Recusant Polemic & Monographs
An Assertion of Poetry
A polemic on substance over style
More than fifty years ago, at the age of sixteen, I began writing poetry. My first efforts were imitations of the Romantics; Shelley, Keats, Byron, my favourite, who brought order and structure into my chaotic life. School so far had been depressingly sterile, offering me little in the way of knowledge that I could not glean on my own, even less exciting was the pathetically sterile challenge of learning. So without a guide to direct my efforts, I plunged into the English Classical poets, having already read diversely in English drama and American fiction. I had memorized large chunks of Byron, Grey’s ‘Elegy’ and many others who delighted me, which was consoling as I struggled to find my path. After careful reading and evaluation of my poems, I found that I appreciated the developmental process, but concluded that they were wanting in originality. I burned them ceremoniously and reassuringly, this did not launch a career of book-burning. I did not regret their destruction and never looked back and said: ‘If only I had saved them’!
I moved on to reading the American poets and devoured Eliot, Pound, Cummings, many others, who I found more timely than their English predecessors, sometimes almost as elegant, but never as beautiful. Beauty seems to be less compatible in the torment of the industrial age. Then, at the age of seventeen, I hitchhiked to California. I lived in San Francisco and discovered the Beat poets, who were just erupting in the formerly more tranquil landscapes of literature. I admired their vitality, but was turned off by their colossal naiveté. One of their loudest voices proclaimed that he saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. I knew the best minds of my generation were preparing to send men to the moon. An immense and irreconcilable difference of opinion. Their movement offered me no safe harbour.
For the next few years I kept the semi-noiseless tenor of my ways, finding college almost as drab intellectually as high school, with virtually everyone focused on career. Whatever happened to the love of learning? Several slightly compatible companions helped keep me anchored, which let me endure in the wilderness of poetry. I, an emperor of impracticality, wanted to be a poet. I dreamed of tasting the immortal fire. I was ill-equipped for the academic environment, the protected haven of many poets, so I wandered aimlessly in an unknown land. One of the few benefits of my education was enough mastery of French to read the symbolist poets, then the more moderns, particularly Mallarmée and Apollonaire, from whom I rediscovered the invention of free verse. (French also allowed me in later years to translate Moliere for my theatre work.) I read more and more of the younger American poets, looking for kinship. At the same time, I read the Russian, Japanese and Chinese poets, always feeling that the language barrier mandated translations, which altered the fabric of the writing. I began a search for my natural voice, an aspiration that imposed strenuous difficulties, since I was on my own and had to reinvent the wheel daily, a complicated task when working without blueprints.
The more American poets I read, the less connected I felt to their concept of poetry, however much I admired their artistic accomplishments. I saw a world aflame with constant upheavals, disasters man-made or natural, and progressively more destructive violence.
Yet I found poets increasingly seeking esoteric metaphors, cherishing style above substance, placing form above content. Suddenly, all the poets were college graduates, many with advanced degrees in the field of poetry. I definitely did not belong in that company. I was the classic loner, but was sufficiently self-sustaining, or ego-driven not to seek entry into the networks of poetry. There was a corresponding classic irony. I, the consummate outsider, had been a theatre director for most of my adult life. I had started in theatre at the age of seventeen in San Francisco, plunging into an arts discipline that mandated group involvement! I found a curious symbiosis to the world of poetry, since I translated and directed the classics, as well as writing and directing new plays that dealt more and more with political and social issues. My poetry began to reflect the broader range of world problems, with the subject being my primary concern, not the expression thereof. This further distanced me from the practitioners of the art of poetry.
As the years went by, I found myself more concerned with the message, rather than the ‘poetic’ quality of poetry. I saw the arts begin to turn progressively inward, not in the nature of profound meditation, or seeking deeper understanding, but more in the aspect of flaunting personal agonies and confessions. This is what our culture has wrought. It satiates the consciousness with an endless stream of pictorial imagery that stupefies the visual sense and degrades the uniqueness of verbal description. So poets, increasingly shunted aside by a growing public preference for non-stop TV, turned to baring their guts in anguished revelations of childhood abuse, or indignation for their neglected feelings.
This type of indulgence and I are incompatible. To me, poetry is greater than my personal sufferings. I feel there should be room in the chambers of poetry for alternatives to academic products and disclosures of angst. I have chosen my own direction and have evolved to expressing thoughts and feelings about issues. And if I may have abandoned metaphor and simile, it is not that I despise them, but I must deliver what I believe to be a necessary blunt message. In an age of increasing insecurity and danger, we must still cherish poetry. But the guardians of the gates of poetry should allow examination of the problems of the world, with direct communication, in order to extend the diminishing influence of poetry on the events of our times.
Poetry, What’s It Good For?
Why is it so difficult for humans to think critically? Is it an evolving cuneiform brain? Or is it the tribal brain, otherwise known as the blood brain barrier threatened by walls surrounding its sensibility? Reminds me that half the US is foaming at the mouth to elect a rightwing president. We who found Nazi Germany abhorrent & said it would never happen in our country fail to realize that people are people & that mob behavior gets molded by the culture. Translation? Any mob can be controlled by the mobsters in charge of the culture. So, now, folks are saying that if the winger gets elected, the folks who elected him deserve what they get. But what about the rest of us? We don’t want a madman running our country for the next four years. Oh, almost forgot. The Executive Branch only controls a few things; big banks control the rest. Another aberration altogether. Anyway, emotion rules the individual, & the individual is but a microscopic spoke in the mob. That’s why it’s so difficult for humans to cultivate complex sensibility? Remember, William Blake clarified that after our state of innocence, in order to enter the Palace of Wisdom it’s imperative that we become enlightened by the bloody womb of experience. Alas, emotional intelligence or something that resembles enlightenment, that’s how we do it, said William over 200 years ago! So, what’s the holdup? Ay, almost forgot again. So busy plundering dreamland, I almost forgot that humans don’t read William Blake except when they’re forced to in a liberal arts curriculum. No value there, right? Business majors grumbling, college athletes revering multimillion dollar quarterbacks, basketball dunkers, & moral majority panderers. Even in his day, Blake struggled to feed his devoted wife, Catherine. In his day, William was ostracized as a weirdo, a nonconformist to the mob. Ginsberg read Blake & infiltrated the mob, a mob that first found Allen’s politics spurious &, later, his lifestyle, never minding that he influenced Dylan & to some extent, Lennon. Blakelight! Blakelight! Batteries dimmed but not forgotten. Well, sentimentality is the easy way to go. Don’t get me wrong; no brain muscle required. Without emotional neurons the human race, indeed, would be doomed. Empathy would not exist. Humans would kill every living thing on this planet, including each other. & with the dumbing down of our homeland, as other cultures cling to their own fantasies for salvation, what can a few surviving intellectuals do—we’re thrown together inside this gigantic bait ball called humanity. I guess that’s why we teach, why we preach, why we write poetry.
Thoughts On Socialism and Capitalism
In every modern state, capitalism always co-exists with socialism to one degree or another. The socialist principles of political equality, honest wages and universal care are practiced
in diluted form in all countries with welfare, human rights institutions and respect for the equality of races and sexes. Socialism, far from having died with Perestroika, continues to support the capitalist project. The two feed off each other, as socialist principles prevent social unrest, stress, and excessive pity for the poor, while capitalism prevents sloth and stimulates individuals with the childish hope of becoming powerful. In short, socialism and capitalism depend on each other, living in a mutually parasitic yet profitable relationship.
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Communism might be the world’s first concerted attempt to remove class differences and reverse the process of humankind’s growing enslavement to work. Its failure was inevitable, and not only because it proposed an environmentally unsustainable industrial/agricultural model. Communism failed because, first and foremost, it was devoid of any notion of culture beyond craftsmanship and never understood that it must do something higher with energies commonly directly into religion, drama, opera and other creative conventions. Like so many other philosophies, cults, utopian and intentional communities, communist made no systemic effort to evolve and integrate all aspects of life, and – in particular – saw no value in humor, death, child rearing and – among other things – aesthetics.
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A revolution is bound to fail if it does not address and revolutionize all aspects of human life.
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Beyond productivity: Unfortunately, socialists, like capitalists, tend to view artistic and philosophical production as secondary, or as luxuries. From an elitist perspective, given the abysmal investment developed countries put into these pursuits, perhaps they are secondary. However, today plenty of money is spent on entertainment, and it’s safe to say that no matter how work-obsessed a people is, they will always need some form of art and philosophy – which are, in their commonest forms, entertainment and religion. They may well be opiates, but only insofar as they marked a stage in our development, and we can now do better, not that we can do without all semblance of them.
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I don’t mind that all the world is a stage, I just wish we had better scripts and better actions. As for the make-believe acting, that is the proper domain of children, whose work I love.
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The modern model of the arts and philosophy basically follows the energetic production and unenergetic consumption model. This means that the production of higher goods generally requires high levels of industrial energy and very low levels of intellectual energy. Novels are industrial productions insofar as they require an absolute minimum of intellectual
engagement, and even the imaginative element is prefabricated for the reader, who absorbs the author’s imaginative visions about as easily as a sponge absorbs water. And so, any revolution that wishes to succeed must also revolutionize the arts, and turn reading and even music appreciation into something other than acts of passive consumerism.
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The Marxist focus on the material world and its rejection of idealist philosophy is symptomatic of a failure to appreciate the imagination and our higher love of language games. At the very least, we need to recognize the underlying artistic and imaginative value of all religious and pseudo-religious ideas and develop them beyond anything we have seen before.
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What else could we expect from Hitler, a complete Romantic and a painter without the energy or courage to be imaginative? Ditto for Stalin, who thought himself a poet.
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The failure of both capitalism and socialism to build a profound relation to death is a startling oversight. Religion has always served as a means of reducing the stress generated by our awareness of death, injustice, and difficulty.
The Nazi socialists offered quasi-immortality through participation in the community; the capitalists ignore the issue and allow religion and atheism to co-exist in muted conflict. A revolution that does not address the primary fact of our mortality and provide a revolutionary relationship to it, cannot succeed.
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I suggest that, rather than consigning the topic of death to the margins of cultural development, we consider the essence of the thought of death as present in all higher thinking. Wherever consciousness is active, saying “No” to one image or idea (typically in order to freely consider other images or ideas), there death is present, for the thought of death is that ultimate negation, the “No” to everything – all our memories, possessions, beliefs, all the contents of consciousness.
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The contents of consciousness – through material abundance or consumption – can ever be sufficiently great to plug the abyss. Even we renounce the right to possess private property, say “No” to the entire notion of property, this alone does not create harmony with the No posed by the universe and the future. The challenge is to incorporate No-ing into the arts.
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The end of specialization should also apply to the arts; but if we are all artists, who will consume our art and save us from the deluge of art – a deluge that already exists? Every possible taste must be invented and satisfied by the modern marketing machine; every taste, the matter of nutrition does not enter into their calculations.
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The notion of plurality and infinite consumer choices eventually undermines humanism and equality. The way out is to accept all cultural products as equal in value (provided no one is insulted, deceived, or hurt) shows a lack of discernment. If a state of delusion already exists, some amount of painful disillusioning is good and necessary.
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Different philosophical schools continue to multiply, each with its own, undoubtedly unique perspectives and methods. One way to overcome this annoying cacophony of philosophy is to make a meta-critique of pure philosophical patterns; a delineation of the abstract patterns described by philosophical methods and ways of thinking. Afterwards, the patterns could be measured for their complexity and intensity (clarity). Finally, they could be evaluated according to their ability to produce optimal and sustainable happiness in one of the following two ways: 1) by producing such happiness as texts and reading experiences, or 2) by providing readers instructions for producing happiness.
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Like so many daring juveniles, modern artists, poets, musicians have experimented with everything, producing a vast assortment of very unique and very different STUFF. For consumers of the arts and amusements, the world offers an infinite smorgasbord of cultural goodies. The romance genre has split into super-romance, gothic-romance, Muslim/Hindu-teenage-romance, palliative-romance and whatever. In the interest of creating some kind of cultural unity, let’s divide the various genres and sub-genres their respective levels of intelligence. Or, categorize them all according to the five means of stifling intelligence: emotional stimulation (hope, fear, horror, etc), sensory stimulation (videography, tourism, etc.), hormonal stimulation (violence, extreme daring and sex), and information over-stimulation (news, academic research) and pure confusion (please guess). And there may be other means of intellectual and artistic suicide: for today even gardening, interior decorating, automotive design, advertising, jewellery and figure skating are making claims to beauty. And let’s not forget pot boilers and predictable plots, everyday objects and elitist gimmickry, as well as our emotional and oh-so predictable music – none of which require more than an instant of thought from their absorbers. Attention spans may well be decreasing because tolerance for inanity in the arts and irrelevancy in education is decreasing.
Philosophy (1)
This is not modern psychology or ancient wisdom, nor is this art, nor is this a work of forensic history or science fiction, this is a work of philosophy, one that says a great deal about the past and future, and largely says them silently.
According to ancient superstition some dreams tell or suggest important things about the future, and according to modern psychology some dreams tell or suggest important things about the past. I don’t doubt that both views may sometimes be true. Dreams are often driven by hopes and fears about the past and future, hopes and fears that can be based on true ideas and memories. But this discussion of dreams will not deal with those particular past or future events which are the realm of ancient superstition and modern psychology. As a work of philosophy I will discuss universals, which does not mean that this will be a discussion with no practical application. The fact that deeply disturbing dreams are often blamed on particular individuals or events, an approach that produces limited success, is reason enough to consider a few universals involved in dreams.
Dreams should be seen as a product of two universals: (1) the total environment which created them, and which created – and was created by – (2) a dreamer whose understanding or lack of understanding, particularly of our total environment and of our nothingness in death, produces dreams with corresponding levels of stress.
The danger with looking into dreams for particular truths, that is, for references to the past or future, is that historically this assumes dreams are solely products of weakness and self-deceit, and historically this assumes that we must find the truths hidden in dreams. The idea that dreams conceal the truth is a product of a culture that does not understand the value of art (concealment) or of philosophy (revealment); it also quite misses the point that the primary reason a truth is ever concealed is that it was a source of stress and that to force the patient, or dreamer, to re-confront this truth seems tactless and cruel, and it might well be counterproductive if the individual is not given the skills required to deal with it. However, such skills are not imparted to anyone by such banal comments as, “You must be honest” or “Be brave,” “realistic,” “true to yourself.” A person who repeatedly talks about painful matters with no more art or wisdom than such comments show will do little to help anyone deal with pain, and all too often such banal “open” discussions accomplish nothing, or are counterproductive. Whether we are speaking of dreams or arguments, psychology or sociology, the full potential for recovery and peace will not be approached until pain is treated with some semblance of art and wisdom.
What does it mean to treat pain with art? Since art, like dreams, here means concealment, we are asked to treat painful dreams by becoming dreamers again, but not precisely. The artist does everything the dreamer does, employing symbols and other devices to conceal meaning, but the artist does so consciously, if not always without fear, hope, or stress, at least with some awareness of the truths that cause pain.
What does it mean to treat pain with wisdom?
Dreams are not merely products of weakness and self-deceit, they also manifest degrees of strength and honesty, for what is concealed is not utterly destroyed or lost. More importantly, the act and effect of concealing is a healthy and necessary function. By concealing truths with false and fantastic images, with symbols, metaphors, puns, and so forth, we are actually creating a tapestry of meaningful connections. Yes, the tapestry conceals the truth, but we must avoid negative connotations here, for no truth can exist in isolation, for everything exists as a part of the larger environment. A truth isolated, a truth corralled and hunted into a corner will bite back: all roads may lead to Rome but if everyone goes to Rome than Rome will fall: we must be focused, but to be focused on one thing is to be obsessed. To speak like a neurologist, I mean like an electrician: if all our energy is forced through a few, or through one thin line of reasoning, we are bound to short circuit.
Connections must be made, and it is not enough to connect ideas with a straight line of logic or rhetoric. A tapestry, a complex network of connections, is needed.
Philosophy (2)
According to ancient superstition some natural phenomena tell or suggest important things about the future, and according to environmental science some natural phenomena tell or suggest important things about the past and future. I don’t doubt that both views may sometimes be true. Our perception of natural phenomena, if not nature itself, is often shaped by our hopes and fears about the past and future, hopes and fears that can be based on truth and fact. But this discussion of natural phenomena will not deal with those particular past or future events which are the realm of ancient superstition and environmental science. As a work of philosophy I will discuss universals, which does not mean that this will be a discussion with no practical application. The fact that deeply destructive natural phenomena are often blamed on particular individuals or events, an approach that produces limited success, is reason enough to consider a few universals involved in natural phenomena.
Natural phenomena should be seen as products of two universals: (1) the total environment which created them, and which created – and was created by – (2) the perception of the person whose understanding or lack of understanding, particularly of our total environment and of our nothingness in death, produces natural phenomena with corresponding levels of stress.
The danger with always looking into natural phenomena for causes is that this assumes nature must be changed; the danger with looking into destructive natural phenomena for particular truths, that is, for divine motives or human causes, is the assumption that destructive natural phenomena are bad, and that we have a responsibility to prevent them. The idea that natural phenomena can be bad is a product of a culture that does not understand the value of a destructive and creative nature; it also quite misses the point that the primary reason a natural phenomenon is ever destructive is that it is necessary and natural, and that to force nature to stop being destructive could be foolish and futile, and it might well be counterproductive if we are not given the skills to properly perceive nature. However, such skills are not imparted to anyone by hugs or by such banal comments as, “It’s God’s will,” or “That’s life,” or “Be a man.” A person who repeatedly talks about painful matters with no more art or wisdom than such comments show will do little to help anyone deal with pain, and all too often such banal “open” discussions accomplish nothing, or are counterproductive. Whether we are speaking of our perception of natural phenomena or of war, of environmental science or of geo-politics, the full potential for recovery and peace will not be approached until pain is treated with some semblance of art and wisdom.
What does it mean to treat pain with art? Since art, like nature, here means a thing that creates and destroys, we are asked to treat the mental pain, or stress, caused by nature by becoming natural, but not precisely. The artist does everything nature does, creating and destroying, but the artist should always do so with the aim of producing pleasure, not fear, hope, or stress.
What does it mean to treat pain with wisdom?
Negative perceptions of natural phenomena are not always products of weakness and error, they also manifest degrees of strength and honesty, and positive or optimistic perceptions can conceal as much stress as any negative perception may reveal. More importantly, both positive and negative perceptions of nature are healthy and necessary.
By viewing nature as a negative or positive entity, from a variety of perspectives, we are actually creating a tapestry of connections. Yes, the tapestry confuses the reality, but we must avoid negative connotations here, for it is natural to have a diversity of perceptions and feelings about any single phenomenon, since no phenomenon can be perceived as something unrelated or unconnected to our diverse, contradictory and changing needs. Any phenomenon that is forced to conform to a single view, a single opinion about its value or meanings, is a phenomenon that will come back to haunt us: everyone might like Rome, but if only Rome existed no one would live: sometimes we must be decisive, but to be decisive about everything is to be a tyrant. To speak like a neurologist, I mean like an electrician: if all our energy is forced into a single opinion or vision of life, than we are poor conductors of electricity.
A diversity of perceptions must co-exist in peace, but this does not mean that we must live in confusion. Actions must be guided by firm and reliable opinions about human nature and the environment, and yet each opinion must live with contradictions and parodies.
A Marxian Reading of Wuthering Heights
The following article, first published on Culture Matters, is a fascinating Marxian analysis of Emily Brontë’s timeless masterpiece, Wuthering Heights, within the context of the social and political upheavals of the times. The novel was published the year before the European revolutions of 1848, and, perhaps more tellingly, two years after the publication of Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England, and was written during a tumultuous industrial period and at the height of the Chartist movement.
In this article, Jenny Farrell quite ingeniously argues that Wuthering Heights is, at least on some levels, a sociological allegory with a fundamental political message, though it’s open to speculation as to how conscious this was on its author’s part (indeed, according to a recent, far inferior, article on the novel published in The Guardian, Emily was, so we’re told, a ‘Tory’, even though, of course, that was a very different thing in the 1840s than it is today). But Farrell’s thesis immediately chimed in my mind with recollections of the novel and its numerous ambiguous themes. In a nutshell, what else does Heathcliff symbolize –apart from the rebellious Miltonic Satan archetype– but the oppressed proletariat throwing off its shackles by buying back its freedom and overturning the entire social order, in Heathcliff’s case, by buying up its properties, or capital..? For all the novel’s gothic Romanticism of style and memorable title, Wuthering Heights is, essentially, as much about social class and inequality as the novels of Charles Dickens, George Elliot and Thomas Hardy (it is arguably a work of ‘covert-pastoral’ (albeit probably unconscious on Emily Brontë’s part), a term which William Empson coined to describe proletarian literature which camouflaged itself in pastoral imagery and rural settings, but which harboured social or political meanings (Some Versions of Pastoral) – though one could equally call the novel ‘covert-gothic’ or ‘cover-Romantic’.
Yes, Heathcliff’s ‘means’ are mercenary and his ‘ends’ even more so, but although he employs capitalist methods, his motive is not cupidity, his motive is purely emotional, but the only way he can vent his frustrated emotions is through gaining ownership of the properties which were once the backdrop to his own oppression and thwarted love –ownership of his own prison. Heathcliff knows, rather like the Buddhist, that the person doesn’t own the property but rather the property owns the person, and so, in a sense, his rather warped attempt at revenge is a form of self-punishment as much as it is punishment for everyone around him and under his thrall.
Heathcliff’s revenge against his former oppressor, his tyrannical step-brother, Hindley, is to seize ownership of Wuthering Heights from him but keep him there, dipsomaniacal and powerless, as a kind of ridiculed pet misanthrope; while he avenges himself against Edgar, whom his one love, Cathy, marries (because it would “degrade” her to marry Heathcliff –their different social stations force them apart), by marrying and then abusing his sister, and eventually buying up his home, Thrushcross Grange; then later, he kidnaps Edgar’s daughter, also called Cathy, and tries to force her to marry his valetudinarian son, Linton. Heathcliff’s revenge is nothing short of a one-man revolution. This revolutionary will-to-power of the antihero-protagonist Heathcliff, from subjugated and abused gypsy orphan and effective slave, to a man of property who weaponises his capital to wreak revenge against his former oppressors and against those who indirectly played their part in his emotional destruction through losing Cathy first to a more privileged rival, and then to death itself, gives a whole other level of meaning to the tumultuous title of the book. But there are many other subtleties to Wuthering Heights, which Farrell picks up on, that hint at intimations not just of metaphysical and spiritual but also social and psychological transcendence.
A.M.
30 July 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of Emily Brontë’s birth. Her novel Wuthering Heights (1847) is an amazing, creative challenge to the personal cruelties and oppressions based on class, gender and ethnic background which were being generated by the hardening class divisions of English society in the 19th century.
Emily was one of four Brontë children to survive into adulthood. Their father was an Irish clergyman, from an impoverished family, who moved to Cambridge to study for holy orders, became a Tory and received an Anglican parsonage on the Yorkshire moors. Three sisters wrote novels, which they first published under male pseudonyms. Charlotte became most famous for her novel Jane Eyre, Anne also wrote fiction, and Emily wrote poems and just one book, Wuthering Heights. Their hapless brother Branwell’s claim to fame is a portrait of his sisters, still exhibited in London’s National Portrait Gallery. All Brontë children died before the age of forty – Emily was thirty when she perished of TB.
England in the mid-1840s was in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, vividly described by Brontë contemporary Friedrich Engels in his first book (1845) The Condition of the Working Class in England. Growing up, they would have been aware from the newspapers they read of the devastation of hand-workers, especially the handloom weavers in their region, and the resulting large-scale impoverishment. Haworth, homestead of the Brontës, lay near the Yorkshire mill towns, badly hit by the Hungry Forties. Their adult lives coincided with struggles against the Corn Laws, factory reform, strikes and the height of Chartism. Ireland was haemorrhaging from its holocaust, the Famine. All this affected the writings of the Brontë sisters, filtering through in one way or another.
Emily’s profound understanding of 19th century England, and capitalism, is reflected in Wuthering Heights. This novel shocked the Victorian reader, and its violence still alarms readers today. At its heart is the story of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a destitute, probably Irish child brought home by Mr Earnshaw from Liverpool. A deep bond develops between the children. Catherine is a tomboy, the opposite of the Victorian idea of a female. Mr Earnshaw protects Heathcliff, and insists he be treated as a family equal. Catherine’s elder brother Hindley detests Heathcliff, and torments him physically and emotionally. After Mr Earnshaw dies, this abuse escalates. Hindley, who had been away for three years, returns with a wife and orders the servants and Heathcliff to stay away from the family living quarters:
Hindley … won’t let him sit with us, nor eat with us any more; and, he says, he and I must not play together, and threatens to turn him out of the house if we break his orders. He has been blaming our father … for treating H. too liberally; and swears he will reduce him to his right place.
Catherine and Heathcliff, however, remain inseparable. Cathy teaches Heathcliff everything she learns. In a key episode, they roam over to Thrushcross Grange, home of the Linton family, the largest capitalist landowners in the area. It is very different to the Heights – a Victorian mansion furnished in the most expensive style. Mr and Mrs Linton are absent; Edgar and his sister Isabella are seen violently pulling a dog between them for pleasure, a thing Heathcliff cannot comprehend.
When the Lintons become aware of two onlookers outside, whom they mistake to be after the rent money, they let the bulldog loose on them, and it gets a hold of Catherine. When they are brought into the Linton house, Heathcliff is sent away, whereas Catherine is deemed respectable and treated for her wounds. She stays five weeks and returns a young lady.
Increasingly, Catherine is sucked into the prevalent class values, spending less time with Heathcliff and more with the Lintons. Unsurprisingly for the reader of Victorian novels, Edgar asks Catherine to marry him. However, contrary to Victorian expectations, Brontë makes clear that Catherine’s acceptance signifies her betrayal of Heathcliff, of their absolute loyalty, of their impassioned and classless relationship.
Catherine reveals to the housekeeper Nelly Dean that it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff. Heathcliff overhears this but disastrously does not hear her continue:
He shall never know how I love him; and that not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.
Catherine’s bowing to money and convention triggers the tragedy. Heathcliff, devastated, leaves Wuthering Heights, not to return for three years.
The turn of events in the second half of the novel is unprecedented for the Victorian and uncomfortable for the modern reader. Heathcliff has acquired money and an understanding of law. He returns to “settle my score with Hindley; and then prevent the law by doing execution on myself”, but Catherine’s welcome rekindles all the old passion. Heathcliff puts into operation a plan that is designed to beat class society at its own game. He gambles with Hindley, taking his property. He marries Isabella Linton in order to gain Linton property. He treats Isabella brutally, as just what she is in terms of Victorian law – his property. Interestingly Heathcliff tells Nelly about Isabella:
No brutality disgusted her: I suppose she has an innate admiration of it, if only her precious person were secure from injury! … set his (Edgar’s, JF) fraternal and magisterial heart at ease: that I keep strictly within the limits of the law. I have avoided, up to this period, giving her the slightest right to claim a separation; …
Edgar makes clear their new relationship: “she is only my sister in name: not because I disown her, but because she has disowned me.” Who disowns whom is a matter for the reader to decide. The institution of the Victorian family as a harbour of humanity is shattered at every level.
Heathcliff becomes master of Wuthering Heights and many years after Catherine’s death forces a marriage between his weakling son Linton, “my property”, and Catherine’s daughter Cathy, again to acquire Linton property. He even imprisons Cathy to do so. Interestingly, Linton immediately turns tyrant to Cathy:
She’s my wife, and it’s shameful that she should wish to leave me. He says she hates me and wants me to die, that she may have my money; but she shan’t have it: and she shan’t go home! She never shall! …. uncle is dying, truly, at last. I’m glad, for I shall be master of the Grange after him. Catherine always spoke of it as her house. It isn’t hers! It’s mine: papa says everything she has is mine.
With this action, Heathcliff parodies, in a grotesque way, Catherine’s class marriage to Edgar. In the likely event of son Linton’s death, Heathcliff not Catherine would inherit. Everything is turned into its monstrous extreme.
Hindley’s son Hareton, who resembles both the young Catherine and Heathcliff remarkably, is Heathcliff’s fiercest and most loyal defender. And despite himself and his best laid plans, Heathcliff likes Hareton. Heathcliff treats Hareton and the servants at the Heights without much social difference. They all work, live and eat together. Women coming to the house, such as Isabella and later Cathy Linton, are stripped of their property, by marriage, and of their class comforts. They work for their living.
The only person who enjoys a work-free existence is son Linton, whom Heathcliff despises but has educated. When he is dying, shortly after his marriage to Cathy, Heathcliff comments: “but his life is not worth a farthing, and I won’t spend a farthing on him.” Repeatedly, the reader is shocked at the lack of sentimentality. Over and over, we are confronted with the reality of cash nexus and the law.
Hareton, Hindley’s son, is not educated and cannot read, write or use numbers. Again, this is in keeping with the rules of class society – why educate a farm worker? Heathcliff has pared down all his dealings to the bare logic of capitalist rationality. There are no frills, no pretences of kindness. Heathcliff’s tenants too are treated roughly. There is no humanity. It is only in this stark, unmasked form that readers realise this is the true nature of their own society. It is hyperbole, yes, but for that reason all the more effective in revealing the essence.
The union of Hareton and Cathy, which concludes the novel, is a rebellion against a world governed by the iron grip of inhumanity. Although they will overcome the property barrier with their marriage, they will accommodate themselves in the ‘respectable’, ‘civilised’ Thrushcross Grange. And yet there is hope for a relationship of equality, untypical of the Victorian era.
What remains with the reader, however, is the tragedy of Catherine and Heathcliff whose absolute freedom from all the dictates of class and hierarchy was the essence of their relationship. This kind of relationship is doomed. That is the tragedy.
I often think of Heathcliff in today’s world, as the ruling class increasingly reveals its profoundly barbaric nature. There is ever less pretence of culture and humanity. Education and health care are business, the state extracts itself progressively from a duty of care. Politicians set ever-decreasing value on a shallow veneer of humanity. We are seeing the beast for what it is, perhaps most grotesquely in Donald Trump, but certainly not only in him. The difference to Heathcliff is that Heathcliff cannot reach personal fulfilment by living this way. He wreaks revenge on the class system, but the price is his own humanity, indeed his life. Class society is the root cause of Heathcliff’s inhumanity.
