Viewpoint: City of Ottawa should innovate its new poet laureate position

By Alexandra Mazur

Next month, the City of Ottawa will reinstate its poet laureate position, crowning both a French and an English poet to serve as the capital’s bards for two years.

It’s a long-sought goal for Verse Ottawa, the minds behind VERSeFest, Ottawa’s only annual poetry festival. They have been petitioning for years to get the poet laureate position renewed in the city. Ottawa did have an English poet laureate from 1982 to 1990, but the city has had trouble since then justifying space in its budget for versification.

It’s a big win for Verse and for poets in Ottawa, with each poet laureate set to receive a stipend of $5,000 yearly. But is it a big win for the citizens of Ottawa? The city might be missing an opportunity to refresh the poet laureate position in order to make this bid to popularize the arts more appealing to a wider audience.

The truth is, interest in traditional poetry is plummeting. According to the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, released by the American National Endowment Centre for the Arts in 2015, poetry was the fastest declining artistic form in general popularity, ranking below knitting and dance, just above opera. In 1992, 20 per cent of respondents said that they had read a poem in the last year; in 2015, that number had dropped to less than seven per cent.

And yet Yves Turbides, president of Verse Ottawa, said that the positions won’t be awarded to anyone outside the realms of a “traditional poet.”

The poet laureate position has a long history and a rich tradition. It’s understandable the city might want to keep it the way it’s always been.

The term “laureate” derives from the Pythian Games — founded sometime in the 6th century BC in ancient Greece — from the laurels that were awarded to champions of their craft, both in sports and in the arts. The position has been held by to the 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch, 17th-century Englishman John Dryden — Britain’s first poet laureate — and 19th-century literary icon Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

It’s an easy to imagine ancient Greek rhymes and iambic pentameter bursting forth at historic events in the past. But in modern times, national or even citywide sentiment is a hard thing to pin down, and people don’t seem to have the time or patience to dissect a poem.

George Elliott Clarke is Canada’s parliamentary poet laureate for 2016-2018. His duties include recitations of his poems across the country at events, during memorials and great big celebrations. But according to Clarke, even he finds the position vague and in flux, as he’s been quoted publicly saying, sparking discussion about the relevance of the position in 21st-century Canada.

Turbides said it will be the job of the two poets laureate to whip up interest in poetry in the city, and to go to schools and get young people invested in couplets, rhymes and meter. Although the positions will be held by established versifiers, Turbides added that the poet laureates will be creating an online presence with a Facebook page and a website, and probably even a Twitter account. But will that be enough? I fear that it may not.

I’m not saying poetry is dead; it’s simply different now. Especially for younger generations, poetry has evolved to new modes of expression.

If you’ve ever tweeted in your life, you’ve realized how difficult it is to not sound completely pedestrian in 140 characters, so there’s clearly an art to crafting a compelling Tweet. Also, if you listen to a particularly catchy pop tune, an impassioned rap song or a tenderly crafted folksong, that’s poetry at work.

What if the city took this opportunity to bolster spoken word, fiction, long narrative work, social media, blogging, songwriting and everything literary that has exploded from the legacy of verse? A literary laureate that included some of the aforementioned styles might actually have a better chance of buoying poetry alongside other forms.

It might, in a way, take a step towards saving poetry in the city.