National Poetry Competition: First Prize
Patricia McCarthy
Clothes that escaped the Great War
Not the familiar ghosts: the shaggy dog of Thorne Waste
that appeared only to children, the chains clanking
from the Gyme seat, nor the black barge at Waterside.
These were the most scary, my mother recalled: clothes
piled high on the wobbly cart, their wearers gone.
Overalls caked in dung, shirts torn from the muscle strain
of heavy hemp sacks, socks matted with cow-cake
from yards nearby, and the old horse plodding, on the nod.
Its uneven gait never varied whether coming from farms
where lads were collected like milk churns, or going back
with its harvest of dungarees scented by first fags,
notes in pockets to sweethearts; boots with laces undone,
jerseys knitted – purl, plain – around coke fires.
And the plod, plod, quadruple time. Then the catch
in the plod from the clank of loose shoes, from windgalls
on the fetlocks of the horse, each missed beat on the lane
a missed beat in a heart. As a small girl she could see –
at their windows – the mothers pressing memories
too young for mothballs into lavender bags, staring out
propaganda posters, dreading the shouts of telegraph boys
from lines of defence and attack. As the harness creaked
and the faithful old horse clopped forward and back,
the lads were new-dressed in the years never to be had,
piled higher than high over the shafts of the buckling cart.
Poetry Society Events
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May
17 William Morris Gallery receives major award for best permanent collection (Waltham Forest Guardian)
17 Bob Dylan made honorary member of US Arts Academy for 'poetry made manifest in song' (BBC)
16 Screen-agers: Young people prefer to read on computers rather than print, says survey (BBC)
15 Kate Fox will be this year's poet-in-residence for Glastonbury Festival website (Glastonbury)
15 "What do poets bore on about when they all get together?" I ask Roger (McGough). "Money," he says. "Artists don't, because they can sell things, money is a real issue for poets" (Telegraph)
15 Salt to concentrate on anthologies rather than single-author collections (Salt)
13 Michael Mackmin, Rialto editor: I think poetry is the most important art form we have in this country and that is because it deals with language, and keeping language working expressively. We neglect at our peril. The culture will fall to pieces without poetry (EDP24)
13 Wales (poetry) Book of the Year shortlist: Deryn Rees-Jones, Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, Rhian Edwards (Literature Wales)
12 'Lost' WH Auden journal sheds light on pivotal time for poet (Independent)
10 Michael Rosen: socialism, poetry and folk tales (Telegraph)
9 Carol Ann Duffy unveils poems inspired by Cambridge's museums (Guardian)
8 Larkin handwritten poem sells for £7,500 (BBC)
3 Message for Mars: NASA seeks haikus (Guardian)
2 Bodleian buys draft of 'Binsley Poplars' for £50k (Guardian)
2 U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey: It’s easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it (Washington Post)
2 PS member Lydia Macpherson wins Crashaw Prize for first poetry collection (Salt Publishing)
1 Langston Ward, 18, wins $20k for national U.S. Poetry Out Loud reciting competition (Spokesman Review)
1 PS members success in flamingofeather poetry comp: Kate Ling, Diana Gittins 1st and 2nd; Christopher North wins short poem prize; Timothy Adès wins long poem prize; Claudia Daventry wins prize for poem about dance; Nick Makoha and Jonathan Edwards commended (flamingofeather)
1 George Szirtes wins the CLPE Poetry Award (CLPE)
April
30 Warsan Shire wins Brunel University African Poetry Prize - Warsan was recently published in Poetry Review 102:4 (bookslive.co.za)
30 PS members Mark Fiddes & Usha Kishore, highly commended in Gregory O'Donoghue Poetry Prize (Southword Journal)
25 Dylan Thomas's final reading tour to be portrayed in TV film to mark centenary of his birth (BBC)
23 Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) Poetry Award shortlist: Carol Ann Duffy, George Szirtes, Wendy Cooling, Sarah Crossan (CLPE)
