Run by the Poetry Society of Great Britain, the National Poetry Competition is regarded (at least by the Poetry Society) as the most important poetry competition of them all. Which is probably true. Winning it, or even being well-placed, leads to a small but important amount of media attention. The Independent on Sunday will print the winner on March 30th. In UK poetry terms, this is as big as it gets, so it’s not surprising that not just anyone wins. As far as millions of people in Britain are concerned, they’re more likely to notice the story of the innuit who catches a migrating bird that was being tracked by the BBC.

In September 2007 I had a strong idea for a poem and devised a way of working that would mean that by the deadline for the National, I would have a poem that had soaked up hundreds of hours of my time. My belief in the work ethic is very strong. Hard work wins in the end. I worked on it several days a week for a couple of months hoping that seeing it with constantly refreshed eyes would provide new insight each time. Poem rotation has worked in the past. At some point, I decided to make it sound like a National winning poem, lots of mentions of obscure foreign places and a generally obfuscated theme. I posted it online on Oct 29th and was disappointed that the email acknowledgment sounded like the Poetry Society’s computer didn’t take too long “processing” my effort.

Thank you for your online National Poetry Competition entry. Your
entry was processed successfully, and the order details were as follows:

Order #5898

————-

1 x Competition Entry

Total Payable: £5.00

Regards, The Poetry Society

I can’t help thinking that the computerised response to the poem that eventually won might have carried a little more weight for the esteemed poet who probably spent many more hours than I did.

I’m looking at my poem now and it’s crap. My aim to write a poem worthy of winning resulted in a poem that was lumpen and pedestrian. It had no ring to it. The language laboured. I know this, because I remember making the decisions that led it to be like that. Today I spent an hour on the old poem and reduced it by half retaining all the meaning and adding a lot more. Now, I’ll wait till I write some more, put them together and send them off to The Rialto or maybe somebody else online. The Rialto have had six of my poems since Dec 4th so I’m not inclined to send them any more. Other than that, it’s back to attaching copies of my poem to a migrating bird in the hope that the BBC tracks it, an innuit catches it and reads it aloud on BBC Radio 4′s Nature programme. Stranger things have happened in art.

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Here’s a poem from my collection What You Will See (gattopublishing.com) about Liz Dawn who played Vera Duckworth who has just been written out of the long-running soap opera Coronation Street.

Queen of the Minimus

An episode of the longest running soap finishes.

There’s a deadly one-liner from the queen of the minimus.

With that look she snakes off,

Slams a door with a bang and a cough.

A dreadful tune plays over credits.

They roll off the tongue like the names of the dead. It’s

A tea-brewers’ signal to threaten the grid.

There’s a story behind it that no one will give.

It was tough out there for the nation’s favourite star.

She struggled in a town in a snow-blocked car,

Hoiking a suitcase from the back of a Zephyr,

Rushing to audition in a social club mecca.

She dropped that wig with her dress tucked in her knickers,

A mophead in the slush, she was on with the strippers.

Miss Harp Lager, nineteen sixty-two,

A courtroom drama, a standby screw.

She made the murderess in episode four

Rigid as a gibbet and they asked for more,

Extra episodes in the nation’s favourite soap,

Factory girl, picket, barmaid with the most.

Finally bricked-in as the redoubtable landlady,

The fireplace smile said she’d really made it.

On set her lines were as faultless as veneer.

The combustible temper hid the fear.

The doors were slammed with a plasterboard thump.

When she ignited, the sound men jumped.

Some remembered when she answered to Kiddo.

In sad moments thought of going early, a widow.

She bit on the capsule with impeccable timing,

Back next year with a facelift, smiling,

Pictured in the paper on a pile bricks,

Wielding a sledge-hammer, signing books at six.

And who really cares that her knickers were seen?

That her mother swore and her corsets went green?

When viewing figures showed her popularity slipping,

The headlines reminded her she was queen of the minimus.

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The great thing about being a full-time writer is occasionally seeing my work appear in print. In this case, Moral Purpose Poem appears in print and online in issue 139, October 2007.

Martin Holroyd selected this poem way back in August out of a group of 6 I wrote way back in May. It’s not a gloomy poem, but it is about gruesome images in print, and it does ponder the role of the poet, as a lot of my poems do.

I don’t like second hand poetry, ie poetry that is a response to the media, which this is. But in this case, I feel that most poets would run miles rather than address a ‘moral purpose’. After all, most poets’ purpose seems to be to themselves. For example, I’m not a subscriber to Poetry Monthly, but I soon will be. It’s a great magazine, and here’s Martin’s fantastic introduction:

Well said, Martin. If you can’t read the quote from Martin, the bit I’m talking about is, “poets with regular acceptances in this publication who do not offer to subscribe or resubscribe must feel that it is not a very good magazine…” Come on, poets, put your money where your mouths are.

The meanness of poets never fails to impress me. Can there be another genre that develops meaner artists? I think not. A painter has to buy materials, and pay for gallery space, but a poet has to pay for nothing. Is it that the poet is so scared of the dreaded word vanity, that they will pay out nothing? I doubt whether they are penniless. Just the opposite. Most poets own vast houses and huge cars, and use their cars above any other form of transport when there is a whiff of being able to read their great works to the public. Art is an expression of your own existence, but if it was down to poets, art would cease to exist.

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