I might as well come clean; I’ve been involved in a tax-avoidance scheme for some time. I wouldn’t recommend it as it doesn’t seem to save me any money. Basically, I shove several trees’ worth of receipts to the back of a drawer for a year and ignore until many are faded and illegible. I then avoid all calls from my accountant until mid to late January when, in one panic-ridden week, I simultaneously clear the drawer and my bank balance. I admit to a severe lack of judgment.
Michael Gove’s educational master plan to force pupils to learn poetry by heart caused ripples in the poetic pond. It was excellent to have poetry being discussed in the public forum at all, albeit for only half an hour. For a “street urchin” like me, however, alarm bells ring when I hear the peal of conservative policies insisting that all children today should learn exactly what the putty-faced politician learnt at school. Fifty years ago Frank O’Hara prophetically observed, “Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with dripping (tears).” These poets still find their way onto a box-ticking syllabus. Great poetry engages language at its most alive, most playful and most exciting, which consequently engages pupils. We need to expand the canon for consideration, even to include rap and song lyrics. Poems that “the Empire was built on”, just as the models that free-market economics was built on, will soon appear ridiculous.
READ MORE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/9379271/Dan-Stevens-goes-to-bat-for-poetry.html
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