Joanna Lumley criticises modern poetry

July 22, 2008

Joanna Lumley, the star of the British comedy ‘Absolutely Fabulous’ has created waves recently with her condemnation of modern poetry. She started the most recent furore when writing the introduction to Liz Cowley’s forthcoming book, A Red Dress and Other Poems by stating: ‘It is a rare modern poem that achieves the balance between being challenging and accessible.’

Most of contemporary poetry she goes on to say is frustratingly incomprehensible and vague and at worst, self-indulgent. Many of Britain’s best known writers have been deeply offended as a result.

Wendy Cope, a former short-listed poet for the 2001 Whitbread Poetry award said: ‘Joanna Lumley might be widely read, but sometimes people who make comments like this don’t know very much about poetry. People make very good poetry out of the humdrum and commonplace. There are lots of poets writing good poetry that is obscure, and the answer is to educate the public to help them understand that.’

The BBC Radio 3 presenter Ian McMillan, who is widely tipped to be the next Poet Laureate also launched an attack on Lumley’s choice of words. ‘It’s sad and frustrating that people can still come up with generalisations like this. You shouldn’t be able to get poems on the first reading. Part of the delight is the time you take with them to understand them,’ he said. ‘But what’s wrong with humdrum and commonplace, anyway? Frank O’Hara called his poems “lunch poems” because he wrote them in his lunch hour. By the act of writing down his humdrum, it became delightful.’

Other critics of Lumley’s remarks included Dannie Abse, the winner of the Wales Book of the Year award and poetry critic Al Alvarez both of whom directed, perhaps rather unjustly, their attacks at the 62-year-old’s age.

‘This is such an old-fashioned remark. It is not well-informed. In the old days people said modern poetry was obscure, but now people everywhere read it. It is true that most poetry is very bad, but this is true of all poetry in all times.’ said Abse.

However there are many people who share Joanna Lumley’s views including the actor, novelist and comedian Stephen Fry who termed the work produced by many modern poets as ‘arse-dribble’.

Liz Cowley, whose introduction Lumley was writing, also demonstrated her support and said: ‘The problem is that Britain no longer has a cultural voice: it’s all so messy and muddled because people aren’t educated to write word constructions any more. With rare exceptions, I stopped enjoying poetry written any time after the 18th century.’

The debate is set to continue after the former professor of poetry at Oxford University James Fenton added: ‘Poetry has a large audience in the UK and that’s because it hasn’t been obscure for quite a long time. She’s thinking back, perhaps, to the obscurity of modernism, but there’s been a lot of ink spilled since TS Eliot and Ezra Pound.’

In 1985, Joanna Lumley was on the panel of judges for the Booker Prize.

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