Trick or Treats from the TS Eliot Prize

Sweets from strangers, or a bitter pill: poetry prizes, and being on or off the longlists, shortlists and final nomination lists, for them, can be either a thrilling gift, or a blade in an apple. The three judges for this year's TS Eliot Poetry Prize, the most-sought and respected of its kind in the UK, have met, and tomorrow their list of ten poets will be made public. Four are already known, as they were earlier selected by the PBS, hosts of the award, and these are Sean O'Brien, Sophie Hannah, Ian Duhig and Sarah Maguire. Six places are up for grabs, and near to 100 books are in contention. At this stage, with his Forward win, O'Brien would be the early front-runner.

Eyewear will comment more, tomorrow, after the list is announced. It will be intriguing to see how parochial, or how open-minded, the final list is - that is, whether it veers more to Hobsbaum's closed sense of Tradition, or early Eliot's ideas of experiment. The panel of judges - Peter Porter (filling in for UA Fanthorpe), Sujata Bhatt, and W.N. Herbert - represents a variety of poetics and tastes, and years of experience with form and language-play. I wouldn't be surprised to see Daljit Nagra, Edwin Morgan and Mimi Khalvati there. There are many other good poets up this year, such as Annie Freud, Joanne Limburg and Luke Kennard. Will Salt, for instance, breakthrough and get books nominated? Another good young poet debuting this year is Frances Leviston, who read for Oxfam in the past. And Fiona Sampson, David Morley, Elaine Feinstein, Michael Schmidt, are also strong possible contenders. Too many other names to mention here, such as Claire Crowther, and Matthew Sweeney. Also, this year a number of major North American poets had books eligible, such as John Ashbery, Margaret Atwood, and Adrienne Rich. It'd be good see Ashbery on this list, especially, surely. We shall see...

Top Ten Albums of 2007

Barring any surprises - and there may be a few - Eyewear would like to begin the listmania that usually begins in a month or so - and suggest a plausible provisional top ten list for popular music recordings in 2007. Looking back over my list for 2006, I realise I rarely listen to some of them anymore - music's charms can be fickle - but this is what is still in my ears now. You'll note that Arcade Fire are lower than might be expected - their album, while astonishing and innovative in places, was also over-hyped and grandiose, and put in its place by the far loftier-yet-serene experimentalism of In Rainbows, by far the most impressive album of the year.

I have also left off the Arctic Monkeys second album, which hovers somewhere in 12-20th spot. An early favourite for best of the year, it somehow faded in interest as the year wore on. Winehouse's retro album retains its power to shock with how the new can be so uncannily borrowed from the past, and yet be fresh. It is noteworthy how many of the albums were influenced by political events in America and The Middle East, and, however subtly, expressed concern with the world's current political ills - 1, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, especially - 2, 3, 4 and 10 rather reflecting the more-or-less apolitical sounds of an earlier era or time (whether the 60s or 70s) - which, ironically, were also very politcal moments. But, as I have suggested in my reviews, The Shins and Interpol are, in their ways, obliquely relating to current events. The strength of this list, and the longer one it draws from, argues that the 00s will be considered a good musical decade for popular music - even if no one dominant style has emerged - unlike the 90s with, say, Grunge, the 80s with Rap and Alternative, and the 70s with Disco and Punk.

1. In Rainbows - Radiohead.

2. Our Love To Admire - Interpol.

3. The Reminder - Feist.

4. Wincing The Night Away - The Shins.

5. Magic - Bruce Springsteen.

6. We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank - Modest Mouse.

7. An End Has A Start - Editors.

8. Zeitgeist - Smashing Pumpkins.

9. Neon Bible - Arcade Fire.

10. Back To Black - Amy Winehouse. [not previosuly reviewed at Eyewear].

11. New Moon - Elliott Smith. [not previously reviewed at Eyewear].

Going To Mascara

There is Mass and then there is Mascara. One gets you to Heaven, the other to good poetry, published in Australasia. Eyewear encourages both journeys, but only one is as easy as a click here. I should add I am in this second issue of Mascara.

Monocle de Moloko

Eyewear is sad to hear the eye of Roisin Murphy (pictured) has been injured in Russia. Murphy should recover, though her Eastern European tour has been shelved due to her near-optical concussion. There is an irony in this, perhaps, since her new album is Overpowered.

