Jeremy Paxman had some choice words for poets in early June 2014. ‘I think poetry has really rather connived at its own irrelevance,’ he lamented. ‘It seems to me very often that poets now seem to be talking to other poets and that is not talking to people as a whole.’ Normally, such opinions from a broadcaster and quiz show host who had otherwise shown little interest in the state of contemporary poetry would not have circulated so widely in traditional media outlets, nor, as a result, been criticised so widely on social media. Except in this case, Paxman had been appointed chair of the judging panel for the UK's Forward Prizes, and these statements were made in conjunction with the announcement of its shortlists. The response from the supposedly self- defeating poetry community was better than immediate. Alison Flood, first reporting the story in the Guardian newspaper, had already collated responses from eminent poets and critics. Added to Paxman's reproach, however, Flood's mention of poetry's declining sales, alongside a concession by Michael Symmons Roberts, a previous winner and judge, that Paxman's censure was ‘not without foundation in terms of the symptoms’, had set the charges for an explosive defence of poetry beyond those solicited responses, in the more than 7,500 shares of the Guardian article, 428 comments below it (before closed), reprintings of the story in other newspapers, and any number of social media posts, blogs, or comment pieces in those same mainstream outlets. The Guardian published a longer response by the poet George Szirtes and a further letter responding to Szirtes that same week, while the awarding of the prizes that September were another occasion for weighing Paxman's comments against the work by winners Kei Miller and Liz Berry.

In his formative study of cultural prizes, The Economy of Prestige (2005), James F. English argues that this proliferating commentary and meta- commentary is essential to prizes’ function. ‘Much of it, indeed,’ he writes, ‘is simply part of the extra- institutional apparatus of this or that particular prize, part of the prize's undeclared and perhaps unwitting publicity machinery, even and especially when its posture is a scandalized or condescending one.’