Plagiarism - what can we do about it?

The high-profile plagiarism scandals of recent months can't have gone unnoticed by the editors of top literary journals or the organisers of poetry competitions. With two serial plagiarists unmasked recently, many editors must be asking themselves if this is just the tip of the iceberg. What if those brilliant, original, prize-winning poems aren't original after all? What if someone just happens to have nicked them from somebody else's website, or from a forgotten poetry collection published 30 or 40 years ago?

There must be more than a suspicion that the plagiarism scandal calls into question the whole existence of poetry competitions. When a brilliant, unknown poet appears from nowhere to walk off with several hundred pounds' worth of prize money, some are bound to look askance on the winner and wonder just how original they really are. Are they just passing off the work of forgotten writers from a generation earlier? There are certainly rumblings that some competition organisers are going to start looking with new suspicion on ‘unrecognised’ names who achieve competition success.

To me, this is a dangerous mindset. After all, the whole point of poetry competitions is to give the brilliant unknowns a chance to make their mark, on a level playing field when up against established names. That's why poetry competitions are judged anonymously – so there's no chance of a judge being influenced by an entrant's reputation, or lack of one.

There are already competitions which churn out the same ‘type’ of winner, year after year with tedious predictability – often a winner who turns out to be a well established name on the poetry scene, frequently someone with several collections to their name. It's almost as if the judges only want work from a particular school of thought or writing. It would be depressing indeed if those competitions which still champion the independent voice are put in a position where they can no longer do so. Small competitions don't have the funds to defend lawsuits, and can't afford the reputational damage that might ensue if their champion work turns out to have been a plagiarised product. Will these competitions close altogether, rather than run the risk?

I'm a competition judge myself. I certainly don't want to be in the embarrassing position of mistaking a plagiarised poem for a brand new piece of original writing. But it could happen, even to the best of us. The sad fact is that many poets of the last hundred years have published their collections and then vanished without trace – and there's nothing to stop an opportunist taking advantage of the words they left behind them. Not even the best read judge is going to be able to recognise every plagiarised work for what it really is.

However, there's just the possibility that the recent scandals are signs that the situation is getting better, not worse. Serial plagiarisers are being found out. And we have the internet to thank for that.

Many poets are nervous about their work appearing on the internet. We're almost preconditioned to believe that someone is out there waiting to steal what we put out to public view. But in fact, the internet makes it harder for plagiarists, not easier. A poem placed in public view can always be matched with its real owner. A simple Google check (other search engines are available) is a standard tool in the competition judge's repertoire. It will pick up, not just plagiarised work, but also any other work that runs the risk of creating a copyright lawsuit by having been previously published somewhere else. Every competition I've judged has seen at least one entry disqualified from the shortlist as a result.

The Google check isn't perfect. There are any number of poems from the pre-internet generation which are not online, and which won't show up on a Google search. But a winner's name may well show up, once announced. Their past publication history may show up. And thanks to the dedication of poetry detectives like Ira Lightman (pictured), who brought the recent scandals to light, the plagiarists will soon run out of places to hide.

Iain Banks: RIP

It's perhaps a tad unusual for a poetry blogger to be writing a memorial to the life of one of the UK's most unusual prose writers. But the sad loss of Iain Banks, who died on 9th June aged 59, has got me thinking about why the poetry I write sounds the way it does. The man's influence got into my writing, I think, more deeply than I ever realised.

I've been obsessed with stories and storytelling all my life, from long before I ever started writing poetry. There was a rather fantastical element to my favourite reading matter – fairy tales, Victorian novels, and Tolkien – and I have to confess that when I was younger I pretty much avoided contemporary fiction altogether. I was writing, all this time: fairy stories of my own, some of them of epic proportion. I used them as allegories – spaces where I could get to grips with the darker aspects of the world around me, to try to make sense of the struggles of the people I loved. I've always believed, as Tolkien did, that mythic storytelling is anything but escapism. It is full of symbolism, allusion and metaphor, a way of looking slant-wise at the world and of setting its tragedies and pains in a wider, more universal context.

