A New Canon?

The Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion (pictured here) along with other major British literary figures, such as Philip Pullman and J.K. Rowling, has been asked to supply their ten essential literary works that all school-children should read and study.

Motion, the best Poet Laureate of modern times, has provided a canonical list that pulls no intellectual punches, and aims to reverse the brain-numbing dumbing down of so much British media discourse on culture and writing (see Dancing, Morris). The lists, along with The Guardian article, below:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1698548,00.html

Andrew Motion's list is:

The Odyssey Homer
Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes
Hamlet William Shakespeare
Paradise Lost John Milton
Lyrical Ballads Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth
Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë
Great Expectations Charles Dickens
Portrait of a Lady Henry James
Ulysses James Joyce
The Waste Land TS Eliot

***

It's an impressive, undeniable list. If I'd been asked, mine might have been...

The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
Collected Poems Robert Frost
King Lear Shakespeare
The Idiot Dostoyevsky
The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford
Prufrock and other poems T.S. Eliot
Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift
Long Day's Journey Into Night Eugene O'Neill
Collected Poems Emily Dickinson
The Outsider Colin Wilson

More Poetry And Politics

The concluding part of my essay, see link below:

http://wanabehuman.blogspot.com/2006/01/comment-on-poetry-and-politics-part_31.html

Without Title

Hooray for Geoffrey Hill (pictured above)!

His new book is out, and gets a rave review from Nicholas Lezard - see below.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1690132,00.html

I have just purchased it, and look forward to reading it this week.

One pleasant surprise, my friend, the fine American poet, Eric Ormsby, now based in London, is quoted on the back of the Penguin book:

"Hill has been writing his incomparable poetry for over fifty years now ... each new book of his has been a fresh, and sometimes unexpected, triumph. The combination of immaculate poetic skill with intense originality is always rare, and never more so than in our diminished age" - Eric Ormsby, New Criterion

Goodwin Predicts Bad Days For Poetry Ahead

Another day, another trumped up British media scare-story about the death of poetry...

Cue Fry's "arse-dribble" claim; cue BBC lit-star Daisy Goodwin's well-meaning lament for the decline of poetry...

(as banal a debate as the one about Rimbaud lampooned in Haneke's masterpiece, Cache, where Georges, the TV producer and host for a French culture show cuts and edits deep opinion for shallow times. )

This most recent anti-poetry-virus started yesterday, as reported in The Observer, which claimed Goodwin had expressed fear that poetry's demise was, like global warming, an inevitable disaster - soon poetry would be as obscure and eccentrically-loved as "Morris dancing". Today it was on the BBC's famous Today radio broadcast at breakfast, and the usual emails came in to the show, denouncing poetry as useless twaddle.

Why all the anxiety? Because sales figures show only about 800,000 poetry books sold each year in the UK, compared to 45 million for other books (such as novels, cook books, bibles, etc). Hmm.

Isn't this in fact a startlingly positive development? How about the headline: Poetry Sales In UK Almost Million Per Year? As a genre, poetry seems to be selling incredibly well.

Of course, sales figures don't tell the whole story, even in terms of readership - since many poetry books are borrowed from libraries, or passed down, or acquired second-hand - or, horrors! - found on the Internet.

The fact is, and I have said this before, the UK Media doesn't know what to do with poetry. They keep hearing it is immensely popular at a grasroots level (see Turnbull's performance work, all the readings, E-Magazines, awards, etc.) but then send out jaded prose-types to cover the story, and all they want to do is belittle the wonder.

It is deeply ironic, and sad, that, whereas the British media basically collaborated like Vichy turncoats to make the Potter phenomenon occur, they can't collude to generate the same wide-eyed feel-good buzz about poetry. Perhaps because poetry is what the media is not: deep, complex, and resistant to the cheery sound-bite.

No, I am afraid the news isn't good for the BBC - when it is long forgotten, poetry will still be around, in some form or another. The reason? Poetry is not just about distibution systems or technology - it flows through all cultures and time - it is part of the very way that humans interact with language, themselves, and natural, timeless experiences, such as death, love, birth, the seasons.

Morris dancing? Not bloody likely.

Ugly Is The New Less Ugly

Issue 11 of The Ugly Tree poetry 'zine is available from February 1st 2006.

This issue features poetry from Todd Swift, John G.Hall, Ian Mullins, Peter Johnson, Usha Kishore, Ken Champion, David Thornbrugh, Ivana Sojat-Kuci, Vincent Berquez, Reshma Madhi, Brendan McMahon, Deborah Maudlin, Paul Tristram, Austin McCarron, Ben Barton, Cathy O, Timothy Fighting Light-Shade-of-Blue, Carol Batton, Geoff Stevens, Arwen Lewis & a review of Smoke magazine.

The Ugly Tree \ ISSN 1478 8349 \ £3.00 per issue \ £8.50 annual sub \ ed. Paul Neads

Copies can be ordered from Mucusart Publications, 6 Chiffon Way, Trinity Riverside, Gtr Manchester M3 6AB enclosing payment of £3.00 (payable to P. Neads) or by visiting Cornerhouse Bookshop & Whitworth Art Gallery Bookshop in Manchester.

For a taster of this issue & those that went before

www.mucusart.co.uk/samples.htm

Poetry In The Library

http://www.library.mun.ca/qeii/pil/index.php

Tim Turnbull Wins Big

Tim Turnbull has won 'The Contenders', a £10,000 Performance Poetry Fellowship, awarded by the Arts Foundation.

Turnbull, born in North Yorkshire in 1960, recently published his first full length collection ofpoetry - Stranded in Sub-Atomica - with Donut Press (in the review pile of this humble editor).

Readers of this august blog will recall that I singled his work out in my review of the Hallam anthology, last summer. It's good to see a poet who fuses the page and stage get this sort of recognition.

In December he performed with fellow Contenders Shortlistees at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall. On Thursday 26th January, at Pentagram in London's Notting Hill, he discovered it had won him the £10,000 prize.

The Contenders judges were Ian McMillan, poet and presenter of BBC Radio 3's The Verb; Ruth Borthwick, Head of Literature and Talks at London's South Bank Centre; and poet, Philip Wells. Other shortlisted poets were Zena Edwards, KatFrancois, Matt Harvey and Shamshad Khan.

A side-note: I included the work of Francois in my Short Fuse anthology several years ago, and am glad to see her continuing to do so well.