MODERNISM AND TRADITION: THE T S ELIOT PRIZE SHORTLIST

Published in Prospect Magazine, January 2002

British poetry is currently in a good, rich, interesting state. The one thing wrong with it is that it's not being read. Or not, most glaringly, by the people you'd think are its natural audience: the professional, culture-minded, middle classes. Most people who "did English" at college, go to plays, operas, Vermeer exhibitions, who buy, read, publish, publicize, commission articles on, or write novels on the Booker shortlist, don't open a book of modern poems from one year's end to the next.

You'd think that enjoying contemporary poetry is part of a full cultural life. Increasingly, since the Sixties, it isn't. The media, who use "poetry" as metaphor for anything from Tiger Woods' swing to a retro sofa-leg, tend to assume it is "difficult", élitist, or "irrelevant". For most News desks, the only poetry story is poets behaving badly. Books editors don't need to know anything much about it except big names. Some do but many don't and no one thinks that odd or wrong. It's even cool not to know about it. I've heard a novelist, fiction reviewer and arts journalist declare, respectively, that "Poetry lost its way in the twentieth century", is "An obsolete art form", and "No modern poets are any good". "Do you read it?" I've asked. "Who is no good?" But they don't know names. Why would they? They've already justified not reading the work.

There are people enjoying poetry, buying it. going to poetry readings festivals and readings, all over the country. But these are the people who stayed in touch. Getting in touch from scratch is becoming harder and harder. Poetry reviews are far thinner on the ground. Advertising on books pages was falling before September 11th; since, books pages are being brutally squeezed by editors higher up the paper who are mostly not poetry fans even if their Books Editors are, and don't want to see unsexily minority interest books crowding the pages. So anyone who wants to know what's going on in poetry is doomed to a specialist hunt.

However, Sunday 20th January is the best public chance to discover the state of British poetry viva voce. This is British poetry's one big public annual reading unattached to any festival, a reading at the Bloomsbury Theatre, London, by the ten shortlisted poets of the T. S. Eliot Prize shortlist, the night before the prize is decided and the great poet's widow presents the £10,000 prize, which she generously funds, to the winner.

This event (always sold out) is a good window into the way poetry operates in Britain today. The prize was inaugurated in 1993 to celebrate the fortieth birthday of the Poetry Book Society, which Eliot himself founded as a guide to British poetry for its members (currently numbering 2,200) in Britain and throughout the world. It is the UK's largest single unit retailer of poetry, selling £150,000 worth of books a year, and appoints two poets to pick annually four "best" books (the quarterly "Choices", which its members get free) and twelve "Recommendations" which members buy at a discount. When Oxford University Press (aping the media trend of coldshouldering poetry) scrapped their superb poetry list, the PBS offered the shredder-headed cancelled titles at a pound each and sold 8,000 books. Prizes needs sponsors. The Poetry Society, a separate outfit, runs the National Poetry Competition, a prize for a single poem sponsored by BT.

For the Eliot Prize, Mrs Eliot gives the prize-money and Bol.com, the Internet entertainment and media store, currently sponsors the admin. "We see sponsoring the prize as a way of adding value to our Arts side", said Bol's Publicity Director Catroin Hughes. "Poetry books are a tiny fraction of our sales, but we are proud to be involved. Many people here are into poetry." For, bewilderingly, just as interest in poetry slews to an all-time low on the literary circuit, it is rising over the country among punters and in the business sector. In addition to sponsoring prizes, businesses are commissioning poems and putting resident poets on the payroll. Britain's three poetry book prizes make an enormous difference to sales (last year's winners head the PBS's sales figures) and, as Andrew Motion said the year he was a judge, the Eliot is "the prize most poets would most like to win". Why? Well, it is judged only by poets. Judges for the Whitbread and Forward prizes include journalists, literary editors, celebrities. They represent readers, critics, conduits by which poetry reaches readers, but in the Eliot Prize you are judged by your colleagues. (Of course this involves paranoia-generating variations of personal taste and personality clashes, but that's an occupational hazard.)

