I might be against the badger cull and the bedroom tax – and think it is both saddening and hilarious that Owen Paterson recently remarked that the reason they hadn’t been able to murder enough badgers was because “the badgers moved the goalposts”. But despite this, I believe that cleverer political poetry has been written than the seeming hash job recently penned by everyone’s favourite GCSE syllabus poet, and our esteemed Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy.
Writing in The Guardian, a newspaper whose readers regard her as some sort of saint and are the sort who are all outraged at the prospect of the ‘nasty Tories’ shooting bullets into the heads of our furry woodland friends, there’s little doubt that the readers will lap up Duffy’s anti-Tory rhetoric.
The poem is based on the line that the “badgers have moved the goalposts” and gives 22 spurious reasons for the bedroom tax, all based on animals from the British countryside. For example, “The Hares are losing the plot”, which is presumably supposed to mirror the spurious reasons and the scapegoating that she thinks the Coalition uses to justify their actions. The pun at the end “but only the Bustards have broken the bank” is unoriginal and cringeworthy enough to fit right in with the titles on York Vision’s news stories.
Duffy’s poetry is often marketed as poetry for people who don’t like poetry- it’s accessible and lacks subtlety and finesse – and this poem, with its clunky pun, rushed rhythm and obvious idea, is no exception. It’ll be popular because the concept (i.e the Tories are mean and nasty) is popular among her audience, but the poem does not come close to greatness.
All in all, it seems like a piece of writing that, given time and a few newspapers, a schoolchild could have come up with. I
suppose that it is a bit cheeky for a Poet Laureate to write something against our current government, but if it is angry revolution we are looking for, we are definitely not going to find it in a few lazy lines about cuddly woodland creatures .