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Odd as all these new uses of poetry appear, a still odder piece of functional poetry came to light yesterday. In Pakistan, a school manual of literary excerpts in English, aimed at English language learners, was published. It included a poem in English called The Leader. On the surface, it looked exactly like the kind of sycophantic, harmless kitsch encouraged in the court poets of Hoxha’s Albania or Kim Jong-Il’s Korea; a poem, a very long way after Kipling, presenting some sort of harmless sucking-up to the nearest autocratic leader, under the guise of stating high moral principles. Very suitable for schoolchildren, in whatever part of the world. Hilariously, on examination, the poem turned out to be an acrostic, in its initial letters spelling out PRESIDENT GEORGE W BUSH. (“Patient and steady with all he must bear/Ready to accept every challenge with care/Easy in manner, yet solid as steel/Strong in his faith, refreshingly real/Isn’t afraid to propose what is bold ...” etc) It could hardly be funnier; the idea of this being published in Pakistan, where you could travel from one end of the country to the other without being able to find a single admirer of the American president is almost too much. How on earth did it happen? Well, devotees of the cock-up theory of history will easily conclude that someone found a patriotic outpouring on the internet somewhere, didn’t notice the acrostic and thought it was perfectly suitable to give to juvenile admirers of despots anywhere. Wild fantasists will like to think that out there in Pakistan somewhere is an eager admirer of Bush who wrote a poem, and managed to weasel it into the anthology without anyone noticing. Personally, I think the poem is so terrible and has such a loose grip on English idioms that it can only be the work of CIA operatives. Sick of dealing with kidnappers, of bribing government officials, bored with torturing randomly-selected members of the faithful, perhaps one agent decided to write a nice little poem and send it in anonymously to the Ministry of Education, well-wrapped in $100 bills, to ensure publication. After all, the war on terror continues on a number of fronts, and there is no reason why those fronts shouldn’t include the acrostic poem. There is some concrete evidence to suggest that the poem, as well as being about an American subject, was indeed written by an American. For instance, the word “mould”, meaning “to form”, is spelt “mold”, which turns out to be correct, should you be American. There are none of those very characteristic sub-continental turns of phrase in English; it is probably written by a native speaker of English, and an American one. Of course, it could just be taken off the internet, which would be very bad luck, but I prefer my scenario. After the war, the CIA funded abstract expressionists, literary journals, Mr Stephen Spender and all sorts of odd organisations in the interests of promoting Western capitalist culture across the globe. They’ve had decades of dealing with terrible exponents of vers libre whose works never seemed to get anything in the way of results. Who, honestly, could blame them if they decided to start writing poetry themselves, and see whether, where a professional poet failed, the cold, well-trained mind of a professional killer could succeed in getting results through rhyme? — By arrangement with The Independent |
Poetry, now, has a function, and if you’re too ignorant to know about, or too idle to find something which might perform that function, you write your own. That’s even better. You bet your life that when Calum Best was announced as down to read “a poem” at his father’s funeral, it wasn’t going to be Lycidas but some confection deriving from an eager fan.