On National Poetry Day, Poetry and Political Rhetoric

At The Guardian, reporters Alison Flood and Jade Cuttle write about National Poetry Day and the ways that poets across the UK view the festivities, the state of poetry, and the ways that it becomes entangled with national politics. They note that new poet laureate Simon Armitage said on a recent podcast that the "language of politics is so 'shallow and threadbare' that it has stopped 'feeling like it has any truthfulness at all'" and "that when politicians use cliches it feels like 'some kind of screen being erected in front of you'." More from there: 

“One thing we tend to think about politicians is that they use language to get their own way,” he said. “The language of politics becomes very tired very quickly and it stops feeling like it has any truthfulness at all because it is just so shallow and threadbare.”

If politicians start speaking personal truths they may find themselves “outside the party line”, he continued, “so they erect these monuments of speech which are very boring … Language becomes a defence mechanism.”

Poets, by contrast, said Armitage, “have always felt a responsibility to not use cliches for that very reason; they’re emptied of potential. They’re exhausted. You invite fresh thinking by inventing new formulations, new patterns of language.” Armitage was elected poet laureate in May, taking over from previous incumbent Carol Ann Duffy.

The theme for the thousands of events due to take place today for National Poetry Day is “truth”. Earlier this year, broadcaster Cerys Matthews put out a call via her BBC radio shows for poems “which touch on a truth that matters to you”. Nominations came in from figures including Ed Balls, who chose WB Yeats’s The Second Coming for the line “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”, and poet Imtiaz Dharker, who picked Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle One Art, describing it as a “cleverly constructed lie”. They have now been collected in the anthology, Tell Me the Truth About Life.

Continue reading at The Guardian.