NYT story on Royal laureates at
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/07/books/07laureate.html?hp&ex=1112932800&en=
3a1856dda79f56a8&ei=5094&partner=homepage
LONDON, April 6 - How do you solve a problem like "Camilla"?
If you are Andrew Motion, Britain's poet laureate and the man charged with
producing a cheerful commemorative poem about Prince Charles's impending
marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles, none of the obvious rhymes - vanilla,
flotilla, Godzilla - seem appropriate, somehow.
Nor would you want to dwell on the pre-wedding mishaps that have filled
Britons with such unbecoming Schadenfreude in recent days: the panicked
confusion over the time and place of the ceremony; the fact that the groom's
parents will not attend; the lingering specter of Charles's dead ex-wife,
looming like Banquo at the feast.
But although this royal occasion might seem trickier than most to
immortalize, all present their own particular problems, said Robert Potts,
an editor at The Times Literary Supplement who until recently was editor of
Poetry Review magazine.
"Every single time, it's an impossible job," Mr. Potts said of poems
celebrating royal weddings. "One's not entirely clear why anyone bothers to
do it."
Mr. Motion declined to be interviewed on how his poem was coming along but
said that interested parties could read it on Saturday, the day of the
wedding. Since his appointment, in 1999, he has come up with royal-themed
poems, praising Queen Elizabeth for "fifty years of steadiness through
change," saying of Princess Margaret that she died knowing that "love and
duty speak two languages," and writing, on the occasion of Prince William's
21st birthday, that:
It's a threshold, a gateway
A landmark birthday;
It's a turning of the page,
A coming of age.
In the past, royal-themed poems have rarely been considered a laureate's
best work.
The great poet Ted Hughes, Mr. Motion's predecessor, once wrote a poem
celebrating Prince Andrew's wedding to Sarah Ferguson in 1986 that included
the lines: "A helicopter snatched you up/ The pilot, it was me." (The
marriage ended in divorce.) In a poem observing the 40th anniversary of the
Queen's coronation, he praised her corgis without apparent irony.
Although Mr. Motion wrote a poem denouncing the Iraq war, he has pledged
never to "mock, deride or criticize" the royal family in his poetry. He says
that he sees himself "as a town crier, can-opener and flag-waver to poetry,"
and he has produced poems on a range of nonroyal topics, including Nelson
Mandela; bullying; the Paddington rail disaster; the national census; the
English rugby team; and the annual meeting of a national workers' union.
But the royal poems invariably attract the most attention, and the most
sniping. Poets as a group tend to be thin-skinned, jealous and suspicious,
and the elevation of one to such a public post invariably opens the door to
everyone else's rude comments.
It was even worse in the old days. Poets laureate have produced some
shockingly poor work in their time, as in the case of the Edwardian laureate
Alfred Austin, who, when the Prince of Wales fell ill, is said to have
produced the following: "Across the wires the electric message came/ 'He is
no better, he is much the same.' "
But even Austin was not ridiculed as relentlessly as Colley Cibber, who
flattered and social-climbed his way into the laureateship in 1730.
Alexander Pope immortalized him in a later version of his epic poem "The
Dunciad," making him the King of Dunces, and an anonymous contemporary
wrote, meanly:
In merry old England it once was a rule,
The King had his Poet, and also his Fool:
But now we're so frugal, I'd have you to know it,
That Cibber can serve both for Fool and for Poet.
Mr. Motion has not been roughed up quite so much, but whatever he writes is
inevitably critiqued by anyone who feels like it. Three years ago, The
Guardian newspaper printed an article titled "Is Motion Any Good?", allowing
various people to opine that he was not. Although the poet Alan Jenkins
handsomely said that Mr. Motion was "trying to do something very
interesting," the critic A. N. Wilson begged to differ.
"He used to be an average poet," Mr. Wilson said, "and now he's turning out
twaddle."
Appraising Mr. Motion in The Daily Telegraph, the poet Craig Raine allowed
that he had written some "perfectly creditable" laureate poems. But then Mr.
Raine branded a Motion poem not only derivative of a work by Wilfred Owen,
but also reflecting an "inadvertent, unconscious lift" from one of his, Mr.
Raine's, own poems.
Mr. Raine said, though, that he sympathized with the laureate's enforced
inoffensiveness. "Good taste is the enemy of literature," he wrote,
imagining what might happen if Mr. Motion could let reality, rather than
discretion, be his guiding force.
Referring to two of the many royal scandals that seem to cry out for comment
by an anti-laureate, Mr. Raine wrote: "It isn't that I'd like laureate poems
entitled, 'On the Occasion of James Hewitt Visiting Princess Diana for the
Purpose of Consolation,' or 'Imagine Being a Tampax: Intimate Thoughts on
the Mobile Phone.'
"Well, maybe I would."
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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