Ali Smith on the 2009 Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets

Pamphlet : from the Anglo-Latin panfletus, possibly sourced in the Latin erotic poem Pamphilus, and related to the Greek Pamphilos, meaning beloved of all.  Chambers says: “A small book stitched but not bound; a separately published treatise, usually controversial, on some subject of the day; a small booklet of information.”  
 
Poem: from the Greek poiema, from poieen, to make.  Chambers says” “a composition in verse; a composition of high beauty of thought or language and artistic form, typically but not necessarily in verse; anything supremely harmonious and satisfying.
 
What’s a poetry pamphlet?  I found out one day in spring this year, when the postman brought a large box to the door, then went back to his van to get the other bigger box, and then when I exclaimed on the heaviness of the boxes and put them both down behind me and said thank you and went to shut the door, he said, hang on a minute, then handed me a poster tube too.  
 
I opened everything up and spread it out all over the floor, shiny, matt, small, large, multiple, varied, eye-catching, black, white, colours, pictures, typeface after typeface.  My house was paved with pamphlets.  They took up the whole front room and even went some way up the stairs.
 
My neighbour from along the road was passing the front door and came in.  Look at this one, she said, picking out a beautiful artwork on handmade paper, which unfolded itself in her hands like a rich white concertina.  And look, look at this one, she said, stone-stepping from pamphlet to pamphlet to bend and pick out, from all the bound and stitched and big and small and perfect and beautiful, a rough sheaf of dog-eared A4 photocopied pages stapled at a corner at the top, with a not-very-good photocopy of a picture on the front; oh, this one looks very interesting too, she said.  And she was right.  
 
A poetry pamphlet has, according to the rules of the Michael Marks Awards, no more than 36 pages.  That’s what each of the entries for the Award shares in common.  Other than that, in their variation, their originality, their shapeshift, their possibility of concentrated sequence and their possibility of discrete singularness, their independence, their anything-goes bravado and their equally courageous attention to detail, they’re proof that the form is far and away one of the most vibrant and inventive of the contemporary literary forms – a place where spontaneity, imagination and design come together to produce something fresh, something intriguingly both throwaway and lasting.
 
It is a form which thrives on the energy of and demonstrates the connective force between the age-old notions of small-scale, contemporary, controversial, ready-made, composed, satisfying, harmonious, and, let’s not forget or sideline, erotic and beloved, because it is a lovely and exciting form, the poetry pamphlet form.  It is a book lover’s form.  In a way the poetry pamphlet, in its contemporary efflorescence, is a proof that the book form will never end.  The next person who tells me the book is a dying form and cites this most digital of ages etc, gets redirected straight to the imaginative poetic use of the form and the publishing imagination that constitutes just this one year’s worth of Michael Marks entries.  It is a most modern, contemporary form, a slight-looking, great-weight-bearing small form, and one that meets a word like recession with a word more like cornucopic.  
 
So imagine Richard Price, Jo Shapcott and I, who were this year’s judges, sitting down to the cornucopia, over 150 entries for the Poetry Award and ten entries for the Publishers’ Award, and our task of shortlisting, then choosing winners from the exceedingly strong shortlists we finally agreed on.  
 
I’m neither overstating the case nor just being polite at an Awards Ceremony when I say, for all of us, that these Awards were a total pleasure to judge.  So much good poetry, so stimulating in variation, a revelation of energy in the range of the individual poetic alive up and down the whole country and, at a time when the large publishing houses are fretting, like everybody else, a similar revelation of the ingenuity and editorial courage of so many independent small publishers.
 
It was hard to go from longlist to shortlist, and we all mourned lost favourites.
 
Four publishers made it to this year’s Publishers’ Award shortlist, three of them for their second time, having been shortlisted last year for the inaugural Awards.  
 
Helena Nelson’s Happenstance, based in Glenrothes, in Scotland, helps establish its newer poets by publishing them alongside already-known poets.  It is a thriving press, elegant in form and accessible in content; a publisher whose ethos is, to quote Helena Nelson, “the best words in the best order, presented simply and beautifully.”  Its sister-publication, the magazine Sphinx, adds an extra audience-widening dimension to this very energetic and eye-catchingly clean-lined publisher.
 
Peter Hughes’s Oystercatcher, based in Norfolk, won the Publishers’ Award last year, and is a very exciting entrant, whose house-style is insistently democratic and instantly recognisable and whose editorial is rewardingly receptive to new and unsolicited work.  Oystercatcher is a wonder, adventurous and prolific.
 
Templar, based in Derbyshire, was also shortlisted last year.  Its publications are simply beautiful, beautifully made, printed on lithographic presses, seductive to the hand and the eye.  Its superb list of authors plus its ‘pamphlet to first collection’ publishing strategy, is a demonstration of the health and richness of the pamphlet form.
 
Finally, Veer, based at Birkbeck College in London, are new to the shortlist this year and they’re there because they make a vibrant virtue of all newness; their pamphlet publishing label, Burner Veer, made up a great percentage of the sheer ingenuity stakes in the entries this year, coming in all shapes and sizes, embracing and thriving on experiment right across the board when it comes to form and content; a publisher that’s wide-open minded, both editorially and formally.  
 
Happenstance, Oystercatcher, Templar and Veer. Just casting a quick eye over the Publishers’ Award shortlist, just the names of the publishers, conjures out of nowhere, with an aptness that accompanies this form’s versatility: chance, wings, tradition, and sudden risky exciting changes of direction.
 
I’ll announce the winner of this award at the end of this speech.
 
The Poetry Award shortlist is a revelation in itself of the strength and elasticity of the pamphlet form. Before we went into our final judging meeting we discussed the very fine feeling that any one of the works on this shortlist would make a good winner. It proved very hard indeed to choose one.  This choice, in the end, came down to a knife-edge decision.
 