21 Inaugural Poetry By Heart competition won by Kaiti Soultana, 18, reciting Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop (Sunday Times)
15 Sharon Olds wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (N Y Times)
11 Sylvia Plath gets all-star tribute for Ariel anniversary (Guardian)
11 Why Margaret Thatcher chose Wordsworth's Ode for her funeral (Guardian)
10 Leontia Flynn to receive 17th O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry (University of St Thomas)
10 Kate Tempest - the performance poet who can't be ignored (Guardian)
10 Charlotte Brontë poem manuscript sells for £92,000 (Guardian)
10 Thomas Hardy's musical manuscript poem up for auction (BBC)
10 Rare Keats portrait comes to auction (Guardian)
10 Martin Daws is Wales' new Young Poet Laureate (BBC)
9 Tim Waterstone: If reading is going be all digital in 50 years, so be it (Guardian)
9 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist announced (Times Colonist)
8 The mystery of Neruda's death (BBC)
6 PS members Judy Brown, Cheryl Moskowitz, Martyn Crucefix 1st 2nd and 3rd in Kent & Sussex Poetry Comp. Members Pnina Shinebourne, Patricia Ace and Brian Docherty = fourth (Kent & Sussex)
4 Benjamin Zephaniah: I’m so glad I turned down Big Brother (The Voice)
3 Poetry Society member Tess Jolly wins $5k in Dorothy Sargent Poetry Prize (dorothyprizes.org)
5 Dannie Abse on loss, new poetry and his beloved Cardiff City (Wales Online)
4 Daniel Hoffman, former US Poet Laureate, dies at 89 (New York Times)
2 Poetry Society member Valerie Laws wants credit for her 'sheep poetry' (North East News)
March
29 Great tips on entering poetry competitions from NPC judge Nick Laird (Guardian)
29 Centenary of R S Thomas's birth (BBC)
28 Forward Prize judges: Jeanette Winterson, Sam West, David Mills, Paul Farley, Sheenagh Pugh (BBC)
28 National Poetry Competition: 1st prize Patricia McCarthy; 2nd Jane Draycott; 3rd John Freeman. Commended poets: Keith Chandler, Pascale Petit, Edward Barker, David Swann, Sally Goldsmith, Stuart Pickford, Robert Stein (Guardian)
28 Ted Hughes Award goes to Kate Tempest (Guardian)
26 On show after 80 years, the poetry of Lorca that Franco couldn't kill (Independent)
25 PS member Matthew Barton shortlisted for Hippocrates Prize open category; PS member Ann Gray shortlisted for NHS category. Commended PS members include Cheryl Moskowitz, Kim Lasky, Ellen Storm, Valerie Laws, Andy Jackson, Miles Burrows, Nick Leach, Kate Compston, Chris Bridge, Allison McVety, Suzanna Fitzpatrick, Pat Winslow, Joanna Sedgwick, Lesley Saunders (Hippocrates)
24 Fenton Aldeburgh 1st Collection Prize judges announced: Robert Seatter, Peter Blegvad, Maura Dooley (Poetry Trust)
24 Heaney: school pupils should memorise poems by rote (Telegraph)
24 New edition of D H Lawrence's poems reveal him as a talented war poet (Guardian)
22 Poetry Society Member Eve Power awarded residency bursary in The Tyrone Guthrie Centre Waterford (blog)
22 Chinua Achebe dies (News Day)
19 York Mix Poetry Comp winner is Caroline Price. PS member Doreen Gurrey 2nd; Gaia Holmes 3rd. PS member Lydia Harris wins York Prize (YorkMix)
19 Marie Ponsot wins $100k Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement (N Y Times)
18
17 Anthony Conran dies: acclaimed poet and translator born with cerebral palsy (Independent)
16 R S Thomas's poetry teaches us to want less, not more (Telegraph)
15 Poetry works better on the web than with e-readers (Washington Post)
13 PS members Emma Danes, David Attwooll, and Kim Lasky among winners of the Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition, alongside David Grubb (Poetry Business)
13 PS Members Robin Houghton & Jacqueline Haskell 1st and 2nd in New Writer single poem prize. PS member Christopher North 2nd in Poetry Collection prize (New Writer)
12 John Agard: I feel an empathy with the bad characters (Telegraph)
11 Foyle Young Poets 2013 Opens for entries
11
10 Jackie Kay using poetry to help female asylum seekers (Scotsman)
5 Poetry School / Pighog Press pamphlet comp includes 7 PS members on the shortlist: Janet Lees, Jocelyn Page, Martin Malone, Rodney Wood, Katherine Crocker, Matthew Paul, Kate White plus 4 others (Poetry School)
