When was the last time a poet made the front page of a major daily newspaper in the US? An amusing party game might be to imagine just how many bodies would have to be dug up in the backyard (and which chapbook series each had once edited) before a poet got that kind of coverage. And yet, here’s a story that ran on the front page of Britain’s Guardian this Saturday: “Poet’s Rhyming Riposte Leaves Mrs. Schofield ???Gobsmacked.’” Now, aside from the fact that this is a masterpiece of the British headline writer’s art ??? with its “rhyming riposte,” its assumption that the reader must already know who Mrs. Schofield is, and the groan of editorial pleasure we can sense still hanging in the air from that carefully quoted ???gobsmacked’ ??? what interests me here is that this is a front page story about the fact that a poet, well, wrote a poem. Here’s the back story: on September 4, it was announced that Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “Education for Leisure” had been ordered removed from the GCSE curriculum by the exam board because it supposedly glorified “knife crime” during a period in which the British media has been obsessed by the wave of stabbings that have taken place across the country. Mrs. Schofield, it turns out, is the “Lutterworth grammar school’s exams invigilator” (a position, I presume, which somehow involves brooms and a quaffle) who lodged the original protest against the poem which led to its banning. Three days after that original story was reported, Duffy’s “rhyming riposte” ??? entitled “Mrs. Schofield’s GCSE” — made the Guardian’s front page and, to the joy of the paper’s editors, Mrs. Schofield announced herself “a bit gobsmacked” at suddenly finding herself in the literary canon.
I gather that book banning is suddenly back on the front pages in the US, now that Sarah Palin has revealed herself to be less a Republican Hillary Clinton than Ralph Reed in drag, but what would it take for us to move beyond the politics of books to actually reading them? Will the day ever come when politicians in the US care enough about poetry to want to ban it? I find myself strangely hoping for that day, if only so that I can find the occasional “rhyming riposte” on the front page of USA Today.
And in case you’re not yet convinced that things are different in the UK, here’s a job posting that appeared in the Media section of today’s Guardian. I encourage you all to apply, especially those of you who have “experience with both proactive and reactive news management.” God knows, you’ll need it.