Mslexia

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New Writing

5th Annual Mslexia Poetry Competition

Carol Ann Duffy introduces her selection of winning poems

The Mslexia Women’s Poetry Competition is a significant feature of the poetry year in which new poems by women are properly highlighted and celebrated. It is, I think, important to bear in mind this element of celebration when considering the point of poetry competitions at all: it’s good to clear a space for new poetry and fun to sprinkle a bit of stardust from time to time in the form of prizes. I’ve been delighted to stand by with my small bag of glitter next to the 2008 entries.

I’ll explain how the judging worked: my fellow poet, the wonderfully gifted Colette Bryce, drew up a long shortlist from the poems that more than 2,500 entrants had submitted. The standard of this anonymous shortlist was, I’m pleased to report, pretty high; there wasn’t one poem which didn’t offer something to admire. I also received a further set of poems, not on the shortlist, for comparison. Each poetry competition, mysteriously enough, tends to produce its own themes, and there were several poems in this year’s crop about school, caring for the sick, foetuses, mothers, grandmothers and – oddly – spiders. (Don’t anyone let Private Eye see this…). The difference between the poems on the shortlist and those not on the shortlist can be summed up in one word: energy. To hold the attention of a reader, a poem has to contain, in its deployment of language, something of the life-force of the writer. Although many of the shortlisted poems were domestic and personal in theme and tone – using a small canvas, if you like – they glowed, to greater or lesser degrees, with the energy of transmission. For me, a good poem asserts its own necessity to exist. That is why we can quote from those poems that we love and admire most. A bad poem is almost immediately forgotten.

The heap of poems from Colette sat on my kitchen table for a period of about a fortnight and I returned to them daily, or in the evening with a glass of wine, sifting and re-reading and putting into piles marked Yes, No or Maybe. More than one poem visited all three piles at some stage. Judging is such an odd process. One day a poem which obscurely annoyed will clearly endear. There’s a poem in the final 25 here which would probably have won a prize but for the fact that, while I admired the obvious talent and bravado of the writer, I couldn’t fully understand the poem. This poem, in particular, made me wish I wasn’t judging the competition alone and I will think twice before doing so again. I missed discussing the poems with another reader; hearing a different viewpoint; arguing. So I argued with myself. Was this poem too obvious in what it was saying and in the way that it said it? Was that one overly sentimental? Was this poem too concerned with style? Why hadn’t this poet thought harder about the ending…the rhyme…that verb….

And so to the winning poems. ‘A Song of Jean’ was the only poem that sat firmly in the Yes pile from day one and never moved. In the tradition established by Christopher Smart (‘For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry,’ from Jubilate Agno) this skilful, beautifully-paced poem makes robust use of the list as a form to celebrate not the feline but the human. It’s a wonderfully funny poem (‘lost in the ring road of her speech’) and a deeply moving one (‘the muchness of Jean’s mind’); a poem by a writer fully at ease with her own considerable abilities. It will be much-anthologised. I absolutely adored it and I hope Mslexia’s readers do too.

The second prize was ultimately between ‘A Litter of Moons’ and ‘Ruby Turning Thirteen’ and to choose one over the other gave me a real, see-saw problem. The latter wears the skill of its construction lightly while presenting us with a mother/daughter relationship, on the point of change, of aching beauty. As the mother of a 12-year-old girl myself, I was astonished at the effortless truthfulness and warmth of the portrait of the child in this poem. And what a great ear for contemporary speech this writer has! (‘He is soooo fit…’). Nevertheless, in the end, I gave second prize to ‘A Litter of Moons’ for its ambitious lyric originality and the richness of its word-hoard as it gives a voice to foetal specimens in their cold jars. Just read the second verse of this poem – ‘Many of us are twin, gazing into identical eyes /across a single body like a seesaw held / in perfect balance.’ Gorgeous.

