Catherine Gander: We need a poetry idol
At a time when novelists have acquired the status of rock stars, poets are still the poor relations of the literary world. Just how poor can be seen in the tepid reaction to national poetry week, the days from October 3 to October 9 officially allotted to the celebration of poetry. Yesterday was national poetry day and no one cares.
The week has already seen David Harsent named as winner of the annual Forward prize for poetry. Comprising £10,000 and a nudge to the door leading out of gloomy obscurity, the award for the best new collection was created by the Forward Arts Foundation to bring contemporary poetry to a wider readership. Yet what audience, apart from an academic one, wants to pay attention?
For the past decade there has been a push towards poetry for the masses. A surge of BBC books in the 1990s, listing "The Nation's Favourite" love poems (to recite to a lover), childhood poems (to fondly reminisce over), comic poems (to prove poetry is fun) and "poems for journeys" (to read in the car?) followed a TV countdown to The Nation's Favourite Poem hosted by Griff Rhys Jones in 1995. The legacy of this seems only to be the incessantly broadcast "100 best ... " programmes that underline the nation's favourite pastime of watching "competition" the same way that it watches television: from a comfortable distance.
Winning competitions is the best way a poet can hope to be noticed. It's either that or dying. This raises the question of whether poets want to be noticed in the way the modern world acknowledges celebrities. While a posthumous reputation rules out any hope of poets enjoying it while they are alive, it does guarantee a life free from flashbulbs outside their bathroom windows and strangers examining the contents of their bins. If such intrusion is the price of popularity then, in the words of TS Eliot, poets - those representatives of humankind - "cannot bear very much reality".
I exaggerate. Poets spend their time observing, not being observed. They will surely never reach the masses in the manner of pop stars, nor would they want to. They are a precious commodity, and scarcity enhances value. Yet in terms of seeking readership, the publishing houses and poetry societies need to strive towards fashion.
Many academics may bleat that this will achieve nothing but a detrimental dumbing-down of poetry, but as is the case with all major reforms (and it is widely agreed in poetry circles that "something has to be done"), a bold decision for change is needed. Poetry is unforgivably poorly publicised, and any event concerning poetry goes largely unnoticed. So does poetry need a celebrity representative in order to be thrust into the public awareness? Perhaps so.
I'm not proposing a race for the Nation's Favourite Celebrity Poet, but I would suggest that an outside influence is needed to get people reading poetry outside the university seminar room.
Returning to the modern phenomenon of celebrity, Martin Scorsese recently gave his stamp of approval to Bob Dylan as one of the most important cultural icons of the modern age in his documentary, No Direction Home. Dylan is acknowledged as a social commentator and poet first and a singer second. Even the poet laureate, Andrew Motion - a man in a largely wasted position to promote poetry - attributes the idea that poems can be sung to Dylan.
The point that poetry needs an energetic, fashionable ambassador should be seriously considered by those trying to promote it. Meanwhile, to mark national poetry day the Poetry Society has held a poll to find a favourite poem. It will be displayed at the National Space Centre in Leicester before being shot into space. That's how to make poetry accessible.
· Catherine Gander is researching a doctorate on modern poetry
catgander@yahoo.co.uk