Hwaet! - are we getting McPoetry at Ledbury?

It has been edited by Mark Fisher, who was briefly a Minister of the Arts under Tony Blair, and it can claim to be fairly representative of the kind of verse being promoted and written today.

The title, however, is the opening word from the nation's oldest epic, "Beowulf", which was written in Anglo Saxon, more than one thousand years ago.

It's hard, however, to define what 'Hwaet' actually means. The Festival insists it means something like "Listen, here!", but while I was at Durham University, studying Old English, the favoured translation was "Attend!". Seamus Heaney, in his translation favoured "So!" - and a Manchester University academic, George Walkden, recently suggested that "Hwaet" should actually be translated as "how", without any exclamation mark at all. So does this anthology actually deserve its exclamation mark, or it is ultimately disappointing?

There is no doubt that thousands of poetry books are still being sold in the UK; but poetry remains a minority interest for most. Even Carol Ann Duffy's highly amusing "The World's Wife" had sold fewer that 20,000 copies by 2013, according to data from BookScan. Now most poets would love to sell 20,000 copies, I'm sure; but compared with the millions of copies being sold by best-selling novelists, it's still on a modest scale. So, why isn't modern poetry popular? What exactly is modern poetry?

The names of modern poets are easy enough to find. The Festival anthology carries work by most of the more celebrated practitioners, alongside some relative unknowns; yet some 'big names' who have read at the festival are notable by their absence. This is, after all, a selection; and anyone who's edited an anthology will know what a headache the rigmarole can be.

In 2005, when I was asked to edit "The Review of Contemporary Poetry" for the (now defunct) publisher 'bluechrome', - a book that was sold to raise funds for the Stroke Association, - I managed to obtain work from Andrew Motion, Alan Brownjohn and Brian Patten, to name just a few of the bigger names; but that was the easy part. The hard part was deciding what to leave out, - out of the rest of the submissions, because the book had to contain a certain number of pages. Mr Fisher too must have felt, I suspect, the tension between quality and deadline, required length and the selection process. It's a tricky task. After all, as the great American poet Randall Jarrell said of anthologists: "You may leave out James Whitcomb Riley, because you are afraid of being laughed at; but if you leave out Spenser, you mean business." So, what sort of job has Mr Fisher done?

Personally, I think the Festival is to be applauded in its ongoing support of foreign poets, and the translations of foreign verse in the anthology are, for the most illuminating and moving; a good thing.

Modern English language poetry is harder to quantify for me, because it is such as broad church these days. When, back in 1998, Sean O'Brien published his collection of essays, "The Deregulated Muse", he was referring to this fact: the muse is indeed deregulated, although one note, that of urban "bathos", is increasingly dominant, and you hear that note often in this anthology. Bathos is the opposite of elevated speech or heightened language which, since the time of 'Beowulf', has been explored through poetry.

For example, take this opening from the anthology poem by Simon Armitage, one of the biggest names in the book: "Arrives with his daughter, she's all braced teeth/and blunderbuss freckles, she bolts/from the passenger seat of his Fiat Doblo...."

Hwaet! - how, is that poetry at all? - some might ask. It's still down to the individual reader, of course.

And what of this opening, from a lesser-known poet, Isobel Dixon: "I have forgotten the Periodic Table of the Elements,/apart from the famous few..." but only a few lines on, she reaches the sublime, "Earth's Ten Commandments graphed in code..."

The balance between bathos and the sublime works very well here, I think; but there remains a rising wail of dissent, it should not be forgotten, concerning the overall state of contemporary English verse.

Back in 2007, writing for the "English Poetry on Trial?" edition of the well-respected "Acumen" literary journal, the award-winning poet Ross Cogan identified something he called "McPoetry".

He wrote: "To the McPoet, feeling is everything; technique is nothing; 'it just came out that way' is an excuse for anything."

I'm not quite sure what Mr Cogan meant by 'McPoetry'; but I suspect he meant verse with a degree of "street-cred", which may be fine, now and again, but which is quickly produced and is ultimately unsatisfying.

I fear there is a wide selection of "McPoetry" in this anthology, because such verse is the dominant key of the moment: at universities, at the writing schools and among the poetry establishment.

There are other kinds of poetry here too, more controlled and considered: including from Carol Ann Duffy and James Fenton.

But if "McPoetry" is increasingly dominant, how has this situation come about?

The establishment, such as the Arts Council, supports magazines, publishers and festivals, through heavy grant funding, and it is a fact that without grant funding the Ledbury Poetry Festival would either cease to exist or would be of a much smaller scale.

Some poetry editors would welcome the ending of all grant funding for the poetry scene.

Writing of grants to magazines, Kevin Bailey, editor of the HQ literary journal wrote: "Like a sot-sailor, once a magazine falls dependent on a grant, it usually becomes bloated, lazy and impotent...a simple and honourable independence seems to be the best course".

There remains, then, the suspicion that certain types of contemporary verse, certain attitudes and certain themes are being preferred and promoted, at the expense of other kinds of modern verse.

So, are two decades of the Ledbury Poetry Festival worth celebrating, and is the anthology worth celebrating? I think so, albeit with reservations.

The Festival brings together like-minded people, all seekers for the intangible, to one special place, and wonderful and memorable things can occur when that happens.

There are anecdotes in the anthology which brought back great memories for me: such as Carol Ann Duffy being heckled by a man when she was reading in the parish church. Apparently, he thought she was a man-hater and was "blaspheming in the house of God". She handled it brilliantly of course, and it all added to the occasion.

I will also never forget the first reading in Ledbury by James Fenton.

When he recited, in a most animated fashion, his "Ballad of the Shrieking Man" in Ledbury Community Hall, several years back, I realised at once, with a shudder of recognition, what poetry in performance could be.