The 12 Commended Poems could all have won a prize and I hope that their authors take real encouragement from this. ‘Sundowner’ crackles with formal skill, with extraordinary, vibrant language (‘serenading his own phizog, his gurning mug’), and with great style, but felt, ultimately, elusive in meaning. I have no doubt, however, that there is a gifted poet at work here. ‘The Patron Saint of School Girls’ was always in my top ten – a kind of comic elegy for schooldays, totally recognisable and very entertaining, which is oddly haunting and surprises even itself with its ending. The element of surprise within the familiar is important in a poem, and for this reason I very much admired ‘When I Was a Boy,’ another strikingly original and exuberant perspective on girlhood. Poems about trains are a familiar part of the English poetic tradition, from Hardy and Edward Thomas onwards, and ‘Strangers on a Train’ is a modestly luminous addition with its superb image of a mobile phone – ‘cradling your confessional in restless hands / like a saint’s relic.’ High-up on the shortlist, equally luminous, were the elegiac ‘Heirloom’ and the erotic ‘Blue Jewels,’ two poems which use clothing – a sari – or jewels – lapis lazuli – to explore the intensely personal to memorable effect. I love ‘my mother’s sari / will be the print of her last kiss’ and ‘the blue beads revelling in their queenliness, medicinal and true.’

When I think back to my days and evenings of judging this competition, what I remember most are the poems about mothers, brothers, children, people at the heart, or sometimes at the edge, of women’s lives. The most fully-achieved of these poems include ‘Emily Cohen Knits Summer,’ a perfect, Dickinson-like miniature; ‘Not Too Bad, Mum,’ the hardest kind of poem to write, of loss and bereavement, done perfectly and the one poem, reminding me as it did of my own experience, which made me cry; ‘Name as many things as you can that begin with the letter S,’ which uses sane humour to cast light on dementia’s darkness; ‘Wedding Anniversary on the North Sea,’ a fantastic, quiet poem of love and death and time; and ‘Dads’ and ‘My Other Grandmother,’ two very accessible and entertaining poems, both of which would make excellent models in workshops for young or new writers.

I’ve selected another ten poems which merit inclusion here, the best from a strong long shortlist. I admire the willingness to experiment and to play in ‘Schedule of Restrictive Covenants’ and in ‘Rough Guide to the London A-Z’ and I would have liked to have seen a lot more of this risk-taking in the entries generally. It’s only through risk as poets that we discover and advance, or as Samuel Beckett put it, ‘Fail, fail again, fail better.’ This includes thinking hard about style as well as content. That said, what struck me overall was the confidence of many of the poems – ‘Actually She Was’ does far more than play with the Metaphor Game – and the sense that the writers here actually read poetry as well as write it (see the influence of Sylvia Plath on ‘Sweetbread’). It was great to see that the author of ‘Found Wanting’ reads WS Graham – a hugely important poet – pleasing, also, to sense the differing cultural influences on ‘The Floating Man,’ ‘The Ripening of an R.U.C. Man’ and ‘Mourning Elvis.’ And I was fascinated by the contrasting use of communicating, of sending a message, between the equally accomplished ‘So I lost You’ and ‘Write Me A Letter.’

It has been a task of real pleasure and interest for me to judge this unique competition. The next excitement for me will be to not only discover the names of the 25 final poets but to seek out their work – if it is in print already – or to watch out for it in future if it isn’t. I warmly congratulate everyone – in particular the overall winner, who gets most of the stardust. I believe, with the invaluable help of Colette Bryce’s shrewd eye, that we have a final group of 25 poems here which are memorable, moving and engaging. And remember, the only losers in poetry are those who do not read it.

CAROL ANN DUFFY’s most recent collection for adults is Rapture (Picador, 2005), and for children The Hat (Faber, 2008). She is currently Creative Director of The Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, which this year launches the UK’s biggest Poetry Prize. Carol Ann lives in Manchester with her daughter, Ella.

The 25 winning poems are published in the current issue of Mslexia. To read New Writing in full subscribe now.