Why Poetry is Really, Like, Relevant
by and published in Edition Eight of Pomegranate
I have a lot to thank iPlayer for; it’s got me through plenty of late nights when my usual sources of procrastination have been exhausted. Unfortunately, it has also introduced me to the BBC’s poetry season, which I have watched with horrified fascination. In April, May, and June this year, the BBC tried to make high-brow content accessible and relevant for its entire audience, and it was not a success.
It started so innocently: ooh, Griff Rhys Jones, he’s funny, I like him. And he’s talking about poetry, and I’m doing an English degree. This is revision! Brilliant!
It was not brilliant. It was the beginning of something terrible; the BBC’s decision that it has a solemn duty to educate the British public about poetry. This seems to have been sparked at least partly by the shock discovery (by, er, Boris Johnson) that children don’t learn poetry off by heart in school any more. He used strong language in decrying it, too; I think ‘rage and despair’ were mentioned.
I was particularly touched by his ‘rage and despair’ because I was one of those deprived non-poetry-reciting children. I can just about do ‘Jabberwocky’, which is a good party trick these days when my audience is the wrong side of a few gallons of Lambrini, but probably wouldn’t get me out of a caning in a Victorian schoolroom. Not to worry if you’re in the same boat, though, because the BBC has jumped, uninvited, to your rescue and mine. They’ll have the whole country reciting sonnets before the year is out.
The aim is admirable; a lot of people I know seem to have dismissed poetry because it was badly taught to them at school, and then ever since associated it with impenetrability and pretension. But the BBC is not going to be any help, because their solution is to be appallingly patronising and simplistic; whichever commissioning editor thought that getting DJ Nihal off Radio 1 to recommend William Blake’s ‘London’ because it reminds him of The Verve has some serious pop culture issues. Nihal even offers the insight that ‘you could have someone beatboxing to it.’ Great. Those totally unhip granddads think the way to make young people like poetry is to try to convince us that it’s almost as good as something else, which spectacularly misses the point.
This desperation to make poetry edgy and up to date is the worst problem with the BBC’s poetry season. I’ve lost count of the number of programmes that contain this phrase: ‘So, back then, poetry was the equivalent of a TV show or rock concert!’ Just the equivalent, not something good or better in its own right. The presenters try desperately to convince us that poetry is both important and exciting, but it doesn’t really work because they don’t seem to believe it themselves. To them, poetry was just something people did to pass the time before TV came along. But if the presenter doesn’t trust poetry to be exciting enough to talk about on its own merits, then we’re not going to either.
This desperation also extends into a strange section in most of the poetry programmes, the purpose of which seems only to be to justify the licence fee.
It involves the presenter running around on the Millennium Bridge asking random passers-by if they’ve ever heard of the person the programme is about. Invariably they haven’t. And all that running about makes me think Gok Wan’s going to appear any minute and grab someone’s breasts, and none of us wants that. But there you have it – a validation of the programme, all wrapped up in a neat two minute montage with a bit of excitement and some direct public contact. Now sit back and be educated, informed, and entertained – badly.
I’m being unfair. Armando Iannucci’s documentary on Milton was genuinely interesting – and so it should be, as Iannucci studied for a PhD on Paradise Lost. And Robert Webb’s programme on Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ was very personal and very moving. But these were rare; they were the programmes that formulated a proper response to the poems themselves, rather than just cultivating a touchy-feely emotional reaction to the poets’ lives and then making grand and unsubstantiated claims about how they were the greatest, the rudest, the most modern, and the most relevant writers, like, ever.
None of these poets are allowed to be just good. They have to be shoehorned into a modern setting, and the relevance of their work to modern life forced through your screen and into your eyeballs. And the BBC’s alleged aim to make us think more about poetry disappears when Simon Schama tells us that Donne was the best poet in the history of English Literature, that he wrote the most shocking lines and that he said the truest things. These violent assertions mean we don’t have to think about the rest of poetry at all, because Simon and co have already told us the important bits.
The BBC’s poetry season was a failure that has done poetry more harm than good. If all they want is for people to learn more poetry by heart, their aggression is misdirected. The only way to do it is to get Phil Mitchell to recite The Waste Land in full, five times in a row, every night on BBC One for a week, and then test everyone at the end. And if you get the lines mixed up in ‘The Fire Sermon’ then he’ll come round your house and get you.
Charlotte Runcie
Charlotte is Pomegranate’s editor. She won first prize in the Christopher Tower poetry awards in 2007. When she’s not being a poetry editor, she’s a student and a journalist, and was named Columnist of the Year at the Guardian Student Media Awards in 2009. She’s a big fan of photography and is a connoisseur of exotic teas. You can usually find her living in Edinburgh or studying at Cambridge University, but she may occasionally be elsewhere. Her first pamphlet of poems, seventeen horse skeletons, is published by tall-lighthouse.