This has always been the difference between the British and American poets laureate: The office of Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom is a royal appointment, and the national poet is commonly expected to write poems to order for state occasions and special events in the life of the Royal Family. That’s why there has been such a fuss in the British media over the notion that the current UK Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy might not write a poem for the recently announced royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton:

from The Telegraph (UK):
“Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy signals there will be no engagement poem,” by Roya Nikkhah
“It would be the perfect wedding present for Prince William and Kate Middleton—a new work specially written for the happy couple by the nation’s poet. But Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate, has signalled that she will not be writing a poem to commemorate the royal match. Peter Straus, Ms. Duffy’s agent at the Rogers, Coleridge & White literary agency, told The Sunday Telegraph: ‘She doesn’t want to do it and I don’t think she will. I don’t think she’ll do the engagement or wedding as a royal poem.... When she took on the role, the deal was that writing for royal events was not a necessity.’”

Interestingly, Andrew Motion, Duffy’s predecessor who complained in 2008 about the “thankless” job of writing poems to order, saying it was “very damaging to my work,” now says “writing such poems for the royal family is a way of placing poetry in the middle of the national conversation, and I think it is a nationally important event, whether we like it or not...” (although he did preface that remark with an acknowledgment that the job of Laureate is Duffy’s to interpret as she pleases. And more interestingly, the report that Duffy would not write an engagement poem was immediately followed by an official denial of that denial, issued through Buckingham Palace.

The US Poet Laureate, on the other hand, is chosen by the Library of Congress, and the only required part of the job is to give a single reading at the Library. Some of the poets who have served as US Laureate have used the office to promote poetry in American life through public projects like Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project, Billy Collins’ Poetry 180 anthology for high schools, or Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry newspaper columns. But other American laureates have preferred to serve poetry by simply continuing their own work, alone, as poets. The current US Laureate, W.S. Merwin, admits he was reluctant to take on such a public office and has shown no sign of wanting to be a “poetry booster,” but he does seem to want to use the national pulpit that comes with the title to say a few things:

from PBS NewsHour (October 27, 2010):
“W.S. Merwin on Becoming the New Poet Laureate,” a conversation with Jeffrey Brown
When asked why he accepted the position of Poet Laureate, Merwin replies “...it’s not for likes that I did it.... I wanted to talk in an official situation, in a very public place, as public as I’m ever likely to be, about the—what I think of as the one thing, the one talent, the one gift of human nature that does distinguish us from every other form of life.... And I don’t mean intelligence. I’m not sure that we're the most intelligent of species. We use our intelligence differently. Nor am I sure that language is a good definition, because we define language. And, in fact, there are forms of language among all species, or they wouldn’t survive, communication.... But I think what does distinguish us—what distinguishes us really is imagination.... the ability to sit here in Arlington and feel distressed by the homeless people in Darfur, or by the starvation of the whales in the Pacific, or by the species that are being snuffed out as we talk, or by the people who are suffering in Iraq and in Afghanistan....”

from the Syracuse Post-Standard:
“Poet laureate W.S. Merwin urges Syracuse audience to preserve nature,” by Hart Seely
“‘This just once, I would like to be able to say in a public and reasonably efficient way what I feel that we are doing,’ Merwin told a crowd of several hundred at the John H. Mulroy Civic Center. ‘I think we are destroying everything that’s been given to us.... I don’t think the universe owes us anything....’”

Applause, applause! Congrats are due to T. Obatala, one of the most fiercely talented of the poets in our Forum, whose poem caught Judge Paul Lisicky’s eye in the October InterBoard Poetry Competition.

October IBPC Winners

• In first place, “Chichicapa, Mexico” by Bernard Henrie, a poem “enlivened by its awe and cold wonder of the place“ that also “suggest[s] something about the limitations of description, the inability to make complete meaning of a bewildering experience.”
• In second place, “Iowa Born” by Billy Howell-Sinnard, admired for its “inventive syntax... unexpected rhythms... dark humor.”
• In third place, “God War” by our own T. Obatala, described by the judge as “an appealingly sassy poem that makes use of a dark litany to bring about an unexpected ending.”

More on the IBPC:
General information
Requirements for IBPC nominees
Anthology of the monthly IBPC winning poems
Archive of poems entered in the IBPC from our Poetry Forum
Background information page on October-December 2010 judge Paul Lisicky

Poems are more than song lyrics, often more complex and certainly more independent—take the music away from most pop song lyrics and they collapse into someting very thin, almost transparent. But that is not to say that a poem can’t be remade into a good song, and since there have been poems, composers and songwriters have set them to music. We’ve taken note of several recent instances in the news (see the links below), and that has prompted us to compile a selection of the best contemporary CDs on which classic poems are set to music, old poems made into new songs—with shopping links, for thoseof you searching for gifts for the poetry-lovers in your life.

from The San Francisco Chronicle:
“San Francisco Symphony review: Rufus Wainwright,” by Joshua Kosman
“Rufus Wainwright’s ‘Five Shakespeare Sonnets,’ which the composer premiered with the San Francisco Symphony in Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday night, turned out to be an imaginative, emotionally probing and often beautiful suite of pop songs.”

from The Guardian (UK):
“Why poetry and pop are not such strange bedfellows,” by Graeme Thomson
On the occasion of the Waterboys’ March 2010 performances of “An Appointment with Mr. Yeats” at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Graeme Thomson tells the story of how that show came to be: “One day in 2005, Mike Scott decamped to his music room armed only with a long-cherished dream and a copy of WB Yeats’s greatest hits, a brick-like anthology of the late poet’s collected works. For a fortnight, the leader of the Waterboys sat at his piano and ploughed methodically through the book, pushing and prodding at the words on each page until some began to offer a glimmer of a song....”