The idea of Irish electronica-dance music is slightly far-fetched, but Murphy's latest is actually wonderful, within the groove of its genre. I've long felt that music is a derangement of the senses no worse than opiates or wines - or carnal knowledge - and so should also be allowed its wild, silly moments, as well as its austere, or heightened ones. One rarely makes love to Wagner, or would want to boogie all night to Bach.

Madonna and The Doors, for instance, are both mood stimulants, and purveyors of bottled lust, released like pheromones via stylus or wireless. Sounds carry - and they transport us. Overpowered is merely trashy dancefloor pop but is also, within its tawdry, midnight realm, sublime. Mirrorball sublime yes, but disco's sublunar (and gilt, guiltless) pleasures are also worth pursuing. Murphy's impressive vocals veer appropriately between 80s strip-club Tina Turner, and early Annie Lennox - at once Motown and robotic (cars built by machines, then). The album's production emphasises this circa 81 Depeche Mode tone, and swirls and bleeps in lovely retro fashion. Meanwhile, "science struggles to explain ... a chemical needing is there in the brain" - as she plays with po-faced lexicons of science and love. A cheeky, often ironic work, then, that also delivers bravura song after bravura song that makes one want to dance. Four out of Five specs.

"Masters of all they survey"

There is a nice irony in the fact that the Observer has chosen to start its poetry page in its Review section with a headline that resonates with tropes of conquest - observation eliding into possession - that is, "Masters of all they survey". This page seems a wrong start, even as I am glad to see the paper taking on the responsibility for giving poetry more space in its pages.

My problem is with the trope of "mastery" itself, in relation to poetry. As Craig Raine wrote recently, in his controversial essay about Don Paterson's poetry, "The two great, natural enemies of poetry are exaggeration and euphemism." I am not sure this is always so - hyperbole is a poetic option - but exaggeration in the criticism and publication of poetry is rampant in Britain, and has lead to runaway critical inflation. It has also lead to a small, select group of mostly male poets dominating the conversation that the media is having with poetry. Sean O'Brien's recent Forward-winning collection, The Drowned Book, has on its back cover the following phrase: "The Drowned Book again shows O'Brien a master of the authortitative line ...." That seems like a lot of emphasis on mastery and control - and authority - and it is a somewhat male way of reading things, I think.

The media often says poetry is dead or dying. The media is often the one who killed Cock Robin, though. The new Observer poetry page, to return, has begun inauspiciously, if it is intending to present, to the readers of its pages - who, one would imagine, from the emphasis elsewhere, on trendy films and pop music, are otherwise geared to intelligent people in the 25-50 range - the actually-exciting truth about contemporary poetry - that it is vibrant, heterogenous, multicultural, and appeals to young and old. What, precisely, possessed the editor to allow the first page, then, to focus its observant eye on three white, male poets - one dead, one middle-aged, and one slightly older than that - Henry Reed, John Burnside and Hugo Williams?

Reed is a fine Forties poets, and I am glad to see his book is out. I very much like the work of John Burnside, especially - and spent several days with him in Montreal this spring, when we both read together at a major Canadian literary festival - so this isn't about their work, or anything personal. But how about a little balance? It might have been fun to have a poem by one of the younger, rising stars of British poetry - Luke Kennard, Daljit Nagra, Katy Evans-Bush, say - or mention of one of the many fine established women poets currently working in the UK. Instead, the page rather solemnly establishes an establishment feel (Hugo Williams is on record as actively mocking J.H. Prynne) and a feel that experimental, different, edgy, or more radical poetic efforts will not be looked at.

I could be wrong, of course, and we shall have to see how Adam Phillips navigates his way through the various channels of British poetry and poetics, now. You might think I am carping, but first impressions do count. This is why, whenever I present poetry events, or anthologies, I do seek a careful and nuanced balance of styles, and options - because I believe that the single most important fact about poetry currently is that it is not just one kind of thing - but many ways of being poetry. It is precisely this unmasterable, destablising flow and pulse that disturbs the smooth-running of the central London publisher-editors, who seek to keep a lid on things. But you cannot master poetry, anymore than you can conquer the sea with a sword.

Out of the shadows

The British little magazine is having something of a heyday at the moment. Mimesis started up recently, and is impressive. Now here is Penumbra, a magazine devoted to "Verse, Prose and Criticism" which is on to its second issue, and looks very handsome indeed, in its "smaller, smarter format". I have a poem in it, alongside work by Julian Stannard, Heidi Williamson, and others. To submit short fiction and verse, email the editors Alex Latter and Elle Collins here.

