There may be worse jobs. Moose-skinner to the Governor of Alaska, perhaps. Or Gordon Brown's press officer. But few jobs are quite so hard, and so strange, as that of the Poet Laureate.

This week Andrew Motion, the present incumbent, recited his laureate's lament at the Ealing Arts Festival: “Writing for the Royals,” he said, “was a hiding to nothing... the job has been incredibly difficult and entirely thankless [and] very, very damaging to my writing.”

The Poet Laureate is poorly paid, and widely mocked (especially by other poets, who would not have turned the job down). The Queen provides no feedback or reward, save a small cheque and an annual barrel of sherry (“a butt or pipe of the best canary wine yearly”, as stipulated for the first formal appointee, John Dryden, in 1668).

A laurel leaf placed under the pillow was once believed to be a cure for failing inspiration, but crowning a single poet with laurels has often had the reverse effect. Motion reports that the post induced a chronic case of writer's block, and that he “dried up completely about five years ago”.

Motion, who stands down next year after a ten-year term, made the best of this bad job. He manfully turned out verses for royal occasions, and kept poetry in the public eye. He also used the post to start the Poetry Archive, an online collection of poets reading their work.

At his best, Motion is a brilliant poet, but the role did not produce his best. He candidly admits that none of the verses he wrote for the royals will be included in his future collections. The most important job in British poetry, it seems, failed to produce important British poetry.

Taking up the job in 1968, Cecil Day-Lewis remarked that the laureateship was “considered by some an accolade, by others the kiss of death”. More often, it has bestowed the even more deadly kiss of anonymity. Who now remembers Rowe, Whitehead or Pye? The second Poet Laureate, Sir William D'avenant, is memorable chiefly for having no nose.

Nahum Tate, who put in a 23-year stint from 1692, wrote the words for While Shepherd's Watched Their Flocks by Night, and rewrote King Lear to give it a happy ending, by marrying Cordelia to Edgar. The rest of his work is entirely, and rightly, forgotten. Some of our greatest poets were laureates - Dryden, John Betjeman, Ted Hughes - yet the post seems to have encouraged some of their worst poetry. Betjeman on the Royal Wedding: “Blackbirds in city churchyards hail the dawn/Charles and Diana on your wedding morn...” It induces tears, but for the wrong reason.

For sheer toadyism, no poet has surpassed the croaking of Laurence Eusden in praise of George II: “Hail, Mighty Monarch! Who desert alone/Would without birthright, raise up to the throne/Thy virtues shine particularly nice/Ungloomed with a confinity to vice.”

Even Ted Hughes's royal poetry, although better than most, did little to enhance his reputation.

So should it be scrapped, this archaic royal role, that has so often elevated the mediocre, and diluted the talent of good poets? Marks & Spencer, Barnsley Football Club and London Zoo all have their own poets; the nation surely needs one too, but in what shape? The answer is surely to return to the origins of the laureateship, by making it shorter, more valuable, more relevant - and drunker.

The post should last one year (as in the US) renewable for a further year by popular acclamation. Poets are as varied as any other sort of writer, and the notion that one should wear the laurels until death (or even for a decade, as stipulated by Motion) is absurd. They should be changed every year, appointed by a Booker-style panel of judges, generating as much controversy as possible.

Dryden was paid £300 a year. At current prices that is about £25,000. The Poet Laureate is now paid just £5,000. The sherry supply should also be increased.

Poets are notoriously thirsty. Dylan Thomas famously declared “18 straight whiskies: I believe that's the record”, before expiring in the White Horse Tavern in Manhattan. Without going to that extreme, an increase in the alcoholic stipend equivalent to one barrel of “best canary wine” a poem should do the trick.

Finally, and most crucially, the Poet Laureate should be required to write poetry about anything at all, except the Royal Family. Two of Tennyson's best-loved poems, The Charge of the Light Brigade and Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, were written when he was Poet Laureate, but eschewing royal themes. Motion's best poem as laureate was a blistering condemnation of the Gulf War.

Wordsworth took the job only when assured by Peel “you shall have nothing required of you”, and wrote not a single official verse for his seven years. Yet subsequent poets laureate have felt obliged to versify on royal events, with uniformly embarrassing results.

Johnson thought poets should be “superior to time and place”; but this, surely is why so many people (wrongly) assume all poetry to be otherworldly and irrelevant. By firmly rooting the laureateship in time and place, the here and now, it may recover some of the power it enjoyed in Dryden's day, as a medium for describing, satirising and understanding public events. Traditionally, the Poet Laureate is supposed to be above politics; but making the role avowedly political might ensure its relevance, and thus its survival.

And if the Royal Family still needs poetry, it can write its own. Indeed, the Queen herself is no mean poet and well equipped to commemorate an important event in verse, as shown by a poem she sent to her mother after a particularly vast banquet at the Castle of Mey: “A meal of such splendour/Repast of such zest/It will take us to Sunday/ Just to digest.”

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