More on Poetry and Music:
Poems and Popular Songs: Kissin’ Cousins or Closer? (2008)
Poetry and Music, Sister Arts Allied (2007)
Listen to the woodlark’s song: “Lullula” (2006)
Are Songs Poetry? (2004)
Poetry + Music, an Inspired Collaboration (2004)
Caught in the Act, The Making of a Live Poetry + Music CD, by Whitman McGowan (2004)
Ngoma: Entering the Dreamtime with Music and Poetry (2002)

It seems the English-speaking host nations are determined to incorporate poetry into the quadrennial international Olympic gatherings—Australia designated a poet to write about the 2004 Sydney Olympics, Canada included a poet in the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, and now Great Britain has launched a project, headed by Simon Armitage, to “assemble poets from all of the Olympic nations in 2012” in conjunction with the London games:

from BBC News:
“Poet Simon Armitage plans Olympic gig for 2012,” by Tim Masters
“Simon Armitage, the poet behind the idea, said: ‘My hunch is this will be the biggest poetry event ever – a truly global coming together of poets.’ The unique congregation, called Poetry Parnassus, would take place at the Southbank Centre for a week during the 2012 Olympics.... ‘It’s insanely ambitious.’...”

Bravo!! It’s the Dream of the World of Poetry coming to life at last! And the planners of the London Games have already begun to include poetry in the Olympics’ permanent local legacy—poems inscribed in the buildings and monuments of the Olympic Park on the banks of the Thames.

Veteran’s Day began as Armistice Day, commemorating the end of World War I on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. That war, known at the time as the Great War, sparked an outpouring of still-remembered poems, some of which are already in our collection, Poems of War and Remembrance.

• “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae
• “Iron” and “Grass” by Carl Sandburg
• “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfrid Owen
• “Aftermath” by Siegfied Sassoon

• “Comrades” and “Back” by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
• “The Soldier” by Rupert Brooke
• “Anthem for Doomed Youth” by Wilfrid Owen
• “Country at War” by Robert Graves

William Blake was that rare thing, a great artist who was as much poet as painter, as much illustrator as writer. He was a visionary who created his own mythology, wrote satires, prophecies, epics and children’s rhymes, and made hand-colored illustrated books that remain admired icons of the two arts centuries after his death. Knowing that his Songs of Innocence and Experience date back to the end of the 18th century, a time when the United States of America was a newborn nation, you might not look to Blake for commentary on the state of American society in the 21st century—but there it is indeed. Just read Mark Edmundson’s explication of “London” in The Chronicle of Higher Education (pointed out by our friend Jim Finnegan on the NewPoetry list):

“William Blake’s America, 2010,” by Mark Edmundson
“Sometimes you need some help to see what’s directly in front of you: It’s often the most difficult thing to see. Looking for a compressed vision of the state of America now, I’m inclined to turn not to any of our esteemed journalist-pundits or renowned public intellectuals but in the direction of the poet William Blake, who did his work 200 years ago.... If he were to recast ‘London,’ probably his best-known poem, for the uses of the present, he might be inclined to retitle it ‘New York’ or ‘Washington’ and update some of the diction. Other than that, I’m not sure that he would have to change all that much. Grandly, shockingly, the poem reveals us to ourselves.”

More on William Blake:
Our Profile of Visionary English Poet/Artist Blake
Library: Poems by William Blake
“Burning Questions,” Study Guide to “The Tyger”
“Wm. Blake & 3 Li’l Voids,” Valentine’s Day Meditation on “The Clod and the Pebble”

The wall calendar page has turned to another month, and we’ve selected another pair of poems to represent our Poetry Forum in the monthly IBPC. Lacking new nominations in the IBPC folder, Poetry Guide Margy Snyder turned to the work of two standout poets whose poems have represented us before:

Our November Entries

• “The Sorrow of Birds” by Tim J. Brennan (68degrees)—a diamond of a poem, compressing wintry echoes and images into a very few words.
• “The Universe’s Mother” by Guy Kettelhack (GuyBlakeKett)—a witty exhortation that paints a colorful picture even without its accompanying drawing.

More on the IBPC:
General information
Requirements for IBPC nominees
Anthology of the monthly IBPC winning poems
Archive of poems entered in the IBPC from our Poetry Forum
Background information page on October-December 2010 judge Paul Lisicky

May our collection of Poems for Election Day—classic American poems by John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay and William Carlos Williams, plus two contemporary contributions from Jim Finnegan and Guy Kettelhack—inspire those of you who are eligible to get out and vote on Tuesday!

Baseball players say they’re going to get “between the lines” and see what happens, because that’s where the game is played: between the foul lines. The poetry game is played inside the lines also, and instead of watching endless irritating ads between the innings of tonight’s World Series game (won by my San Francisco Giants—yippee!), I spent the time hunting up my favorite baseball poems for you to read between the innings of the second World Series game tomorrow night. Go Giants! [~So says Poetry Guide Margy Snyder, who cannot claim to speak for her co-Guide Bob Holman in the matter of baseball allegiance...]

These are two things that go together. Looking back to his job at the CETA Artists Project in New York City in the late 1970s, Poetry Guide Bob Holman says: “At the time, I was embarrassed to admit I worked for the Feds. Now, I... see the job as what turned me into a poet who makes money being a poet.” It was “the largest federally-funded artists’ project since the WPA... a hotbed of collaborative impulse, a visionary socialist utopian paycheck”—would we had funding for programs like that today. The “individualist and careerist atmosphere of the old literary world” is even more powerful in this century—all the more reason we should pay heed to Bob’s thoughts on Poetry and Community.

More on Poets and Making a Living:
Poets’ Work, Poets’ Jobs
Poets and Paid Work
Readers Respond: How Do We Make a Living?—Tell us how you survive.