New Delhi: Imtiaz Dharker has turned down Britain’s highest poetry honour, the poet laureateship, citing a need to focus on her writing. The Pakistan-born acclaimed British poet was reportedly set to be named as the next holder of the position, though no formal offer has been made.
Dharker, who grew up in Glasgow, said she had to weigh the privacy she needs to write poems against the demands of a public role. “The poems won,” Dharker told The Guardian, adding, “It was a huge honour to be considered for the role of poet laureate and I have been overwhelmed by the messages of support and encouragement from all over the world.”
Carol Ann Duffy is the current laureate, a public position with a tenure of ten years. Her tenure ended on May 1.
Andrew Motion, the laureate from 1999 to 2009, called the job thankless, saying it gave him a writer’s block. “I dried up completely about five years ago and can’t write anything except to commission,” he said in 2008.
While the Sunday Times reported last week that Dharker would be announced as the laureate this month, no formal offer has been made to or accepted by any candidate, The Guardian reported.
A spokesperson for the British government’s department of digital, culture, media and sport said on Friday that the recommendations of an independent panel have been considered in the usual way and that an appointment has not yet been confirmed.
Among the contenders are said to be Daljit Nagra, Simon Armitage, Lemn Sissay, Alice Oswald and Jackie Kay. According to The Guardian, Kay and Oswald are not inclined to take up the position, but Armitage has been more positive.
The Wire has fielded reactions from two poets, Kartika Nair and Jeet Thayil, on Dharker turning down the position.
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Karthika Nair, poet, dance producer and curator
It was a joy to hear of the probable nomination of Imtiaz Dharker as the next British poet laureate. I have long read and admired her work – agile and sharp as a rapier, tender as forgiveness – and because her self-avowed “cultural mongrel” identity would be a Tiger Balm for our polarised, raucous world.
But that completely pales in front of my fist-thumping delight at her gentle refusal of the position. Dharker said that though a great honour, it would interfere with her focus on writing. While the poet laureateship is the greatest literary recognition in the UK, it has always seemed deeply problematic to me as well.
For one, it is rather painful to see brilliance diverted by poems around royal weddings and coronation jubilees (the poet laureate’s duties include verses at important national occasions). I think Wendy Cope and Benjamin Zephaniah are on the right track about this one.
Jeet Thayil, poet, novelist and musician
I was 24 when my poems were published for the first time, accompanied by a pen and ink portrait by Imtiaz, in the pages she edited for Debonair. This was around 1984. I knew nobody in Bombay’s poetry world; I was nobody. Debonair was a skin magazine – exploitative, down-market, embarrassing – its only glimmer of respectability in the literary material it published, and in the name Imtiaz Dharker on the masthead.
It is a strange sensation when you’re a young poet to first see your poems in print. Nothing will ever again compare, but you don’t know it at the time. I’ll always be grateful that she recognised something in those early, flawed poems and gentled them so elegantly into print.
Imtiaz is the correct choice for poet laureate at this moment of agon, an existential moment when the question of what makes Britain British seems to hang in the balance. She would bring an incomparable, inspirational depth to the role.
But it entailed a choice, she said, between the privacy needed to write poems and a kind of fame. “The poems won.” This is not the absence of ambition but its opposite: the ambition of the poet versus the ambition of the politician, the infinite versus the topical, time versus matter, Imtiaz versus whoever comes next.