You won't, I suspect, get many hoodied and snarling protesters attacking policemen with Molotov cocktails at the news that the Poetry Book Society has lost its Arts Council of England grant. But that doesn't stop it being a disgraceful decision by the ACE's Literature Department. They didn't just reduce the Society's meagre annual lifeline of £111,000. They withdrew it completely. They didn't just prune this tender shrub. They scythed through it at the roots. The PBS isn't some quango, like the Egg Advisory Council or the Milk Marketing Board, dreamt up by Sir Humphrey Appleby to give a sinecure to his cronies. It's an important part of our culture. If poets have traditionally accounted for a quarter of the writers, from Chaucer to Carol Ann Duffy, who embody what we mean by English literature, it's vital that an organisation dedicated to the promotion of its finest flowerings should be kept alive. The Poetry Book Society was set up in 1953 by the Arts Council at the suggestion of Stephen Spender, with TS Eliot and Basil Blackwell as its original directors. Eliot, who once described poetry as "merely a higher form of entertainment", would have appreciated the Society's role as a kind of upscale cheerleader. The function of its "selectors" was to recommend one poetry collection every quarter to its members, plus a few other endorsements of worthwhile books. For nearly 60 years, the PBS's distinguished judges (Philip Larkin was chairman in the 1980s) have steered the nation's poetry-lovers towards the best stuff around. The Society also runs the TS Eliot Prize, the most important poetry prize anywhere, endowed by the great man's widow, Valerie. On the day before the prize is awarded, every January, the poetry world turns out in force to hear the 10 short-listed bards declaim their works. This year saw the biggest audience in its history – 900 people crammed the Festival Hall to hear Simon Armitage, Fiona Sampson and their peers. Market-fixated malcontents may argue that, if poetry were sufficiently popular with the reading public, enough money would change hands in shops and at festivals to make public subsidy unnecessary. Why should public cash subsidise work that only a small percentage of readers read? To which one can only reply: it's always been like this. Poetry has always been a minority interest, because it's difficult. It's not to be gulped down on a flight or devoured on the beach at Formentera. It's not to be consumed like a thriller or fantasy novel, or heard and dismissed in three minutes, like a song. It deals in specialised language which it takes time and patience to decipher, whether it's "On His Blindness" or "Kubla Khan" or "The Waste Land." Partly as a result, poetry tends to lurk at the back of the bookshop, along with the erotica and the Bibles. It's not made widely available, it's badly publicised by publishers and it seldom troubles the bestseller lists. Poets themselves – strange, perverse beings – have an ambivalent attitude to making money. "I have always believed that poetry was a grace in my life," Seamus Heaney once said, "a total sweetness and extra-ness, and that it wasn't to be used as a meal ticket." It remains, despite these economic privations, the highest form of expression in our culture, the finest words in the finest order, the breath of Parnassus, the secret rhythms and buried meanings of our individual and collective lives. The Poetry Book Society has for 57 years kept us up to speed about our finest home-grown poets, and rewarded them every year. It should not be removed from existence by a single ignorant stroke of the Arts Council's pen.
No comments:
Post a Comment