Words of a poetry competition Judge

You agree to judge a competition not because you want to sit in judgment, or ‘discover’ an unknown talent, but to find out what’s going, what the prevailing fashions are. What you receive is a sort of windfall tax on contemporary poetry.

But you have to choose winners. Soon enough a snow of rejects covers the floor. Then you ask – what is it I’m looking for? If I don’t know, how will I know when I find it? But you do know. What you look for, feel for – what you end up longing for – is a piece of work with an inner urgency. I don’t mean loud or fast. I mean any sense that the poem required to be written, and may have surprised its author. Perhaps ‘urgency’ is not the word. Maybe ‘necessity’ is a better. Or ‘self-willed’. A poem which arose out of necessity. What I sensed was many entries had been built from ‘ideas for poems’ and very probably in the context of a workshop or writers’ group. This gave them a stilted feel. Also, I sensed many had been written for the competition – which never works. Write the poem that wants to be written, then wait for a competition to happen along.

Where do poems come from, if not from ideas? – yes, that’s the question. From scraps of wild energy, from images that snag in the mind, from odd phrases that cohere with those images, from – as I say – some agenda of their own. I suspect an ‘idea’ is already too set in its ways. You want a pre-idea.

Having got the nagging feeling, the energy, the image, the scraps of words, what then? Then, of course, comes the craft; the growing, shaping and forming. The most common fault among the entries was the writer’s failure to hear a line. When I’m asked what is the difference between poetry and prose, I reply the status of the line. Lines that were both controlled and breathed, that listened to language, that revealed and slowed... or raced and paced – these were hard to find.

The three prize winning poems were those that stuck most in my mind, and brought me a species of joy. Perhaps I mean relief. All are richly imagined, unexpected, and as it happens, constructed in three different ways, which just proves that ANY structure is better than none. ‘Sisters in a Wood’ is a quiet, melancholy and tender sonnet, nicely judged, quite without pyrotechnics. ‘Hello, I’m visiting the area…’ dreams a believable, complete, if slightly tilted world with long loping rhythmic lines, which by rights ought to fall apart, but don’t.

‘The Canal Road’ is a poem where, in rhyme, and with gloriously old-fashioned poetic inversions, we are addressed by a worn-out sandal. I loved it the moment I read it. I don’t know what ‘murram’ is and don’t know if the poet is from the Subcontinent, but I kept returning to the poem, grateful to be taken far beyond myself.


Kathleen Jamie has published several acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Queen of Sheba and Jizzen. Her most recent, The Tree House
(Picador), won the Forward Prize for best collection in 2004. She has received numerous other honours, including the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Prize. As well as poetry, Kathleen writes for radio, especially travel scripts, and has published a travel book Among Muslims. She lives in Fife and teaches at St Andrews.