Brontë does not spell this out in quite these words. Her very clever and innovative narrative ensures that the reader is taken in by the double, prejudiced Victorian class lens of Mr Lockwood and Nelly Dean. Even Isabella’s letter, the only verbatim document apart from Heathcliff and Catherine’s direct speech, quoted by Nelly and filtered again via Lockwood, expresses her class point of view. Therefore, the reader has to do what readers of the bourgeois press must do daily: read between the lines and presume that we are dealing with half-truths, omissions and fake news.
Heathcliff only responds humanely when he is with Catherine, and in his torment after she dies. They can only be together in death, buried beside each other outside the church: “on a green slope in a corner of the kirk-yard, where the wall is so low that heath and bilberry-plants have climbed over it from the moor; and peat-mould almost buries it.”
The sides of their coffins are open to each other. Heathcliff’s love for Catherine, is his humanity, and it is a world apart from Victorian class marriage. In their relationship of unequivocal equality Emily Brontë anticipates a more humane society, one that reaches far beyond hierarchical systems. It reaches into a time when unequal gender difference is replaced by an equality of personhood. In her subtle, utopian vision, Emily Brontë anticipates a humane society, unrestrained by the class-based laws that Heathcliff reveals to be barbaric.
If the meaning of life is to create conditions that are commensurate with humanity, then Emily Brontë’s remarkable novel highlights this. Her dream is yet to be achieved.
First published as ‘Emily Brontë, Heathcliff and imagining a classless society’ on Culture Matters
Michael George Gibson
On English Poetry and Poems
There is some perplexity in people’s minds as to what English poetry and a poem may be. Poetry was, and to some extent, still is, an important part of our culture and sense of nationhood. I therefore propose to make a definition of English ‘poetry’ and a ‘poem’. In fact these terms were not widely used in English until the 16th century: but I think that it is fair to apply them to some things which were made in this land in earlier centuries.
We have some written stuff from the 8th century onwards which may be called English poetry. In Anglo-Saxon times there were word-things then called ‘lays’ or ‘songs’ which were of essentially the same nature as the things later called ‘poems’. Anglo-Saxon lays and songs were made according to ‘lay-craft’, ‘song-craft’ or ‘word-craft’. The Anglo-Saxons spoke of their lay-craft or song-craft as one in which the parts of the lay or song were ‘verses’. The word ‘verse’ meant a ploughed furrow both in the sense of its line and length and in its turn to make another furrow. These early makers also spoke of theirs verses having ‘feet’ and of their being ‘metered’. Their verses were by and large of much the same length and had much the same amount of stuff in them as the others in a particular ‘fitt’.
The word ‘rhythm’ was not used in those days but was implicit in the word ‘song’. Their songs were markedly rhythmical – as is the case, one presumes, in all early cultures. This was so that anyone could partake in the song and often the dance that might go with it. This is why the word ‘foot’ was used in describing and defining the craft.
The metered verses of the Anglo-Saxon or Old English poetry were further shaped by means of a system of internal correspondences of consonants or vowels at the beginnings of some of the words in each verse. This we now call ‘alliteration’. It is clear that in most Old English poetry a verse usually had in it four main beats or pulses which were linked by the initial sounds of the words rather than their endings – though this was not usually the case for all four beats in a verse.
In due course ‘end rhyme’ came to be used at the ends of some verses, and this system of shaping poetry eventually overtook the alliterative way during the Middle English period. But the metering out of verse into feet was always done. It is to word-things made up of metered and rhymed verses to which the words ‘poetry’ and ‘poem’ were later applied. There were of course other aspects of the use of language that came into the consideration of the nature of poetry: but these were not fundamental to a definition of ‘poetry’ or a ‘poem’.
It was several centuries before any very different way of doing things was tried. Towards the end of the 19th century ‘free-verse’ – from the French vers-libre – became a technique of writing. But I hold that the term is illogical, a nonsense.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (1990) defines ‘free verse’ as:
a kind of poetry that does not conform to any regular meter: the length of its lines are irregular, as is its use of rhyme – if any.
The definition is exact and right except in one respect: it contained a wrong use of the word ‘poetry’, which should be replaced by the term ‘writing’ or ‘word-stuff’, or some such.
In its original sense a verse, or furrow, was metered out and turned in accordance with a system of related furrows (which of course all accorded with the form of the field). This accordance was and is essential to the craft of ploughing and the craft of poetry. ‘Free verse’ is a contradiction in terms: a verse is by definition metered and therefore not free – it cannot be both.
There is something of the same sort of confusion in the matter of rhyme. ‘Rhyme’ means identify of end sound in words.’ Anything less – be it called ‘half-rhyme’ or ‘part-rhyme’ or whatever – is not rhyme, it is other than rhyme.
In the last hundred years writing styles have changed more quickly. Very different things are presented to us as ‘poems’. Trying to find new ways of doing things and new things to make are natural human traits. It is also natural to look for the differences in things and to find words with which to describe and name them in order to discriminate between one thing and another.
‘Songcraft’, later called ‘poetry’, was and is the making of word-things according to certain clear, objective, defining and essential rules and techniques of metre and alliteration and rhyme. These things may be called ‘poems’. To avoid confusion, word-things not made according to these rules but according to some different – and, one hopes, objectifiable – rules, should, as things of a different kind, be given a different name.
References:- The Oxford English Dictionary
A Thesaurus of Old English (King’s College, London. 1995)
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms 1996
Tubby Country
The birthplace of both the Teletubbies and Shakespeare, Stratford upon Avon has become a focus of pilgrimage for little people throughout the Gibberish and English speaking worlds respectively.
The international clout of the Tubbies cannot be understated. No sooner had the Fab Four set toe-less, clumpy foot in the New World than Tinky-Winky found himself the object of a fatwah proclaimed by self-appointed defender of American morals, the Rev. Jerry Falwell. The justification for this tirade? Those unmistakable badges of buggery: the handbag, lavender pelt and triangular head-aerial. Americans swung into action in the Tubbies’ defence, purchasing Tinky-Winky dolls en masse and flooding the streets with Tinky-Winky costumes over Halloween. The press, by this time bored with tar-and-feathering Tinky-Winky (not that such treatment would significantly alter a Tubby’s naturally fuzzy appearance), turned their guns on the rest of the quad. ‘Teletubbies can kill your kids’ headlines screamed, citing cases of several small children crushed to death attempting to give Russian-style ‘big hugs’ to the Tubbies on the screens of their big fat American TV sets.
These are just sour grapes, of course. What evangelist, TV producer or film director, of any stripe, wouldn’t give his back teeth to command such adulation? Wouldn’t Mr Spielberg be just a bit smug if rapturous cinema audiences started sprinting down the centre aisle and splatting themselves against his latest blockbuster? The Rev. Falwell is likewise smarting from the unpopularity of his own deeply unpleasant creed. One can imagine him wearing the heads of his VHS player to the bone, scouring each episode for any suggestion of deviancy or, at the very least, a blurred freeze-frame of possible background rabbit copulation on the astroturf. As a matter of fact, the Teletubbies inhabit an ordered, regulated world presided over by a traditional, Old Testament God. What more appropriate way to represent such a deity than as a monstrous baby in the sky, manifesting itself without warning to exhibit arbitrary disapproval or mirth?
So it is that Chapel Street in Stratford upon Avon now contains two shrines. The first is the centre-piece souvenir shop and HQ of Ragdoll Productions Ltd., creators of the Teletubbies. The second is Nash’s House; home of Shakespeare in his dotage.
One of the first things you notice when you get off the bus in Stratford is the flags. Great, big banners, bearing the banana-yellow spear (geddit?) of the bard’s own coat of arms, snap in the wind over each of the three town-centre properties cared for by the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust. They’re an incongruous sight for England. By the curiously modern virtue of being a medieval kingdom, rather than a nation-state, we’ve never had much of a flag culture. Both the Union-Jack and George Cross have all but been abandoned to far-right fringe-politics and that last great bastion of popular, uniformed fascism, football. The flags that fly over Stratford are of a different type, they are the standards of England’s state-religion, heritage.
The process by which living culture becomes heritage is a complex one but broadly analogous to that of the formation of fossils. A living, shagging, evolving animal performs its genetic duty and then dies. Its remains are squashed flat for a long period of time until, at last, unearthed by specialists and put on display, in a glass box, accompanied by a wildly inaccurate ‘artist’s impression’. At this point only does the creature become an object of intense interest and veneration to members of the public who have, in all likelihood, run over dozens of the same fossil’s living descendants in their range-rovers, without a second thought. Or, to put it another way; culture is to heritage as dairy cows grazing on lush pasture are to St. Ivel processed cheese slices.
Stratford maintains a strict, kosher segregation of live cows and rubber cheese.
The artists are confined to the RSC and the pilgrims to the shrines. Chief shrine, the Kaaba of the Shakespeare world, with the biggest flag of them all, is the wibbly-wobbly timbered birthplace itself. An entire house preserved in aspic; eat your heart out Damian Hurst! The imposing, neo-Stalinist, concrete Shakespeare Centre, hugs close by like some over-protective, cringing acolyte. This is the eye of the Shakespeare vortex; a heritage singularity sucking in people from the furthest corners of the globe. I yielded to its pull during my last visit to Stratford; ushered along past the museum cross-stations and into the garden, where I was stopped by a trembling Indian who puffed out his chest to be photographed. This gentleman was not the only person I noticed suffering from a visible erosion of self-belief as he neared the object of his reverence. It was like watching normally confident, out-going folk soil themselves in the presence of royalty. Inside the house I had to release two paralysed middle-aged Americans who couldn’t even bring themselves to use the exit, for fear that the iron latch and door itself were ‘do-not-touch’ exhibits. The house’s contents are unremarkable; it is the walls themselves that people come to see, and to breath the air between. It is secular relic-worship; that same sweet, febrile urge which drives Catholic faithful to press sweaty lips to dusty reliquaries of dubious mummified human toes.
Heritage speaks the universal language of the inferiority complex and kisses the arse of an affluent public who want to believe that just ‘being there’, going through the motions and having the T-shirt is as good as doing or understanding. It is the cultural equivalent of a New Guinean cargo-cult, the adherents of which believe they can attain cash wealth and material status simply by pouring coins from one bowl into another, and back again, for hours on end. The Teletubbies, on the other hand, speak the universal language of nothing-in-particular. Their following of recent-embryos may well grow up and join actual cults, though nothing as vindictive as that of the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s. Most likely they will be attracted to something authoritarian but loving, co-operative and sexually well-adjusted. Perhaps they’ll become followers of Osho Rajneesh, the eccentric, Rolls-Royce-collecting, Indian mystic famously expelled from the US in the 1980’s for tax irregularities and, almost like Tinky-Winky, being too damn popular. Or maybe, before they reach that stage, their young minds will be subverted by the current vogue for cartoon super-hero militarism, or elevated by the sophisticated, atheist social-morality of re-runs of The Clangers. Until then, don’t worry, the future’s still bright. Bright red, that is, and yellow, and purple, and green. Amen.
Sim City
Those of you who go out at night will not have experienced addiction to the computer game Sim City.
Sim City is a town planning simulation of the ‘god-game’ genre. You start in the year 1900 with a square of randomly generated virgin wilderness, and some money, and the aim is to transform this into a vast, stinking metropolis in the course of a few hundred evenings. You mould your city by ‘zoning’ residential, commercial and industrial areas by dragging, respectively, green, blue or yellow squares across the prairie. Each of these come in incrementally darker shades of ‘light’, ‘medium’ and ‘high’ density. Then you sit back as little building sites erupt like time-lapse mould across your map and bloom into houses, shops and factories. Disturbingly, my version of Sim City includes optional replicas of the New York World Trade Centre towers. I put them in my city for a joke, but then felt guilty and demolished them, which made me feel even worse.
Suffice to say, this becomes very tedious after a while, but by then it’s too late. For every block of simulated urban life you create, there’s a yawning gap next-door, literally begging for exploitation. “Citizens need more commercial zones” flashes the appeal across your screen, and so you give it to them, and it feels good to be such a benevolent god. But it doesn’t stop there. The citizens need more parks, water mains, schools, hospitals, police stations, bus stops, railways, airports, zoos, marinas, fountains….and the more they get the happier they are, and the bigger the city becomes, and the more they need. By this stage, if you crank it up to its fastest setting, the screen resembles a complex pulsating neon sign, with dozens of buildings in different states of construction, use or disrepair. Sim Cities are ambitious, hungry creatures, always bursting at the seams. Growth is their raison d’être. They are modern, on the move, upwardly mobile cities; they are, above all, American cities because, of course, this is an American computer game.
Even as I allow myself to be enslaved by my simulant population, I am indignant. What sort of culturally impoverished country is Sim-land that their urban history begins no earlier than 1900? Where is the unplanned, organic growth and reuse that shapes a real living city? How can the entire kaleidoscope of human activity be pigeon-holed as residential, commercial or industrial? It’s bollocks. I begin to fantasise about a realistic western European Sim City, should computing power ever make it possible. You’ll kick off in the 8th century AD, at the very latest, with the shell of an abandoned Roman fort in which to establish your dark-age burgh. Agriculture will be a dominant feature for the first hundred hours of play, and you’ll be stuck with the field systems forever. The cathedral will remain at the ‘building site’ stage for at least 400 sim-years. It will be a higgledy-piggledy sort of a city, like York. (There’s kink in one of the streets in York where they reckon a Roman building fell flat on its face and the Anglo-Saxons just got used to walking around it.) It will get progressively more higgledy-piggledy until wiped clean by a Great Fire, or by massive aerial bombardment in the 1940’s, to make way for some impressive Imperial avenues. Right angles will be banned. (I am sick of Sim City’s right angles. It can manage diagonals, but only with extreme reluctance. You can lay out a diagonal road, but the game gets sulky and won’t let you build bridges over it or even create junctions. Usually I give up and confine myself to squares.) Railways will be constructed in beautiful neo-gothic, and occur about 100 years earlier than in the current version, in which, laughably, underground railways only become available around 1950. Running water will have to be painstakingly installed under existing streets, not laid out in advance in big grids. Above all, there will be no absurd free hand to demolish and ‘increase density’ everytime the simulants outgrow their houses, nor to wallpaper over the above-mentioned medieval field systems with mock medieval housing estates. Planning regulations will be enforced. The sim-scum will learn that money cannot buy a past or a future.
I related this to my town planner friend in California. She wasn’t impressed at all. Then I went to stay with her and found out why. It was all squares; every street numbered. Her home town had been created in 1978 around a grid of motorway junctions outside Los Angeles. It was a ‘residential zone’, light green. She illuminated our drive through the city with her planner’s observations. “They’re trying to get the density up in this part of town” she remarked at one point, “this was just agricultural before” at another. What finally crushed me, however, was the desert. Joshua trees and scrub as far as the eye could see, much as it had been for a thousand years, except for the fire hydrants. Row upon row of fire hydrants at 100ft intervals, stretching out in a huge grid across the waste. “It’s going to be developed for residential use,” my friend explained, “they put the water supply in first”.
Geoffrey Heptonstall
This is the maiden all forlorn
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn
That tossed the dog that worried the cat
That killed the rat that ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
Handmade Software, Inc. Image Alchemy v1.11
Handmade Software, Inc. Image Alchemy v1.11
However we may encounter Jack, and the ways vary, he is marked as nature’s outcast. He is a rogue and a vagabond, sometimes seen as a knave and occasionally as a fool. What acceptance he may receive is a lowly position in the social margin. The house that Jack built is a ramshackle of driftwood and tin. Jack wins by discovering ingenious ways of survival, but he must keep his distance. His house stands alone.
We may think more benignly of him as Everyman Jack, the universal symbol of our common humanity, simple but not ignoble. Of course he must accept his place in the corner. He sells a cow for a handful of beans. But when the beanstalk grows, so does his moral stature. While remaining a simpleton, he takes on the role of adventurer, and even of a hero. He is resourceful and capable, a Jack of All Trades.
But the foolish or congenial part of him is only one part. There is the sinister side of him we must consider. As Stingy Jack of Irish folklore he has great cunning, sufficient to trick even the devil. We may see him even now as Jack O’Lantern, the wandering, ghostly figure, the will o’ the wisp, to be seen on dark nights in lonely places. Crossing the Atlantic, he becomes the Halloween spirit whose face is carved on a pumpkin. Children may tame him if they pay due respect to his power, but Jack O’Lantern is among the less savoury manifestations of Jack. At sea he is Jack Tar, the common sailor, whose life is one of harsh tasks and cruel treatment. Who is responsible for the cold but Jack Frost?
In rural Suffolk there was the traditional threat to children of Jack O’Boot. This persisted into the Twentieth Century, and is thought to have its origins in the Jacobite risings. The Bonnie Prince of the Scots becomes the child-catcher of the English. Out in the dark on unlit roads all manner of demonic mischief may be lurking. The fear is personified by a creature not of this world, yet recognisably human in its general features. The fearful country folk give the demon a name.
Stingy Jack invited the Devil himself to drink with him. Not wanting to pay for the drink, Jack persuaded the Devil to turn himself into a coin. This coin Jack put in his pocket next to a silver cross which rendered the Devil powerless. Jack agreed to release him on the conditions that he leave Jack alone for a year, and that on his death the Devil should not take his soul. After a year the Devil returned and was persuaded to climb a tree to pick some fruit. On the bark of the tree Jack carved a cross, and once more the Devil was powerless. The condition of release this time was that he leave Jack alone for ten years. Soon after Jack died, but was refused admittance to Heaven. Sent back to Earth with only a burning coal, he became no more a spectral glow among other wandering creatures of the night.
It does not pay to be cunning. Too much guile makes for a soulless existence. It suggests a savagely twisted naivety to believe one can fool the natural order of things. A soupcon of innocence, if no more, makes for the better human being. Jack climbs the beanstalk at his peril. If he runs up the hill he is likely to come tumbling down. From these misfortunes he may learn some of his life’s hard lessons, but not if he thinks he knows how to take on life and win where others have failed from time immemorial. The innocent fool is the wiser Jack than the ghostly wanderer of the twilight world that is neither death nor life.
Jack has known many lives, and has been called many things. Among his many appearances is Jack the Giant Killer of Cornish myth. He is the farmer’s boy in the reign of King Arthur, that legendary golden age of Celtic Britain. Jack’s first triumph is against Cormoran (Cornish for sea monster), the cattle-slayer. There follow Blunderbore and Thunderel. On the road the lady who serves the Devil is encountered. Jack breaks the diabolic spell and defeats the Devil. Finally in the enchanted castle is the giant Galigantus. (The names of these giants are so apt and memorable.) After his final triumph Jack is welcomed at Camelot to take his rightful place at the Table Round.
But this is a rare happy ending to the tale of Jack. In this version he is no longer outcast, but he has known a life of wandering lonely roads. ‘Now, where are you going, Old John,’ a Wiltshire farmer once asked me, following an ancient trail. Old John I knew of from a poem by Edward Thomas. He is the restless traveller of country roads. I once saw Old John on the South Downs (which is Edward Thomas country). This Old John was quite elderly, lean and fit. He was very clean but ragged. He was not down-and-out, but you could see how he was apart from society. You could see at once that he was an isolate content within himself. He lived here and there, by his wits, well away from the world. I supposed he walked everywhere, keeping away from busy roads and busy towns. ‘Hit the road, Jack, and don’t you come back no more.’
In the remote Derbyshire hill town of Castleton there is the annual procession of the Garland King on 29 May. This is Oak Apple Day, the generally forgotten festive day celebrating the return of Charles II from exile. The Garland King is both Jack-in-the-Green, more usually seen on May Day, and Charles II. Charles I is said to be the original Jack Sprat of the nursery rhyme, lean from his inability to raise taxes. Charles II in the Civil Wars was a wandering figure, famous for his refuge in an oak tree (a real occurrence, not a legend). Far from courtly life he fled England in rags, more a personification of Jack-in-the-Green than of the monarch he became.
Not only does the wanderer keep away from us; we may not wish to be near him:
Jack be nimble,
Jack be quick,
Jack jump over
The candlestick
He is alert and elusive. To jump over a candle without extinguishing its flame was said to be a sign of good luck. This suggests a magical power, and magic is always of the unknown world beyond the visible and tangible. Spring Heeled Jack is more than nimble. He is capable of exceptional and impossible leaps. There is nothing comic or even pleasing about this. Jumping a candle may be child’s play, but Spring Heeled Jack is sinister indeed.
What is extraordinary is the relative modernity of this manifestation. This is no figure from medieval superstition, but an urban myth dating from the first year of Victoria’s reign. In October 1837 Mary Stevens, a servant girl, was reportedly attacked in a dark alley by a madman whose manner and appearance she thought devilish. The following day he appeared again. Several witnesses reported that he leapt over a very high wall, giving out a ghoulish shriek of laughter as he did so. There followed several sightings of a cloaked figure with claws and an oilskin costume.
The sightings became so frequent and so seemingly authentic that they began to be reported seriously in The Times. The Lord Mayor of London declared that some trickster was at work. This, however, does not explain later sightings elsewhere in the country, including a group of soldiers in 1877 at Aldershot, a garrison town not known for mysteries. One possible explanation for the sightings is hysteria. Another is the presence of copy-cat appearances. One explanation need not exclude the other. It is curious how Spring Heeled Jack is an urban folk-devil, and how relatively recent (the last reported incident was in 1904).
By this time Jack the Ripper had appeared. Whoever he was, and whatever the causes of his horrific crimes, he is no legend, although his identity is enclosed by speculations so prevalent they have assumed the character of myth. His notoriety has been extraordinary, a figure who continues to hold a lurid fascination in popular culture. The story is too well known to detail here, except to say that the fascination has tended to anaesthetize the appalling nature of the crimes against defenceless and desperate streetwalkers whose daily lives were lived in peril. Attack was always a threat. The victims were vulnerable and available. That the murder should be given his famous soubriquet testifies to the fearful power of mythic presences even in a sophisticated metropolitan setting.
Jack the Ripper was all too real a man. There is nothing romantic in his crimes. The dark allure of his name cloaks his anonymity in an undeserved sense of thrill. There is more than fear associated with his name. He embodies an unalloyed evil, a presence that is to be found within our common sense of dread at any time and in any place. Sally Purcell, a poet in love with the mythic, named this strange presence Jack Shadow:
Jack Shadow changes tree to man,
or casual face to lost familiar
He knows his victim’s fears and frailties. And we are all potentially his victims. He lurks in alleys, or he leaps over walls. He changes manner but not purpose, which is to negate the good in life. He is not to be spoken of lightly, for his power extends into caverns of the human psyche. The other Jack is more amenable. Jack the Lad is a rogue, irresponsible and self-seeking, but he is not evil. He is the man of all trades and none, he is the thief and swindler, but only of the gullible and the rich. ‘A mad-cap ruffian and a swearing Jacke.’ (The Taming of the Shrew). He is the street corner man with a smile and a winning patter. But he is, if amiably and benignly, on the other side of the law. He is not respectable. He is a knave.
‘He calls the knaves jacks, the common labouring boy!’ Estella snobbishly and cruelly observes (thereby revealing her own kind of vulgarity) when she plays cards with Pip the blacksmith’s boy in Great Expectations. This touches on a sore point, for Jack Would be a Gentleman. Gillian Freeman’s novel of that title appeared in 1959, but the phrase has an archaic ring to it. And so it proves. The original phrase is ‘Jack would be a gentleman if he could speak French.’ The explanation for this saying seems to be that after the Norman Conquest a sure mark of gentility was the French tongue, a mark that lingered in English social discourse.
But of course it takes more than language skills to raise Jack from his lowly position. He has to learn manners, and not to spring out from his box so rudely. By diligence and resourcefulness he may pull out a plum, and say, ‘What a good boy am I.’ But that only serves to show how clumsy as well as crafty he is.
A possible source of the rhyme is the life of John Horner, Mayor of Glastonbury. Johnny Horner is Cockney rhyming slang for corner. The suggestion seems to be that John Horner, having a finger in every pie, was likely to be round every corner. Jack may have risen in society, but he cannot shake off so easily his crafty habits and a vulgar display of himself.
From a Jack to a King was a popular song of the early Sixties. It was gentle and wistful, a simple tale of love’s transforming power. Jumpin’ Jack Flash was a later, and more violent, leap of aspiration. In the hedonism of Swinging London a clever chancer, like the eponymous Jack Flash, could succeed with charm and panache when gentility and culture were absent. There were a number of candidates for the possible source of the song.
Also in London of the Nineteen Sixties there was a real life figure by name of Jack Dash. To the powerful he was no more than a troublemaker. To others he was a champion of workers’ rights. Jack Dash was a leading campaigner and activist in the London docks. His career serves as a reminder that even in Swinging London there was deprivation, and there was the fight for justice among the underprivileged. But our particular interest is the wonderful name. It has an aura of myth about it. He is commemorated in Jack Dash House on the Isle of Dogs, itself a quaintly-named low quarter of historic London.
Jack lives on the margins of society. His power is derived from the sense of myth his marginal status offers him. He has no place in society, no social identity except the rumours, the trail of footprints, and the shadow that may be glimpsed as Jack moves from commonplace journeyman to the mysterious and elusive possibility that can survive by wit and wit alone against the learned and gifted of society. He moves among them unseen but felt as a presence, a reminder that material technologies do not provide a complete answer to life’s abiding complexity.
Almost A Whisper
Of course I hoped to be a poet when I began writing. This hope soon faded into an occasional attempt which was rarely successful – until quite recently. I took up my pen, and I found I was writing readable poetry. It was working in a bookshop with a poet, and helping out with events and readings that stimulated me to think about poetry. Hearing other poets led me to think seriously about my own writing.
I began to sketch out poems. Rarely did anything flow easily. My notebooks were, and remain, a scrawl of deletions and rewrites. Version after version transforms the raw and awkward phrases into the concise and apt images which please me as a reader. The question I faced was whether they would please anyone else. Fortunately I have an in-house editor with a critically-acute intellect. ‘You should write more poetry,’ my wife said. I wasn’t sure how things were going until I read some work out, and it sounded better than I had expected it would. So I began to read my work to others. It proved easier to find an audience than I had anticipated. It seems there is an appetite for poetry, a hunger for metaphors, whether read in a corner or spoken out loud in a performance space.
But of course a lot of people are trying to satisfy that hunger. Publication is not easy. Unsolicited poems tend to clog up the works. What chance is there to be heard among so much aspiration? Venturing out as a poet necessarily entailed some rejection until the floodgates opened. Success breeds success. Publication engenders the essential confidence which can turn commitment into achievement. I was becoming known as a professional poet, rather than as the essayist-reviewer seeking to regain the creative voice that had lain dormant for a while. Writing workshops and seminars had meant nurturing others in their writing. What I had done for others surely I could do for myself?
What I had not considered is that writing poetry means Becoming a Poet. The essayist is anonymous. The poet is expected to perform. That means adopting a public persona in finding a public voice. Walking into a pub to give a reading, I was greeted at once with, ‘You must be the poet. You look like a poet.’ Flattered at the recognition, and irritated by the wrong kind of recognition, I simply smiled and confirmed who I was. It is the writing that deserves recognition, for at times I feel as much a conduit as an imaginative intellect. I have a personal voice, but it speaks from necessity as much as choice. It speaks in a network of literature that enables me to be more than I can be on my own.
It’s a frequent complaint of harassed editors that so much unsolicited material lacks that sense of dedication which the network gives you. Reading contemporary poetry is essential. Hearing contemporary voices is advisable if not essential also. Gradually you become part of the network. You become a poet. That does not mean acting a part. It means dedicating a vital part of yourself to a certain way, a certain world, of imaginative responses.
There are preconceived ideas of how a poet should be. These notions have to be acknowledged and confronted. We cannot ignore the fact of stereotypes convening in the public mind when the word poet shimmers on the horizon. In recent years the literate public media have sought to countermand the idea of the romantic, possibly fey, bohemian with the presentation of the poet as the worldly street corner shaman,. demotic in voice and manner, approachable in person and in poetry. The danger, of course, is that the image takes over the words. The poetry itself becomes a performance, a little too self-aware of what it is doing to capture the freshness and spontaneity it appears to be seeking. When carefully you read the Beats or the Liverpool Poets of the Sixties you understand how difficult it is to emulate those achievements. Unless you have the right equipment you shouldn’t even try.
What we call poetry is a generic name for radically different approaches in style and theme. That does not mean that ‘anything can be a poem’. Nor does it mean that ‘poetry is the new rock ‘n’ roll’. There is poetry in music. There is music in poetry. But words are precious things, easily lost in the crowd. There is an underground feeling about poetry, an unofficial network of the like-minded. Poetry’s surest means of communication is word of mouth. When it is acknowledged by the mainstream it is sure to be absorbed. That will make the poet better known and better-financed. But the danger is in the loss of impetus, of character, and of truth.
I have in mind my beginnings as a writer. There was a lot of literary activity in the south-west corner of England . Based on the poetry and performance happening there a few of us sought in 1978 a gathering for a larger audience. We persuaded an initially very reluctant Michael Eavis to loan a few fields of his farm near Shepton Mallet. George Andrews, Neil Oram’s company (of which I was part), Jeremy Sandford and Heathcote Williams all came. There was some music of course, for this was the site of the famous Glastonbury Fayre of an earlier time. Our event went well. The next year the same thing happened. In 1980 there was nothing in the fields, but there were events round Glastonbury town. Then we dispersed. I went far away to take up a lecturing post. After that ‘ Glastonbury ’ became a ticketed event centred on stadium rock. That wasn’t what we had in mind.
It was the distance from the mainstream – the lack of media interest – that appealed to performers and audiences alike. It’s not that any of us believed in coteries. Coterie writing says nothing to the cultural democracy one would like to see develop. That development should be almost a whisper, something that seeps slowly into the blood stream. The public has been taught to fear poetry as something apart from life. Poetry on the Tube is one example of the ways it can become truly part of daily living, not something to be feared or envied.
Our foundation experiences shape us. They predict our future development. Writing for me is a means of personal communication. I like to see my audience. I like to know my audience. Language begins with the spoken word. Literature began as intimate speech, and where it retains that quality of human contact it remains vital. In Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s insistent phrase, it is ‘an insurgent art.’ It has the varied dimensions of metaphor rather than the plain surface of the known and obvious. The sequestered nature of the enterprise enables it to influence by stealth, by degrees, by happenstance. Once They get in on the act the real poetry moves elsewhere. You can find it in the independent bookshops and their attendant cafes in our cities. The network is easily found by anyone who wishes to look. Just listen for the unofficial voice of unacknowledged news.