It was rather a shock to the system to discover a contemporary writer who set his tales in the modern world, but had a way of telling them that was utterly faithful to the tradition of mythic storytelling with which I'd fallen in love. The BBC dramatisation of The Crow Road in the 1990s was my first encounter with Banks's quirky storytelling (I still maintain that “It was the day my grandmother exploded” is the greatest opening line in English literature), and I was captivated from the outset. There was an epic quality, not just about the sweeping Scottish landscapes of the story, but about the young hero's classic quest (in this case, to uncover the truth about the mysterious disappearance of his uncle some years before, opening up all kinds of dark family secrets on the way). The mixture of folklore and pop-culture which seasoned the story was an intoxicating combination for me. And for the first time, it made me realise that it was possible to tell a timeless tale in entirely modern language.

And that, really, is what I've been trying to do in my writing ever since.

Iain Banks was more than a cracking good storyteller, though. His descriptive writing was some of the most beautiful I’ve ever read, in prose or poetry. There was something of the nature poet in Banks’s writing, a knack of capturing a place in a way that engages every sense. The opening paragraphs of Espedair Street, his roller-coaster faux-biography of an ageing, forgotten rock star, have haunted me for years:

“Two days ago I decided to kill myself. I would walk and hitch and sail away from this dark city to the bright spaces of the wet west coast, and there throw myself into the tall, glittering seas beyond Iona (with its cargo of mouldering kings) to let the gulls and seals and tides have their way with my remains... or be borne north, to where the white sands sing and coral hides, pink-fingered and hard-soft, beneath the ocean swell, and the rampart cliffs climb thousand-foot above the seething acres of milky foam, rainbow-buttressed.

“Last night I changed my mind and decided to stay alive. Everything that follows is... just to try and explain.”

My own nature writing harks back to similar scenes – the shore, the deep ocean, even the Corryvreckan whirlpool (which also makes an appearance in that first paragraph) – and I've always tried, like Banks, to convey a sense that my reader is right there in that place, in the snapshot moment, smelling and tasting the tang of wind and sea-spray. I'm surprised now, when I revisit his prose, just how many echoes of him I find in my most recent poetry.

Tastes and tangs and the crazy soundscapes of life infuse Banks's descriptive writing. It's hardly a surprise. Banks was a malt whisky enthusiast of the highest order. He knew the spirit's capacity to surprise and astonish with its spectrum of flavours and fragrances. He also knew the futility of trying to pin down the character of a malt whisky. His non-fiction bestseller Raw Spirit wasn't really a "search for the perfect dram", despite the advertising slogan: it was an autobiographical road trip, a journey of self-discovery. That heightened capacity for sensory detail, honed through a finely trained whisky palate, was a gift that any poet would envy.

There's a Gothic aspect to Banks's novels which made it very easy for me to fall in love with them after an upbringing on fairy tales and Victoriana. The macabre murders in Complicity (the first Banks novel I read cover-to-cover) almost have something of the Brothers Grimm about them; the islands and open spaces and creaking ancient buildings where his stories are set could easily belong in the work of the Brontës or Bram Stoker. Banks's characters have secrets, personal tragedies, enormous unspoken sadness, which make them grotesque and compelling at the same time. They are the sort of characters I have been trying to fathom out in all my writing, from my first teenage epics to my most recent prize winning poems. But it's his eye for the small details which make their awful dramas resonate. In The Steep Approach to Garbadale, a dream-like fixation with the description of an old coat becomes a chilling foreshadowing of the wearer's suicide:

“The coat is too big for her, drowning her; she has to double back the cuffs of the sleeves twice, and the shoulders droop and the hem reaches to within millimetres of the flagstones. She rubs her hands over the waxy rectangles of the flapped external pockets... The door slams shut behind her, leaving him where he's been for some time now, screaming unheard at her, silently and hopelessly, begging her not to leave.”

