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.
Andy Croft
The Democritisation of Everything
I’m back inside. After four years in HMP Holme House, followed by shorter spells in Durham, Low Newton and Frankland prisons, I have just started a nine-month stretch at HMP Moorland, outside Doncaster. Fortunately this is one writing-residency where I will not be resident. But British prisons are full of writers.
Writing is important in prison. If you can express yourself on paper, you are likely to be in demand helping others write apps, statements, instructions to solicitors and letters home. Poetry has a special role in prison life. Men who would not often go near a library in their ordinary lives, in prison can find solace and encouragement in reading and writing poetry. Prison magazines always carry pages of poetry. The Koestler Awards are an important part of the prison calendar. No-one is embarrassed to say that they like poetry in prison. Among the ‘window warriors’ who stand at the windows at night shouting to themselves and to others, there are always some who rap for hours in long improvised monologues. There are certain poems – usually about love, heroin and regret – that prisoners take with them from one prison to another, copying them out and learning them by heart until the poems ‘belong’ to them. The poet Ken Smith once met a man in Wormwood Scrubs who genuinely believed that he had written Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem ‘The Wind Hover’. This is what happens when poetry is taken seriously. In such an emotionally-strained environment, poetry can be a form of release, a means of clarification and self-justification and a kind of public confessional. It is even a form of currency (especially around Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day). Poems are copied, passed around and sent out in letters to wives and girlfriends:
Induction, first thing Monday morning.
The library's full of spaced-out lads,
Hung-over, rattling, bruised and yawning,
Exploring life outside their pads.
Their first long Monday back in gaol,
Most look as if they haven't slept;
There's always one though, without fail,
Will ask me where the poetry's kept.
He knows he has to write a letter
Explaining what went wrong this time,
And somehow thinks regret sounds better
Expressed in someone else's rhyme;
Though why should anyone suppose
That poetry makes the best excuses,
I can't imagine – still, it shows
That even poets have their uses.
He skips the modern stuff of course –
Too personal, hard work, unclear;
The awkward syntax of remorse
Needs more if it's to sound sincere –
A common music whose appeal
Is that it speaks for everyone,
The patterned language of the real
That's usually written by Anon.
This little poem is part of a sequence about working in prisons which appeared in my last full collection Sticky. The title of the poem, ‘Form’, alludes to the criminal past which shapes every prisoner’s future, as well as to the ‘old-fashioned’ poetic tastes of most prisoners. Not many contemporary poems lend themselves to being copied and sent out in letters from prison. Their provenance is too specific, the ‘voice’ too highly individuated. Most prisoners don’t know what to ‘do’ with most contemporary poetry. As one young man said to me once, ‘I want to read poetry, not poets.’
It is fair to say that Sticky was not widely reviewed. The few notices that the book received were friendly enough, with the notable exception of an attack in Tribune, which compared it to ‘third rate Victorian verse’, ‘pub rock and doggerel’:
The problem with the full-on rhyme schemes he employs is, unless you’re writing for children or to be funny it does make the poetry look dreadfully old fashioned. Not many people, post Eliot, write like this anymore. (1)
In a sense, this was an accurate description of the book, which does occasionally try to be funny, and which contains several poems (including the title poem) written for children. The whole collection self-consciously celebrates the possibilities of a number of pre-Modern verse forms –various sonnets, including Pushkin sonnets, clerihews, ottava rima, heroic couplets, ballads, a villanelle and the six-line stanza borrowed from The Ballad of Reading Gaol. The book’s title is supposed to be a play on the Russian word stikhiy (verses), which is derived from the Greek stikhoi (a line of words, or soldiers). It is a book about the limits and the freedoms set by different kinds of ‘form’ – poetic, linguistic and political.
I want to try to unpick the accusation of being ‘dreadfully old-fashioned’ and its relationship to ‘writing for children’, trying to be ‘funny’ and the use of traditional poetic form. It seems to me that the set of assumptions on which this review was based are wholly representative of a critical narrative, which – for all its talk of Modernity – still regards Eliot’s assault on traditional form as something new (hence the use of the term ‘Victorian’ to signify naivety and sentimentality). According to this narrative, metre, stanza-form and ‘full-on rhyme schemes’ were abandoned a long time ago to hymnal, birthday-cards, ‘humorous’ light-verse (‘doggerel’), popular song (‘pub rock’), advertising and tabloid headlines. Of course, there have been exceptions to this – notably Sassoon, Auden, MacNeice, Barker, Betjeman and Mitchell, and among contemporary poets, Dunn, Harrison, Herbert, Szirtes and Duffy. Although the exceptions may, in fact, be so many and so glaring that it makes no sense to describe them as exceptions, the assumption persists that poetry may be divided between the ‘Modern’ (a Good Thing) and the ‘dreadfully old-fashioned’ (a Very Bad Thing). But form is not necessarily conservative, any more than formlessness is automatically progressive. It depends what you do with it. Writers like Eliot, Celine, Marinetti and Pound employed the new techniques and the technologies of Modernism in order to defend the past. Modernity may also be defined by inclusivity, participation and democracy. The ‘new’ is an uncontested but heavily-loaded category.
Generational anthologies have always defined themselves as the bearers of the ‘new’, challenging existing tastes by claiming to represent the future. The editors of New Signatures, New Country, The New Apocalypse, New Lines, The New Poetry each represented themselves as the next wave of a Modernism line of advance defined by the rejection of the past (usually the most recent version of the ‘future’). The latest example of this is James Byrne and Clare Pollard (eds) Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, which bravely declares war on the ‘uncool’ poetry of ‘warm white wine in a pokey bookshop or plodding recitals in a half empty village hall.’ The book brings together twenty-one ‘of the best young poets who have yet to publish a full collection’ from Britain and Ireland, who are apparently ‘extending and remaking the tradition of poetry in a fast-changing new millennium’, and whose work is ‘sexy’, ‘dark’, ‘daring’ and ‘brimming with vitality’. As usual, the editors claim that ‘the future of poetry begins here’.
In many ways it is a fascinating selection, a good sample of some of the poets who have emerged out of the performance-publishing nexus of Generational Txt, Spread the Word, Apples and Snakes, the Foyles Young Poetry of the Year Award, the tall-lighthouse pilot project and the world of Creative Writing MAs. But it is a pretty depressing read too, a curiously familiar collection of confessional poetry, filmic sensibilities and ‘a multiplicity of styles’, a kind of poetry for the Facebook generation. These poets are said to share ‘a deep fascination with the world as it is today’, but you would not know it from a book which barely mentions the world’s social inequalities, the destruction of the environment or the globalised economics of poverty and war – never mind those popular movements trying to make another world possible. There are lots of ampersands, lower-case titles, vocative cases and references to high art and trash- culture. But there is not a single rhyme in the whole book, not enough anger and not one joke.
It does look as though there is a consistent set of connections here, suggesting that ‘the future of poetry’ is defined by humorlessness, political indifference, a serious underestimation of the potential music of patterned language (those ‘plodding recitals’) and a hostility to all the ‘uncool’ organisers, readers, book-buyers and would-be writers who do not know that white wine is supposed to be served chilled. If this is the ‘new’, it smells uncommonly like old-fashioned snobbery.
The sound of ‘professional’ poets pulling the ladders up behind them is part of the background noise of contemporary British poetry. According to Jane Holland, there are now ‘too many people out there writing poetry.’ For Hugo Williams, these days the Forward Prize receives too many entries – ‘I think it’s something to do with the democratisation of everything – that everyone’s got a right to get a book out…’ The use of the word ‘amateur’ as a term of abuse is of course a particularly British way of avoiding the word ‘class’ – consider for example, Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Dear Writer-in-Residence’, Sean O’Brien’s ‘In Residence: A Worst Case View’ and ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’ or Peter Reading’s Stet.
The most consistent advocate of this kind of flaky elitism was of course T.S. Eliot, a believer in the Divine Right of kings and an opponent of the 1944 Education Act on the grounds that it would encourage cultural ‘barbarism’. Giving the 2004 T.S. Eliot lecture at the Royal Festival Hall, Don Paterson called for poetry to reclaim its status as ‘a Dark Art’. Poetic technique, he declared, is ‘the poet’s arcana’, ‘something that must be kept secret from the reader’. Only by joining together in a kind of medieval ‘guild’, can professional poets ‘restore our sense of power’. Furthermore, Paterson called for the ‘total eradication of amateur poets’, whom he accuses of ‘infantilising poetry’. Armed only with ‘a beermat, a pencil, and a recently mildly traumatic experience’ they bombard Don Paterson, who is poetry editor at Picador, with their ‘handwritten drivel’.
Does Paterson mean he wants to eradicate all unpublished poets? Or just those who have ambitions to be published by Picador? How many poetry-prizes do you have to win before you become ‘professional’ poet? Or is there a hereditary principle involved? Professional poets do not spring fully armed from the soil. You have to be unpublished before you can be published. It may be hard to imagine, but even Don Paterson was once an unpublished poet. Not many poets make a living solely by selling books. Don Paterson certainly doesn’t. Before he became a ‘professional’ poet, he used to be a professional musician. He still is. He also teaches at the University of St Andrews. Not much time for writing poetry there.
According to Paterson ‘only plumbers can plumb, roofers can roof and drummers drum; only poets can write poetry.’ Has Paterson never changed a tap, or tapped a drum? Poets are not genetically different from plumbers. Most roofers are probably better at writing poetry than poets are at replacing missing roof-tiles. It is not as if there are only so many as-yet-unwritten poems to go round. Anyway, ‘amateur’ poets in schools, colleges, prisons, libraries, reading-groups, book-shops and poetry-readings constitute the bulk of the audience for the ‘professionals’. Do professional musicians feel threatened by people who sing in the bath? Do professional footballers burn with resentment at those who play in Sunday leagues? Do professional chefs object to the thought that most people cook their own meals? Presumably Paterson’s students at St Andrews are ‘amateurs’. Has he told them they require ‘eradicating’?
