In the world of contemporary poetry, a growing list of prizes is regularly attached to the books published each year. A few hardy – or deluded – PR types pursue the apparently noble cause of popularising poetry, by rebranding (sexifying) it through minor-celebrity tie-ins, or by redefining what counts as poetry entirely. Even so, the fact remains that, on the whole, the real stuff is – and for a long time has been – of niche interest. As part of marketeers’ attempts to insist on the case for a particular poet’s urgency, revolutionary capacity or soul-raising merit, a great deal of emphasis is forced onto the person of the poet themselves: their background, politics, schooling and appearance are all ripe for exploitation as ways of getting eyes on their work — in many cases taking precedence over whether the writing itself will reward that attention. For many poets, this sort of personal scrutiny is deeply uncomfortable but seemingly unavoidable.  

Denise Riley is one of them. An exemplary poet – her 2016 collection, Say Something Back, presents a strong case for being one of the finest of this century – she’s also an extraordinary thinker. Her new book, A Chorus of Ears, makes available in print adapted versions of her Clark Lectures, delivered in 2024 at Trinity College, Cambridge. It allows us to re-examine at a foundational level what poetry is: how it’s made or, perhaps more precisely, how it comes about. Equally vitally – especially in this marketing-saturated climate – Riley discusses how wrong-headed it is to try to centre the poet instead of focusing on the poem, its own inner voice and its logic. As Riley so ably points out, for a poet to receive all the credit for a poem is akin to ‘being warmly congratulated on how likeable your children are, as if this were all your own doing’. It’s a damaging mistake because it prevents scrutiny of poetry from focusing on the art and instead, in her brilliant description, forces writers into something resembling an atrocity exhibition: ‘led across some lime-lit public stage to trot as if in a gymkhana. Nervy ponies, rosettes clamped onto their ears, bright ribbons in their manes.’ 

This spectacle would be bad enough in itself – all this showbiz for introverts – but Riley brings us back to an older understanding of a lyric poem as springing from something more like a visitation, or at least a wrangling with inner and outer voices, than an expression of