What I love most of all about Banks, though, is that his writing bursts with an unstoppable compulsion to tell stories; and it's that compulsion that makes the tales so vibrant, so addictive. The plots may be fantastical, the settings might read like something from Robert Louis Stevenson or Daphne du Maurier, but they're infused with satire and social comment which brings a realness to them despite the preposterous excesses of their characters. If Banks ever guest-featured in one of his own novels, for my money it was in the guise of Kenneth McHoan, the storytelling father of The Crow Road – the curmudgeon with a romantic streak, blasted off the face of the earth by a lightning bolt on a church roof, leaving the memory of endless tall tales behind:

“ 'The rich merchant was very powerful, and he came to control things in the city, and he made everybody do as he thought they ought to do; snowball-throwing was made illegal, and children had to eat up all their food. Leaves were forbidden to fall from the trees because they made a mess, and when the trees took no notice of this they had the leaves glued onto their branches... but that didn't work, so they were fined; every time they dropped leaves, they had twigs and then branches sawn off. And so eventually, of course, they had no twigs left, then no branches left, and in the end the trees were cut right down... Some people kept little trees in secret courtyards, and flowers in their houses, but they weren't supposed to, and if their neighbours reported them to the police the people would have their trees chopped down and the flowers taken away and they would be fined or put in prison, where they had to work very hard, rubbing out writing on bits of paper so they could be used again.'

“ 'Is this story pretend, dad?'

“ 'Yes. It's not real. I made it up.'

“ 'Who makes up real things, dad?'

“ 'Nobody and everybody; they make themselves up. The thing is that because the real stories just happen, they don't always tell you very much. Sometimes they do, but usually they're too... messy.' ”

I have to leave this tribute on that thought – and with the awareness that the world has lost one of its most original and idiosyncratic storytellers, a poet in his own outlandish way. The great man is away the Crow Road; and may the journey ahead be a bright one.

A long way to fall?

It's finally happened. After years of submissions to magazines and competitions, many rejection letters, occasional acceptances, and the odd envious glance at my younger, better looking, more successful friends in the poetry business, I finally have a book of poetry to my name.

It's been a rapid journey from acceptance to print – 3 months to correct the manuscript of A Long Way to Fall, gather in endorsements, and get the finalised version printed and bound. But that's not to say that the process of producing the book has been a rapid one. My initial query to the publishers was submitted a year ago. That was after half a dozen years putting together prototype versions of the collection, trialling different combinations of poems to try to find a harmonious whole. Then there's the time it took to produce the poems themselves – seventeen years since I first started writing poetry. It has taken about as long to create my debut collection as it takes to mature the most famous expression of my favourite Ardbeg single malt. As one who believes that poetry and whisky have a lot in common, I'm not altogether displeased by the comparison.

As it happens, there aren't any poems in A Long Way to Fall which date back quite that far. The oldest poem in the collection was written in 1999, though it has undergone a few changes since then. The newest pieces? Mere months old – babies by comparison.

The collection might never have seen the light of day were it not for the support of a select group of fellow poets. Two of them – Ann Heath and Tanya Nightingale – are still without a debut collection to their name: a serious deficiency that I hope the poetry world will remedy soon, because the best of their writing is amongst the best poetry I've read anywhere, ever. Ann and Tanya were in on the story right from the start. Not only did they offer some invaluable critique of individual poems, but they helped enormously in the selection and ordering of material. It is thanks to their insight that I was able to figure out the eventual shape of the collection, the sequence and flow of the poems, and – crucially – which poems to put in, and which to leave out.

Just over half of my 50-odd previously published poems made it into the collection. So what about the poems that weren't included? Some of them were immature pieces. They got picked up by editors in my early days, when I submitted a great mass of work all over the place. It was a great encouragement to get these accepted for publication, and I'm proud to have them on my CV. But if I'm honest, I probably wouldn't write these poems the same way if I were writing them now.

Other poems were left out, not because I was unhappy with them, but because they didn't gel with the overall feel of the collection. I decided with some sadness that I wasn't able to include my first ever competition-winning poem, Joni Melts Wax in a Saucepan. It isn't rubbish – the cheque it earned me back in 2004 testifies to that – but its style and voice are very different from the rest of the material in the collection. Joni is light-hearted, satirical, and really a much 'fluffier' poem than anything else in the collection. It may well belong in a future compilation, though, one with a slightly different mood to it.

