John Walsh: We should cherish poetry, not kill it

You won't, I suspect, get many hoodied and snarling protesters attacking policemen with Molotov cocktails at the news that the Poetry Book Society has lost its Arts Council of England grant. But that doesn't stop it being a disgraceful decision by the ACE's Literature Department.

They didn't just reduce the Society's meagre annual lifeline of £111,000. They withdrew it completely. They didn't just prune this tender shrub. They scythed through it at the roots.

The PBS isn't some quango, like the Egg Advisory Council or the Milk Marketing Board, dreamt up by Sir Humphrey Appleby to give a sinecure to his cronies. It's an important part of our culture. If poets have traditionally accounted for a quarter of the writers, from Chaucer to Carol Ann Duffy, who embody what we mean by English literature, it's vital that an organisation dedicated to the promotion of its finest flowerings should be kept alive.

The Poetry Book Society was set up in 1953 by the Arts Council at the suggestion of Stephen Spender, with TS Eliot and Basil Blackwell as its original directors. Eliot, who once described poetry as "merely a higher form of entertainment", would have appreciated the Society's role as a kind of upscale cheerleader. The function of its "selectors" was to recommend one poetry collection every quarter to its members, plus a few other endorsements of worthwhile books.

For nearly 60 years, the PBS's distinguished judges (Philip Larkin was chairman in the 1980s) have steered the nation's poetry-lovers towards the best stuff around. The Society also runs the TS Eliot Prize, the most important poetry prize anywhere, endowed by the great man's widow, Valerie. On the day before the prize is awarded, every January, the poetry world turns out in force to hear the 10 short-listed bards declaim their works. This year saw the biggest audience in its history – 900 people crammed the Festival Hall to hear Simon Armitage, Fiona Sampson and their peers. Market-fixated malcontents may argue that, if poetry were sufficiently popular with the reading public, enough money would change hands in shops and at festivals to make public subsidy unnecessary. Why should public cash subsidise work that only a small percentage of readers read? To which one can only reply: it's always been like this. Poetry has always been a minority interest, because it's difficult. It's not to be gulped down on a flight or devoured on the beach at Formentera. It's not to be consumed like a thriller or fantasy novel, or heard and dismissed in three minutes, like a song. It deals in specialised language which it takes time and patience to decipher, whether it's "On His Blindness" or "Kubla Khan" or "The Waste Land."

Partly as a result, poetry tends to lurk at the back of the bookshop, along with the erotica and the Bibles. It's not made widely available, it's badly publicised by publishers and it seldom troubles the bestseller lists. Poets themselves – strange, perverse beings – have an ambivalent attitude to making money. "I have always believed that poetry was a grace in my life," Seamus Heaney once said, "a total sweetness and extra-ness, and that it wasn't to be used as a meal ticket."

It remains, despite these economic privations, the highest form of expression in our culture, the finest words in the finest order, the breath of Parnassus, the secret rhythms and buried meanings of our individual and collective lives. The Poetry Book Society has for 57 years kept us up to speed about our finest home-grown poets, and rewarded them every year. It should not be removed from existence by a single ignorant stroke of the Arts Council's pen.

A ringside seat at aterrific online spat

Spare a thought for the British author Jacqueline Howett, who came to grief this week after she self-published a novel online, and responded with abuse to a critical review. Ms Howett's book, The Greek Seaman, is about an 18-year-old girl who joins her new sailor husband at sea on a cargo ship full of swarthy plotters. A review from the "Big Al's BookandPals" website praised the story but regretted the spelling and grammar errors that littered the text. Ms Howett rertorted that the critic had obviously read the wrong version and that his review was "very unfair"; for good measure she posted three gushing (and surprisingly similar) five-star reviews her book had received on Amazon.

Big Al replied by identifying a couple of the sentences in Ms Howett's book that he found slightly inept: "She carried her stocky build carefully back down the stairs," and, even more comically, "Don and Katy watched hypnotically Gino place more coffees out at another table with supreme balance." The author went ballistic. "My writing is just fine!" she cried, before demanding that Big Al "remove this review as it is in error" and calling him "discusting [sic] and unprofessional."

The online/self-publishing community responded, as to a call to arms. As they piled in on her, in a shrieking multitude, Ms Howett called her critics names ("You are a big rat and a snake with poisenous [sic] venom,") and finally told them all, twice, to "Fuck off!" If not a great day for Literature, it was decidedly a good day for watching the sub-literate standing on their dignity (with supreme balance.)

Could I sing my way out of trouble? I'd have a go ...

Country singer Willie Nelson, 77, in court for possessing six ounces of weed and facing jail, has been offered a way out by the prosecuting attorney. We could call it a $100 fine, she said, provided Nelson agrees to sing his new hit, "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" to the court by way of "community service."

Could British law courts adopt this sensible alternative to fines or banging felons up in the Scrubs? Those in trouble for driving offences could delight the jury with "Motorbikin'" ("I'm moving on the Queen's highway looking like a streak of lightning,") repeat stalkers could try warbling Ray Charles's "I Can't Stop Lovin' You (I've Made Up My Mind)" – and, whatever the circumstance, I'm sure my rendition of "I Fought The Law (But The Law Won)" would melt the sternest heart...