Rhyme and reasoning

THEY could have hung a banner outside Durham Town Hall announcing, “Together for the first time”, like the tagline for a new movie in which two screen icons are united.

Andrew Motion and Carol Ann Duffy aren’t movie stars, although the job they have in common has achieved more celebrity status of late.

Motion was the poet laureate who, after a decade in the post, handed over the title to Carol Ann Duffy six months ago. It took Durham Book Festival to bring them together.

Motion read and talked about his work, then performed a specially-commissioned poem for the audience on Friday night. Duffy, the first female poet laureate, read alongside North- East women poets at another event.

“We’ve known each other for a long time,”

says Motion. “This is the first time we’ve seen each other since she was made poet laureate, although we’ve been writing to each other.”

He’s pleased that Duffy took the post. “She’s a good poet and a very well-liked poet,” he says.

“It’s very, very good that she’s a woman. All kinds of things can flow from that. And it’s good she comes from a less obviously academic background than I do. She’s able to meet all the academic requirements that come with it, but it probably gives her a different kind of mobility.”

Motion was the 2009 Durham Festival Laureate.

“There are a lot of festivals up and down the country and they vary very much in quality, but this is a good one,” he says.

“One of the ways it’s kept good is by developing, not staying the same. So this year it’s slightly more diverse in its appeal than it has been before. In other words, it’s renewing itself.”

He was slightly apprehensive about writing a poem for the event because the worry with a commission is that the subject “strikes no bells within you,” he says.

The brief was broad – write something about being in the North-East, not a part of the world he knows particularly well. His poem is called Holy Island, so no prizes for guessing the subject.

It finds the poet and his partner on the mainland looking across the water to the island.

“I’ve never been there but it’s been on my wish list of places to go since I first became aware of its existence as a teenager,” he says.

“I thought I’ll write a poem about going to Holy Island. But no, I haven’t been there, so I’ll write a poem about not going to Holy Island, but wanting to go there.

“I left that lying around in my mind for a bit and then I thought I’ll write a love poem as well about wanting to go there with her.”

Motion was appointed poet laureate in 1999, following the death of Ted Hughes. Until then, the post had been for life with a yearly stipend of £200 and a butt of canary wine. He got a pay rise but said he’d only do it for ten years.

During that time, he’s proudest of seeing the Poetry Archive go online. It now has 200,000 visitors a month, listening to a million and a half pages of poetry. “It’s phenomenal and has done good for poetry, but I couldn’t have done it had I not been called poet laureate. Nobody would have given me the money. They’d have thought, nice idea, who are you? And that would have been it,” he says.

THE poet laureate, previously seen as being there to write poems for special national and royal occasions, has become more high-profile during Motion’s tenure. It might not make the cover of Heat, but has edged into the celebrity culture.

There’s a price to be paid for that, he points out. “Your privacy gets invaded, you get a lot of journalists being interested in things you don’t particularly want them to be interested in. That all has to be negotiated. But it must be good for poetry, provided you can use all that for the greater good of poetry.”

He was adamant that ten years was long enough to be poet laureate.

Not that he wants to give the impression that he regrets taking the post. “I’m very glad I did – and very glad that I’m not doing it any more,”

he says.

“As far as writing is concerned, there are obviously difficult boulders to lift in terms of writing poems about things you have very strong or emotional feelings.

“But the most insidious and most significant of all is that, if you’re poet laureate and being commissioned to write poems, they’re appearing in places poems don’t normally appear, such as newspapers and on radio and the television.

You know you’re going to be read by a lot of people who don’t normally read poems and that, in turn, creates a curious sense of responsibility for making them comprehensible.

“That can be quite difficult if you’re the sort of poet who likes to go in through the side door or the back door of a subject, which I am, and you suddenly feel you’re having to go in through the front door.”

There’s a sense of relief and lack of responsibility now he’s no longer poet laureate. “To know when I sit down to write a poem I don’t have to please anybody, and don’t have to make it immediately ‘gettable’ is a form of imaginative restoration I’m very pleased to have.

“It’s probably for that reason more than any other that six months ago, when I gave it up, I started writing poems much more freely than I’ve ever done in my life before.”

Does he see himself as a poet or a writer, I wonder. “I’m a poet who writes other things,”

comes his reply. He’s thought about it a lot because Philip Larkin, the subject of a 1993 biography by Motion, has writer on his gravestone.

“I want poet on mine, but want people to know I’ve written other things,” says Motion.

“I’ve tried to do good for poetry because poetry puts people in touch with their deep selves. It’s primitive, although we might grow up to learn the complicated language to talk about it if we’re teaching it at a certain level.”

“What is the first poem anybody hears,” he asks. “Goo-goo,” he answers, making baby noises.

“What’s the second thing they do around poetry?

Standing in the corner of the playground chanting.

“We should never forget that primitive human relish for words, a certain form of nonsense or not making precise sense in the way we expect a newspaper article to make sense."