Poetry? Please…

An article in today's Guardian discusses the use of poetry in adverts. Some poets say it's fine to write on commission for McDonald's, or for an insurance company. Other companies have used existing canonical texts.

In one sense, I'd like to think that a viewer might be surprised by a skilful or beautiful line in between being shouted at to buy more shit. However: as Bill Hicks says in relation to licensing your music for adverts - you're off the creative register for ever. Art is often, but shouldn't be, the creation of a desire for profit. The more beholden to trade it is, the worse the art - see Damien Hirst's 'art' if you don't believe me.

More to the point: most of the stuff masquerading as poetry in adverts isn't. It's verse, which isn't the same thing at all. Verse screams 'I'M ARTISTIC. THIS IS ART. LOOK HOW CLEVER I AM'. It's desperate for credibility and fails, if versifying is the only skill on display.

Poetry, rhyming or not, is unsettling. In it, meaning is ambiguous, or arrived at through an alchemical transformation of words and your own imagination. The 'meaning' is as emotional as it is rational, perhaps more.

I can't think of any poem which can be boiled down to 'buy our burgers'. Here's Bill's take on it:

For solace, turn to the weird poet who connected his testicles to his liver

All the institutional rubbish is getting me down. Here's what it should all be about, thanks to Yeats (not a poet to whom I generally turn)

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

Mythologies (1977) p. 331.

On an unconnected note, I celebrated the return of my bank card by buying the DVD of In The Loop and another anthology of Very Bad Poetry.

(Yeats really did route his testes through his liver, by the way. It was an attempt to redirect 'masculine energy', and he wasn't the only one).