Different strokes for different folks - and for different newspapers, too. While the tabloids were drivelling on about the engagement of David Beckham and Posh Spice, the upmarket broadsheets spent the last few weeks drooling over Ted Hughes's preoccupation with Sylvia Plath, as manifested in his latest volume, Birthday Letters.
No link there, you might think - the on-going romance of a footballer and a pop singer can hardly be compared to the doomed marriage of two poets three-and-a-half decades ago - except that the approach of both the tabloids and the broadsheets to their separate stories was marked by the same kind of hysteria.
Indeed, in their general, and increasing, rush to embrace tabloid values, the broadsheets tend to get even more hysterical about the stories they decide to embrace than the tabloids do. They did so with their ludicrously over-the-top coverage of the Hugh Grant-Divine Brown story (a watershed moment in the tabloidisation of broadsheets), and they did it again here.
Actually, I found their treatment of the Hughes story rather strange. Why all this fuss about a collection of poems concerning a woman who took her life thirty-five years ago? I can dimly understand the frenzied overkill of the people at the London Times - they, after all, paid a lot of money for the advance serial rights and were thus going to hype the "story" for all it was worth - but what about the simultaneous and almost equal hysteria from the Daily Telegraph, the London Independent, Guardian and other heavies? Had poetry and its creators suddenly become all the rage without this columnist noticing?
The reason became clear when I read last week's NB column in the Times Literary Supplement. After pointing out that several of these "hitherto unknown" poems "are so unknown that they were published in Hughes's New Selected Poems 1957-1994", the column referred to the Independent on Sunday's fawning editorial and gushing headline ("Now We Know He Loved Sylvia") and sardonically observed: "Welcome to Dianamania, Part 2."
And yes, it all fitted - the charismatic but deeply insecure and unhappy woman (Sylvia/Diana), the blighted marriage (Diana/Charles; Sylvia/Ted), and the stoical man left to recall the past and mourn what might have been (Ted/Charles). All that was missing were a few heart-felt words from Tony Blair to capture the public mood that the broadsheets were so assiduously trying to drum up.
As for the poems themselves, well, the reviews have been published and everyone - from Seamus Heaney in this newspaper to John Carey in the Sunday Times - has been hailing a major achievement. But the prevailing news and feature hysteria has been such that the reviews - indeed, the poems themselves - have seemed almost beside the point.
Perhaps in ten years' time it will be possible to assess how good the poems actually are. As good as Hardy's astonishing 1912-13 poems to his late wife? That's what some critics have suggested. Well, time (as it always does) will tell, though already my money's on Hardy:
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
P.J. Kavanagh would hardly agree. "I want, " he announces in a recent issue of the TLS, "to say something possibly outrageous, want to suggest that Thomas Hardy, apart from a few anthology pieces (which are not typical), is not a good poet. He has two kinds of poems: ain't it awful (that we die), which has a subdivision, often to do with his dead wife; isn't it awful that we never know when we are doing something for the last time, or what was our highest point of felicity, until it is too late. The other kind of poem that he writes is a versified novelette, usually about sexual betrayal, or sex-motivated disaster. These have the benefit of not being as long as his novels."
Hardy, he says, "irritates" him. He certainly does - to the point (see above) of causing him to abandon basic syntax and grammar. "I would not take him with me," he roundly declares, "to the famous Desert Island. Whereas I would take Edward Thomas, who is equally pessimistic. The difference between them is that Thomas is not a propagandist for pessimism, as Hardy is, relentlessly. He's a bully."
Yes, I love Edward Thomas, too, but what to say about the charge against Hardy? Oh, hell, here's the last stanza of the poem quoted above:
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
Although there are literary competitions galore over the next couple of months, I have space to mention just a couple of them this week.
The biggest prize money comes from the Peterloo Poets 14th Open Poetry Competition, which is offering a whopping £4,000 first prize and is being judged by Carol Ann Duffy, Jo Shapcott, Simon Rae and Harry Chambers. You can enter up to ten poems (£4 fee to accompany each poem), the closing date is March 2nd, and if you want to know the full details, write to 2 Kelly Gardens, Calstock, Cornwall, PL 18 9SA.
Matthew Sweeney is the adjudicator of the Kick Start Poetry Competition, which offers a first prize of £200 and four runners-up prizes. The closing date is February 28th, winners will be invited to read their work at the Salisbury Festival, and you can find out more from High Walls, The Street, West Winterslow, Salisbury SP5 1RY.
If you want to see and hear Nobel winner Nadine Gordimer reading from her new novel, The House Gun, she's in the Walton Theatre, Trinity College, next Friday at 7pm. Tickets are £2 (redeemable against the price of the book, should you buy it) and can be got from the ground-floor main till at Waterstone's of Dawson Street.