In the Magazine:

It Could Happen to You...
by Kathryn Gray

Welsh poet Kathryn Gray's first book of poetry, The Never-Never, was shortlisted last year for the world's most prestigious poetry award, The TS Eliot Prize (to be announced this coming Monday, January 17th). No one was more surprised than she. We asked Ms Gray to give us a sense of what it's been like to receive so much attention for not only a first book, but a first book of poetry.

In the generous essay below, Ms Gray provides a candid history of the artist as well as a few choice words about what awards mean to the struggling poet in a time when poetry is often the last thing on people's minds.

It begins twenty years ago. I am standing in a sports hall, arms crossed, round-shouldered, flat-chested, goose-flesh and all. I am the last girl left to be picked and even then I am taken in a gesture of magnanimity and goodwill. Less accepted than tolerated. These girls, I think - no I’m sure - are supposed to be my friends. But I’ll show them. I lumber around with my arms in the air. I jump up and down on the spot. I cry out for the chance, the ball is passed - away from me. I cry out, the ball arches over me. I cry out and the ball is thrown offside or anywhere - rather than to me. An hour of despair passes like this. Yes, it really is that simple. It all began with being not very good at netball. It all began with shame.

That’s when I first knew that the myths my parents had written for me - or wished for me - were just that. And if I was no sportswoman, then perhaps, after all, I wasn’t pretty or clever either (I wasn‘t). So, in fact, I was a beta girl. An also-ran. I spent the rest of that afternoon in History looking out of the window onto a playing field patchy with snow, hating my parents for those myths. In this way, at least, I had become a writer in that moment (because, even though there were great existential issues at stake, I still noticed the snow), though it would take me a further 15 years of failing at most things I turned my hand to to realise it.

Where the story really begins, though, is where it might just as well have ended. Twelve years later, I am studying towards a Masters at the University of York. I am told that I am analysing masculinity in the English Romance. I am agreeing with people a lot in seminars though I’m well aware they are talking crap and still, still, I do not shine. My supervisor tells me I require application. It slowly dawns on me that I do not feel passionate about my passion at all and that I find my supervisor repulsive. He has long, yellow nails, I note on our last meeting. The same impetus that sees insurance salesman kiss their wives goodbye of a morning only to disappear forever drove me. This was no breakdown. This was a break-up. But it was, finally, a cowardly and honourable one. I went AWOL, finished by thesis, left it in the in-tray of the secretary’s office and never looked back. Well, that’s not strictly true. I never looked back in the same way.

I would move to London. I would go into PR. I would earn good money. I would go blonde and have a boyfriend call Tim.

I spent four months in the sports hall of the grown-up and court-shoed, being interviewed for every gig in town. And it could have happened to me, I swear. But it happened to someone else. Eventually, I got a job as a clerk in the darkest back room of the civil service. I remember that there was lots of paper but never any space to actually put it somewhere. By the time the next summer had come, I had gone beyond my friends, the pub, the lash that blocks out Monday morning. Weekends were my room, a second adolescence. This was the preparation.

It was a friend who suggested that I enrol on a writing course. I am certain now that he thought I should write a novel. Yes, I’m sure he said that. But in the end, I picked up a brochure from the University of London on evening classes. A poetry class run by the late Michael Donaghy was what caught my eye. I knew nothing of Michael’s work - but I liked his name. It was an Irish name. Being Irish he was ethnically programmed to understand my predicament, I thought. Being Irish is almost like being Welsh, but it’s more fashionable and has a better soundtrack.

I enrolled. And my verse was wretched. My attitude to criticism was personal, foolish, wrong. But somehow, I became addicted to my Thursday nights. Here was a room so similar and yet unlike my workday life. Beta people making a virtue and authority out of their limitations. Someone wrote a sequence of poems about the Yangtze river. There was a bloke whose nose was always scabby with tissue fluff who wrote about Van Helsing. There was myself, working sub-Plath lyric. We were an allegory of hope flying in the face of all experience. We were shit.

But if you wait long enough, something will always happen. And eventually, it did. At work one day, at around 3pm, I wrote what I now know to be my first real ‘poem’.

From one came many more. A year later, I had secured an Eric Gregory Award. I was included in Anvil New Poets 3 and got some good notices. In 2004, my first collection, The Never-Never, was published by Seren. It arrived with no fanfare and even less hype. It could be found in a few bookshops in London. Only if you looked very, very carefully of course. Therein the predicament. Poetry was about being a beta person, being the last of the last chance disco outsiders; poetry, the poor cousin of the novel. But now a card-carrying poet, I longed to be alpha. My book only seemed to enhance my feeling of anonymity rather than redressing it. I spent some months in gloom. I bit my lip to blood as I checked my Amazon Sales Rank. July, though, proved an auspicious and fortunate month: I was buoyed by a nomination for the Felix Denis Prize for Best First Collection. Suddenly The Never-Never seemed to be in every bookshop. I had cracked it. I had been one of the lucky ones. So never say never.

