Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. I've become slightly fascinated by the role of the poet laureate.

I'm thinking specifically in this instance of the poet laureate of the United Kingdom or the countries have them.

And it's an interesting job if you're interested in poetry at all. What does the poet laureate do? Why do they exist?

They get the job nowadays for a 10 year tenure. I feel there's a poem in that, a 10 year tenure.

And they don't have any actual obligations, but it's sort of semi-expected that occasionally they'll write poetry about national and particularly royal events.

You don't have to if you don't want to. You know what it's like? You get that sort of job and you think, oh, I ought to do one or two.

There's other advantages. You get 5,750 pounds a year and a barrel of sherry.

A barrel of sherry might sound archaic and ridiculous to you, but I used to keep a large bottle of what we used to call loose sherry at my bedside.

And I used to wake up and drink relatively large amount before setting out upon my day.

And it is surprising how quickly you get through it. I'm not recommending that as a lifestyle. I don't do it anymore and it was my darker days, much as I love them.

Anyway, I wanted to talk about these poems, one poem in particular, which fits the sort of bespoke poet laureate bill.

In other words, a poem about an event, a royal event. And I just want to consider the fact that such a poem can still be really good.

I think it's a temptation to think, if you write a poem about the royal family because you sort of have to, it will be rubbish.

I'm going to disprove that and my evidence, Exhibit A, is a poem by the current, as I speak, poet laureate Simon Armitage called The Patriarchs an Elegy.

And this is, now what about if I started the whole thing with this? This is a poem about the Duke of Edinburgh.

You'd have probably already switched off by now, but I actually think this is really good.

Well, obviously I only talk about poems I love on this show because I ain't got no space for negative waves in my life.

Okay, so I want to talk about this. I love occasional poetry.

What I mean is poetry written for a specific occasion. You get it a lot.

I read a lot of 18th century poetry and someone falls off a stagecoach and somebody writes a poem about it.

So it's the idea of almost like just charting life through poetry, which I'm keen on.

Anyway, this was a poem written by the poet laureate. It already been Simon Armitage, it already been poet laureate for I think two years or more.

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