Poetry? Please.

I get the Guardian every Saturday  (unless the fuckers have ran something particularly transphobic during the week). The main reason l like buying it is the Review section. But every now and again even the books pages manage to do something to annoy me, and they managed it today with Tim Dee's dismissal of 'angry performance poets' in an otherwise polite little article about Radio Four institution Poetry Please.

Creating a false division beween 'performance' and 'literary' poets? Assuming that all us performance types do is 'shouty rhymes'? Characterising us as being so arrogant we think we're better than Donne? Wow. I really would like to think we're past that. Then again, perhaps Dee feels he needs to get his retaliation in first, given that, as he admits, he's shilling for a poetry programme on which 'the most recently published poet...is Dylan Thomas'.

Way to make poetry seem alive, dude. It's almost enough to move one to angry shouting.