Welcome
Welcome, one and all to the official blog of the Corpus Christi Poet Laureate. As you will no doubt be aware the role of Poet Laureate is an ancient and noble position, accorded a great deal of prestige and respect. It dates back to 1720, when a young student (whose name cannot be revealed for fear of bringing his family into disrepute and legal scrutiny) left a dirty limerick scrawled on a piece of paper in the JCR. When the offending boy was hauled before the SCR disciplinary body, faced with charges of Gross Literary Indecency and Lewdness with Intent to cause Unsanctioned Jocularity (the penalty for which was flogging, rustication and confiscation of tea and biscuit privileges) he unexpectedly wowed the Dons with an improvised sonnet in perfect Petrarchan metre pleading his innocence and lauding the values of satire as a medium for sociocultural commentary. So impressed was the then-President by the young scholar's lyrical aptitude, philosophical insight and ability to find no less than six different rhymes for 'pelican' that he was immediately pardoned and commissioned to write three poems per week on subjects relating to the college and its members.
Thus was the position of College Poet enshrined forever in Corpus tradition, along with its integral and long-standing traditions of quality, integrity and strict adherence to deadlines. However, it was not until the end of the the first week, when the new Laureate had only produced a single half-finished haiku entitled 'Essays vs. Pub', that the far more integral and much longer-standing traditions of apathy, cheap laughs and flagrant disregard for any semblence of professional commitment were established as the true foundation of the Poet Laureate's role in college affairs.
Much has changed since then, or, to put it another way, practically nothing has changed since then (twas ever thus in the time-bubble of Oxford). I am immensely proud to have served a year as Corpus Poet Laureate, and have enjoyed the stress, loss of time, artistic exhaustion and public humiliation more than I could hope to express without a concerted course of therapy. During my term of office a number of people have requested some way of seeing all the various travesties I have enacted against poetry collected together in one bite-sized easy-to-swallow package, and so I have resolved to place them in the morally ambiguous quagmire of degeneracy that is The Internet. More specifically the blogosphere, since this will allow future Laureates to add their own painfully inferior works to the Corpus Canon, the Corpus Corpus, or whichever violation of classical grammar I choose to inflict upon the poor blog as a title (see button above). I fully expect that this will be as unprofessional, sketchily edited and poorly maintained a blog as befits anything associated with Corpus' Official Wordsmith, but I hope that it will provide some of you lovely Corpuscles with some kind of enjoyment in some way or another, some of the time, or something.
And so, whilst deftly snipping the red ribbon of poetic integrity with the oversized scissors of denied rhyme and dirty jokes, I pronounce this, the Corpus Christi College Official Poet Laureate's Official Poetry Blog officially...open! In true Laureate style, I have entirely failed to write a poem to commemorate this highly significant and poem-worthy event. If this upsets you, go bother Jimmy, it's his job now...poor bugger.
Thus was the position of College Poet enshrined forever in Corpus tradition, along with its integral and long-standing traditions of quality, integrity and strict adherence to deadlines. However, it was not until the end of the the first week, when the new Laureate had only produced a single half-finished haiku entitled 'Essays vs. Pub', that the far more integral and much longer-standing traditions of apathy, cheap laughs and flagrant disregard for any semblence of professional commitment were established as the true foundation of the Poet Laureate's role in college affairs.
Much has changed since then, or, to put it another way, practically nothing has changed since then (twas ever thus in the time-bubble of Oxford). I am immensely proud to have served a year as Corpus Poet Laureate, and have enjoyed the stress, loss of time, artistic exhaustion and public humiliation more than I could hope to express without a concerted course of therapy. During my term of office a number of people have requested some way of seeing all the various travesties I have enacted against poetry collected together in one bite-sized easy-to-swallow package, and so I have resolved to place them in the morally ambiguous quagmire of degeneracy that is The Internet. More specifically the blogosphere, since this will allow future Laureates to add their own painfully inferior works to the Corpus Canon, the Corpus Corpus, or whichever violation of classical grammar I choose to inflict upon the poor blog as a title (see button above). I fully expect that this will be as unprofessional, sketchily edited and poorly maintained a blog as befits anything associated with Corpus' Official Wordsmith, but I hope that it will provide some of you lovely Corpuscles with some kind of enjoyment in some way or another, some of the time, or something.
And so, whilst deftly snipping the red ribbon of poetic integrity with the oversized scissors of denied rhyme and dirty jokes, I pronounce this, the Corpus Christi College Official Poet Laureate's Official Poetry Blog officially...open! In true Laureate style, I have entirely failed to write a poem to commemorate this highly significant and poem-worthy event. If this upsets you, go bother Jimmy, it's his job now...poor bugger.
posted by Ben at
15:49
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