As a fellow AQA board member, you will be shocked to discover that my teenage son, without any prompt or encouragement, quoted a few lines from a poem in the new AQA anthology. I was so shocked at this display of free will and literary pleasure, that I immediately ordered a copy of the anthology and read the poem for myself.

I discovered several major failings:

Firstly the problem poem doesn’t have a title, how did this manage to slip through? I have written to the software providers for a copy of the relevant checks.

Secondly, the poet, a Simon Armitage, looks nothing like a poet. In fact he looks like someone teenagers could relate to – is there an agreed protocol for photos provided?

Finally, the actual poem is written about his ‘Mother’. It tells how she helps her son measure rooms in an empty house and yet there is no mention of the father. This shows signs of the oedipus complex and I am concerned it will subconsciously encourage young men to kill their fathers leaving only their mother to help with the DIY. This would be a disaster as the poem clearly does not give proper advice on the use of tape measures:

“Mother, any distance greater than a single span/requires a second pair of hands.”

We know this data to be incorrect as all measures have a metal clip on the end.

This poem fails in the fundamental strategy to “provide pupils with poems which they do not understand and fill them with dread ensuring they do not read poetry after leaving school except in proper situations such as weddings, funerals and Burns nights.”

“If” by Ruddy Hard Kipling. http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm

This poem is utterly sexist and totally unsuitable for education. There is not one single reference to the feminine viewpoint throughout. Apart from that, it encourages selfish acquisitiveness (Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it), and a scheming attitude to life, though you will notice it does not distinguish between success and cock-ups (If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/
And treat those two impostors just the same).

But worst of all it contains a whole section encouraging out and out secret gambling (If you can make one heap of all your winnings / And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss / And lose, and start again at your beginnings / And never breathe a word about your loss).

Moreover this so called poem was composed as an after dinner speech for some raucous all-male occasion, for which purpose it was first printed on a menu card. There it should have stayed, and no doubt would have stayed but for the chauvinist attitudes accepted at that time in history when it was written. No this certainly is not suitable for our children.

First of all it is far too long to be a poem – and it doesn’t rhyme either, so I think Mr Whitman has a nerve to even call it poetry. Neither is it a song. Mr Whitman professes to be a writer and yet cannot even define the form he writes in accurately.

Bad as all that may be, it is even more serious that Mr Whitman encourages the sin of sloth – at numerous points throughout the text the writer is encouraged to “lean and loafe”, waste time “observing a spear of summer grass”, “loafe with me on the grass”, I could go on. Is Mr Whitman not aware that there is a recession on? How are we to prosper if we take Mr Whitman’s lead?

But that is not all. This grass that Mr Whitman would have us loafing about on. Whose grass is it? Mr Whitman does not say. I would suggest that Mr Whitman would be well advised to remind his readership that (if they must) they may loafe about on their own lawn, but are likely to be in breach of the law of trespass if they do so on any random piece of grass they come across.

Finally, and I think most damningly, Mr Whitman blatantly promotes obesity in the line “I am large, I contain multitudes”.

So then: sloth, trespass and obesity – if that is not enough to see this irresponsible piece of “poetry” banned indefinitely then I do not know what is.