It’s that time of year when people on my social media feeds are posting pictures and updates from poetry prize ceremonies. I used to get invited to a few myself back in the day. But these days I sometimes just want to be shot of all of it. Now that I’ve got some distance from all of it, it starts to resemble something a bit culty or insular, something that might exist along a contintuum that starts at train spotting and ends at Scientology. One thing about the prize scene that rubs me the wrong way is it’s earnestness and the sense of its own importance, something that tends to be fatal to most art forms. Really it’s a room full of mainly upper middle class types, quaffing wine and having a good chinwag, which isn’t a bad thing within itself. One year, me and two other working class poets were at one of these functions and we were asked to move away to another part of the room because the part that we were stood at was crowded. Nobody else was asked to move. We looked around to see who we might be stood to close to and it was probably Sir Alan Yentob, but I can’t be sure.
It’s also a reading to a room full of 3000 poetry enthusiasts (people who maintain spreadsheets detailing which poems they’ve submitted to which magazine), which is a good turnout for an unloved art form but isn’t a fraction of the number of people that get turned away from the Mobos or the Brits.
I used to be a bit judgemental about the bigger poets who often seem rude or aloof at these things but I’ve come to believe that they hate it too, hence their aloofness or rudeness. Again, nothing really wrong with any of it. I’m just glad I don’t get invited any more.