In this shortlist, we have a pamphlet where the limepit of history is revealed inherent in the voice of your everyday email; and one where a stately ship, and everything stately and tragic and historic its loss means, metamorphoses into a condemned corner caff; and one where the real meaning lurking in words like animal and print is released in the street; and one where a poem and a pamphlet can act as a literal bridge between forms; and one where explosions of possibility meet notions of aubergine and potato; and one where a visionary realignment of poetic and philosophical weight takes place in a soaring and musical and original redressing of all our historical expectations.  
 
Tom Chivers’s The Terrors (Nine Arches Press), is a prose-poetry fusion of eighteenth-century London and online modernity. Questioning notions of freedom and imprisonment, it fuses the inmates of Newgate Prison with the inmates of our own online chatrooms; fuses history and the contemporary, collapsing time into a poetic that’s a force in itself, one of rage and ranginess.  It makes for a new kind of street ballad. “Immortality,” it declares, “is only a pamphlet away.”  It reinvests the dead with life while suggesting comparative contemporary deadliness; it concocts a texture complex in voice, grandiose, dandified, seedy-rich, with which it re-sees crime, poverty, fakery, over the centuries, and lends its newly contextualised understanding to the cultures of the here and the gone, the invisible history we’re living right now.
 
David Hart’s – to grace it with its full title –  The Titanic Café Closes Its Doors and Hits The Rocks: Or : Knife, Fork and Bulldozer Ultra Modern Retail Outlet Complex Development Scenario With Flowers – also published by Nine Arches Press – does exactly what it says on the tin, which is quite a feat.  It is a free verse elegy/eulogy of communal voice, history, comedy, loss, abandonment and exquisite melancholy.  It is savvy, and expert when it comes to rhetorical and imagistic juxtaposition.  With gentleness, with precise bathos, in a mourning of the disappearance of an old café, a piece of so-called waste-ground, it examines the loss of a way of living, the resistance in nature, and the rhetorics which lead to the loss. It wittily, beautifully maps our loss. It is a piece of necessary salvage.
 
Selima Hill’s Advice on Wearing Animal Prints (Flarestack Poets) is formed of a deeply wild, deeply disciplined poetic. It is hard to summarise.  It refuses soundbite, and it has real bite. It is close to miraculous, a bit like walking across water, but on ice that might give way at any moment, a work of surface which holds your weight, just, over deep danger, and it is a work of depth that knows the frozen fragility, the risk, of all surface things.  In a visionary and surreal sequence which builds seeming fragments into an A to Z of everyday human savagery, and in stanzas held so lightly they might simply blow away it itemises a casual descent into hell; a child-adult existence invested with terrible pressure and loneliness; a life whose legacy is the moving realisation, the making visible, of what is uncaring and what goes unseen.  It is an unforgettable work.  
 
Devorgilla’s Bridge, by Hugh McMillan, a single airy span of a poem, designed by Hugh Bryden and published by the gloriously inventive Roncadora Press, is memorable too, but for quite other reasons.  The perfect match of form and content, this single sweep of free verse is a single bridging construction, a delight to handle, to read, to open, to cross, to close and to open again.  It is proof, again, of the border-crossing nature, the art, the pleasure, the urge for joy and the joy of inventiveness deep in the genetics of the pamphlet form.
 
And if we’re talking pleasure, we’re definitely talking The Reluctant Vegetarian, by Richard Moorhead, published by Oystercatcher Press.  All three of us loved the exact fertility, the overspilling exactness, of this pamphlet, and how its endless inventive connectivity translates into a kind of nourishment in itself; the way its new definitions of old forms, old vegetables and fruits, opens the synaptic connections; the way it makes a sensuousness of metonymy; the way something about it is both medieval and completely modern.  In this pamphlet, every thought is an energising one on the way to yet another energised thought, and by these poems every sense we have is addressed and re-enlivened.  It is a piece of life, and then more life, and then more.  
 
Finally, the astonishing, powerful remix of history and language and the possibilities of both, in Ballast: a Remix, by Nii Ayikwe Parkes, published by the wonderful tall-lighthouse press.  What if slave ships had been balloons? It’s a collision of history, an ingenious reworking of the elements of dominant narrative, and a breathtaking take on the making of meaning and the loss of life.  In a ten poem set, each with twelve 2-line stanzas, and a beautifully calibrated preface which considers definition and redefinition, this pamphlet’s sequence is full of uplift, wit, anger and calm, concepts which pass from poem to poem and become a kind of music, a kind of remade memory, an interlinking of motifs which swells into something as strong and airy and everywhere as a sea or a sky.  Parkes rewrites the slave trade, to give weight to those so obscenely and lightly lost to history.  He gives weight to the voices of the unheard.  This pamphlet makes something else and something new of history’s givens. In this way it is properly visionary.
 
And now at last to the awards themselves.
 
When it came to the Poetry Award Jo Shapcott and Richard Price and I argued hard.  
 
Finally, and after much discussion, we agreed on the great resonance of a pamphlet whose strength is deceptively subtle, a courageous, startling, mysterious and unforgettable work, a piece of disciplined wildness which grows in power and suggestion with each re-read.   
 
The winner of this year’s Michael Marks Poetry Award is Advice on Wearing Animal Prints, by Selima Hill.
 
And now the Publishers’ Award.  
 
This year’s winner of the Michael Marks Publishers’ Award, outstanding in the elegance, thoughtfulness and clarity of their design and the infectious interaction, open-mindedness and energy of their publishing ethos, is Happenstance Press.
 
 Ali’s Smith’s speech as Chair of the Judges of the 2009 Michael Marks Awards was delivered at the Readings and Awards Ceremony at the British Library on 16 June 2009.