. I saw that Adrian Chiles has been given the job on Radio 5's Drive on Friday tea times. Perhaps the legend Peter Allen has not been doing Fridays for a while now but if this is the thin end of the wedge and the latest place that Adrian Chiles has washed up then my increasing migration from habitual Radio 5 listenership to elsewhere can only continue.
Meanwhile, I have two shortlists to compile. So excuse me while I do.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
