Originally Posted by
Eric Hayman
As someone who has worked in engineering - building roads, an airstrip, etc - and who has written both verse and prose most of his life, I would ask is
Engineer's Corner actually a poem, or just a series of thoughts that happen to rhyme?
Also, apart from Poet Laureate (and Andrew Motion's latest bleatings about not being able to come up with anything for state occasions has me wondering why he took on the post), writing any sort of fiction does not, in my book, constitute "a job".
So Wendy Cope has created a false concept that poets and engineers are the opposite faces of some imaginary coin. They are not. Perhaps it is just that poets finish up in cathedrals, since both poets and preachers spend their lives talking and writing about the abstract; engineers (you can see it coming) deal with the concrete, and that is where their busts should be. Go to Paddington Station in London and see Britain's most famous engineer - Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Travel from Paddington to Bristol and admire the poetry of his Great Western Railway. Go to the Clifton Gorge and see his memorial in the form of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, go to Bristol docks and see his pioneering yet elegant SS Great Britain.
If you want to see another place where poetry and engineering meet, go to Beattock Summit on the West Coast main line from Euston to Glasgow and sit down and read Auden's "Night Mail": "This is the Night Mail crossing the border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order, Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, . . . "
Engineeers spend years studying to become proficient at their profession, to ensure that bridges or buildings don't collapse and kill people. Poets may go on writing courses, yet when a poet writes a bad poem no one is going to get killed (except possibly the poet).
Coincidentally, yesterday on BBC Radio Four's Poetry Please, the featured poet was Canadian Robert Service - remember The Shooting of Dan McGrew? - and Service, despite starting as a bank clerk made penty of money as a poet. So cut the nonsense about poor poets and rich engineeers, Brunel died just 53, worn out by travelling by horse and stage coach, and by battling against contractors and politicians. He was not found slumped over a keyboard, a worn rhyming dictionary in his limp hand.
Stop worrying about what Cope meant, or did not mean. Either like it or leave it. Today's poem is tomorrow's bog paper. I should know; it come close to what I'm told I write.