But also the name T.S Eliot spotlights English poetry's whole modern being. Modernism in England (it had different line-ups in America, Scotland and Ireland) means basically three figures, and the best-known is T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land is our talismanic modernist work. Eliot's fellow American Ezra Pound encouraged Eliot, edited The Waste Land, was Yeats' secretary (galvanising him into the modernism of his late poems), and his work is still an important influence on British poets today. So is the work of a British Quaker from Northumberland. Basil Bunting, born 1900, racketed round the world (sailor, journalist, British vice consul in Istanbul in 1945) writing radically original poems which Pound published. Back in Northumberland, in 1966, Bunting wrote his masterpiece Briggflats. Retrospectively, Bunting is increasingly both influential and emblematic for post-war British poetry, which looks increasingly to the North. Poetry publishers Carcanet and Bloodaxe operate from Manchester and Newcastle; Yorkshire had supplied key poets in three generations in the last fifty years, Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison, Simon Armitage.
Eliot and Pound re-forged British poetry, juxtaposing esoteric allusion and myth with "street" talk and perceptions. But the pair of them affected English poetry very differently. Eliot is Mr Establishment. As Faber's poetry editor, he built up Britain's most important poetry list (and posthumously sustains it with royalties from Cats). Rhythmically, he radically re-worked English poetry's essential unit, the iambic pentameter, setting it coursing like a pent-up whippet into blank verse, spiritual reflection, dramatic dialogue, pub talk. He also wrote authoritative criticism that we still think with today. The fact that he was basically gay, the first wife who died in an asylum: all that was smoothed over in a social process uncannily similar to the aural smoothing of his verse. Pound too mixed demotic voices invigoratingly with recondite literary references and foreign languages, and smashed open poetic form. But he went further, was more violent, worked especially through images, and ended a traitor, in a mental asylum. Poetry is always dangerous, and modernism really meant to be. It upset people and apple-carts, passionately.

Eliot had all of that wildness in his nature, life, and poetry. The recent biography of his first wife argues that, appalling as his seventeen-year first marriage was, it did provide the impetus for his best work. But both in public life (enthroned, surface-respectably, in London's literary heart) and in his poems, he somehow earthed that electricity, made it decent. Pound was modernism's erudite rough trade: difficult to handle, the raw snaky cable itself.

If you put the books shortlisted for the 2001 Eliot prize into teams, you would find more on the Eliot side, with Bunting as back-up. You might describe this group as rationally comprehensible, politically- underpinned lyric, focussing on landscape and society. First, four English landscapes. From the south, Burning Babylon by Michael Symmons Roberts (born 1963) who grew up next door to Greenham Common and recently watched the base being returned to common land. His book, in which the dismantled base becomes a derelict satanic city, gives voice to the local community's fear of being top British nuclear target. Would you live long enough to suffer? That was the teen topic at school. A brilliant, now supremely uncomfortable poem, "Ground Zero", clothes these imaginings in demonic beauty. Meanwhile The Age of Cardboard and String by Charles Boyle (born 1951), is all elegant, throwaway wit and English reticence, full of unreliable narrators prowling past the sparkling windscreens of London car parks. From the north comes Downriver by Sean O'Brien, this year's Forward Prize winner: funny, angry political lyric, teeming with ballads, sports pages, prose poems, urban landscapes. O'Brien, a Newcastle resident, is famous for his urban pastoral. social realism, humour, and political bite: and the river is the Tyne. Lintel by Gillian Allnutt, from Co Durham, is set in tatteredly Christian modern wildnernesses from Lake Baikal to Haworth, the Holy Land to Newcastle Lunatic Asylum.

Then come two out-of-Britain landscapes. Seamus Heaney's eleventh collection Electric Light elides Greece with Nineteen Forties Derry, linking "the first house where I saw electric light" to classical Greek ruins and the Delphic fountain of poetic inspiration; James Lasdun's Landscape with Chainsaw, set in the Catskill Mountains, voices the discovery of an English-born poet with European roots that he feels elatedly at home in the alienation of a harsh, rattlesnakes-in-the-outhouse, New World rurality. All these I'd put on the Eliot team, with O'Brien in the northern colours (socio-political with underglinting songlike lyricism) of Bunting.
Poets on the Pound team are more rebarbative, more "difficult". They do not explain their leaps of thought; they tend to operate by image rather than sustained reflection. They seem (this may be coincidence) to be more sequential too, often narrative. And they wear their more personal emotions, more upsettingly, on their sleeve. Speech! Speech! is the ninth collection by Geoffrey Hill (born 1932), a deeply original tilt, seen through the internet, against today's ways of public speaking, in a hundred and twenty poems (numbered for the days of Sodom). The Beauty of the Husband, by Anne Carson, a Canadian Classics Professor of deadpan lyric wit with a unique gift for relating bizarrely different worlds. Her daring, poignant, book takes mad risks of form and voice. Intersplicing poetry and prose, with long lines patchworking in all kinds of different writing genres from classics commentaries to Keats' Letters, it tells the story of a crumbled marriage in twenty-nine "tangoes". Finally, two magic realists. The Zoo Father by Pascale Petit (born 1953) is the only book published not by a mainstream commerical publisher but the specialist Seren Books, in Wales. It is about a dying father whose legacy was abuse and abandonmnent, and uses Amazonian landscape as a colourful image-bank for all the traumatic feelings. The horrific bedside encounters and memories are illuminated through shamanic and jungle imagery: shrunken heads, jaguars, penis-invading fish. It could be one long howl of pain, but translates searing emotion into an elegantly beautiful menagerie of images.

