Whither the poet laureate?

Perhaps he could write such poems in his spare time.  Or perhaps better not?:

Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate, wondering aloud why the government never asks him to write poems, has inadvertently answered his own question.

“I wish that my government had asked me to write poetry about immigration policy, about Idle No More, about Canada’s complicity in the Middle East, the Enbridge pipeline,” Fred Wah, a Saskatchewan-born poet now living in Vancouver, recently told an audience at an Edmonton literary festival.

“I haven’t been asked to do any of those things.”

…He warned that the taxpayer-funded position risks becoming “homogenized and diluted,” and expressed frustration that during his two-year term in Ottawa he’s been asked to produce just one work — a “mediocre” poem about Queen Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee.

That’s the British Queen Elizabeth by the way, not the Queen Elizabeth who sits on the Bangalore city council.  Here is more, via Pierre Lemieux on Facebook.