I'm largely in sympathy with Peter's article, which scrupulously avoids the facile malice that often accompanies these discussions. There are a few minor 'beefs' I have but they don't really detract from the lucid analysis.
For example, the "multiple of 1000 (for financial gains) is a conservative guess". I think this is exaggerated rather than conservative. A poet who might expect to sell 1000 copies would probably sell 3-5000 with the assistance of a big prize. It's only because sales of poetry are pitifully low that this kind of increase looks so monstruously disproportionate. If we're just talking about money - let's say with a £10,000 prize for a book that will have taken 3 or more years to write - it's not really that crazy a sum. 'Successful' painters, in nothing like the big league, can sell canvases for £15,000 which they'll have worked on for a few months.
The passing use of Faber as a metonymy for overweening power in that world, with the suggestion that judges if they belong to such a house are likely to favour their stable-mates, is also unconvincing. In an earlier discussion here I've already given a list of figures that at the very least would question those assumptions.
Another quibble is the quote from the anonymous prize-winning poet - if he or she thought the judges so skull-numbingly dull why on earth submit to their judgement? (Their reading at the event will have been a condition imposed on them for the judging fee, not perhaps a good idea but not their fault.)
"Prize culture" certainly reinforces lazy attributions like "the best" but as Peter shows, with his example of the early reception of Heaney's work, that's long been a tendency of a culture that's incurious about the breadth and depth of what's published. It's much easier to choose one poet out of a thousand to represent a generation, and it obviates the need to read much else.
David's argument that there should be 'NO relation' between money and poetry seriously puzzles me.
Does it apply to the other arts or only to poetry?
Does it mean that accepting payment for a poem in a magazine or for a book of poems or for a reading is, in his view, morally compromised? (The first two usually fairly paltry.)
I just don't get this idea that accepting money for work, of whatever kind, is a bad thing.
Jamie