Patterson’s comments, in the same lecture, on Harold Pinter were especially instructive. Referring to Pinter’s anti-war poetry, he argued that ‘ anyone can do that’. Of course a great many poets – ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ – have written powerfully against the war in Iraq (although few have employed iambic pentameter to such passionate effect as Pinter did in War). The fact that ‘anyone’ can write poetry about such a necessary subject is precisely its enduring significance. As the US poet Jim Scully argues:
The poetic field is no less a political construct than an aesthetic one. When we speak of mainstream poetry we’re talking basically about academic poetry, poetry in its institutional aspect, which is the basis for jobs, careers, publications and poetic norms. It’s where the continuity of money and recognition is maintained. There’s a lot of cute, too-clever-by-half poetry without an ounce of gravity, and of course no resonance. It seems we lack even the language with which to speak social or civic reality. The ancient Greeks called “apolitical” citizens, who care only for their own personal interests, idiotai. This is the opposite of politai, citizens in the true sense. For the Greek tragedians, the primary point of collective reference was society, not the individual. They took everything on, and in front of everyone. Full-bodied, adult stuff. Not crimped by the servility that comes of habitual evasiveness. (2)
Until very recently in human history, poets were popularly understood to speak for and to the societies to which they belonged. The development of printing and publishing and the emergence of a reading-public have helped to elevate poets into a separate and professional caste. The Romantic idea of the rootless individual alienated from ordinary society (by education, sensibility and mobility) has become in our time the cult of the international poet as exile, crossing cultural, intellectual and linguistic borders. This cult reached its logical conclusion a few years ago with the Martian poets, who wrote about life on earth as if they really were aliens.
Of course poetry has to contend these days with other voices, more clamorous and more powerful. How can poetry compete with so many sound-bites, slogans, bill-boards, trailers, jingles and headlines? The cult of ‘difficulty’ is one way in which poets feel they can be heard against the deafening white-noise of contemporary culture. In a complex and difficult world no-one wants to be accused of simplification. As a result, many people find contemporary poetry difficult. This is not usually the fault of the reader, but of the weakening of poetry’s function as a shared, social activity. As Adrian Mitchell famously put it, ‘most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people’.
The US poet Tom McGrath once said there were three kinds of poet – Cattlemen, Sheepmen and Outlaws. The first were those like Eliot and Yeats, ‘aristos’ who articulated a vision of the past with which to criticise the present; the second, like Whitman, Crane and Ginsberg, represented the literary equivalent of the rising bourgeoisie, open to all kinds of language and forms, old and new; the third were those like Neruda, Rimbaud, Brecht, Joe Hill, Emily Dickinson (and McGrath himself), who desired to confront the future ‘on all fours’ by listening to the music that were already there. ‘The language is there,’ McGrath argued, ‘all you’ve got to do is to – like the snake, get out of your skin (which is all the cliché and shit language that you’ve had) and be a born-again snake, or poet, or snake-poet, or whatever… When Sitting Bull needed to write his death song, he just said it. Didn’t write it, it was there.’ (3)
All poetry inhabits the common language of everyday living. A poem can be unique without being original; it can be ‘new’ at the same time that it is already known. The greatness of writers like Bunyan, Clare, Hernandez, Grassic Gibbon, Aragon, Gurney, Hikmet, Burns, Lawrence, Brecht, Vaptsarov, Ritsos – ‘Outlaws’ in more than one sense, often working in political or linguistic exile – was to have inhabited this argument and sustained it a long way from the centres of cultural power and authority. The French poet Francis Combes makes a similar argument:
Poetry belongs to everyone. Poetry does not belong to a small group of specialists. It arises from the everyday use of language. Like language, poetry only exists because we share it. Writing, singing, painting, cooking – these are ways of sharing pleasure. For me poetry is like an electrical transformer which converts our feelings and our ideas into energy. It is a way of keeping your feet on the ground without losing sight of the stars. It is at the same time both the world’s conscience and its best dreams; it’s an intimate language and a public necessity. The issues at stake French poetry today are profoundly political. It is often said that modern French poetry began with Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre.” Today we need to reverse this phrase and say, “L’Autre est aussi Je” or even “Je suis tous les autres”. (4)
Over the last five hundred years, poetry has lost many of its historic functions. Character has fled to the novel, dialogue to the stage, persuasion to advertising and public relations, action to cinema, comedy to television. This always seems to me to be an unnecessarily heavy price to pay for the development of the individual ‘voice’ of the poet. The shared, public music of common language and common experience remains its greatest asset – the power to communicate, universalise and shape a common human identity (what Tom McGrath called the way in which ‘language socialises the unknown’). Poetry is essentially a means of communication, not a form of self-expression. Difficulty is only a virtue if the poem justifies the effort to understand it. Why write at all, if no-one is listening? If they think no-one is listening, poets end up talking only to each other, or to themselves. Language belongs to everyone. This is Mitchell again:
In the days when everyone lived in tribes, poetry was always something which was sung and danced, sometimes by one person, sometimes by the whole tribe. Song always had a purpose – a courting song, a song to make the crops grow, a song top help or instruct the hunter of seals, a song to thank the sun. Later on, when poetry began to be printed, it took on airs. When the universities started studying verse instead of alchemy, poetry began to strut around like a duchess full of snuff. By the middle of the twentieth century very few British poets would dare to sing. (5)
Much of the potential power of poetry still lies in its popular, traditional forms. The historical music of poetry can help to naturalise arguments which may seem outside the current narrow expectations of poetry. It can assert the longevity of these arguments, by placing them within older, popular literary traditions. The element of anticipation and memory implicates reader and listener in the making of a line or a phrase and therefore in the making of the argument. This establishes a potentially inclusive community of interest between the writer/speaker and the reader/audience – through shared laughter, anger or understanding. In other words, poetry is a form of magic, through which we strive to impose our will on the world by mimicking the natural processes we wish to bring about. As speech is metaphorical, poetry is doubly so, the gift of Prometheus and Orpheus. When poets stand up to read in public they have to address the readers beyond the page, the listeners across the room and beyond. Inspiration, improvisation, prophecy and possession – these are the elements of what Ernst Fisher called ‘the necessity of art’:
The magic at the very root of human existence, creating a sense of powerlessness and at the same time a consciousness of power, a fear of nature together with the ability to control nature, is the very essence of all art. The first toolmaker, when he gave new form to a stone so that it might serve man, was the first artist. The first name-giver was also a great artist when he singled out an object from the vastness of nature, tamed it by means of a sign and handed over this creature of language as an instrument of power to other men. The first organiser who synchronised the working process by means of a rhythmic chant and so increased the collective strength of man was a prophet in art. The first hunter who disguised himself as an animal and by means of this identification with his prey increased the yield of the hunt… all these were the fore-fathers of art. (6)
The Pre-historian Steve Mithen has recently argued that language and music evolved 50,000 years ago out of ‘holistic, multi-modal, manipulative, musical and mimetic gestures’ (or ‘hmmmmm’). (7) Although language and music now have separate functions, their common evolution can still be heard in religious ritual, in dance, song – and in poetry. According to the classicist George Thompson,
the language of poetry is essentially more primitive than common speech, because it preserves in a higher degree the qualities of rhythm, melody, fantasy, inherent in speech as such… And its function is magical. It is designed to effect some change in the external world by mimesis – to impose illusion on reality. (8)
Although anatomically modern homo sapiens emerged 200,000 years ago, the earliest known written scripts were only developed in the Jiroft and Sumer civilisations during the early Bronze Age (3,000 BCE). Gilgamesh, the earliest known written literary text, was not written down until sometime during the Third Dynasty of Ur, that is, approximately 2,000 years BCE. In other words, we have only recently taught ourselves to ‘write’ – but is hard to believe that humans were not telling each other important stories in memorable and musical language for a long time before then. For most of human history poetry was anonymous, public and shared, passed on and learned and changed and passed on again. Rhythm, repetition, metre and rhyme were mnemonics which enabled listeners to be simultaneously the creators of poetry’s common music.
The Iliad was ‘written’ around 750 BCE – a hundred years before the earliest known Greek poetry was written down. It records events which took place 400 years earlier. The oldest surviving written version of the poem, known as ‘Venetus A’, was not made until sometime during the tenth century CE. The first printed version did not appear until 1488. Which means that for most of its life, this 16,000 line epic poem only existed in people’s heads. And this was only possible because of the poem’s music – the rhythmical reiteration of phrases, tropes, motifs and ready-made epithets (‘cunning Odysseus’, ‘swift-footed Achilles’, ‘Agamemnon lord of men’ etc) within the six-beat hexameter line. The poem survived because it was both memorable and memorisable. Try learning The Waste Land off by heart.
The power of all art is still located in society – in the audience and not in the artist. Writing – in the sense of the composition of memorable language to record events that need remembering – is essentially a shared, collective, public activity. It is only in mass-literate societies that poetry becomes privatised, a personalised form of individual expression rather a means of public communication. And of course, mass-literacy requires policing by the game-keepers on the wooded slopes of Mount Parnassus, armed with ideas of copyright, grammatical rules, unified spelling, critical standards and a canonical tradition against the possibility of a Mass Trespass.
The UK was the world’s first mass-literate society. And yet most of us on this island were not even functionally literate before the 1870 education reforms. That’s only 140 years ago – around the time that my great-grandmother was born. Most of our neighbours on this planet are still not able to read or write. The globalised economy does not require the world’s poor to read. Meanwhile, dependence on communications-technology in post-industrial societies is rapidly reducing the economic importance of literacy (consider how e-mails texting and other social media are already corrupting punctuation, capitalisation and grammar). The dream of mass literacy was a twentieth-century aspiration, connected with ideas of social justice, economic progress and scientific control over nature. But if literacy suddenly does not seem so important, the need to express ourselves in the best words we can think of is a constant common human need. You don’t need to be able to write in order to ‘write’. Not many people are wholly excluded from language. Most of us are fluent speakers in several registers, and functional in more than one language.
