There is something about major events happening close by. It excites in a passive-itchy sort of way. One doesn’t like to be a spectator, not at all. Like when a bomb goes off in earshot and you aren’t hurt, aren’t even showered with glass but somehow it’s personal and you want to talk about it. Or like the people down the road from a grizzly murder – yes, I met him once, well, I saw him come out of the house. So it is with Hadfield’s winning the T.S. Elliot. Not that Shetland is just up the road from us, though figuratively it rather is. Not that I’ve ever met her. But somehow the bomb has gone off and I could about hear the rumble and I’m left gasping with that sensation that I really must do something. Maybe also because she is so young and doesn’t it mean that genius is somehow more within our grasp than we had realised? Of course the hard fact is that there is something to be done. One can turn again to the empty or the note-filled page and try again to be a better writer. And that is all one can do.
Though as a bonus, while following the media coverage, I did manage to extract one brillliant form of words that fits a verbal hole I have been trying to fill for months. In the Guardian, Tobias Hill, one of this year’s judges, shows us some of the notes he made when reading Nigh-No-Place. He describes the work as ’a collection, not an accumulation’. That was exactly the simple phrase I have wanted to say to some of the poets who submitted for publication – instead of mumbling away about connectivity and theme and even, in my wilder folly, ‘longer wavelength rhythms’. I’ll learn.
David