Deaths and Entrances

Speaking of Welsh poets, Dylan Thomas (pictured) was born on this day in 1914. He would die 39 years later, in November, 1953. There is an extraordinary, brief letter, in The London Magazine’s first ever (Volume 1, No 1) issue, which opens, “Sir, the death of Dylan Thomas at the age of thirty-nine is an immeasurable loss to English letters. In memory of his poetic genius a fund has been started for the Establishment of a Trust to assist his widow in the support and education of his three young children.”[1] It is signed by thirteen hands, including T.S. Eliot, Peggy Ashcroft, Kenneth Clark, Graham Greene, Augustus John, Louis MacNeice, Edwin Muir, Edith Sitwell, and his dear friend Vernon Watkins. This sounds like an establishment view.

And yet, an unfortunate and I think misguided rear-guard action was already underway, in Scrutiny, well before 1954, to undermine this “genius”. It only grew, after his death. As G.S. Fraser puts it, “… Dylan Thomas’s reputation as a poet has undoubtedly suffered at least a mild slump. He was always far too directly and massively an emotional poet, and in the detail of his language often too confusing and sometimes apparently confused a poet …” for the newly-dominant critics of the Scrutiny school.[2]

Neil Corcoran, writing forty years after the London Magazine letter, begins by arguing that Dylan Thomas had his origins in an interest in Surrealism (among other things) but, mainly, himself[3]. The problem is, apparently, one of narcissism. “His is a poetry much taken up with the fact of, and with the emotions attached to, certain forms of psychological regression.”[4]

This is not considered a good thing, for the poetry. “There are too many poems from the 1940s in which the nebulously vatic seems repellent in its myopic self-assurance or triumphalism.”[5] The poems are trouble, and cause trouble. “The trouble with numerous poems is that their glamour and charm cannot disguise the fact that they are elaborate tautologies.”[6]

Apparently, the surface pleasures of a Dylan Thomas poem (almost like a 40s silver screen goddess, charming and glamorous) hide a troubling fact: poems are meant to be logical statements that must not contradict themselves (or else they become tautological). For Corcoran, a poem cannot, then, be a sheer verbal pleasure, enjoyed, say, for its ornamental qualities. It must be rigorously worked through, an equation that yields clear, new results. “The effect (of a Thomas poem) can seem like being insistently told, in some baffling way, some extremely simple things that we already know perfectly well…”[7] – which, despite its obviously critical intention, seems like a rather good job description for most mainstream English poetry.

Dylan Thomas is a snake charmer, or charming snake, his poems wild: “with their libidinous dictions of friction and flow”[8] – “the body of the poem always turning back in on itself”[9] – and this self-sustaining interest in body, fluid and experience is deeply troubling to a critic who wants, ideally, the poet to turn their work “outwards to a recognisable external world of action, event, suffering and relationship”[10].

Linguistic, primitive energy, with its potential slippage, its force, might render the world “unrecognizable” and therefore draw a veil over the rational order of things. In short, Thomas is “Dionysian” and therefore threatens a different order of things, one which wants its apples back in the cart – actually back on the garden’s tree. Recent anthologies of the last decade or so (for example, The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945, edited by Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford) pay short shrift to any post-war Forties poems or poets, neo-Romantic or otherwise, other than George Barker, Dylan Thomas and W.S. Graham (and they have 14 pages between them). Lynette Roberts and F.T Prince are not included. This is a period that time has selected to forget.

In Sean O’Brien’s recent anthology, The Fire Box: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945, Graham is described as a “major” poet, in the Introduction, and is included, though Dylan Thomas is not. Nor are Roberts or Prince, again. It is unclear why Thomas, whose best work, arguably, was published in 1946, is excluded; his name is not mentioned, either, in the Introduction, though we are told that “the Movement also saw itself in reaction against the poetic excesses of the 1940s, exemplified by the hysterical irrationalism of the New Apocalypse School”.[11]

[1] London Magazine, February, 1954, Vol. I, No. I, Correspondence, p. 79.
[2] G.S. Fraser, Vision and Rhetoric: Studies in Modern Poetry (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), p. 238.
[3] Neil Corcoran, English Poetry since 1940 (London: Longman, 1993)pp. 39-42.
[4] Corcoran, p. 43.
[5] Corcoran, p. 42.
[6] Corcoran, p. 44.
[7] Corcoran, pp. 44-45.
[8] Corcoran, p. 44.
[9] Corcoran, p. 44.
[10] Corcoran, p. 45.

[11] O’Brien, Sean, The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945 (London: Picador, 1998), p.xxx.