The idea that poetry is a publicly-owned, shared and common language persists at a subterranean level within British culture, a long way from the centres of cultural authority and the cult of the ‘new’. Not surprisingly, it is still felt most vividly among those who were historically excluded longest from education and literacy by the forces of caste and class, empire and slavery. Poets like Linton Kewsi Johnson, Kokumo, Moqapi Selassie and Jean Binta Breeze do not read their poems in public – they sing them.
A sense of poetry as social ritual and magic may still be felt at UK musha’ara, marathon poetry-readings in Urdu, Punjabi and English. They are unlike most poetry-readings in that they last several hours and attract several hundred people of all ages. The most distinctive feature of the musha’ara, however, is the level of audience participation. Poets do not always read their ‘own’ work. They often sing. And they are frequently interrupted by applause, by requests for a line to be read again, by the audience guessing the rhyme at the end of a couplet or by joining in the reading of well-known poems. This is a collective, shared poetry, the expression of a literary, linguistic and religious identity among a community whose first language is English, but whose first literary language is Urdu. From its beginnings Urdu was a language of exile, the lingua franca of the nomadic camp:
Verse forms and metres, besides diction, have helped to preserve continuity; and, still more strikingly, a common stock of imagery, which can be varied and recomposed inexhaustibly in much the same way that Indian (and Pakistani) classical music is founded on a set of standard note-combinations (ragas) on which the performer improvises variations. (9)
The enviable traditions of Urdu poetry illustrate Christopher Caudwell’s argument that poetry can be a means of asserting our original, common humanity:
…poetry is characteristically song, and song is characteristically something which, because of its rhythm, is sung in unison, is capable of being the expression of a collective emotion. This is one of the secrets of “heightened language”… Unlike the life of beasts, the life of the simplest tribe requires a series of efforts which are not instinctive, but which are demanded by the necessities of a non-biological economic aim – for example a harvest. Hence the instincts must be harnessed to the needs of the group festival, the matrix of poetry, which frees the stores of emotion and canalises them in a collective channel… Thus poetry, combined with dance, ritual, and music, becomes the great switchboard of the instinctive energy of the tribe. (10)
Writing is ordinary. Poetry is especially ordinary. It arises out of the contradictions and consolations of a whole life and a whole society. It requires the proper humility necessary for any art. Poetry is indivisible. If it doesn’t belong to everybody, it is something else – show business, big business, self-promotion, attention-seeking. Poetry is not a Meritocracy of the educated, the privileged or the lucky. It is a Republic. As the poet Randall Swingler once put it, ‘The artist is not a special sort of being, inhabiting a rarefied atmosphere beyond the exigencies of common life. Rather it lies in his essence to have more than usual in common with the generality of men.’ (11)
Poetry can clarify, focus, channel and release emotional and imaginative energy. It can connect poets to readers, and readers to poetry; it can help us feel a little more connected to each other than usual. Despite the commercial, cultural and political pressures to emphasise our uniqueness and our separateness, the differences between us are not very great. When I sneeze, the sensations of tension and release in my face and chest are exactly the same as when you sneeze. Chocolate tastes the same in my mouth as it does in yours. My feelings for my children are no greater and no more significant than the feelings that all humans bear for their children. When I tell my wife that I love her, I can only say what every man has ever said to the woman he loves. ‘I love you’ is a quotation. We share the same small planet, we breathe the same air and we share the same fate. In case we forget this, poetry is one of the ways in which we demonstrate our common natures, inside and out. Anyone can do it.
Because the need for love's a truth
More desperate in the Slammer,
All those who have been starved so long
Of tenderness and glamour,
Create a common art that speaks
In love's peculiar grammar.
I love you babe, ich liebe dich,
Sound weak and lachrymose,
Je t'aime's been said so many times
In poetry and prose.
But odi et amo's still true,
And a rose is still a rose.
In all the clichéd, second-hand
And sentimental tropes,
Each unconvincing chat-up line
Once heard on TV soaps,
You hear the brittle sound of little,
Fragile human hopes.
Though Valentine's the patron saint
Of young hearts everywhere,
This festival contains a truth
In which all mortals share:
That someone loves us still's the hope
That keeps us from despair.
And here, where every letter home
And billet-doux's policed,
The poetry of every man
This Valentine's Day feast,
Asserts that art, like hope and love
Cannot stay unreleased. (12)
Notes
- Tribune, 8 May 2009
- Jim Scully, Morning Star, 11 October 2011
- Reginald Gibbons and Terrence Des Pres (eds), Thomas McGrath: Life and the Poem (University of Illinois Press, 1987), p39
- Francis Combes, ‘Qu’est-ce le communism?’ Morning Star, 16 June 2010
- Adrian Mitchell, Just Adrian (Oberon Books, 2011), p140
- Ernst Fisher, The Necessity of Art (Pelican, 1963), p33
- Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals (Phoenix, 2006)
- George Thompson, Marxism and Poetry (Lawrence and Wishart, 1945), p9
- Victor Kiernan, Introduction to Poems by Faiz (OUP, 1971), p32
- Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality (Macmillan, 1937), p33
- Randall Swingler, Left Review, October 1934
- from ‘The Ballad of Writing Gaol’, Sticky (Five Leaves, 2009)
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.
*
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.
*
A revolution is bound to fail if it does not address and revolutionize all aspects of human life.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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 murderers, 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.
Illusion & Austerity: Verses in an Advertising Culture:
A ‘Caudwellian’ Take on Two Volumes: Advertorial Verse versus Adversarial Verse
81 Austerities
Sam Riviere
(Faber, 2012)
Porterloo
Niall McDevitt
(International Times, 2012)
None of us knows ‘the truth’ –though a frequent hermeneutic trope of post-modernist poetry criticism is the non-falsifiable rhetorical poser, ‘but does it ring true?’, which almost always precedes a mandarin-like verdict that the work under the microscope lacks the unspecified characteristics, in accordance with some mystified formula, which apparently signify ‘truthfulness’. But the only truth poets can really aspire to is to be true to their work, to their poetic calling, and thus to themselves –there lies the only obtainable kind of truth, or authenticity, for poets, or any other writers or artists, no matter how ‘truth’-seeking they may feel themselves to be; and, after all, isn’t much creative self-expression a kind of quest for some sense of ‘truth’ reflected in the self from the outer forms of ‘reality’ (itself, a sort of composite projection of multiple subjectivities perceptually compromised and commingled in order for some sense of practicable cooperation to be possible among myriad individualities).
Some might think this a strange statement coming from someone who writes much ‘political’ poetry, and who edited two anti-cuts protest anthologies; but these are not attempts to claim some monopoly on ‘truth’, simply to attempt to approach something of its adumbration, in terms of commonality, and in an emotional just as much as ‘polemical’ response to what are without a doubt some of the most extreme and vicious social policies in living memory –and, significantly, imposed on our society by fanatically right-wing politicians who themselves purport to have a ‘monopoly on truth’ (cue the ‘ideological’ intransigence of, for instance, Iain Duncan Smith…).
In short, such politically tempered poetry petitions and verse missives are ultimately still subjective, reflexive and ‘felt’ responses to the societal effects of policies promulgated and imposed on them and on others by subjective ideological dogma –in the case of the current government, what might be reasonably described as ‘vicarious fascism’ –that is, a persecutory and attitudinally violent directive against certain defenceless social groups deemed economically unproductive (the unemployed, the sick and disabled, squatters, travellers, gypsies, Roma, ‘illegal’ immigrants etc.) is sublimated through purely material administration deemed ethically acceptable to our vestigial ‘democracy’, even if the effects of these, again, in material terms (mass evictions, destitution, homelessness, suicides) are to many of us morally unacceptable (though I hesitate to use that term much-fetishised of late by politicians, in itself a non-falsifiable and almost mystical adjective always abused by its user as a semantic fait accompli to arrest discourse and abort debate on sometimes morally ambiguous issues: effectively, to verbally re-seal a subject with the ‘incontrovertible’ boulder of taboo).
The fact this government also markedly lacks the electoral legitimacy of full ‘democratic’ mandate to pursue such ‘radical’, or extreme, social policies, makes it all even more difficult to accept. But just because a number of poets join together to write in opposition to political policy doesn’t mean they are collectively asserting some prerogative of ‘truth’: such verse interventions are as emotional as they are polemical responses: they are the expressions of a multitude of individuals who feel compelled by their social consciences and concern for others victimised by government directive to express their opposition through the medium in which they habitually practice (i.e. poetry; thus, apart from anything else, attempting in part to reassert the long-neglected ‘social role’ of poets, of which Christopher (St John Sprigg) Caudwell (1907-1937), for one, in his posthumously published Marxist dialectic on the societal function of poetry, Illusion and Reality – A Study of the Sources of Poetry (1937), placed paramount emphasis). But, to recapitulate, all this simply signifies attempts by poets to adumbrate their own emotive notion of some externally sensed social ‘truth’ through felt response to a perceived political offence against themselves and their fellow citizens, to which they wish to assert their right to conscientiously object; not to claim they, above any other group of people, know exclusively what is true.
