Vote for TLS/Foyles poetry gold

How much should a poet be paid per line?

Or should it be per word - lest poets be encouraged by accountancy alone to write only short lines for the TLS?

I remember this argument when I first arrived at the paper five years ago.

Someone reminded me that the Emperor Marcus Aurelius had paid the poet Oppian at the rate of a gold piece per line.

Ah yes, I thought, but Oppian was writing about fish and fishermen and fishing.

I knew about Oppian. He was a favourite of an eccentric early tutor of mine.

Ancient fishing was not like it is now. It was a trade that could bring untold riches in the Roman world.

If poets today were to write in praise of hedge funds and derivative trading they might find equal sponsorship.

As far as I can understand none of the excellent finalists in this year's TLS poetry competition is about global finance.

So the winner will have to be satisfied with our £2000 prize, sponsored by our friends at Foyles.

And a boost to a poetic career path that may be lined with gold - or may not be.

Perhaps only goldfish.

The winner is our readers' choice.

So vote now before it is too late.

Lest anyone may be confused about Oppian, that is a very respectable state to be in.

I am not meaning the writer on ancient hunting.

You might reasonably think that two poets of the same name and roughly the same period, one with a fishing theme and the other choosing the hunt, would be the same person.

But they are not.

The gold-coin-a-line Oppian may have been either the hunter or the fisher - or neither, it is sometimes said.

He was the fisher when I was at school. And I have tended - dutifully if not scholastically - to stick with that.

The fisher Oppian gave great accounts of the home life of hermit crabs and the divine cleverness of dolphins.

He gave a mysterious account - a great lure, I should have thought, to modernist critics, of a fish, the Echineis, which can hold back a ship with its mouth in the highest winds.

The fisher Oppian was translated by the tragic eighteenth century Balliol man, William Diaper.

And Diaper has been adopted in recent times by anthologists, natural historians and poets, most of all by the late Geoffrey Grigson who was all three of those and whose more famous wife Jane could cook up a gold-standard sea bass too.

This is the point in this TLS blog when I might normally refer to some new book that has landed on our shelves.

A book, perhaps, that explained out how little we learn from an ancient poem, like Oppian's Halieutica, being adddressed to an Emperor called Antoninus.

Is it Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (probably, yes) or Commodus, Caracalla or some other psychopath who bore the same name?

But there is no such book on the TLS table right now.

I just want as many as possible to award gold stars in our poetry competition.

I can't write about the short-listed competitors  - lest that be seen as an attempt to sway the outcome.

Just read them now for yourselves and vote.

Comments

[Woefully Belated]

Dear Paul Groves:

ooRoo!

I congratulate you on snagging first place in the TLS/Foyles Poetry Competition (in which I voted for you). Your poem, "The Mauve Tam-O'-Shanter," deserves the honour. The formal considerations with which you clearly wrestled (to the groundswell of beauty surrounding their final shape and meaning) impressed yours truly greatly. The scansion, breathing life and heartbreaking intimacy, seamlessly hiding in the open — that's what did it for me. Well, partially. Also outstanding? The deceptive artlessness (which is so beautifully controlled, so perfectly righteously executed, nothing jars nor jingles loosely in the poem's aesthetic pockets). Radical and wild enjambments. Rarely, very rarely, does a poet work the line so brashly, so brazenly, so utterly exquisitely refinedly raw. What a stroke of art you've created, the kind what knocks yours truly for a loop-de-loup. Its structural unity, the metrical and lexical elements, the musical / anti-musical cadences, moving from fugue state to frozen broken shatterment to discover a way to polyphonically celebrate love, loss, and language's inexpressibly gorgeous otherness, gracefully accomplishing what all great poems ought to do, that is, leaving a reader breathless with both admiration and jouissance — the thing tore my head to shreds, blessedly allowing for that brief express transport away from the thinking self, a luminous moment; so, again: Thank you, Mr. Groves.

Good on ya, Mate.

BUT.

David Jones still rules :).

Undeniably, Woefully Belated

[Judith Fitzgerald]

Sir Peter refers to William Diaper, a protegé of Jonathan Swift who did, indeedly, lead a tragic life (dying at 29). I wondered how his name affected his standing in that world; so, checked the Online Etymological Dictionary to see if our modern usage was in circulation then:

"c.1330, from O.Fr. diapre 'ornamental cloth,' from M.L. diasprum, from Medieval Gk. diaspros, from dia- 'entirely, very' + aspros 'white.' Aspros originally meant 'rough,' and was applied to the raised parts of coins (among other things), and thus was used in Byzantine Gk. to mean 'silver coin,' from which the bright, shiny qualities made it an adj. for 'whiteness.' Modern sense of 'underpants for babies' is continuous since 1837, but such usage has been traced back to 1596."

Hrmm. Would Diaper have fared better if Oppian had bestowed silver coins instead of gold ones?

[Judith Fitzgerald]

Done-and-a-half. There's much I want to say about the finalists; but, shall zip a lip/tip. Didn't enter since have no A4 paper; but, did spend a week reading the entries when they were first posted.

Larkin's contribution to poetry is inestimable; and, I wonder if poets are, indeed, meant to live on the avails of poetrification. ISTM an oxymoron (which does not mean I consider same either valid or valuable, in this context). I'd follow anyone to the ends of the earth who gave me a gold coin for every line I've inked. I wonder why I was born in the wrong age, sometimes; a patron would be such a luxury! Know any?

Thought not.

BTW, you are right, Candadai; but, what if the poet is not British?

[Candadai Tirumalai]

The late Philip Larkin used to say that if he had tried to live by his poetry he would have been a heap of whitened bones long ago. He became a librarian. John Betjeman, whose "Collected Poems" were a best-seller, could live by his poetry in later years but he still needed the boost provided by television programmes and guide books on British architecture.
Regardless of what you pay, I am sure the TLS can contribute to the discovery of the next major talent in British poetry. It would be nice to think that someone could still live entirely for poetry and by it.