Is it possible to hold a literary award these days without igniting some sort of controversy? The latest storm in an inkwell surrounds the TS Eliot Prize, whose shortlist shrunk after two poets dropped out in protest at its
sponsor, the hedgefund Aurum.
John Kinsella and Alice Oswald have boycotted the prize, explaining ‘the business of Aurum does not sit with my personal politics and ethics.’ The poetry world is holding its breath to
see if any remaining shortlistees, which include heavyweights Carol Ann Duffy and John Burnside, will follow suit.
The news has been met with an inevitable online backlash. ‘Pagey’, a commenter on the Guardian website asked ‘How can someone who writes for profit be anti-capitalist?’,
while ‘jackie_potter’, a visitor to the Telegraph online pointed out: ‘Principles are not always good … The men who flew planes into the Twin Towers had strong
principles.’
To suggest Oswald and Kinsella’s actions are morally comparable to those of Mohamed Atta and co. may be going a bit far, but it is tempting to dismiss this boycott as hopelessly naïve, a
futile gesture from unworldly poets. You have to feel sorry for the award’s organisers, the Poetry Book Society, who were forced to look for other sponsors after having their Arts Council
funding withdrawn. Other literary prizes get sponsored by investment companies without any fuss: the Booker and the Sunday Times Short Story Prize to give a couple of examples.
You do wonder what T.S. Eliot, Lloyd’s bank’s most famous poet in residence, would have made of it all. Probably, as someone who championed morality and Christian virtue, he would have
congratulated Oswald and Kinsella. You don’t have to believe hedgefunds are the root of all evil to be heartened by those prepared to take a public stand against something many of us think is
immoral.
That said, it is difficult to see what this protest will achieve apart from making the boycotters feel warm inside. If Oswald and Kinsella really feel so strongly about hedgefunds, why don’t
they use their undoubted gifts to do something about them? Instead of rewriting the Iliad (which was more or less OK the first time round), why not pen an epic poem on the eurozone crisis? How
about a sonnet on graduate unemployment?
We’re living through interesting times. Poets should be writing about them. Instead, with a few exceptions, most are still obsessed with love, death and nature. But it’s easy to be
lyrical about weeds and wildflowers; much harder to write beautiful verse about the need for stronger financial regulation.
Anna Baddeley is editor of The Omnivore.
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