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