These days, for young and/or new poets, prizes seem less like an honour, the cherry on the proverbial top of the cake, than a mandatory requirement - especially if you come from one of the independent publishing houses from across the UK - if you can expect to see your book comprehensively stocked in the retail outlets and acknowledged in the newspapers. In an age where poetry is read by about as many people who still watch TV in black and white (and often these two groups coincide), award nomination - with admittedly some exceptions - is often the only way in which people will actually bother to read - and hopefully buy - your work. And that’s if the whim takes them. In no small part, this situation is exacerbated by the status anxiety that surrounds poetry. Even those who take an active interest in contemporary poetry seem less than certain of its standards - and of their own taste. People are told poetry is elitist (because it actually bothers to exploit syntax and meaning in a line) by people who never read poetry anyway and people believe them for some murky reason. Readers often look to the establishment to point out what is of merit, what is less so. They look to awards to make the invisible visible - or at least appear so. But the Forward Foundation's Felix Dennis Prize, the major award for new poets in the UK, has only 5 possible nominations.

Normally, this wouldn’t prove such a problem for either judges or poets. But 2004 highlighted a major difficulty. This was the year in which the finest clutch of debuts for many years - particularly erudite collections by women such as Kona MacPhee, Sasha Dugdale or the ebullient Cheryl Follon - emerged. All deserved the nod, arguably. But there was not enough jelly and ice-cream to go round. The knock-on effect of the Next Gen promotion also detracted from the overall achievement of this new wave of poets. Readings and press attention had already been allotted elsewhere. Exposure proved elusive. What should have been one of the best years for new poets proved, for most of us, to be an annus horribilis of the highest order.

But it serves to highlight the chanciness of the vocation. And the great paradox. Poets must counter the establishment rather than represent it. And yet to be out there, to survive, they need the establishment. Success is a messy business. Certainly, at the heart of any poet’s critical success lies the internal, infernal problem. To be effortlessly self-reinventing, to challenge your art, wide approval can be deadening. Too much success and many poets seem condemned to be stuck in the groove of the taste that they have carved out or filled for critics and public, blandly serving up cold seconds of the original article. Or poets are tempted to fly in the face of their own convention, to assert their aesthetic, their ambition; the ensuing loss of an audience confuses and shakes the poet, with his fragile, monumental ego. The successful poet often can’t win. Only the truly great manage to transcend the issue. But too little success and our poet is damned also. As a marginal, neglected practitioner of a marginal, neglected art, they may be tempted to explain away their vocation as caprice and become a HR Consultant. Enough people will tell them to. But as history proves, posterity frequently belongs to the overlooked, the wrongly-shelved, the lambasted and the low-key. This thought is what keeps many of us going.

As my father has always said, it’s not polite to talk about money. But I will. Beaming-faced, beatific young poets will always say, long before the book deal and the strangulation of insecurity and paranoia, that they are not 'in it' for the money. This pragmatic and entirely reasonable attitude undergoes something of a sea-change, however, once the work is bound and out there in the wider world. Suddenly, those young idealists find themselves desperately pecking in the coop with the bigger birds - and they’re a lot bigger - while simultaneously teaching the art of the villanelle for what is a fraction of one week’s salary in the real world of watercoolers. Why, they deserve it as much as the next person! And if they do get it, they expect to be able to make a living out of it and soon realise they can’t. Days turn into weeks turn into years spent emailing around for commissions, applying for residencies, praying for the readings and not writing any poetry. Bitterness can threaten at every turn. And in a small world of slim-pickings and over-familiarity your greatest enemy quickly proves self-revealing: you, friend.

When I discovered that I was nominated for the T.S. Eliot Prize I was less delighted than astonished. Okay, okay, then I was delighted. For several years, I have tried by hook and by crook to subvert security and find some way to get into the awards ceremony and see the poets at play. Needless to say, my efforts in this direction have been consistently fruitless. Now, strangely, I find my presence - under order of the Poetry Book Society - not just tolerated but requested, no less. Knowing that such moments are few - and rightly so - adds a certain sweetness to the occasion and provides the added security that I might happily slip back into oblivion at any moment. My art is safe, but my ego is massaged. Prizes are not proof of excellence - nor should they necessarily be interpreted as such - but that my book was chosen by three poets - Douglas Dunn, Paul Farley and Carol Rumens - whose work has influenced and informed me since my first tentative steps towards becoming a poet feels personal, somehow. And while I won’t be the star-player of the evening, there’s no doubt that for a girl like me it’s nice to be passed the ball just this once.

(discuss)

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