Geoffrey Heptonstall
Asked about the structure of poetry, Robert Frost, so the story goes, reminded his audience that Homer wrote in hexameters because his work needed a disciplined technique. The implication is that Frost was magisterially ruling on the necessity of tight metrical form. But we know that Frost advocated no such thing. Looking at work by his English friend, Edward Thomas, Frost showed how Thomas’s prose might easily be turned into verse. Thomas was amazed. He never had thought of himself as capable of poetry. Frost released a gift within his friend, the gift by which Edward Thomas is remembered now. It was free verse, but none the less verse. It had the feel of poetry in its rhythm and imagery.
The quest for magisterial strictures in poetry misses the point. Homer wrote in the tight metrical form of hexameters because he was writing work, in Greek, to be recited, just as Shakespeare wrote for performance. The written text was secondary. Shaw once remarked that all we have of Shakespeare are prompt copies. All we have of Homer is an inscription of a long tradition of aural recitation, with all the variations and improvisation such work entails. So much is now lost. The work was spoken, and only survived if remembered. So, of course, a mechanism for holding the verse in memory was essential.
The question of free verse is an old one. The matter ought to be resolved by now. There ought to be general acceptance. But, as with James Joyce and Picasso, the debate rages as if a century had not passed, as if nothing had been decided. That may not be such a bad thing: better to have debate and dissent than a monolithic orthodoxy. General agreement is another matter; it allows for discussion, for consideration of what needs to be considered. Strict adherence to the rules is a warrant for mediocrity.
There is a lot of good poetry being published, but most poetry submitted is mediocre. Poetry is the one form everyone supposes they can do. It looks easy, like playing the drums looks easy. It is easy to write badly. It is easy to write prose in an affected arrangement of lines. The poetry is not in the structure, but in the nature. Behind the words are unspoken words. The poetry is in the distillation of language to its crystalline essence. The essence of language is metaphor. Poetry is metaphor. A poem is a weaving of metaphors into a pattern. The more interesting patterns bear the signature of the weaver.
In the aftermath of Modernism we cannot write as if a revolution had not occurred, a revolution of extraordinarily creative generosity which we are fortunate to have inherited. We can discard the perverse dynamic that led to fascism. We can ignore the banalities of bourgeois realism. What we have is the freedom to experiment. We have the obligation to re-create the world as a liberating experience. We open the doors every time they close. Our perceptions are open to the relentless challenges of expressive language.
Free verse does not circumvent the need to respond to the challenges it offers. Picasso’s caution that after him would come many charlatans is true for all Modernism. Frost’s much-quoted remark that free verse is ‘playing tennis with the net down’ may be revised as ‘walking the tightrope without a net’. Put like that free verse becomes the supreme challenge of poetry. It is interesting to learn that Frost suggested an alternative word for form in poetry is performance. In contractual law performance is deemed to be the fulfilment of an obligation in a manner that releases the performer from further contractual liabilities. To perform is to find a means toward liberation. Say the appropriate words in the appropriate way and you are free.
Of course free verse is not free of all obligations. It has to adhere to some common understandings of what is meant by poetry. The intensity of language is one mark of contrast between poetry and prose. The potent imagery is another. There are resonances of language that are peculiar to poetry. Technique is only a part of it. Hebrew poetry had no metre. Some Classical Chinese verse used irregular metre. Even the Shakespearian iambic pentameter was adaptable, as John Livingston Lowes demonstrated. Shakespeare did not keep to the strict regulation of metre because it proved contrary to the meaning and power of the language employed.
Not all Modernist poetry was written in free verse, but the breaking of bounds, the adoption of abstract forms and arcane allusions, denote another freedom from the exhausted and archaic conventions of a debased late Romanticism.
‘I have never been able to retain the names of feet or metres, or to pay proper respect to the accepted rules of scansion.’ There may be those even now who are scandalized by the apparent ignorance and stupidity of this confession. It seems to show no feeling at all for form, and no respect for the tradition of which all literature must adhere in some way. So T.S. Eliot was wrong to speak as he did? The context of his confession, The Music of Poetry, shows great concern for form and tradition. It shows also how Eliot learned his craft by intuitions about the poetry he read. He not only read the poetry: he absorbed it. He took it into his sensibility and refined it in the aesthesis of his creative practice. Eliot’s experimental style was not a denial of tradition, where tradition was vigorous, but a response to it. The radical goes to the root of matter. Eliot’s political conservatism, however orthodox he may have declared it to be, cannot evade the aesthetic revolutionary in the pin stripe suit.
The defence Eliot made of Kipling, a defence echoed by George Orwell, may be considered a special case, as Kipling himself was a special case. It is difficult now to engage with Kipling, harder yet to appreciate any qualities he may have displayed. The imperial shadow proves chilling. Kipling’s verse is anything but vers libre. It is neither Modernist nor contemporary. The sentiments are Nineteenth Century in a narrow and discredited way. The technique, however, is interesting. Kipling’s use of music hall styles and language predicts (and perhaps influenced) the infusion of popular culture into poetry. It was the use of ordinary speech, not the language associated with ‘poetic’ style that distinguishes Kipling. Eliot himself was to use ordinary speech (the barmaid’s monologue in The Waste Land, Sweeney Agonistes).
By 1950 Charles Olson was confident in declaring sound in a poem to be more important than sense. He spoke of Modernist poetry as ‘the revolution of the ear.’ The musical phrase had replaced the metronome. Vers libre had begun the task of liberating poetry from the corsetry of correct form. What Olson named projective or open verse was to develop the revolution of 1910: ‘Verse now, 1950, if it is to go ahead, if it is to be of essential use, must, I take it, catch up and put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings.’ Because one perception leads to another perception in a seamless flow of sensation, the poet must discard the strictures of closed form in favour of a transfer of energy to ‘keep it moving as fast you can, citizen.’
What is essential to the technique of open verse is the syllable. ‘It is by their syllables that words juxtapose in beauty, by these particles of sound as clearly as by the sense of the words which they compose.’ Relieved of its strictures, poetry may discover its radical energy in its essential being. It may tend towards the choriambic line. That is natural and intuitive discovery. The consciously inherited line is exhausted, whereas the potential energy in the syllable may be, to the human imagination, infinite. ‘What does not change is the will to change.’
Olson was writing in 1950. The idea of open verse is a manifesto, a testament rather than a dogma. It is open to challenge, but it cannot be ignored. It has not been ignored. It need not be accepted in its entirety, but it has to be taken into account. The alternative is to write as if nothing had happened after 1900 but a riot of confusion. An aesthetic of the genteel and the parochial may produce well-observed and elegant verse, but that is to impose a limitation against which the dynamic of poetry always will be straining to break free.
The Movement poets of the Fifties are a case in point. Thom Gunn’s strict adherence to traditional metre worked against the innovative themes and language of his early work. Sharply-observed poetry of contemporary urgency, like Elvis Presley – ‘He turns revolt into a style.’ – cried out for the liberating dynamic of a form more open to the possibilities contained within the subject matter. Gunn did break free. The alternative prospect was a slow absorption into a world so safe that nothing happens. This world of predictable words in familiar arrangements may be where the fees are high and the public profile is large, but it is not where the poetry is, citizen.
Geoffrey Heptonstall
‘Psst. Have you heard about..?’ Yes, we all like a delicious morsel of gossip, don’t we? It’s harmless. And if anyone is hurt, well, they shouldn’t have done it in the first place.
Gossip is justified sometimes as a safety-valve, a channelling of legitimate resentments that cannot find other means of expression. Hypocrisy and double standards are the detritus of society that otherwise might flow unchecked were there not the unofficial channels of public shame. The influential and powerful tend to play by different rules. Resistance requires a strategy outside the legitimate sphere. What cannot be said openly is either silent or subtle. A whisper among the few in time becomes the printed word acknowledged by many. How else was Nixon brought down?
But a challenge to the powerful is a case of necessary subterfuge. Democracy needs that means of challenge as surely as it needs elections. Hearing the rumours, testing out their authenticity, is one of the tasks of a genuinely free press. It was always possible that the Watergate reporters might have found no link to the Oval Office. It was right that they sought to uncover the truth rather than simply print the legend. The rumours may have been false. Often they are. Gossip is not to be trusted. It is a lie until its veracity is proven beyond doubt.
In a culture where rumour is everywhere who knows what to believe of anyone? When truth is held in contempt, when it is malleable to the requirements of the hour, it is easy for the unscrupulous to deny, and for the denial to be believable. Wicked celebrities slip away while the rumour hunters follow some easier prey. [‘Never mind the evidence, I say he’s guilty.’]
Gossip is a game of Chinese whispers, a field of rich speculation where surmises become true, where possibilities become fact, where even the improbable is accepted as very likely. Gossip is where calumny grows in fecund ground. Malice born of ambition or envy or spite comes into play. Let us sketch a scenario: ‘I personally thought there was nothing in those rumours,’ instils and encourages doubt where none need be. A feigned innocence protests that nothing actually was said. The rumours weren’t detailed. Indeed, they were denied. But their existence was spoken of in a tone that implied some dark corner hidden from light. If there are rumours there may be some truth. Certainly there is doubt. Of that we can be assured. And so a letter of rejection is typed with polite phrases of regret that mask the invidious suggestion and the unfair judgement. ‘It’s probably for the best. You can’t be sure of someone like that.’
A courageous challenge to the powerful cannot be compared with a cowardly blow at the powerless. And that is the point: the target of gossip is powerless. When things are said openly they can be countermanded. That is why in our law courts we have counsel for the defence. There is no defence against whispers. They succeed by not being fair and, perhaps, by not being true. They are in any event unlikely to be the whole truth. Stated openly they may disappear like dust. Malicious gossip is not justice. It is lynch law.
Wild justice was Bacon’s attribution of revenge. There is something vengeful in gossip. It is the revenge of the mediocrity jealously guarding his/her position. It can be an exercise in power for the sake of being powerful, an arrogance of a low, cunning kind. It doesn’t arise in those who are comfortable in their positions. It arises in those who suspect – or know – they are not more deserving than others. It was chance or influence or scheming that brought them to their position of advantage. Legitimacy can be established only when every possible challenge is eliminated. Gossip is dictatorship in an open society.
The justification is by a curious legerdemain in which the challenge to power is regarded as not only evil but in some indefinite way more powerful than the power being challenged. Stalin characterised Trotsky not as a rival revolutionary leader but as a counter-revolutionary in league with the fascists against whom the humble, toiling masses must seek resistance with whatever weapons they could muster.
Of course Stalin was hardly likely to say, ‘Actually the truth is that I’m not nearly as clever as Lev Davidovitch. I envy his cosmopolitan culture, his charm, his intellect, his originality of mind. Lenin was quite right: I do need watching. I’m suspicious of everything because I’m an undeserving, narrow-minded fanatic with a vainglorious streak that adds spice to my cruelty.’ No, he wasn’t going to say that, not even to himself. But every pejorative was an admission of guilt. That is what gossip says: ‘Our enemies are on to us’, whether or not those enemies actually exist.
The need for enemies is a corollary of power. They have their ‘enemy’ in their grasp. They can do as they wish. It is a violation of human integrity against which there is virtually no legal redress. Gossip takes possession not only of the chosen subject but of truth itself. ‘You are what we say you are.’ Witnesses who could come forward in defence are too frightened, too ashamed or too corrupt to do so. It is, as you may have noticed, a wicked world.
That would be a counsel for despair were it not the case that in the end a restorative balance settles the question. In time the undeniable fact makes nonsense of the false supposition or the deliberate lie. That depends on an essential decency prevailing against the temptations of selfishness. If we lose that decency, well, that’s it. The fear is that we may be losing it.
There are those who would argue that revenge is sometimes necessary, and the only available means are whispers. But revenge is both wild and destructive. Its corrosive effect on the human spirit is indiscriminate. Perpetrator and victim are equally defiled by the violent nature of revenge. Malicious gossip is invisible violence. It is torture. It is rape. It is murder. Its instigators are conscious of their odious intentions.
Gossip is tolerated by the powerful because the vicious tongues of minions willingly do the dirty work of the powerful. Gossip is unattributed and is thereby deniable. Throw in the suggestion and let bitterness and spite do the rest. The end justifies the means. The end is to save ‘everything we hold dear.’ But the means define the end. The means throw everything away. Gossip displays contempt for everything. There is no respect for oneself or anyone else. Those who lack respect for themselves are in no position to regard others. The absence of imaginative sympathy is as absolute as the indifference to the consequence of invidious actions.
Tolerating this as an inevitable part of human nature is tantamount to saying it is acceptable. Yes, there always will be rumours and whispers. That is true. However, what we are considering here is not folk-wisdom but willed malevolence. It is almost systemic in its nature. We are a competitive culture, a society that has lost the value of co-operation. We no longer wish to pool our resources as a society. Winning is everything – by fair means or foul. Social attitudes affect personal attitudes. A lack of co-operation ensures an erosion of empathy. Why should we care about anything or anyone? Is a thunderbolt going to strike us down? Well, no, so, as long as it’s not illegal – or if it is, as long as you don’t get caught – do it. Do it and win. You’re a winner. You’re a winner even if you have lost your humanity in the process.
Simon Jenner
A polemical response to contemporary ‘scrounger’ rhetoric in the tabloids with particular focus on a recent article in The Daily Express by Janice Atkinson
The Atkinson Diet
Liberal and even conservative commentators have reminded us of scapegoat culture recently and it’s axiomatic we reflect on it. It remind us of others, indeed ourselves in the mental health sector. It was the late lamented Gore Vidal who commented back in his 1981 Essay ‘Pink Triangle, Yellow Star’ that if you want to see how civilised a society is, see how it treats its women, Jews and gay people. We’d add mentally distressed to that.
Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee is one of many who’ve stated that the gloves are off, that we live after Osborne’s latest budget with the government’s cheerful admission that it’s not about any deficit, that policies are indeed politically not economically driven. So one set of scapegoats – the opposition – is less prominent. The real agenda has begun.
The bizarre Philpott family tragedy, a real life Shameless ensemble of scroungers and an abortive scam leading to the death of six children, must have seemed like several City bonuses arriving at once. As Toynbee stated:
What a gift the Philpott case has been, a bizarre and monstrous distraction to poison the public debate in the week benefits are cut while the richest cash in. In a leader, the Times calls for benefits to be paid for only two children per family… children are what Ann Widdecombe calls benefit “meal tickets”. …
Swift’s savage A Modest Proposal (Irish famine solved by broiling children) should be revisited. What’s never highlighted in such rhetoric lead by the PM is naturally where benefits go: half we’re frequently told by the BBC to OAPs (and the figures tally when we can access them), especially those unproductive types auditioning for euthanasia; and of course landlords, rent-hikers pocketing housing benefits now much council property’s been sold off to people who often lost their homes in the original right-to-buy scams of the late 1980s and after. In addition as Toynbee reflected – after rehearsing the truths about most benefits recipients working, that our dole’s amongst the lowest anywhere and only 10% of it goes on the unemployed – it’s better to focus on stories like Martine White’s:
a thalidomide victim … losing £110 a week and told to attend a work training course… official figures show more than 1,700 disabled people died last year within weeks of being found “fit for work”… The government… rightly sens(ed) that cuts for the frail and party-time for the mega-rich risk shocking even natural conservatives… From now on there will be hundreds of thousands more Martine White stories – while Philpotts are rare.
Anyone concerned with discrimination against mental health is disturbed at the way it’s subsumed into an increasingly negative rhetoric, an assault on all who claim any form of disability allowance being a sub-set of the Scam Society, the ‘parasites’ as some call most of us. These prelude such well-known diatribes against benefit scroungers the PM and Chancellor have gifted our current debate with. The increasing rhetoric of well-primed provocateurs has taken its cue and seems intent on influencing the public further against an imagined horde of scroungers.
It’s striking that even moderate callers on Radio 4’s Any Answers recently pointed out that to be unemployed these days, despite the levels touching most peoples’ lives, was a stigma. Further, two callers added, the public are notably less sympathetic to those unemployed for any length of time, than they were 30 years ago. This gradual re-education away from sympathy to scorn and even ostracisation is as disturbing as it seems systematic. It was given expression by a minor character in Anders Lustgarten’s play at the Royal Court in March 2013: If You Won’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep. Beyond the bracing bellicosity of the title lurked some uncomfortable perceptions. One character who’s finally gained unpleasant government-enforcing business declares that he thought being unemployed would bond him with many others also thrown out of jobs. It didn’t. They now all judge each other. Such successful engineering of social sympathy, even responsibility, is worth returning to.
We can also chart the slide from sympathy by scanning a little of David Cameron:
At a time when we’re having to take such difficult decisions about how to cut back without damaging the things that matter the most, we should strain every sinew to cut error, waste and fraud.
On the one hand we have got to ask, are there some areas of universal benefits that are no longer affordable? But on the other hand let us look at the issue of dependency where we have trapped people in poverty through the extent of welfare that they have.
If you can work and if you’re offered a job and you don’t take it, you cannot continue to claim benefits. It will be extremely tough…. We spend billions of pounds on welfare, yet millions are trapped on welfare. It’s not worth their while going into work…. But we will say something else. That for far too long in this country, people who can work, people who are able to work, and people who choose not to work: you cannot go on claiming welfare like you are now.
The BBC reported in flagship liberal quotations.
Child benefit cuts that will hurt more than one million hard-pressed families are ‘fundamentally fair ’, David Cameron has insisted…
A little earlier it gave rise to similar newspaper comments by Janice Atkinson, for instance:
…benefit vouchers to fund essentials such as food and fuel – not for those who have paid into the system all their lives and need help when they lose their jobs but for those who are drug users or alcoholics, those who have mental illness and those who have previously committed benefit fraud. …Neither should the state fund uncontrolled childbirth. …When the state funds feckless families there is no limit to the children they can have as they are guaranteed funding. Child benefit should be restricted to three children. A larger family is a lifestyle choice. …If you start to withdraw benefits and instead channel the money into schemes that directly benefit the children then that is a first step to weaning them off the taxpayer. …You cannot imagine many deadbeat parents using benefits to buy a book to help their children read before they start school. …Until it is made worthwhile for everyone to work, to contribute and to be decent neighbours there will be more parasites…
The Daily Express, 8 March 2013 by Janice Atkinson
The tone of others slides from this into altogether harder ones.
They ought to please observe the laws of hospitality and not behave as if they were the same as us. Everyone suddenly found someone in the neighborhood who seemed like a harmless fellow citizen, who perhaps complained or criticized a bit more than normal… It always happens that when we take some measure against them, English or American newspapers report it the next day.
The excuse they give for their provocative conduct is always the same: they’re after all human beings too. We never denied that, just as we never denied the humanity of murders, child rapists, thieves and pimps, though we never felt the need to parade down with them! Every one is decent who has found a dumb and ignorant guy who thinks him decent!
They’re gradually having to depend more and more on themselves, and have recently found a new trick. They knew the good-natured in us, always ready to shed sentimental tears for the injustice done to them. One suddenly has the impression that the population consists only of little babies whose childish helplessness might move us, or else fragile old ladies. They send out the pitiable. They may confuse some harmless souls for a while, but not us.
If we have a fateful flaw in our national character, it is forgetfulness. This failing speaks well of our human decency and generosity, but not always for our political wisdom or intelligence.
I’ll come back to this argument and that of the sympathy-engineering outlined earlier. Here’s another discussion on the Minimum Wage, which underpins much of what Scroungers can expect, propelled into a benefit-free zone where the rent is out of reach of anybody on the low wages currently constituted even with a minimum wage. The arguments against that – that it stifled employers from taking on in effect serf labour, that a bare minimum per hour rendered the employer bankrupt and thus unable to employ at a ‘competitive’ rate. Competitive that is, with the pittance paid overseas, since we’ve destroyed most of our indigenous industries (Thatcher who died as I wrote this, brilliantly controlled the means of production and unions by destroying both). The ones we have remaining – mostly service – are easily replaceable. That is, we compete with Chinese labour and to a very large extent that of the Indian subcontinent. The difference is that the costs of living aren’t commensurately higher by comparison. In real terms, the pittance paid aboard is more sustainable to the cost of living than here. Here, we’re unable to support ourselves at this rate even as debt slaves. Here are some arguments against the minimum wage:
If it is high enough to be effective, it increases unemployment, particularly among workers with very low productivity due to inexperience or handicap, thereby harming less skilled workers and possibly excluding some groups from the labour market; additionally it may be less effective and more damaging to businesses than other methods of reducing poverty.
Black, John (September 18, 2003). Oxford Dictionary of Economics. Oxford University Press, USA. p. 300.
Wikipedia’s comments on a fixed minimum wage is that it ‘actually hurts the same low-rung workers it vows to protect. The minimum wage, they say, is an artificial, government-imposed value for an individual worker. The real value of a worker should be decided in the open market.’
Other British writers have taken this further of course. Is it possible that the Minimum Wage will be repealed. The nub of the argument has always been the same of course, particularly with regard to immigrant workers (often used to undercut a local workforce), and the recent arguments for ‘on yer bike’ that social displacement of workers from prime-site areas in London to cheaper housing.
It’s necessary to the success and wealth of Britain. The adoption would mean ruin for Britain, as the whole economy would collapse.
If Britain did not engage then others would. If Britain ceased to trade our commercial rivals would soon fill the gap and the employed would be in a much worse situation.
Taking from their home area actually benefited them. They argued that such societies and cultures were unskilled, uneducated. For example, Michael Renwick Sergant, a merchant banker from Liverpool claimed: ‘We ought to consider whether they’re in a well regulated plant, under the protection of a kind employer, do not enjoy even greater advantages than when under their own despotic governments’. In his publication Mr Edwards also uses this argument. ‘They’re unfit for other work’.
Familiar arguments of course. Well you might have guessed when Michael Renwick Sergant was writing, in that last paragraph, and around the time of the second paragraph – from 1749, when a pamphlet was written outlining these arguments: Pro-slavery ones. The first para was an argument used in a speech to parliament in 1777. I’m indebted to The History of the British West Indies (published 1819), and The Abolition Project for such enlightened summaries, though they’re not responsible for my juxtaposition. I merely removed the words ‘slaves’ and ‘slave trade’, replaced ‘master’ with ‘employer’. Shaved ‘plantation’ to ‘plant’ and added ‘banker’ to ‘merchant’. Naturally as we know, the trade’s returned with slave-trafficking of children and young women, the latter often for the delectation of rich city men who’ve been known to comment sourly online on ‘poor’ performances with ‘surly girls’ – and with unforeseen and unconsidered repercussions on those women. Not notably different to the reaction of wealthy city-made slave-owners in the 18th century.
And after that you might guess the paragraphs about benefit frauds after Atkinson were in fact from Joseph Goebbels, a Berlin rally in June 1935 and his estimable summary of his position The Jews are Guilty, 1941. I merely had to remove ‘Jews’ from the argument.
This doesn’t mean anything so simple as Cameron or Atkinson being either currently anti-Abolitionist or indeed anti-Semitic. It’s more disturbing in part because given the societal structure I’ve little doubt Cameron and other right thinkers would be anti-abolitionists now: such right-thinking has to react generation by generation, at a glacial pace, in the face of interfering do-gooders and liberal upstarts like Wilberforce and Fry, for instance (I credit William Hague with a greater sense of history and the sense to avoid the rhetoric and government position that might bring him too close to views that might oppose his admired Wilberforce).
This lies at the disturbed heart of the sympathy-engineering I alluded to earlier, and if it’s not on the heinous scale and pace of Goebbels’ persuasion of most of the ‘civilised’ German populus – or indeed the ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ championed in Milosevic’s Serbia only 15-20 years ago – then Atkinson’s rhetoric, unthinkable 30 years ago, holds uncomfortable sway with many today, in and out of tabloid readership. That’s where such anti-humane rhetoric is forged and sometimes won. It’s done for many vulnerable people on benefits for whatever reason, what the tabloids, BNP, and even Westminster has done for the ‘I’m not a racist but’ position.
That’s one particular political world view. But there is a further consequence. That scapegoating ‘scroungers’ and the mentally ill as Atkinson stigmatises them, covers very large swathes of the population including the elderly or infirm that – Goebbels reminds us – renders us a little soft. So then we indulge in the ‘other’ that has been identified by several commentators: the ‘scrounger’ or ‘parasite’ or spuriously ‘mentally ill’. S/he is ‘other’ a convenient hate figure to rally a party-view and indeed world-view against; party psychology needs its Jews and its scroungers. It touches evil.
George Orwell abolishes the simple left/right rhetoric prophetic of a time when they would indeed be abolished and of the disappearance of paternalist Toryism (Edward Heath being the last representative, as well as the first to flirt with monetarism). Orwell, writing on Kipling in 1941, commented almost incidentally:
Although he had no direct connexion with any political party, Kipling was a Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays. Those who now call themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists.
Orwell’s words have never resonated so closely with those of us looking over our shoulder at those accomplices in Westminster.
David Kessel
Schizophrenic Salvation Network
‘Can’t you see buried within all that wreckage he’s craving for freedom’ Malcolm Lowry
Our disability could be a diabetes of the mind, caused by traumatic disbelief?
Solidarity Very often invalidated and demonised, and often bound together. Could become the modern Jews?
Over half of us, discharged from old asylums, died within a year of dislocation, neglect, cold! The Inadequate, friendly simple schizophrenic, the devastated, emotional hebephrenic, the intense, wordy paranoid schizophrenic… we are not told about them!
Also, probably, ‘guinea-pigs’ for secret state experimentation – psychotropics, mind-policing, and short-wave radiation, etc. (no one believes anything we say).
Fellowship Must associate to counter loneliness and stigmatisation.
Local Groups needed for fellowship, mutual therapy, political initiatives.
‘Full-Shilling Club’ hope to have regular central London meetings.
Prakash Kona
“They Shriek in Finely Turned Sentences”:
The Poet as Subverter in the 21st Century Avant-Garde
A Paper by Prakash Kona
Rejection is the shaping force of society. – Pier Paolo Pasolini
Abstract
The corporatization of the publishing world has lead to a canon formation from the traditional author-based kind to one that manufactures taste to suit a consumerist audience. Poetry as an art form that counters the violence of bureaucratic governments and MNCs has suffered a serious decline for no reason except that it has the potential for social transformation. The general decline of humanities and social sciences with the exception of economics – which has a strong institutional bias – reflects the overall control mechanisms at play in the production of certain knowledges termed as useful while excluding others. This is the context where one needs to place the avant-garde poet.
The avant-garde poet is as much a fiction writer as she could be a pamphleteer, a graffiti activist, a drug-induced mystic or simply anyone overwhelmed by a sense of nothingness. My paper recognizes in avant-garde poetry the defiant and consciously stylized nature of writing as opposed to the inspired and dreamy kind of creativity while it shows how such a stylization can lend itself to conformism of another kind.
The avant-garde poet walks the thin line that separates political conformism from creative rebellion. To challenge conventional forms of writing is not merely to reject mainstream notions of the fall of the poem as opposed to the rise of a fiction-based readership but to work proactively to dismantle institutionalized forms of discrimination and serve as a voice to the marginalized that Fanon metaphorically refers to as “the wretched of the earth.”
My paper examines what it means to be an avant-garde poet in the global context.
Keywords: Gramsci, Avant-Garde, Poet, Realism, Resistance
To Destroy is to Create
At the very beginning of his 1913 article titled ‘The Futurists’, Gramsci says:
The Italian intellectual hen-house is all of a flutter. It is no longer enough to cry shame. People thrust their hands in their hair: there’s no more religion! They shriek in finely turned sentences: the world is going to wrack and ruin! The second millennium that will mark the end of this putrid humanity is approaching! (Gramsci, 1999, 89).
This prophetic rant that Gramsci begins with sounds in fact like the futurists themselves who make a virtue out of shrieking in “finely turned sentences.” It’s not the apocalyptic tone that Yeats adopted in 1919 when he wrote ‘The Second Coming’ in a profoundly pessimistic tone that ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity’ (Yeats). Gramsci is both parodying the apocalyptic tone and using polemics to deride the futurists.
Gramsci relies on the poetic and the metaphorical to make his point –a writing strategy not different from the futurists. Gramsci observes in Prison Notebooks that, ‘The superstructures of civil society are like the trench-systems of modern warfare’ (235). There is an inclination to use military-related metaphors to explain the operations of both state and civil society. The metaphor grounds the reader in the reality of these institutions rather than be lost in Hegelian abstractions that are euphemisms disguising reality rather than metaphors interpreting the truth. In the 1921 article ‘Marinetti the Revolutionary’, Gramsci sees in the futurists a revolutionary potential to provide an alternative in the domain of culture to the present bourgeois version. ‘They have destroyed, destroyed, destroyed, without worrying if the new creations produced by their activity were on the whole superior to those destroyed’ (Gramsci, 1999, 96).
He goes on to call the futurists ‘revolutionaries’ and that in supporting the futurists ‘the workers’ groups showed that they were not afraid of destruction, certain as they were of being able to create poetry, paintings and plays, like the Futurists; these workers were supporting historicity, the possibility of a proletarian culture created by the workers themselves’ (Gramsci, 1999, 97). And yet only a year later a slightly wizened Gramsci writes to Trotsky a bitter letter about the futurists in the resentful tone of a son complaining to his father: ‘The Italian Futurist movement completely lost its character after the war. Marinetti is not particularly active in it. He has got married and prefers to devote his energies to his wife’ (Gramsci, 1999, 98). The promise of ‘destruction’ of the old cultural order that defined the futurist manifesto was never achieved. Gramsci’s complaint is a familiar one: Marinetti the ‘revolutionary’ these days devotes his energies to his wife. ‘Destruction’ of an unjust order is the tone of both Gramsci and the futurists. While Gramsci substantiates his point-of-view through intensive analysis – for instance, what he says of Marx in ‘Our Marx’ is as true of Gramsci himself: ‘He is an example of intense and tenacious work to attain the clear honesty of ideas, the solid culture necessary in order not to talk in a void, about abstractions’ (Forgacs, 2000, 39) – the revolution of the futurists is an unleashing of rhetoric without achieving a similar transformation in the life-worlds of masses.
