If we want more poetry readers let's give the public what they want
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Your support makes all the difference."Poetry is a zoo in which you keep demons and angels," said the Australian poet Les Murray.
It's a statement that effectively captures the fear and rapture that surrounds the whole process of writing and reading poetry. That's why we prefer our poets to be dead. We don't want to be bitten and we don't want to feel stupid.
Ten years ago, in a bid to address our poetryphobia, the New Generation Poets promotion kicked out 20 of the best and sold them as a package.
Suddenly, poets were everywhere: on the radio, on the television and, squeezed into Paul Smith ski pants and polo necks, in photoshoots in Vogue. Whitbread-winning poet Don Paterson, writing about it in the leading poetry journal, Poetry Review, thought he looked like "a cross between Max Wall and a binliner full of jellyfish". Poetry, it was declared, was the new rock'n'roll. It wasn't, of course, and sales of poetry books did not rise in line with the media razzmatazz.
What it did achieve, however, was to highlight the work of a number of extremely talented poets, who have, in the way of such things, undergone a rapid metamorphosis from young turks to heavy hitting members of the poetry establishment.
The quota of leather jackets and spiky haircuts was not necessarily in line with popular appeal. Simon Armitage, tipped as a potential poet laureate and one of the few contemporary poets to sell in significant quantities, is considered one of the most accessible of this bunch. Paterson is considerably more challenging, but is the only younger poet to have made it into the current Waterstone's poetry top ten.
Poetry can, like most things in life, be difficult or easy. It can be good or bad, beautiful or banal. At its sublime best, it is hard to beat the heart-stopping electric intensity of a finely crafted poem. The poet Peter Porter, a current candidate for the post of Oxford Chair of Poetry, has described poetry as "either language lit up by life or life lit up by language". We can live without it, of course. We can't live without bread, but bread and roses are better.
Christine Patterson is deputy literary editor of 'The Independent' and a former director of the Poetry Society.
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