Costa: And the winner is…

A poet. ‘A Scattering’ by Christopher Reid, in fact. And no, I haven’t read it. But I will order a copy. BRB (be right back). Ok, so have ordered a copy from Amazon who interestingly only had two in stock. They should’ve probably ordered more in, right? But perhaps they didn’t think it would win either… Or maybe I put too much importance on prize-winning and the knock on sales effect. Who knows?

Anyway, the succinct quality of my opening sentence may have belied my surprise here. And leads me onto a subject that I may have alluded to on this website and, if not, certainly in my debut novel. And I will hold my hands up here to my own inconsistencies having referenced poetry both classic and contemporary (Donne and E.E.Cummings) here too. I am a poetry lover, if not much of a reader these days.

Here goes: I think poetry is dead. I don’t believe it has a place in our current culture. I believe it has been entirely replaced by popular music. And greeting cards. And online dating. And texting. And social networking.

I was sent a poem by a lover once, years ago. I’m sorry to say that it wasn’t received in the manner in which it was given. I didn’t even keep it. He even felt the need to apologise for sending it much later when we became lovers again for a while. I always assumed he didn’t write it himself, but I have no way of knowing now, since I no longer have it and at the time was careless/stupid/selfish enough not to pay attention to it. And I don’t talk to him enough now to ask.

My point is, what’s the point of poetry? Either it’s a one to one romantic message or it’s a universal romantic message. Poetry’s never really about anything but love, is it? Where novels can be about crime, suspense, families, history, politics, war, religion, everything and of course, romance, poetry’s nearly always about love (or at least lust). The only exceptions that immediately spring to mind are Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ (about realising one’s own mortality on the death of a very young peer) and Larkin’s ‘This Be The Verse’ (on the ‘challenges’ of parenting).

So if a poem’s function is/was to woo or seduce a lover, how do we do it now? How many people now receive a poem from their prospective lovers/partners/spouses lyrically expressing their innermost emotions? When we are in pain from a break up, how many of us turn to a poetry book for succour and solace? Or do we send and receive suggestive emails and texts, offer materially valuable gifts to express our interest, infatuation or love? Do we switch on the radio and feel our ecstatic joy or agonising loss in the words of the songs in the chart that week? Or the classics from twenty or thirty years ago?

At University we had an essay in Literary Criticism, I think, for which I received one of my highest A’ grades for my effort. Which was on the lyrics of several songs from the album ‘Shooting Rubber Bands at the Stars’ by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians. I still have the album and can remember the lines:

‘Little Miss S in her mini-dress,
Living it up to die,
In a blink of the public eye.”

And much more but I won’t go on… although that reminds me very much of one of Lily Allen’s songs ‘The Fear’ from her most recent (and last?) album ‘It’s Not Me, It’s You’.. Both of these actually aren’t centered about love, unless we include narcissism within the definition in which case they very much are. However, I drift slightly off the point that I was making which is probably about mass communication and consumerism. But if you think about all the other songs on those albums, ‘Love Like We Do’, ‘Keep Coming Back’ for Brickell and ‘It’s Not Fair’ by Allen – they are all about love.

How many people go to poetry readings now? How many people buy poetry? Where are the ‘Poems on the Underground’? I love these and have their books. On Facebook I am a member of the ‘Bring Back the Poem to the Waterloo Underpass’ group – I used to walk past it and the homeless and buskers every time I went into South Bank. Once we have those numbers let’s compare them to; How many people listen to the radio? How many people download from iTunes? How many people will buy Corinne Bailey Rae’s new album on the 1st February? How many people know who Carole-Anne Duffy is? Or Andrew Motion was? Or can give you a line or a title of a work by Coleridge? Versus one by the Beatles?

Anyway, it’s all a bit of rant but here’s my final point. I do think I am a creative person. But I do also think that you can break creativity down into three parts; 1) Visual 2) Aural and 3) Literary – that is, pictures, sounds or words. I do words first, pictures second and sounds last. But I think anyone that wants to be a poet now needs to combine their words with music – in order to reach what we define as success now – mass consciousness. We’re not in the business of standing around camp fires telling rhyming stories anymore. Digital media and musical sophistication’s taken care of that. Short words and tunes are bound together. And in my mind and ears it’s a good thing.