More to the point, if poets, by way of one example, have in their possession some monopoly on ‘truth’, then, in contemporary supplemental terms, it is a very misty verisimilitude with which they convey it (though more often than not –and ironically, given the peculiarly figurative aegis of poetry– not by any obviously intriguing or imaginative means that would lend them the parabolic quality of, say, the aphorisms of the Gospels, or long-resonant symbolic works of, let us say, the last century, such as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, David Jones’s In Parenthesis and The Anathemata, or John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (to pick just a handful off the top of my head). And while some contemporaries might rail at what they see as wilful ‘obscurantism’ in more ‘avant-garde’ verse, it is nonetheless even more frustrating to find in the elliptical tendencies of those poetry exponents who purport to be putting forward some form of ‘truthful’ insight or experience in the form of what appears to be a poem –though often actually reads more like ‘chopped-up prose’ (or, ‘prosetry’)– there seems insufficient actual content, or, if quantitatively sufficient, then too textually non-committal a content, to succeed effectively to communicate this (indeed, as I’ve commented before, postmodernism, due to its apolitical nature, seems implicitly ill-equipped to address, let alone apprehend, contemporary political vicissitudes).
And these aspects are in their own special senses forms of obfuscations: not necessarily to meaning or interpretation, but in terms of ‘putting off’ the reader from bothering to properly engage with the poem due to its tonal attitude of urbane, almost self-disinterested, indifference. This isn’t to say that such poets come in any way close to the much more conscious, occupational obfuscation of politicians –although, to self-paraphrase from one of my former polemics, ‘Reoccupying Auden Country’, in terms of the phrasal-framing of their own internal disputes and controversies, some high profile contemporary poets and their apparatchiks demonstrate a capacity at pure spin which easily compares to the type practised in contemporary politics –a sour irony that at a time which is in many senses a cultural rerun of the Thirties, when the much of the reading public is crying out for more ‘political’ voices among high profile contemporary poets, we have more ‘politician poets’ instead: not so much the ‘legislators’ as the cultural ‘hedge-betters of society’, to paraphrase Shelley; or, to paraphrase Marx, the ‘shopkeepers of the workshop of the world’.
As with many Marxian paradigms on the subject of poetry in capitalist society, Christopher Caudwell disputably pitched in first, even though his polemics were published posthumously and some years after composition:
The poet regards himself as a shopkeeper and his poems as cheeses, but he becomes more convinced he is a man removed from society… …realising only the instincts of his heart and not responsible to society’s demands… his poems come increasingly to seem worthy ends-in-themselves…
It is a crowning irony that post-modern poetry culture places so much emphasis on ‘truth’ when it is itself almost antipathetically equipped to actually communicate any. To my mind, postmodernism is in many ways a euphemism for poetic constipation. Not to say, political constipation: as I wrote in my polemic of 2012, ‘Emergency Ambulance: Reoccupying Auden Country’:
If literary critic Fredric Jameson’s description of postmodernism as the “dominant cultural logic of late capitalism” (Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; Verso, 1991) is anything to go by, this poetic impasse in the predominantly postmodernist mainstream to polemically open up, at least to more left-wing, even ‘anti-capitalist’, sentiments, does seem to be a casualty of a self-imposed stylistic. 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.
This is not to say there haven’t been any oratorical interventions on contemporary political issues by high profile poets, because there have been sporadic episodes over the past four years which have pleasantly surprised some of us: most notably when poets Alice Oswald and John Kinsella both withdrew their names and books from the T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist in protest against the PBS’ somewhat ‘politically tactless’ uptake of funding from a hedge fund company. More recently, in fact, only this week, there was also a well-argued case for Scottish independence put forward by award-winning poet Kathleen Jamie –and I excerpt the final two paragraphs, which are particularly apposite:
Those of us who want Scotland’s independence want it because we have no further interest in being part of a U.K. “brand”; we no longer want to punch above our weight. We seek a fresh understanding of ourselves and our relationships with the rest of Europe and the wider world. If Scotland were independent, we would have control over our own welfare and immigration policies, look more to our Scandinavian neighbours and rid ourselves of nuclear weapons.
We want independence because we seek good governance, and no longer think the Westminster government offers that, or social justice or decency. We find the prospect of being a small, independent nation on the fringe of Europe exciting, and look forward to making our own decisions, even if that means having to fix our own problems. We’ll take the risk.
However –and there is always a caveat– there is still very little evidence in verse terms to date of an authentic trans-authorial response to Tory austerity cuts in the actual poetry of the mainstream (and this taps back into my view that still ‘fashionable’ postmodernist sensibilities inhibit such a fusion –and the very fact that there are a fair few high profile poets who do oppose much of what is happening at the moment, but choose to voice this not through their prime medium of expression, but through supplemental columns, would tend to vindicate this view). It’s almost as if many high profile poets are stubbornly trying to prove, as ever, Auden’s long-enduring aphorism ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, which was long ago surgically removed from its poetic context to serve as a kind of anti-rallying-call for poetic Quietism (and I’ll not delve into the hermeneutics of ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ here, since I did so previously in ‘Reoccupying ‘Auden Country”).
Perhaps many poets today feel poetry should offer something entirely ‘different’ or ‘separate’ to the rest of society, that as a medium it should keep out of politics altogether and instead communicate something more ‘transcendent’ or even numinous –but then, if that is the case, why is so much contemporary verse preoccupied with domesticity and the quotidian? Surely poetry readers have more ambitious appetites than can be sated by such thematic conservatism?
But more importantly, this unspoken –but demonstrative– reticence in mainstream poetry to more authentically and noticeably comment on contemporary social calamities (that is, those of domestic politics: many high profile poets are much more outspoken in their poetry on international topics, such as oppressions in Russia and Syria, or on macrocosmic single issues, such as ‘war’) is in many ways to neglect much of the potential of poetry as a medium not only of individual but also social transformation; a way of reaching out to as many people as possible through a symbolic form of communication (not entirely unlike religion), which could, if exploited to its full, operate as potently as, say, red-top propaganda, but, oppositely, towards stimulating independent and reflective thought (as opposed to implanting automatic parrot-thought and parrot-opinion into the populace, as the red-tops do), which in turn might lead to a wider psychical awareness among readers.
While ‘poetry’ might not make anything ‘happen’ in material or political terms, it can nevertheless lead to a ‘change of heart’ –also an Auden phrase– and what else is a political change if it is not, fundamentally, a ‘change of heart’? Much political ‘opinion’ is rooted in the emotions (or disputable lack of them in the Tory case), less so in the intellect (ditto) –and this is never more apparent than in the hysterical ‘politics’ of “welfare”, itself such an emotionally-loaded term now that it is almost a verbal taboo, and not only semi-homophonic to but also part-synonymous with the word ‘warfare’.
In poetic terms, there are still many attitudinal ‘fashions’ which unfortunately obfuscate authentic, heartfelt engagement with the more emotive vicissitudes in society, and this is partly because it is still perceived as somehow heretical in contemporary poetry to be too openly ‘outspoken’, particularly on political topics; and any poets who break with this unspoken convention lay themselves immediately open to prosodic traducing which is, however, almost always a camouflage for ideological antagonisms. Alan Bold discussed this prosodic onus on political poets in his Introduction to the Penguin Book of Socialist Verse (1970) –and in this context, for ‘socialist’ read ‘political’:
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.
(This quote has of course become something of an ‘aspirational’ motto of The Recusant, enshrined on its front page for some time now). Another irony would seem to be that perhaps the prime factor in putting off so many contemporary poets from confronting political issues, or ‘the bigger themes’, is as much to do with the prosodic challenge as with that of exposing themselves to potential establishment blacklisting (i.e. with regards to prizes and honours). Instead of equipping themselves more preparedly with reinforced prosodic armature in order to attempt tackling political themes, they instead mostly kit themselves out in reinforced ‘irony’ (and, no, Sameer Rahim’s oxymoronic phrase ‘ironic sincerity’ –see further down– doesn’t equate to a credible escape from this trap). This is as much a means of self-protection as anything else, but equipping oneself thus, any polemical muscle is sapped from the poetry in the process. It’s almost as if many poets are more preoccupied with keeping up with the trends of society rather than with its events –and this is one of the prime pitfalls of ‘capitalist poetry’ (Caudwell*); it is also, arguably, symptomatic of what sociologist William F. Ogburn termed ‘cultural lag’.
Indeed, the still-trendy postures of ‘knowing irony’, of a post-political cynicism inculcated into our culture during the ‘as good as it gets’ ideological chill out lounge of the ‘New’ Labour Noughties (epitomised by the ubiquity of the now obsolete ‘bookuccino’ Borders circuit), which also promulgated a ‘been there, done that, bought the t-shirt’, hash-in-the-backpack Thailand-travelling ‘year out’, experiential annihilation of Western trustafarianism –all of these are unfortunately, and ruinously, still rampant in what passes for ‘finger-on-the-pulse’, ‘zeitgeisty’ edginess in contemporary verse, at least to the minds of what we might indulge ourselves to imagine as flannel-lapelled ‘talent’-spotters Starbucks-slurping their way through the sifted piles of elliptical, pared-down manuscripts of impersonally toned ‘poem-shaped’ prose or pastiche text-speak, in the big publishing hubs of the metropolis.
All this is tragically symptomatic of a long-predicted co-opting commoditisation of poetry –and culture in general– by business-minded establishments that seek to promote a new commercially sponsored ‘brand’ of verse which in many senses is little different in terms of the ‘effect’ it produces on the public than the promotional spiel of the advertising copywriter, much of which is itself a form of fetishised doggerel –what Jerry Mander, in his blistering polemic Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1971), called ‘advertising verse’ or ‘corporate poetry’, what S.I. Hayakawa called ‘sponsored poetry’ in his Language in Thought and Action (Chapter 15. ‘Poetry and Advertising’), and what Christopher Caudwell in his sublime dialectic, Illusion and Reality (1937) termed ‘bourgeois’ or ‘capitalist poetry’.