The remainder of the poems in the collection are hitherto unpublished. They include a whole set of more recent poems which really created the distinctive 'voice' of the collection. They dictated the ebb and flow of material, the pace and style of poems which went together, the vital balance between lighter and more serious material. Once these were included, the other poems fell into place.

The process of getting A Long Way to Fall into print has been a voyage of discovery. At times I've felt like the seafaring character who appears in several of the poems: adrift on uncharted seas, never quite sure where I'll end up. But the book is here now. Finally, I am a Proper Published Poet. And here, I'm beginning to discover, is where the journey really begins.


A Long Way to Fall is available now from Lapwing Publications (email lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com), price £10. ISBN 978-1-909252-40-0.

Poetry Transvestism, Part 2: are you Sounding Lyrical?

Recently I had the privilege of taking part in the inaugural concert of the Sounds Lyrical Project – a collaborative venture between a group of poets and a small team of classically trained composers who have set our poems to music. I've always loved classical recitals, and for the Project, a full-length evening concert of original work was a "yes we can" moment: it was proof that the concept of Sounds Lyrical has something going for it.

But all of us, composers and poets alike, are aware that the Project won't get very far if we stick to this format.

A number of things struck me about the audience. One, there weren't all that many of them. Okay, fair enough – I've performed poetry to smaller crowds. What matters isn't so much the number of people turning up, but the quality of the experience they have when they do.

More striking than the numbers attending, though, was the proportion wearing what I would describe as "smart dress". Jackets and college scarves were the order of the day. Heck, I wore a jacket and college scarf. There was a practical reason for this (we were performing in a freezing cold chapel – why does this seem to be a recurring theme of my poetry gigs?!). But I was acutely aware that this isn't how I normally dress when I'm performing poetry. Jeans and T-shirt are more my style.

I don't think the audience were any posher than the crowd that used to turn out to hear me MC at Speakers' Corner. But there's clearly a feeling that a classical concert is a "special occasion" and requires a slightly higher standard of decorum than the average open mic. The need to dress smartly, to sit perfectly still for two hours in a cold chapel, not to shuffle feet or to cough, was clearly in evidence. Maybe this is the reason that concerts of this type (not to mention poetry readings of this type) tend not to attract large audiences?

The conversation at the pub afterwards explored this issue. One of the reasons the project was set up in the first place was to tackle an image problem within contemporary classical music. The intellectual elitism of Schoenberg and the European avant-garde, according to my composer friends, have done for modern composition what the pretentious poets of my recent blog post have done for contemporary poetry.

But, in composition at least, intellectualism is now on the wane. Composers these days, by and large, want to collaborate – to fuse genres and styles, to pick and mix from a melting pot that includes rock, jazz and world music as well as the European classical tradition. The opportunity to work with artists across a range of media also presents the chance to bring new music to audiences who wouldn't ever do the wear-a-jacket, sit-in-a-cold-chapel thing.

The ideal venue for our concert might well have been the pub we adjourned to afterwards. Not that we'd have wanted to ambush unsuspecting punters with a resonant baritone and the nifty fingerwork of a skilled professional pianist; but there was actually a piano in that pub, and no particular reason why the Project couldn't make use of it at some unspecified future date.

The advantage of "doing art" in an unconventional venue – a pub, cafe, railway station, or wherever – is that it opens up the art to people who wouldn't otherwise take a chance on it. Effort is needed to put on a jacket and sit in a cold chapel; but if you’re anything like me, you won't need all that much persuading to come along to your regular pub and stump up the price of an extra pint or two to try out something just a bit different. Especially not if beer, conversation and good company can all still be enjoyed into the bargain.

So where now for Sounds Lyrical? Our lead composers have been adventurous with their material, and in choosing to collaborate with an unruly group of poets. We need to be equally adventurous as to how and where we present that material. There are plenty of possibilities. When we lived in Birmingham, my wife and I sang in a choir who did more gigs in pubs than in concert halls. Their repertoire ranged from Britten and Barber to Abba and Queen (not to mention some extraordinary original compositions from members of the choir themselves). Their concerts were fun, accessible, and very different to any recitals I've ever attended.

