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Dear All,

tomorrow I am leaving for Gdansk to attend a conference on contemporary Scottish literature (John Burnside, Alan Riach, and Alan Spence will give readings) which is why I will not be able to participate in the discussion, but please continue. I hope you agree that this is exactly what we need - an open discussion about prize culture.

Peter, this is exactly why I copied the shortlists into my mail and just in case I have not stressed it, and I am sure you know, my congratulations to you and Tony.

Carrie, even if two nominees were first published in the US and afterwards in the UK, my criticism is still valid. The great majority of British prizes are administered with a closed-shop policy - only British publishers are eligible, whereas my suggestion is author-centred - "born in Great Britain or Ireland, of British or Irish nationality, or long-term residents in Great Britain or Ireland", and one could certainly discuss "long-term" and have something like "resident for 3 or 4 years" instead.

With very best wishes from Salzburg,
Wolfgang

Am 06.10.2015 um 12:29 schrieb Tim Allen:
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Jamie, - I know nothing about Clare Harmon - but so what - do I really need to? do I need to have some biographical knowledge that will suddenly change my opinion of the quality of her poem. This prize list is for Best Poem of the Year - not, Best Prize for A Poem by someone who hasn't had a book out yet'. And what has the fact that she's written a biography of R.L. Stevenson got to do with anything.

I know, I get it, I should have kept my reaction to those poems to myself - just talked about them in the pub - not aired my views here. Well I think it is a lot more honest and a lot more healthy to speak out. Feel free to defend the poems against my opinion but don't just accuse me of being 'unpleasant'. I know I have probably broken list protocol, we try not to bring in 'names', but if a discussion about the Prize culture is going on and here we have a demonstration of it in action I think it is fair game to actually look.

OK, let's be clearer - Apart from Andrew Elliott's poem the other 4 are poetic slush, shaped and compacted into just the right form to appeal to the 'OO' and the 'AH' of a critical abyss that can't tell the difference between a cliche and a box of potatoes (don't know why I said potatoes). 

Cheers

Tim Allen (just added my Sir name so some other Tim doesn't get the blame for this scurrilous and unpleasant attack on the innocent)  
     
On 6 Oct 2015, at 02:19, Jamie McKendrick wrote:


Hi Carrie,
From some quarters of the list, I'm afraid, you're more likely to hear the cheerless sound of derisive laughter, in this case directed at someone who has yet to publish a book of poems. An unpleasant world to be entering. Clare Harmon has written, among other things, a fine biography of R.L.Stevenson, so I don't think she needs to pay any attention.
Jamie



On 5 Oct 2015, at 18:46, Carrie Etter <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Wolfgang, two of the Forward Prize books were originally published in the US, Rankine's and Siegel's, then published in the UK. Tim, the five finalist poems came from 225 poems submitted, and only a tiny, tiny percentage of those might be called avant garde or experimental or what you will. I would think this list would be glad to have seen Rankine and Riley on the best book prize shortlist. 

Yours in exhaustion,
Carrie