Hi Michael. There have for a long time been certain poetry prizes that seemed valid to me because of their specialist area but the growth of the wider prize culture in poetry with competitions etc I always saw as a bad thing, being partly to blame, in my opinion, with the breeding of a certain type of dull acceptable poetry etc. But the thing has gone on so long now and become so acceptable there is nothing any of us can do about it except mumble on the sidelines or join in. I remain a mumbler on the sidelines but I do understand why many go along with it and see it as part and parcel of the scene.
Cheers
Tim
On 5 Oct 2015, at 10:41, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> The widening of the Forward Prize's range in recent years is indeed notable. The 2015 book (the "Paxman" competition) included D Riley, A Brady, S J Fowler, C Herd, M Morris etc.
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> I don't know whether to see this only as a register of cultural change (as Ron suggests) or whether to believe that the widening does, in some trickle-feed sort of way, itself have an influence in the larger poetry world . I'm disposed to think the latter, but optimism is my weakness.
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> Prizes and competitions certainly don't matter to poets in the way they do to classical musicians, for whom the competitions themselves are an essential career element and a necessary part of honing skills. Poetry is much more solitary.
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> But the prizes matter to culture as a whole because they are the only thing about poetry that's ever reported in newspapers. Publishers, even of innovative poetry, usually take care to mention competition successes. Ultimately these things do play a role in determining what reaches a wider readership; why, for example, one poet is translated across the world and another isn't.
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