The threesome ones

Above, a completely gorgeous short poetry book, At Thurgarton Church (a single poem in 29 five-line stanzas) by George Barker, with drawings by Barker too. Trigram Press, 1969. I bought it in the summer of 1970, when I was working on a farm in north Norfolk, planting potatoes in a field that surrounded the church at Thurgarton, so at least one of the names on the cover I recognised. I asked the farmer if he knew of a poet living in the area, and found my way to Bintry House, where Barker had got the lawnmower out: our first lines were shouted above its noise, while Barker made up his mind whether I was worth switching the thing off for. Barker was the first ‘real poet’ I met. He made, to put it mildly, an impression. A year or so later, on a weekend when I went back to see him, there was an evening involving wine, fire, argument erupting into violence, flight and return.

Other poetry books I bought around that time, or slightly earlier: crucially, Michael Roberts’s The Faber Book of Modern Verse, either 2nd edition (1951) or 3rd (1965); which I stumbled through, teaching myself how to read (there was nothing of this sort at school) and usually coming up short, but there must have been something in there I was curious about; the Penguin Modern Poets, the threesome ones, and some Penguin Modern European poets; Roy Fisher’s Collected Poems, the Fulcrum edition with the street-party photo on the front. I wasn’t a very social person at the time; I had anorexia in my teens. I can’t now recall whether I was writing poems myself (I may have been starting; I published a first and forgettable collection in 1977). It, a lot of it, was the geeky equivalent of behind-the-bicycle-sheds.

Cut to today, when the TSE Prize shortlist is announced. And last year’s list, and the list before: people on there whose work has been part of my life, but in most cases I’m not going to get round to reading their new books, I know this, because of this feeling I have that I’ve already read them and there is so much new work that interests me coming through and time is short and anyway I’m more interested these days in fiction. Unfair, yes. I think I’d like to tease this out in something longer. People coming through harder and faster; the shortening of writers’ career spans, unless they’re among the blessed; the vanishing of the ‘midlist’; the mediation (mediafication, mediafiction?) of poetry in the marketplace, tending to favour the safe bet, the serious white males. (I’m one of those myself: it’s an observation, not a complaint.) I thought the Forward Prizes this year represented a shift, a kind of catching-up (a difference from what prizes often do: stick with what you know, leave it to the next year), and still think this, there’s been a shift, and the TSE list is, well, dull; it is hampered by the logistics of 40 per cent on the list being automatic, as PBS seasonal choices chosen by an old guard. (Might they be freed up by having another category, a lifetime-achievement thing? Even, given the acceleration, a decade-achievement thing?) In my sixties, I’m now old guard myself. It’s not a bad place to be: too late to worry about making a career of any kind. Meanwhile, I trust there’s still space for people working on farms and liking books.