To Caudwell, contemporary capitalist society was ‘the superstructure of the bourgeois revolution in production –a revolution whose nature was first analysed completely by Marx in Das Kapital’, and thus, in applying such dynamics to the microcosm of poetry, concluded that ‘Modern poetry is capitalist poetry…’*. Caudwell elaborated at length on this subject, but here’s just a snippet: ‘bourgeois poetry expresses the spirit of manufacture, of the petty manufacturing bourgeoisie, beneath the wings of the big landowning capitalists…’. And one of the key aspects to this ‘capitalist poetry’ is its obliviousness to its own complicity in a cultural system which it consciously presumes itself to be somehow writing in spite of; victim as it is to its own perpetual ‘bourgeois’ rebellion to established modes, which are, paradoxically, actually part-generated by its own propulsions (and often copied, patented and copyrighted by commercial publishing houses) –in Caudwell’s mind, it was a kind of unconscious poetic ‘permanent revolution’, a stylistic Trotskyism of the middle-class poet:
…this anarchic position of the contemporary bourgeois artist is only a variant of the old tragedy of bourgeois revolt. At each stage the bourgeois revolts against the system by the assertion of contradictory categories which only hasten on the advance of the things he hates…
The artisan of yesterday is the factory hand of to-day. The shop-owner of this year is the chain-store manager of the next year. This guarantee of individualism and independence produces the very opposite –trustification and dependence on finance capital… This golden garden of fair competition produces the very opposite of fairness: price-cutting, wars, cartels, monopolies, “corners” and vertical trusts’, and so. The bourgeois is always foaming at the mouth for freedom for it is the thing ‘always slipping from his grasp’. His drive towards a free market exposes the producer to a gale of competition of which the only outcome is – an amalgamation. …and so he makes himself a ‘“mirror-revolutionary” and ‘continually revolutionises society by asking for that which will procure the opposite of what he desires’…The bourgeois poet treads a similar circle…
(Perhaps more of us are prone to this Caudwellian paradox –in spite of our best conscious intentions– than we’d like to know!). In his illuminating polemical pamphlet Marxism and Poetry from Lawrence & Wishart’s Marxism Today Series (No. 6; 1945), George Thomson –who argued in defence of Illusion and Reality against Martin Cornforth’s critical attacks on it through several issues of the Modern Quarterly between 1950-51, a critical joust which became known as ‘The Caudwell Controversy’– recapitulated much of Caudwellian theory:
During the past half-century capitalism has ceased to be a progressive force; the bourgeoisie has ceased to be a progressive class; and so bourgeois culture, including poetry, is losing its vitality. Our contemporary poetry is not the work of the ruling class — what does big business care about poetry?— but of a small and isolated section of the community, the middle-class intelligentsia, spurned by the ruling class but still hesitating to join hands with the masses of the people, the proletariat… And so bourgeois poetry has lost the underlying forces of social change. Its range has contracted —the range of its content and the range of its appeal. It is no longer the work of a people, or even a class, but of a coterie. Unless the bourgeois poet can learn to re-orientate his art, he will soon have nobody to sing to but himself…
Forty years on from Thomson’s polemic, Humphrey Jennings also picked up on this long-term consequence of an ever-spiralling specialisation in poetry ending up as a form of solipsism, in his Pandemonium: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, 1660-1885 (1986) –here interpolated by John Hartley in his polemic Tele-ology: Studies in Television (1992):
…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…
And I’ll be returning to these polemicists and their sources further into this review.
Suffice it to say that there are certain types of contemporary poetry, often, significantly, those promoted under the opportunistic marketing ploy of being ‘political’, ‘polemical’, ‘topical’, and challengingly ‘edgy’, that are, in actual fact –when one digs down to any hints of ‘truth’ in the actual reading matter they so ‘provocatively’ package– precisely the opposite: are, in fact, supreme examples of ‘capitalist poetry’ at its more unscrupulous and deceitful, and serve very much as ‘verse as advertising’, or, in the case of one of the two books under discussion in this review, ‘verse as self-advertising’ (albeit of a type which seems to play on the conceit of ostensibly trying to do the opposite by making itself appear as textually unattractive as possible), seemingly only to the purpose of wrong-footing more politically sincere readers, even indirectly insulting their aspirations for some real political muscle in contemporary high profile poetry; or, in spite of ostensible gestures of conscious ‘self-parody’ imparted through self-amplification so pompous that it can only seriously be interpreted as ‘irony’ or self-parody, nonetheless putting noses out of joint among more experienced –and in many cases more accomplished– poetic craftspeople who suddenly find they’ve laboured for years or decades under the misapprehension that poetry publishing is some sort of pool of meritocracy in a cultural swamp of nepotism and one-upmanship.
Such output has the surface-appearance –even in spite of conscious intentions– of poetry as self-promotion; and on closer inspection is often so elliptical and tonally impersonal as to only reconfirm one’s initial impression. It’s almost as if the ‘poetry’ itself is simply being used as an expedient means to constructing a marketable ‘package’ (or ‘cult’) out of one’s personality, so that a subsequent zeitgeist and ‘mystique’ is automatically generated –because capitalist society implicitly pulls towards it the nauseating tropisms of arrogance and egoism– around the up-and-coming amplified ‘personality’ that has authored the ‘product’, rather than around any obvious singular qualities of the actual content, or substance (if any) of the content, implicit in the ‘product’ itself. Here the ‘personality’, or the ‘packaged profile’, even if as yet unknown and indistinct as the product, appears to be what is being promoted, what is ‘on offer’ for purchase, but, importantly, only in the object through which it is being projected: in this case, a book –but it could well have been anything else.
In a sense, the book itself becomes just a fashionable accoutrement to the rootless and untested conviction that somehow the author is spontaneously apotheosised simply by such athletic promotional investment by the publisher –a commercial self-fulfilling prophecy. The book is the tangible bonus to a new mystique, like an invisible but faintly detectable scent, surrounding an establishment-sponsored, pre-packaged ‘prodigy’ –a kind of prefab Rimbaud sans any as yet-significant distinction. And much of the public fall for the promotional hype, for the advert over and above the product. But they’re not purchasing something lasting or revelatory or life-changing, as the sales spiel projects: they’re simply purchasing another near-identical variation of all the other brands’ special offers, only under a different label and design. In the case of 81 Austerities, the prestige of the Faber ‘brand’ (which in turn invests itself into the ‘brand’ of the volume) is of paramount potency in terms of the book’s cultural candidature and promotional prospects –the ‘brand’ of the imprint is in many ways more important than the product it patrons. To quote from S.I. Hayakawa, advertisers prefer that we be governed by automatic reactions to brand names rather than by thoughtful consideration of the facts about their products.
This is part of the capitalist anti-transubstantiation trick, whereby the substance/thing/product is effectively turned back into its symbol, as expressed most morbidly in money, seen as an end-in-itself, rather than simply a token for product-purchase (see further into this review for more discussion on this subject via Karl Marx and Edmund Wilson), and ditto with the ‘advert’, which is supposed to be promoting a ‘product’ for purchase, but which ends up more promoting the ‘brand’, in and of itself, irrespective of the actual quality of the product.
And it seems almost trite to note that, of course, by sponsoring poets who appear on the surface to be producing something with an ambiguous aura of ‘edginess’ –just as the bourgeois art-dealing world capitalised on the –in any case, apolitical and narcissistic– Stuckists, and has attempted, but so far thankfully failed, to acquire the authentically political and provocative graffiti works of the anonymous ‘Banksy’ (even down to physically stripping one of his works off a public wall, replete with half the plaster as a canvas)– the acquisitive hegemonies appropriate their own synthetic ‘rebel’, their own poetry ‘agitator’, in order to both dupe the public into believing that our publishing culture really is proactively ‘democratic’ and ‘open-minded’ in terms of representing more ‘radical’, leftfield types of literature, and, purely opportunistically, to capitalise on a current cuts-pelted public appetite for more ‘political’ and dissenting types of literature.
But what the public is offered through such duplicities is synthetic substitutes for the real thing, which only placates radical appetites in the short-term, and at the expense of proper nourishment (like the paradox of simultaneously appetite-appeasing-appetite-stimulating fast food or thirst-quenching-and-thirst-causing fizzy drinks: the aim of these being, of course, to make an even more frequently hungry and thirsty ‘customer’ tantamount to an addict of entirely under-nourishing and un-quenching comestibles, thus dependent on their pocket-emptying, habit-forming properties –which all spells perpetual profits for the manufacturers). Similarly, when such approaches are applied to poetry ‘products’, readers experience personally the contemporary paradox of poetic under-consumption in the midst of poetic over-production, though in their special cases, this is a two-in-one phenomenon: the under-consumption comes in spite of exercising the spending power in purchasing the item of over-production. Not so much a case of ‘poetry will eat itself’ as poetry will repeat itself (or ‘reheat’ itself).
Perhaps, then, it isn’t entirely surprising such half-hearted and unfinished poetry has an over-reliance on reader participation (which, in itself, is a potentially good thing), even though there is a distinctly insufficient investment in the prompting of the process by the poets themselves, or, at best, a certain light-touch approach to capturing the readers’ attention through the imaginative energising of language–‘evocation’–and an almost inbuilt resistance to ‘drawing’ readers ‘in’, which is perhaps indicative of a lack of poetic conviction, authenticity, or, if you like, ‘truth’…?
It’s at moments such as these that some poets are tempted into certain conceptual artifices, pretensions seemingly empty of any purposes other than to frustrate interpretations (if nothing else, to deflect from the fact that there is nothing to interpret), trip up their readers with hermeneutical obstacles; in a sense, manipulate them into even, in some instances, falling into the trap of piling up interpretations of the poetry at hand that are far richer, more imaginative and, in themselves, more ‘poetic’ than the rather barren material to which they are so boundlessly giving the benefit of the doubt. Such ‘poetry imposture’, as it might be termed, is unfortunately quite commonplace today, especially through the auspices of some of the most prestigious poetry imprints, which really should know better.
