Alice Oswald Discusses Her Experience as Griffin Poetry Prize Judge at The Globe and Mail

British poet Alice Oswald, author most recently of Memorial--and a member of the Griffin Poetry Prize jury for 2016--talks to The Globe and Mail about how the temperament of her own work collides with the Canadian poetry she's now adjudicating; themes of the work she's detected; what the younger generation of British poets is up to; and more. A glimpse:

Did you notice any particular trends or through lines that set the Canadian submissions apart from the international ones?

There was a certain modesty to the Canadian submissions. Sometimes this manifested as a bashful attentiveness to the natural world, sometimes as a self-deprecating humour in the face of the urban world. Modesty is a good quality, although too much of it might deprive a poem of necessary contradictions. Related to this modesty there seemed to be a strain of anxiety about land ownership – which at its most interesting emerged as a disturbance or wavering in the language.

I’ve watched with great interest as a younger generation of British poets seems to be coalescing – I’m thinking of some of your Faber and Faber colleagues, in Jack Underwood and Emily Berry, and writers such as Rebecca Perry, whose first book I quite liked. What is new and interesting in British verse? Where is it going next?

I’m no expert in new English verse because I don’t live at the centre of it, but I’ve been excited by the effect of American rap on younger poets. Performance poetry is no longer looked on as inferior to page poetry and I think that has brought drama and increased clarity to the poetry world. Kate Tempest’s work is well-known, but there are plenty of others. There’s also room for experimental work, with digital poetry now more widely known and a lot of visual or audio poetry installed in public places – and, as you mention, there is a wave of interesting new poets, including Rebecca Perry, Sam Riviere, Russell Jones, Harry Mann, Fiona Benson, et cetera. So I would say that poetry is thriving in its world – but there is a wider context, in which the arts are being undervalued in schools and universities and underfunded across the country. I do think our culture is suffering from the unequal education systems that now operate over here.

Read more at The Globe and Mail.