Why a poet laureate is a terrible idea

Look, god knows there are more important things going on at the moment, but the less important the issue, the more one might have a chance of persuading a course of action on it.

So I will say this: Yartz Minister Tony Burke, please, please do not appoint an Australian poet laureate.

Yes, if you didn’t read the new national cultural policy Revive (so called because “‘Going to 300 volts — clear!” Dvvvvvvvv. Ca-chunk!’ would not fit across an A4 page), you will have missed the suggestion that this country should appoint a poet laureate. A brilliantly bad proposal which, though it’s early days, is already a strong contender for worst idea of the first Albanese government.

The poet laureate, as trivia quiz tragics know, is most famous as a UK office, originally appointed by Henry VII. Various Italian cities had them in the Renaissance, the US has one through the Library of Congress, and Canada appears to have one for every province — it’s really gone wild for it. 

The office varies. The US poet laureate just does what they do. The Canadians I really have no idea. The UK ones are the real gig. They get a butt of malmsey or a Diet of Worms, or a relief of Mafeking or something and have to produce ceremonial verse, which has been, in our era, almost uniformly awful. 

Dear God, I presume no one is proposing that (“Lines on Mr Albanese opening a new tungsten processing plant in Yass”, etc), but even the more limited idea of honouring a poet with some sort of quasi-official state role to honour poetry is a very, very bad one. 

Why? Well, the problem is poetry simultaneously has the highest of artistic status, but just about the lowest public one. Poetry genuinely is the most important of the literary arts, because it’s the place where nothing else is required but language itself. Plot, character, setting, description, syntax, conventional spelling — all are optional for poetry. 

The wellspring of culture

Poetry is the engine room of linguistic artistic creation. Not only is the creation of poetry a good thing in itself, but it’s where a few prose writers find new ways to do what they do, and so on. It is the wellspring of a situated — i.e. national or regional — culture, of a way of doing things not done somewhere else.

But that literary role can often be taken as implying that the various strong emotions and experiences poetry generates are somehow superior to those generated by other, more popular arts, chiefly music and screen media. That’s a false assumption, a category error. 

Poetry, like any medium, does not communicate in of itself, in a single poem, the power that it has for those who have been trained in its appreciation. Once, people were. Poetry was a popular culture, at least for certain classes. Now they are, for music and screen, surrounded by it from birth. 

Poetry, the most important of the language arts, is also the most irrelevant to the public, considerably less popular than birdwatching, pig shooting or embroidery. There is a certain following, and circuit, for “spoken word” artists, but the following of actual on-the-page poetry is largely confined to people who are poets, poet-adjacent or generally literary. 

So anyone who really cares about poetry in a society like ours should be aware of the dual character of the art’s status, and be careful not to damage it by giving it an official role unreflective of its real social and cultural position. That would do it a disservice.

The suggestion for a poet laureate appears to have come from somewhere within the Melbourne left cultural elite, linked to its network of wholly state-subsidised journals, many of which once had something of an independent existence, but are now largely outlets for cultural governmentality and national branding. 

The idea of a poet laureate is thus connected to a smooth, untroubled assumption that a cultural elite within the knowledge class should connect themselves to the state, and use its power to dictate official taste and aesthetic value. This would be bad for any poet who took the gig, bad for poetry itself, and would rapidly expose the form to ridicule. 

After the jokes, the bad stuff

The role would never achieve what its supporters suggest it would: some sort of notion that a poet can represent or express something about the country that people would recognise as their own. The immediate barrier would be one of resentment at the idea that an appointed person, in an art form almost no one voluntarily encounters, should have that role. 

The jokes would be terrible, i.e. wonderful, and the best bit. But then the bad stuff would start. Should the poet be a non-First Nations person, the move could be reasonably said to be reinscribing colonialism. Should they be First Nations, they’d be hit with a torrent of racism. If it’s an avant-garde poet, their work would be ridiculed. If it’s someone who works in a more traditional mode, the attention and the state imprimatur would quickly kitschify it. 

The worst thing is, should it have a decent stipend attached, it would tempt poets who would otherwise be wary of it, because most of them can be had for a Mars Bar. It would corrupt the profession, but not in a noble way; just by dangling some cash in front of people who, by and large, are scratching. It would all quickly become a global embarrassment. Monty Python is down to four remaining members, but they’d reform just to take the piss out of this.

You want to help Australian poetry, minister and government? Start by rescinding the Morrison government’s slanting of arts courses’ fees, which has a bachelor’s humanities degree costing $50,000. Bring it back to parity or less, with a commerce or science degree, so people can actually read and study poetry. 

What else? Well, in general, more money, so that more poets can have periods of working full time, and take part-time work over a sustained period of years, while maintaining some financial security (it is not good for poets to be funded as full-time poets for any sustained period; after a while, they look like those news stories about a racoon that broke into a bakery and is found fat and unconscious amid 35 half-chewed cannoli).

More money for publishers to bring out decent editions. More Australian poetry of diverse types in school curricula (while avoiding Year 12 exam questions that basically order students to tell the examiner how good it is). More money for poets-in-residence, for school and regional tours, so that people get a chance to actually encounter poetry. Most won’t find that it’s anything much for them. Some will feel that something suddenly blew the top of their head off and sent an arrow through their heart, and want to read it for the rest of their lives, and all points in between.

The thing is, if you really believe in poetry as a good thing, then this should be done, rather than some farcical scenario where the author of “Rimbaud Divagations on Eora Dreaming” becomes a state officer, and Sky News crowns Aussie John Williamson as the people’s poet. And it would cost chicken feed, compared with the money pit of opera, cinema and dance, to deliver a significant extension of Australian poetry’s reach.

Besides, we’ve already got the words that move us collectively as a nation. They’ve got titles like “Flame Trees” or “Wide Open Road” or “Spring Rain” or “Into My Arm” or a dozen others of various provenance and reach, and none that’s for everyone, but few that aren’t to many — the sort of thing that a lot of different types of people sing together when they feel good, or to themselves when they don’t.

No, they’re not poetry. They don’t have to be. They do what poetry did when poet laureates were first a thing, and to them is not the riband of bumpkin snobbery and national branding, but the garland gathered from the place where we live.