Founded in 2009, The Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets now include four categories. From their inception, the awards have aimed both to promote the pamphlet form and enable poets and publishers to develop and continue creating. The awards offer prizes for: Poetry Pamphlet (£5,000), Publisher (£5,000), Illustration (£1,000) and Environmental Poetry Pamphlet (£1,000). Two places on a residency in Greece are also awarded, to the winners of the Poetry Pamphlet and Environmental Poetry Pamphlet.
The awards are funded entirely by the Michael Marks Charitable Trust and have grown to include four partners who collectively enable the awards: The British Library, Wordsworth Grasmere, The British School at Athens and The TLS.
Traditionally, pamphlets have provided a vehicle for new writers to emerge, as well as offering established poets a focused, short structure that is ideal for exploring themes. This continues to be the case. Pamphlet publishers enable these shorter portfolios of poetry to reach publication without the obstacles and delays that are typical of book-length collections. Historically, and still, often small presses have been labours of love, individually crafting each pamphlet. Some work closely with illustrators. Many presses not only publish pamphlets but arrange series of events, giving poets opportunities to perform and discuss their new work, bringing readers and poets together and generating excitement about the poetry. Most have worked to promote their poets in these ways out of a deep conviction that this work is of fundamental importance, both to literature and to creativity. Our awards exist because we agree with them.
“These inspired awards recognise that the pamphlet has a fundamental importance in literary culture far exceeding anything suggested by the dictionary – “a brief publication, generally having a paper cover”. For many of the best poets now writing it was not only their first means of distribution but the first ratification of their gift.”
It is the conviction of all partners involved in the Awards, and of the Michael Marks Charitable Trust, that the poetry pamphlet as a form deserves wide recognition and support.
Pamphlets are one of the first places a reader can encounter new poets. Arguably the best way the public can discover very recent work, the pamphlet offers a concentrated burst of poetry for its audience. Whether it’s a well-judged showcase of a new poet’s range or the powerful concentrate of a themed sequence, the short book, the pamphlet or “chapbook”, is a compact universe, an art-form in itself.
It’s often the poet’s publication of choice: it may be as portable as a passport but it quickly crosses so many more borders – real borders but checkpoints of the imagination as well.
Pamphlet publishers help new authors emerge while giving established poets the thinking space for new ideas. They match text with sympathetic graphics, well-judged typography and visual panache. They invest in new writing and new ways of presenting poetry and promoting it to readers, helping to develop a wider audience for the form.
Leonard and Virginia Woolf knew this when they published new poetry by TS Eliot and Robert Graves in the little books of the Hogarth Press. The only poetry book Edward Thomas published in his lifetime was a pamphlet, Six Poems by ‘Edward Eastaway’.
WH Auden’s first book, Poems (1928) is another remarkable example. It was printed by his friend Stephen Spender on the kind of press used for printing prescriptions. As history has shown, its contents did turn out to be strong medicine in a small bottle.
All traditions are represented by the pamphlet : Philip Larkin, Bob Cobbing, Ted Hughes, J H Prynne, Carol Ann Duffy, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Penelope Shuttle, Tom Leonard, Kathleen Jamie, Simon Armitage, Daljit Nagra, Jen Hadfield and Nobel Prize winner, Seamus Heaney, to name but a few, have all used the very slim volume with aplomb. Across the decades the pamphlet has announced new poets and new poetry, and the tradition continues today.
