Oh great and gentle muse, inspire Beyoncé with the genius of poetry

As it goes about its glamorous daily business, people often stop Lost in Showbiz and ask it important and pressing questions. Usually those questions are: “Have you paid for that item, sir?” and “Would you come back into the store with me, please?” But occasionally they deal with matters of great philosophical significance. “Lost in Showbiz,” they say, “you must have developed a vast store of wisdom and knowledge during the many hours you have spent sitting on your awful bloated arse reading OK! and Closer. What one piece of advice would you give the world’s celebrities?”

At this, Lost in Showbiz pauses, presses its fingertips together and takes a deep breath: perhaps a moment’s reflection will bring forth a new response. But no: the answer is always the same. “My advice to the world’s celebrities is: write more poetry.” It’s not just that Lost in Showbiz loves celebrities writing poetry, it’s that Lost in Showbiz believes wholeheartedly that the greatest poetry ever written is by celebrities. Where others talk up Auden or Eliot, it raises aloft Musings From the Bed of Pamela, the poem written by Pamela Anderson to accompany her 13th nude spread in Playboy: “The adults … Living and dead that fought for our rights … the artists … sweet artists … Hold on … Crazy, the world goes on.”

You say Larkin’s High Windows, Lost in Showbiz says Charlie Sheen’s 1999 collection A Peace of My Mind: “Should I play guitar and join the band / or head to the beach and walk in the sand?” It was distraught when Robbie Williams abandoned plans to publish an anthology of verse after only one extract was released to the public (“I’m on the telly, so people think I don’t have feelings / I do”). And its life’s mission is to track down the poetic oeuvre of Sean Penn, understandably enticed by the actor’s description of a work called This Water’s Cold: “It’s about a guy with faeces on his chin who goes to take a shower but the water’s cold.”

So imagine its excitement when it chanced upon the latest issue of CR Fashion Book and discovered that it contained a poem apparently written by Beyoncé, called Bey the Light, a piece of work that it can assure you belongs right there in the pantheon of literary greatness listed above. “You call me a singer, but I’m called to transform, / to suck up the grief, anxiety and loss / of those who hear me into my song’s form,” it reads. “I’m a vessel for all that isn’t right, / for breakups and lies and double-cross. / I sing into that vessel a healing light. / To let go of pain that people can’t bear. / I don’t do that myself, I call in the light. / I summon God to take me there.” Lost in Showbiz can’t help but hope that’s what she writes under the heading “occupation” when she’s filling in her tax return.

And then came the discovery that Beyoncé hadn’t actually written Bey the Light at all: it turns out that CR Fashion Book had employed a Pulitzer prize-nominated poet called Forrest Gander to arrange quotes from a Beyoncé interview into tercets – one passage employing the terza rima stanza form first used by Dante – and present it as a poem. It was at this point that Lost in Showbiz’s eyes went crossed like Nookie Bear’s through sheer excitement: it thought celebrities writing poetry was good, but this – this is even better. For one thing, it likes the idea of the editorial meeting where this approach was decided: “We’re thinking of running the usual painfully obsequious fashion magazine interview, but can anyone come up with something even more unctuous and sycophantic?”

“I’m just spitballing here, but how about we pay a Pulitzer prize-nominated poet to arrange the gold that drops from Beyoncé’s lips into a 13-stanza verse partly inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy?”

“Hmmm, not just sycophantic, but pretentious with it. You’re a genius.”

For another, it likes Gander’s response when asked if the poem’s opening lines were an allusion to the traditional invocation of the muse found in Homer, Virgil, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, the prologue of Henry V and the opening of Paradise Lost: “No. Er, yes.”

But mostly, it likes the idea that Beyoncé is so hugely important that she now has someone who is paid to write poems on her behalf. What a thrilling new accoutrement for the modern-day celebrity! It expects they’ll all want one now. Kim Kardashian is probably on the blower to Andrew Motion as we speak! Victoria Beckham is frantically texting Tom Paulin! Katie Price has got the guy who does Purple Ronnie! What a glorious new dawn for literature.