A day without rhyme or reason

As though to mark the occasion, Carol Ann Duffy launched P Day with a fine display of what the laureateship does to a talent by reading -- aloud, too -- a piece called Atlas that had me thinking.

Specifically, I was thinking: “Is it just me, or is that a really bad advert for poetry?” By the end I was thinking back to the first line the considerate Ms Duffy had spoken: “Give him strength...”

But such is verse: each to his own, sure in the knowledge that he will be on his own. Who reads poetry? Publishers say they can’t give the stuff away. I would have voted for Don Paterson’s book, and for Robin Robertson as best Forward single-poem author (another Scot: is something going on?), but a £10,000 award is as good as it ever gets in poetry-money. This art wouldn’t keep a frugal rabbit.

Which tends to suggest that the avowed poetry lovers who voted for Old Possum do not sully their passion by actually buying books. According to the BBC, 18,000 people expressed a preference online to put Eliot a tilted nose ahead of John Donne, Benjamin Zephaniah, Wilfred Owen and Philip Larkin (Burns, the local boy, was well down the field). And this, too, is odd.

If you read poetry at all, and if you read it in such a way as to arrive at a favourite, and if you can be bothered to go online to vote for anything, what are you -- the word is probably obligatory -- celebrating, exactly? Why does the BBC imagine that the staging of Strictly Come Versifying is the best way to aid a perennially frail art, never mind its almost-living practitioners?

It must have something to do with the C word, “culture”. This, as those who practise loose talk remind us, is always a good thing. We can’t have too much of it.

Culture is the five-servings-a-day green veg of intellectual life, even if -- or perhaps especially -- when the esteem granted is inversely proportionate to knowledge or actual interest. How could the poor BBC have coped with poetry without anexciting online vote?

Don Paterson won’t get rich from his book Rain, though. Herta Mueller, former Romanian dissident, will simply make space for the annual slew of articles wondering how the Nobel could go to another foreigner “we” have never heard of. And I’ll still be wondering: Eliot, eh?

Far be it from me -- or not so far -- to note that the BBC had a repeat showing of an Arena documentary on TS scheduled for last Thursday night, long before the result of the vote was announced.

Nor would I demand a head-count of all the declared fans who can name the Eliot poem that kicks off with “Midwinter spring is its own season/Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown...” and tell me why it’s the bees knees.

But there I go again: probably elitist and seriously doubting a popular affection for the author of the effortlessly pompous, pseudo-liturgical, sub-Tennysonian Four Quartets. Perhaps it’s the Christmas one everyone likes. Perhaps I underestimate a liking for anti-Semitic, God-bothering

reactionaries reputedly callous to their first wives. In any case, did no-one tell “the nation” that its favourite was an American, more or less?

I can manage to admire Eliot long after the usual adolescent fascination has abated, but I defy anyone to love that curious figure. If he is truly the favourite of the poetry-reading minority, strange things are going on in the country (or “Wasteland UK” as we shall now call it).

The claim that most teachers couldn’t tell a poet from a postmaster is reasonable. But Eliot? Tell me -- for I will believe it gratefully -- that it is all the fault of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cats.

I don’t have favourite poets. That would, I think, be missing most of the point. (Despising dead writers is another matter, and a game anyone can play). But the real risk with National Poetry Day and favourite poet polls is the institutionalisation, if you like, of unpopularity.

Face it, where verse is concerned, most people leave school wondering what all that was about. The “teaching” of poetry might as well be aversion therapy.

A dedicated day and a brief flurry of chatter over a patrician who conflated complexity and class distinctions is liable to put off more people than it converts.

At this rate -- if it hasn’t already happened -- poetry will have the status of opera, exclusive and impenetrable to outsiders.The Poetry Society and the BBC would argue, no doubt, that polls and poetry days are designed to have the opposite effect. They would probably say that they aim to extend the franchise for art, to democratise enjoyment.

But the more likely effect of their efforts will be to make poetry, its reading and writing, into a club for initiates only. The great majority who find the very idea of verse tedious and incomprehensible will not be converted by gimmicks.

Why should they be converted, in any case? Removing obstacles is one thing. Most young children think poetry is fascinating; most teenagers run a mile: why is that?

Too many people, meanwhile, associate this art with higher education, as though it can’t ever be enjoyed without specialist training and equipment. Even in the case of ostentatious Eliot, this is nonsense: the footnotes to The Wasteland were only put in to pad out the book.

Yet none of this is to say that anyone “ought” to know -- or, worse, “appreciate” -- poems and poetry. Art is not, or should not be, a test, a measure of status, an exam you have to pass. You are not socially inadequate if poetry leaves you baffled. And you are not helped to discover new worlds if verse is made to seem exclusive and intimidating.

Anyone can reach a judgement about Eliot without having to wonder every five minutes if they have missed the point.

Don’t have a national day; don’t have a vote: let people come to the stuff unhindered, preferably by accident.

Personally, I would have picked WH Auden as Eliot’s superior in most respects, but what do I know? He failed to make the top ten, as did -- so much for the curriculum -- Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. This suggests, oddly, that even book sales are no guide to the opinions of those who voted -- early, no doubt, but how often? -- in the BBC’s poll. As for yon Mr Shakespeare, he didn’t even get a mention in the company of Larkin and daffy old John Betjeman.

Was the cause of poetry therefore advanced? I can’t see it myself. Then again, I cannot quite see that poetry should be a cause, like some charity, with its own awareness day.

It is something that anyone can do, some can do well, and a very few can do in such a way as to remind you that this art is language perfected, capable of containing the world in a handful of words. And all this, if needs be, with just a pencil, the back of an envelope, and an optional drinking problem.

The fact that a National Poetry Day is deemed necessary is intended to tell us, presumably, that the art needs help. Given that it has survived for a couple of

thousands of years, I’m sceptical. A National Not Reading Dan Brown Day might be more useful, or at least a National Not Ruining Poetry for the Class Day. Every little helps.

Better still, why not make the reading of verse illegal? That would catch the attention of Britain’s youth. Done for free-versing, caught in possession of a sonnet: think of the cachet.

This is a dissenting art, after all, not some cultural heirloom. So ban poetry now, and stand well back.