"Bad" Irish Poet Wins Presidency

As we posted Monday, Irish poet Michael D Higgins was elected president. But, according to others, he's a bad poet, or, "no poet at all." Look at this post from The Guardian, for example.

As Michael D Higgins is announced the new president of the Irish Republic, no doubt we'll be told repeatedly that the politician is also a poet. Having read the poem "When Will My Time Come?" I wonder where this assumption comes from.

Admittedly, the opening line "When will my time come for scenery" isn't bad. It's the rest of the poem that's the problem.

After a jerky gear-change it offers a modest joke: "… Decades ago I was never able/ To get excited/ About filling the lungs with ozone/ On Salthill Prom." Then we get serious. The speaker missed noticing changes of light in the sky, and adds, " …when words were required/ To intervene at the opening of Art Exhibitions/ It was not the same." Why would it be? And why that clumsy verb "intervene"?

This kind of close reading continues, and then the article concludes:

An anonymous report of a poetry reading Higgins gave in 2007 for the Greek-Irish society ended with the following "… always he would add not as a politician, but as a poet he would know immediately like Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney or Brendan Keneally 'when a poem is made'." Not only does Higgins not know when a poem is made, it's almost sacrilegious to mention him alongside Irish poets who actually do make decent poems.

The Northern Irish poets have a phrase for rubbish poetry. I first heard it from Longley himself, though I believe he said he got it from Frank Ormsby: mad-dog-shite. I'm afraid I think this is the category into which "When Will My Time Come" effortlessly slips. Whoops!

Take that!