Yes, poetry's in crisis! Hang on a moment though. Was there ever a moment when poetry was not in crisis? When poets didn't feel horribly neglected and hard done by? When Browning was not being called an obscurantist? When John Clare was not being bawled at by his London publisher for using words that were incomprehensible to those who lived twenty-five kilometres beyond his garden gate? When the vulgar money men were not mashing the faces of the hypersensitive wordsmith with their seven-league boots?

Thank goodness we've got all that off our chests! Now we can go back to living the lives of grudging, suspicious, poetical recluses, those unmined rough diamonds buried in the black slopes..

*

Neville's organising a Poetry and Reflexology evening. He doesn't know anyone who plays jazz

*

'The renaissance in British poetry is surely one of the best-kept cultural secrets of the Noughties,' wrote the editor of Poetry Review, Fiona Sampson, ringingly, in the Independent on 11 December of last year. 'Unafraid to deal with the big topics - war, mortality, the search for meaning in the everyday - contemporary writing is accessible, memorable and often strikingly beautiful…'

Accessible! Memorable! Strikingly beautiful! Slightly damp of eye, I set down the text, quite slowly and ruminatively, and glanced out of my window at the patio, ever on the look out for meaning in the everyday. A lumberingly obese grey squirrel, swinging its jib from side to side, was making off with a hunk bread that I had already gifted to a lean sparrow, the first of the season to have blessed the back garden.

For slightly different points of view from Fiona's, read what Carol Rumens and James Sutherland Smith have to say about the state of British poetry in the great British Poetry Debate which begins elsewhere in this issue.

*

This time he is concerned about the fact that young people run the risk of becoming dangerously over-excited by the possibility of memorializing that close-cropped footballing hero Wayne Rooney in verse. This will distract them from more serious matters. It will inevitably cause them to fling the latest broadsheet of 'Ode to a Nightingale' to the ground, and grind it into the dust with their bespoke heels.

I think that he has not gone far enough. I think that all sporting heroes, be they Grecian or Manucian - and perhaps even all martial heroes too; in fact, anyone who does things rather than ruminates upon doing them - are unfit subjects for poetry.

I have recently written to the Poetry Society requesting that they recommend to schools the wholesale blanking out of texts from the Greek Anthology, the Iliad and the Odyssey. I hope that they act upon this recommendation quickly. It is never soon enough to turn the tide of ignorance, apathy and boorishness which threatens to overwhelm us all.

Are you really trying to tell me that school children have not even heard of the Odyssey these days?

Mount the other donkey. It has a tail on it. It may even be an ass.

*

What in the name of heaven is to be done? Now, at last, a solution may be at hand. I was recently trawling through a fine anthology of the best of Poetry Review, published by that tremendous Mancunian poetical institution, the Carcanet Press. For those of you who may feel inclined to buy a couple of copies, one for the open stacks, the other for the reference section, its full title is: A Century of Poetry Review, and it's edited by that mighty organ's current editor, Fiona Sampson (see above).

In there, as I was thumbing through quite serendipitously, occasionally stifling the odd yawn (as one tends to do with quite long anthologies), I came across a marvellous answer to my problems (well, to one of them at the very least, let's not start on all the rest) in a little piece of prose written by that arch mage, Robert Graves.

Here is what Robert wrote, way back in 1967, as part of a tribute to his old seafaring friend and ex-Laureate John Masefield, who had just died. 'He…never lost the supreme poetic quality: of unselfish love for all and sundry…'

That's clearly the answer then! To be poetic means neither more nor less than to be capable of loving people selflessly. It's as head-thumpingly simple as that. Why did something so blindingly obvious take so long to reach me? Well, why grumble though? Good night.

*

At the moment I caught sight of him - I'd been staring at a woman reading an almighty wedge of a saga of a book, in a rather fetchingly shouty puce dust jacket - he was hurling the tissue at the ground, clearly hoping to send it off the platform and down between the tracks of the Newcastle-London Express. That one was due any minute.

He missed alright. It fell short. So he picked it up and began to shine his black shoes with it. Then he popped it back into his pocket. A nano-second later, it was out again, wiping his perspiring brow.

As I watched him, utterly enthralled at how a despised and rejected thing can become sacred again in the blink of an eye, I was thinking to myself: words are a bit like that, aren't they? You throw them away, thinking they're good for nothing at all, then they come in for something after all, even the most despised ones.

I spotted some dreadful ones yesterday as it happens. I was idly leafing through a new book of poems by an anonymous author. I kept stumbling over these repellent things that had fallen straight out of the dictionary like great hulking stones, without the least sideways glance at humanity. Here are just a few of them: clasticated; luteous; mismouths. They'd come in for something after all. The author had built almost unreadable poems out of them.