The ‘futurist’ tone can best be seen in Marinetti in the 1909 The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism: ‘Poetry must be conceived as a violent assault launched against unknown forces to reduce them to submission under man’ (Rainey, 2009, 51). A few lines later he adds: ‘We intend to glorify war—the only hygiene of the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and contempt for woman’ (Rainey, 2009, 51). The framework of Marinetti’s tone of rejection is not something that the futurists thought of for the first time. How in fact different is what Marinetti says from the 19th century Russian nihilist Sergey Nechayev’s Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869) that opens with the lines:
The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion – the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose – to destroy it. (Nechayev)
In Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862) we catch a glimpse of a definition of what Nechayev (a distorted Bazarov figure) stands for: ‘A nihilist is a person who does not bow down to any authority, who does not accept any principle on faith, however much that principle may be revered’ (Turgenev).
The elements that constitute the discourse of avant-garde poetry can be discovered in the sense of nothingness that consumed the 19th century revolutionary consciousness along with the attitudes of individual revolutionaries. In embracing the ‘nihil,’ every kind of authority is rejected and faith relegated to being a steward before reason its radical master. To imagine the avant-garde poet without a revolution is futile. To imagine a revolution in the global discourse whose defining trait is consumerism is a fallacy. Unfortunately in the attempt to reconcile futility with fallacy by being ahistorical and apolitical, the avant-garde writer of the 21st century is striving for the same objectivity that in the first place instigated the challenge to produce an alternate way of looking at the world. Christopher Innees in Avant Garde Theatre: Themes and Definitions, points out that: ‘Borrowed from military terminology by Bakunin, who titled the short-lived anarchist journal he published in Switzerland in 1878 L’AvantGarde, the label was first applied to art by his followers. Their aim in revolutionizing aesthetics was to prefigure social revolution; and avant-garde art is still characterized by a radical political posture’ (Goodman, 2000, 70).
At the heart of the avant-garde is a ‘radical political posture’. This is the gesture made by the small publisher and the equally small poet alike. Unless the gesture of defiance is made it won’t enter the discourse of the avant-garde. The avant-garde poet is the bard of the resistance challenging genre-based writing or the so-called opposition of theory to practice, not in the sense of Marinetti – which is more of destroy for destroy’s sake – but more in the sense of Gramsci – which is to destroy that you may create: ‘In this field, ‘to destroy’ does not mean the same as in the economic field. It does not mean to deprive humanity of the material products that it needs to subsist and to develop. It means to destroy spiritual hierarchies, prejudices, idols and ossified traditions’ (Gramsci, 1991, 96). Through his creative re-reading of Marxism and his insights into the politics of fascism that uses culture as an instrument of politics in many ways Gramsci is much more avant-garde or literally futuristic than Marinetti.
After the failure of the experience with a futurist political party in 1920, futurist politics, as captained by Marinetti, swiftly renounced the libertarian motifs of its ideology and the utopia of futurist democracy. With the advent of fascism to power, Marinetti and the futurists returned to fascism with a de facto acceptance of its politics as the ‘minimal program’ of the futurist revolution. (Gentile, 2003, 64)
Within the creative function of destruction one finds the seeds of avant-garde poetry that takes the form of experimental writing beginning with the second half of the 20th century and diving straight into the intellectual whirlpool of the 21st century. While they ‘shriek in finely turned sentences’ the point of the shrieking is to recreate an alternate vision to the existing order and not merely play with words without changing the reality constituted in language.
To Reject is To Be
The turning of the sentence is not for poetic effect. Rather it is about poetic affect. While the effect is an end in itself the affect is a series of disjointed ideas that produce an impact on the reader similar to that of the Eisensteinean montage. While wholeness is what the montage aspires toward, the avant-garde poet leaves the fragments in the open giving the reader a chance to configure meaning on her own or look for none. The affect brilliantly comes out as a ‘political gesture’ because it forces the reader to confront reality not as the truth but as a possibility of arriving at the truth. The whole point of the shrieking in ‘finely turned sentences’ is to make sure that the reader is without respite. Says Gandhi in Attenborough’s movie version: “The function of a civil resistance is to provoke response and we will continue to provoke until they respond or change the law” (Attenborough). The avant-garde poet is a civil resister and does with language what the activist does through deeds. She provokes the passive bourgeois reader to view reality from the point of view of resistance rather than power. The basis of the provocation is the rejection of an existing order to make way for an alternative one.
Unlike the celebration of destruction in Marinetti’s manifesto, the politics of rejection touches the core of one’s being. The 1971 volume of Pasolini’s poems is titled ‘To transfigure and to organize’ (Pasolini, 1996, 207). To transfigure is to invent a metaphor that will encompass the revolutionary aspirations of the masses. Metaphors that do not evolve from a struggle to organize the daily life activities of men and women in relation to their personal space are meaningless. The political can only be the personal. The personal is the barometer of social and political change. It cannot happen externally. It cannot not happen internally. The without and within do not complement one another. As a matter of fact they occupy one and the same being. Gramsci makes the point that, ‘In reality it is not possible to separate living from philosophizing’ (Gramsci, 1992, 363). In embracing a politics that does not separate living from ‘philosophizing’ or any other creative activity, rejection shapes the order of things. Rejection is not just about saying “no” to the unethical and the unjust but a way of life in itself. The avant-garde poet plays the role of an educator as much she is as a poet.
In the avant-garde discourse, poetry cannot be separated from political education. The best instance I can think of is the British poet Alan Morrison whose anthology Emergency Verse – Poetry in Defence of the Welfare State is not just a collection of poems from an extraordinarily diverse group of poets but an argument for a just society. ‘I just seem to instinctively itch to use my poetry for social and political subjects in the main’ says Morrison in an interview to the webzine Sociological Imagination. When Pasolini declares, ‘my only hero is Reality’, (Hanshe) he is speaking of the instinctive ‘itch’ to reach out to ‘social and political subjects’ rather than loiter in the corridors of metaphysics.
The irony of being an avant-garde poet is that you cannot be radical in language without a conception of reality attached to it. While the small press in all fairness opens the doors to big ideas and in that sense is the real harbinger of change, it is mandatory that avant-garde writers bear the reality in mind that’ll reflect in the language of a history that cannot find space in text-books approved by the corporate state. Avant-garde poetry is a 20th century invention; it is political and it is revolutionary; if it is neither of them it cannot make claims to be avant-garde. A language cannot enter the narcissistic domain of celebrating itself as language; it can only celebrate that which is not itself. The self is an object of performance that can be located neither in the ‘I’ nor the ‘You.’ It is translated, transformed, transfigured and transmogrified.
The ‘real’ self being the performing self, the avant-garde poet is a radical performer. It cannot be otherwise. To bring the future into the present, to introduce the present to the future, to recreate the present as the future, to imagine the future as a possibility in the present, to rewrite history as point-of-view, to explore within point-of-view a history of archives or an archival history – the histories that history has concealed all along, the history of remembering what you’re certain is forgotten, to comprehend ‘history’ as a word in language, to comprehend the language of history or the history of a language – that’s where performance and radical politics meet.
What is the political in politics? And, what is the politics of the avant-garde? The phrase ‘in the nature of things’ is an empty, meaningless one. There’s nothing natural about ‘nature’ nor is culture which gives us a definition of both nature and the natural ever apolitical. Politics is about the power to define; it’s not innate but connected to what individuals and groups believe or are persuaded to believe in terms of their own rhetoric. What kind of a language describes the reality is as important as the reality; it’s not the reality but, without it reality would exist in a vacuum.
Avant-garde’s sworn enemy is the discourse of realism. Realism attempts to mirror reality in the language of the so-called reality. The avant-garde literary artist shatters any complacent notion of either such a reality or a language that makes claims to it. In mirroring reality, realism justifies the politics of an unequal society. Realism is a discourse of power that thrives in the big publisher’s market. Marx famously said that he made Hegel stand on his feet. What the avant-garde poet does is to free reality from the clutches of realism and in the act of subverting institutionalized meaning forces reality to stand on its feet.
A manifesto must be rewritten for the ‘small’ publishers who, in fact, are the intellectuals that create the taste of mass audiences that the ‘big’ publishers cleverly exploit to their advantage. The above statement is a generalization that needs to be contested on a larger terrain: which it is not possible to do so because the forces are not equally placed. The financial constraints and the audience reach of small publishing houses do not stand comparison with the big ones. But the contact with the creative ‘masses’ is more so with the small publisher given the interactivity between the publishers, the writers and the readers. The politics of the avant-garde writer is the politics of the ‘small’. It’s the ‘David’ complex of fighting the Goliath of money and power as embodied in a corporatized state and reinforced through the “big” publisher that controls and manipulates the taste of the readership. With the small publisher the readership can only be an active one; that’s where avant-garde politics manifests itself because it is constantly at war with words that make claims to reality.
Being Avant-Garde
Peter Eckersall in the article ‘From Liminality to Ideology: The Politics of Embodiment in Prewar Avant-Garde Theater in Japan’ notes that: ‘The aim of the avant-garde is nothing less than to bring about a revolution of everyday life by aesthetic means—to transform the modern world’ (Harding, 2006, 225). In the global discourse the postmodern parody element meant to deconstruct attempts to arrive at absolute truth has the negative consequence of preventing a serious critique of power. Globalization has created a calculated desperation for heroes and heroism, either to become one or to find one that you uncritically dedicate yourself to; the vacuousness of overconsumption does not come without a price. Polemics is the answer to that kind of vacuousness; Pasolini’s 1975 film Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom responds to the ideology of consumption which is the guiding force of the bourgeoisie – you not only literally eat ‘shit’ but you also prostitute your children and you’ve no problems enslaving and abusing them mentally before you do it physically. Polemics does not reject point-of-view; it problematizes it. It shows that points of view are neither innocent nor meant to be so. It shows that innocence is a false ideal of a decadent bourgeoisie invented by their organic intellectuals to make exploitation seem human and at all times unintended. What the polemicist does is ‘to direct one’s attention violently towards the present as it is, if one wishes to transform it’ (Gramsci, 1992, 175).
The avant-garde poet of the 21st century is neither the nihilist we see in the character of Nechayev or Bazarov nor the misogynist Marinetti glorifying war and militarism. Years after his essay on the futurists says Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks not without a sense of the future that, ‘What “ought to be” is therefore concrete; indeed it is the only realistic and historicist interpretation of reality, it alone is history in the making and philosophy in the making, it alone is politics’ (Gramsci, 1992, 172). The politics of the avant-garde poet is the politics of what “ought to be;” while the politics of the big publishing houses is the politics of “what is” that rejects the notion of reality as a changing entity and reduces it to stasis.
To rephrase Gramsci’s comment on the futurists in a 21st century context, the global ‘intellectual hen-house is all of a flutter’ especially with social networking occupying much of intellectual space in the lives of the youth across the world. Digital technologies carry within them the unfortunate tendency to distance poetry from human concerns such as war, floods and famines – more so when the agents of environmental and social destruction can be clearly identified in the global corporate agenda. The avant-garde poet throws down the gauntlet to the forces of reaction restoring poetry to its original function of being a critical voice of the masses: embrace the irreverence to forms that characterizes the “ought to be” in the face of “what is,” celebrate the power of labor to invent itself anew through a poetry of perpetual resistance, confront the rhetoric of nationalism whose political expression is fascism, reject that which comes in the way of social change and shape the order of things enabling the weak and the disempowered to have a chance to fight back.
References
Gandhi. (1982). Dir. Richard Attenborough. Perf. Ben Kingsley. Columbia Pictures, Film.
Gentile, Emilio. (2003). The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism. Connecticut and London: Praeger.
Goodman, Lizbeth and Jane de Gay. eds. (2000). The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance. London and New York: Routledge, Print.
Gramsci, Antonio. (1999). Cultural Notebooks. William Boelhower (trans.). London: Elecbook. Print.—. Prison Notebooks. (1992). New York: International Publishers. Print.
Hanshe, Rainer J. (April 2008) ‘Interview with Roberto Chiesi on Pier Paolo Pasolini’.
Hyperion, Volume III, Issue 2. Web. 5 August. 2011. Online.
Nechayev, Sergey. Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869). Anarchism Archive. n.d. Web. 22 August. 2011. Online.
Rainey, Lawrence, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman. eds. (2009). Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Print.
Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. (1975). Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini. United Artists Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Film.
The Sociological Imagination. (23 August 2010). ‘Interview with Alan Morrison’. Web. 22 August. 2011. Online.
Turgenev, Ivan, Fathers and Sons. n.d. Web. 22 August. 2011. Online.
Prakash Kona
A Modest and “Swift” Proposal For India’s Poverty and Backwardness
Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public is one that needs to be considered by all present and future governments and policy makers in this country. In fact, there is nothing modest about the proposal. Given its realistic bent it is the only pragmatic and functional response to the rising prices of food and fuel that are killing the poor anyway.
The Nazis killed the Jews by sending them to the gas chambers and concentration camps. The British starved the Indians through deprivation caused by man-made famines. Either way a human being is murdered. I see no difference between what the Nazis did to the Jews and what the British did to poor Indians living in the villages. The genius of the Indian government takes the wisdom of both the Nazis and the British. It starves the poor when it must and kills them when it thinks they’re turning into a threat. Since we’re arriving at some kind of a dead-end I think Swift’s solution will prove a relief to both the rich and the poor alike.
The poor should start selling their babies as food for the rich – that’s in summary the proposal Swift makes in order to make it “beneficial to the public.” It’s a brilliant proposal, entirely original and state-of-the-art. Swift thought this proposal was relevant to Ireland in the 18th century. He would be surprised if he lived in 21st century globalizing India, the second most populated nation on earth, leader in Information Technology and too many other things to enumerate.
We’re convinced of a couple of things. Poverty cannot be removed and the class divide is there to stay for good. The prone-to-sulking middle-classes are reconciled to this situation. The rich couldn’t be happier because there’s a perennial supply of cheap labor that suits them only too well. It’s the poor who’re our real problem. They can be a thorn in the flesh. Swift’s proposal is a lasting solution for them.
Give your babies to the rich and the powerful, to the owners of corporations and the actors and the politicians and the sports people. Let them eat the babies of the poor. The middle classes can have the leftovers since they’ve a history in this regard. There are enough babies in this country to keep the rich fat, thriving and happy for a few generations. We don’t have to worry about population growth. The bare survival of the poor is assured because they get paid for all the babies that go into the well-lighted, warm kitchens of the rich.
On a more serious note this is the only workable solution in India. We can have a quota system here. As far as baby meat is concerned reservations are limited to the upper classes since the lower classes are bound to the role of suppliers. It would be unfair to deprive our diaspora brethren of a fair share in the baby meat that the rich are enjoying. An American passport holding Indian gets the lion’s share followed by a green card holder. A permanent resident in any other western country comes next in line. Non-resident Indians from other parts of the world will be provided a different quota of baby meat to avoid confusion. This is what the Ministry for Resource Sharing decided after a lengthy debate. We absolutely need this hierarchy to avoid a scramble for poor Indian baby meat in the local markets.
This proposal can ease the pressures of globalization on the third world. Once guaranteed of meat especially from the flesh of babies with parents who cannot make ends meet, Indians need not worry about the rising dollar or the repercussions of the nuclear deal etc. Baby meat from the poor is our new source of wealth. We don’t have to worry about rising oil prices and food prices. In fact other third world countries need to come to India to learn our success story in baby meat. All babies are not the same. There are classes and groups within the baby species and Indians can lead the world in educating what is the best way to do things. We can have a degree in Baby Meat Engineering and scholars and researchers from all over the world can partake in seminars and workshops to establish a university dedicated to eating poor babies. We can have baby meat think-tanks and watchdogs to combat dissenters at an ideological level since success of this kind is bound to create enemies.
What is oil to the Middle-East are babies of the poor to us. Both are sources of wealth. We can have a picture of a slaughtered baby on the national flag. The nations of the west will have something to envy with our astonishing success in the area of baby meat production. Although the original idea belongs to Swift we can patent it because we’re the first to implement it successfully.
A whole new menu will come into existence. The Indian baby meat curry and the Indian baby meat pizza are specialties. There are other varieties too. Babies whose parents were “accidentally” shot by the army and police. Spiced tribal baby meat from Maoist-dominated areas. Special thoroughly exploited baby meat from the famine-stricken regions of Vidarbha and Telangana. Extra spiced South Indian poor baby meat. Deep fried baby meat from murdered girl-children in the liberal, feminist, matriarchal states of Punjab, Haryana, UP and Bihar with lots of empowered women who choose their ways of life for themselves and never heard of the word ‘male-domination.’ Baby meat cooked vegetable style with lentils and greens and so on.
We’ve four hundred million people living below the poverty line. The job of the government and the politicians and the corporations is to make sure that more and more people stay below the line in order to ensure that we’ve a regular supply of baby meat. That’s what they’re doing anyway. But this is just an urgent reminder. There is no question of crime any longer because we’re finishing off crime when it’s still a baby. No need to worry about the rise of extremism or radical left and most importantly no need to worry about the third world debt problem. We can supply babies to IMF and World Bank on an annual basis. With their history of draining the third world they would be glad to accept this proposal. The rich can sleep in peace with doors and windows open now that we’ve arrived at a fair and globally accepted system of doing things.
We don’t have to see starving babies on the streets in the arms of pitifully thin mothers and suffering fathers. That terrible sight will come to an end. We don’t have to worry about the plight of landless labourers and poor farmers committing suicides. Now all they’ve to do is to give their babies to the blood-sucking money-lenders and the private banks who would love nothing better. The governments can relax and the politicians can go on a holiday. Our businessmen from the corporate world are the only people who will be busy because they’ve to keep the slaughterhouses running round-the-clock. I agree that they’re used to it but it’s no easy job given the fact that butchers are in short supply these days and mechanized slaughter apparently takes away the taste of baby meat and turns it bland. Our bureaucrats will be busy as well but these days I hear that they love the work they do.
For a change I can see a smile on the haggard and broken faces of the poor beaten by life and circumstances. I can feel their hearts dancing and souls ecstatic. The media can rejoice too. The flash of “breaking news” will not stop. Journalists are busy and reporters are occupied. This time it’s real news. India’s progress in the baby industry fuels headlines all over the world. Finally, after sixty two years of independence we’ve something to be proud of.
Prakash Kona
The Ten Commandments from an Indian god without a sense of irony
And the Indian god who was more Indian than a god spake all these words to the peoples of his nation, saying:
1) I am GREED FOR POWER AND MONEY the LORD thy God, which hath put you in bondage for hundreds of years and will continue to do so. Thou shalt have no other gods like KINDNESS and COMPASSION before me. Thou shalt not dare treat anyone as thy EQUAL for it is written that thou must CRUSH the bodies and souls of the lowly especially if they happen to be your country folk.
2) I MONEY, the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
3) Thou shalt not spend thy MONEY in vain to reduce human suffering in any form for I will not hold him guiltless that doeth that.
4) Remember the day thou hath become a SELF-CENTERED, CORRUPT and RELENTLESS EXPLOITER, to keep it holy.
5) Honor thy MONEY and thy POWER to RIP others of what is rightfully theirs that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.
6) Thou shalt not hesitate to MURDER wherever and whenever the occasion demands. Thou shalt also gossip, slander, suppress and injure others for otherwise thy life hath no meaning in
this land of milk, honey and downright crooks, loved and revered by gods and men alike.
7) Thou shalt commit treachery whenever thou hath the opportunity since nothing is greater proof of thy INDIANNESS than betray those in need of thy succor.
8) Thou shalt LOOT as much as thou canst as long as thou hath the good sense not to get caught.
9) Thou shalt bear false witness against thy neighbor for thou hath to disclose to the Lord, thy God that there is no neighbor like thee.
10) Thou shalt gladly COVET thy neighbor’s house and his wife and his manservant and his wife too, and his maidservant and her mother, and his ox, and his ASS and everything that is thy neighbor’s especially if that one happens to be poor and without means to challenge thee. Otherwise thou hath no moral right to exist in this country or any country on earth.
Prakash Kona
I am not an intellectual because I choose not to be one. I despise the word ‘intellectual” because it sounds pretentious and that’s what it is. It carries the sense of someone who is good at his work, likes to be seated in a position of comfort, thinks logically and is filled with good advice for others. I cannot think logically. I don’t want to and I don’t care to. Logic is not my cup of tea. It was never meant to be.
All artists are critical of the times they live in. They tell the truth as they see it because that’s why they’re here in the first place. I did not invent myself. I was invented by those who wanted to hear what I say and by friends with a sense of humor. My capacity for language-learning is pretty limited but I understand the languages of protest no matter how subtle or not so subtle they are.
Quintessentially Japanese even more so than Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi is to modern cinema what Euripides is to Greek tragedy. Extraordinarily beautiful and with the faces of angels are the women in the movies of Mizoguchi. But the holy anger of Christ when he throws the moneychangers out of the temple hides in the hearts of those women protesting against what men have done to them. I understand why that happens as much as Mizoguchi himself if not the protesting women.
According to Freud, if Dostoevsky was not the great artist that he was he would have been a great criminal. All artists are in some sense endowed with the potential to be criminals. If art is a form of sickness then artists are compulsive-obsessive people and therefore sick too. I owe my sickness to writing. It’s a sickness of the heart and mind that every performer is cursed with. I’m sure I would be alive and happy without it. The sickness however defines me in a way that I would not have been able to define myself.
The communism I subscribe to is that of spirit more than anything else. It’s the communism of the mother-goddess in the Neolithic era of Anatolia, the Gnostics and of the authors of the Upanishads. It’s the communism of Jesus and Saint Francis. It’s the communism of the Buddha and Rumi and Saint Joan. It’s the communism of the tribes before patriarchy made an entrance. It’s the communism of Emma Goldman, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and John Lennon. It’s the communism of children at play. It’s the communism of the poorest of the poor and the downtrodden, of those who live in the villages, those who fight for alternate ways of looking at the world, those who never stop resisting and those who seem to disappear but are not extinct because they’re alive at the margins.
It’s the people’s government of the Paris Commune in the spring of 1871, the anarchist utopia in the middle of the Spanish Civil War and the communism of Spinoza, Tolstoy, Rosa Luxemburg and Antonio Gramsci. It’s the communism that Blake and Shelley imagined and we catch a glimpse of it in Pasolini as well. It’s the communism of mothers and daughters, of animals and trees and earth and sky and the stars.
You cannot have a classless society which has no place for the sacred. The point is to confront a disease of the spirit called greed. The point is not merely to impose an order based on economic equality from the outside. Such an order is bound to break down sooner or later. People have to believe that greed is unnecessary and money is not an alternative. In the absence of such a belief we end up replacing one set of injustices with another.
Anarchism is the birth-right of every new-born child immaterial of where she takes birth on this planet. That’s my right as well and yours. The idea of libertarian communism is in nature itself. To go against it is to go against nature. It is only natural that I made protest a way of life. There is no other way for me to be who I am.
John McKeown
Unless its a case of not being able to see the waiter or the barman for a dense blanket of smoke, smoking in pubs and cafes doesn’t really bother me*. I was a smoker once myself and still have a lingering affection for the untipped coffin-nails. What really gets my goat, and what I think really should be banned in public places, and that immediately, is LOUD MUSIC.
Why is it that virtually everywhere you go you’re aurally assaulted by the asinine gibberings of some radio DJ, or mindless techno-music loud enough to wake the dead and all their relatives? I can understand a little soothing background music – but the galling thing is you are not given the choice.
What I’d really like to hear when I walk into a restaurant or cafe is not ‘smoking or non-smoking?’ but ‘ear-drum crushing din or non-ear-drum crushing din sir?’ The waiter or waitress might be as nice as pie, but just try and ask them to turn the music down a little and their faces turn into frozen pudding. ‘Well… I’ll see what I can do sir’, and seemingly all they can stretch to is a token fractional turn of the volume knob because the din hardly alters a decibel.
Of course some places are worse than others, and some of the chain cafes are the worst offenders. I was sitting in one of my locals last week quietly enjoying a morning read of the paper, marvelling at the unusual peace and tranquillity when, sure enough, the manager appears and pumps up the volume. There were just two or three of us sitting there having a coffee and a snack, and suddenly we’re in Discoland. Suddenly were expected to cast away our broadsheets, leap onto the tables Travolta style and break into a searing rendition of ‘Greased Lightning’.
What is going on? Could it be that they’re trying to turn our brains to mush so we’ll forget just how many hard-earned euros we’re forking out for a coffee and a pastry? Or is it that at Business School the managers of these places had the mantra: No Noise No Profit drummed into their heads? The idea being that if you create a ‘lively’ enough atmosphere you’ll attract more customers. This might work in the immediate short term, but it’d be interesting to watch the average chain cafe and count how many people sit around for more than twenty minutes having one more coffee or one more slice of carrot cake for the road.
It isn’t just cafes, its everywhere. I was having my hair cut in a salon the other day and the music was so loud I was afraid the hairdresser would pick up the beat with the scissors and I’d wind up with an eyeball hanging out or one of my ears in a dustpan. What can we do? We simply have to be more assertive and insist as firmly and politely as possible that we can’t conduct a conversation with our aged aunt while the soundtrack of The Rocky Horror Picture Show is making her teeth rattle. Whatever happened to that old retail commandment: The Customer Is Always Right? The Customer IS always right, even when he’s deaf.
*Written before the smoking ban in the UK and Ireland.
Alan Morrison
A Scowling Class Apart: A sketch of James Keir Hardie
‘Keir Hardie has been the greatest human being of our time. When the dust raised by opposition to the pioneer has settled down, this will be known by all’
(The Women’s Dreadnought (1915))
The (ex)* premier leader of Labour is an ex-barrister, son of a barrister, educated at Edinburgh College and St. John’s College Oxford. Keir Hardie, leader of the original parliamentary party which adopted the name Labour 100 years ago this month (12th February 1906), was an ex-miner, illegitimate son of a single mother, and self-educated at a Lanarkshire coal face.
Considering the two greatest achievements of the Labour Party were masterminded by ex-coal miners – its Parliamentary formation by Keir Hardie, and the NHS by Aneurin Bevan – one begins to think the party has been truer to its cause when in the hands of those from the class it traditionally purports to represent. Further, taking into account the ‘modernisation’ of policies under the Oxford-educated, Clause IV-sceptics Hugh Gaitskill and Tony Blair, a detectable pattern emerges: social background influences the degree of radicalism or moderatism in Labour policies.
Blair has stretched Gaitskillian ‘moderatism’ to new extremes. With the power allowed him by the massive majority with which he swept into office, he has inexplicably squandered a golden opportunity to reverse Thatcherism. Instead he has embraced it, championing the virus of privatisation and further paralysing the public sector. New welfare benefit concessions are paltry alms in the widening shadow of the British class divide. Again, there is no significant party in Parliament representing the interests of the working classes. A similar state of affairs to those which the Labour Party first came into Parliament to change over 100 years ago, under the leadership of the spirited Keir Hardie.
James Keir was born on August 15, 1856, illegitimate son of Mary Keir, a servant from a pit village in Lanarkshire. She married ship’s carpenter David Hardie, gifting her son a legitimate surname. David Hardie was an outspoken atheist whose humanism ironically took inspiration from selected social teachings of Christ – later inspiring his stepson’s Christian Socialism.
At eight years old Hardie started work as a baker’s delivery boy, but his wage of 3s. 6d. a week made scant difference to the penury induced by his stepfather’s unemployment and mother’s second pregnancy. In 1886 Hardie was sacked from his second job as a rivet-heater due to coming in to work late after being up all night nursing his dying younger brother (a scenario almost straight out of Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists). His next occupation was as grittily poetic a motif for his subsequent political rise as for his ideological inheritor, Aneurin Bevan: ‘No one should ever look at Keir Hardie without remembering the pit from which he was digged. He was sent down the coal mine when a bit laddie of eight’*. It was while working down the pits that Hardie taught himself to read and write; an extraordinary stride of will for someone unable to sign his own name only six years earlier. He completed his self-mentoring in literacy by ‘…reading from the picture books in the booksellers’ shop windows’*.
But it wasn’t only literacy Hardie taught himself: ‘When he had a little spare time in the pit, he took his pit lamp, blackened with its smoke the white stone, and scratched upon its surface the shorthand characters with a pin’* – a sketch stranger than fiction (even Robert Tressell’s or Arthur Morrison’s); bringing a new meaning to ‘Pitman’. This laudable self-education would later pay off with the tribute: ‘He was the only really cultivated man in the ranks of any of the Labour parties’**.
Hardie’s autodidactic gifts fitted the Messianic map of his future, one fired by apparently rootless faculties, drawing Biblical comparisons: ‘If the … prophets of the Old Testament and the fisherfolk who became apostles in the New Testament were to … enter the House of Commons; they would … find themselves more at home in the company of Keir Hardie than in that of any other member…’*. The archetypal photo of a Moses-bearded Hardie, legs planted on soap box, arm out-stretched evangelistically, is indeed prophet-like. And like all prophets Hardie was ’emphatically a man of the future’ as he demonstrated in Ishmaelitism Justified (1903), an open letter to one Mr. Morley, who had deprecated the Independent Labour movement as ‘a sullen and scowling class apart’: “Even a ‘sullen and scowling class sitting apart’ would be preferable to a besotted and unthinking class dragged hither and thither by unscrupulous guides”.
Hardie’s first step towards politics was in becoming Secretary of the Miner’s Union. Four years later he pitted his shorthand in journalism, working as editor of The Miner. He converted to Socialism with the encouragement of Robert Smillie, leader of the Lanarkshire miners, and then, at 32, stood as MP for Mid-Lanark – unsuccessfully. Undaunted by defeat, he stood again as Independent Labour Party candidate for South-West Ham and was elected to Parliament in 1892 with a sizeable majority. His inauguration as a Member of Parliament was described like a political caricaturist’s sketch: ‘…Keir Hardie sent a shudder of horror through the Mother of all Parliaments by presenting himself at the bar of the House …clad in the costume of his class. … It was as if the avant courier of the social revolution had knocked at the portals of Parliament’*.
Around 1897 Hardie was converted to Christianity, to him synonymous with Socialism: “We are called upon at the beginning of the 20th century to decide the question propounded in the Sermon on the Mount, as to whether we will worship God or Mammon. The present day is a Mammon worshipping age. Socialism proposes to dethrone the brute god Mammon and to lift humanity into its place.” He made no bones about his political inspiration: “…the impetus which drove me … into the Labour movement, … has been derived more from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth than from all other sources combined” (Keir Hardie, 1910). The influence of Hardie’s former lay preaching in the Evangelical Union Church and public speaking in The Temperance Society shone through in his sermonizing parliamentary speeches: “The peoples who have carved their names most deeply on the tables of the human story all set out on their conquering career as communists… When the old civilizations were putrefying, the still small voice of Jesus the Communist stole over the earth like a soft refreshing breeze carrying healing wherever it went”***.
