Supposedly a poet, so show it (From The Northern Echo)

Supposedly a poet, so show it

12:07pm Tuesday 16th June 2009

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EENY, meeny, miny mo; put the baby on the po... I apologise for this lurch into poetry, but I have been sorely provoked by the new Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, whose first effort since her appointment is called Politics and starts like this: “How it makes of your face a stone that aches to weep, of your heart a fist, clenched or thumping, sweating blood, of your tongue an iron latch with no door.”

It’s pretty feeble, but not as sinister as one she wrote earlier: “Today I am going to kill something; anything; I have had enough of being ignored; I’m going to play God.”

I don’t so much object to these lines because they might encourage readers to commit murder, but purely on the grounds that they do not make a poem, or even a part of a poem. There is too much sloppy talk about poetry. Actually, few people can write poems.

I would say about as many as could write a symphony or paint a portrait.

The idea that everyone can write poems arises simply because no one is clear as to what a real poem is. As a result, any group of words which don’t quite extend to the margins on the page get to be described as a poem.

In truth, poetry is an art and a skill, even more difficult than writing a short story or a novel. To become even a half-decent poet you need to work at it for years, to think, delete, revise, chuck away and start again. Only in this way do you have the vaguest chance of entering what TS Eliot called the “intolerable wrestle with words and meanings”.

Sometimes a poem can appear quite by chance. For example, when I first read that poem by Duffy about killing, it was on the same page as the weather forecast by Francis Wilson. In his predictions for the day’s weather there occurred these words: “Glossy blossoms in heavy clusters on the cherry and apple trees – promise good times to come...”

Well, it’s not Keats or Wordsworth, but say it out loud, and don’t you agree it has charm and a certain rhythm? At any rate it’s a damn sight better than Duffy’s murderous dirge.

Great poets are accused of elitism. But why elitism should be such a crime I don’t know.

Nobody criticises a premiership footballer or a world-class sprinter for being better at their sport than most other people. So why is it only artists and literary geniuses who attract the politics of envy? To be a great poet it is necessary to be among the elite. But great poets are not unintelligible.

Back to Eliot again – about a typist roughly treated by her boyfriend – for great tenderness and heartbreak: “She turns and looks a moment in the glass; hardly aware of her departed lover; her brain allows one halfformed thought to pass; ‘Well now that’s done, and I’m glad it’s over.’ When lovely woman stoops to folly and paces about her room again alone; she smooths her hair with automatic hand; and puts a record on the gramophone.” Those lines always make me cry with sympathy for the poor girl.

The greatest and most serious poets often turn out to have the knack of being amusing, too. Mention Ezra Pound and immediately up goes the cry of “elitist”. But I love his parody of Housman: “Come tum tum Greek Ulysses come, caress these shores with me; the windblown sea has wet my bum; and here the beer is free.”

Go away and write a poem about it Ms Duffy – if you think you can.

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