The Ambition Bird: Fiona Larkin and The Poetry Society

Op-Ed

Varo's artwork "Creación de las aves (Creation of the Birds)," from 1957.

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“I must get a new bird
and a new immortality box.
There is folly enough inside this one.”
—The Ambition Bird, Anne Sexton

The results for the National Poetry Competition recently dropped, and once again, the winning and placing poems are (to me) bland and uninspired. Fiona Larkin’s winning poem, Absence has a grammar, reads like a narration of her day with a molecule of poetic turn thrown in. From thousands of entries, this is what was picked? The only minorly ambitious entry on the longlist is Kit Buchan’s Hallowe’en Ghazal.

While I didn’t place for the fourth year, this isn’t about me. I can recognise great work, even if it means I am forgotten and overlooked. But The Poetry Society tends to favour the same kind of stilted pieces—no matter who is on the judging panel. An article I read some months ago touches on this very matter:

“For a journal with a national reputation, the quality of poetry is underwhelming. If we expand the scope of this review to include the journals international competition—The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and a host of other prestigious publications—the Poetry Review appears provincial.”

However, it’s not just The Poetry Society who promote this kind of poetry—it’s the majority. If poets like T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Brooks, and Frost were around today, their brilliantly ambitious work wouldn’t get a look in. The poems that do the best today are simplistic and dry. Their vocabulary is painfully limited (I highly doubt a thesaurus is the first port of call).

I don’t read many contemporary poets for these very reasons. I’d love to find more traditional work (and I’m sure it’s out there), but it’s not the poetry being called “innovative”—which it actually isn’t. I am not alone in my sentiments, for I have seen similar complaints echoed in other circles. It has come to a point that I specifically seek out the poets who don’t win competitions because they are far more likely to produce ambitious verse than whatever piece actually won.

Year after year, the same banal verse is lauded and praised; much akin to a plumber making a bog-standard toilet as opposed to one with a silent seat. Yes, they both work, but the latter is far more ornate. Just as an example, I shall include one of my own poems.

We Blue Stars
After ‘Cinderella’ by Valentine Cameron Prinsep

Cinderella under the stairs—
Eating your handful of stars,
From where do you hide your bouncing blue;

Your sky rejecting the course?
We blue stars are affixed,
Anointed by cosmic rain.

There is absence in the midnight hour—
A tower with flitting festoons.
Womb-blue, you have found fault with domesticity,

Have accrued a loaf of embitterment;
As finite as milk-cap.
But a dream is an electrocution.

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This poem is a complete rewrite of a previous poem, as detailed in an older article I posted. With this poem, I wanted to go through every possible synonym to find the right words. Do you see the subtle rhymes? Do you hear the assonance? The alliteration?

The first stanza of Fiona Larkin’s winning poem is:

“I am learning to use the abessive
case as if I were Finnish,
to indicate that what I miss
is so much a part of me
that its loss is structural.”

This is an essay forced to where a poem’s clothes. If this had been a prose narrative about the poet’s son leaving (as she has stated the poem is about), it could have been excellent! But as a poem, it doesn’t fit. It’s supposed to illustrate a mother’s grief at her baby flying the nest, but I don’t feel any emotion! Yet this was picked out of thousands of entries for a grand prize of £5,000?

Last year’s winner saw similar criticism from me:

“I don’t see any semblance of lyricism whatsoever, and while I can reluctantly agree that it provokes some thought on account of subject matter, I cannot abide by its supposed extraordinary nature.”

The state of poetry today is quite depressing. While the bland poems are heralded, the truly ambitious work that evokes past greats is passed over. Something has got to give with the National Poetry Competition. I am tired of reading the same monotony, knowing how it has become the standard for verse. I have often wondered why celebrity poets no longer exist, and maybe the answer is that we just haven’t found a poet who deserves it.

Beyond the competition itself, the current editor of The Poetry Review, Wayne Holloway-Smith, rarely includes anything complex. In the most recent edition, Smith includes Joe Dunthorne’s poem, I am forty; a short, pithy poem that you would find inside a birthday card:

“but can play forty-five
in the unforgiving light
of the wi-fi router.”

Overall, I don’t have any solutions, other than to ask The Poetry Society to branch out of their box. Their insular mode is not working, and quite frankly, it’s killing poetry. While I am not much of a fan of many contemporary novels, there is at least a great sense of ambition in the work coming out of it. Please, please, please, gift me the whole boulangerie, for I am sick of oatmeal.

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