The Poet Laureate, documents life through stanza,
But it's really as relevant, as a fat Tony Danza.
This, the above work of art, is my rhythmically woeful attempt at a rhyming couplet. I ask you to drink in it's juvenile charm because- I'm proud of it. No really, I am. I found it difficult to compose: I had to use an on-line rhyming dictionary and everything. I was close to tearing my ears off in frustration at my inability to rhyme the world “laureate”, then spent ages mulling on an effective rhyming scheme, before settling on the glorious AA scheme you see before you, and I still managed to shoehorn in a pun about Tony Danza. Although, I have no idea whether he is fat or not. Why? I don't hear you ask. Because recently I came across this:
Afterwards, I found him alone at the bar and asked him what went wrong. It's the shirt, he said. When I pull it on it hangs on my back like a shroud, or a poisoned jerkin from Grimm seeping its curse on to my skin, the worst tattoo.
I shower and shave before I shrug on the shirt, smell like a dream; but the shirt sours my scent with the sweat and stink of fear. It's got my number.
I poured him another shot. Speak on, my son. He did.
I've wanted to sport the shirt since I was a kid, but now when I do it makes me sick, weak, paranoid.
All night above the team hotel, the moon is the ball in a penalty kick. Tens of thousands of fierce stars are booing me. A screech owl is the referee.
The wind's a crowd, forty years long, bawling a filthy song about my Wag. It's the bloody shirt! He started to blub like a big girl's blouse and I felt a fleeting pity.
Don't cry, I said, at the end of the day you'll be back on 100K a week and playing for City.
This is the latest in line of sporting poems by our current poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy. And it has proven beyond doubt that the position of Poet Laureate is the most utterly, utterly, pointless position in the whole country. And I include whatever it is Nick Clegg does in that assessment. I'm not an expert on poetry but, when I read the above “poem,” it made me hate language. It made me hate all forms of communication; it made me pray for a regression back to the use of guttural sounds and violent sexual advances as our only forms of interaction, in the hope that something so mortifyingly shit could never be committed to coherency ever again. I'm not an expert on poetry, but I don't think that's a good reaction.
It bothers me how smug poetry aficionado's react when I mention that, shock horror, I don't particularly like poetry! How they chuckle to their friends, how they shake their dreadlocked heads, how they look at me like I just admitted I have difficulty tying my own shoelaces. Well you know what? I'm right. Poetry is the easiest and least rewarding of all artforms. And I include whatever it is Nick Clegg does in that assessment. I don't look down on them when they say they've never played Call of Duty. And Call of Duty is better than anything Alexander Pope ever wrote, and that a fact. I know this a contentious argument but I will attempt to illustrate my point. Below is a very famous poem by William Carlos Willliams
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
I had a poetry teacher spend an entire term trying to explain to me why that was good, why the clarity of language is a brilliant example of Modernist American poetry, how through work such as this Williams was one of the forebearers of imagism, and why there is art in it's simplicity. And I just don't get it. It's just not good. I don't like Hiakus, I don't like sonnetts, I haven't enjoyed a limmerick since I was 13 and, do you know what? I'm o.k. with that. Fine and Dandy, thank you very much and people should be o.k. that I'm o.k. with it. So why should I be made to feel like the intellectual equivalent of a dog learning to fetch a stick?
I attended a poetry evening recently and it was the most soul destroying experience of my life. When asked for my opinion of her set by an angry ginger woman, who uncannily resembled Susan Boyle's face drawn onto a digestive biscuit, I politely offered that poetry wasn't really “my scene”- the smug condensation I was met with was tangible, and was joined by a room full of pretentious nitwits exhaling in my direction at the same time. The smell was quite horrific. I later found out this woman didn't even own a T.V! I was getting grief for being an intellectually inferior being from someone who had never even seen the Wire, and, I'm sorry, but this just doesn't wash with me, go fuck off back to your audience of fat girls and thirtysomething men in berries, because I think you're an idiot. Someone once remarked to me that if you can't become a writer you become a poet. And there is truth in that. I believe a poet is to writers what a ball juggler is to footballers, someone who can be impressive in small bursts and knows a number of impressive tricks but is lacking and not able to compete on the real field of play. Ross from Friends described his music as wordless, sound poems and I feel poems are soundless, word songs and are exactly as dull as that sounds. Most poetry is written and performed by pseudo intellectuals with ideas above their station, who, for some bizarre reason, believe that their drippy metaphors for the fact live hasn't kissed them on the arse is somehow art- it's not. I don't think anyone should be considered a poet unless their dead, and even then I'm on the fence.
I should qualify myself at this point and say I don't hate poetry entirely. I do, however, think there should be a craft to it; there should be a rhyme scheme, there should be meter and there should be worldplay. I don't hate poetry, I just don't get it. And that's what bothers me. Why is there such intellectual snobbery in a dying art form? Why do people feel their love of Paradise Lost is somehow greater and more intellectually satisfying than my love of the Final Fantasy series? The Final Fantasy series has just as much creativity, invention and poetry as Milton's overrated ripoff of the Book of Genesis. Play Final Fantasy 7 on the Playstation and it's biblical in it's scope, why can't this be as celebrated as some words cobbled together and left to your own imagination? Because people are pretentious.
I think my main problem comes down to free verse poetry more than anything. Art critics will find meaning in anything, mnaking the vast majority of free verse poetry redundant, hence Tracy Emin, Damien Hirst, the Turner Prize, Gillian Clarke. When there is a craft on display such as painting or sculpture, I can appreciate it. The Raven was criticised by William Butler Yeats for being “insincere and vulgar” and for being, simply, a “rhyming trick” But that's what I love about it. I love it's artificiality, I can get on board with that. It's clever, I can look at it and think "I couldn't do that", and that should be the case with all great art. And I find it a damn sight more entertaining than something like Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas which is just a drunk throwing metaphors at a page and seeing what sticks. Jimmy Carr writes brilliantly clever one liners but his jokes are not afforded the same intellectual integrity as Haikus and that's deeply unfair. I don't think a well crafted Haiku has anything to offer that a one-liner doesn't, but because it's classed as poetry it's given it. This is why I hate free verse poetry, because readers will do your work for you, they will intellectualise something that has no right to be intellectualised, giving it meaning that it doesn't deserve and that it's composer hasn't earned.
So what this rambling, incoherent entry basically amounts to is that anyone can write free verse poetry because no one knows if it's any good, it's subjective and it's easy. It's an art form for people without talent, who can't admit to themselves that they are not the creative, haunted soul they believe, but merely a stuck up moaner. Poetry has no bearing on Modern Britain and the post of poet laureate is meaningless. It should at least be replaced with some form of literature that people actually care about- a twitter laureate, perhaps? I don't get poetry and I think that should be celebrated, because most poetry isn't very good. Instead of pseudo intellectual bellends looking down on me in the way that only someone who can't grow a proper moustache can, people should celebrate true art forms of the 21st century: Flash Animation, stand up comedy, twitter (which is essentially no different to Haikus) and forget about an outdated, meaningless art form which hasn't been relevant since World War 2.
**Nb On the subject of Haikus my friend Ed came up with the following during a session in our student union, and it remains the greatest Haiku I have ever heard.
Hitler posseses
the greatest moustache ever
Shame about the jews.
You will never, ever beat that.
