BEING the Poet Laureate is a thankless task.
Andrew Motion steps down in May after a decade in the job and ‘our own’ Simon Armitage from Marsden (pictured) is bookmakers’ second favourite, after Carol Ann Duffy, to get the job.
But he might not want it. He’s been very quiet about the whole matter.
Simon could have been put off by Motion’s admitting that writing verse for the Royal Family has made his head hurt.
Poetry has made something of a comeback in recent years. After a brief flurry of Betjeman and Larkin, McGough and McMillan it became uncool, huddling into the same niche as clog dancing, acappella folk singing and moleskin trousers.
I used to write poetry, mostly back in the 1970s. Then I liked to say the Muse left me. What I really meant is that I got bored and turned to doggerel to amuse colleagues.
I occasionally look at the stuff wot I wrote and am embarrassed, but not embarrassed enough to burn it, which is perhaps what I ought to do. I wouldn’t want to inflict it on my children.
“Look what dad left,” they’d say. “It’s a book of poetry.”
“Is it any good?”
“I don’t know. What does good poetry sound like?”
“Do you think he’d want it published?”
“Well he didn’t publish it himself, did he? Why should we?”
“Oh dear, it appears to have fallen in the waste bin.”
