Why is Contemporary Verse so Slippery?

Rostrata: American eels in fervent colloquy

Novels. Tick. Biographies. Tick. Diaries and letters. Tick. Cookery Books. Tick. Instruction Manuals. Tick. Opera libretti. Tick. Modern poetry. Uh, oh.

In the ten years I've been pastiching the written word for the Guardian's various Digested Read columns I've worked my way through everything from Proust to Tony Parsons, the Queen to Jordan, Oscar Wilde to Alastair Campbell, Heston Blumenthal to Nigella, the 1930 first edition of the Highway Code to the European Constitution, Donizetti to Janacek. And yet modern poetry keeps slipping through my fingers.

Not that I haven't tried. It's just that every time I have a go, it always ends up the same. Doggerel. And since the whole point of the Digested Read is to parody and satirise the writer's work, to illuminate what makes a particular work unique by highlighting the pretentious stylistic tics, the flaws in structure, the self-deceptions, and the absence of any great thought, it's rather self-defeating if every poet becomes indistinguishable from one another in a great, amorphous blob.

So what's the problem? Is it me? Am I just not smart enough to nail it? Or is there something about modern poetry that makes it resistant to being digested in the usual way? My guess is that the answer is a bit of both. But as I can't do very much about the first part of the equation other than to confess and apologise for my inadequacies, I'm going to concentrate on the second half.

Here's the nub of it. The Digested Read is - as you can probably guess if you are unfamiliar with it - an exercise in précis and humour. So given that most poems aren't that long, if you're to preserve the format of reducing a 500 page book to about 1000 words, then your average poem is going to have to be limited to just a few - hopefully funny - lines. So your chances of creating an individual voice that sounds markedly different from the iconic EJ Thribb are already severely limited.

Then there's the language. Poetry is an already condensed art form where each word carries a weight not generally found in other writing. So poetry pushes the accepted boundaries of style, imagery and meaning, and often teeters on the verge of hyperbole. And it only takes a small nudge from a satirist to tip it over the edge and render it ridiculous.

But I would also argue that a great deal of modern poetry isn't actually very good anyway and that - presumably unintentionally - the poets have already moved into the territory of self-parody long before I can get my teeth into them. Under these circumstances the satirist is left with an unusual choice: you can either just reproduce verbatim extracts of the original and see if anyone notices, or you can up the ante by going for the jugular, and risk turning a format that usually cuts through crap like a scalpel into a blunt instrument.

Here are some examples. Harold Pinter may have written some of the best plays of the post-war years, but he has also written some of the worst poetry. Bizarrely, though, Antonia Fraser's memoir of her husband, Must You Go?, seems to suggest that Pinter would rather have been recognised for his poetry. Fraser's willingness to reproduce it, with ever more hagiographic eulogies, implies she felt the same way. I would beg to differ.

His early offerings were all billet-doux love poems to Antonia which he would leave lying around the house. They all go something like this.

Towards the end of his life, his work became rather more political. But not actually any better.

Then there's Seamus Heaney. When he's not translating the epics, Heaney is most often to be found versifying on horticulture and the relationship with his Dad these days.

I've never found JH Prynne intelligible at the best of times. He's the kind of poet that seems to thrive on inaccessibility. To recreate one of his poems, all you really need to do is bolt together a selection of random images.

Yet for truly bad poetry, surely you don't have to look much further than Andrew Motion's verses as Poet Laureate. Here you can find just about everything that's wrong about trying to make royalty hip, modern and relevant in cod rap poetry.

Case made?