This is the sort of model I would like Sounds Lyrical to aim at. I love to see poetry invading the public consciousness by showing up in unexpected places. And I'd love to hear modern classical music do the same.

Poetry transvestism?

It's not all that long ago that I was blogging about the possible demise of the York Literature Festival - one more victim of an austerity regime that seems to place little value on the power of the creative arts. Thankfully, the Festival has survived. This year it recorded its most triumphant season yet, with over 2000 tickets sold for a variety of shows ranging from big-name gigs to smaller community arts ventures. There was a veritable buzz about the Festival this year - ample proof that all that energy, enthusiasm and creativity has not been in vain.

One thing that struck me very forcefully about this year's Festival was the capacity for poetry to manifest itself in all kinds of guises that one wouldn't automatically think of as poetry. It crept up on this year's audiences in other guises - wearing the clothes of other artforms, if you will, a sort of literary transvestism.

It manifested itself most clearly in this year's headline act - a double-header, featuring on the one hand a fairly conventional poetry reading by the Poet Laureate herself, Carol Ann Duffy, and on the other a sublime fusion of classic verse with rock 'n' roll in the guise of poetic troubadours Little Machine. Little Machine are a couple of 90s stadium-rock survivors who have teamed up with a performance poet to present several thousand years' worth of poetry - from Sappho through Shakespeare to Philip Larkin's infamous "This Be the Verse" - in a variety of infectious musical arrangements. Some were sublime, some ridiculous, but all were calculated to get right under the skin and leave you humming along. When they handled classic texts, they had the gift of breathing new freshness into words which were otherwise over-familiar, giving them a whole new lease of life. When they set contemporary verse, they created a whole new way of approaching an art form that is all too easily dismissed out of hand as too serious, too difficult, or too intellectual. The great joy of Little Machine is that they showed just how wrong this stereotyping of poetry can be.

Little Machine aren't the first musicians to do this, of course. Last year I had the great pleasure of seeing my personal folk-rock heroes, The Waterboys, electrify the stage with a concert performance of An Appointment with Mr Yeats, an entire album's worth of musical settings of the poetry of WB Yeats. And if Little Machine surprised and delighted, the sheer power of the Waterboys' rendition of The Hosting of the Shee was enough to blow you backwards off your chair.

Poetry and music, of course, go hand in hand as art forms. An even more intelligent form of poetic transvestism took place in the form of Bob Beagrie and Andy Willoughby's show Kids: a poetry cycle ostensibly inspired by the film reel of Charlie Chaplin's silent classic, The Kid, but underpinned fundamentally by the writers' experiences of working with deprived and troubled teenagers in the most recession-hit areas of north-east England. The power of Kids came not just from the words, the mimes that accompanied them, and the excerpts from Chaplin's original movie that played out as the backdrop to the show (to the accompaniment of a brand-new piano score). It came, most of all, from the quiet anger of the social commentary that infused each poem. This was poetry in the form of an art that wasn't afraid to challenge the status quo, and ask the big questions of how and why society has ended up in such a mess, and what are we going to do about it?

I'll even admit to having a go at a bit of poetic transvestism myself. Telling the Fairytale, my first ever show for the Festival, wasn't really my show at all, if I'm honest: it was a collaborative effort between me and my good friend, storyteller Helen M Sant, to recreate some classic pieces of folklore and re-tell them in a 21st century context. In some ways, Telling the Fairytale was the exact opposite of Kids. Instead of contemporary social comment, here we had timeless fairy stories. Instead of a Powerpoint projector and a piano, our backdrop was an icy cold, medieval gothic church. But the reason I love fairy tales lies in the layers of imagery and metaphor behind them. The archetypes of fairy story may hark back to a bygone age, but they represent real concerns. Love, abandonment, social disconnection, mental illness - and the ultimate need we all have, for that happily-ever-after. Being able to wrap these concerns in the cloak of familiar childhood stories provides a way in for an audience, where a direct approach to the subject in a poem might be hollow or trite. Being able to perform these poems, set against some wonderful contemporary storytelling and a haunting flute accompaniment, made an hour of sheer enchantment.

