Poetry Bookshop Online

Poetry: The real Big Conversation

All over the country people write poetry. Walk down the average street and you might not notice this. A first-time writer might think he or she is alone. But poetry is a culture, a network of conversations - it has to be, to thrive. (Those archetypal writers in their garrets, in that fond Romantic image, they were insatiable readers, having daily conversations with the absent and the dead.)

Somewhere in the mists of the last era, Tony Blair launched ‘The Big Conversation'. I forget quite what that phrase was meant to mean, but the real big conversation is poetry, and it has been going on probably as long as there's been human speech.

So how do you discover what you're part of? Some writers join groups - both reading groups and writing ones... and good writing groups tend to be both. All real writers read. Come to that, all real poetry readers are part of the creative process, because that's what poetry invites: not just applauding a poem but getting inside it, inhabiting it, until the sounds and thoughts and images are happening inside you. The poetry culture needs us all. That's why it needs its opening doors, such as that of the Poetry Book Society, to help us find each other, so the conversation can take place. Other doors are those small magazines that are the seedbed and the fertile undergrowth of poetry, and the gallant independent publishers, and (increasingly) websites and blogs that are establishing word-of-mouth reputations to compare with inky print.

Why am I saying this? I was asked to write about the experience of winning the T S Eliot Prize for 2009 with my book The Water Table - and then, a few months later, winning the Wales Book of the Year award with my collaboration with photographer Simon Denison in I Spy Pinhole Eye. To complete a serendipitous hat-trick, my children's poetry collection Off Road To Everywhere was selected as a Children's Poetry Bookshelf choice - not a big-money prize but just as gratifying, an affirmation of a vision of rich substantial poetry to be shared by people of all ages. Each of these is a tribute to a publisher as well - to Salt for committing to this vision of children's poetry, to Bloodaxe for having faith in my work in the long haul, and to Cinnamon for taking a chance on a gloriously eccentric project.

For most poets, moments like these are the only ones where you feel yourself break into something like the public eye. From the other side, it would be easy for readers new to poetry to think that big prizes are the summing up of all we need to know about the world of poetry. Not so.

What a prize like this says is that several good readers, fine writers themselves, have given your book their best attention... and found that it blossomed for them into an outstandingly rich experience. That's a great conversation in itself... and don't forget that the other books on the shortlist will have been part of it, too. What the prize does is open a door.

As a writer who's been publishing for thirty years, I know that since these two awards a lot of people who had maybe had a vague fix on me as being an able and honourable long-haul writer and teacher of writing, somewhere in the corner of their vision, suddenly turned and really looked. What they found then was not just skilfully made; it mattered. And maybe that's what every poem craves: to be read as if it really mattered, by readers coming at it with imaginative boldness, ready to be moved, to get inside it, to be asked to think.

For the writer, of course, that's a sobering thought - and so it should be. If we're writing not just to grab the attention, or to bring a smile in passing, but... to be read as well as that, then we'd better live up to it. Get back to work!

So a prize is a reminder to keep opening those doors. No two prize shortlists, thankfully, are the same, so we know that different readers find the rich exchanges in different places... and there are always interesting, even vital, books that will get missed. Never let your attention be limited by prizes or by rave reviews... nor, come to that, by dismissive, rubbishing reviews that tell you don't read this. Look for reviews, blog writing and word of mouth recommendations that give you a glimpse of someone finding real food for thought and feeling in a poem or a pamphlet or a book. Go there. Join in. And so the conversation grows.


Apart from the books he mentions, Philip Gross is the author of some 15 books of poetry, including The Wasting Game, shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize in 1998, and The All-Nite Café,which won the Signal Award. He has published ten teenage novels - most recently The Storm Garden - and is Professor of Creative Writing at Glamorgan University, where he leads the M Phil in Writing programme.