British journalist Jeremy Paxman bears a personality which serves as a fine antonym for his name.
“I think poetry has really rather connived at its own irrelevance and that shouldn't happen, because it's the most delightful thing”, he said. “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”.
Paxman made his observations as chairman of the judging panel for the 2014 Forward Prizes for Poetry whose previous recipients have included laureates Carol Ann Duffy and Ted Hughes.
As Paxman has been joined on the panel, inter alios by the veteran Welsh poet, Dannie Abse, I’ll wrap up here with Abse’s Cats, which features on the Forward Poems website:
“Cats
“One Saturday afternoon in Istanbul
on waste ground fit for a parking lot
not far from the Galata Bridge,
the hullabaloo of two cats copulating”.
© Natalie Wood (02 June 2014)
2 comments:
Now 'The Guardian' has published a beautifully written and delightfully well-mannered rebuttal to Jeremy Paxman by George Szirtes (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/02/jeremy-paxman-poetry-newsnight#start-of-comments). "Words", he says "are not stable entities you can slam down like dominoes. They carry a baggage of music, context, allusion, attachment and history. It is the baggage that produces the poetry".
I think Paxman should go back to reading the news and leave the world of Arts to those that have a soul.
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