Christopher Tower Poetry Prize 2011

The long listed winners for this year's Christopher Tower Poetry Prize were recently put up on the internet and I am among them! A link to read the poems [including mine, which is entitled Contrasts Between Watch and Stone (or William Paley)] is right here. I cordially invite you to have a little glance.

Also see amongst them my fellow Foylers; Catherine Olver, Sarah Lucas and Andrew Wynn Owen. I also particularly liked Elizabeth Crowdy's Simplicity. The first line, "Our home sang simple" was very catching and the uncomfortable, yet very exact image which followed, of floorboards bent as if with scoliosis, cinched the knot which pulled me into reading it carefully the whole way through. I liked this years winning poem quite a lot, especially the lines: "I am trying, slowly, to shut them down forever. /
They are all too filled with blistering flame.".

Ledbury Reading

Come see me and other Foyle Young Poets at this year's Ledbury Poetry Festival. I'll probably be around from Friday to Sunday. Here's the schedule: Readings. It's going to be brilliant, I promise.

Favourite Poets, again

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
W. B. Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

This is the first poem I ever memorised fully. It makes me cry. We studied it in school once, and another girl in my class cried at it. It does that to people, maybe because it makes me believe that love is selfless.

'to the universe' by Ameerah Arjanee

Ameerah Arjanee, who is one of the 14 poets that came on the Arvon course as a prize from the Foyle Young Poet's award is releasing a book of her poetry called 'to the universe' soon. This doesn't surprise me one bit because she is fantastically prolific as well as being a great poet. She must have a very talkative muse, or something, I don't know. I came with six poems to the retreat, all folded into little squares and an empty notebook, and she had this massive stack of them. It was quite daunting. Anyway, I will update this when her launch event at Institut français de Maurice in Marituis (why, oh why, is it so far) happens, and also I will probably order it. So, that's cool. She's a poet to watch out for.

Foyle Young Poets

{Merlin the horse at the Arvon Centre}

Winning the Foyle Young Poets of the Year award for 2011 was probably one of the biggest achievements of my life so far. The honour was much more about the people that I met as a result than about recognition or success, though. Leaving aside the sheer brilliance of Luke Kennard and Jane Draycott as teachers to us and poets in their own right, the other winners who came along for the Arvon Foundation course were the kind of amazing people that make you constantly doubt yourself while internally promising to write better and better and better poems. (I mean that in a good way, obviously.) Also, we danced the Macarena together. And, also, you have never seen fridge-magnent-poetry like Arvon Centre poetry.

{a fridge poem - collectively authored}

Read my winning poem (and also, everyone else's) here.

Favourite Poets

Filling Station
by Elizabeth Bishop

Oh, but it is dirty!
--this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it's a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide
the only note of color--
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)

Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO--SO--SO--SO

to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.

This poem is one of my very favourites. I think it is something about the nearly haunting quality of the perfectly understated humour, or maybe the whispering row of cans, or maybe that last line that makes me shiver it fits so perfectly right where it is. Bishop is an inspiration.

One Poem

This is a Map

I am touched by the blue water
where all the edges of me
are carved out by the sea.
The veins of me are more colours
than red and blue--
(vehicular more than ventricular).
I am all over freckled with cities.
I am smooth and flat and tattooed.

All the people, touching, building
their little lives on my skin.
I am fixed here
As a bottle blue dragonfly pinned to a frame.
I am between two pages
And freed, briefly, for a road trip and
We touch only beneath those acres of blue
Where no cartographer can see.


{have a little taste of my writing :D }