Poetry?
It'll soon be about as popular as morris dancing



David Smith
Sunday January 29, 2006
The Observer

>Daisy Goodwin, the TV presenter dubbed the Nigella Lawson of poetry, has warned that the art form of Shakespeare and Keats is dying and set to become as quaint as morris dancing.

As sales of poetry plunge, Goodwin, whose BBC shows feature actors reciting verse, fears it will become extinct from the national culture. 'It will be like morris dancing: really interesting to people who do it, and incomprehensible and slightly annoying to people who don't.

'Twenty years ago everyone could name a Larkin or a Betjeman poem and had read them. I think you'd be very hard pressed to find anybody who could name a poem by any of the top 10 poets today. It's an endangered species.'

Sales of poetry in Britain last year sank to 890,220 books, the worst performance in years, while sales of fiction soared to 45,772,541. A Book Marketing/TMS survey found that last year 63 per cent of Britons aged 12-74 bought any kind of book, with 34 per cent purchasing fiction and only 1 per cent verse. The state of poetry was questioned by actor and writer Stephen Fry in his recent book The Ode Less Travelled, in which he condemned the 'arse-dribble' produced by some modern practitioners.

The novel is celebrated in numerous awards, most prominently the Man Booker Prize, but poetry's TS Eliot Prize is by comparison a low-key affair, and its award this month to Carol Ann Duffy for her collection Rapture had comparatively minimal exposure.

Goodwin, who is exploring ideas to text poems to mobile phones, hit back at critics who accused her programmes of being patronising. 'They feel that perhaps my approach is a little facile and I'm promoting poetry as self-help, and that's not what it's about. Fair enough, but then they have to take the rap for the fact that no one will read poetry any more.'

She has just been appointed a spokesperson for I Can Chatter, a campaign to highlight the importance of children's communication skills, and argues for a return to learning poetry by rote in schools. 'Anybody who's been forced to learn poems by heart knows that they are a huge boon to you in later life. They're like mental furniture.'

But Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, felt that Goodwin's view was unduly pessimistic. 'There's a huge appetite for poetry, not just at the crunch times in people's lives - births, marriage, death - but with a more general sense that it can belong in our lives.' That's why we see it in a completely now unsurprising manner on the London Underground, and so on.'

Debbie Williams, of Waterstone's, admitted poetry sales were static. 'It's mostly older people who read poetry, which is a shame. There's a lot of contemporary poetry which is relevant and exciting, with young people talking about the Iraq war.'

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