Well, yes and no.  You indicated that it was wrong to attack a single poem without any context or background--e.g. the fact that Claire Harman hasn't yet published a first book of poetry (you can call me out if I'm slightly misreading you here).  Your 'anti-royalist analogy' makes this point too.  

Don't the phrases really strike you as cliches?  "Mythical skyline" -- really?  Sheesh.  I forgot to mention another 'formal cliche' -- the wrap-up line, the line that leaves the reader, or is supposed to leave the reader, with a little delicious whisper of transcendence.  

The point about prizes and the neoliberal culture industry would be that this is part of a large scale administration of culture that includes the rapid growth and spread of creative writing programs and the appearance of many prizes (Peter said there used to be none - no reason to doubt him on this).  Not all of this is necessarily a bad thing; Silliman's point about money going to poets makes sense, for example.  Prizes "fetishize" because they excerpt the single item--poem or book--from the context of poetic practice, criticism, publication, reading, etc. -- five poems out of 225 and then one poem from those five.  We can't really say that there's a market for poetry that would sort all this out (as there may be a market for popular forms that continue to sell - I'm guessing that there are fewer prizes around for romance novels or thrillers); but we can simulate competition and call our winners examples of excellence.  A good line on a CV and an item for the back cover: career advancement.  Further, prizes tend to consolidate an establishment, including a pattern of production and response ('so -this- is what a prize-winning poem looks like…').  

Enough on this.  I'm rather urgently supposed to be pawing at Paradise Lost, winner of the 1667 prize for 'things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme'.    

Best,
Jeremy

   



On Oct 6, 2015, at 10:45 AM, Jamie McKendrick wrote:

> It's a bit odd that Jeremy thinks I object to the singling out of the winning poem - when it was clearly the derision and 'laughter' I was objecting to, with a single phrase as the basis for this. As well as to Tim's fierce and very unspecified put-downs directed collectively to 4 poems.
> If we can address each other personally, I have no objection at all to your critique of the poem that makes specific points about it and doesn't do so in the spirit of spiteful mockery. There's the possibility of engaging with what you write, agreeing or disagreeing with it. The phrases, for instance, which you pick out as cliches or pretty close don't strike me as such. Of course "trying - and failing - to understand why someone would think this a good poem doesn't constitute a personal attack". Can you really not see the difference?
> 
>  To say that prizes are part of an (administered) cultural industry would seem to be obvious - in what way they are therefore 'neo-liberal' and subject to 'fetishization' needs, I think, to be spelt out. Literary prizes have been around since the times of the Athenian dramatists (some better winners there perhaps) and would they be more or less liable to 'fetishization' than those of what you're calling a 'neo-liberal' culture? Just wondering...I can't say I've ever felt even a remotely fetishistic emotion towards a book that's won a poetry prize, but maybe it's just unsophisticated folk who fall prey to this?
> Jamie
> 
> -----Original Message----- From: Jeremy F Green
> Sent: Tuesday, October 06, 2015 4:05 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Prizes
> 
> It's a bit odd that Jamie objects to the singling out of the winning poem by Claire Harman.  Hasn't the poem already been singled out?  Isn't the publicity among other things an invitation to read the poem and try to figure out what makes it special or not special?
> 
> I have to admit that I don't understand why the judges thought "The Mighty Hudson" better than the other poems on the shortlist.  I don't have a problem with whimsy, necessarily, but I don't think the whimsy in this poem takes us anywhere interesting or new.  Indeed, the poem seems intent on giving some sort of life to the archaic image of the circus strongman--shades of Peter Blake or Fellini, perhaps, but faint indeed.  And the poem can't seem to decide how cartoonish it wants to be (not a strong man, but Superman, apparently).  I don't find the moments where it strains for the startling image remotely compelling--"Heard her hot geyser of giggling"--and there's the use of ostentatious similes ("Bear mountain twirling oddly away like a girl" -- really?  isn't this a labored attempt to pull the poem together?), which seems in these late days a cliche at the level of the device.  (And aren't phrases like "mythical skyline" and the river "grey as a vein" cliches or pretty close?).
> 
> Trying--and failing--to understand why someone would think this a good poem doesn't constitute a personal attack. (I rather liked what CH said in the interview, and anyone who's written about Sylvia Townsend Warner gets my vote.)
> 
> I suppose the truisms about prizes include the idea that the right book or person never wins (or they win for the wrong book).  It's also true that prizes belong to the neoliberal culture industry with all that that implies--administration, fetishization, etc.