Who Wants to be Poet Laureate?
I've been thinking about who should take up the poet laureateship when Andrew Motion stands down and I've come to the conclusion that perhaps no-one should. It seems something of a poisoned chalice, a muse-killing job, for a start. Motion may well have done remarkable things in his time in office, but it's nothing to do with the poems he wrote for others.
"...every time there's been a royal birth or wedding or death in the past 10 years," Motion told the Guardian, "a terrible low rumble has begun in newsrooms across the country. A rumble that has led to some people ringing me up to ask whether I'm 'thinking of doing something'. The voice at the other end of the line puts the question in such a way as to make me feel that I'll be castigated as an idle, sherry-swilling republican if I don't take the top off my pen and start rhyming at once."
What poet wants that kind of pressure? What writer? If something doesn't move you, why write about it?
Ted Hughes is one of the few modern laureates who have escaped with reputation intact; but then he co-opted the Royal family into his views of nature in such a way that they were transfigured almost beyond recognition. His gloriously baffling poem for the Queen Mother comparing her - if memory serves - to an oak tree was at once wonderful and terrible, and several steps above Motion's Royal poems, which seem born of indifference.
Certainly Motion has done many things to make poetry more accessible - the Poetry Archive being the most notable example. And he has written topical poems in abundance, on liberty, homelessness, 9/11, the Paddington rail disaster and more. But as Ezra Pound wrote, "Poetry is news that stays news". Topical poems rarely live beyond a few months, if you're lucky. Topicality creates ephemeral poetry, poems you wrap your chips in the next week, and that isn't helpful - it hardens the common view that poetry is irrelevant, an artform of passing meaning that connects with no one beyond a brief moment, usually in childhood.
I've written topical, satirical versicles (so called because they melt to nothing in The Sun if you don't consume them quickly) - 150 or so of them - on "celebrities, politicans and other scoundrels", so I know how unnecessary they are. Of those 150 or so versicles, perhaps ten have a merit that will see them last beyond a decade. The rest are worthless and will not stay news. They were fun to write, all of them, because I was contemplating the strange state of society at the start of the new millennium, but that's all they were. The only thing they did for me was teach me to delve deep into the structures of other people's verse in my attempts at parody.
My own writing and understanding of a poem's structure is stronger as a consequence. But they changed nothing, like nearly all topical verse.If a new laureate is to be appointed, then perhaps they should eschew the tradition of writing poems for royal occasions and just get down to the business of promoting poetry as something relevant to the cultural, intellectual life of all of Britain. Perhaps they should encourage the people who actually care about the Royal family to write the poems in celebration instead. An open poetry competition, theme "The Death of Queen Elizabeth", would certainly get media attention and some interesting poems sent in.
A Laureate needs to get into schools, onto the streets, exciting children with poetry in a way that only a poet can. A performer with a resounding love and exhaustive knowledge of poetry would be ideal. Get kids interested in poetry without the usual murder committed by too many disinterested teachers hacking them to pieces in the classroom and a great service to poetry will have been done. In the meantime, all I know for sure is that anyone who actually wants the laureateship should perhaps not be allowed it.
