Books “Poetry is Archaic,” Say Poets
posted by June 11 at 13:11 PM
onWell, that headline is a little misleading. Three female British poets have refused the title of Poet Laureate. One refused it because it’s archaic, one likes her quiet life, and then I love this quote, by Fleur Adcock:
“It’s terribly hard work for very little pay,” she said. “The poet laureate is fine as an institution, as long as I don’t have to do it.”
The job pays five thousand pounds a year and 630 bottles of Spanish sherry. Poet Laureate used to be a lifetime position in the U.K., until Ted Hughes died, whereupon it was lessened to a ten-year stretch, which still seems like an awful long time to be laureating.
Via Bookninja.
Comments
What are the duties of the title? We have a new one yearly, right? Does the American equivalent have obligations tied to the title?
I think that I shall never see
A port as lovely as sherry
The dregs are port
The sherry's sport
Yet naught but wine for me
I assume that's 630 bottles total, not 630 a year, which seems like rather a lot. Is it good Sherry? Or ten dollar plonk? The problem with Sherry is, if it's fino, you don't want 630 bottles of it at once, and if it's something that takes age OK like amontillado or oloroso, well, not even I want to drink THAT much of it. It's probably some horrible Harvey's Bristol Cream. And even if it's some rare Lustau single cask, you have to churn out your official state poem every year, and I don't think they allow dirty limericks or old-fashioned "It took a Welsh miner to find her vaginer" type stuff.
I could crank out one new poem a year for 5,000 pounds and 630 bottles of sherry. Would they accept an epic science fiction poem written entirely in waka form?
@4 - only if you wrote it in Klingon.
@3 Its actually a "butt of sack per annum". A butt of wine = 2 hogsheads or 3 tierces (126 gallons). So that would be ~ 630 bottles each year.
Apparently the Brits like their writers (even poets) to be old style... Heavy drinking wife beaters.
Well that would be interesting. Adapting the Klingon rhythmic structure to 5-7-5-7-7 shouldn't be too hard, I guess, but it would sound a little arbitrary.
Comments Closed
Comments are closed on this post.