Poetry, prizes and the roads not taken
If my early experiences of poetry taught me anything, it's that encouragement in the right places makes all the difference.
My first successes included a local library competition and a school prize when I was seven or eight. Then there was the Ainsdale Show, the village fête whose beribboned arena boasted not only a poetry prize, but such attractions as under-fives country dancing and a display of 'Christians With Dogs'. Scandal was perennial and infamous: the year my dad's shortbread narrowly missed out on second place in a field of two; the orchid sabotage of 1997.
These first sparks were fuel to my confidence. In 1999, I entered and won the competition which would later become the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, and everything changed. The enormity of this scheme – not only the prizes, but the clarity with which the organisers knew what we, as young writers, were desperate for – is something that dawned on me only in the years afterward.
The prize, for the chosen 15, was a week-long residential writing course with the Arvon Foundation. I was 11 when my parents (my mother herself a poet and thus, perhaps, understanding the need) sent me off to live for six days at Lumb Bank, the mythical house where Ted Hughes had lived – lived, wrote, sat in this very chair – in the deep green crook of the Calder Valley.
Each morning we met around the vast dining table, where our tutors offered up poems like gifts. After barely tasting our lunch, we roamed the woods for hours, devoured the library or, in one person's case, locked ourselves in the broom cupboard for three hours to write. We stayed awake until three in the morning, cooking eggs and bacon and talking about Hughes and Olds and Keats as if we'd been doing it all our lives. We had, in a way.
And that was it, really. When I got home, unkempt and exhilarated, I started writing in earnest and in full view. We emerged blinking from our broom cupboards. For me it's always been poetry, and I've spent the last 15 years trying to get to a point at which I can do it for a living. Not literally, obviously – I'd go awfully hungry (labouring by the guttering candle in a draughty garret etc) trying to live off poetry money – but to immerse myself in the world of it, to get up to the elbows in it.
Since that Lumb Bank week in 1999, I've seen first-hand what well-placed encouragement can do. I had poems taken by magazines who didn't judge my suitability on the number of books I'd published. A second Foyle win in 2005 took me on another Arvon week, where I made enduring friendships leading, in many cases, to future collaborations.
The focus, the determination and the craft of these new writers would put many older poets to shame. To not only know with glorious clarity what they are passionate about, but to carve a path at this early stage, is something remarkable.
Half of them go on to cut their teeth on a creative writing degree, benefiting early from the advice of their tutors and an ethos of rewriting and refining their technique. I myself read English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, and then an English masters, during which time I co-founded Cake magazine with Andrew McMillan. I gave workshops in local colleges, and read my work at every opportunity.
What I mean has become blurred, then; the boundaries are – happily – sliding away. Because when I say 'them', I include myself, and now that I have started work at Faber & Faber, I also refer to myself when I say 'publishers'.
Freelancing as a proofreader and copy-editor, and pushing for internships at the same organisations responsible for much of the support I had as a young poet, I've landed a job which offers me the opportunity to do the same for the next lot, while also publishing those I have looked up to for so many years.
The excitement I feel about being involved in the work of our most cherished poets is matched by the joy of discovering something new, and being in a position to offer encouragement (not least via the Faber New Poets scheme, which aims to identify talent and offer long-term support).
I want to stress that all this represents only one of 100 different routes into poetry. It's not an assault course, nor a series of tests and initiations leading to an end goal. No one in this odd, shifting world has arrived anywhere, and those who think they have should be wary. Rather, the choice to write is contingent on any number of tiny, endlessly adjusting decisions and interactions, encounters and discoveries.
Without the magazines who first let me see my work in print, my high school English teacher, my local library, the Ainsdale Show, my university, Faber, and the wonderful Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, poetry might have stayed in the broom cupboard. I wouldn't have learned to refine the craft, to enter into dialogue with others, and I wouldn't have discovered the poetry which shaped my own.
Every cog in the machine plays its part, every organisation and voice of support and influence is another affirmation to the young poet that they can do it, that their contribution is valid, and I'm glad to be involved in that.
Martha Sprackland is poetry editor of Cake magazine and assistant editor for poetry at Faber & Faber – the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2013 is open for entries. More details here
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