ho needs a poet laureate?

Mes den hep tavas a-gollas y dyr
(Cornish saying: The tongueless man gets his land took, quoted in Tony Harrison's poem, National Trust)

he United States Congress does, for one:

(a)

Why not have laureates for
literature . . . drama . . .
songwriting . . .
children's books?

Recognition
The Congress recognizes that the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress has for some time occupied a position of prominence in the life of the Nation, has spoken effectively for literary causes, and has occasionally performed duties and functions sometimes associated with the position of poet laureate in other nations and societies.. . The Congress further recognizes this position is equivalent to that of Poet Laureate of the United States.

(b) Position established
(1) There is established in the Library of Congress the position of Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. The Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry shall be appointed by the Librarian of Congress pursuant to the same procedures of appointment as established on December 20, 1985, for the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

c) Poetry program
(1) The Chairperson of the National Endowment for the Arts, with the advice of the National Council on the Arts, shall annually sponsor a program at which the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry will present a major work or the work of other distinguished poets.
(2) There are authorized to be appropriated to the National Endowment for the Arts $10,000 for the fiscal year 1987 and for each succeeding fiscal year . . .

Makes Brenda's £100 and a bottle of plonk look pretty penny ante, doesn't it?

The laureateship has been devalued in recent years, not only by the variable quality (mostly bad) of the work produced by writers who were in every other respect among Britain's finest, but there has also been a "guilty by association" feedback from the general opprobrium in which the Saxe Coburg Gotha royal family (aka the Windsors) has been held in recent years.

And yet little in today's tabloid media compares with the scurrilous penny broadsheets that assailed the royal family in the 19th Century; but it was then, be it noted, that giants like William Wordsworth and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, held the office. Then, of course, the fiercely republican temper of the times was what fuelled the public disregard; only the way Victoria briliantly reinvented the monarchy prevented Britain from consigning its royals to the same dustbin of history into which their continental cousins were dumped so unceremoniously.

Today, however, her success in identifying herself and her family with the national identity has rebounded, and during the media barons' attack upon the nation state it becomes necessary to rubbish the royals, and thereby to demolish anything which stands in the way of their GrosseEuropa agenda.

Yet though patriotism be the last refuge of the scoundrel, a love of what makes each nation unique - and, indeed, each constituent grouping doubly so, whether it be Yorkshire tykes at Headingley or Geordies on Tyneside, or African-Caribbean dub poets in Brixton - is something still worthy of celebration.

It is precisely because such an appointment should celebrate our cultural diversity that the laureateship should be removed from royal patronage and opened up so that it embraces not only poetry, but also the many other areas of creative writing in which British authors rule the world. For instance, couldn't someone of the stature of Paul McCartney or Bernie Taupin be awarded a songwriting laureateship? What about a drama laureateship for Harold Pinter? JK Rowling a children's laureate for his wonderful Harry Potter books?

And despite his protestations to the contrary, who better to achieve the poetry laureateship, not in spite of but because of his staunchly anti-establishmentarianism, than Tony Harrison? Similarly Adrian Mitchell, who has an equally fine anti-establishment pedigree, plus the popular touch that would endear his "official" verses to the non-poetry reading public? (This would be in the great tradition of Robert Bridges, who upset the warmongers by his refusal to produce patriotic drumbeating during Wiorld War I.) Or, to celebrate our multi-cultural society (and a blow at the now at last acknowledged institutional racism which has prevented any new works by either appearing for the past several years) it could or even should be awarded to either Linton Kwesi Johnson or Benjamin Zephaniah.

Let us, therefore, open up the question to public debate. On another page, you will find a ballot form, on which you may either vote for any of our nominations, or write in your own (with reasons). Whoever submits the best reasons will be awarded one of our monthly £30/$45 books-of-your-choice prizes from the Amazon listings.

As new nominations are received, we will add them to this page.

So let us open up the hustings, with "election addresses" (strictly unofficial, and not endorsed by any of the candidates), and our not-too-serious examples of what their laureate submissions might look like. (We have excluded Seamus Heaney from our hustings. Heaney won the Nobel prize for literature in 1995 and the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1997, but though born in Northern Ireland he has taken Irish citizenship and is thought unlikely to be willing to celebrate Brit matters.)

