The chattering classes of Great Britain are, well, chattering. Not to mention buzzing apoplectically. The reason? After Andrew Motion came to the end of his seven-year tenure, Carol Ann Duffy was named the new Poet Laureate.
But many people, including some poets themselves, thought that the post should be scrapped altogether. These same people think that the Laureate, whose salary is a butt of sack, automatically becomes tethered to the Establishment and its demands: the job, after all, is to write poems of celebration for State occasions.
Such prescription is often irksome: Motion's first collection in seven years will appear next month, and he confesses to being 'rattled' by what was almost writer's block.
The accepted wisdom is that people do not read poetry any more, that they no longer listen to it, and that publishers everywhere have axed their poetry lists. But in big cities you can go to a poetry reading every night of the week if you feel inclined, while heroic small presses and prominent literary journals still give shelf-room and online space to poetry.
As well, in this literate age, you may not have read a poem in a decade or more, but some poetry will always be part of you.
Then again, Australian poetry sells very well when the small population is taken into account, and Les Murray is up there with international giants like Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott.
Poetry is as ancient an art form as dancing: one has only to think of the compelling rhythms of Hiawatha and the repetition of 'We'll all be rooned, said Hanrahan' to understand that this is so.
Yet even poets are hard put to it to say what a poem is exactly. Wordsworth (pictured) famously opined that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity. The word itself takes its origin from the Latin and Greek to make, and as tranquillity is vital, so is craftsmanship.
Yet although one can learn the techniques, mere obedience to rules does not necessarily produce a poem, for there is an essential magic to poetry that makes it quite different from prose. As Sylvia Plath remarked, poetry is a tyranny in which the poet has 'to burn away the peripherals'.
Thomas Mann believed the artist's highest joy is thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought. To achieve their own particular joy, poets have to add stringent discipline and mastery of form.
In this increasingly secular age, poetry can be said to have a new function as an alternative or complement to religion. Les Murray, for example, describes himself as a poet who is religious rather than a religious poet, and celebrates a sense of wonder and mystery.
I am, alas, not a poet, but my own case is one in point: raised in childhood and adolescence by Nonconformists of various stripes, and long the mother of three Greek Orthodox sons, I now style myself, when asked, as a Wordsworthian Pantheist.
Wordsworth's claim that 'the meanest flower that blows can give/Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears' certainly holds good for me, especially in the Greek spring, when, as it happens, very few flowers can actually be described as mean.
A good poem lingers in the mind, and the best ones mark the soul and memory indelibly. But as well as words, poems provide gaps, spaces and silences in an increasingly complicated and cacophonous world. Poems invite meditation and contemplation, while fusing the sensual with the spiritual, as in the truly marvellous work of John Donne; they are an integral part of civilisation.
Supremely talented British journalist A. A. Gill says that words are obviously his tools of trade, but that, despite attempts, he is not a poet. He professes himself horrified by the notion of abolishing the post of Poet Laureate, for, he maintains, we carry scraps of poetry with us until the very end.
He does not actually say so, but he seems to argue that the Poet Laureate can be considered an emblematic or iconic figure. What he does say is that poetry 'maintains a connection with the lyrical beat at the heart of the tribe'.
Which is the reason so many readers look forward to Tuesdays on Eureka Street.
Gillian Bouras is an Australian writer who has been based in Greece for 28 years. She has had eight books published. Her most recent is No Time For Dances.