In 1899, seven years after Hardie’s election to Parliament, the various Socialist and union factions conglomerated to form the Labour Representation Committee. Hardie was now MP for Merthyr Tydfil. In the 1906 General Election, while the Liberal Party formed the new government, the newly-named Labour Party won 29 seats and Hardie was elected its leader in the House of Commons. But with overwhelming divisions within the party, Hardie resigned the leadership in 1908 – he led from the front and was not by nature a rank-and-file caretaker.
It was Hardie’s brazen radicalism which marked him out as a figure with ideas far ahead of his time. He made speeches for self-rule in India and racial equality in South Africa; supported women’s suffrage; and later attempted to organise a national strike against Britain’s involvement in the First World War.
On a day in June 1894, when the Commons moved an address of congratulations on the birth of a son to the then Duchess of York – later to become King Edward VIII –Hardie further moved an amendment that the mining disaster of the same day, in which over 250 men and boys had died, should take precedence over the birth of “any baby”. J. R. Clynes related the result of Hardie’s defiant interruption in his Memoirs (1937): ‘The House rose at him like a pack of wild dogs. His voice was drowned in a din of insults and the drumming of feet on the floor. But he stood there, white-faced, blazing-eyed, his lips moving, though the words were swept away’.
The 1910 General Election saw 40 Labour MPs elected to the House of Commons and Hardie agreed to become leader again but in the very same year he resigned for a second and final time, handing over to George Barnes. On 25th September 1915, in the aftermath of his controversial open opposition to Britain’s involvement in the First World War, Hardie died after a long illness. Sylvia Pankhurst wrote: ‘…he had a stroke in the House of Commons after some conflict with the jingoes. … he arranged for the disposal of his books and furniture and gave up his rooms, foreseeing his end, and fronting it without flinching or regret’****; a harassed, white-haired Aslan of politics, fatally mauled by the mocking Commons’ goblins, crawling into retirement amid the dull thuds of book-packing, was a muted end to a ferocious career.
But what of Hardie’s legacy?
Unfortunately its resonance, which culminated in the 1945 Labour Government’s creation of the Welfare State, was eroded by Thatcher’s trampling of Socialism, and her cancerous infusion of monetarism into the public consciousness. The ultimate sting in the tail has been the Thatcherite corruption of Labour itself, now ideologically invisible bar token lapses such as the minimum wage, first proposed by Hardie on entering Parliament in 1892: “A minimum wage might … be established, making it a penal offence for an employer to engage a worker under a sum sufficient to ensure the necessaries of life”*).
The House of Lords Act 1999 half-heartedly modernised the moribund second chamber, but fell short of full reform by allowing 92 hereditary peers to retain their seats. Hardie’s proposal to abolish the Lords was fired by his opposition to the rich buying titles and votes by bankrolling their political party. With the present ‘modernised’ Lords attracting accusations of housing ‘Tony’s cronies’ – recipients of life peerages being, coincidentally, former New Labour financial donors – one can see Blair’s Act as merely a replacement of the old second chamber with a differently undemocratic one. The idea of thorough reform (let alone abolition) of the Lords, is being continually filibustered in Parliament and is – like the belated blood sports debate – still a controversial bugbear among the well-camouflaged landed classes and Daily Mail reactionaries. Thankfully some Labour backbenchers still argue for total abolition of the second chamber in the vein of political scientist Harold Laski, who echoed these Keirite sentiments way back in 1938 by alluding to the Lords as “an indefensible anachronism”*****.
Meanwhile, other propositions of Hardie’s have still yet to come about: “A restriction of the hours of labour to eight per day … the erection of workshops … wherein work now performed at home could be undertaken, these having crèches attached for the benefit of women with children called upon to earn a living for themselves … Recreation-rooms and reading-rooms should be abundantly provided, especially in poor quarters, together with small open spaces laid down in grass for children to play upon, and thus preserve their contact with nature and mother earth, the loss of which is accountable for much of the atheism which is a natural product of city life”*. This bucolic vision of labour echoes William Morris’s dictum: ‘A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he … wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body’.
We can only hope now, having gone full circle back to a Parliament in which the working people and underprivileged are not properly represented, someone else fired by a first-hand sense of social injustice might emerge to lead a truly Socialist party back into the Commons. For as much as when that Lanarkshire miner first lifted himself from the coal pits into the light of literacy and politics, Keir Hardie’s country needs him now.
* Mr. Kier Hardie M.P., W. T. Stead (ed.), Coming Men on Coming Questions No: VI, (May, 18, 1905)
**James Mayor, My Windows on the Street of the World (1923)
***James Keir Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism (1907).
****Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement (1931)
previously published in Chartist magazine 2006
Alan Morrison
The Primark Shirted Philanthropists: Paralells between 2006 and Robert Tressell’s 1906 novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
In 1906 Robert Tressell (real name Noonan) started writing his autobiographical novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, while working a fifty-six hour week as a painter and decorator in Hastings. In the novel Tressell’s alter-ego, Owen, attempts to convert his exploited workmates to Socialism, ultimately to no avail. It was completed by 1910 to be returned unread by the publishers because it was in long-hand. It was finally published four years after the author’s premature death, in 1914.
It is dispiriting to glimpse in a novel written at the turn of the previous century, passages of industrial parallel. Many of the book’s themes are perennial as the Socialist and Marxist ideas that inspired its ethical fibre. That this novel has over the past century gained a near Biblical status among the British Left further emphasises its timeless relevance. Some even cited it as contributing to the 1945 Labour election victory.
The book invites us into the dead-end existences of a group of painters and decorators whose employer, the exploitative private firm Rushton & Co., pits them against one another in an inexorable grappling for scant work placements which they’re encouraged to ‘scamp’ (i.e. rush) in order to maximise profits. Owen nicknames his workmates ‘the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ for submitting themselves unquestioningly to this cycle of pitiful wages, bouts of unemployment and poverty. Subsisting on ‘…block ornaments, margarine, adulterated tea, mysterious beer (p772)’, their lives are a collage of cheap tobacco and tubercular diets – the Pound Stretcher fare of yesteryear. Their only daily respites are short breaks sipping stewed tea from tins, sat on upturned pails occasionally used as makeshift soap-boxes by Owen for tub-thumping on the sanity of Socialism, which always falls on deaf ears: ‘…it was not as if it were some really important matter, such as a smutty story … something concerning football … or the doings of some Royal personage or aristocrat’ (p748).
Our present ‘celebrity’-obsessed, Royalist society shows little has changed in terms of the British idea of ‘culture’. These ‘philanthropists’ rely for their opinions on the local tabloid rag, The Obscurer, which voices the jingoism of the Directors of the limited company that funds it: ‘The papers they read were filled with vague and alarming accounts of the quantities of … the enormous number of aliens constantly arriving … the crimes they committed, and the injury they did to British trade’ (p34).
One can see a parallel to the reaction of British tabloids such as The Daily Express to the proposals of EU Enlargement in April 2004: ‘Gypsies say they can’t wait to arrive in land of dole and benefits’.
The derelict lots of the ‘philanthropists’ are depicted in 12 hour shifts decorating the freezing interior of a house referred to poignantly as ‘the Cave’, constantly stalked by their taskmaster foreman. Seems remote? One only needs to draw up the contemporary parallel of call centre staff having their work time monitored by their own computers (even logging out to go to the toilet) to see how this Orwellian practise has translated into the electronic age.
The employees of Rushton & Co. are liable to dismissal at an hour’s notice. This might no longer be the case today in permanent jobs, but it is still par for the course in temping placements where contracts can be terminated at less than an hour’s notice. Gate Gourmet’s recent instant sacking over loud-hailer of 160 Union-backed workers for striking over poor conditions, shows how even permanent contracts can be stripped of any rights on whims of private sub-contractors.
If I had been writing this article in the new Welfare State of the late 1940s I would be approaching it optimistically. Unfortunately I am writing in 2006, a time endemically tarnished by Thatcherism, the carrot-throwing regime – council house mortgages, utility shares etc. – that inspired yuppidom and the now institutionalised consumer culture, decadent trends Tressell relates as far back as 1906: ‘These wretches had abandoned every thought and thing that tends to the elevation of humanity … in order to carry on a mad struggle to acquire money which they would never be sufficiently cultured to properly enjoy.’ (1304-5)
The most depressing parallel between 2006 and 1906 is the cancer of privatisation: despite the much-needed surgery of nationalisation in the mid 20th century, this growth re-attached itself through Thatcherism. ‘The only reason they have not monopolized the daylight and the air is that it is not possible to do it. …’ (p397)
Today we see Private-Public Partnership infesting the NHS to the detriment of patient welfare and provision; and taking into account the rapid rise in prescription charges since 1951, we are pretty much back to 1906: ‘It happened that it turned out to be more expensive than going to a private doctor… The medicine they prescribed and which he had to buy did him no good…’ (p1673). Owen’s health problems are down to poor diet and industrial stress – with the present Government’s proposal to replace Incapacity Benefit with a new Workers Support Allowance and place employment advisers in GP surgeries, even the sanctuary of ‘the sick’ is to contract into a new set of pressures.
As recently as 2002 my father worked ten hour shifts as a security officer for a private firm. He was not allowed any sick pay and so often worked when he was ill. Assertions that slave labour is a thing of the past falls as much on my deaf ears as Owen’s attempts at Socialist conversion do on his workmates’. The recent introduction of a minimum wage (originally petitioned for by Keir Hardie as far back as 1892) does little to improve the lives of working people. It can be seen as another ‘carrot’, a meagre concession for the astronomical increases in private companies’ profits; but its benefits are barbed by annual increases in Council Tax and ‘public’ transport fares.
Our ‘public’ services are run by unaccountable private companies – like the novel’s Electric Light Company – , who siphon off profits to shareholders instead of investing in improving their ‘services’, and who surround themselves in a sub-contracting labyrinth, impervious to customer complaints. Our ‘democracy’ is – as Tressell’s Mugsborough (Hastings) – dictated to by tabloid tycoons and businessmen. The three main parties – like the novel’s Liberals and Tories – squabble over a capitalist centre-ground.
At least in 1906 Tressell’s generation had the hope of the Labour Representation Committee, which took 29 seats in Parliament along with the new title of the Labour Party that very year. In post-Thatcherite 2006, the Socialist optimism of Tressell’s vision – voiced in the book by Owen’s friend, Barrington – is put into a tragic context.
We have come full circle: weaned on carrots of credit, lotteries and loyalty cards, we are the Primark Shirted Philanthropists.
[All quotes taken from the Project Gutenberg website, the pagination corresponding with Robert Tressell’s original longhand manuscript]
Alan Morrison
Emergency Ambulance – Reoccupying ‘Auden Country’
Ever the unwitting microcosmic reflector of the macro politics of its day, the often fractious and factional British poetry scene has recently been engulfed in various intrigues and infighting: most recently, this revolved around the controversy of a hedge-fund company being recruited to subsidise the annual T.S. Eliot Prize, following Arts Council England’s unceremonious disinvestment in its parent organisation, the Poetry Book Society. This rather compromised countermove on behalf of the PBS prompted two high profile poets to withdraw from the Eliot shortlist (more on which later). Simultaneous to this was ACE’s suspension of grant monies – for reasons as yet unclear – to that other bastion of the British poetry establishment, the Poetry Society, which, among other productions, publishes the flagship journal of established poetics, Poetry Review. PR was founded in 1912 by poet and publisher Harold Monro, and grew to be a broadly representative journal of contemporary poetry; but there are those who would argue that it has barely even ‘ostensibly’ served this purpose in recent years. There has been a swelling insurgency among members and subscribers for some time now against what they have perceived as PR’s habit-forming promotion of a small cosseted elite of ‘big names’ at the expense of a more comprehensive representation of the poetry scene. But it is not that particular internecine dispute which is the focus here; it is the equally cloudy quandary as to the journal’s oddly ambiguous stance on politics and poetry, especially at this time of austerity cuts and seismic shifts on the social map, which, in part, spurs this polemic.
The summer 2011 issue of PR announced – over the incongruous photo of a bound-and-gagged naked man – in red capitals, THE NEW POLITICAL POETRY, which, perhaps with postmodernist irony, was less than qualified by much of the actual contents. But this ostensibly promising cover claim was also ambushed by the opening editorial by Fiona Sampson (whose resignation after seven years at the helm was announced towards the end of February), somewhat solipsistically sub-titled (my italics): ‘Where Is The New Political Poetry?, This poser came across as rhetorical, and was echoing recent journalistic questioning of the relative Quietism of literary establishments – ironic of itself, since journalism is notoriously myopic in its cultural scope (more on which anon). With further irony, the broadly postmodernist, apolitical platform of PR, known more for its robust representation of established reputations and imprints than for coverage of dissenting and radicalised poetics (and associated imprints), was hardly the obvious candidate to address this journalistic quandary. As Niall McDevitt put it succinctly at the end of his own polemic on the same PR issue, at The International Times: ‘The answer to the question ‘Where is the New Political Poetry?’ is: not in the Summer 2011 edition of Poetry Review’. This polemic is inclined to conclude the same. McDevitt evocatively alludes to a long-entrenched conservatism in PR’s editorial approach as the unspoken behest of (his) leitmotific ‘blue-rinse subscribers’; he also suggested the more appropriate title for this issue of PR would be ‘The New Politic Poets’ (noting the ironic etymological roots of ‘politic’ and ‘polite’ – ‘polis’, the Greek for ‘city’ or ‘body of people’ – ‘politics’ then meaning ‘of or relating to people’, or to ‘public’ issues). One could go further and argue that ‘realpolitik’ is the aptest term in this case, since much ‘political’ poetry in the British ‘mainstream’ seems often more generalised and single-issue-based than ideological.
But in any case, this ‘New Political Poetry’ issue of PR was fairly late off the mark in terms of zeitgeist. It is not possible to ‘spearhead’ an already existent poetic discourse, only intercept it. It is laudable that Sampson at least finally caught up with the dialectical surge of verse-response to the austerity cuts, though perhaps less commendable that in doing so, no acknowledgement was forthcoming either to the title’s own ‘lateness’, nor to the considerable body of work produced more promptly and published fairly visibly throughout the preceding year. This verged on (wilful) solipsism. Moreover, if one is to provide a full-blooded poetic riposte to journalistic impeachments of contemporary poetry’s polemical nervelessness, is it not a little self-defeating to only highlight the highest profile poets, few of whom can reasonably be described as ‘political’ to any discernable degree? Fiona Sampson nevertheless did just that in her editorial:
Everyone who has read John Agard or Jackie Kay, Grace Nichols or Carol Ann Duffy will be aware that contemporary British poetry explores questions of identity, authority and social rights. These questions are unmistakably political. In 2011 poets are continuing these explorations, though sometimes, perhaps, using less declarative forms…
In a poetry culture in which there are so many unambiguously political poets – Michael Horovitz, Andy Croft, Niall McDevitt, Barry Tebb, Judith Kazantzis, Alexis Lykiard, Paul Summers, Andrew Jordan, John Gibbens, Owen Gallagher…. (the list is literally bursting) – it seems almost beyond belief that the flagship journal of contemporary British poetry which purports to represent its full gamut, so conveniently but unconvincingly ‘politicises’ – through the broadest definition possible – what is in the main consciously un-political output. It is an approach which feels only ‘political’ in strictly ‘literary’ terms, but not in any others. Readers might have been left pondering which ‘more declarative’ political poetry this “less declarative” species was being contrasted by, and perhaps my own alternative list provides some of the answer. One can make equally pedantic sport with this detectably pedantic term: some might see the word ‘declarative’ as a euphemism for ‘political’, thereby reading the phrase as “using less political forms”. But this phrase also conceivably provides those poets not wishing to ruffle any establishment feathers with a passport to coat any polemic of their own in thick applications of figurative impregnability. Nothing wrong with that per se, but it can smack of aesthetic convenience, and also suggest a hint of condescension towards any contemporary political poetry which chooses to express itself more directly than the commoner metaphorical meditation (say, peach bloom symbolising the fragility of social democracy); or which claims to be commenting on current socio-political themes, but without any evidence of this in its actual content. Moreover, could it be that most mainstream poets today are not appearing to write politically because they are in fact not writing politically, whether declaratively, figuratively or otherwise. Or is it all about being direct, even prosaic, in use of language, but always vague to the point of invisibility in meaning? There are times one wishes it was quite the other way round; anything to roil up the flat lucidity of much supplemental verse and shake some grit into it. But what seems to be being implied, conveniently for an establishment outlet, is a post-modern reassertion of the ‘politicalness’ of practically any and every subject (including, no doubt, peach bloom), in a similarly evasive manner to conceptual artists’ mantra that anything, no matter how mundane or apparently uninteresting, is ‘art’, and therefore also has political implications.
But PR’s gesture of progressiveness seemed short-lived, and slightly undermined by the editorial in the following autumn issue, a much more cautionary polemic, as if there’s been an ideological sea-change between issues:
In the face of mob rule, poetry’s rugged individualism seems especially important. It offers its alternative, a kind of focused integrity – the understanding that we do not need to be totalizing, or totalitarian, but write all the more tellingly when we acknowledge our own particularity…
What this is supposed to mean is – once again – porous to interpretation, though the rather hyperbolic reference to “mob rule” would appear to indicate a more propertied response to the recent riots. Anyone already wary of a perceived stylistic and critical conservatism in PR over the past few years will have no doubt balked slightly at the phrase “poetry’s rugged individualism”, which smacked more – probably accidentally – of a kind of artistic Thatcherism than anything resembling a new Left Book Club-like realignment (though of course it would be dogmatic to presume all ‘political’ poetry to automatically be left-wing – and PR’s editorial stance seems emphatically not that, but more liberal, or libertarian). There are many practising poets today who would argue that a form of ‘rugged individualism’ – or, as The Penniless Press’s fiercely polemical editor Alan Dent might put it, ‘narcissism’ – has increasingly pervaded the poetry – and other arts’ – scene(s) of the past thirty years, and has resulted in systemically narrowed poetic horizons in the British ‘mainstream’; just as, simultaneously, British poetry – mostly on the margins, through smaller imprints – has oppositely mushroomed into a rich and deeply varied renaissance which, ironically, has not been authentically represented through the established agencies (wilful blindness again?).
Somehow the ‘poetry establishment’’s overall (anti-)‘stance’ feels too convenient, even synthetic, tacitly enabling more career-minded poets who don’t wish to speak out too openly against any government (even one which is forcing through legion impingements on our social rights, ransacking the welfare state – historically the refuge of poetic impecuniousness – and privatising the NHS, among other administrative vandalisms) to mop up their social consciences in amorphous metaphors but otherwise leave the gate open to sunnier uplands of un-nettled patronage. Some of those ‘selectively political’ poets were more in their comfort zones when – quite rightly – speaking out against library closures, but, in many cases, only against library closures, which was a bit like MPs toeing the line of the party whip and expressing opinions solely on issues contained within their own constituencies. Some poets, even more contentiously (or contradictorily), rallied to the otherwise politically astute Poet Laureate’s call to pen prompt verses congratulating the recently wedded royal couple in, of all places, The Guardian. Were we to interpret from that that none of those poets harboured any republican sentiments? If some of them in fact do, then what has happened to our poetry culture that poets who do not have the obligations of laureateship publicly contribute to a sudden gush of poetic nuptials just happening to coincide with a high profile royal wedding? Or are some of the most prominent poets of today, card-carrying monarchists? Or is this simply the latest evasive post-modern nuance designed precisely to open up such a debate among all heart-sleeved literalists? Whatever was behind that particular flinging of poetic bouquets, it sends some very mixed signals to that portion of the public who still hopelessly expect its poets to be a bit rebellious, oppositional and, dare one suggest, anti-establishment.
‘Bardic Spring’: Green Shoots of a Poetic Recovery?
While Caparison’s anthologies, Emergency Verse and The Robin Hood Book, are amorphously partisan in terms of politics, neither are literarily partisan, but have been and are open to contribution from poets of all descriptions and allegiances. There were numerous higher profile ‘horses’ who simply would not sample the pool, even when invited. Why so much reticence ‘up there’ to take part ‘down here’, in what should be a common cause far and above the sum of its parts, or normally tortuous protocols, or impenetrable reputations, or hierarchical deference? If the British poetry scene is as “inclusive” and open-minded as its’ top apparatchiks frequently claim, then why such a labyrinth of partitions? It won’t do at a time such as this: there needs to be a more united front in poetic response to the prosaic punishments of austerity inflicted on us through this presently dehumanising right-wing government agenda.
Certainly the augurs of early 2012 bode more promising than last year for a possible ‘Bardic Spring’: a stirring of political hormones in the poetry scene as the nation warms up after a second hibernating winter of austerity. The ‘poetry establishment’ and related flagship outlets do at least seem to be finally waking up to the causes of the day, having been – in the main – up until now, somewhat tortoise-like in intercepting the widespread verse response to ‘Con-Demonics’ from the broader ‘poetariat’ (over a year later, to be exact). But it is a promising sign of greater social engagement and lesser solipsism that these mainstream ‘late-starters’ have finally been snagged by the zeitgeist. Following on the heels of Poetry Review’s ‘polemical’ slot, long-established journal Acumen recently published its own ‘Do Poetry and Politics Mix?’ issue (No. 72) – even if this cover poser appeared to be rhetorical, as the Contents listed a titular capitulation, or rather, statement, ‘Poetry and Politics do not mix’ (again, echoing PR’s ‘rhetorical’ approach). More contemporaneously, in the spring 2012 issue of Poetry London, Colette Bryce’s editorial, sub-titled ‘Occupy Poetry’, commented briefly on the new surge of more politically engaged poetry as a sign of a verse sea-change (more on which further into this polemic).
So does it seem now that the more established outlets are trying to readdress disproportional representation of poetries and topics? It might seem that after a period of cautious observation and peer-review, some are deciding they want to have a piece of the dialectical action. Fair enough; but in opening up to the political debate, it is important that they demonstrate the spirit of humility (even, dare one make so bold, ‘solidarity’?), since their ‘awakening political consciences’ are currently on ‘catch up’. A less solipsistic approach would be more attractive than hinting at a prosodic superiority with which to more effectively tackle the urgent issues of today than the mere ‘lumpen poetariat’ of the saddle-stitched fringes are capable. It would however also be helpful in confirming that PR et al. do actually inhabit the same reality as the small presses and fringe journals if it didn’t openly sport borderline-myopic posers which appear to ask something in a manner which clearly doesn’t want to be answered; at least, not by anyone outside its own pages. Nevertheless, today’s poetry grassroots can take heart such outlets are at least starting to ask the relevant questions (even if rhetorically), and possibly, in time, some of them may start to answer them. It’s open to debate as to whether this belated ‘engagement’ indicates the true stirrings of a tidal shift in poetic focus – or more simply pragmatism: the realisation that it is increasingly important to at least appear to be addressing the new austerities dominating the minds of most ‘readers’ today.
Authentic or synthetic, a gestural verisimilitude is itself a vital move, as self-preservative as it is ‘conscientious’, if mainstream poetry is to be perceived as contemporaneously relevant to these urgent times of rapidly altering perspectives, perceptions and, inevitably, tastes. Judging by form, such a focal shift is no doubt more Darwinian than Marxian: an adaptation to a shifting cultural narrative as mutative as the austerity that is gradually diminishing the false defences of capitalistic narcissism that has, by and large, predominated British artistic society since the Thatcherite ascendancy and the once endless-seeming fabrication of neoliberal ‘affluenza’. Debatably, this sea-change might presage an ‘opening up’ to new perspectives, politico-poetic approaches, which have over the past couple of decades been considered to go against the grain of New-Next-Gen de rigueur, to have hovered uncomfortably close to challenging its domesticated, apolitical hegemony. A growing radicalisation of certain sections of our culture should prompt the upper poetry echelons into taking more notice of its own counter-cultural shadow. We are still waiting, however, for fuller and more fruitful consolidation of this resolve in terms of poetic representation. Certainly the poetry mainstream needs to adapt to survive; a species apart writing in its own Teflon tower is unlikely to produce the more robust experiential poetics necessitated by this radically changing period. Tonal and topical catholicity is vital to meet the challenges at all levels; to metaphorically ‘occupy’ the various spaces and approaches in a topographically unpredictable polemical landscape. No one prosodic approach, whether it be protest, didactic, parabolic, postmodernist or obscurantist, can capture the dynamic in its own hermetically sealed vacuum; there needs to be a pooling together of poetical resources; a commingling of poetries that in less seismic times oppose one another, but which need for the moment – and it may only be a moment – to join forces for a once-in-a-generation literary cause. It is hoped that, if more as prompts than a consolidations, EV and The Robin Hood Book help push us more in this direction.
As it stands, if appraised in its own isolated sphere, the deconstructive, reductionist impersonalism of much postmodernist poetry seems ill-equipped to effectively address the pressing issues concomitant to a systemic siege against our already vestigial social democracy. Irony and satire have their place, but they need discernable objects, or subjects, to be more than mere stylistic conceit. This is a time where the more empty postures and synthetic epiphanies of supplemental postmodernism sit jarringly against a backdrop of apocalyptic newspaper headlines. How can a customarily solipsistic species of poetry even begin to tackle such a macrocosmically ‘thorny’ topic as the current attack on the welfare state and the last remnants of the Attlee Settlement? More to the point, does it even aspire to? If literary critic Fredric Jameson’s description of postmodernism as the ‘dominant cultural logic of late capitalism’ is anything to go by, this polemical impasse in the predominantly postmodernist mainstream, at least with regards to more left-wing, ‘anti-capitalist’ sentiments, does seem to be a casualty of (self-imposed) stylistic remit.
Small wonder then that other poetry communities outside the postmodernist paradigm, free of socio-political inhibitions, have stepped into the breach; to have not done so would have been negligent to the point of cowardice. And all such poets wish to encourage is a more encompassing poetical response to the injustices of this period. But instead, by implication, whether cryptic or explicit, there is an atmospheric sense of having trodden on invisible toes. For instance, subsequent to the initial surge of polemical poetry post-election, there has been a sporadic but detectable spread of platitudes from choicest high profile poets as to poetry’s intrinsic ‘politicalness’. Such supplemental interventions have phrased themselves in such a proprietorial way as to elliptically impart a pincer-movement of the lips around any lesser known poet-upstarts who take it on themselves to choose a more vocal, ‘declarative’ stance against this government, without any prior deferential nods to the ‘doyens’ of the medium, or observance of unspoken protocols of cultural permissions.
The phrasal pusillanimity of some of these spokespersons also helps protect reputations and candidacies for prospective establishment carrots forthcoming, while – couched as it is in vagueness and distinctly ‘un-declarative’ ambiguity – allowing them a certain modicum of what The Penniless Press’s eloquently polemical Alan Dent coins ‘radical chic’. So the mainstream is both non-committal, non-declarative, but also intrinsically political at the same time – and, in some quarters, even a tad “anti-capitalist” – it’s just not willing to spell this out, or even reveal it to any fathomable degree. It would be churlish to characterise this simply as charlatanism or duplicitous cop-out, so let’s just agree to the mandarin catchphrase, “less declarative”. It’s almost a poetic parallel to the ‘selective’ take on ‘Opposition’ by the current Labour Party. But there was a time – particularly in the politically neurotic Thirties, which in terms of capitalist near-collapse and related austerity is arguably a forgotten decade of precedent to our twenty-tens – when sparse literary acquittal was predicted in the long-term for literary quietists or ‘conscientious projectors’. As Cyril Connolly put it (albeit contradictorily, given his initial reprimand that ‘politics are more dangerous to young writers than journalism’) in his 1938 polemic, Enemies of Promise:
To-day, writers can still change history by their pleading, and one who is not political neglects the vital intellectual issues of his time, and disdains his material … He is not a victim of his time but a person who can alter it, though if he does not, he may be victimised. He has to be political to realise himself, and he must go on being political to protect himself.
This campaign takes some heart in such sentiments; and, in the marked absence of any politico-poetic imperative, will pitch the tents of its protest anthologies, making its presence felt – however vicariously – on the page, in the manner of a Poetry Occupy; an indefinite cross-partisan presence on the factional map of the poetry scene with the hope of influencing other poets of various stylistic allegiances to join us in this verse campaign against a distinctly anti-democratic and socially draconian government. If this Conservative-led administration is effectively – to borrow a phrase aimed at ministers of the mid-70s cuts from the eponymous socialist Labour MP in Trevor Griffiths’ 1976 TV serial Bill Brand – “killing with ink”, surely it is the duty of all poets who oppose its Malthusian social cleansing to use their own inks to reclaim our politically subverted language and demonstrate theist true moral value through adversarial verse. Now does not feel like the right time to be asserting “poetry’s rugged individualism in the face of mob rule”.
But for some peculiar reason, and unintentionally no doubt, the country’s ‘progressive’ media – the unambiguously socialist Morning Star apart – seems yet to translate its patronage of oppositional politics into patronage of contemporaneous literature which noticeably articulates such oppositional politics. The Morning Star’s Well Versed Column (edited by Jody Porter) seems almost alone in the national media in providing a platform to the politically engaged poets of our time. Even in the poetry publishing scene itself, the outlets for polemical poetry are few and far-between, but all the more important for it: radical imprints such as Smokestack Books, Five Leaves, Sixties Press, Red Squirrel, Flambard, and the late John Rety’s Hearing Eye, and journals such as Red Poets, The Penniless Press and – since 2007, this writer’s own webzine –The Recusant, have all contributed in print and online to a surge in left-wing socio-political poetry, which is growing in strength by the year, with recent additions including The Spleen, Jody Porter’s ‘Well Versed’-related blogsite and the newly – and timely – revived counter-cultural titan, The International Times. As well as these, and the Poets in Defence of the Welfare State (PDWS) anthologies, there have been numerous poetry collections published in the past few years addressing both pre- and post-austerity political vicissitudes: Michael Horovitz’ A New Waste Land (New Departures, 2007), Andy Croft’s Sticky (Flambard, 2009), Niall McDevitt’s b/w (Waterloo Press, 2010), Steve Spence’s satirical A Curious Shipwreck (Shearsman; shortlisted for the Forward Prize 2011); in 2011 alone: Nigel Mellor’s For The Inquiry (Dab Hand Press), Clare Saponia’s Copyrighting War and Other Business Sins (Olympia Publishing), Paul Summers’ union (Smokestack); and just published, Helen Moore’s Hedge Fund, And Other Living Margins (Shearsman, 2012) – to name just a handful. Very tellingly, a more concentrated surge of politically inclined collections has sprung since the last General Election.
