I’m going to do things a bit differently and count down from 5^th to 1^st, just to prolong the tension. I’m imagining families up and down the country huddling round their laptops, scrolling down inch by inch, unable to bear the suspense of not yet knowing whether Carol Ann Duffy’s made it to number one…

I’ve had a busy week here, but we’re moving steadily towards the top five. Time to place your bets on the identity of the 2012 Poetry Premier League champion…

(Suggested prizes for the first correct guess: A personalised ‘bee-cosy’ knitted by Carol Ann Duffy; Life-size replica of the Tollund Man, to be presented by Seamus Heaney;  ’Poetry mafia’ poster featuring Sean O’ Brien’s head photoshopped onto Vito Corleone’s body.)

The mid-table Stokes and West Broms of British poetry. If you’re a ‘trophy cabinet half-full’ sort of person, they’ll be challenging for European glory next year; if, on the other hand, you believe the trophy cabinet’s half-empty, they could be plummeting towards the relegation places.

The Wolves of British poetry… and the Wigan, the Q.P.R, the Bolton…  For an explanation of what the Poetry Premier League is all about, and how I arrived at the points totals, please read this post, which goes into it all in slightly confusing detail.

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My attempt to find the ‘best’ poets in Britain over the last five years, or at least the ones who’ve been winning the awards and getting published in the big magazines.

THE CHAMPIONSHIP

Brief explanation for readers who’d rather chew through their keyboard than have anything to do with football: The Championship is the league directly below the Premier League (the poetic equivalent of which will be published soon), and contains the teams ranked 21st to 44th. Here are the corresponding poets:

 Since starting this blog, I’ve been hurled off the Creative Writing MA bandwagon and crushed under the onrushing wheels of ‘the real world’, working long hours for no money at all, but — as the old saying goes — you’re never too busy to spend an afternoon on Excel fine-tuning a complex system of ranking poets based on their publications and prizes over the last five years.

Auto da fé

-Elias Canetti

   By most accounts Elias Canetti is a writer who deserves to be forgotten. Clive James describes him as ‘a particularly bright egomaniac’ with ‘limitless reserves of envy and recrimination’, and remembers an afternoon in a coffee house (The Vienna Cup) in Hampstead when ‘intelligent beauties lined up to be treated like dirt’ (Canetti’s admirers included Kathleen Raine and Iris Murdoch) and Canetti ‘didn’t even pretend to be polite.’ Robert Fulford calls Canetti ‘an unashamed egotist’ who ‘became famous even though most people didn’t know what he was famous for’ (in some respects the Kim Kardashian of the highbrow literary world). Auto da fé, his only significant work of fiction, seemed to have been read by only one person in the whole of England — Arthur Waley, an expert on Chinese literature (the book’s main character, Paul Kien, is a leading Sinologist).