:: Farrukh Dhondy

Curious case of the royal rhymer

Farrukh Dhondy

May.16 : "And the People said, ‘Speak to us of Guarantees’. And the Prophet said, ‘They are the wise men who interpret the book, because their very name arises from the book…’

‘Hang on’, said the People, ‘we were talking about bank guarantees in these tough times, what have wise men got to do with it?’

‘Oh’, said the Prophet, I thought you said ‘Granthis’ — it must be your Punjabi accent’".

From The Profit by

Kareless Gibberish

(Tr. into proper English by Bachchoo)

P.B. Shelley, perhaps looking for a bit of acknowledgement, said, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". A legislature of poets may, today, do a better job of making the laws, managing the economy and keeping their expenses in honest check than the present occupants of both British Houses of Parliament. Shelley, of course, meant that poets did more than just those three things. They represented, as perhaps he himself didn’t quite, the fundamental tenets of an age. Byron could have claimed to be a better candidate.

And in our times, the Queen has again overlooked my candidature, passed me by and appointed a lady poet called Carol Ann Duffy to the erstwhile vacant post of Poet Laureate.

In Britain at this time one must ask if a poet is representative of anything at all apart from his or her own conceits. The accelerated grimace of the age isn’t capable of being represented by a poet. No wordsmith can unify or represent the fragmented consciousness of Britain. We have feminist poets, black poets, satirical poets, nostalgic poets, old-fashioned poets, jihadic poets, Rap poets, crap poets and poets who are to poesy what the Turner Prize is to art — an occasion to argue about the contemporary nature of poetry. No one poet represents the rhetoric of the age.

The fact that Bob Dylan’s latest album has gone instantly to No. 1 may simply mean that there are a lot of old hippies and hipsters (guilty, Your Honour!) with a few pounds to spare and not enough skill to pirate material from the Internet. That wasn’t true of his album which topped the charts more than 30 years ago. Then, it could be said that Dylan’s was the distinctive voice of a whole generation and a crown for an acknowledged legislator could easily have gone to him or indeed to John Lennon.

Poet Laureates are appointed in the Queen’s name, but actually by the legislators — in the present case, Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He and his advisers confer the post and distinction on a British versifier, just as they appoint ex-soldiers and grandees to be Black Rod, Blue Stocking, Master of the Garter, Keeper of the Lard or whatever. Wearing the laurel crown has become a comic duty, a literary red-nose turn, writing verses for the birthdays and public outings of the royal family. And that with a straight face and in prosody devoid of satirical or ironic spin — or off to the tower, metaphorically speaking.

There have been ages, before the spread of universal literacy, in which a poet’s voice could be heard above the babble of the rabble. Wordsworth could certainly claim to have purified the dialect of the tribe with his simple stories, his determination to write in the people’s voice without sacrificing the profundity of his mystical and visionary intimations. Tennyson, despite his long and boring idylls and sentimental, overwrought epic narratives, gave a voice to the early Victorian Age, from the jingoism of The Charge of the Light Brigade to the crisis of faith in the long and beautiful In Memoriam.

Kipling’s verse, now dated and deservedly neglected, spoke for several collective voices and sympathies of the Imperial period, from his mock-cockney protest of the soldiers on whose lives and labours Empire depended to the hymns to courage and duty (regardless of the race of the hero).

T.S. Eliot, bursting on the English-speaking world with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Wasteland, almost single-handedly encapsulated the arrival of the "modern" poet. His fragmented and musical allusions juxtaposed with the banality of concerns and speech of the age were taken to be the authentic voice of disillusion and these contrasts of disillusion were accepted as the pigment of the age. All of these could have been the deserving laureates of their time.

The appointment of Ted Hughes in the Eighties and his acceptance of the by-then motley role, remains a puzzle. Conferring the title of Poet Laureate on him was a recognition of his talent and gift which was self-evidently the opposite of laudatory verse for Royal occasions. His laureatage as any reader could have predicted, produced nothing but a parody of his own verse. And then come Andrew Motion and now Carol Ann Duffy. Do we need her?

There is never an age or a society that doesn’t need poetry, but it breaks out in different ways.

An Indian Poet Laureate, if there was such a thing, would probably be a voice such as Javed Akhtar’s — demotic, inclusive and profound at the same time — someone who could write Bollywood songs as well as continue the tradition of Urdu poesy.

In Britain there would be pressure to crown some Rap poet, because that’s the fashion of the age. Rap is spoken to musical accompaniment, it rhymes, it has metre and it adopts and plays with the vocabulary of the mob. Then why don’t rappers qualify to be laureates? Some of them, I am sure, would have a shot at praising the Queen or paraphrasing the Duke if there was a crown, cash and cases of claret to be had. The appointment of Fifty Pence or Sloop Katty Kat (made-up British versions of likely names) to the post would be met with howls of protest after 10 Downing Street announced that it was complying with multicultural diversity targets and further integrating the broken society.

My own protest, which would remain unheeded on the Internet, would be that Rap may be verse and it may even be attractive and efficient verse, as in the narratives of Eminem, but it isn’t poetry because it doesn’t in its essence engage the subconscious of language. It is, as is much of the verse of the other champions of sex, race, gender and attitude concerned with bragging and not with discovery of the self, of the depths of meaning and association or anything else.