It seems that rumours of the death of literature in York have been very much exaggerated. It's well and truly thriving, and often in the most unexpected guises. All art is richer when it collaborates, when it draws from experience beyond itself. And poetry, perhaps, most of all.

So that's my challenge to poets for 2013. Try on someone else's clothes for size, and see how they feel. An artist's, a musician's, a social campaigner's. You could find a new freedom in your writing. And, perhaps most importantly, you might find new audiences too.

Pretentious poets

I'm not convinced that performance poet Tim Ellis will thank me for name-checking him at the start of a blog post headed "Pretentious Poets." But it's thanks to him that I'm writing this post. Tim and I have different poetic backgrounds and interests, which has made for some lively online debates in the past couple of years. While we often disagree about specifics, we mostly keep a healthy respect for the other's point of view.

But I cannot, ever, agree with Tim that the work of TS Eliot deserves to be consigned to the poetic dustbin.

I should add that Tim is one of the least pretentious poets I've ever met. As a writer he's a genius of rhyme and rhythm; as a performer, he was a worthy winner of the 2011 York Poetry Slam, for which I was part of the judging panel.

As I understand it, Tim's take on TS Eliot is this. TS Eliot is a pretentious poet. Much of his work is so thick with obscure allusions to ancient Greek and Roman civilisation that it's impossible to find a way into it unless you have a higher degree in classical literature. And, surely, any poetry that is this hard to understand just adds fuel to the argument that poetry is something that's disconnected from reality, and simply not worth bothering with.

I have a lot of sympathy with this argument – and it's one that has made me think about why I first started writing poetry. I came to poetry relatively late in life, following teenage years filling bookshelves full of ring binders with really bad novels of epic proportion. My poems started life as stories that I was trying to tell: some to fathom out the problems of the world or the complexities of the people around me; others, simply to capture the mood on one particular day or in one special place. "Art", for its own sake, was practically non-existent in my list of priorities.

Accessibility is always really important if you're trying to tell a story. And it's the same with my poetry. If people don't get what my poems are going on about, then on some level the poem hasn't worked.

The trouble is, other poets don't write for the same reasons that I do. There are many who write for no other reason than the joy of artistic expression. They don't necessarily need an audience; and when they get one, it may not matter if not everyone in the audience can understand what they're going on about.

Which brings me back to TS Eliot. His approach to poetry was in many ways the polar opposite of mine. Yet, when I blogged awhile back about "The Ten Poems that Changed my Life", The Waste Land was one of the poems I listed.

There is something magical for me about this poem. Eliot's ability to draw scenes and atmospheres, to get deep into the guts of his characters' (and his readers') dreams and fears, and the sheer musicality of his free verse – all these things weave a sort of spell about me. It doesn't matter that three-quarters of the classical allusions go straight over my head. Somehow The Waste Land bypasses my head and echoes inside my gut in a way that few poems have ever done.

Four Quartets, by contrast, leaves me cold. The layers of classical and artistic reference are so thick here that to me they're completely impenetrable. There's nothing I can latch on to or identify with. The atmospheric quality of The Waste Land is missing, the rhythm and musicality of the words seem to be lacking too. Its philosophising is abstract, self-indulgent. It makes no connection with me and sheds no light whatsoever on the world around me.

There seem to me to be a lot of poets who have been encouraged to write in a way reminiscent of what Eliot does in Four Quartets. The end result is to daze the reader with intellect. This can be done very cleverly; even though I don’t understand the end result of Four Quartets, I can at least tell that there's a master craftsman at work. Mostly, though, it just seems insufferably smug.

If there is a huge intellectual hurdle to be overcome before you can appreciate poetry, to me it is not good poetry, no matter how many awards it wins. Outside the rarefied atmosphere of literary circles, the misconception that 'serious' poetry is something too snobbish for the average man or woman in the street is still one that's all too common. And any poet dead set on propagating that misconception is going straight into my personal rejection bin. They're not telling a story. They're not even enchanting their readers with a glimpse of a dream. To put it bluntly, all they are doing is showing off how clever they are.

