In 2014, the chair of the judges of the Forward prizes for poetry, broadcaster Jeremy Paxman, said: “I think poetry has really rather connived at its own irrelevance … It seems to me very often that poets now seem to be talking to other poets and that is not talking to people as a whole.” It was only five years ago, but his complaint seems to have issued from another world.
The sealed edges of the poetry world have loosened recently. Some may look askance at poems shared on social media, seeing little of literary merit in the shareable sentiments that some “instapoets” convey, but audiences are also growing for spoken-word poetry, as the means of distribution is opened up by the internet. The contrast with so much current public debate is stark. As Rowan Williams has put it, at the end of another week of Boris Johnson’s and Donald Trump’s lazy abuse of the value of words, poetry’s “task of ‘turning noise into music’ is irreducibly political, a sustained resistance to commodified, generalised language and the appalling reductions of human possibility that this brings with it”.
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