Much contemporary poetry still seems caught up in meditations on deadening domesticity (even, in some examples, dropping ‘brand’ names into poems not as signposts of any polemical point being made, but simply as impartial ‘cultural’ references), as if in futile attempts to somehow versify a cult of consumerist tedium, out of which must be somehow massaged a sense of sublime ‘truth’. And in such a hyper-consumerist society as ours (unabated by retail austerity), where ‘brands’ are etched into the brain like bar codes on a daily basis, thoughts are commoditised, and our very basal adumbrations of ‘reality’ and authentic consciousness are bowdlerised by the billboards of interminable advertising, any ambitions as to somehow being able to dowse someone else’s words and thereby detect, or not detect, some veridic nuggets in the undergrowth, are wildly optimistic.
Nevertheless, in the case of much ‘post-modernist’ contemporary poetry, the treasures to be unearthed are almost all in the hermeneutics of the most devoted of readers. And, inescapably, in the case of a piece of criticism, which I’m attempting to undertake here, the hermeneutic antennae is on auto-pilot, is almost spontaneous, and inextricable from the attempt at articulating a critical response to a piece of work. The point of this proem is to emphasize that, ultimately, as ‘objective’ as I might try to be in my evaluation of both these books, in the end, my own ‘verdict’, for what it’s worth, will inevitably be subjective, even if I do try to bring in, from variously mixed critical sources (both contemporary and historical), some concordant ‘voices’ to try and leaven my own views with a modicum of cross-correspondence, or rather, ‘peer review’. But I am always aware that I might be entirely wrong in my judgements –I only have my personal tastes and impressions to go by.
And in terms of that vexed question of poetic ‘truth’ –that most Babel-like of rubrics in contemporary poetry criticism, and slipperiest of grails for the practising poet: poets can only attempt to communicate ‘the truth’ as they individually perceive it. And in terms of expressing personal senses of ‘political truths’, such poets are few and far between these days (most are noticeably elliptical when it comes to addressing inconvenient truths of their own poetic culture, let alone topics of wider political designed by Nick Byrne, ingeniously titled Porterloo (International Times, 2012, with striking illustrations by Mike Lesser), is a case in point, and will be reviewed after consideration of another volume, which is only meretriciously –and mostly only in its titular and conceptual conceit– related to themes of austerity (and which, by that token, served as a kind of prefab- adumbration of the more authentic verse-conviction of McDevitt’s).
This was the debut full volume of Sam Riviere, deceptively titled 81 Austerities, and published by Faber by way of a consolidation of this young poet’s previous induction into the prestigious and historied press’s famously simple but elegant trio-toned jackets, with a slim pamphlet sampler under the Faber New Poets Series. To this writer, speaking more from the point of view of an editor, Faber perhaps extended the full honours of its much-coveted livery a little too precipitously in the case of Riviere, whose verse has that sort of reasonably well-camouflaged greenness which can sometimes be easily mistaken for ripeness. And on the latter point, I wish to emphasise that it is indeed early days for this up-and-coming poet; that, although I personally find it a significant challenge to fathom from the evidence of the actual verse itself anything which to my own tastes would mark it out for poetic distinction in terms of craftsmanship, emotional power, fathomable purpose, or a sense of artistic authenticity, I do not mean to say that I think the poetry is entirely without merit, only that it falls pretty far outside the parameters of my own personal tests for what, to me, is accomplished and important poetry.
Moreover, and noting that Riviere is as well a visual artist (a graduate of Norwich College of Art and Design), which in part explains the ‘conceptual’ impetus of his volume, I would argue that 81 Austerities is, to my mind, actually just that: a work of conceptual art that just happens to use what appear to be often extemporised, chopped-up and/or ‘found’ words, when it might just have easily used paint, sculpture or some tangible ‘installation’ to its ‘statement’ on ‘austerity’ as an abstract concept.
In many senses, 81 Austerities is more an ‘installation’ than a work of literature, it just happens to be using language as its medium. I’d even argue that interpreting it as a fully fledged work of verse is in many ways an aesthetic mistake –but then, just as our contemporary ‘art’ culture likes to claim ‘anything and everything is art’ –thereby de-investing ancient notions that art has to be in some sense illuminating, insightful, inspired (or inspirited), expressive and invested with that unmistakable mark of talent and/or craftsmanship (or ‘gift’: the almost mystical ability to translate thought through the hand into an external image or form of remarkable beauty and/or deeply affecting visual intensity), it seems, as well, that contemporary poetry culture adheres to similar ‘principles’ –that ‘anything and everything can be poetry’, hence the plethora of frequently plainly expressed, domesticated anecdote that typifies much of the most prominently published verse today.
And here we seem to enter into a dialectic that hurtles towards a wishful ‘democratisation of talent’ as its synthesis, but which many would argue translates, in practice, into a ‘mediocritisation’ of art; and it is perhaps an approach typical of the ‘Oh, that’ll do’ expedient British temperament –culturally manifest in reductionism– that inclines towards a ‘democratisation’ of art (and talent) without having first established its ‘meritocratisation’. In short, it’s a faulty dialectic, which leapfrogs from thesis to synthesis, missing out the much more difficult to pin down but absolutely vital antithesis altogether.
And, to my mind, the kind of ‘artistic produce’ indicative of this cultural and aesthetic short-circuiting in terms of perceptions as to what constitutes talent, or whether there is even such a quantifiable thing as ‘talent’ altogether, are, for example, the purely conceptual, apparently skill-less installations of the likes of Damien Hurst and Tracy Emin, and, in the verse scene, the type of extemporised anti-poetry or contra-verse of which in many ways 81 Austerities has proven one of the more ‘marketable’ distillations. But the only ‘democratising effect’ generated by these very public ‘rehearsals for art’, improvisations, or ‘adumbrations’ of the authentic thing (‘art-by-its-absence’, if you like), is, bluntly, that they prompt in some members of the public/viewers/readerships a greater respect for their own talents, whether actualised or not (as well as, of course, riling many lesser-praised practitioners at the unfathomable veneration of what they perceive to be obviously less accomplished output to their own –not so much ‘sour grapes’ as ‘pitted olives with anchovies’).
It almost gets to a point when too obvious an evidence of ‘talent’ in an artist, writer or poet is somehow interpreted as some kind of anarcho-aristocratic affront to democratic principles; but since we inhabit only a pop-up, flat-back, two-dimensional ‘film set’ attempt at ‘democracy’, we can be sure any ‘principles’ at risk of offence here might be many things, but they are not, authentically speaking, ‘democratic’ (unless one defines democracy purely in terms of ‘majoritarianism’. But I’d be inclined to argue that, in a society where the majority of the population are deprived adequate education –most markedly, in the spheres of culture, politics and sociology, subjects which could help them make more sense of the hegemonic ‘hidden persuaders’ (i.e. our disproportionately right-wing press) that help shape their perceptions and beliefs, and, in turn, preclude their chances of acquiring authentic occupational opportunities, not to say denying them full and accountable democratic political representation and access to the upper echelons of intrinsically anti-democratic capitalist power structures (i.e. oligarchy and oligopoly) –whatever the ‘majority view’ might be on any given subject is, arguably, just the aggregate regurgitation of hegemonic ingestion (to which, one might describe, in same gustatory terms, any dissent from received views as ‘ideological indigestion’ –e.g. socialism as a colic caused by an excess of bile).
This is all of course upside down and results in the worst of both worlds: a society which is eaten up with its own rapacious ‘competitiveness’, one-upmanship, institutionalised nepotism and correspondingly implacable class structure, but which yet, schizophrenically, invests much of its ‘democratic’ inclinations in a qualitative relativism within its arts and culture.
To my mind, with these two only superficially similar but actually diametrically opposite poetry collections, we have, in McDevitt’s, a book which, to coin a perennial phrase, pretty much ‘does what it says on the tin’ (and much more besides), and directly engages with the dystopian farce of hyper-commercialised and commoditised yet economically paralysed ‘austerity capitalism’, through a brilliant subversion of the topsy-turvy ‘Newspeak’ of its corporate apparatchiks’ rapacious propaganda of ‘brand’ advertising and intransigent right-wing propaganda (through that ubiquitous and unholy alliance of Tory and tabloid, or what we might call, ‘blue torch and red-top’), so as to equip his deeply oppositional poetry with its own self-empowering, counter-hegemonic armoury of antagonistic nomenclature formulated in ways that government and tabloid mythologists (e.g. with regards to what I call ‘Scroungerology’: the contemporary mass “scrounger” shadow-projection of un-confronted societal vices and moral failings onto the most vulnerable, particularly the unemployed, and, even more shamefully, the sick and disabled) will both instantly, and antipathetically, grasp. So, in these senses, McDevitt’s is verse as anti-advertising, verse in adversity; and, moreover, adversarial verse –something which unlikely iconoclast T.S. Eliot believed to be the only authentic form of poetry:
…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.
Riviere’s verse, on the other hand, seems more just verse as advertising. In spite of its posture of pastiche advertising spiel, 81 Austerities comes perilously close to playing its own commercial confidence trick on the reading public: and this is because, perversely, Riviere’s verse does the imitation too convincingly, whereby his alleged attempts at self-ridicule through self-hyperbole simply come across as self-hyperbole: it actually does read, in the main, as if the poet is promoting himself, and the very promoting itself –a kind of poetry as product and advert all in one, a ‘commodity poetry’.
Christopher Caudwell was disputably the first poetry polemicist to observe that ‘The poet now begins to show the marks of commodity-production’. He speculated on the likely future development of many venerated poets who had not lived beyond their greener years, as to whether the likes of Byron, Shelley and Keats would have been destined to a Wordsworthian winding down of their poetic passion and revolutionary zeal –and thus Caudwell saw much consolation in the fact that they were all spared the inevitable ‘tragedy of the bourgeois illusion working itself out impersonally in their poetry’. But then, of course, William Blake lived to a ripe three scores and ten and lost none of his poetic edge or visionary zeal –though Blake is very often an ‘exception’ to the ‘rule’ of his period, and, arguably, to all periods).
