Sunday's Observer reported a new 'poetry boom', a renaissance in the art marked by sell-out festivals, soaring sales and all kinds of mayhem and mania going on.
It is a story that is recycled every few years, usually coinciding with no new discovery about Shakespeare or other satisfyingly esoteric news to fill half a page with. If there's been no recent sighting of a beast on Bodmin Moor, nobody building a moon rocket in a garden shed or no teenage school student eloping with a teacher, then it must be time to wheel out the one about a new fashion for poetry.
It happened in the sixties with Adrian Mitchell, Ban the Bomb and the Liverpool Poets deciding that the likes of Edmund Spenser were too boring for them, and it's happened regularly since. The estimable John Cooper-Clarke could be forgiven if he has tired of being cited as in the vanguard but he probably won't if it keeps him in work.
What it means, of course, is performance poetry and this time it's Kate Tempest downgrading the art to an accessible level that abhors such deliberate difficulty as that espoused by Geoffrey Hill. It doesn't mean that suddenly, rather than pilates or model railways, some of non-campus lower middle class have taken to composing gently ironic sestinas or crafting syllabic sonnets to soothe away the anxieties of our difficult times. Would that it were, Mr. Ponsonby, would that it were.
So let's not be too alarmed. The disparate network of fuzzily overlapping societies, groups, magazines and readings is probably not going to be over-run by hordes of ranting doggerel-mongers full of pent-up anger and righteousness. They have always come and gone. Neither is it likely that any of our more eminent names, like Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage or Andrew Motion, those three successive Poet Laureates in no particular order, are suddenly to become the sort of national figure that Tennyson was and we should all be grateful for that, including them.
No, it was no more than another recondite piece of journalism swindling readers of their time and money by providing them with some words to read on a Sunday. It is unlikely to cause any more waves than a few cosmopolitan types looking up from their coffee and thinking, wow, poetry, how marvellous.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I publish booklets of my own poems, or did. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become. It keeps me out of more trouble than it gets me into. I hope you find at least some of it worthwhile.
