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After cheese-farming and classical music, Blur bassist Alex James's latest unexpected area of expertise has been unveiled: poetry. In a short film for Radio 4's website, James gambols in Oxfordshire before sitting down in a field of daffodils to utter the immortal line, "When I was a teenager, I like, hated poetry. I was more interested in playing football. It was Damon Albarn who gave me my formal introduction to Auden."
Meanwhile, former KLF front-man Bill Drummond describes in reverential tones how he loves Ted Hughes so much that on a train across India, having read each one of his Birthday Letters - Hughes's moving verse letters to Sylvia Plath - he tore them out of the book one by one and threw them out of the window. "When I reached the temple I left the remains of the book as an offering." Come again?
Take it as the latest proof of poetry's new-found fashionability. These celebrity endorsements - what Radio 4 touchingly terms "famous person advocacy films" - are part of the station's new survey to find the nation's favourite poet. Voting closed earlier this week; the winner will be unveiled on National Poetry Day on 8 October. The last such survey, in 2004, was topped by Philip Larkin.
Should poetry stoop to such endorsements in order to pull in new fans? If voters took any notice of the videos, God help Auden and Hughes, two of my favourites. I fear London's small poetry community may be tormented by James's assertion that if you grit your teeth and get through 10 Auden poems you might like the 11th.
Thanks to Alan Yentob and Cerys Matthews, TS Eliot and Dylan Thomas get rather better treatment. But if Radio 4 thinks we need celebs to get us excited about poetry, it could have set its sights a bit higher. The best-selling Bloodaxe anthology Staying Alive was garlanded with praise from Meryl Streep and Mia Farrow. Meg Ryan, Gwyneth Paltrow and Imogen Stubbs adore Sylvia Plath. Meg wanted to play her.
Then there's Jerry Hall, who writes poetry herself. She once applied to a poetry course that my friend, the poet Hugo Williams, was teaching - perhaps the first and last Texan supermodel to sign up for Arvon, the creative writing charity founded 40 years ago by John Fairfax and John Moat.
For all of the poetry world's discomfort over celebrity endorsement, I don't suppose it much matters as long as young readers' interest is sparked. For unless you are really lucky, getting excited about literature won't happen in the classroom. I recently heard of an English teacher who despaired of teaching Yeats because the curriculum demanded that students know "how many swans there were in the Wild Swans at Coole".
Still, relying on celebs makes my heart sink. Where will it end? A poetry reality-TV show, with eight self-obsessed neurotics analysing every detail of their lives and desperate for fame? "Day Four: Philip is feeling a bit down " Now that really would send us poets over the edge.
Snappy skills that made Bardot a star
The most common relationships these days between dewy-eyed starlets and the paparazzi are legal injunctions. An altogether flirtier story is told in Brigitte Bardot and the Original Paparazzi at the James Hyman Gallery, which opens tomorrow.
The pictures show her frolicking her way to superstardom through their lenses, via St Tropez, Paris and Rome.
This seductive show is the work of photographers adept at composing a good shot in seconds. The work of their modern-day equivalents make for dreary viewing by comparison. Digital papping means that every morning, thousands of rubbish shots hit picture desks around the world - people that no one cares about in the back of a car, looking not Bardot-luscious but slightly pissed.
It's a long way from And God Created Woman.
* I wish my grandparents had been here to see the moving tribute paid this week to the three million evacuees who left London in September 1939. As two small participants in Operation Pied Piper they were sent aged 10 to within a few miles of each other near Penzance.
Nanny's stories - from the desperate homesickness to mistakenly waving at a German bomber - gave me an insatiable appetite for war-themed children's fiction. When I had to write at school, I stole her traumatic plots for my own. Many a teacher must have wondered how on earth I could picture the glint of the bomber pilot's sunglasses as he ignored the girl, grinning and waving in the Cornish bluebells.
Lost laptop? Call Sydney
Landing in Nice I realised I'd left my laptop at Heathrow. With my ear clamped to my phone (“Thank you for calling Heathrow Lost Property. There will be a short delay”) I made my way to the BA help desk. “Eet eez not my fault that you have lost your computer. Eet eez yours,” intoned the deeply gelled assistante, barely looking up.
My boyfriend, who is Australian, thought tangentially and rang Qantas. Amazingly, on a Saturday night, within hours they found someone to have a look. My trusty little computer and I were happily reunited back in London.
To the heroic Kevin Frost of Qantas, thank you. Note to travellers at Heathrow: if you lose anything, ring Sydney. And yes, I am investing in something called an external hard drive.
Reader views (2)
Separated by terminal at Heathrow from my luggage.Due to not realising my connection being booked on a separate
ticket.I too made the mistake of asking advice from BA desk.I was also told without eye contact to go and find my connection operator. Though in somewhat less polite terms.
Faith in human nature was restored by a young man from Emirates Desk who personally took me through endless checks to my lone suitcase standing by the carousel.
Buy British?
- Des Cornan, Sowerby Bridge UK, 03/09/2009 19:13
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'' A type of super natural and spiritual mind is inevitable to become a true poet; Writings poet is good practice to go ahead to be a broaden-and enlighten man.........
- Anwar Ahmed Chowdhury, London, 03/09/2009 10:03
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