Basil Bunting (1900-1985)

Nasty little words, nasty long words,
it's unhealthy.
I want to wash when I meet a poet.

They're Reds, addicts, 
all delinquents.
What you write is rot.

You can enjoy this poem as a joke, or as a caricature of a very common attitude towards poetry. It’s not work in the way being a bus conductor is work, and if the ten year old son can do it and rhyme, and the school teacher thinks that the poetry isn’t good, after all, school teachers know about this stuff, what claim does the poet have to any type of excellence, let alone any financial reward.

But beyond the grim humour is something else. The issue of public funding for the arts, and poetry especially. The Chairman, for all his bluster, has a point, or a series of points. And if instead of dismissing him as an uneducated and unsympathetic whatever, you try and refute or answer his points, you might find the exercise not as straight forward as it seems.

I’ve always assumed the Tom In Question is Tom Pickard, but I have no evidence to support that.

This is taken from the excellent Bloodaxe edition of Bunting’s Complete Poems.