4 Marianne Boruch wins $100k Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award (Huffington Post)
4 Roger McGough: There’s this idea that an audience is there to marvel at you and it’s all very tense, and I don’t like that (Yorkshire Post)
3 What is a poet for? (Huffington Post)
1 Larkin's advice to Roger McGough: You walk an impressionistic tightrope and sometimes it’s a success and sometimes you fall off (Telegraph)
1 Clive James frail but cheerful, and writing poetry, says his daughter (The Australian)
1 Claire Askew wins Salt best single poem. PS member Peter Daniels one of runners-up (Salt)
February
28 Maxine Peake to star in new version of Shelley's The Masque of Anarchy (BBC)
26 CBeebies children's TV series to feature poetry performed entirely in British Sign Language (BBC)
25 Qatari poet's life sentence reduced to 15 years (BBC)
25 Fifty unseen Rudyard Kipling poems discovered (Guardian)
25 You don't have to be a mind reader to understand poetry, proves English teacher Jamie Warner-Lynn with his favourite word cloud inspired lesson (Guardian)
24 Billy Collins: poetry is incontestably the only history we have of human emotion. It’s the history of the human heart (U-T San Diego)
22 British Poet and professor Michael Edwards joins elite learned body that defends the purity of the French language (Guardian)
23 Sophie Clarke wins PBS Student Poetry Competition with her poem 'Signal' - Sophie also features in the current, winter 2012, issue of Poetry Review (PBS)
22 PS member Denise Bennett wins Hastings International Poetry Comp. Members Carolyn King & Eve Jackson 2nd and 4th (josephineaustin.co.uk)
20 Auden 'an author who is as radical as T.S. Eliot or Samuel Beckett' (The Journal)
20 'First rate'. Gillian Reynolds reviews Tony Harrison's new reading of 'v.' on Radio 4 (Telegraph)
18 Poetry Society member Amali Rodrigo wins Magma Poetry Competition. Lucy Ingrams 2nd and Poetry Society member Rosalind Hudis 3rd (Magma)
18 Rare poem by McGonagall could fetch £3k at auction (Guardian)
18 Wenlock Poetry Festival announces line-up including Zephaniah, McMillan, Sweeney, Sheers, Duffy, Petit, Dharker... (Shropshire Live)
16 Simon Armitage to give poetry readings on South West Coastal Path in return for food and shelter (This Is Cornwall)
15 Welsh poem sheds light on the demise of Richard III (BBC)
14 Rare unpublished A.E. Housman poem about unrequited love expected to fetch £25,000 (Independent)
14 Culture Show talks to Somali poets performing with National Theatre Wales (BBC)
14 Ahren Warner is the new Poetry Editor at Poetry London (Poetry London)
13 T S Eliot letter found in Somerset (BBC)
12 Robert Bly receives Frost Medal for lifetime achievement in poetry (Poetry Society of America)
10 Sylvia Plath: Jillian Becker on the poet's last days (BBC)
8 150 years of Poems on the Underground (Guardian)
6 Maya Angelou: We are in a place where we need to use and seize poetry. All of it was made for us (Red&Black)
6 Winston Churchill manuscript reveals his poetic side (Guardian)
6 The new Poetry Review editor is Maurice Riordan (Poetry Society)
6 Society members Catherine Ormell & Lydia Macpherson shortlisted for Crawshaw Prize for debut collections (Crawshaw)
5 Poetry Society member Polly Atkin wins Mslexia pamphlet competition. PS member Mara Bergman highly commended with Elizabeth Speller and Stephanie Conn (Mslexia)
4 Slams are not killing poetry (Ottowa Citizen)
4 Musa Okwonga: Poetry’s enduring role... is to capture moments and emotions with a rare and beautiful brevity (Independent)
3 'Were you relieved when your reading was over?' Richard Blanco discusses his Inauguration Day poetry reading (Chicago Tribune)
3 David Tipton, founder of Redbeck Press, dies aged 78 (Guardian)
3 George the Poet: 'entertainers have a duty to educate young people' (Observer)
3 Manuscript shows Sassoon toned down piece about British soldiers killing German prisoners (Observer)
2 Sylvia Plath in New York: 'pain, parties and work' (Observer)