And when one considers the disturbing mutuality between the rhythms employed in poetry and those employed in promotional copy/spiel to sell products, it’s not difficult to see how an attempt to parody what Hayakawa terms ‘sponsored poetry’ (advertising verse) through the medium of ‘unsponsored poetry’ (i.e. actual poetry –though at another level, Riviere’s verse is a kind of ‘sponsored’ poetry in the sense of its promotion by a major ‘label’) without sufficient pre-consideration of how most effectively to do so, can so easily become confused with the very thing it is supposedly parodying. 81 Austerities lays itself open to such a trap even more so by its choice of subject matter –mainly that of Sam Riviere, its author– and its tone of Stuckist-esque ‘narcissistic chic’, so not only does it come across as verse as advertising, but also as verse as self-advertising. Riviere –rather than the verse– would appear to be the ‘product’.
Hayakawa reminds us of the unhealthy interrelation between verse and advertising in his fascinating chapter ‘Poetry and Advertising’ from Language in Thought and Action (1949), when he argued that the aim of the ‘copywriter is the poeticising of consumer goods… A poet…cannot let a yellow primrose remain merely a yellow primrose… the primrose comes to symbolise things… Similarly, an advertising writer cannot permit a cake of soap to remain a cake of soap and “nothing more”…the copywriter, like the poet, must invest it with significance so that it becomes symbolic of something beyond itself… aristocratic elegance (Chanel No. 5)… rugged masculinity (like Marlboros)… the tasks of the copywriter is the poeticising of consumer goods.
One might, in the context of the volume under discussion, turn the latter trope round to say that the verse in 81 Austerities seems more commensurate to some subversion of the poet’s task towards the commoditising of poetic goods (it might have been more accurately titled 81 Adverts). Hayakawa goes onto say:
The unsponsored poet of today works in a semantic environment in which almost all the poetry that ordinary people hear and read is the sponsored poetry of consumer goods’ and that subsequently, the once-hypnotic power of words through pure poetry has been sapped by public association with ‘poetic language’, or, more accurately, rhythmical verse, with ‘purposes of salesmanship’. … Poets, too, must work with the symbols that exist in the culture, and… Almost all the symbols of daily living… have been appropriated by advertisers…
Which begs the question: is Riviere trying to re-appropriate advertising language for poetry? And does that mean his poetry is employed for the ‘purposes of salesmanship’?
But stylistics aside, it is the disingenuousness of 81 Austerities that irritates: rather than trying to genuinely grapple with the multitude of catastrophic social vicissitudes of recent years, as its tricksy title hints might be the case, it actually and explicitly doesn’t ‘do what it says on its tin’, but opportunistically plays on the abstract concept of ‘austerity’ and applies its precepts of systematic thrift to the medium of poetry itself, almost like performing a workshop exercise to try and find as many ways to compose a poem with as little verbal embellishment as possible, stripping the verse down to its bare components, and thus producing what are, in a sense, poem-carcases, and certainly eighty-one verse-‘austerities’ (and in that one sense, at risk of contradiction, perhaps Riviere’s book does ‘do what it says on the tin’, albeit in a rather roundabout way).
This conceit might have perhaps seemed more of a novelty in previous poetic periods when more marked engagement with image, metaphor and description were relatively commonplace; but, the opportunistic confidence-trick of the politically counterfeit titular conceit apart, even the method fails to distinguish itself amidst what is already a broadly reductionist or deconstructionist postmodernist poetry culture where such elliptical pseudo-textspeak and ‘prosetry’ is already widely pervasive (again, the proverbial postmodernist ‘poetic constipation’, although, inexplicably, promoted as if this particularly manifestation of it is somehow outré).
It’s almost painful to have to say it, but in both ethical and aesthetic terms, 81 Austerities ultimately proves its own worst enemy, even its own victim, its very title self-prescriptively disadvantageous, a big glaring ‘hostage to fortune’ hoarding of a title (though I recognise of course that everything I am writing here, in all sincerity of opinion, is itself one aggregate ‘hostage to fortune’) almost like one of Reginald Perrin’s ‘knowingly undersold’ anti-advertisements for his ergonomically illiterate Grot, manufacturers of entirely useless products (“solar-powered torches” and the like), any verisimilitude of which is instantly betrayed by the pop-up poetry skeletally sketched within its covers –and although, as with many Faber firsts, the volume was (automatically? as part of the publishing contract?) catapulted to the top of the Forward Prize list for Best Debut Collection, and a Guardian Book of the Year (‘has a wry, sardonic touch, with, however, an underlying power that signals a gifted new voice’, Edna O’Brien…?!), in broader critical terms, if one discounts inescapable supplemental plaudits –promotional spiel in themselves– which are really cases of the proverbial ‘damning with faint praise’ (in such a wide gamut of outlets as The Guardian (by Ruth Padel), The Independent and The Telegraph), such Olympian summits would appear to have scored mostly only pyrrhic conquests.
More bluntly, the hype surrounding this publication, based on the evidence of the actual verse served up within it, is, for me personally, unfathomable; even more so when one surveys the ‘real thing’, as it were, authentic political verse of some contemporary smaller presses, much of which is also far more prosodically accomplished output; most notably, Smokestack Books, which offers a list of truly exceptional, ripely topical and hugely powerful contemporary ‘political’ poetry from a rich crop of highly individual voices united by their common socialistic values, while yet so different stylistically, almost in complete opposite parallel to the far more uniformed and formulaic voices published through the bigger imprints and poetry journals, most of whom are united, ironically, more in terms of their individualistic values. It’s interesting to reflect, again, on the individualistic editorial stance taken on the 2011 riots by then-editor Fiona Sampson of the flagship journal of the postmodernist orthodoxy, Poetry Review:
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…
It is also not without significance that Poetry Review, and its fellow high profile postmodernist cousin, Poetry London, both excerpted sizeable chunks from Riviere’s volume, being as it was a conveniently apolitical ‘response to austerity’ from a large imprint, which they could safely promote in order to seem relevant to current events but without ruffling any establishment feathers in the process; for instance, the sheer deluge of authentic and technically accomplished political poetry pouring out from the smaller presses of the same period –such as Smokestack, Flambard, Red Squirrel, Waterloo et al– were markedly absent from Fiona Sampson’s solipsistic ‘round up’ in the now notorious non-sequitur that was the ‘Where Is The New Political Poetry?’ summer 2011 issue of Poetry Review –a velum-coated non-event in the verse scene which McDevitt, for one, brilliantly ripped to pieces in his article at International Times, in which he riposted, ‘The answer to the question ‘Where is the New Political Poetry?’ is: not in the Summer 2011 edition of Poetry Review’.
Poetic conceits such as 81 Austerities, then, manage more to muddy the waters of contemporary poetic-political dialectics than illumine them, almost in the same way that advertising distracts consumers from the necessities of their lives for the flash and whiz of manufactured ‘false needs’, or commodities of no true worth or usefulness, but that are simply the latest ‘must have’ of entirely dispensable and ephemeral fashion. Riviere’s efficacious confidence-trick is, in its actual manifest form, less verse than advertisement –though it’s not even clear what is actually being advertised. No doubt that’s part of the point of his conceit, and certainly marketed as a key conceptual selling-point by the publishers. (And, yes, I am aware that if the author ever reads this review, choicest snippets from it may well end up forming part of one his cut-and-paste collages of those pockets of negative criticism which diverge from the general received view of the book’s inalienable triumph, as spun by its corporate-minded sponsors).
But, after what had been in 2012 two years of pulverising austerity cuts and remorseless shaving down of living standards, had we not even by then grown out of such affectedly synthetic nihilism and ‘nothing really matters or means anything’ poetry ‘manifestos’? Although some obvious aspects to Riviere’s volume signpost certain symbols, memes and nomenclature (the proliferation of text-speak and the frequent nods to the vicarious ‘cyber-sex’ of internet pornography, are examples) which are recognisably attributable to something resembling a ‘zeitgeist’ (though certainly not in the true sense of the term, meaning ‘spirit of the times’, since ‘spirit’ is not an ingredient I detect in the verses themselves), some might argue that this is more now a ‘vestigial zeitgeist’, that we’ve moved on, quite abruptly, over the past four years or so through the very ‘austerity’ culture that the book itself uses, if only superficially, as its rubric (or, more opportunistically, its cod-topical ‘selling point’).
81 Austerities feels more like the product of the deeply apolitical, culturally atomised hiatus of the anodyne Noughties (a commoditised verse companion- piece, perhaps, to Oliver James’ Affluenza) than anything obviously representative of the increasingly radicalised and mobilised ‘anti-capitalist’ activism (cue the Occupy movement etc.) of ‘Generation Rent’, or ‘Generation Tent’ as the case may ultimately be. Far from having its ‘finger on the pulse’, I personally feel the book is slightly behind the times in many respects, and is, as with the Stuckists in the visual art medium, symptomatic of a deeply ironic ‘cultural lag’ in contemporary arts culture (and yes, I am aware that, at risk of contradicting my own precepts, ‘cultural lag’ is itself a reductionist term, coined by William F. Ogburn, but it was prefigured by Karl Marx in the form of ‘technological determinism’): a seeming inability, or wilful refusal, to catch up ‘poetically’ with the seismic social and political tectonic shifts of the here and now, which demand to be addressed by society’s poets and artists (particularly those who occupy the most public platforms). But it seems, in postmodernist mainstream culture, it’s still a case of ‘Stuck-in-a-rut-ists’, of ‘post-relevant postmodernists’, of ‘marketable packages’ for non-existent markets instead of ‘trends-reversing survival kits’ for the newly emerging verse-activists (of which, significantly, Niall McDevitt is a prime example).