Poetry Occupy
Most politically engaged poetry today, being generally outside the ‘mainstream’, has to work extra hard to gain its audiences. Reviews tend to be the main promotional currency for the smaller imprints, partly because the major prizes are mostly dominated by the ‘bigger’ imprints. Establishment imprints and journals are arguably complicit in the wholly unnecessary obscuring of such abundant and challenging output of the small presses. This makes it all the more frustrating when otherwise astute cultural commentators such as John Pilger and Terry Eagleton hit out at the paucity of ‘high profile’ political poetry, but by curious emphasis on ‘eminence’, fall into the common mainstream media trap of browsing no further than the spines of the ‘big six’ – Faber, Picador, Carcanet, Bloodaxe, Cape, Chatto (and their nearest competitors) – in their local Waterstones, to form their generalisations. If they did look beyond these imprints, they would discover an entire universe of alternative poetics being published today, much of which is resoundingly polemical, if not directly political. Nevertheless, the point made by Eagleton that ‘for almost the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet… prepared to question the foundations of the Western way of life’, is in itself a much-needed statement, even if it is slightly solipsistic in its scope, and tight in its definition of ’eminent’: while the most ‘highly ranked’ contemporary poets – though largely by their own self-regulating peers – come across as almost uniformly apolitical, one can argue that other poets of equal ‘eminence’ (in terms of output and critical reputation) are currently addressing these issues. But one also suspects that the aggressive media marketing of major poetry prizes is expediently used by most outside the poetry scene as a chart-list of ’eminent’ names; which they are, but mostly only among a narrowly ranged mainstream, and generally not of any other poetry constituency, of which there are many: modernism, formalism, polemic, protest, ‘naif’, ‘outsider’, and so on (though this representational deficit is slowly being challenged through new ‘alternative’ annual rankings in such places as Stride, The Poetry Kit and Purple Patch.
If even esteemed leftfield thinkers such as Pilger and Eagleton do not seek these alternative poetics out, then who will? It is ironic of John Pilger to opine the absence of a Shelley or Orwell in the very – and only – newspaper that weekly publishes the type of poetry most likely to be the closest contemporary equivalent. Or does Mr Pilger skip the Well Versed column every Thursday? The very fact that Messrs Pilger and Eagleton continue to tug at the coat-tails of indifferent high profile poets in an attempt to drag out of them a few words of token political comment betrays a disturbing deference to establishment definitions of what constitutes the most important in contemporary poetry, which one would not really expect from two of the foremost left-wing socio-cultural pundits of our time. Again, it is more evidence of that political-cultural Cartesian Dualism that retards the ‘progressive’ media in general. It also reminds those poets on the fringes of a narcissistically competitive poetry culture, just how much disproportionate weight is given – almost unconsciously – by the reading public to the FTSE-like ‘ranking’ of a poetry imprint rather than the actual quality of the poetry it publishes. This is an unsurprising but still parlous state of affairs, particularly for the legion poets who write in contradistinction to fashionable formulas promoted by the higher imprints; who know full well their own poetry, irrespective of whether or not it is ‘good enough’, is unlikely to be taken up by the ‘Cabers’ and Picaxes’ because it just doesn’t fit present trends, or threatens their hegemonies.
Apart from anything else, Pilger partly argues against himself when bemoaning the absence of a ‘Blake’ among the upper poetry echelons (again, why insist on always looking up?): he should know from that very example that the last place to look for the most dissenting voices of any time is among its establishments; more so among the obscure, such as Blake was himself in his own lifetime. Pilger makes a point but with dubious examples, while also missing the bigger picture, as does Eagleton: the question should not be: Where are the ’eminent’ Blakes, Shelleys (or Cyril Connolly’s edible-sounding ‘Shelleyblake’s) and Orwells? But: Why aren’t they more visible? Why aren’t the bigger imprints publishing them? Ultimately, even these venerable observers only further advance the very apolitical literary scene they so outspokenly criticise: if they want more politically engaged poetry to gain wider notice and a higher platform, then they must start to look outside the chain bookstores to the smaller presses, online catalogues such as The Poetry Library for instance; then buy and read these books, perhaps even review a few in the broadsheets, in order to give them more exposure. Assuming, as their interventions suggest, they are both passionately appalled by the present absence of literary polemic, it might be Messrs Pilger and Eagleton’s new mission to scout out and discover the more politicised ‘underground’ poetics and prose of our time and champion it themselves. Until they do so, they would seem themselves partly culpable for contemporary literary Quietism, since they appear to still be nursing a wilfully naïve faith that ‘high profile’ necessarily means high quality or importance (except by its own self-fulfilling prophecy), or that the ‘bigger’ imprints have a superior acumen in terms of talent-spotting than the smaller ones. Such ‘faith’ in literature’s ‘free market’ as conducive to filtering through the most important or necessary writing of the day would seem to contradict practically everything else these two cultural commentators stand for. Many would argue that if the prime directive of the poetry establishment’s titan imprints was to objectively discover the strongest and most challenging poetry currently being produced, then the hallowed spines of every Waterstones and Blackwells throughout the country would be ringing with some very different names to many they presently enshrine. What seems evident during the last couple of decades is an almost formulaic reproduction of a certain constrictive type of poetics, shorthanded by its critics as ‘mainstream’, by its scholarly cataloguers as ‘postmodernism’, and by its (postmodernist) exponents as simply ‘poetry’, in spite of a large proportion of it possessing more the characteristics of prose. (Postmodernism, of course, has nothing really to do with modernism, but seems only named thus for having followed – or circumnavigated – it, and arguably, failed in the process (perhaps deliberately) to define its own distinct purpose, being a rather cloudy melange of Forties parochialism, ‘Black Mountain’ poetics and Fifties ‘Movement’ verse, allied with additional ekphrastic and hermeneutical preoccupations).
The representational logjam at the core of the left-of-centre cultural Commentariat is particularly marked at The Guardian, The Independent and the glossier ‘progressive’ magazine titles such as The New Statesman: all appear party to unspoken protocols or codes of hierarchical deference to ‘self-regulating’ cultural elites that fly in the face of their ‘meritocratic’ and ‘inclusive’ stances. Such titles still appear to have chronic blind spots to the necessary aligning of editorial political ethic with corresponding cultural representation; or, of ethical rhetoric with ethical practice. Inescapably, as long as this politico-journalistic-cultural interface remains in disconnect, any ‘progressive’ aspirations for society in general remain, in turn, permanently retarded. Left-of-centre outlets that argue for greater equality and meritocracy, for a trampling of the hedges of nepotistic pecking orders, are – perhaps unconsciously – contradictorily complicit in a symbiotic myth-maintenance of the cultural sphere, by demonstrably up-keeping the ‘hedges’ of artistic and literary hierarchies (which are themselves the artificial constructs of the capitalist culture these titles supposedly wish to transform, or even, incrementally, overturn). Purely material ‘revolution’ is ultimately an empty pursuit: it must also have a cultural and psychical dimension; it must involve a transformation in thought and behaviour, prejudice and habit; a comprehensive erosion of false favouritisms, preferential treatments and spuriously gauged barriers to opportunities for those who merit them.
The historically consummate left-of-centre New Statesman, first launched by George Orwell in 1913, seems in latter years to have strayed perilously far from its ideological roots (its overly self-conscious pluralism being one example), particularly in terms of cultural representation. Its current editorial board appear to see no inherent contradictions between their ideological overtures and distinctly establishment-centric protocols regards cultural candidatures; whether this be in Oxbridge-culled columnists or contributing poets from the ‘big six’ imprints (many of whom are culled from UEA-type creative writing programmes). Such selective ‘scouting’ tends to result more often than not in the systemic recruitment of almost entirely theoretical – as opposed to experiential – ‘left-wing’ columnists and polemicists ‘preaching to the converted’ on issues which few if any of them have ever actually experienced or been challenged by directly in their own relatively well-heeled lives. Not that this is to denounce the reportage of macro-empathy, but it is to highlight something of a representational contradiction, a poverty of empirical insight, and a still endemic dearth of non-Oxbridge, red-brick, state-educated, or (perish the thought) working-class commentators. For full-blooded socialist titles such as the Morning Star, there is a more authentically classless quality, and this is, in part, reflected in the more politically ‘declarative’ poetry excerpted in its robust Well Versed columns. (Such poetic interventionism at this time seems pretty imperative in terms of reviving a sense of solidarity between the literary and social spheres; a sense of what Marxist poet and critic Christopher Caudwell would have perceived as the vital integration of the ‘poet’ into society, fulfilling his or her core social function, as opposed to its emasculated, ‘bourgeois’ dislocation from readerships).
But an editorial deficit seems to have opened up at the NS between principles of meritocracy and their intra-textual application. This is not so much hypocrisy as proverbial journalistic short-cutting; it’s just that many would have hoped that the New Statesman might have tried to buck this trend rather than absorb it into its shadow editorial policy (ditto The Guardian, fellow-sufferer of the perennial chronically gradualist ‘embourgeoisement factor’, or ‘Em Factor’). Indeed, such titles have yet to trace the clear link between their own ‘Russell Group’-style elitism of recruitment and exclusivity of by-lines, and the perpetuation of the cultural stratification and ‘celebritising’ philistinism of the nepotistic capitalist ‘pyramid of patronage’ they purport to oppose. But while the ‘progressive establishment’ and its numerous outlets seem healthily keen to reject capitalist hegemonies and hierarchies, they seem detectably less keen to surrender their own meticulously selective methods and mouthpieces for communicating this. If there is to eventually be a progressive ‘post-capitalist’ transformation of society and culture, then its’ most elevated proselytisers must be prepared to sacrifice their own detectable elitisms and monopolies – a socialist aristocracy would please no one; only authentic social and cultural meritocracy will do.
Processed Responses
Cracks are slowly showing in the hitherto closed-shopped ‘poetical classes’ with the recent principled standing down of poets Alice Oswald and John Kinsella from this year’s T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist in protest against the Poetry Book Society’s acceptance of private hedge fund company Aurum’s patronage, following disinvestment by Arts Council England (ACE). Here, at least, has been a belated gesture of solidarity with wider society from two high-profile poets who decided that their individual consciences took precedence over personal ambitions. Thinly veiled carps from the sidelines by one or two of their fellow ‘high profile’ contemporaries demonstrated the otherwise far more typical culture of compromise and complacency still entrenched at the heart of the British ‘poetry establishment’. This has never been more starkly in evidence than at this time, when seemingly its biggest movers and shakers appear to be motivated by priorities of a parallel universe. Far from penning, or just voicing, gestures of solidarity with the wider public during a time of unjustly meted-out national austerity, itself a result of the despicable behaviour of unregulated hedge-fund speculators, the mainstream ‘giants’ – the shortlisted and the shortlisting – seem oppositely content to languish at the fag-end of their funds-thinning empire by accepting sponsorship from a hedge-fund agency. Apparently such a badly timed ethical ‘compromise’ on behalf of the upper poetry echelons is worth it, according to the markedly unapologetic T.S. Eliot Prize apologists. But even if said prize did genuinely seek out the objectively appraised ‘best’ in contemporary British poetry, rather than playing ‘pass the parcel’ among a rota of repeating ‘names’ promoted by a tiny self-regulating elite of ‘top’ imprints, there could still be no literary justification strong enough to overshadow the ethical Colossus-in-the-room of pawning the most iconic podium of poetic recognition in the country to an opportunistic hedge-fund outfit. Not at the best of times, not at any time; but most emphatically not at this time, when our very social fabric is up for sale, thanks to the recent shady practices of such auspices.
This paradoxical chain of blame was echoed in Colette Bryce’s editorial to the spring edition of Poetry London – which, for other reasons, is worth deconstructing here. Its opening was apposite:
Margaret Thatcher, the once unlikely muse of a generation of British poets, is currently being portrayed on our cinema screens in tragic decline, like the spectre of capitalism itself.
But to those incredulous to the ‘natural selection’ or Darwinian characteristics of the rapaciously competitive and factional poetry scene, such a sentiment feels more tokenistic than authentic; a bit like digging out an old rusty badge to say “Yep, I’ve been a member of that for ages”, but finding the safety-pin has corroded stiff through lack of use. Because although most contemporary poets would assert they were politically ‘left-of-centre’, ‘anti-capitalist’, historically ‘anti-Thatcherite’, these views do not perceptibly match the behaviour of the more robustly ambitious among them from (unconsciously?) applying rather Thatcherite instincts of ‘animal spirits’ in terms of self-promotion, factional promotion, and passive-aggressive resistance to – and non-promotion of – poetic alternatives. This is not to say some of us are entirely innocent of such ‘adaptive’ manoeuvrings ourselves, but it does seem more marked the higher up the ‘pecking order’ one looks – as in most sectors of society; perhaps all poets, whether mainstream or marginalised, need to do some ‘soul-searching’ (see further down) at this time. In the case of the Eliot Prize apologists, however, it was rather like listening to a bunch of children wining “We didn’t want to do it, we weren’t given a choice, the nasty capitalist system made us do it”. But there is a choice: assert poetry’s spirit of transcendence above shoddy materialistic compromise, but receive less Smarties; or spinelessly capitulate to the marketisation of an art-form, and keep getting the same amount of Smarties. But does it never occur to such poets that a triumph of pragmatism might symbiotically involve a whittling of the spirit of the very ‘poetry’ for which they are apparently prepared to put their personal ‘principles’ aside, in order to keep in the public eye? And keep in the public eye to what purpose? High profile prizes mostly seem to only keep a very select 1% of poets in the public eye; they do not, in the main, recognise the full range and choice of contemporary poetic practice. It’s the old paradox of the fallacy of a ‘free market’: unfettered competition ultimately leads to contra-competitive monopolies.
The holistic short-circuiting between socio-political ‘ethics’ and contradictory cultural-artistic ‘practice’ is not peculiar to the poetry scene (as discussed elsewhere in this polemic); but recent internecine controversies have simply heightened its prevalence in terms of profile. Is it, therefore, because of rising insecurity regards its rather tarnished ‘PR image’, that apparatchiks of the ‘poetry status quo’ are so keen to keep spouting terms such as “inclusiveness” and “variety” – just as politicians invoke an undefined “fairness” to front quite the opposite in terms of policies and cuts: say something enough times and people start to believe it, even if the opposite is actually the case? This contra-representation of established realities was also echoed in poet Sean O’Brien’s tribute to departing PR editor Fiona Sampson, which went out of its way to highlight precisely those aspects to her controversial editorship perceived by her detractors to have been markedly lacking during her seven years tenure:
While broad in her tastes and encouraging towards emergent writers, she showed exacting standards in poetry and criticism and had no time for parochialism
Many readers would ask where the evidence is for any of these assertions, while pointing at an abundance to the contrary; indeed, if almost habitually publishing poetry from a repeating cabal of ‘names’ – which PR has been accused of publicly for some time now – isn’t its own form of ‘parochialism’, one wonders what is.
But to return to Bryce’s editorial: there is again an echo of Acumen’s cautionary take on the nature of our times and how, or even whether, poetry should respond to it; basically, the ‘default Auden quandary’ as to the relationship – if any – between poetry and politics
One poet suggested that ‘poetry should be questioning not endorsing such institutions’. What poetry, or indeed poets, should do presents an intriguing dilemma. Does the act of writing make us automatically ‘right thinking’ in political terms (where ‘right’ means ‘left’)?
There is, also, a less attractive echo of the proprietorial tone to the Poetry Review editorial:
Together with the highest level of work, there were many less processed responses to current events: to the August riots, the credit crunch, the ever-widening divide between rich and poor. For some, full rhymes with ‘bankers’ had proved irresistible.
Note the demarcation between ‘the highest level of work’ (i.e. establishment-endorsed) and ‘less processed responses’ (i.e. comparatively unpolished, or possibly just less formulaic…?), which comes uncomfortably close to Fiona Sampson’s ‘declarative’ and ‘less declarative’ distinctions. There is also a selective historical signposting:
From the Thirties to the Sixties, to the Eighties, the high points of twentieth-century poetry have coincided with the proverbial ‘interesting times’ of social unrest. The 2010s look set to prove as fruitful.
The initial premise is open to contention: the Thirties, as discussed in this polemic, was a mixed period poetically, although an extremely important one on the polemical level; the Eighties equally so, although there was at least Tony Harrison’s V; but it is curious there is no mention of the Seventies. The 2010s may very well prove one of the ‘high points’ for British poetry, but if the evidence for this is to be ‘visible’ to a wider public, it must be matched by more comprehensive and braver representation of all styles, not simply those issuing from a tightly schooled nexus of ‘academic talents’, which is more likely to produce the vicarious ‘conceit’ but less likely the experiential ‘revelation’ – and both approaches, ideally segued, are needed for these times. Bryce presents an ambiguous exposition on recent solecisms of the poetry establishment:
The poetry community has also had its own soul-searching to do. The issue of corporate funding was raised and debated, after it was announced that an investment management firm had provided sponsorship for a high-profile prize. That the funding had been necessitated by cuts to the arts, was a further complication…
But has the poetry community been doing ‘its own soul-searching’? The Eliot Prize apologists didn’t seem to be doing too much. And the premise that funding had been ‘necessitated by cuts to the arts’ feels as if it is couching an ultimately ethical issue in the sort of language employed in disembodied ‘it is regretted’ tropes of politicians, police officials, hacks, tsars, bankers and corporate executives caught with their ‘principles’ in the till. But more to the point, it is also not addressing what exactly the reasons were for the axing of ACE funds to the PBS…? If there has been some ‘soul-searching’, has it searched at all in the direction of the possibility that the facilitating of the T.S. Eliot Prize was beginning to be perceived as too predictable and non-representative? Was the “further complication” just one of ‘PR’? Bryce does make a very valid point by noting the ironic, almost paradoxical chain of culpability to this unravelling of consequences by noting the very arts cuts themselves were
brought about by financial mismanagement by companies similar to the one involved.
This is absolutely true and, in a circumlocutory way, Bryce is not entirely exonerating the PBS of criticism. But there is still the implication that the funding cut to the body in charge of the highest profile poetry prize in the country was entirely arbitrary and not based on any other operational or qualitative considerations. Certainly the ‘Aurum card’ played was beyond tactlessness, or disingenuousness; even post-modernist ‘irony’ would find it tricky to get a grip on it; and, as a gesture, it would appear to put a seal on long and widely-held suspicions that symptoms of opportunism and one-upmanship are endemic (even epidemic) at the ‘top’ end of the poetry scene. In the long-term this overture of complicity to a morally compromised capitalist-cultural machine by its compromised prestige-addicted alumni will go down as one of the least edifying episodes in the recent history of British poetry; a kind of ultimate antithesis to the literary and literal altruism in response to a call to arms from the besieged Republic of Thirties’ Spain to help defend its socialist democracy against Franco’s Fascist uprising. We all know how that ended, and was protracted; we also know that a generation of young left-wing writers volunteered in the International Brigades and the POUM to put their guts where their pens were and risk their lives in the fight – of some of the most well-known, Tom Wintringham, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Robert Graves and Orwell all survived; John Cornford, and Marxist polemicists Christopher Caudwell (Illusion and Reality et al) and Ralph Fox (The Novel and the People; Storming Heaven et al) did not. In 2012, those politically sympathetic poets with the most far-reaching public platforms at their disposals have comparatively little if nothing to lose in speaking out against the political injustices of a right-wing Tory-led government – yet they are, in the main, silent. Certainly on that ostensible point we agree with Messrs Pilger and Eagleton’s interventions.
Poetry Makes Nothing Happen … Again: Reoccupying ‘Auden Country’
Rather than being occupiers of a second poetic ‘Auden Country’, then, the ‘poetry establishment’ seems content to be its absent landlords, allowing it to sit derelict until an influx of verse-‘squatters’ spurn them into a sudden assertion of custodianship, but in the marked absence of contractual reciprocation. Previous efforts to evict EV and similar poetry campaigns from this pitch have been, one might say, elliptically detectable, both through significant contributory abstentions, and journalistic omissions in some flagship outlets of the ‘progressive elites’. The Robin Hood Book carries the same counter-cultural baton into a now part-privatised ‘Auden Country’. Outsourcing and sub-contracted ‘inclusiveness’ projects have been in operation in recent times: some high profile imprints have launched their own ‘outreach’ mentoring programmes but it remains a shame that these mostly tend to ‘scout’ out into rather hermetically sealed spheres. There is therefore an ‘unspoken’ protocol at work, logical in itself, but not complimentary to its medium, nor comprehensive or imaginative enough to harvest the full crop of contemporary talent in all its richness and diversity (and often the most startling and distinctive poetry crops up in the most unlikely of places). Such self-regulating ‘schooling’ of poetics also, inevitably, results more often than not in a formulaic ‘voice reproduction’ which, if left unchecked, can actually arrest organic poetic development, and obscure more experiential poetics.
Today’s apparent poetic quiescence in the face of a brutalising political climate smacks of a lofty detachment perennially hard-wired into the mainstream literary mindset; one which poet Roger Roughton once robustly denounced in his October 1936 ‘Fascism Murders Art’ editorial to Contemporary Poetry and Prose:
There is no longer a fence for intellectuals to sit on: they must choose between fascism and anti-fascism; and magazines of modern poetry can no longer pretend they are Something Apart.
Though this statement was written in relation to the rise of Spanish Fascism, its rudiments can just as easily be segued into contemporary polemic regarding the disturbing complacency among the British literary elite towards the ascendancy of our own home-grown Tory ‘Blueshirts’ and their fiscal fascism. EV made the bold point that it was attempting – only attempting, mark – to countervail the literalist interpretation of W.H. Auden’s famous (and possibly ironic) aphorism, ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, in its attempt to rouse contemporary British poets to the call of the pen in a verse campaign against this Conservative-led government; “a big poetry for a ‘Big Society’”, as it was also coined at the time. That poetry can make things happen is still an ambition of spirit implicit in our anthological campaign against what we perceive as an un-mandated and therefore undemocratic administration, albeit with our eyes now more open to the deep-veined cynicisms and prejudices of some more reactionary corners of literary-journalistic culture. But our spirit is not by any means necessarily in opposition to the sentiments of Auden in what was arguably a slightly cryptic, rather crafty, trope, tellingly emphatic more on the part of action, of causation, in its assertive and proactive phrasing ‘poetry makes’, before pausing on the clause with ‘nothing happen’, tellingly on ‘happen’ before the colon, pointedly put there to elucidate this seeming pessimism in the following lines (see below). The word ‘nothing’, in the literary cannon – particularly in the taciturn emotiveness of Cordelia’s reply to King Lear’s prompt for her to engorge his ears with some wholly superficial verbal gesture of her love for him – can be a loaded one, often as indicative of ‘something’, or even of an unspoken abundance that transcends the verbal. Auden’s aphorism has a contradictorily catalytic quality to it, in spite of its ostensible negation.
But in any case, the surgical removal of the phrase ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ from its context is disingenuous, cynical, and a form of bowdlerisation to suit the apolitical quiescence to the status quo of the ‘post-modern’ poetry schools that followed the ‘Auden Generation’ and its last ditch attempt to segue together the notions of ‘poetry’ and ‘politics’, ‘art’ and ‘action’. But, as others have reminded themselves in recent years, curiously much more so on the other side of the pond, such as Don Share and A.F. Moritz, in their respective articles ‘Poetry makes nothing happen… or does it?’ and ‘What Man Has Made of Man – Can poetry reconnect the individual and society?’, in a 2009 issue of the U.S. Poetry Foundation’s Poetry magazine (in many ways the equivalent to the UK’s Poetry Society/Poetry Review ‘package’, though Poetry is markedly more polemically informed and dialectically inclined than its comparatively pedestrian counterpart), Auden’s historically de-contextualised trope, from his stirring 1940 poem ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ (in some ways Auden’s own attempt at a kind of micro-Waste Land), the poet’s full exposition is far less defeatist or passively therapeutic as is traditionally suggested:
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
So what Auden seems to be saying here is that while ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ in, say, a physical or practical sense, it nevertheless ‘survives’ to serve as a ‘A way of happening, a mouth’; it becomes its own unique form of ‘happening’, a verbal event in itself, and ultimately all human behaviour –which is the enacting of things, the performance of happenings– is triggered, instructed and directed verbally, whether it be by suggestion, political rhetoric, or direct orders. But what almost always precedes human action is some form of verbal signal. In this sense, then, Auden is quite clearly indicating that poetry, particularly ‘political’ poetry, as a form of verbal signifier, or even imperative, is, or can be, a precursor to happenings. Not only this, but the poem in itself, therefore, a kind of ‘vicarious event’; what is pretty certain, at least, is any great or good poem is likely to induce some sort of psychical response in the reader, and thus, in turn, to have a bearing on their subsequent behaviour –this is the poem’s ‘way of happening’, simply by being a poem, one of the supreme fruits forthcoming from any human ‘mouth’, and the ‘mouth’ is the ultimate human organ of communication, persuasion and influence. And, to excuse the pun, if it is important never to forget that Auden was, as with many in his distinctly ‘active’ –in the political sense– generation, a poet who put his poetry and his politics, albeit briefly, where his mouth was: he volunteered as an ambulanceman in the Spanish Civil War, was reassigned to use his oratorical powers to communicate radio propaganda for the Spanish Republic, and didn’t stay too long –but he did at least plant his feet on the terra firma of the Spanish mainland for some amount of time, and thereby left experiential footprints in the metaphorical and ideological map of his eponymous ‘country’ for posterity. This empirical personal campaign to test his ‘Communist’ sympathies by exposing himself to the full reality of what was perceived by the British Left as a uniquely ideological crusade –against fascism and in defence of social democracy, and socialism– did, of course, disillusion Auden in the end, and thus prompted the very poem which produced that ill-fated aphorism. But what excuse do the comparatively inactive, apolitical generations of poets since Auden and his ilk have for their pessimism, apathy and (synthetic?) impotency, when they have not been so empirically tested? Christopher Caudwell and John Cornford died in their attempts to enact their poetic and political beliefs and to prove, in part, that ‘poetry and action’ is not always a mutually antagonistic marriage, but, in the service of certain idealistic and humanitarian causes, can make an unlikely but compatible match –if fatally, but still as a lasting statement. Fortunately some of these poet-volunteers survived the Spanish Civil War and thus had the time afterwards to reflect and fully harvest their experiences of having, for a period, put rifles before pens in promoting the cause they believed in. The not entirely defeated testaments to a war which was ultimately and devastatingly lost by the Republican Left survive for posterity in the writings of Tom Wintringham, for instance. They –that is, Caudwell, Cornford, Wintringham, Auden et al– were, at least, poet attempters: they attempted to put their political beliefs into action at a point in history when it seemed the only conscionable thing to do if one was to continue to expound specific political convictions. But there are other ways of attempting, or of ‘happening’, as we know, through poetry, which can, as and when the political climate of a certain period, by its sheer rhetorical ferocity, demands it, be temporarily diverted in its conventional purpose and employed as a medium for the expression of political consciousness, as polemic, the mouth of protest, or even, to some extent, as a form of metaphorical propaganda.
The contributors to EV, and now The Robin Hood Book, are at least part of a tradition of ‘poet attempters’, those who try to muster their prosodic energies to meet head-on the social and political challenges of their times – and, crucially, not afterwards, once those challenges have subsided and a torpid retrospection has set in to contemporary literary consciousness; but during the challenges, in the thick of them, and necessarily at such a pace as to keep up with their momentum where some small peripheral window of possible influence on the public is briefly ajar. Again, as collaborative editors Auden and Charles Plumb wrote in a preface to the 1926 volume of the politically focused journal Oxford Poetry:
In this selection we have endeavoured to pacify, if not to content, both the progressive and the reactionary. And to the latter, who doubtless will be in the majority, we would suggest that poetry which does not at least attempt to face the circumstances of its time may supply charming holiday-reading, but vital interest, anything strictly poetic, it certainly will not. …. At the same time, the progressive would be unreasonable to expect confidence until he has proved that his destination justifies his speed.
One editorial difference here, however, is that EV – perhaps slightly greenly, and to its subsequent partial chagrin – didn’t ‘endeavour… to pacify …the reactionary’, nor even particularly for that matter ‘the progressive’: its intention wasn’t to ‘pacify’ at all, but to prompt, to challenge, perhaps ‘ruffle a few feathers’ too, which it did, to a degree beyond even its own predictions. But note Auden and Plumb’s uses of the words ‘attempt’ and ‘speed’: both pretty much sum up the fundamentally kinetic characteristics of contemporary polemical poetry and its close relation to more spontaneous ‘protest poetry’; the ‘speed’ comes in as an imperative, for if poetry of any period is to be politically topical, it inevitably must be composed and published within a compressed time-frame, which is inescapably proscriptive depletive of prosodic polish. On reflection, due to its race to the page to chase the new political momentum and, however quixotically, attempt to arrest some of its worst excesses of propaganda before the rot truly set in, EV was perhaps as much inclined towards ‘protest poetry’ as it was less spontaneous ‘polemical poetry’ – though, taken altogether, it presented a tonal and stylistic heterogeneity which proved slightly foxing, or just plain inconvenient, to some. This book, which has taken a bit more time to put together, and this time by the ‘two heads’ of an editorial collaboration, displays among its still stylistically varied poetry some contributions that are ostensibly perhaps more considered, observational, satirical, or ‘processed’ in approach – as is perhaps inescapable after a year and a half of greater assimilation as to the effects of government policies and imposed austerities, composed as many have been at some distance to the barrage of black announcements during summer and autumn 2010. Having said that, there are many contributions to this book penned pre-austerity, but still germane to the more timeless themes of this campaign, and thus put to timely use. It is hoped this lends some parabolic muscle to an otherwise topically combative anthology.