1 Nathan Thompson: The only division in poetry is between those people willing to take the time to read it and those who will not (Independent)
1 My hero: William Cowper (Guardian)
January
31 A Dark Water - remembering Sylvia Plath in Hebden Bridge (Guardian)
31 Writing poetry is good for you (poetry.about.com)
31 Brunel University African Poetry Prize shortlist includes Kayo Chingonyi & Warsan Shire - both have poems in the current Poetry Review (African Poetry Prize)
30 'It was the voltage of the language, it was entrancing' Seamus Heaney & Simon Armitage on how they discovered poetry (BBC)
28 Former home of Cornish poet Charles Causley to be be transformed into a writers' retreat (BBC)
25 Why we should memorize poetry (New Yorker)
25 New book of poetry celebrates The Beatles' impact (Independent)
25 When Words Collide - hip-hop v poetry (BBC 1xtra)
25 Liz Lochhead; my poetry hero, Robert Burns (Guardian)
24 Do business and poetry have anything in common? (Mumbai Mirror)
24 All 154 Shakespeare sonnets have been spelled out in DNA (Guardian)
23 James Franco: the actor who wrote a poem for Obama (Guardian)
23 Robert Polito named President of Poetry Foundation (N Y Times)
23 Christina Patterson: Me, myself and I: How easy is it to write confessional poetry? (Independent)
22 Charles Wright wins $150,000 Bollingen poetry prize for American Poetry (Yale News)
22 Sylvia Plath: 50 years later and the same bitter arguments rage on (Guardian)
22 Carol Rumens on Richard Blanco's poem for Obama: writing good poetry for a grand national celebration is an impossible feat (Guardian)
22 Ruth Siverns dies, inspiration for Larkin's early poetry (Guardian)
22 Jen Emery of Salt Publishing to run as Labour candidate (North Norfolk News)
21 Richard Blanco's reading at Obama's inauguration (YouTube)
21 Interview with Richard Blanco, poet at Obama's inauguration (BBC)
20 Obama's inauguration will be a high-profile moment for poetry (San Bernardino Sun)
18 Guardian Book Club talks to Elizabeth Sigmund, friend of Sylvia Plath (Guardian)
18 Ted Hughes's sister on how misrepresented she feels the story of Sylvia Plath's death has been (Guardian)
18 New Cape Farewell project launched in collaboration with the Young Poets Network
17 PS member Marie Naughton wins £1k Cafe Writers Poetry Comp. Jane Monson 2nd & PS member Colette Sensier 3rd. Other PS members commended: Rosemary Norman, Amali Rodrigo, Jonathan Beale (Cafe Writers)
16 How strong emotion summons poetry (Guardian)
16 Where couplets meet calculations: combining maths and poetry in class (Guardian)
15 Arts Council chief accuses Gove of abandoning cultural education (Guardian)
15 Poetry Society member Judy Brown is Wordsworth Trust's poet-in-residence for 2013 (Wordsworth Trust)
15 Manuscript for Auden's 'Stop All The Clocks' to be sold (Fine Books Magazine)
14 Sharon Olds wins TS Eliot poetry prize for Stag's Leap collection on divorce (Guardian)
14 Online robot creates poetry out of Twitter posts (rt.com)
14 Radio 4 courts controversy with broadcast of Tony Harrison's V (Guardian)
13 Reading Wordsworth and Larkin provides a 'rocket-boost' to the brain (Mail Online)
11 Is poetry the new comedy? (Telegraph)
10 Martin Samuel: I'll never vote for learning poetry by rote (Mail Online)
10 Poet Richard Blanco to read at Obama's inauguration (Guardian)
7 Launch of 'Poetry by Heart' national anthology and website for teenagers (education.gov.uk)
6 Sharon Olds: I want a poem to be useful (Guardian)
4 Gwyneth Lewis: Welsh-language books deserve their subsidies (Guardian)
3 Jude Kelly, Southbank artistic director: More funding should be put into the arts not less (BBC)
3 My hero: Dennis O'Driscoll by Seamus Heaney (Guardian)
2 Kathleen Jamie wins poetry category at Costa book awards (Guardian)
2 Five British poets to watch in 2013 - Mark Burnhope, Isabel Galleymore, Andrew Philip, Martha Sprackland,
Paul Stephenson (Huffington Post)
2 Editor Christian Wiman announces departure from Poetry Magazine (Poetry Foundation)
1 US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey: Poetry showed me that I wasn’t alone (Washington Post)
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