Polished poetry and glittering prizes

Poets are minor carnivores, preying on their own (and everybody else's) vulnerability. Vulnerability is poetry's stock-in-trade. Now a poem about it has won me first prize in the National Poetry Competition: an unvulnerable-looking pounds 4,000, half of it tax-free. (Only half, because I entered myself. If my publisher had done it, it would be all tax-free).

Weird. It's not what poems usually do. You work away obsessively several days then tinker over weeks, alternately thinking "This is great"/"What a mess". Then suddenly it doesn't want you any more. When a poem wins something you look at its words (I now know) with a new eye. They take up the same space on a microchip, but how much is each worth? I tried to work it out but got dizzy. If I had cut a word, would the ones left be worth more?

Poems don't get that sort of money. They get a bit, never commensurate with work done on them: pounds 25 plus a poetry magazine; pounds 100 from a national newspaper. Four thousand pounds is incommensurate the other way.

I nearly didn't send this poem in. It took a month after seeing Andy Goldsworthy's sculpture in The Independent on Sunday to beat into any shape. That happened the day before the deadline. Then it appalled me. (Talking Trees? Whatever next? This is Tolkein going on Traherne.) "You are a mess," I told it. "You need six months' intensive care." I put it in a drawer. Two minutes later I fished it out and sent it off with the entry fee, regretting pounds 5 and a first-class stamp.

The prize-giving at the Poetry Society in Covent Garden last week was a blur: wine flowing an hour after things were supposed to stop, a fairy- tale cheque in my jeans, plus three black boxes containing a Mont Blanc pen and its entourage of inkwell, etc. I shyly told Andrea from Mont Blanc that I usually write with a biro. (I didn't breathe computers.) Oh, she said with the charm of a duchess putting someone at ease with Bollinger by calling for stout. "We'll exchange it for a biro." But I'll stick with the pen.

"Avoid bearing down too hard when writing," says its instructions. I couldn't part with a pen that tells me that. It has a "special highly expressive nib" and describes what you've always wanted to know, "the ideal writing position". The mystical filling instructions include a drawing of an aeroplane. "Always fill your pen completely before travelling by air." Mont Blanc, you see, knows poets write flight-poems under the influence of free spirits.

My pen has a white marigold at the tip, is "designed to fit comfortably in the hand" (Andrea was afraid it might be too big for mine) and "provide a lifetime of writing pleasure". To men, apparently - the illustrations have a man writing to his mate, Bob, about strenuous chess problems. The nib, "adorned with intricate platinum inlay", has a "handmade tip of iridium alloy, rarer than gold and significantly harder than steel".

Wonderful. Wonderful. But I'm worried I might start writing like a man. "The poet Joachim Ringelnatz gave this pen his ultimate tribute". This phrase (echoes of Fanny Hill) means a four-line address to his awe-inspiring tool.

My pen wants to be polished with a jeweller's cloth, an attention you could give words instead. I always got C for handwriting and have never had a mature relationship with any ink-filled object. I'm not their type. I suppose I'll learn. I've had it five days now but had too much work (on a laptop) to begin with proper awe. One day, I'll fill it.

A real pen, first prize out of 7,000 anonymous poems, money to fill your overdraft - this is what people dream of when they try an Arvon poetry course or a workshop listed in the pages of Poetry London Newsletter. (Catch the launch-reading for the next issue, on 27 February, in London's most spookily glamorous venue, the Old Operating Theatre.) "You'll have to write differently now," says Chris Meade, helping me look at my pen.

Chris runs the Poetry Society, its crimson basement, the Poetry Map on the Internet, the award-winning Poetry Cafe. Well Chris, thanks for everything. When I write now I promise I'll try out recommended positions, and not bear down too hard.