Though this campaign is reticent to entirely buy into the sanctification of Auden as the nation’s posthumously inalienable yardstick of English ‘political’ poetry (an epithet in any case resting almost entirely on a small per cent of his output, between 1931-39) – would, moreover, be inclined to cite less canonised names of the last century as having been every bit as, if not more so empirically, ‘poets of the people’: Joe Corrie , Richard Free, William Robert Halls, Charles Poulson, William Dorrell, Leslie Mildiner, J.A. Elliott, Sue Shrapnel, Howard Mingham, to name just a handful of relatively fugitive 20th century working-class poets of more experientially tested social consciences – and would partly subscribe to notions of his and his circle’s rather ivied-quad ‘attitudinising’ in some aspects of their slightly gauche, undergraduate ‘Communist’ postures (which practically all of them ultimately abandoned anyhow), there is nevertheless a certain tidiness of thought to Auden’s deeply skeptical approach to the quandary of poetry and politics, activism and action, and the pros and cons of their fusing together, which at least on an intellectual level leavens any subsequent attempts at segueing these mediums.
Indeed, Auden emphasized the ‘parabolic’ quality of his poetry, the encouraging of the reader to think and make an informed ‘moral’ choice on an issue, rather than the ‘didactic’ function of instructing the reader not only towards a choice but also to a subsequent action. There is admittedly the risk of academic hair-splitting in such sub-textual analysis, and one might just as validly conclude that whether it is to encourage thought, guide choice, help one escape, help one confront, educate, empower, persuade, instruct – poetry is ultimately, as with any other literary medium, polemic included, formulated with the intention to ‘move’ the reader to a different emotional or intellectual ‘place’, and thereby inevitably to instigate some kind of psychical ‘change’, out of which all political thought, ideology and action is formulated. But, dialectically speaking, Auden’s prosodic contentions as to the most effective or authentic stylistics towards cutting a convincing and nourishing politico-poetic cloth superior to agitprop, is so comprehensive as to demand consideration, even if one’s own synthesis ultimately takes a different turn. In his Introduction to The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s, Samuel Hynes, in reference to Auden’s own poems and correspondences of the Thirties, sinks his teeth into the ‘Poetry’ and ‘action’ Audenian dialectic, its thesis and antithesis, and nubs the debate with a Hegelian synthesis:
In these questions there is a new and different conception of the literary act, adapted to a sense of the critical nature of time. The writer must be strict and adult, adjectives that impose moral discipline upon the act of writing. By his pen – in his role as a writer, and not simply as a citizen – he will make men aware of the need for action, and of what action means. His insight will give men strength to resist their enemies, without and within. This is more than simply a moral theory of literature, it asserts a direct relation between literature and action in the public world; writing becomes a mode of action.
This writer tends to err towards Hynes’s synthesis: poetry through its reciprocal relationship with a public symbiotically instrumental to its amplification and authentication on the published page, and in spite of some practitioners’ solipsistic fancies of inexhaustibly self-generated subjects, is implicitly political – as is all literature, and all mediums which mine human ideas and emotions: the public, as much as the private self, is an essential source of ‘subject’. It just so happens this sensibility reached a peak during the cultural neurosis of the Thirties’ ‘morbid age’; and arguably hit its nadir in the Nineties and ‘Noughties’, probably due to ‘the Third Way’s’ annulment between politics and party ideology. In our current decade, one with uncanny parallels to the former, there is an embryonic groundswell of political and protest poetry, some of which is ideologically tinged, and this is a partly expected artistic response to a new age of austerity. But the key difference between the Thirties and now is that the Oxford-bolstered Audenites were in the ascendant in terms of securing established platforms, while today, their inheritors, or rather, hereditary ‘attempters’, are not; and the majority of those who are, have apparently very different priorities altogether – hence a gaping polemical deficit in our mainstream literary culture (bar some valuable interventions against library closures).
Today, the poets of this country are only being encouraged to put their pens where their hearts are – hardly, one would think, such a tall sacrifice in comparison to those of the Auden generation. But, whereas the overarching quandary of the Auden generation was that of ‘poetry and action’, how far public crises should infringe on or influence the private imagination of the poet, much of today’s poetry mainstream seems more preoccupied with how far the poet’s private sphere and “rugged individualism” should circumnavigate public crises, as the euphemism “less declarative” (or cautionary and ‘non-committal’) implies. Many of today’s higher profile poets seem primarily ‘active’ in terms of self-promotion at all costs, which includes making occasional public gestures towards wider solidarities when it suits, and also subtly undermining the more ‘declarative’ initiatives of versifiers outside their charmed circles. The Audenians agonised over the trap of having to survive in bourgeois literary society while holding communist convictions inescapably committed to the uprooting of that society. No such anxieties appear to trouble today’s post-Thatcherite ‘baby boomer’ poets.
‘Eliotology’
Too many mainstream poets at the moment remain deafeningly silent, seemingly indifferent, or even plain evasive regarding the big topics. But none of these poets has yet deigned to elucidate the reasons for their marked lack of engagement in the political verse imperative of our time. Happily, at least 128 contemporary poets, a gallimaufry of established, upcoming and novice practitioners, have joined together in this gesture of solidarity with wider society; crucially, opting to confront the very real and urgent issues the majority of people in our communities are currently grappling with, and which affect us all – poets are not a species apart, but the mediumistic interlocutors of and for the public; the oratorical opposites to politicians. This is what, essentially, poetry should be doing, especially at times such as these; anything else is window-dressing (though frequently not even decoratively so), or as Auden put it, ‘charming holiday-reading’.
Let this not be the generation of poets who only go to finally validate unequivocally the pessimistic projections of socialist filmmaker and Mass Observation founder Humphrey Jennings in his 1940s polemical work Pandemonium (published 1987), as paraphrased by John Hartley in his own exceptional filmic-polemic Tele-ology – Studies in Television (Routledge, 1992; a copy of which I’ve only recently unearthed among the deciduous leaves of a local Oxfam shop – perhaps its inevitable home, given its high cultural ambition):
…the function of the poet has, historically, been subjected to a division of labour, such that poetry becomes more specialized, until at last it has no subject but itself.
Oh how painfully familiar-sounding in 2011. Hartley’s analysis of Jennings’ seminal views make up most of a particularly fascinating chapter, ‘The politics of photopoetry’. Jennings posited the contentious theory that ‘poetry’ had, in late the twentieth century, long since migrated from the page to the televisual and film mediums. Hartley’s reuptake of this thesis reads, indeed, even more presciently from our early twenty-first century viewpoint:
Meanwhile, the function originally performed by poet-sages like Homer, Hesiod [etc.]… namely to deal with ‘all problems of life – religious, scientific, social and personal’, did survive, but outside poetry.
This sounds chillingly contemporary.
Unlike the cultural criticism whose hegemony is being forged in Bond Street, Mayfair, Bloomsbury and Hampstead … Jennings does not seek to rubbish civilization in the name of culture. He assumes that ‘the poet’s vision does exist, that the imagination is part of life, that the exercise of imagination is an indispensable function’ of humanity … In the intellectual climate of mid-[twentieth] century England, this integrated theory of poetry and industry is nothing less than counter-hegemonic; subversive of the dominant cultural regime, and deliberately so…
Note the word ‘subversive’: not a term which could be reasonably associated with the vast swathe of mainstream British poetry written today, or arguably in the last twenty or so years (to my mind, the last mainstream example of political or subversive verse would be Tony Harrison’s V, way back in 1985!).
Ironically, in our context of the contemporary T.S. Eliot Prize, Hartley frequently alludes to T.S. Eliot the poet as a kind of proto-punk iconoclast who recognised modern poetry had to oppose popular culture if it was to remain true and relevant; and whilst one might rightly point out Eliot’s own self-confessed Nietzschean elitisms, Falangist sympathies and rather paradoxical ‘royalist’ Anglo-Catholicism, there can be little doubt that much of his oeuvre – particularly The Waste Land, ‘The Hollow Men’, ‘Gerontion’ and even aspects of the more subtly subversive Four Quartets) – was radically anti-materialist, even if also, tragically, anti-democratic (and in that, the clear influence of Eliot’s less celebrated poet harbinger, John Davidson, rears itself, though the latter’s stance was more experiential than the former’s). But a conformist or line-toer Eliot certainly was not. One wonders then what the T.S. Eliot Prize judge panels of the past decade or so would make of this snippet from Hartley on their award’s namesake:
…what’s important, to Eliot … is not the content of the ideology but its adversarial structure. For Eliot … the hope of poetry lies in pitting it against civilization; distancing the means of vision still further from the means of production. Culture [in this context, ‘high’ culture] is anti-technological, anti-modern, anti-popular. Popular culture is thus structurally the opposite of ‘live’ culture; that is, it is death. Its content doesn’t matter.
Have the T.S. Eliot Prize seers forgotten the very poetic mission of their chosen patron? Certainly, if last year’s rather typically pedestrian shortlist was anything to go by, it would seem so. There was, as well, no discernible sign of a meritocratic ‘opening up’ or burgeoning sense of inclusiveness: a now fairly typical ‘pass the parcel’ seems chronic, as evidenced by the entirely establishment-centric 2011 T.S. Eliot ‘ten’, all high profile ‘names’, carved up largely between the ever-competing ‘Cabers’ and ‘Picaxes’. So it still seems, disappointingly, that there remains a depressingly convincing case for drawing parallels between the ‘political’ and ‘poetical’ classes – theses of protectorates of ‘vested interests’ at unbridgeable distances have much polemical room; as does such sharp-toothed satire as might suggest that for the future the Eliot include the disclaimer: Please note that any entries received from the more diminutive imprints will not get further than the filterers’ slush-pile…
But any reader of modern poetry who casts his/her net wider than the select six or so imprints could tell you that while no doubt these shortlisted titles have their merits, any implication that they are conveniently (given their salubrious credentials) representative of the best in contemporary poetry requires some considerable suspension of disbelief: many could quite easily cite alternative top ‘tens’ of 2011 which would more than hold a candle to the Eliot’s. So it seems that in a year of radical cultural upheaval and dissent, this prestigious prize is still carrying the baton for a self-perceived poetical ‘elite’ (defined within its own strict remit). But how oppositely its purpose flip-flops forward compared to the life-long aesthetic strides its namesake’s own oeuvre exemplified! (One wonders whether today’s more experimental modernist schools shouldn’t just start their own annual competition and call it the John Betjeman Prize). Eliot’s own take on ‘elitism’ seemed more geared towards experimentalism than a seemingly eternal ‘tried-and-tested-ism’. Eliot was implicitly the muddier of mainstreams, a light-fingered conjurer in waders. He was essentially a ‘cerebral’ poet, albeit one with a deft emotional touch when appropriate, which, for instance, elevated his Joycean ‘Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ above the merely philosophical, to a level of epiphany, a masterfully disciplined ‘outpouring’ of middle-class neurosis more English than the English. In other senses – his Classicism, his anarchist ‘spiritually aristocratic’ Nietzschean predilections, his self-proclaimed ‘royalism’ etc. – Eliot was a card-carrying cultural ‘elitist’, and while his was not a creed I could comfortably sign up to, the contention here is that the poetic cerebration and ‘high style’ Eliot enlisted into and championed through his own work and others’ hardly seems to be echoed, in the main, by the often ‘safe’ and un-ambitious shortlists annually compiled in his name.
For those who might wish for some critical background to this point of view, I’d recommend the appropriately sallow conclusions of F.R. Leavis in his New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), more particularly his deeply pessimistic 1950 postscript in the 70s’ Pelican reprint, in which he expresses his despair at how poetry since a perceived Renaissance in the 1930s, in his view, took completely the wrong path (one which, for many, it still follows today, 70-odd years later).
What we seem to have much of the time is the worst of both worlds: a form of ‘poetry elitism’ which seems to frown on anything seen to be overly stylised, unclear (or ‘obscurantist’), or intellectual; one not primarily based on discernibly sound or objective judgement formed from any obvious poetic qualities, but more on the absence of them, and a perceived suggestion therefore – often through elliptical tone or treatment of topic – of an unquantifiable ‘sublime’, in part, or largely, reliant on the readers’ own interpretations (though not quite in the sense of Empsonian ambiguity). This could be seen as a means of democratising poetics, of involving the reader more in the poetry, chiefly in trying to fathom its meaning, purpose, or even whether it is poetry at all, which can result more in making poets out of the readers than distinguishing the poets themselves (though I’d think this is not intentional); but more often than not the effect comes across as vague, overly impersonal, even unimaginative and dull – or one might dare say, bloodlessly bourgeois, as if composing a poem has become more of an obligation, habit or class-pastime than a creative impulsion or expressive reflex. There is as well a shadow criteria at work, a perhaps slightly unconscious journalistic ‘package’-approach: biographical tick boxes, ‘merit’ of high-achieving educational background (as if, anyhow, one’s academic credentials have any bearing on one’s creative ability), prosodic ‘polish’, accessibility, commercial appeal, pared down ‘clarity’ of expression, and other factors seem, often transparently, to come into play in deciding which up-and-coming poets will be precipitated as the precocious cream of their generations. If, however, as the case may still be, such approaches are believed by their apparatchiks to angle towards genuine critical objectivity, then the only other tenable conclusion can be that there is too a ‘wilful blindness’ towards anything that stylistically or topically diverges from a thinly camouflaged ‘formula’.
This seems then to be an elitism based not so much on originality, distinctiveness or experiment, as on an approximate score of perceived ‘marketability’ – even if, as most of us sadly recognise, contemporary poetry barely has any market – arguably often based on unthreateningly mouldable, even deferential, qualities, as much as talent. Some might argue more sourly that not only has poetry throughout the past thirty-odd years ‘sold out’ to a rather shadowy populism, but it has in addition, failed to grow significantly more popular than if it had retrenched itself in the stubbornly imaginative grooves of mid-twentieth century modernism (again, one might seek out F.R. Leavis, or, to be more up to date on the debate, Andrew Duncan’s The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry (Salt Publishing, 2003), for a more in-depth polemic on these issues).
So we seem to have a kind of ‘inverted elitism’ where – rather analogous to the mock-egalitarianism of comprehensive education in an otherwise irrationally competitive society – a kind of aesthetic ‘communism’ (in the most simplistic and misinterpreted meaning of the term) is implausibly embedded in ‘the formula’ used to gauge and rank perceived contemporary poetic quality; one which seems to enshrine within it a kind of Hemmingway-esque emphasis on ‘omission’, along with a distrust of rigorous language, and an allergy to poetic personality.
Perhaps it is inevitable in any prize system which almost exclusively uses practitioners in a particular medium to decide who gets the Smarties, judges will consciously or unconsciously look for submissions which stylistically and topically reflect the clear influence of their own poetry, or the promise of its further development, and therefore of their own posterity of oeuvre and influence. In such a materially disenfranchised medium as poetry, where publication and critical ‘recognition’ are often the primary or only rewards, it is even more inevitable that there will be an element of abject egoism coming into play when deciding which poets to pass the podium to. No poets are perfect, few are moral paragons; but at the same time, an increasingly prevalent self-aggrandizing, proprietorial posturing of some through a subterfuge of ‘open-mindedness’ and ‘objective’ taints the public perception of the modern day ‘poet’ to a distinctly unattractive tincture.
To those more cynical social-solipsists or closet Ubermenchen among contemporary poets, carping – or not even bothering to carp – from the sidelines, we should also take note of the prosodic insights of Alan Bold in his Introduction to the Penguin Book of Socialist Verse (1970):
The function of politics in poetry is to show the reader how events external to his inviolability as an individual continually impinge on his behaviour.
Such polemic is very much rooted in Caudwellian dialectic. This also links in to a more recent polemic by the aforementioned Alan Dent – editor of The Penniless Press – in his incisive introduction to Common Cause by French socialist poet Francis Coombes (Smokestack):
However great the contributions of individuals of genius, talent is worthless outside a social context which permits it to be realised … We are all born with a unique genetic endowment, but nothing can be made of it without society.
Dent also reminds us of a brilliant insight into the very distinctive, phantom-like but spiritually crippling nature of ‘poverty’ in advanced capitalist societies once made by one Marxist-physicist named Albert Einstein:
If the crippling were obvious, if the poor all had rickets … we would act; but the crippling is to identity so we can claim it’s nothing to do with us.
But it is to do with us, all of us, and arguably poets as much as politicians. None of us, including poets, no matter how solipsistic, are islands, or else they would not be poets in the first place; poetry is ultimately about people, it is fundamentally a political art form. The more concentrated and explicit medium of ‘political’ poetry is particularly vulnerable to snapshot prosodic criticism, probably because it so easily runs the risk – even frequently by its more accomplished and experienced exponents – of metaphor-light didacticism, or as reductionists and post-modernists might gauchely term it, ‘sententiousness’. There is always the potential pitfall of inadvertently subordinating aesthetic discipline for polemical message; but even some of the most venerated poets of the past themselves occasionally fell foul of such occupational hazards, Milton, Shelley, Byron, Auden, Harrison, Mitchell among them. But isn’t it still better to at least try; to rise to the challenge of one of the most difficult but fundamental disciplines of poetry; and thereby at least to, if only symbolically, raise the stakes of the medium? Certainly the composition of authentic political poetry is a precarious and formidably hurdled lap to run, and demands a considerable mixture of skills to convince both poetically and politically. As Alan Bold put it:
It is necessary for the socialist poet to have more impressive technical equipment than his apolitical contemporaries because his task is that much more important.
Would it that Bold’s outward-looking dictum for the social and political purpose of poetry inform today’s post-Thatherite individualist consensus; in spite of the mainstream’s almost mock-communist aesthetic principles as to the accepted contemporary poetic formula of pared-down, uncluttered, impersonal, ekphrastic and epiphanic prose-poems, and its allergy to overt didacticism, confessionalism, ‘sentiment’, ornament and verbalism, the fashionable prosodic hegemony nevertheless heartily promotes and perpetuates a fetishist culture of reputational narcissism among its most celebrated exponents, which rather contradicts itself. No doubt Bold and other like-minded socialist poets would prize far more a poetry culture in which individuality is emphasized over individualism, where the exact opposite was prevalent: one rich in variety of style, tone and topic among a true meritocracy of exponents whose poetry alone, not half-manufactured or pecking-ordered ‘reputations’, precede them, but never to such pretentious purposes as to obscure the rainbow of alternative voices in the hyperbolic shadow of a cloud-elect. Such phenomena, in any case, often prove ephemeral, in spite of wish-fulfilling prophecies. As Bold further remarked:
… it is wrong and an act of artistic cowardice to imagine that the currently fashionable or approved constitutes the work of permanent importance.
Alan Morrison
Paxman at the Mainstream Launderette
It is quite symbolic of the solipsistic ‘sleep-in’ of the ‘upper’ poetry scene that this year’s token ‘layman’ judge of the Forward Prize, Newsnight stalwart Jeremy Paxman, has commented that contemporary poetry –at least, that portion of it filtered routinely through the ‘big six’ (or sometimes ‘big eight’) poetry publishing cartel– is increasingly out-of-kilter with the climate and concerns of wider society.
There have been previous rhetorical incursions on contemporary poetry’s perceived socio-political solipsism by left-wing literary figures such as John Pilger and Terry Eagleton. But Jeremy Paxman, a household name of our times, whose long, griffin-like face with its permanent gadrooned grimace is now something of a national heirloom, is an unexpected ‘coup’ for today’s poetry-sceptics –even if, as with the aforementioned cultural pundits, he is making his judgements on the basis of exposure to a small sample of contemporary poetry rinsed through the ‘Mainstream Laundrette’.
Paxman’s comments were included in a piece by Alison Flood in The Guardian of 2 June, and I excerpt parts of it most relevant to my following responses:
Shelley had it that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, and that “poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds”. For Jeremy Paxman, though, it is an art form that has “connived at its own irrelevance”, as he believes that poets today have stopped talking to the public and are only addressing each other.
Paxman called for an “inquisition” in which “poets [would be] called to account for their poetry”, appearing before a panel of the public where they would have to “explain why they chose to write about the particular subject they wrote about, and why they chose the particular form and language, idiom, the rest of it, because it would be a really illuminating experience for everybody”.
The television presenter was speaking after judging this year’s Forward prize for poetry…
…Paxman said there was a “whole pile of really good poems here”, and “nothing on the shortlist that I don’t feel better for having read”. But he also expressed the wish that poetry more generally “would raise its game a little bit, raise its sights”, and “aim to engage with ordinary people much more”.
“I think poetry has really rather connived at its own irrelevance and that shouldn’t happen, because it’s the most delightful thing,” said Paxman. “It seems to me very often that poets now seem to be talking to other poets and that is not talking to people as a whole.” …
Michael Symmons Roberts, a poet who has both won and judged the Forward prize, said that Paxman’s proclamation was “not without foundation in terms of the symptoms – it would be stupid for poets to say poetry is as dominant as the novel” – but he disagreed with Paxman’s diagnosis.
“Poetry doesn’t have the currency in our culture that novels and films have – people who would be embarrassed not to have read the latest Julian Barnes or Martin Amis are not the slightest bit embarrassed not to have read the latest John Burnside or Carol Ann Duffy. But I don’t believe it’s quite good enough to say this is a problem of poets and poetry – it’s far more complex,” said Roberts. …
“There is an awful lot of very powerful, lyrical, and readable poetry being written today,” he said, but what was needed was education, because “we have lost the sense that poetry sits halfway between prose and music – that you can’t expect to read it like a novel. We are quite used to downloading an album and listening to certain tracks … poetry needs to be consumed in that way. …
Dr Jeremy Noel-Tod, editor of the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry, said he tended to respond to sentiments like Paxman’s …: “Lyric poetry has rarely produced immediately popular art. But the poetry that people need emerges over time. And very often it’s by writers considered irrelevant or insufficiently ordinary by the commentators of their day”…
But Susannah Herbert, director of the Forward Arts Foundation, welcomed Paxman’s “splendidly provocative proposals for a Forward inquisition”, expressing the hope that they would “kick start an overdue national debate about the power of well-chosen words, communication and the role of poetry in our collective lives”. …
William Sieghart, who founded the Forward prizes in 1991, said the writers on the shortlists “bring news that stays news, in fresh and startling language”, and that their voices “remind readers that, in an age of shortened attention spans, good poetry can communicate insights and visions with a power other art forms can only envy”.
Suffice it to say that there’s not really a lot of point excerpting this year’s Forward shortlist itself since its poet-and-imprint ‘roll of honour’ (or, replicated ‘pecking order’) is, almost by tradition, pretty predictable. And perhaps this is, in part, what Jeremy Paxman is picking up on.
As to the token defences from emissaries of the ‘Poetry Illuminati’: as is often the case, these come across as spurts of complacency mixed with wilful blindness, dialectical inconsistency (if not contradiction) and a disturbingly familiar obfuscation and unsubstantiated rebuttal which we’re more used to hearing from today’s politicians (particularly those currently in power).
As I wrote in my polemic on contemporary poetry culture, ‘Reoccupying ‘Auden Country” (which can be read at http://internationaltimes.it/reoccpying-auden-country/ as well as in The Robin Hood Book – Verse Versus Austerity), today it seems that the ‘upper’ poetry echelons sport not so much ‘political’ poets as ‘politician’ poets. Like politicians, many high profile contemporary poets appear too careful and economical with their use of language to risk articulating anything so near-taboo as an ‘opinion’. For too long now Auden’s much de-contextualised trope, ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’, has been misappropriated by subsequent generations of poets as some kind of passport to an apolitical Pimlico –or we might call it, Apolitico.
In spite of the near-collapse of capitalism and over four years of remorseless austerity cuts designed to resuscitate it, we still appear to be stuck in the rut of a period of Poetry Realpolitik, or ‘Realpoetik’, which pre-dates the economic crash and has apparently continued pretty much as if little has happened since it. This in itself marks a form of what William F. Ogburn termed ‘cultural lag’, that culture takes time to catch up with technological changes, and that social problems and conflicts are caused by this lag. Only that in this particular case, the ‘lag’ is a seeming incapacity of the poetry scene to catch up with social and political changes.
What a great pity and wasted opportunity that while we have been forced by elective Tory austerity to endure a repeat-Thirties, our highest profile poets appear to have been repeating the ‘Georgian’ period of 1912-22. The two chief differences between today and the Thirties, to our modern detriment, are the absences of both a prominent ‘political’ opposition in poetry, and a proper Opposition in Parliament (that is, of one which actually articulates any alternative to the Government’s austerity agenda).
In the Thirties we could look to Auden, Spender, Day Lewis, MacNiece, Orwell, Caudwell et al, and to a principled Labour Opposition led by Arthur Henderson, and then by Christian Socialist George Lansbury. Today’s equivalents of such poetical and political firebrands are entirely in the shadows of the back rows and backbenches, while paler flames of Realpoetik and politik splutter from the pusillanimous tallow of a candle which cannot be held to them.
If we first take Michael Symmonds Roberts’ initial premise: “I don’t believe it’s quite good enough to say this is a problem of poets and poetry – it’s far more complex” –well, he may have some point, and to give him his due he does go on to expand what he means, but isn’t the choice of language chillingly familiar here in terms of fashionable contemporary ‘politician-speak’.
Beginning with the polite denial: “I don’t believe…”, which is uncannily similar to the average minister’s “I don’t accept that” or “I don’t recognise that characterisation”. Then the pedagogic clause by which the criticism itself, rather than the target of the criticism, is subjected to qualitative scrutiny: “(I don’t believe) it’s quite good enough to say…”.
‘Good enough’ for whom precisely, the object of criticism? Or is this shorthand for ‘This is actually just very inconvenient’? Or simply, ‘I’m all right Jack’? Symmonds Roberts himself is a prolific beneficiary of our poetry prize culture, having won practically every major award going –Eric Gregory, Whitbread, Forward, Jerwood, T.S. Eliot shortlist, and 2013 winner of the Costa (the implausible ‘domino effect’ for a select few of the contemporary poetry rapture). So it’s possible that his opinions in this particular area are just a tiny bit rose-tinted.
But the phraseology of his counterintuitive response seems to be simply turning the topic on his head, as if in lieu of an actual valid counter-argument. Surely what clearly isn’t “good enough” is that for the umpteenth time we’re back here again on the same ‘Round Robin Rondeau’ of gainsaying refrains seemingly designed to magic away legitimate criticisms of a perceived ‘closed shop’ prize scene, until the next year’s Verse Déjà vu…?
Symmonds Roberts then comments: “There is an awful lot of very powerful, lyrical, and readable poetry being written today”. To which one might well respond, well yes, there certainly is, but is much of it getting through the Forward filtering system? Since, if it were, would those such as Paxman be urging poets to ‘raise their game’?
Next comes an unhelpful analogy coupled with some dubious terminology: “We are quite used to downloading an album and listening to certain tracks … poetry needs to be consumed in that way”. Firstly, many would argue that if poetry is comparable to an ‘album’, then it would more likely be the equivalent of Pink Floyd pop-symphonies than any mere commercial gatherings of hit singles. Secondly, there is that really unhelpful and ill-chosen term “consumed”.
To risk pedantry, or even seeming ‘elitism’, many would argue that of all art forms poetry has very little if anything to do with ‘consumption’ (except perhaps in the tubercular sense) but more to do with ‘absorption’ or ‘reception’; and, unlike most escapist entertainments of capitalist culture –such as pop music and cinema, which provide what would be termed in sociological parlance ‘immediate gratification’– poetry, rather like classical music or spirituality, is not ‘consumed’ so much as ‘imbibed’, but, more often than not, through an initial conscious focus and effort on behalf of the prospective appreciator. Indeed, rather than ‘consumed’, poetry is ‘appreciated’. Or would we now also argue the religious ‘consume’ God? Even in terms of the Eucharist this hardly seems an entirely appropriate description.
To reduce the topic of poetry to consumerist standards is to –deliberately or not– dumb it down; although I will concede here that Symmonds Roberts was responding to a charge which seemed, at least ostensibly, geared towards implying a sense of cultural exclusiveness and inaccessibility of contemporary poetry (while, quite oppositely, many of us would argue that much contemporary poetry is so ‘accessible’ and ‘plain-speaking’ as to be almost indistinguishable from average prose).
However, I don’t think this is what Paxman means, even if on the surface it might initially seem so: known for his own rather specialist tastes and interests, and general contempt for commercial ‘junk culture’, it is highly unlikely Paxman is suggesting that poetry should become more ‘hip’ and ‘street’. I think Paxman is talking not so much about ‘style’ here as subject and substance: he does, indeed, specify that he feels “poets now seem to be talking to other poets and that is not talking to people as a whole”, which would suggest to my own reading that Paxman is implying it is what contemporary poets are talking about, rather than necessarily how they are talking about it, that is the main problem.
And, as is fairly typical today, practically the only remotely ‘political’ topic higher profile poets tackle is that of ‘war’, which, in spite of its undoubted importance, particularly in a period of prolific global armed conflicts, is nevertheless a ‘single issue’, and one which most people, particularly the artistically inclined, fairly unanimously deplore. It is, thus, and in spite of its abjectly unsafe nature in real life, a fairly ‘safe’ poetic topic, since it is broadly outside the remit of the ideological tensions and sensitivities of topics relating to, for instance, domestic politics.
And domestic politics, those thorny topics perilously close to home, being ‘on our own doorsteps’, are infinitely more challenging to tackle in poetry. War is the easiest evil with by which to avail devastating verse; it is a crie de Coeur thrown out to the converted; and its countervailing is a universal cause that only dictators and armaments capitalists would dissent from.
It’s far harder to use one’s verse to vocalise those less panoramic causes specific to polarised communities on the domestic front; far more difficult to dramatise the often painfully mundane but no less significant or profound sufferings of those living in poverty ‘amidst plenty’. There are many poets writing today on such unspectacular but important themes (and a fair crop of them can be found under the Smokestack imprint), but today’s poetries tackling the plight of the unemployed, the Atos-afflicted sick and disabled, the victims of the bedroom tax, and the lengthening queues outside food banks are, like the very impoverished lives they strive to give voice to, seemingly invisible to the likes of the Forward, Eliot or Costa sifters. In the charmed circles, poetry solipsism appears to rule supreme.
In his seminal polemic on the role of poetry in society, Illusion and Reality (1937), Christopher Caudwell argued that what he saw as ‘bourgeois poetry’ or ‘capitalist poetry’ was turning in on itself, distancing itself from wider society, becoming more irrelevant through over-specialisation, and hence inescapably approaching its own annihilation. Caudwell was of course writing in the Thirties, a time at which, ironically, poetry was opening out in terms of social and political engagement through the ‘Auden School’ (in graphic contrast to the supplemental solipsism of our otherwise parallel economic period). However, he would have had much in mind at the time the relatively recent shockwaves of avant-garde Twenties Modernism, which significantly altered the tectonics of literature –an era when, as Cyril Connolly put it in his Enemies of Promise (1938), ‘the Mandarins ruled supreme’.