Our candidates in alphabetical order

Click to expand or collapse each biog

Carol Ann Duffy

Thought by many to be Britain's leading female poet (though what her sex has to do with it is hard to imagine), Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1965, studied philosophy at Liverpool University, and is poetry editor of Ambit. Her collections include Standing Female Nude (1985), Selling Manhattan (1987), The Other Country (1990), Mean Time (1993, winner of the Forward Poetry Award and the Whitbread Poetry Award), The World's Wife, and Selected Poems (Penguin, 1994).

Robert Nye greeted her first book as "the debut of a genuine and original poet". Sean O'Brien said of her in the Sunday Times that "she could well become the representative poet of the present day" and Eavan Boland said in The Independent on Sunday that she "is one of the freshest and bravest talents to emerge in British poetry - any poetry - for years".

One could lovingly parody her poem Weasel Words to imagine the following put into the mouths of the Queen's corgis:

Let me repeat that we Corgis do no harm.
You may have heard of our pissing on Guardsmen's trousers
but this is absolutely not the case. Media hype
on a bad news day.

We are short, fat-bodied carnivores with exceptionally
short legs and we have never denied this.
Furthermore, anyone here today could cradle a Corgi
on their laps and nothing bad would happen.

And as for Guardsmen's trousers, here is a Guardsman on duty. His creases knife-edge sharp.
Fine trousers . . . piddle . . . smart trousers . . . piddle . . . a credit to the regiment. . . Piddle . . . Piddle . . .

She has an awareness of what it means to be British today, surely a requirement for any national poet, as in her picture of different kids in a Comprehensive:

Tutumantu is like hopscotch, Kwani-kwani is like hide-and-seek.
When my sister came back to Africa she could only speak
English. Sometimes we fought in bed because she didn't know
what I was saying. I like Africa better than England.
My mother says You will like it when we get our own house.
We talk a lot about the things we used to do
in Africa and then we are happy.

Wayne. Fourteen. Games are for kids. I support
the National Front. Paki-bashing and pulling girls'
knickers down. Dad's got his own mini-cab. We watch
the video. I Spit on Your Grave. Brilliant.
I don't suppose I'll get a job. It's all them
coming over here to work. Arsenal. . .

But it's not all bad:

Here everybody has an anecdote
of how they met you, were the best of mates.
The seagulls circle round a ferry-boat

out on the river, where it's getting late.
Like litter on the water, people float
outside the Cavern in the rain. And wait.
(Liverpool Echo)

Hear her at a gala evening of poetry with Simon Armitage, Margaret Atwood, Hugo Claus, Bei Dao, Ariel Dorfman, Blake Morrison, Tracie Morris and Derek Walcott, at the Peacock Theatre, London, as part of TheWord literary festival, at 7pm, on Saturday March 27.

Tony Harrison

A 61-year-old Yorkshireman, Harrison has attracted media criticism for his use of the four-letter F-word in the TV transmission of his poem V, and also for his poetic rebuttal of the possibility that he might be offered the laureateship:

I'd sooner be a free man with no butts,
free not to have to puff some prince's wedding,
free to say up yours to Tony Blair,
to write an ode on Charles I's wedding,
and regret the restoration of his heir

Nevertheless, he is an important national literary figure, and if the office were disencumbered of its royal trappings, he would be a worthy laureate. Indeed, at his worst, some of his TV verse has the doggerel ring of made-to-order rhymes (for instance, notice the careless repetition of the word "wedding" in the lines quoted above), but at his best he taps into the heroic measures of popular speech, whether in his superb Mysteries (no less bawdy, for all its sacred theme, than his rumbustious The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus) or his documentation of the ravages of Alzheimers.

Sean French wrote of V in New Society: "I never thought that any poet writing today could capture what was happening to Britain in so clear-eyed and unvengeful a way", surely a qualification for a national laureate, if there ever were one.

And although white, his appreciation of non-Anglo-Saxon language, demonstrated before he was 30 with his Africanisation of Aristophanes' Lysistrata (Aikin Mata, 1964), as well as of English demotic, entitles him to be considered a national voice. A French critic said that in his Anglicised Phédre, "la noblesse linéaire, la flamme, la grandeur de l'ouvrage original est préservée". Yet he himself has regretted that, despite his empathy with Swahili, Anagó, Hausa, Yoruba, and of course Latin and Greek, he has lost "the tongue that once I used to know / but can't bone up on now, and that's mi mam's".

