Some of the courses may be bland. Very bland. There is spice, lots of it,
but most of those dishes are centuries old. Of course, popular eating habits
have changed, ordinary brits, who once wouldn't touch any of that 'foreign
muck', now dine out & in on baltis, dim-sum, calzone, jalfrezi & what-not.
But poetry is to do with what is spoken, and in Britain there is a great
unspokenness, the we-don't-talk-about-it, not that is 'no sex, we're
british', but the thrones and fountains of power and influence and money, so
ably symbolised by our absurd royal family, by the insidious presence of
Received Standard Pronunciation, by the 'public' schools and Oxbridge (yes,
that does include Cambridge) which still produce so many of the poeticules
and little literati who dominate the 'scene'.
Here in Leicester last night over 200 people turned out for a reading by a
very average poet in a rather dingy hall in an Adult Education College on a
freezing cold January night. Normally poetry readings here find audiences of
15 to 30 souls. The reason for the attraction, for the sudden unburrowing of
so many schoolteachers, librarians and Horlicks drinkers. Why, the reader
was the Laureate.
Deference, despite rock, is still written in the soul of this society.
But what about the baltis, the exotic dishes that now visit the digestion of
Mr, Mrs & Ms Average? The problem, says British poetry, or it would say, if
it were not that being open about anything is inimical to its spirit, the
problem is, well, they're rather vulgar are they not. Cheap imitations for
the masses.
Less than 5% of Britiain's population speak the RS dialect yet I'd estimate
that over 95% of those of its poets that I've met speak in that false
tongue, an accent, need I remind, schooled and reared to distinguish the
rulers from the ruled, the managers from the managed.
Now Language, new media, etc..... that's another mail
David
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