The Modernist tide peaked early with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses, both published in 1922 (Joyce’s monumental mythopoeic bombshell of a book had been serialised previously between 1918-20, but only in America, in a journal called, ironically, The Little Review) –and while Eliot’s esoteric masterwork, though praised by an appreciative circle of his contemporaries, was otherwise pretty much overlooked at the time (and emphatically failed the litmus test as to what constituted ‘poetry’ to that supplemental gendarme of the establishment, the Tory Literary Supplement (TLS)).
Ulysses also passed by the mainstream of the day, and was, as with The Waste Land, lauded only by the most ‘forward’-looking fellow-travellers (in Joyce’s case, ironically, the critical transfusion came from Eliot in The Dial; though having said that, Virginia Woolf, herself an exponent of ‘stream-of-consciousness’, and so perhaps feeling competitively threatened by Ulysses, famously dismissed it at the time as a ‘memorable catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster’).
But it falls today to one Dr Jeremy Noel-Tod, editor of the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry, to take the past on board by remarking with sympathy for Paxman’s standpoint: “Lyric poetry has rarely produced immediately popular art. But the poetry that people need emerges over time. And very often it’s by writers considered irrelevant or insufficiently ordinary by the commentators of their day”. Although given the arguable ‘ordinariness’ –or, in a socio-political sense, ‘irrelevance’– of much high profile verse at this time, the dialectical trajectory of Noel-Tod’s comment isn’t so easy to determine.
But returning to Caudwell: the ‘specialisation’ of which he wrote was as much concerned with ‘style’ as with ‘subject’. By contrast, today, one suspects such criticisms as Paxman’s are more concerned with the over-specialisation of poetic ‘subject’: i.e.: poets are using their poetry as a means of communicating to other poets, rather than to “people as a whole”; and this is much more to do with their choice of topic for conversation, than, necessarily, the patina of the conversation itself. Or, as Paxman put it in a trope worthy of Christopher Caudwell, or Cyril Connolly: poetry has “connived at its own irrelevance”.
Susannah Herbert at least appears to welcome such an ‘overdue national debate’ –even if it’s a debate which significant sections of the poetry scene has been having for many years, but which organisations such as the Forward Foundation, of which Herbert is currently director, have apparently either missed, or simply ignored. Until, that is, a media heavyweight such as Jeremy Paxman puts in his tuppence-worth!
Less open to criticism and more inclined to the perennial poetry-solipsism comes the response from Forward founder William Sieghart –a more typically reality-denying sound-bite in defence of a paralytic status quo: that the poets on the shortlist “bring news that stays news, in fresh and startling language”.
Firstly, news never ‘stays news’ –that’s why it’s ‘news’: it is about ‘the moment’, it is ephemeral. Moreover, only time can decide what will “last”, and, historically, more often than not it has been that work either overlooked or dismissed for its un-fashionableness in its own time, and far less so that lauded at the time of its publication, which tends to “last” (again, we return to Dr Noel-Tod’s point).
Prizes and honours are often the temporal sops for more ephemeral and/or sharp-elbowed talents, while posterity tends to be the posthumous consolation for lifetime refuseniks. Indeed, as Cyril Connolly argued back in the 1930s in his literary polemic Enemies of Promise:
At the present time for a book to be produced with any hope of lasting half a generation, of outliving a dog or a car, of surviving the lease of a house or the life of a bottle of champagne, it must be written against the current.
Going by such an argument, it would seem unlikely that the poster poets of the contemporary poetry ‘mainstream’ will also prove to be those voices which “last”; it is more likely that those which currently swim against the ‘mainstream’, and thus well away from its awarding radars, will be the ones to resurface in the future. But that is, of course, only if one goes by that argument. As with most subjects, Connolly also had something to say on this, in Enemies of Promise:
We have seen how the style of a book may affect its expectation of life, passing through a charnel house in which we have observed the death and decomposition of many works confident ten years ago of longevity, hailed as masterpieces of their period and now equal in decay.
Secondly, Sieghart’s ecstatically-toned phrase (which expresses a sense of excitement practically no one else outside those either on the shortlist or the judging panel actually shares), literally reads like an advertising slogan, a salesman’s habitual spiel, rather than anything resembling a defence of poetry. Almost contradictorily, however, Sieghart then says, with –at least in theory– much more credence: “in an age of shortened attention spans, good poetry can communicate insights and visions with a power other art forms can only envy”. That’s very probably true –except many would argue that such poetry rarely if ever actually features in such shortlists.
Quite apart from all these discrepancies, in any case, many today no doubt privately regard pretty much all prizes in the arts as not only qualitatively irrelevant, but actually extremely damaging, if not traumatising, to the health of the arts. Since, inescapably, in attempting to compete for such annual back-slapping trophies, artists, or in this case, poets, end up, whether consciously or not, tailoring their poetry –both in terms of style, tone and even subject– to the perceived ‘tastes’ of a rota of established arbiters, most of whom are published by the same ‘six-pack’ imprints, and almost always one of whom is a previous Forward winner.
This means in the end that ‘fashion’ and ‘formula’ have an overt influence on actual artistic/poetic product, as if their chief function is to vicariously tailor bespoke poetics to fit the ‘taste-reputation’ of the particular prize-giving body.
In Caudwellian terms, this is an ultimate illustration of how the arts are adulterated and commoditised under the auspices of capitalism. And capitalism is an implicitly philistine modus operandi, since it is pathologically incapable of distinguishing between authentic talent and talented marketability; it can only perceive merit in that which has a figurative price-tag attached, which pretty much instantly rules out almost all authentic artistic expression, particularly that most likely to “last”.
But to return to Paxman: on his quoting from Shelley, I’m reminded of my own former punning on that famous phrase, to the effect that some contemporary poets aren’t so much the ‘unacknowledged legislators…’ as ‘hedge-betters… of the world’. The following quotes are particularly instructive in this context:
…the function of the poet has, historically, been subjected to a division of labour, such that poetry becomes more specialized, until at last it has no subject but itself.
(John Hartley in Tele-ology – Studies in Television (1992), commenting on Humphrey Jennings’ Pandemonium (1987))
The function of politics in poetry is to show the reader how events external to his inviolability as an individual continually impinge on his behaviour.
(Alan Bold, ‘Introduction’, The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse (1970))
Depressingly as ever, it seems once again that the Forward still refuses to actually move forward in terms of offering a more imaginative and representational range of contemporary poetries, as opposed to simply offering the same revolving table of ‘house dishes’ served up by the same metropolitan imprints. (For example, does Hugo Williams have a Forward Loyalty Card?). Contrapuntal to calls to rein in the Banks, should we also be calling for greater regulation of the poetry prize circuit?
Unless it really is the case that, just as many still believe that the highest positions in our society are occupied by those of the greatest ‘merit’ rather than the greatest hereditary ‘privileges’ and accompanying ‘opportunities’/nepotisms (public school, Oxbridge etc.), and/or those with the most athletic stamina for ‘networking’ (there’s one poetry prize called the Bluenose –it can only be a matter of time until a ‘Brownose’ is founded!), the ‘top’ poetry imprints continue to hold monopoly on the prizes because they are genuinely the ‘best’ imprints and thus publish the ‘best’ poets…?! (And the seldom addressed issue of poetry nepotism –the perennial ‘marking each other’s homework– is an ‘elephant-in-the-room’ which will, I predict, stampede its’ way out into some or other polemical clearing at some point in the future).
Whichever windmill one chooses to tilt at on this issue, one thing is increasingly clear about common public perceptions of our evermore specialised and solipsistic upper ‘poetical class’: they are becoming as out-of-touch with ordinary people and the social and political issues which affect their daily lives as is our plutocratic political class (which also of course creates a lot of these issues). This is, essentially, what Paxman seems to be picking up on.
But many would argue (though very few publicly) that it’s an even direr state of affairs than simply poetry solipsism towards wider society: that what we have currently, and have had for at least two decades now, is a ‘top poetry 1%’ out-of-touch with the 99% of fellow practitioners –a kind of poetry apartheid, as exemplified by pecking order prizes, a top six-pack of metropolitan imprints, and myopic flagship journals. That the high profile poetry scene of today is little more than a shop window display arranged by window dressers who double up as the shoppers (while a plethora of powerful but uninitiated voices are left to mist up the glass with window shoppers’ sighs). Suffice it to say, if Christopher Caudwell was around today, he’d probably be in need of intensive cognitive behavioural therapy to help him cope with the consolidation of his dreaded archetype: a poetico-capitalist dystopia.
Whatever the real truth, for many today, the poetry prize shortlists tend to serve as an annual ‘Oh God, is it that time of year already?’ moment. They come round like recurring hangovers we’d thought we’d shaken off from the last binge, only to find they’d just been dormant, temporarily numbed by a hair of the dog, and are now kicking back in with a vengeance. These are ‘cultural hangovers’, and their primary aim is to discourage future indulgence.
They are also ‘cultural lags’ (or ‘drags’), and ones which, as with Royal pageants and jubilees, celebrate cultural redundancy and prestigious nothing. Like most traditions, they are bad habits on autopilot, and, as with austerity capitalism, are only capable of repeating themselves as acclaimed mistakes, in spite of public disaffection and disinterest. They’re also like so-called hangover cures –moulting hairs of the dog: initially analgesic, but only synthetically restorative, and ultimately ineffective and acridly nauseating. They are annual celebrations of everything that’s nepotistic and dysfunctional about our society –the poetry equivalent of the culturally redundant annual Honours Lists.
They are ‘traditions’; and ‘tradition’ is the flat Alka-seltzer of cultural dehydration.
Colin Robinson
Just like home – mental health and homelessness – a short comparison between the British and Australian experience
Homelessness in Britain has some significant variances both within the country itself and in comparison with Australia. The most striking difference is that homelessness strategies are developed and funded by local authorities which means that in a city like London you can be provided with one type of service on this side of the street and be treated completely differently on the other. I assure you that this does in fact happen. As a consequence, one of the favoured homeless strategies is diversion. This is based on the spurious notion of local connection which means that if you’re last place of abode was in the borough of Camden (this counts even if you were sleeping rough there) and you slip over the border into the City of Westminster, you will be diverted back to Camden rather than being offered a service.
Similarly, although mental health has increasingly become a major public issue it still is approached in an extremely piecemeal fashion due to the differences between the priorities and resources of local authorities. For homeless people the system is unnecessarily complex with most of the responsibility falling on their shoulders. The sense that if you are homeless and suffer from mental health difficulties it is basically your own fault, seems to have greater currency here than I remember was the case in the land of Oz. Although, like the memory of perfect weather, this may be a myth brought on by extended absence.
The first British homeless agency I visited on my study tour in 2001 was The Passage in London. The Passage operates the largest day centre for homeless people in Europe with anywhere between 200 and 300 individuals accessing services daily. What struck me on my first visit was the similarity between the group of (mainly) men using the day centre and the men seeking assistance at The Matthew Talbot in Sydney. The clothes and baggage and general demeanour were the same. Since then I’ve returned on a number of occasions to The Passage and have, in fact, been employed by the organisation to help them re-develop the services they are offering. Part of this work has been to constantly review those participating in the services so as to respond more effectively to any emerging needs.
So who comes to The Passage? As I found with my work in Sydney the age group of the homeless population has steadily decreased over the past 15 to 20 years. The average age at The Passage is early to mid thirties. Very few of the older men or women who used to constitute the street homeless population are still around, either they have died or they have been successful in obtaining accommodation from the ever-diminishing supply of social housing. It’s worth noting that The Passage has recently discontinued a project aimed at working with those over 55 because there weren’t enough people who needed the service.
Another point of similarity is the fact that only 10% of those coming to The Passage are women. This is because those sleeping rough in London overwhelmingly tend to be men and, as a result of this, their presence dominates the service. In turn this may act as a disincentive for women who may not be actually on the street but living in poor quality and inappropriate accommodation. A group of workers at The Passage are currently examining this phenomenon to see if a greater balance can be achieved.
One of the projects I draw most satisfaction from in my years of work in Australia was convening the steering committee that oversaw the production of Down and Out in Sydney. This well respected and groundbreaking report gave clear evidence that 75% of those using inner city Sydney homeless services either had or had experienced a significant mental health problem. Those of you familiar with the findings of that research would also remember the startling percentage of those interviewed who had suffered from trauma. 93% had experienced a serious traumatic event usually involving violence of one kind or another.
Whilst there have been some in-depth studies of mental health and homelessness in Britain none has been as detailed as Down and Out in Sydney. As a consequence, and as a result of my own observations, I doubt the current London estimates of the percentage of street homeless who have mental health difficulties. Generally the figure of 35% is given, but this seems low in the same way that the notorious street counts that are conducted to ascertain the numbers sleeping rough in Britain, seem to be artificially low.
The services provided to homeless people experiencing mental health problems vary considerably. While they are not completely inadequate neither could they be described as comprehensive. Somewhat like the situation, as I remember it, in Sydney. Too often appropriate and timely support fails to materialise. Community mental health teams are run off their feet and can only attend in the direst emergencies. Personality disorder? Let’s leave that one over here shall we in the too hard dustbin.
Despite a variety of systemic problems like the aforementioned drying up of social housing, there are some very good, on the ground projects aimed at those with mental health problems. The Passage, for example, has been running an excellent dual diagnosis programme bringing together a range of individual and group activities and therapies but, wouldn’t you know it, the funding has run out and nobody, especially not the National Health Service (NHS) seems to be prioritising funding in this incredibly important area.
Another service that works with The Passage provides much needed counselling particularly to those experiencing depression. As is clearly obvious to anyone who has worked with homeless people depression and anxiety are epidemic. And why wouldn’t they be depressed or anxious given the daily circumstances a homeless person has to face. This, on top of the often-traumatic events that led to their homelessness, makes it surprising that more homeless people don’t choose to give the game away completely.
Counselling, or more simply to provide opportunities for people to have positive and friendly engagement, can do wonders for anyone’s mental health. Yet it has traditionally, in Britain at least, been a low priority for homeless services and the treatment of mental health problems.
Increasingly in my work with homeless people in Britain I believe it is this positive and personal engagement coupled with stimulating and challenging activities that can do most to improve a person’s chance of surviving homelessness and building a new life in an often hostile environment. I think this is particularly true if mental health problems are part of the story. To many this may sound overly simplistic but it’s amazing how often this basic, warm and welcoming engagement can work. Depression and anxiety, loneliness and lack of confidence need to be addressed much more effectively than they are currently if homelessness is to be eradicated.
This article was originally published in the magazine Parity produced by the Australian Council of Homeless Persons
Fred Russell
Evolution 2: The Roots of Racism
Racism is generally defined as hostility to racial groups other than one’s own. Bigotry is a somewhat broader term, taking in anyone different from oneself and including religious, ethnic and deviant groups. Whatever the term we use, it is generally understood that the labeling of such groups as inferior serves the purpose of magnifying the self-esteem of the racist or bigot. This need clearly derives from the racist’s or bigot’s own feelings of inferiority, though many individuals perceived as strong also reveal themselves to be racists or bigots and therefore, at bottom, are not so strong after all, even if they turn out to be Hitlers.
Racism, however, has an evolutionary root. Recognition of what is different from ourselves and potentially dangerous is essential to our survival, so until we determine otherwise we treat the “other” with suspicion and stay away from him or remain on guard. This can clearly be seen in the savanna, where certain animals graze together and certain animals cause panic in the grazing herds. Like animals, human beings are wary of what is unknown and therefore suspicious of strangers, though they ostensibly have a greater capacity than animals to determines who is dangerous and who is harmless, at least intellectually. In practice, however, it is the animal who intuitively or instinctively sorts out the landscape more quickly and then proceeds to act in strict accordance with his understanding of the dangers involved. That is because the animal evaluates potential threats from other species only in terms of physical safety.
The great difference, the difference that causes human beings, unlike animals, to be hostile (or ultimately contemptuous) with regard to people who are different from themselves even after it is ascertained that these others pose no physical threat, is to be found precisely in the human intellect or more complex mind, for the more complex a mind is, the broader the sense of self and the more vulnerable it is to what are perceived as threats to this self or ego and the greater the need to defend it. Human beings are vulnerable psychically as well as physically and therefore respond to a far greater variety of perceived threats and find a far greater variety of remedies than animals do. In the savanna, once it is ascertained that an animal does not pose a physical threat, that is the end of the matter and the two species live peacefully side by side. Not so with humans, who also require and demand validation from others, in direct proportion to the strength or weakness of their characters. This need to maintain a good opinion of oneself finds a very convenient prop in what is different from oneself, for once a group has been pinpointed and earmarked as such, whether dangerous or not, this same otherness very quickly comes to be used as something against which the weak may measure and bolster themselves, affirming what they are and denigrating what they are not.
As Sartre wrote in his well-known study of the antisemite: ‘There is a passionate pride among the mediocre, and antisemitism is an attempt to give value to mediocrity as such, to create an elite of the ordinary…. To this end the antisemite finds the existence of the Jew absolutely necessary. Otherwise, to whom would he be superior?’ And James Baldwin as well: ‘In a way, the Negro tells us where the bottom is: because he is there, and where he is, beneath us, we know where the limits are and how far we must not fall. We must not fall beneath him. We must never allow ourselves to fall that low…’ (In Search of a Majority).
The ingenuity of human beings in putting Nature to its own uses is boundless. You need a highly developed brain for that, and thank God we have one.
Kevin Saving
Notes Towards A Definition Of ‘Poetry’
(A belated, discursive and presumptuous response to The Poetry Society’s definition of a poem as: ‘whatever a writer wished to style a poem’)
Wilfred Owen, caught up in a cataclysmic war, felt that it was a poet’s duty ‘to warn’. Philip Larkin, leading a rather less precarious existence as a librarian, described his desire ‘to preserve’. For me, interested both in history and in context, it is somehow sufficient to preserve some of the warnings.
Poetry, just like any other pastime, is best viewed as a by-product of the wider society which it reflects and is, in turn, subsumed by. In this respect, our shallow, anecdotal, ‘not what but who’ culture is well-served by the ‘Literature’ it continues to generate. On the rubble-ed site of an art-form once capable of sustaining the efficient presentation of memorable ideas, a succession of culprits have fly-tipped their ‘jottings’. I allow myself to hope that, in time, the appellation ‘Free Verse’ will come to be understood primarily in the context of ‘verse for which no payment is required’. (Alongside more-or-less everything else) we ‘moderns’ have devalued poetry. Every time -if J.M.Barrie’s ghost will pardon the liberty- some crass editor publishes an under-cooked, artless, self-admiring, null travesty-of-a-poem, somewhere a fairy (or at the very least a brain cell) dies. By that token, I’ve probably polished-off a few myself.
Is poetry, somehow -I wonder- a ‘seventh sense’? Are there, as a corollary, people ‘out there’ who wander through life not realising that they experience this particular sensory-deficiency? And, if so: why do so many of them elect to work in publishing? Poetry should (in this performance-ridden, time-obsessed age) be flourishing. And yet, by contrast, we continue to read -or televisually view- the doings of non-existent persons in utterly fictitious circumstances. What could we be thinking of!?
Personally, I’m loath to disparage the current, influential crop of ‘post-modern’ practitioners. Quite the reverse. From their Olympian heights in academe they appear to have set themselves the ultimate literary challenge: to write using only flat, prosaic cadences; with rarefied, unrealistic imagery and about sweet Fanny Adams. Via the use of shrewd psychology (‘Hey, don’t be a fuddy-duddy!’) they have carried-off the huge confidence trick of making most of us believe that their way is the only way of ‘creative writing’. Balderdash! It is a merely-fashionable outlet for mediocrity, kitted-out to preen upon a cat-walk. If it persists, it is solely through the reluctance or inability of the current ‘in-crowd’ to distinguish the (rare) diamonds from the (all-too-frequent) dirty diapers rotating stolidly in the slap-happy, shop-soiled launderette that is our contemporary poetry scene.
Dear old Shelley got it badly wrong: poets aren’t the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. Nothing so grand. At present, they more closely resemble its Electric Toothbrushes -something many feel, vaguely, that they ought to possess but which they are, nevertheless, entirely unable to utilise properly. Perhaps the-makers-of-poems have one more, final role to perform. In a society which appears completely in thrall to ‘celebrity’ -one in which footballers or even chefs (for goodness sake!) are the new gods- more poets both could, and should, publish anonymously. This might help to return the spotlight onto the ‘work’ rather than on ‘the personality’. Even that daddy of modernism, T.S.Eliot, was moved to declare (in a rare moment of clear-headedness) that, whilst he could understand people wishing to write ‘poems’, he could never fathom the motivation behind them wanting to become ‘poets’.
None of these musings, however, has brought us any closer to an acceptable definition as to what constitutes poetry. I would contend that most ‘real’ poetry is ‘about’ (or, at least, displays a tendency to be about) the great existential themes: the quest for Meaning, the search for love, the overture to -and the act of- dying. Put simply, the big themes deserve to be addressed. I also believe that the five, wriggling digits on the slippery hand of poetry are:
1. ORIGINALITY (sounding ‘like one’s self’).
2. ECONOMY (saying the most, in the least).
3. ACCESSIBILITY (being perfectly comprehensible to persons who use the same
language, who possess ‘reasonable’ levels of intelligence
and who are paying ‘reasonable’ attention).
4. UNIVERSALITY (enabling complete strangers to share a perception or experience).
5. MEMORABILITY (resonating on the tongue and in the mind).
I further believe that a poem is, essentially, a device through which one human being (henceforward called ‘the writer’) makes an attempt to enter the head of another (henceforward to be known as ‘the reader’). This device can, perforce, only act in the one, single direction -thus rendering it liable to charges of selfishness, clumsiness etc. To obviate these charges it is necessary to observe a strict etiquette:
‘When making the attempt to enter the ‘reader’s head, the ‘writer’ should always knock first, paying particular attention to their footwear. Entrance is by invitation only and -should the ‘writer’ wish to stay- it is important to display good manners at all times. While it is permissible to sign the visitor’s book or leave one’s card, a considerate ‘writer’ will never fiddle with their attire, scuff the furniture or break wind’.
In order to facilitate more ‘reader-friendly’ poems I append the following:
A CHECKLIST FOR USE WHEN WRITING POETRY
1. Never presume personalised or specialist knowledge.
2. Use only words which can be found in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.
3. Be colloquial, not stilted.
4. Never affect ‘style’ for its own sake. ‘Style’ is like a kind of latex mask
which some writers feel it is necessary to don prior to making a
statement. If and when it becomes so rigid as to preclude a certain type of
truthful articulation, it must be considered a Parkinsonian disability.
5. Distrust the adjective.
6. Disregard ‘mad’ Ezra. You won’t, often, ‘make it new’ but you should at least try to
make it different.
7. ‘Form’ is just the peg we hang our coat on. It’s the coat itself which people remember.
8. Always ensure that you’re actually saying something- not simply trading in ‘poetic’
effects.
9. Authenticity. If you write of an experience, it is important that you actually lived it
and wish to share it as a genuine act of communication.
10. Be leery of similes: nothing is really like anything else.
11. Resemble the boxer: unless you figure on landing a series of ‘hammer blows’, go in
quickly -punch- get out.
12. Again, like the boxer: be prepared to take a few ‘hits’ on your way.
13. Strong beginning, resonant ending.
14 Be concise, even terse. Never ramble nor commit tautology. DON’T USE TOO MANY
WORDS.
In conclusion, it might be possible to postulate some kind of ‘negative’ definition: ‘Poetry’ is that which is left over from a piece of writing once we’ve removed the lazy, the stilted, the verbose, the hackneyed, the self-serving, the ill-conceived and the mis-informed.
Fred Skolnik
Bill O’Reilly has given us another of his takes on American life. This one, on March 28, was inspired by President Obama’s falling poll numbers. The problem this time, according to Bill, are Obama’s strange ideas about equality:
“Equality” is what is hurting President Obama. The left has seized that word to push its progressive agenda. We have income equality, marriage equality, gender equality, and on and on. So instead of solving real problems, the president is living in a world of theory and is shocked when someone like Putin upsets his idealistic vision. The truth is there will never be equality in this world, it’s impossible. I will never have physical equality with Shaquille O’Neal, he’s bigger and stronger than I am by nature. I will never be as smart as Einstein, as talented as Mozart, or as kind as Mother Teresa. President Obama has spent five years trying to social engineer this nation and convince the world to act in harmony. In doing so, he has neglected to fix the economy or set up effective deterrents to villains like Putin. The only path to social justice is building a strong country that can provide opportunity, and economically only the private sector can make that happen. We have become a weaker country on President Obama’s watch. Most Americans know that, and so do all the villains of the world.
You are almost there, Bill, but the problem isn’t that Shaquille O’Neal is bigger and stronger than everyone. The problem is that Shaquille O’Neal makes ten or thirty or fifty times more money than an Einstein or a Mozart and that a Bill O’Reilly makes ten or thirty or fifty times more money than a cleaning woman and that an executive in the dog food industry makes ten or thirty or fifty times more money than a teacher or a nurse. The problem is that we have created an insane social order where people are rewarded for the economic value of their work instead of for its social value. Yes, I know. We don’t want none of that pinko socialism stuff here. This is a capitalist country and that’s what made America great, so great that the gap between the rich and the poor is greater than anywhere in the Western World. There has never been a time when poor people lived well in America and there has never been a time when there weren’t a great many of them.
Bill thinks we should leave it to the private sector – free enterprise – to provide economic opportunity and make the country strong, that is, do what it has never done before, for whenever the private sector has been unleashed and left to its own devices, as in the 1920s or the Bush years, what it has produced is an overheated economy, running on pure greed, that has exploded in its face. Nor has it ever dealt equitably with the working population. It was only government regulation and the unremitting pressure of the labor unions that brought America’s sweatshops to an end (transferred now to Southeast Asia). In fact, if it was up to Bill O’Reilly’s hallowed free enterprisers we would still have child labor and the 16-hour workday in America.
Certainly Obama isn’t governing America very well. Who can? America’s problem is not its politicians but its people. The poorest people in America are African American: over half live in dire poverty or working class poverty in families with incomes of less than $35,000 a year and a quarter live on food stamps. Their condition is a direct result of the way they have been treated by white people. It is, after all, white people who created the ghettoes and the inner cities, denied African Americans a decent education and decent employment, destroyed black families, consigned black children to lives of poverty and crime. And this after 250 years of slave labor. What exactly is free enterprise and the private sector about to do for them?
The values and character of the American people are the source of America’s social and economic problems. Obamacare is a perfect example of how the worship of an economic system makes American health care so difficult to reform. The Affordable Care Act runs to something like 20,000 pages. Israel’s 1995 Health Insurance Law runs to fewer that 100. It is very simple: the Government is the payer, the Sick Funds (nonprofit medical organizations) are the providers, and everyone is covered, with monthly payments averaging around 5% of gross income and supplementary insurance costing around $65 a month. This is socialized medicine, a concept that one might say took all of Obama’s 20,000 pages to get around under a system that has been costing America approximately 20,000 lives a year as a direct result of inadequate health care (according to doctors’ estimates). The inability of Americans to utter the word socialism has cost more American lives than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bill O’Reilly likes to talk about safety nets and people pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and achieving the American Dream through hard work. As most of the poor people who work hard do not get anywhere in America, this is Bill’s own idealistic vision, though a little less generous than Obama’s. As for his safety net, the only thing I have ever heard him say about it is that the government should clamp down on welfare payments and food stamps because there are too many chiselers in the system. Thus, in a macabre reversal of Justice Holmes’ famous remark that he would rather see a hundred guilty men go free than one innocent man go to jail, Bill, it seems, would rather see a hundred Americans go hungry than one American get a free ride. Keep talking, Bill.
Lee Whensley
Some say that the ability to tell a story is a natural skill. Something that you are born to and not something one could easily learn. Some storytellers choose to undertake course upon course and participate in forum after forum in their quest to discover the true definitions and correct usage of their art.
But when the children are sat around the campfire to listen to the words of the storyteller- their curious ears are not interested in the sound of academia, their open minds hear only the tone of the narration and the power of the words and do not pontificate the terms of ‘qualification’.
Thus, ‘qualification’, is defined in terms of the enchantment of the observer, not on pieces of paper signed by college professors who have culled and lulled words into conformity.
So it is: A storyteller need not worry about the finer intricacies of punctuation and grammar- instead they are more concerned with the relaying of a tale to its audience. The words are merely tools to convey the story and if the listener understands then they have succeeded in their self-begotten task. The beauty of words is that they can mean so many different things to so many different people, in so many different ways. It is a question of interpretation and individual perceptions, not a question of uniform understanding that defines them.
But all stories will have three things in common and they are not as obvious as needing a beginning, middle and an end- although this could be considered partly true. In truth- each story must have three basic elements that are unquestionable and unavoidable.
The pre-ordained elements contained in all stories are; a journey, a place of centre and a question and no story is without them- even the stories without an apparent journey, centre or question to them. That is the only requirement of any story, but please do not think that these things need to happen in any set order, nor to any pre-requisitely defined standard and know, also, that each element can be continuous, fluid, play only the smallest of parts or be an interchangeable part of everything that unfolds.
Understand, also, that these three things will be present regardless of how hard you try for them not to be; by accident or by design- they will be there. And if some scholar could disprove my words in the writing of a tale, they will be there- nevertheless, in the telling. Once the words take the listener on a journey, from their own centre and the subsequent question becomes theirs to ask and to answer.
It is how they are centred and the journey that they choose to take that will decide their question and nothing else. Destiny has no part to play- even if destiny is the subject of the story, and is merely the pretext used by those who do not want the responsibility for choosing their own journey and wish to deny accountability for their own centeredness. Ultimately others would, also, decide their question for them and reduce the word to a quest.
How our history has filled the battlefields and workshops with the quests of those who were too afraid to take their own journey and instead followed divine guidance and put their faith in great leaders. How our future awaits the fate of generations to come.
Such is the folly of giving oneself up to fate.
That each cannot seize control of their moment and can only aspire to merely follow along as the story continues is the greatest deceit in human history.
The truth is: We can all write our own story.
The question is: Will we?
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