Joelle Taylor wins!
… and the world creaks back into forward motion!
Well! That was a mad week of chasing books, reading books, choosing poems, preparing handouts, tweeting & emailing, and finally running two half-day workshops on the whole shortlist of ten books! I’m still completely saturated with the poetry of 2021. And with the so-much-missed experience of shared poetry, in person, live and emotional.
There’s a kind of special feeling to it this year: a kind of post-traumatic gratitude and joy that feels like a new part of the experience. The readings at the Royal Festival Hall were stupendous (and the poets looked glorious and glamorous; I can’t think of another year when they’ve all been quite so gorgeously dressed), and were streamed live — an innovation I hope will stay, as it’s so difficult for so many to get to the live event.
I prioritised, watched Sunday’s readings at my kitchen table, and then got on a train on Monday afternoon and went to the awards do in London. And friends, it was electric! A reunion of friends — a resumption of a whole world, it felt like. The last time poets were in that same room at the Wallace Collection was just three days after Roddy Lumsden died, and many of us were in shock. This year the party was on the anniversary of Roddy’s death — and it feels a bit as if we’ve all been to the Underworld and back since then. (There were others missing, of course. I missed Michael Horovitz.) Being back among poets, friends, it felt like a circle closing. Poignant, but also very, very happy.
Nobody I spoke to could understand how the judges could ever have chosen a winner among such a wonderful shortlist, and Glyn Maxwell (the Chair) was joking that he was going to have to skip town the next day. But when the winner was announced — ‘Joelle Taylor!’ — the room went wild. Whooping, cheering, clapping, and the winner herself couldn’t stop crying, standing at the podium. Atmosphere of pure light.
To be clear. The book, C+nto and Othered Poems, is tight, elegant, highly crafted, vibrant and moving poetry. Purely as poetry it deserves the recognition. But equally, it is poetry that might not have got the recognition — being born of performance, from a poet who started in slam and has made her name running the Poetry Society’s SLAMbassadors youth project. the last ten years or so have seen a gradual easing up of the border controls between ‘stage’ and ‘page’: town and gown, you might call it. The exciting thing is that Glyn Maxwell, Caroline Bird and Zaffar Kunial recognised this poetry, gave it a chance, and ultimately pushed it out of the nest to fly free.
The poetry part should go without saying. It’s the other part that’s why this is such a big event. Joelle wrote in yesterday’s Independent:
C+nto & Othered Poems explores the idea of the butch, and by implication the notion of masculine women... Part memoir and part conjuring, C+nto attempts to resurrect our buried and unbreathing stories, to drag the margins to the centre of the page.
...
Having this hidden narrative honoured by the literary establishment is a watershed moment for British contemporary poetry. It is not only a miraculous moment for me as a writer and artist, not only a real moment of visibility for a marginalised sexuality, but also a game changer for those who come from working class backgrounds and who have always built the stages we perform on.
I keep picturing what one of the high poetry mandarins, like Geoffrey Hill or William Empson, might have looked like when Glyn announced the winner. Even the title of the book, an aggressively female appropriation of the Cantos, feels like a snook well cocked. Or well somethinged, anyway.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the overwhelmingly positive response of the women I know to this event: a couple of my friends who were there on Monday actually burst into tears. Also in her piece for the Independent, Joelle writes: ‘We have taken your contempt and sewn a suit from it. Butch is what happens when a woman stops’. We may not all be wearing the suit or cropping our hair (or indeed be lesbians) — but some very old cobwebs have just been blown loose off poetry’s gateposts, and the gates have been pulled open — and the fresh air feels great!