Reading Poems

OK, so back to my premise, there are reading out loud poems and reading on the page poems and, surtitles excluded, they usually aren't found in the same poem. Although in saying that, there can be poems that are one type of poem if you just hear them and when you read them on paper, you get a whole new interpretation or slant to them.

Anyway, I just didn't get Sinead Morrisey's poem "Through the Square" window which was judged the window of the highly prestigious and rich National Poetry Prize. I thought it was just me. I can be quite thick on poems. And stories, sometimes. And films too. I got all the way to the end of The Sixth Sense without twigging. She read it at the Poetry Now festival (not a reading out loud poem, I suggest) but that was the right thing to do although, if she mentioned it won the competition, I missed that bit. I didn't get it/ Was it about Playschool ("Through the round window, the arched window or the square window, children?")

And I read it too online and I still didn't get what quality made it the winner. And then it turns out, I was not alone. Carol Rumens in the Guardian agreed with me. If she had been judging, it wouldn't have won.

And the lesson here, apart from that there are reading out loud poems etc..., is that just because your poem/story/novel/screenplay doesn't win or get shortlisted in a competition, or accepted in a magazine or by an agent or staged or whatever, doesn't mean there isn't someone else out there who will recognise the quality that makes it uniquely yours and a winner.