As Carcanet continues to celebrate Kei Miller's The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion winning for the Best Collection category, Forward Prize judge Vahni Capildeo talks about her experiences of selecting the winners of this year's prize.
How many?
170. 254. “5 is red,” a small synæsthete once confided. Some numbers are memorable even for people who don’t experience them as having colour, texture or movement (7 rotating clockwise in dusty light...). 1845, say: Robert Browning’s wooing of Elizabeth Barrett; the ship Fatel Razack delivering the first Indian indentured immigrants to Trinidad. 170 and 254 became numbers that almost crushed me. As a Forward Prize judge, I had 170 books and 254 individual poems to read. How? By not counting.
Springtime became another Christmas: parcels arriving, rubber bands tingling on A4 proofs, staples abandoning their pamphlets. The floor was the only feasible holding place. Determined to read every word of everything, I was a dizzy giant translated to mainland Orkney. Paper. Rock. No books, but sea stacks; Publisher X’s pile of offerings a fine impression of the Old Man of Hoy.
So, the first problem: quantity. I remembered in-house grammar sessions at the Oxford English Dictionary, mass nouns and count nouns: a pound of quince, the flesh you might cook with (the relentless, silvery voice explained) not being the same as a pound of quinces, individual fruits. The Forward submissions became tamer when viewed as amounts of book: not ‘how many to read’, but ‘how much to walk between’.
Who?
Beyond the personal touch of categories and author/title details sometimes handwritten on the Forward submissions by publishers or administrators, there was the tightness of the ‘poetry world’. Wouldn’t Z.’s name, like a fairytale dress from a nutshell, burst open a moonhaze of festival memories?
So, I swore off looking. I arranged the stacks next to the sofa, according to two of the three Forward Poetry Prizes categories: Best Collection; Best First Collection. This ensured that in any session, I read within one category only, building up my sense of what was being compared. Then, remembering Spanish Creole gamblers’ card games, I shuffled the volumes within each stack: no single publisher’s items stayed bundled together; I’d not absorb anyone’s house style as a generalizable standard or norm. Whenever I took a physical break, moving around or (rarely, during that Forward hermitage) going out, I shifted the stacks. Stretch out, reach down: the lucky dip.
Was that randomization sufficient safeguard? Poetry publishers have an interest in book production. They may make artistic objects: the reader interprets the poems’ world first through the quality of materials, cover, typeface. They may manufacture commercial products for a discriminating niche market. (Why don’t some take more care? What if the books were judged as whole things: text and paratext, poems and presentation? What if, during the process, judging the books as whole things indeed becomes one of the ways to choose between collections of equivalent spirit and verbal technique?) Returning to my initial stages of reading: wouldn’t the heft, the cut of the edges, straightway identify Faber or Eyewear or Knives, Forks, and Spoons? Sometimes. But it didn’t matter, because…
What?
…the big, little, avant-garde, performance, mainstream, ekphrastic, local, transhuman, elegiac, political, lusty, particoloured, compass-pointed indications didn’t matter, because what happened across that quantity, that poundage of book, was that any individual associations I had were destroyed. Greater trends emerged. The Forward poetry stuff began shaping itself, tendencies visible as in wet clay or driven water. I was repeatedly desolated by collections that locked me into interiors; light filtered through nets, trees were contemplated, and in pale sepulchral stanzas, pets and relatives died. Then again, I was softly rocked or brought up smartly, like a swimmer in conflicting currents, by poems that found ways to start, exist, demand readerly replay, while avoiding those deadly, Full Marks endings, the flourish or click. I was released from my boredom with (fear of domination/diminution by) open-and-shut anecdotes: mercifully, many poets, ‘accessible’ and otherwise, don’t do them. There were globe-shaped poems; two-voiced poems; poems alive with several languages and literary traditions; poems structured like games, like memory intercut by music and by news, like a mind struggling against saturation by information-age language. There was war, more than love; childhood and parenthood, more than peer conversation; rangy narratives; superimposition, haunting or fracture; curiosity, marvellous and impersonal, animating lyrics or sequences about an abstraction or about an object – a rug, a minuscule, starry bird.
How?
Myself? With a pencil. With coffee beans (brewed or chewed), no alcohol, and much muttering. ‘The judges’? With close reading, and reading aloud to one other. It’s quite something to hear the same lines voiced by Cerys Matthews and Jeremy Paxman. ‘The poets’? Without editors, apparently. Not always, but too often. As there were enough very good books for my personal longlists to exhaust several sides of much crossed-out and annotated A4, non-poetic questions came up. How could editors ignore proofing errors, or that a collection that had been describing a kind of arc crashed partway through, or that some poems fit with the general theme but not with the poems either side of them? Is this a question of resources and/or identity – time, energy, frames of reference, worldliness, money? Should there be positive discrimination on behalf of raw talent, against the editors it has happened to find: these words made my heart a singing bird, the top of my head was taken off, truths were unfolded and/or complicated, language was changed, the toothbrush was not left out (or whatever criteria one might use when trying if a collection works on its own terms and also when measured against the scope of the others) – reward the work (the writer), as if unevenness somehow mars the book, but not the achievement? But two of the prizes are for books…
Why?
Why were the chosen, chosen? I’ll not answer that. Rather: why say yes to being ‘a judge’? One, because of a consciousness of inequality in the work that readers are prepared to do; the pleasures they are willing to allow themselves. I was long ago invited to learn of Northern Ireland, when reading Seamus Heaney; of Jamaica (a far country to my childhood Trinidad), when reading Mervyn Morris; not that Morris or Heaney poems were limited to the local, but that there was a certain amount of delving into vocabulary and context that had to be done before my imagination could blossom along their lines. So Scotland, Iraq, Leeds, Sri Lanka, meet via white spaces that are not Mallarmé’s margins of silence, but the modern ground of poetry, thick with gradually visibilized code. Two, because for people and texts to connect, they have to know of each other. And like it or not, there are innovative poets (venturesome readers) in non-literary households, and in non-London parts of the world, who may not find little magazines sooner than they find the Forward anthology on Google. I hope it will be an opening of the ways.
Watch Vahni's interview, recorded for National Poetry Day, on YouTube
Click on the links for more interviews with 2014 Forward Prize Judges Helen Mort, Cerys Matthews and Jeremy Paxman
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| Kei Miller accepting his prize for The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion |
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