THE SINGING SCHOOL

The Poetry School, The Poetry Book Society, The Poetry Business:

So much poetry about you’d think I’d want to shout, “Hurray, hurray,

Every day’s Poetry Day!” but I don’t and you don’t either-

You know its flim-flam on the ether, grants for Jack-the-lads

Of both sexes, poets who’ve never been seen in a little magazine

Then gone on to win the Oopla Prize and made baroque architecture

The subject of an O.U. lecture.

Seventy five pounds for a seminar on sensitivity in verse;

A hundred and fifty for an infinitely worse whole weekend of

‘Steps towards a personal fiction in post-modern diction’;

And the inevitable course anthology, eight pounds for eleven

Nameless poets Pascale Petit and Mimi Kahlvati carefully selected

From, well honestly! Who cares? God only knows how banal they’re

Bound to be. Budding Roddy Lumsdens, (Has anyone read a Roddy

Lumsden

Poem?) “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” his first collection short-listed here and

there -

The sheer hype’s enough to put me off for life.

I still write at bus-stops and avoid competitions like the plague.

I’m not lucky that way, I’ve still to win a single literary prize.

Is there one for every day of the year? And as for James Kirkup,

My mentor of forty-odd years, his name evokes blank stares; but

Look him up in ‘Who’s Who’, countless OUP collections, the best-

ever

Version of Val?ry’s ‘Cimeti?re Marin’, translations from eleven

tongues

Including Vietnamese. Is there nothing Jamie can do to please?

I help one poet to write and one to stay alive;

Please God help poor poets thrive.