Australian poetry rarely makes the news.
So, when the position of Poet Laureate was announced, it was a red-letter day. Or was it?
Many countries have a Laureate. Britain’s is perhaps the most famous, its seat being warmed by Tennyson, Wordsworth amongst a long list. Their government once promised an “annual butt of canary wine” in exchange for verses produced on official public occasions.
This announcement hopefully means that the arts might be seeing some increased funding in the next few years. This would be a welcome reversal of the traditional pittance. Sarah Holland-Batt has said in a recent piece on this subject that Australia has a “wilful neglect” of poetry.
Ours is a society where poetry is often dismissed as dilettantish, if it is considered at all. With the increasing removal of English units in universities, the reading and celebration of poetry has been increasingly forgotten.
Australian poetry often has historically been relegated to a place of childish mockery, cheap petty-politicking and the tawdry balladry of jingoistic nationalists wanting to ramble about stockmen and gambolling horse-thieves. Lawson and Paterson ring out as bad advertisements of tired rhyming verse with very little by way of literary value.
To introduce a poet laureate is to go part of the way to reclaim Australian poetry from the stain of its at-once perceived unseriousness and perceived elitism. Poetry is the encapsulation of humanity. How can poetry be elitist if it is a product of something so human: emotion.
By lauding a poet in public, we laud poetry. Appointing a poet laureate becomes an opportunity to make poetry known in the public eye outside the classroom or small reading. It acknowledges that those who hold the purse-strings think of it as something to be valued.
However, a few major issues with this proposal make me inclined to be against it.
Appointing a laureate takes poetry out of the hands of the poets and into the hands of the government. The one lucky winner becomes expected to dish out pithy little rhyming ditties to celebrate public events. Every time an official gets out of a car they’ll be expected to be there with a notepad, ready to compose a tawdry couplet in adoration. It’ll be a conveyor belt for songs of mediocre supplication.
Poets laureates always seem stuck being expected to write what Dryden called a “complimentary address.” Poetry written as a vehicle of patronage serves the patron more than the poet. Consider Tennyson’s “Ode on Wellington’s Death”: would he have written that if he hadn’t been expected to by the conventions of his office?
Further, selecting the laureate is a mess. Who gets to choose? Is there a kind of poet they are looking for? Picking one poet excludes every other. Furthermore, claiming that a single poet can represent the whole corpus of Australian poetry writing today is impossible. Creative writing is too personal to be turned into the output of a government department.
Perhaps the clearest argument against the Poet Laureate is this: What’s the point?
Having one seems entirely superfluous. Yes, it raises the awareness of poetry in the public eye, but proper funding to Arts courses and cultural institutions or publishing grants would do the same thing with a more tangible effect. It would help the state of poetry and not just the career of one writer who would have won a kind of perverse lottery.
We are going to go on writing verse regardless of whether one of our number is ordained as town crier for the profession.
If anything, the announcement feels like a means to an end, with the Poet Laureate being simply used by the government to say ‘look, we aren’t neglecting the arts.’
I am, however, glad that the government is trying. Well-meaning initiatives like this give me hope that at least somebody publicly is interested in poetry, even if I don’t think they will change anything.
People write poetry because it is a compulsion that lies deep within their souls.
They are still Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” and will be able to produce works about public events that are far more meaningful because they haven’t been asked to write them as a condition of their employment. Poetry is an art, not a job. Only a slightly Yeatsian “lonely impulse of delight” should make a writer put pen to paper. Neither law, nor duty should bid them to write; the roar of cheering crowds should fall on deaf ears. Poetry cannot risk being reduced to fodder for a political soundbite.
The Arts Minister has not commented on whether Australia’s Laureate would be showered with libations as part of their payment.
Let’s laud poets and poetry, not a Poet Laureate.
