As you can see for yourself, these two retired poets of a fairly academic bent are bickering over two or three not-so-puny scions of a Dublin Bay prawn - hence their size. That much at least is evident. The one on the left of this painting by Mary Harman taught at tertiary level until she seized an opportunity of early retirement in 2001. The one on the right is freshly plucked from the boiling academic maelstrom, and seldom does anything but vaguely gesture in the presence of the blank sheet, and occasionally weep a tear of two. It will be years before he is fully capable of addressing the English language again. What we need to be asking ourselves is: why a prawn though? And why now?

The more active one on the left knows a good theme when she sees one, that is how she would argue the case to herself were she to be questioned. She has tried it on in all kinds of ways. It has been incorporated into a crown of sonnets. It led off her first culturally high-toned variant upon a sea shanty. There are other opportunities, she tolds us in the course of the interview that took place last Wednesday in our local cellar bar, maddeningly unspecific as ever. Her antagonist disagrees. This is no theme for old men, he warns her. Much better, he tells her, if it were to be incorporated, bodily, into a Surrealist collage along with the piano stool, a doll's daydreams and a recently retired cheque book. He proposes to take it away and do just that. She will not let him do so. She insists that it remain there on this plate as an object of contemplation. For how long though? he asks, howling testily. For just as long as it takes! she hisses. For just as long as it takes, Herbert.

Boy Falling Out of Auden's Sky

You cannot but admire the pluck of ardent lovers of near-contemporary verse. The other day, in the course of a group-bonding session in the West Country, we came across a group of Auden enthusiasts who lived in a sort of - how should I best describe it? - commune situation in the New Forest. Most of them were quite elderly. They were all in rude health though as far as one could tell. (The light was failing when we stumbled upon them)

As you see, the dramatisation is at dress-rehearsal stage. The boy won't be fully tricked out as Icarus for a day or two yet, I would imagine. We wish them well though. 'In Praise of Limestone' should prove to be quite a mountain to climb. That's pencilled in for the spring of 2016, we understand. 

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The Dangers of Voice Projection

Every day we come across yet another new reason for poets to feel profoundly anxious. It must be something to do with the unpredictability of the weather. Or the unpredictability of the poetry-publishing cycle. Sorry: poetry-publishing cyclone. The latest news that is likely to trouble poets from Bayreuth to the Bay of Bisquettay has to do with the fatal consequences of over-much voice projection in unsafe locations.

For some months now the Royal University of Stafford at Newham, which is said to be located in a particularly robust area of North London (hence the urgent need for such soothing patronage) has been offering evening courses in voice projection to aspiring performance poets. So far so predictable. The college spotted a niche need for such a course two years or so ago when various poets ranging loosely around the local neighbourhood began to lobby the college about the fact that poetry venues above the bars of public houses were no longer automatically offering clip-on microphones as part of the in-house service for the entire duration of spoken-word events. Some were stealing back the microphone, quite rudely too, after as little as ninety seconds. What poets needed was an ability to project their voices over distances as great as eighty-five metres (in the case of gastro bars), and often above a terrible hubbub of boorish and/or indifferent diners. The college began to offer such a course. Hundreds of local youths/poets signed up thanks to a charitable gesture from Newham Council.

Now we hear of problems. It seems that after every session - at each session, we need to explain, there is a ratio of a maximum of ten poets to a single male tutor - various poets are declared missing. If, say, ten are signed in at 7pm, only eight will emerge at 11.30. Where could they be? The windows of all the bathrooms are carefully chubb-locked inside and out. All doors are secured by various layerings of metal grilles. After a prolonged investigation by Hollister, Inc., the company with overall responsibility for security at the college, a terrible truth has emerged. One of the poets, a boy at least one metre taller and thicker than all the rest whose name is at present being withheld, has developed a terrible trick as a direct consequence of mastering the mouth-mobility exercises better than anyone else. It seems that the size and general versatility of his mouth is such that he is now able to swallow several poets whole without a second's hesitation - just as if they were so many prawns delicately awash in mayonnaise in a fluted glass. There are moments in the class - gum breaks, for example - when very few poets are together at any one time in the practice room. It is at such moments that he strikes. He has shown no remorse whatsoever. All he has offered by way of an explanation is that it is good for him to absorb the talents of others. It will make him a greater individual performer in the end.

Another chilling development in the midst of the general decline in the nation's poetry habits.

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Verbal Carpetry

The latest edition of an annual publication called Social Deviations Across the Thirty-Seven Or So Counties of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (HMSO, £147) has thrown up at least one surprising fact. Rutland, England's smallest county, has the highest ratio of unpublished poets per capita of general population. This discovery is about to be celebrated in an unusual way.

Each of these unpublished poets is being invited by Rutland County Council, the sponsors of a new poetry initiative, to purchase a body-sized fragment of treated parchment, and then to inscribe on it as many favourite unpublished poems by the purchaser as it can possibly accommodate. All these inscribed body shapes will then be stitched together with stout cat gut to create a giant field of unpublished carpoetry that will then be laid across the entire surface of the county, top to bottom, end to end.

Before that ceremonial laying out takes place - the ceremony is due to coincide exactly with the Winter Solstice - all the participants will be invited to lie, side by side, clothed or otherwise, directly beneath their own particular poem shape, so that the entire field of unpublished poets will eventually be beneath the carpet. Those responsible for setting the carpet in position will need to prove to the council members that they have no emotional attachment whatsoever to the practice of contemporary verse. When the field is fully spread, those beneath it will be encouraged to recite the verses underneath which they lie as the sun rises on that day. The Council has not yet disclosed how long the memorial carpet will remain.

Reports are also coming in that the council is in conversation with the Pentagon about leasing Rutland to USAF as a new air force base, given the impending closure of facilities at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. If this were to happen, the entire county would be covered in tarmac. The benefits to two or three would of course be enormous. Whether the timing of this second initiative will have any bearing upon the poetry project is at present unclear.

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Support our Bow-Wow Day of Poetry Rage for the Helpless

The cuts are biting, and the bitter truth of the matter is that the bitten are incapable of biting back. In Redhill, Surrey, for example, the entire budget for ancillary poetry activities - one of the finest and most enduring legacies of the last government - has disappeared overnight. Youth groups, the elderly and the infirm will no longer be able to engage in community-wide poetry projects. Last year's budget enabled the local council to purchase mechanical writing aids, laptops, costumes, and enough film-making and wide-screen-projection equipment to enable a dedicated community group of housebound poets to write, rehearse and then project the dramatisation of the sea shanty on which they had been working tirelessly, half a day a week for the past nine months, onto the gable end of a redundant sewing machine factory. The legacy of the present government, it seems, will be a blank wall smothered in graffiti and twenty-seven of our most needy voices pitched back into silence. The Human Rights Act has been invoked by a posse of supportive social workers, and a day of Poetry Rage for the Helpless is at planning stage. 

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The General Assumption Being...

Now that the poem has been removed from public scrutiny, there is really no telling what will become of it. Or of us. Even the babe in arms points helplessly in the direction of some magical Otherwhere. For many months it was there in our midst, and now it has gone. We remember it, of course - well, we remember parts of it - but that is not the same as being in its presence. Not that it told us anything in particular. Not that it led us over there - or back here. Its mere presence was enough. It was more than enough. Until somebody began to complain about how much it blocked the view of the landscape, and when that happened, it took itself off. And now we miss it. Well, some of us are missing it. Most of them never even noticed it in the first place. Those kinds of people have nothing to lose. We generally don't talk to those kinds of people.