Think Rhymed British Verse Is Old-Fashioned? Try Wendy Cope.

New York Times

3 days ago

COLLECTED POEMS, by Wendy Cope
Like Cornish pasties and Branston Pickle, Wendy Cope's poems are a uniquely English product that's never caught on in the United States. Over there, she's an institution, an Oxford-educated intellectual, once said to be in line for poet laureate, who writes the sort of poems almost no one does any longer — ones that rhyme, are frequently hilarious and sell in large numbers.
Cope turned 80 this summer. She has largely given up writing new poems. What we have instead is her first 'Collected Poems,' a thick book that reminds us why English readers (and a few of us over here) lost their hearts to her.
One of the best things about Cope's work is how lightly she wears her erudition. She grew up middle-class (her father managed a department store) and is unimpressed by pretension of nearly every variety. As for inflated literary egos, she has a habit of gently taking the piss, as a Brit would say.
In her first collection, the ideally titled 'Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis' (1986), she writes, in a poem titled 'Triolet':
I used to think all poets were Byronic.They're mostly wicked as a ginless tonicAnd wild as pension plans.
In the same collection, she comments on one of England's literary lions: 'It's worse than organising several zoos (several zoos) / Patrolling the unconscious of Ted Hughes.' She picks a fight with Wordsworth's notion that, for a poet, emotion must be recollected in tranquillity. In Cope's opinion, 'there's a serious shortage of tranquillity' these days.
Cope has a complicated relationship with other English institutions, such as poems marking formal events in the life of the country. (She has written a few of these.) One solution for their persistent triteness was to compose a bit of verse titled 'All-Purpose Poem for State Occasions.' Here is the last of its three delightful stanzas:
In Dundee and Penzance and EalingWe're imbued with appropriate feeling:We're British and loyalAnd love every royalAnd tonight we shall drink till we're reeling.
She has written poems criticizing London's rapacious press. ('She'll urge you to confide. Resist. / Be careful, courteous, and cool. / Never trust a journalist.') She has displayed her dislike of photographers, who move into people's houses for hours, push the furniture around and shine lights in subjects' faces 'to get a better view of their blackheads.'
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