Judging the Forward Prize

The word's been out a week now, I think, that I will be one of the five judges for this year's Forward prizes in poetry. My fellow judges are A.L. Kennedy (chair), Colette Bryce, Emma Harding and Warsan Shire. I've just finished reading my first box of books, and the second came today, with more sure to follow. I'm enjoying becoming acquainted with poets and presses I hadn't known before and keeping a list of a wonderful array of potential poems for the anthology. What will happen to my own writing during such intense reading? I'll let you know!

A new badge of honor: scorn from The Daily Mail

A fellow poet brought to my attention the fact that my poem, "Imagined Sons: Greek Salad," received a negative remark in a Daily Mail review of the anthology, The Forward Book of Poetry 2015. The reviewer Bel Mooney comments, "Once or twice, I felt that the poets were having what’s popularly known as a laugh — with ridiculous poems about a rug design and a Greek salad, not to mention an ugly effort in text speak. Why?" 

Ah, to answer that question is so tempting--and yet, I expect, so futile, too....

"Imagined Sons 9: Greek Salad" in The Forward Book of Poetry 2015

On my return from Illinois last week, I found The Forward Book of Poetry 2015 and my poem, "Imagined Sons 9: Greek Salad," among the Highly Commended Poems. It seems to me that there's more range in this edition of the Forward anthology, with the likes of Andrea Brady, Lee Harwood, Marianne Morris and Denise Riley alongside such usual suspects as David Harsent, Andrew Motion and Hugo Williams. I may have to take it with me on the train to Norwich today....

Catching Up with Anthologies: The Best British Poetry 2011

NB: In all the "catching up" entries, I have work in the publication.

Salt Publishing and Roddy Lumsden have come up with a British parallel to the well established Best American Poetry Series overseen by David Lehman. The first editor is Lumsden himself, to be followed by Sasha Dugdale next year. While the initial volume is a largely mainstream selection (with, strangely, not a prose poem in sight), it possesses greater energy and range than the annual Forward Book of Poetry, as evidenced in poems by Gillian Allnutt, Amy De'Ath, and Chris McCabe, among others.

The advantage of a single poet reading through a year's magazines for selections, over the Forward's approach of taking four selections from each magazine editor, manifests in the larger selection of younger and emerging poets therein. It's good, too, to see in the represented magazines a mix of the usual suspects (Poetry Review and Poetry London, but not, interestingly, TLS or LRB) and such internet journals as Ink, Sweat and Tears and Shadowtrain and more experimental journals like QUID and Shearsman. Part of the success of the American series has come from annual editors' choices seemingly pushing beyond personal taste, in an attempt to recognise the best work whatever the style; that range in choice of editors and work selected will need to increase as the series goes on for it to distinguish itself from the Forward. Here's hoping!

The Forward Book of Poetry 2010

"The Trapeze Artist's Dear John Letter" has been highly commended by the Forward judges and as such will be included in The Forward Book of Poetry 2010. It's a telling choice, one of the most mainstream poems in The Tethers--not that I'm complaining--