Please request this poem to be read, by an actor, on Radio 4’s Poetry
Please.
Please let me hear a disconnected, white middle-class
accent, with no vested interest in poetic expression, repeat the
phrase I hate Poetry Please!
Please appeal to (what I hope is) the
producer’s hidden sense of fun and mischief, fear of social
embarrassment, and to her sense of duty to perceived BBC balance, and fl ood
her inbox with a request to hear a poem called ‘I Hate Poetry
Please’!
Please apply pressure on yesterscouse token soft
northern comfort-voiced Waitrose salesman Roger McGough, who, it seems,
may just have forgot the stuff that poetry’s made of: the essence of himself
and his visionary linguistic anarchic oomph. Tell him thank you very much
for the thank you very much, for the Liverpool scene and the Aintree Iron, the
social zest and lyrical philosophical depth, the brilliant translation of the
Molière text, so ably presented in language steeped in access, but please
please please tell him: I hate Poetry Please!
Because I love poems reared
and given voice by their maker, with local knowledge of her spoken
arrangement, because the poet thought of the way, not just the what, of
what’s on the paper –
considered her birth, how she should be
reared, how we should feel her, what she should be if someone came to read
her.
So please read this poem called ‘I Hate Poetry
Please’ out loud on Poetry Please,
please. Shout, Attention! to the new modal army, equipped with original
poetic expression, and Stand easy, tropes; move away from the canon! to the
boredom battalion,
trotting out tired, tedious, twee verses from
ever-decreasing circles of poems whose endings don’t leave us guessing due
to excessive repetition at white bourgeois weddings: well-trodden words from a
handful of bards who once trod the boards, whilst stroking their beards, with
their poems about birds or the supposed absurd, which are now only exposed in
the classrooms of those who bracket that faux-whimsical tone with love, wisdom,
and woe as the inadequately narrow definition they know of a
poem.
This is a cause of great depression. There’s a whole brave new
world of poetic expression.
Now, you could argue that Poetry Please is
doing no harm – let it be, but I believe that Poetry Please restricts
the definition of what poetry can be and suppresses the growth of the poetry
scene.
If Radio 2 is the music station for those that hate music, then
Poetry Please is the poetry programme for those that hate muses.
No new
inspiration, no genius, nothing with unusual rhyme or meter. No globetrotting
antics, or faraway fancies, not much that ambles away from iambic. No new
themes. Same old: love, remembrance, friendship, fellowship, recycled on
calendars like seasonal worship, parrot fashion repetition devoid of passion like
C of E hymns, With endings that make you go Hmm, not Urgh! or Argh! or Jesus
Christ! Because it’s jumper-wearing, avoid all swearing, chicken in
basket, don’t stare at spastics* , biscuits are nice,
don’t like spice, meat and two vegetables, value your
collectibles, keep it in the corner, de-value the performer,
tune out, drawling, gnawing, boring poetry. I want vibrant poems, preferably live, but
at least from the living.
So read this poem called ‘I Hate Poetry
Please’ on Poetry Please, please, and please, please, please change the
nature of poetry, please.
