{"id":892,"date":"2010-11-22T15:58:59","date_gmt":"2010-11-22T15:58:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=892"},"modified":"2012-03-31T12:59:04","modified_gmt":"2012-03-31T12:59:04","slug":"helen-ivory-on-the-eric-gregory-awards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/helen-ivory-on-the-eric-gregory-awards\/","title":{"rendered":"Helen Ivory on the Eric Gregory Awards"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fifty Years of the Eric Gregory Awards<\/span>

This year sees the 50th Anniversary of the Gregory Awards, a legacy of publisher and art benefactor Dr Eric Gregory<\/a> who died in 1959.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 More recent winners are Tom Warner, Jen Hadfield and Helen Mort.\u00a0 The full list<\/a> is a very impressive chart of British poetry, though some of the names are much better known than others.<\/span>

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.\u00a0 It felt pretty special to be at a huge party with lots of famous authors \u2013 which were like mythical creatures to me.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 These days, Roddy Lumsden (a 1991 winner) is making more of a splash for the poetry debutants \u2013 organising readings for them and so on.\u00a0 He has also taken it upon himself \u2013 with no external funding \u2013 to put on 50th Anniversary celebrations. \u00a0<\/span>

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.*\u00a0 Roddy asked us all to write a poem themed around the year we won.\u00a0 Other readers included Clare Pollard, Sasha Dugdale and Sam Riviere, and it was a pleasure to read in such talented company.\u00a0\u00a0 My first instinct for a 1999 poem, was to try to mash in some of Prince\u2019s Party Like it\u2019s 1999<\/span> lyrics, starting \u201cI was dreaming when I wrote this, forgive me if it goes astray.\u201d\u00a0 But intertexuality just isn\u2019t me, so I just flailed around for a while, till I came up with the mildly apocalyptic poem below.\u00a0 It ain\u2019t sassy like Prince, but then most of the young people in the room (I was the most senior Gregory) probably wouldn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 <\/span>Plus \u00e7a change<\/span>.<\/span>


1999\u2028\u2028<\/span>

These are the days before\u2028<\/span>
the days of counting backwards;<\/span>
\u2028planes wait to fall from the sky\u2028<\/span>
as birds eye them suspiciously,\u2028<\/span>
measuring the year<\/span>
\u2028in leaves and twilight hours.\u2028\u2028<\/span>

Deep in the heart of every computer\u2028<\/span>
a disease waits for the stroke of midnight<\/span>
\u2028for white mice to turn their wheels\u2028<\/span>
widdershins, and unborn us<\/span>
\u2028without so much as a twitch\u2028<\/span>
of a whisker.<\/span>

\u2028\u2028So fireworks will draw hieroglyphs<\/span>
\u2028in the sky, so a dog will bark<\/span>
\u2028from its chained-up place in a yard.<\/span>
\u2028And night-roosting birds\u2028<\/span>
will cast out like swimmers\u2028<\/span>
in a broad open sea.<\/span>



*There will be a larger Gregory Awards Celebration at the South Bank in the New Year.<\/span>

<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fifty Years of the Eric Gregory AwardsThis year sees the 50th Anniversary of the Gregory Awards, a legacy of publisher and art benefactor Dr Eric Gregory who died in 1959.\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=892"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1886,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892\/revisions\/1886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}