I've been reading hundreds of pamphlet submissions to the Rialto’s competition. Absorbing, fascinating… and intensive. Three of us sifted the entries to give our
judge, Hannah Lowe, a longlist of fifty to read. The results are on our website. Here are some thoughts about the experience
of sifting and trends among the entries.
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Life writing was popular, some of it addressing, admirably, difficult issues
such as childhood abuse or mental illness.
Racial and cultural identity, often with an autobiographical and/or
ancestral angle, was a big theme that produced some of the best poetry. Herons, cats, marshland, floods, trees, the
sea… all were here, sometimes (not the cats) in elegiac mode for what’s passing
or passed. Unelegiac urban life was here
in all its richness and confusion, and with foxes. Brexit appeared sporadically. The US elections came just before the
deadline.
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For the sifter, entries with an overarching theme or story are easy to take in
and remember. Sets of poems that are
quiet or work together without a story need to be given the attention they
deserve. I found it a pleasure to read formally
versatile entries, and those with poems all in the same form skilfully handled. The same applied to whole pamphlets of short
poems; we didn’t get many of those.
Short poems are hard to do well. Formally and/or linguistically
experimental sets stood out. We didn’t
get many of those either; I’d have welcomed more.
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The first poem is important: eg as setter of tone and theme, and inviter-in of
the reader who is longing to be excited, charmed, wrong-footed, made to laugh, lured,
thunderstruck, transported... This is especially true for electronic submissions
(around 4/5 of ours were online) which encourage linear reading. Yet a surprising number of pamphlets didn’t
lead with one of their best. This
phenomenon struck all three sifters independently. Maybe entrants had a certain idea about
ordering, or were unsure which were their best poems. Some entries only got going after the first
few poems. It felt like that familiar
workshop question, Do you need the first line / the first two verses or are these
just writing into the poem? Perhaps
ordering into a pamphlet is something to watch out for.
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Risks are good to take even if they don’t come off. Conceits, for example, have to be really well
done to work. But that’s OK; the reader
respects the attempt.
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Trusting the reader to understand, make connections etc is important.
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Line breaks that energise their poem are a delight. If they aren’t doing this it might as well be
prose.
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Adjectives… Yes, they still need to be
talked about! Many are superfluous or part
of a predictable adjective/noun combination.
Each adjective should be scrutinised to see if it deserves to be there, and
if so, whether it’s the right one. (It’s
totally fine to write a poem bristling with adjectives … provided you know what
you’re doing and the poem is hungry for them.)
There are other poetry habits too, especially what long-standing HappenStance
pamphlet publisher Helena Nelson calls leaning verbs. She even has a blog-tag for those and her
analyses of current habits are very shrewd.
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Titles: they don’t matter much at this stage but it’s nice to find one that
works.
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As a sifter all I wanted was pamphlets that channelled old Ezra, more than 100
years on: MAKE IT NEW. The best ones created a world of their own
and invited me in. Line breaks electrified
the poems, the language felt alive with unexpected turns of phrase or syntax,
form and content worked together, the poems had their own particular music
(harmonious, harsh or whatever), beginnings and ends earned their place…
etc. The subject matter might not be striking
but the angle on it was. What’s the
point of poetry (among so much other discourse) if it doesn’t convey the shocks
and wonder of living?
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When these things happened I’d get a sense of confidence mixed with excitement,
and read on knowing that the next poem would work, and the next, and with luck,
most of them… I’d also have a sense that
the writer was reading and listening to poetry, whether from the back of beyond
or an urban attic. So along with Ezra
this too goes in capital letters: READ
READ READ. The two exhortations are
complementary, not contradictory. Read
to write and write to read. Read to make
it new.
