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Vacuous Populists

     Jo Shapcott has won the Forward Prize for My Life Asleep, ahead of Muldoon’s Hay (shortlisted, but he doesn’t need any more prizes), Hofmann’s Approximately Nowhere (not shortlisted – is he one of us?), and Geoffrey Hill’s The Truimph of Love (not shortlisted – too intelligent, and a despiser of luvvies).

     Before the announcement, Shapcott made an appearance in the London Evening Standard. Budding poets had to complete a limerick she had begun: “There was a young ladette with attitude,/ Who hailed from a far away latitude”. The competition was accompanied by a photo of Shapcott holding a rubber shark across her forehead. The caption ran: “Shapcott: fishing for the right lines”. A lucky winner got a BT cordless phone, while runners-up made do with a copy of Peter Forbes’s “much-valued anthology”, The Penguin Book of the Twentieth-Century in Poetry. Everyone else received – you guessed it – two copies.

     Praising his friend as the “future health of English poetry”, Sean O’Brien recently contrasted Shapcott with those “vacuous populists who are trying to get their foot in the door”. Let’s hope she manages to keep them all at bay.

Silly Season

     Away from the silliness of poets in Tesco, poets in Bradford City Football Club, poets in domes, poets projecting their poems on the side of buildings etc., real poetry seems to be dying out. How else to explain the demise of Slow Dancer, an excellent small press which has been forced to stop publishing new titles for financial reasons? The London Arts Board, apparently, “have not been able to maintain their early commitment of support”, and the “much-heralded Arts Council Publications and Recording scheme has remained bogged down in red tape”. Slow Dancer, the press release announces with justifiable pride, was responsible for “early collections by Simon Armitage, Lavinia Greenlaw and Peter Sansom, and, more recently, published Tamar Yoseloff’s Sweetheart, which won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize for Best First Collection in 1998, and Matthew Caley’s Thirst, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 1999.” Slow Dancer was also the first to publish Sharon Olds in this country.

     The apparatchiks at the Arts Council obviously have better things to do with their money.

Beware the Blurb

“Vendler is arguing for a depoliticisation of [North] that robs it of much of its power to provoke as well as merely to reassure; and it is a measure of Heaney’s stature that he thrives on being read in just such a provoked or provocative way” (David Wheatley, TES, 20 November 1998).

“It is a measure of Heaney’s stature that he thrives on being read in such a provocative way” (blurb, paperback edition of Helen Vendler’s Seamus Heaney).