Fifty Years of the Eric Gregory Awards
This year sees the 50th Anniversary of the Gregory Awards, a legacy of publisher and art benefactor Dr Eric Gregory who died in 1959. The Awards, overseen by the Society of Authors, aim to encourage and benefit a handful of British poets under thirty every year and past winners include Adrian Mitchell, Penelope Shuttle, Don Patterson and Lavinia Greenlaw. More recent winners are Tom Warner, Jen Hadfield and Helen Mort. The full list is a very impressive chart of British poetry, though some of the names are much better known than others.
When I won mine in 1999, (I was 29 and just limboed under the age limit) the Awards Ceremony was at the wonderful Kensington Roof Gardens, complete with flamingos and fountains and copious wine. It felt pretty special to be at a huge party with lots of famous authors – which were like mythical creatures to me. My fellow Gregories were Matthew Hollis, Owen Sheers, Dan Wyke, Andrew Pidoux and Ross Cogan, and there were a huge sense of camaraderie…before I had to get the early (but latest!) train back to Norwich whereupon I disappeared back into the Norfolk countryside never to be seen again until my first book appeared three years later. These days, Roddy Lumsden (a 1991 winner) is making more of a splash for the poetry debutants – organising readings for them and so on. He has also taken it upon himself – with no external funding – to put on 50th Anniversary celebrations.
Last week, I went along to the Betsey Trootwood in Farringdon, to read with a group of other Gregory winners from the past 12 years.* Roddy asked us all to write a poem themed around the year we won. Other readers included Clare Pollard, Sasha Dugdale and Sam Riviere, and it was a pleasure to read in such talented company. My first instinct for a 1999 poem, was to try to mash in some of Prince’s Party Like it’s 1999 lyrics, starting “I was dreaming when I wrote this, forgive me if it goes astray.” But intertexuality just isn’t me, so I just flailed around for a while, till I came up with the mildly apocalyptic poem below. It ain’t sassy like Prince, but then most of the young people in the room (I was the most senior Gregory) probably wouldn’t have got it anyhow. (Increasingly I find this with cultural references and young people. Sigh) I had to leave before the end of the readings to catch the early train back to Norwich. Plus ça change.
1999
These are the days before
the days of counting backwards;
planes wait to fall from the sky
as birds eye them suspiciously,
measuring the year
in leaves and twilight hours.
Deep in the heart of every computer
a disease waits for the stroke of midnight
for white mice to turn their wheels
widdershins, and unborn us
without so much as a twitch
of a whisker.
So fireworks will draw hieroglyphs
in the sky, so a dog will bark
from its chained-up place in a yard.
And night-roosting birds
will cast out like swimmers
in a broad open sea.
*There will be a larger Gregory Awards Celebration at the South Bank in the New Year.
