Review: Books: THE WORLD OF BOOKS: Poetry is still very much in motion

[David Harsent], on the other hand, won pounds 10,000 in the poetry world's Booker equivalent, the Forward Poetry Prize. The media hype and acres of comment that have surrounded [John Banville] and the Booker have only gone to highlight the distinct silence around poetry in a month that also sa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Observer (London)
Main Author Wilkinson, Carl
Format Newspaper Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London (UK) Guardian News & Media Limited 30.10.2005
Subjects
Amis, Martin
Banville, John
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Summary:[David Harsent], on the other hand, won pounds 10,000 in the poetry world's Booker equivalent, the Forward Poetry Prize. The media hype and acres of comment that have surrounded [John Banville] and the Booker have only gone to highlight the distinct silence around poetry in a month that also saw National Poetry Day. Like [MARTIN Amis], I believe nothing in English literature compares with the final lines of Paradise Lost . But equally, one of the most entertaining groups of young poets I've heard read recently was Aisle 16, whose rhymes are hardly Milton, but are in the Beat tradition and engage a whole new readership. They rhyme on the NME , Richard Madeley and other modern ephemera. The notion that poetry must be serious is false; I'm with Samuel Johnson when he wrote: 'The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.' Adrian Mitchell's cynical 1964 line that 'most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people' today simply doesn't ring true. Modern poetry doesn't ignore most people, but the poetry community must continue to strive to ensure most people can no longer ignore most poetry.
ISSN:0029-7712