I'm really, really proud that there so many good poets on the Yorkshire scene who show that it is possible to be serious about your poetry without it becoming pretentious. The poetry world doesn't need another TS Eliot; one is quite enough, thank you very much. If a few regulars in the learned poetry journals could learn to be a bit less TS Eliot and a bit more Tim Ellis, they'd be doing all of us a favour.

The Poetry Society: do we really need it?

I want to tell you about one of my new year resolutions for 2013. I'm going to join the Poetry Society.

I have to admit to being rather cynical about the Poetry Society. Don't get me wrong – I like the idea of the Poetry Society. Goodness knows, poetry gets precious little promotion in the UK and it needs somebody fighting its corner. But does what the Society offers really justify a full membership fee, at current rates, of £42 a year?

Currently on offer in the membership package are: 4 issues of the society's broadsheet Poetry News (and the chance to submit your own poetry to be published in it); 4 issues of the premium poetry journal Poetry Review; discounts on critiques and appraisals from professional poets; 2-for-1 entry to the National Poetry Competition, which the Society administers; access to the Society website to promote your events and publications; and discounts on Poetry Society events, including products and masterclasses at the Poetry Café in London.

In many respects the Society does pretty good work. Their website (and especially the "Poetry Landmarks" section which lists places of interest to poets region-by-region, including regular performance venues) is a little treasure trove. The network of regional groups, or "Stanzas" (a name which is either poetically brilliant, or just plain pretentious, I can't quite decide which) provides a means for poets to meet, obtain constructive critique and develop and hone their work. The opportunity to promote yourself alongside the great and the good of the poetry world is one that no self-respecting self-publicist would want to pass up. And did I mention that the awesome Roger McGough is currently their president?

So what’s not to like?

Well, the poetry itself, for one thing. Some of the poetry that the Society promotes has what I can only describe as an image problem. To put it bluntly, a lot of people see it as unbearably pretentious. The poems that appear in Poetry Review and a lot of the pieces that win the National each year can be so sophisticated as to be pretty much inaccessible without a higher degree in literature. Many poets I know won't submit work to the Poetry Society for exactly that reason.

I have ambitions to be a serious poet, whose work is taken seriously. That's why I have finally decided to give the Society a try. But I'm still at the point where submitting my work to the National Poetry Competition feels like a waste of money. I simply don't write poetry of the intellectual intensity that seems to be required to make the shortlist. And even in my most serious, pretendy-strokey-beardy moments, I'm not altogether sure that that's the way I want my poetry to be.

As a dyed-in-the-wool Northerner, I have concerns about the London-centric nature of the Society. Sure, the Poetry Café is a brilliant thing. But it's in London. In fact, most of the Society's activities, and 90% of the stuff it promotes, is in London. The rest of the UK may well have the "Stanzas". But when I read the Society's literature, and look at its website, I still get the feeling that the provinces are just subsidising what goes on in London; and if I'm rarely in London, I'm unlikely to have the advantage of it.

I have a more fundamental reservation than these, though. My socialistic instincts don't sit easily with the fact that membership of the Society is solely by virtue of being able to pay for it. This is very different to, for instance, the Society of Authors where you're only admitted to membership once you have a bona fide publishing contract for your work.

I'm not advocating that the Poetry Society should have the same selection policy. Contracts to publish poetry are like gold dust (though not nearly so lucrative!), and any restriction of membership to poets who already have a published collection would raise a massive problem of elitism. But most learned societies require applicants to present some evidence of achievement in the field, and commitment to their continuing professional development. At the moment, all that Poetry Society membership signifies is that you're rich enough to pay the subscription. And as I'm forever arguing, the notion of poetry as a rich person's pursuit is probably the single biggest problem that our art has.

I've ummed and aahed for years about joining the Poetry Society. Now it's time to try it out. After all, the concept of a Poetry Society is one I have no problem with supporting. I don't oppose the Poetry Café, the National Poetry Competition or Poetry News either; I'm just not convinced that they are value for money for a struggling Northern poet who's still without a collection to his name.

I intend to find out if the Poetry Society is really worth the money. A year's membership should be long enough for me to form a reasoned opinion on the matter.

You can be sure I'll blog about it all the way.