While royalists may bridle at it, he clearly has a vision that places the queenly virtues into a popular context:

Empress, Queen,
here slender, beddable, your clean-
living family image drove
my mother venomously anti love
and made her think the stillbirth just
retribution for our filthy lust;
our first (the one we married for)

He also has the gift of prophecy. At the end of his rant for Salman Rushdie, The Blasphemer's Banquet, he says:

Omar writes how nothing stays the same
and it's an irony of fleeting fame
that this Tandoori, OMAR KHAYYAM today
tomorrow will be called another name.

Damn right. Today it's the Bombay Brasserie.

Linton Kwesi Johnson

Interestingly, Johnson's official biography doesn't list the fact that he won a bursary to write for Melody Maker before he had begun to make his name as a poet. It was not a happy experience for the young Jamaican, chosen perhaps to provide some token blackness to a white-created medium that wrote more (and, be it said, at that time with more love) about black music than possibly any other of the popular music "comics", as musicians tend to dismiss them.

His political background - he organised a poetry workshop for the British chapter of the Black Panthers which he joined on leaving school - has always informed his writing, and he first saw poetic print in Race Today magazine.

His marvellous ear not only reproduces the music of African-Caribbean speech, it also informs the eye: titles like Mi Revalueshanary Fren cause us to look afresh at the language we thought we knew. It's almost as if James Joyce had donned dreadlocks and composed a dub Finnegan. And while it is tempting to try parodying lyrics like Inglan Is a Bitch (perhaps Inglan's Queen's a Bitch?), but respect for the power of the original stays the hand that holds the pen.

He is not blind to the way his people have been

duped
doped
demaralized

dizzied
dazed
traumatized

Even at his most despairing, he can still find a note of hope in the Tings an Times:

but noh get mystic
be realistic
an im hear a nex vice like di sea seh
somtimes di pungent owedah af decay
signal seh bran new life deh pan di way.

There is something here of Hugh MacDiarmid's

But deep surrondin' darkness I discern
Is aye the price o' licht.
(Milk-Wort and Bog-Cotton)

No doubt, if he had lived, MacDiarmid too would have spurned a laureateship. But as someone who combed the auld Scots dictionaries for a tongue that made him probably the greatest European poet of the 20th Century, he could have few better successors than this dreadlocked lad from Chapelton, Jamaica.

Adrian Mitchell

The late Kenneth Tynan called him "the British Mayakovsky", but while both are of the left, the comparison falls at the differences, so much greater than the similar social vision, and the way both will collage the superficial banalities of admass culture ("enriched with nourishing marrowbone jelly") into a language both fiery and rich. (Though his poem, Mayakovsky and the Sun has the surrealistic ring of @@@ to it.)

Like Harrison, he has written for the stage, most notoriously in US, his anti-Vietnam war epic directed by Peter Hall in London (the one where they burnt butterflies on stage as a shock tactic to alert people to the horrors of napalm bombing), but he also carries the political message of his writing out on to the streets. He's been in Trafalgar Square with CND.

The title of his 1977 collection Out Loud, says it all, though he prefers not to be called a performance poet: "Originally all poetry was performed- sung and danced. Writing came later. Print later still. There have always been poets who performed. Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends.

"I'm against performance poets asserting any superiority over book poets. I prefer performing myself, but I respect good poets who can't, or don't want to perform. There's always room for good poets of any kind. "

He cites Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas, Corso, Spike Milligan, Mike Horovitz, and Pete Brown (who came to world prominence as lyricist for the Cream rock group) as significant contemporary influences.

He is quite capable of composing an almost-haiku:

Words scribbled on dark waters
Illuminated
By the feathered light of swans

and then to rejoice in the TV image of a boy dancing in front of a Tienanmen Square tank:

You remember how we watched him
Dancing like a strong young tree
And we knew that for that moment
He was freer than we'll ever be
A boy danced with a tank in China
Like the flower of liberty

(Though, strangely, his poem doesn't conjecture what happened to the boy after the cameras went away.)

And (surely a requirement for an official poet) he can compose a lament to catch the heart:

Our scarves are weeping on the gates of Anfield
And that great singing ground is a place of whispers
For the joy of the game, the heart of the game,
Yes the great red heart of the great red game
Is broken and all the red flowers of Liverpool -
By the waters of Liverpool we sat down and wept.

