by Merrick
As we see a change of Poet Laureate, the panel on last week’s Any Questions - including the outgoing Laureate, Andrew Motion - were asked to explain the point of the role.
For a spineless New Labour schmuck, Liam Byrne was very soulful.
Well I think this is a great question the day after Shakespeare’s birthday. Our language is one of the most beautiful things about this country and somebody once called poetry compressed emotion and I think that what Poet Laureates can do, is that they can compress emotion and in doing that they can actually just remind us of the things that we have got in common.
Arthur Miller once said that he wrote to help people feel less alone and actually great language and great poetry in the Arts are one of the things that tell us that we have got 10 times more in common with each other in this country than the things that set us apart.
There’s some great sentiment about literature and art in there. But that is not a defence of the Poet Laureate, though. Does Byrne really think the Poet Laureate articulates what binds us?
Who among us spent 2006 being relieved at the Queen’s 80th birthday? Yet Motion, telling us what we have in common, said in a poem addressed to her
The black-and-white of certainty dissolves,
The single mind insists on several lives,
The ways to measure truth elaborate:
The Golden rule, your constancy, survives.
Close relatives and those getting paid. That’s all I can think of who’d be able to retain their breakfast on hearing such emetic drivel.
Andrew Motion himself said the point of the Laureate’s role was
to do with fulfilling an ambassadorial role for poetry essentially. And you don’t have to be the best poet in the country to be a good Poet Laureate, but what you do have to do in this day and age, though this may be simply because this is how I have tried to turn the post round, is to try and find a way of doing good for poetry which allows it to be manifestly in the lives of everybody, but perhaps especially in the lives of children who have it squeezed out of their curriculum by various means, not to do with teachers but to do with the curriculum invariably.
He received huge applause, seemingly for saying children should have more poetry. And who could disagree with that? But his method, however, doesn’t bear scrutiny.
Sitting off in an ivory tower writing sycophantic sludge about the marriage of Prince Edward to Sophie Whatsherface, or being about the only person in the UK to make a public display of being bothered with the Golden Jubilee, that connects with children does it?
As I walk past my local primary school I see children happily scampering around the playground. I know they can only feel at peace with one another thanks to Andrew Motion writing a cantata marking Prince Charles’ 60th birthday.
Go on, can you even tell me what year that was in? So negligible is the Laureate’s role, so irrelevant their subjects and output, that we can’t even name the events they commemorate let alone quote the work.
In direct opposition to what Motion claims for enlightening children, the Laureate makes poetry seem as pointless, distant, affected, arrogant and overindulged as the royal family themselves.
Sickening as it is to see Iggy Pop hawk car insurance, at least you know car insurance has some useful purpose. As Laureate, you’re a salesperson for an entirely pointless, irrelevant and anti-democratic institution. You’re just Jennie Bond with rhyme, a dancing monkey to amuse the king. Everything art shouldn’t be.
As Roy Hattersley’s brilliantly witty piece about the Laureateship a few years ago observed
Poets are - or should be - outsiders. Like Hamlet after his father’s death, they ought to feel uncomfortable at court.