Miss B. Field, sensationally stripped of the T.S. Eliot Award in 1977 on a technicality because, in the words of a letter published in The Lonesome Echo and signed by 83 leading poets, “she ain’t no human being,” nevertheless continued her meteoric rise to poetic superstardom by winning the Ted Hughes Award. Given her status as a field, she is unable to read or write. Nevertheless she has overcome such challenges as might have defeated those of lesser ambition. Field conjures poems as structures of grass and wind, cowpats, weeds and flowers, punctuated by lost sheep and broken fences. She has no collections. “My life is a poem in progress,” she told The Economist. “My new collaboration with Ruby Rabbit is my most politically charged work to date satirising the house-building industry. Who needs words when you have grass?”
[photo from StevenM_61's photostream, used under a Creative Commons License.]
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