Bunny is the seventh collection by Selima Hill (born 1945, no relation to Geoffrey), telling in imagistic episodes the tale of a Fifties teenager seduced by the family lodger and sectioned in mental hospital. Famously, Selima Hill works through juxtaposing erotic, funny, deliberately ungrand images, often of animals, and her poems often infuriates male readers. In his critical book on contemporary poetry, The Deregulated Muse, Sean O'Brien analyzes the disorientating effect her work has on some male critics who read the images as "uncontrolled metaphorical spillage" ("whimsy", not "mannerly negotiated surrealism"), though in fact her similes "destablize metaphor". She uses them, as Petit does, to track feeling, and to control in language something not controllable in life - our shifting mental states. O'Brien once suggested to me privately that such responses to Hill's work may be a question, not of how women write, but how men read.

For yes, this shortlist shows something else too about how British poetry operates today: that it still belongs mainly to the boys. No woman has yet won the Eliot prize, and a ratio of six to four is far better than some years. Most poetry reviewers are men, and apart from Seren Books (whose editor is American), only one publisher has a woman commissioning poetry (and she is a fultime fiction editor, who packs in poetry, exhaustingly, on top). So most British women poets are published by men. The PBS and Poetry Society have women directors, but they are arts adminsistrators, serving poetry (and readers), not deciding what gets published. That power is almost completely in male hands.

Even so, one of the strengths of poetry published today in Britain is its variety. No ten books can represent its range. For three years, I wrote a discussion column in the Independent on Sunday, analyzing a poem by living poets. The column lived through two editors (a third mistrusted "all that writing under the poem"), and stopped at the hundred and thirteenth poet. I had in mind at least fifty others whose work I thought important. So ten is much too small a number to be representative. But it is a strong list.

At the reading, different listeners will respond to different poets; what I care about is the overall quality, and how utterly unrepresented this is in the media. My column's small demise illustrates the way media, from the top, fail a real appetite for poetry around the country. Readers' letters would pour in every week, asking for more poems, grateful to be introduced, asking for missed back numbers, wanting the column longer. And "Poems on the Underground", copied internationally from Dublin to Latvia, is deeply popular and has just celebrated ten successful years.
So I want to know why poetry is not being read, in 2002, by precisely the people whose education must have stressed it; and is was being read, by their equivalents, in 1902.

I have some tentative answers. The language in which media expesses its indifference to poetry is often defensively competitive, implying poets need taking down a peg. Then there's the pressure of time on professionals, the volume of print everyone has to read. We all respond by speedreading; and you cannot speedread a poem. The whole point is going back, enjoying thinking about it. Finally, there's the possibility that once you stop following an art, you get left behind as it develops. Imagine someone who stopped watching modern film about the time the cultured world stopped reading modern poetry: say, 1950. How would they cope with the film syntax of today?

But still, when the chips are down, when someone dies or falls in love, people turn to poetry. Poets are constantly asked for poems at funerals and weddings. People do need poetry: poems written for them, in their own world, as well as the familiar poems of the past. Taking a wild guess, you might take most Prospect readers as representative of people who aren't reading modern poetry and should be: not for poetry's sake (it will always, as Auden said, survive), but their own. Because they'd enjoy it. Because they are missing out on a cultural pleasure: the contemporary version of the world's oldest verbal art, which addresses fundamental human issues through the fresh language and realities of today. I'd love to know why.