If the royals could have anything as lovely for their birthdays as the verses Adrian Mitchell wrote for his friend Boty Goodwin then they'd be proud. No room for them here. Buy the book.

(He writes great kids' books, too.)

Andrew Motion
Benjamin Zephaniah

When he was shortlisted for a Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge and for the Chair of Poetry at Oxford, the tabloid media went predictably ape. After all, this is a man who was educated in an approved school, did time for burglary, who turned to poetry, by his own admission, because he didn't like poetry. Who wrote:

Some call it Democracy
I call it Hypocrisy
Dat mek me start feel Revolutionary,
When rich fashion cramps poor style
I stop an after a while I ask,
Is it me class or is it me colour
Or is it a ting I don't yet discover,
Us an Dem it is Us an Dem
When will dis ting ever end,
Us an Dem it is Us an Dem
Yu mus know yu enemy from yu fren

And academics try to fit him into the English literary tradition: "I heard recently about one academic at Oxford who's absolutely obsessed with poetic form and he read a poem recently on television and said it was a beautiful poem with beautiful form and the words ran beautifully . . . but he didn't even know what it was on about! He didn't understand it!

"That's what's so different about the written form as opposed to the oral tradition. With the written form, people read it, dissect it, try to read other things into it. I'm against that intellectualisation of poetry. I've seen people do it with my poetry and I'm like, 'whaat?' I live in the real world. To me, it's more important that a poem has form when you say it, using the rhythm of everyday life. Context to me is always important. The big question must always be, "What does it have to do with our real lives?'"

His appearances on BBC radio programmes like Living Colour have not particularly tempered the rich broadness of his vocabulary, though he admits that when he reads in Surbiton he might take more time explaining what the poems are about:

"For some people in Middle England, they've probably never spoken to a black person. I'll tell you this, this is funny - the other day I saw these two cars bump into each other . . . it was a white woman and a black guy, and the language they used was really interesting. The woman was 'Oh! You've collided with my car!' and the guy is saying, `Ah didn do nuffin to yer wheels man! You jus comin outta der like a flyboy!' A flyboy! Ha ha ha! So you see, the language is completely different."

Yu teach me
Air Pilots language
De language of
American Presidents
A Royal Family
Of a green unpleasant land.
It is
Authorised
Approved
Recycled
At your service.
I speak widda bloody tongue,
Wid Nubian tones
Fe me riddims
Wid built in vibes.
Yu dance.

Besides his political commitment, which he shares with most of the candidates on this hustings, he also has a love of language that comes shining off the page, even when his voice cannot be heard:

"If the world was nice and happy and there was nothing in small-p politics to write about, then I'd still write poetry. I must admit, if you asked me that question a few years ago then I'd have said that I use my poetry to get my message across and help fight for my people. But now, I have to be honest and say that if there was nothing to talk about, I'd still be playing with words."

What do you think? Vote for the People's Laureate.

Previous incumbents

England's first poet laureate, in 1616, was Ben Jonson, but it was not made an official royal office until 1668, when John Dryden was appointed after the Restoration.

Other notable appointees have been:

Nahum Tate (1692-1715), composer of While Shepherds Watched.

Colley Cibber (1730-57), whose greatest claim to fame is to have added the "My horse, my horse, my kingdom for a horse" speech to Shakespeare's Richard III.

Robert Southey (1813-43)

William Wordsworth (1843-50)

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1850-92)

Robert Bridges (1913-30)

John Masefield (1930-67)

Cecil Day-Lewis(1968-72)

Sir John Betjeman (1972-84)
and of course

Ted Hughes (1984-1998)

Two appointees have declined the honour: Thomas Gray (Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard) in 1757, and Samuel Rogers (1850) whose line, "To know her was to love her" (Jacqueline) inspired a Phil Spector hit in 1959.

Books by previous laureates

Click to see or hide laureate listings

Sir John Betjeman
Robert Bridges
Colly Cibber
Cecil Day-Lewis
John Dryden
Ted Hughes
Ben Jonson
John Masefield
Robert Southey
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
William Wordsworth

Books by laureate candidates

Click to reveal or hide candidate listings