Tonight:
9°c
Once upon a time, I used to think that poets were quite unworldly and cared for nothing but their art. Then I started to meet some. The financial rewards may be negligible and the public honours available few but that doesn't make poets ethereally unconcerned with such trifles. Quite the opposite. They compete for the few goodies going with alarming ferocity. Ferrets in a sack show more politesse.
The Poet Laureate is paid £5,000 plus a butt of sherry. The Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford does marginally better, receiving a stipend of £6,091 per annum, plus an extra £40 for giving the “Creweian Oration” every other year.
But it's the glory, of course. Even Philip Larkin, who turned down the laureateship (“Mrs T was very nice about my not wanting it”), was tempted by the Oxford chair. But he refused to let his name go forward, saying typically that he had “really very little interest in poetry in the abstract”.
The current Professor of Poetry, Christopher Ricks, is no poet. He's just the best scholar and critic of poetry we have, who has definitively edited Tennyson and Milton, and is currently at work on a much-needed critical edition of the poetry of T S Eliot. Ricks leaves this year.
An election for his successor will be held in May. Every past or present member of the university will be entitled to vote, while to stand, a candidate needs only to be nominated by 12 individuals.
So far, Ruth Padel has confirmed she will stand, pointing out that there have been 43 men in the post so far and no women. Her work includes a recent sequence about the life of her great-great-grandfather Charles Darwin, a travel-memoir about tigers and a book about guitar heroes, I'm a Man: Sex, Gods and Rock'n'Roll. The TLS once hinted at her style by saying it was “as if Wallace Stevens had hijacked Sylvia Plath with a dash of punk Sappho thrown in”, a scenario that hardly bears thinking about.
Andrew Motion, although stepping down from the laureateship this year, has ruled himself out of the contest, saying he needs “a break from this sort of public poet-ing”. Or perhaps he does not care to invite a vote on the quality of his verse.
Other candidates being mooted include Derek Walcott and Anne Carson, the loser against Ricks last time. But nobody yet has named the obvious best poet for the job, Geoffrey Hill.
Hill is notoriously considered a “difficult” poet, profoundly allusive and fiercely restrained, as well as passionate and lyrical. But nobody in his time has taken the art of poetry more seriously, both as a practitioner and in his formidable critical writing. For Hill, “a poet's words and rhythms are not so much his utterance as his resistance”.
If the university wants to show that poetry still matters, there can be no other choice.
* Giant greenhouses in Kent, painfully known as “Thanet Earth”, have just gone into production, growing out-of-season salad items to replace imports from Spain and Morocco. The first quarter of a million cucumbers were picked last week. We'll all be dining Thanet-style, whether we like it or not.
A good thing? The claim is that Thanet salad will have a much smaller carbon footprint. Being grown hydroponically, without any soil or real sun, the cucumbers may not have much flavour but that's hardly a problem with cukes.
A blot on the landscape, though? Anywhere else but not in Thanet, I submit. Unless you prefer cabbages stretching to the horizon.
Switch on the reading lamp
It caused a little stir this week when, in a poll for World Book Day, two-thirds of respondents boldly admitted that they have sometimes claimed to have read books they haven't. But it's a pointless confession. The dishonesty is just as much on the other side. You need only to read, or glance through, French critic Pierre Bayard's tract How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read to know that it doesn't mean what you think when you truthfully say you have read a book.
“What we preserve of the books we read is in truth no more than a few fragments afloat, like so many islands, on an ocean of oblivion,” says Bayard. Every reader knows that's right. Not even islands, I'd say, just a bit of flotsam and jetsam bobbing by. That doesn't mean we shouldn't bother to read at all, though. It means we should re-read, then re-read again. Although possibly not any more World Book Day polls.
Beware this jabberwocky
Andrew Marr is a phenomenon — and not only for his ears. He is tireless. It is not enough for him to present Sunday AM and then Start the Week, he is also now telling us all about Darwin's Dangerous Idea on BBC2. Marr claims he's just fending off his own “indolent streak”. The truth, though, is that he is driven by genuine and uncontrollable enthusiasm for all kinds of debate and ideas. He truly, madly, deeply loves all this jabber.
Everybody in the business of opinionation feels much the same, I fear — rather a misrepresentation of the population at large, perhaps — yet still Marr soars above them all. He is the busybody's busybody. There's only one remedy, I find, whenever he comes on. Mutter some Matthew Arnold: “Let the long contention cease! Geese are swans, and swans are geese…”
