A CRITICAL ISSUE

Last year, the National Poetry competition’s judges awarded second prize to a poem which they claimed was ‘quietly moving’.  They felt the poem, ‘Eric’, ‘establishes a voice and a world …and tells a miniature tragedy with incredible economy’.  The reader learns ‘the world is careless and greedy and love itself is both fragile and surprising.’  Breaking News, then…

But ‘Eric’(available on The Poetry Society website) is not a poem.  It is a 210-word piece of prose flash fiction about a boy who keeps a rabbit and a guinea pig.  The animals make friends but the rabbit disappears, probably stolen to be eaten, and the guinea pig dies, possibly of a broken heart.  The language is authentic, in the sense that it sounds like a boy speaking, even though we know it isn’t.  Children between six and thirteen would respond to the story’s content but adolescents would find it ridiculous.  It has little to offer an unsentimental adult reader, but it could be used in schools to stimulate creative writing or a discussion about relationships.

‘Eric’ was selected ahead of 19,000 other poems entered into the competition by 8,841 poets in 110 countries. Given, from the little I know about judging writing competitions, that few entries are publishable, if the National Poetry judges had thrown away 99% of the entries, they would still have been left with 190.  Many of these would have been well written.  Getting down to a short list of 30 must have been difficult.  After that there wouldn’t have been anything to choose between any of them.  I think ‘Eric’ made the cut because, under extreme pressure, the judges lost the plot – and their pedestrian comments on the little story bear this out.

This is more disconcerting than the merger of criticism and marketing which dominates the cultural scene today.  The judges were being sincere.  They weren’t interested in selling the poem or promoting its author, since competition entries are anonymous.  They believed they had it right, even when they got it wrong.  This is not to say ‘Eric’ is a poor piece of writing but simply that it cannot have been better than all but one of the top 1% of entries, if only because it’s not a poem.  Just as elsewhere the mass-production of cultural product has resulted in restaurant-style reviewing (with only four- and five-star awards being acceptable) the sheer volume of entries in the National Poetry Competition made last year’s result somewhat meaningless.  And if major literary competitions are becoming meaningless, where are we today with critical appreciation?  What can we do?

Not much – other than remember that virtually no contemporary cultural products will survive beyond the year of their making, whatever gets said about them.  For those who have learned not just what we know we like but what is worth exploring, the situation is tolerable.  But for younger members of society looking to broaden their cultural horizons and understand more of the human experience, things are not looking good.