with apologies to the Poetry Society

I hope I'm not coming over unusually bad-tempered this week. I already managed to annoy one person I had no intention of annoying and in fact hadn't thought it was really possible to annoy, as well as a few other people, and then capped it by going off nauseous and sick, my head spinning in its own "bad, bright whip of flow" - so if I offend, please pardon me.

But this thing that has come into my inbox - what is it?

"Rooted at opposite ends of Britain – one in Devon, the other in Fife – Alice Oswald and Kathleen Jamie have much in common. Still in their early forties, both have combined motherhood, and very private lives, with extraordinary success as poets. Alice Oswald has won not only the T.S. Eliot Prize but also the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, while Kathleen Jamie is one of only two poets to have won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize twice. Both have won the Forward Poetry Prize. Each of them combines an intense love for, and close attention to, nature, with imagery that is at once precise, and utterly new - for Alice Oswald, eels in the river Dart are ‘bright whips of flow’, for Kathleen Jamie, a corncrake is ‘a votive statue hidden in the grass’. And while Jeanette Winterson describes Alice Oswald as ‘the rightful heir to Ted Hughes’, Richard Mabey considers Kathleen Jamie’s work ‘as close as writing gets to a conversation with the natural world’. Long-standing admirers of one another’s work, they meet, and read together, for the first time."

Can we just pause for a moment here. "Rooted (geddit!?) at opposite ends of Britain - one in Xxx, one in Xxx - [Male Poet] and [Male Poet] have much in common. Still only in early middle age, both have managed to combine fatherhood and the intense demands of paid employment with extraordinary success as poets..."

Is it just me?

Then the fatuous list of awards won - and to be honest while I wouldn't sneer at any of them once my book is out (and I become a real boy!) I do wish we could sometimes talk avbout something besides awards ("how big is yours?") - and then the luvvie mutual congratulations at the end.

To think of going along to witness two mutual admirers mutually admire each other and then read their poems! You would have to pay me handsomely. And, come to that, why are Poetry Society members going for free? It doesn't sound as if this is being done for the audience, or for the sake of the poetry, at all. In fact, it reminds me faintly of this unforgettable bagatelle from my friend James Marcus...