Forget 'honorary jokes': Carol Ann can show us why poetry matters

With its token £5,750-a-year salary and case of wine for your trouble, our Poet Laureateship has long been what the outgoing laureate Andrew Motion has affectionately termed an "honorary joke".

From Stephen Spender to Philip Larkin, who both declined, the prospect of being asked has traditionally sent poets running for the hills.

So who can blame Motion's likely successor, Carol Ann Duffy, for reportedly thinking twice about signing up to a decade of school visits?

Motion, who has indefatigably promoted poetry to young people, had done 300 such visits at the last count.

In his hands, the laureateship has mattered not so much because of the poems he has written in his public capacity but because he has been on hand to make people listen, to remind politicians and educators of his belief that poetry is not a "weird addition to life but a primitive thing at the centre of life".

It's an unusual conviction and although I, as a poet myself, couldn't agree more, the question of how you go about sharing that passion is a difficult one.

For the laureateship is both the highest honour there is for poetry in this country and the task that leaves the poet and poetry most vulnerable to charges of daftness, pretentiousness, irrelevance and inaccessibility.

Since the death of the much-loved John Betjeman in 1984, the laureate and the press have had a vexed relationship. Even so, for the world of poetry the level of interest this time has been unprecedented.

The favourites' names are not household, save for households with teenagers who have studied their poems at school. But I have been struck this week by the remarkable sense that perhaps people care more about poetry than even we poets tend to assume.

Perhaps such optimism sits ill with poetry today. The state of conventional poetry publishing is dire. Even before the recession took hold, there was "no money" in it.

Even famous poets have got used to the gap between their books getting longer and longer. The days when rakish young readers clutched the latest cheaply printed Auden on the Tube are long gone.

But the upshot has been the explosion of alternative publishing houses such as Bloodaxe and Salt. Running on a shoestring, they have managed to get new poets published - even if sales are minuscule.

And whereas Yeats once wondered how books would get a look-in with all the newspapers and magazines, now the written word competes electronically with i-Pods and Facebook.

Far from vanishing, contemporary poetry from all over the world has become accessible on the internet in a way that blows any library or bookshop out of the water.

From Clive James's online library of contemporary poetry to Motion's new Poetry Archive, where 150,000 readers look at a million pages of poetry a month, more poetry is being read.

That's not all. Whether on screen or on the printed page, poetry still matters because it can seem as modern and as relevant as the grittiest of dramas or the most provocative of artworks.

Take Simon Armitage's unflinching love poem, I am Very Bothered, with its uncomfortable recollection of accidentally branding the object of his teenage desire's fingers with a pair of scissors heated over the "naked, lilac flame" of a bunsen burner: "O the unrivalled stench of branded skin//Don't believe me, please, if I say/that was just my butterfingered way, at thirteen,/of asking you if you would marry me." Perhaps of our artists, only Tracey Emin is as frank in her admissions as some of our greatest poets.

It is not simply the reading of poetry but its composition which is now more relevant than ever. To my mind, even our means of writing today brings us up close with the editing and picking and choosing of words that is a poet's obsessive lot.

Texting and email weave the written word into the everyday in a way that the landline never could. Carol Ann Duffy even has a love poem titled Text: "I tend the mobile now/like an injured bird.//We text, text, text/our significant words ..."

Purists might tremble but her poem flirts with the idea that anyone who's ever kept an email or text (those modern-day love letters) is alive, even without knowing it, to the power of poetry.

Likewise, the publication of Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes's final book of candid verse letters addressed to his late wife Sylvia Plath, reminded readers in their tens of thousands that poetry was not a marginal, difficult medium but something caught up in the fundamentals of life - birth, death, love, loss.

There's a logic when non-poet friends ask me to find them poems for weddings and christenings.

Humanity's lifeblood is language, and poetry remains its most concentrated and considered form; with poetry, we share what it is that makes us human. And being haunted by a line of Bob Dylan, Lily Allen or even Eminem is exactly the same as carrying around poems by heart.

With Duffy, ministers have astounded cynics and made a choice that is inspired. My favourite of her poems takes on Shakespeare, our greatest poet and ,of course, as every laureate hopes to be, both personal and universal. It's often assumed that Shakespeare's marriage was unhappy on the grounds that he left his wife Anne Hathaway his "second-best bed".

Duffy imagines Hathaway speaking: The bed we loved in was a spinning world of forests, castles, torches, torchlight, clifftop, seas, where he would dive for pearls/ My lover's words were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses/Some nights, I dreamed he'd written me, the bed a page beneath his writer's hands In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on, dribbling their prose/ My living laughing love - I hold him in the casket of my widow's head as he held me upon that next best bed.

She takes the supposed killer clue - that he can't have loved her as he left her his second-best bed - and re-imagines it instead as the heady height of romance.

It's an intoxicating, seductively-put theory, especially in the lines in which exploration of a body is blurred with a poet rifling through the language he wants, remaking it, as Shakespeare so often did, time after time after time.

Whereas Andrew Motion started his tenure in 1999 working out how a 21st century laureate might operate, his friend Duffy has seen how it can be done.

It seems to me that it's just possible, with her legions of teenage fans already tuned in, that she's well-placed to remind us why poetry matters. After decades of cynicism, the "honorary joke" could well have the last laugh.

Olivia Cole's first collection, Restricted View, will be published by Salt in October.