Plain Talk
By
Mursi Saad El-Din
I was interested to read about a recent poetry competition with the title "Essential Poems for Britain", organised by the BBC. Its most notable facet was the broad range of contestants, according to Daisy Goodwin, the promoter of the competition, who commented on the entries in the Independent Review. Thousands of poems arrived, she revealed, and they were written by people from all walks of life, some "from the most starkly unpoetic backgrounds".
It is hardly news that the notion of the poet as a dreamy figure with long, unkempt hair has absolutely no basis in reality. Think only of T S Eliot, who was that most unpoetic of things, a banker, or else of Philip Larkin, a bespectacled and crusty old librarian. Eliot, like that other great modernist, W B Yeats, was always fastidiously dressed. There is, of course, another breed of poets, flamboyant and rather loud, like Dylan Thomas. These are the people willing to go from door to door selling their own books.
More to the point, we have heard it said and have read articles that claim that poetry is dead, in England at least. And yet the BBC competition disputes this claim with evidence that the art of writing poetry is alive and well among a wide range of Britons.
Most of us have probably tried our hand at writing verse, though often it is a passing phase that later we tend to deny, if only because poetry is too often associated with romanticism and sentimentality. So writing verse is often a secret that we try to keep from others.
Goodwin discovered a similar reticence about the hobby among the entrants to the BBC contest. Entries came from a pensions officer at East Midland Electric and a lecturer in management studies, among others, and the letters that accompanied them were revealing. One contestant, who works as an administrative assistant in Birmingham, confessed his embarrassment by writing: "It's only recently that I've come out of the closet." Another entrant wrote that he had written poetry all this life, but never publicised this fact for fear that he would be considered odd. "It's only now that I've retired that I have decided to try to get published," he revealed.
The entries were supposed to give a picture of Britain in some way. They were remarkably consistent, noted Goodwin, "in their picture of Britain as a bit shabby, occasionally confused but fundamentally decent". None of the poems expressed support for British soldiers in Iraq. Instead, several of them tried to define Britain's broader role in this post-imperial, multi- national age. One of the winning poems, titled "Earnestly Seeking", began:
Distinguished one-time colonial power
Heart of oak, a naval soul
Anchored uncertainly off Europe
Seeks harbour for a familiar role.
While there were no patriotic poems, some dealt with Britain's multicultural character. Indeed, the winning poem, "Harvest Time", expressed the essence of this new Britain through the metaphor of "a patchwork quilt, to suggest the way in which so many disparate pieces have been joined together to form a nearly harmonious whole". Interestingly, it was written by a management consultant in his early fifties. He made a significant comment on the apparent disparity between his professional and poetic pursuits: "Most management is about people and most poetry is about emotions people experience. It is not so difficult to connect the two."
One of the more innovative contestants decided to update Wordsworth's famous "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud". He began his poem thus:
No host of golden daffodils
Nor hardly any grass,
The paths we walk on our estate
Are strewn with broken glass.
By sheer coincidence, I've recently been entrusted by the Supreme Council for Culture with the task of collecting and editing an anthology of poems on Egypt. I've been looking for a title for the anthology when it is eventually published. Now, I think, I have my answer!
