Poet Laureatism

I just did a quick web search on "poet laureate" trying to understand what this title means and what the job entails. Obviously people who are poet laureates know what it is they're supposed to be doing as such, but I think most Canadians don't really know what a poet laureate does. Even though we don't know what it is that poet laureates do, the title itself carries a great deal of weight and distinction. When we hear the words "poet laureate" we are all immediately very impressed.

It seems though that poet laureatism has always been a kind of vaguely defined description, indicating that someone who has a government job has taken an interest in a particular poet. The first poet laureates were just the literary types who happened to hang around the court of the monarch. They needed an official title and reason for being there, so a position was created. I think a lot of positions were created this way, but we've lost a good many of them over the centuries. I guess it is a sign of its significance that the post of poet laureate hasn't changed as much as other ceremonial positions.

Until recently, poet laureatism was something that played out on a national stage, or at a state level. A country or state could have a poet laureate, but it has been a little bit more rare for a province, or a city to have a poet laureate. Yet in recent years, it seems that more and more smaller political units have been appointing poet laureates.

The good thing about this is that it shows smaller and smaller units claiming identity, which I believe is a move in the right direction. The best form of identification is as the individual, and the worst form is the nation. Anything that breaks the nation down closer to individuals is good. Creating a poet laureate is a step towards nationhood, and the more and smaller nations we have in this world, the happier I will be.

On the other hand, legitimacy is a sort of a shackles for a poet, and to recognize one person as more officially poetic than another, this rubs me the wrong way. I don't mind government appointing official archivers and recorders of poetry, but to recognize an official creator is to denounce everyone else who is creating. Obviously, the smaller the territory, the less of a problem this is. I'd much rather have each city of 100,000 have its own poet laureate than the nation of 30,000,000 presume to have a single person who manages to speak for all of them.

Still, no poet can speak for 100,000 people.