For any who might think these opinions rather harsh, I excerpt below the critical verdict on Riviere’s volume by Alex Niven and Stephen Ross, published in the Oxonian Review, and appositely titled ‘Major Label Verse’ –the only review I read during the thick of euphoric reception for the book which dissented from that general critical ‘line’:
The release of Sam Riviere’s 81 Austerities has quickly become a case study in how easy it is for a young writer to be damned by the praise of the middlebrow mediascape. As the new Faber poet du jour, Riviere has become a minor literary celebrity, but his work is feted for all the wrong reasons. Reviewers have taken both his title (an ostensible dig at the coalition government’s austerity measures) and the origin of the poems (in a series of “poetry posts” on a blog begun in 2010) as an indication that Riviere offers a sort of magic synthesis of political engagement and tech-savvy modernistic innovation.
In one sense, it is a shame that 81 Austerities has been hyperbolised almost out of existence by the casual blandishments of the bourgeois literati (Ruth Padel, for example, argued that the poems “have a lovely energy”, in a queasily gushing Guardian review). The collection is not, all things considered, so bad. Against a backdrop of polarisation in British poetry between an aging avant-garde and a conservative mainstream, Riviere’s formless circumlocutions at least have the virtues of eccentricity and gaucheness, two qualities that are relatively rare in major label contemporary verse.
Riviere’s basic mode, adopted in almost all of the 81 short poems contained in the book, is the unpunctuated monologue. This template is typically used to communicate allegories of hipster culture and the vicissitudes of adolescent or post-adolescent experience, as in the following gap-year-esque conceit-poem, ‘All the Happiness You’ll Ever Need’:
the sun in paris rides a skateboard
giving everyone high-fives winking
at a man whose wife leans out from
a first-floor hotel balcony standing
by a fish stall in the still shady streets
of the disgusting latin quarter at 7 a.m.
having violet eyes like you-know-who
and lighting the unlit cigarettes of two
american boys with very serious hair
wearing plain white T-shirts and then
it’s off going waterskiing up the seine
The formula allows for occasional rhymes (who/two, then/seine) and near-rhymes (from/a.m.) but these are incidental and even arbitrary. What is being foregrounded is a discourse that mirrors the untrammeled loquaciousness of the text message, the quickly written email, the botched website pop-up advert.
It’s in the following four sentences that I think the reviewers really hit the nub of the problem of the book:
This is not an entirely pointless formal trick in itself, but in any deeper sense it does not seem to have a point. There is no situationist détournement, no attempt to run the language of technological modernity back against itself as a means of subversion. And neither is there any attempt to parachute in different lexical registers—as someone like J.H. Prynne might—as a means both of ironising and elevating text-message discourse so that it becomes something strange, jarring, and, perhaps, ultimately ennobling. This is what a good poem is, but Riviere’s apparent attempt to write something like a text-message poem is ultimately just a text message, albeit one with a metaphor and a goofball phraseology tacked on for effect.
The reviewers then pick up on the ghost of Frank O’Hara, which tends to haunt much contemporary postmodernist poetry:
Perhaps a more generous approach would be to judge Riviere by the standards of his own frame of reference. After all, 81 Austerities does not align itself with the situationists or with the strongest of the UK’s late-modernists, but with a range of less austere, non-British predecessors. The most insistent of this book’s ghosts is Frank O’Hara, whose breathless urban egoism and short-gains lyric ironies register Riviere’s room tone. O’Hara’s transformation of witty improvisation into a high art form in the 1950s and 60s licensed countless subsequent poets to name-check their artist friends, apostrophise pop culture institutions, wax anarchically surrealist about the “real world,” and write about lunch. Riviere takes up the mantle with great brio, doing all of these things with a heavy-handed contemporary twist and ruthless consistency. O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that” becomes, in his hands, “I hate this/I love that.” In Riviere’s hands, O’Hara’s flair for irony subsides into ironized flair:
[In the ensuing ‘verse’ extract, we see Riviere planting proleptic ripostes to anticipated criticisms of ‘conceit’ and prosodic ‘confidence trick’ –once again the young poet who is always ‘one step ahead of us’, and of his future detractors, is mining himself and his conceptual impertinence for the very subject matter of his ‘poem’; the point being apparently to be pointless, and the end result: about as removed from any conceivable verisimilitude of verse as would seem possible –or even prose, except for some half-hearted attempt at prosaic stream-of-consciousness, indicated really only by an absence of punctuation, casualised by adolescent-flavoured expletives and text-speak, while language is entirely let off the hook]
One Note Solo
it depends if he is genuine or not
if he is it is wonderfully expressive
sensitive overt yet subtle brave art
if he is not it is an arrogance and
conceit a concept daring to see
how stupid people can be how much
they can be conned by confidence
it’s a confidence trick that if he gets
pleasure from makes him in my eyes
an arsehole to do something like that
although it could be argued if the
audience are aware of his exhibitionism
and enjoy the twist to a normal stage
performance it is no matter what his
psychology is and he would not be an
arsehole or a twat only he himself
knows how much of his planned act
however planned is motivated by
honesty and how much is disingenuous
absurdism if that distinction can be made
Yes, the distinction can be made. ‘One Note Solo’ indeed: this is the sound of one hand clapping for itself. Here, the poet’s failure to out-ironize his own irony does not activate a new kind of ‘honesty’ (as it does, say, in O’Hara’s frenetic late poem ‘Biotherm’)—rather, it strips the poem of all interest. You can’t dig into ‘One Note Solo’, or almost any other poem in this collection, and what’s the point of merely skating over its surface?
Precisely; it’s as if Riviere’s verse is almost critic-proof due to having eviscerated itself of anything substantial to criticise.
Poetry, of course, has always been a dying art, hence the proliferation of “apologies” over the centuries. Poetry’s failure—to capture experience, to change the world, to have itself heard—is the poetic convention par excellence. Good poets bring this dead art back to life again and again, Frankenstein-style; bad poets whine about its death in the idiom of the day. The idiom of our day is the choppy unpunctuated monologue, the voice of endless mediation, staginess, and pixelated solipsism:
All day I have been watching women
crush ripe tomatoes in their cleavage
whatever you think of
someone’s already done it
there’s a new kind of content
pre-empting individual perversions
I’ve seen my missing girlfriend’s face
emerge cresting from a wave of pixels
I sleep with a [rec] light at the foot
of my bed. . .
But does this really allegorise our collective loneliness? Or is it just scabrous faux-confessionalism? Computers, recording devices, missing girlfriends, crushed ripe tomatoes in cleavages. Yawn. He’s right about one thing, though: ‘whatever you think of / someone’s already done it.’ Hasn’t the face of atomized postmodern identity crested toward us before?
The time of day or the density of the light
Adhering to the face keeps it
Lively and intact in a recurring wave
Of arrival. The soul establishes itself.
So writes John Ashbery in 1975. Thirty-seven years later, Riviere trades in the convex mirror for the computer screen, and replaces Ashbery’s suave facture with the art of the blog post.
But, one might object, these poems are not intended to be taken so seriously: if anything, they are lively, wry snapshots of our amphetaminised tech-zeitgeist and don’t aspire to be thousand-year art. They are made for rapid consumption, and if they also prompt reflection on consumerist excesses, so much the better. Maybe. But even so, it seems important to take 81 Austerities to task for the way it so casually condescends to engage with ‘big issues’: austerity cuts, of course, but also the ‘rich/poor gap,’ ‘the destruction of the rainforests,’ the expansion of pornography into the public sector. The book is opportunistic in the worst way, reducing the vulnerable position of artists, and of cultural institutions more generally, into a facile governing conceit—a mere pretext for surfing the zeitgeist.
‘Effortless, wide-ranging and confident’ (the Forward Prize judges). ‘Refreshingly modern, accessible and self-aware’ (Varsity). ‘A sexy book’ (The Independent). This collection wouldn’t merit such a caustic review, but given the often scarily ineloquent, uncritical responses it has received elsewhere, some sort of levelling action seems vital. The culture industry has taken a xeroxed précis of some of the best late-twentieth century verse, and spruced it up for the literary prize circuit in lieu of the real deal. Once again, another generation of readers will have to learn to look harder and further than the dead centre of market orthodoxy for a more authentic, less presumptuous new bearing in British poetry.
It’s interesting again to note phrases such as ‘market orthodoxy’, and hortatory prompts towards looking elsewhere for something ‘more authentic’ –if it wasn’t for the pithier discipline of the Oxonian reviewers’ compendious take (as opposed to my lapses into prolixity), I might have confused there’s and my own reviews. It’ll not surprise readers to know that I wholeheartedly concur with this critical take on the book, and felt its own ‘levelling action’ needed some reinforcements to counterpoint that blasts of broadsheet hyperbole of which the review takes note. Riviere’s verse, or the card-flapped kudos in which it was clothed, pushed all the buttons of a uninamously smitten mainstream commentariat, and, in that sense, would seem to have had something of a Pavolvian effect in terms of predictable critical applause common to titles under that mighty imprint –‘Pavolvian verse’, anyone…?
On the phrase Ruth Padel picked to spark off her damp praise, ‘Effortless’, well, bluntly, this word is self-evident, though not perhaps in the sense Padel intended it: it’s clear, at least, to the Oxonian Review, that much of the verse under discussion does indeed appear to be bereft of any perceptible ‘effort’. To ascribe to a creative work which seems and feels invested with some extraordinary ‘effort’ the epithet of ‘effortless’, implies of course that the critic is also ascribing to the artist or writer the distinction of some genius sans perspiration; but to ascribe to a work which seems and feels to have been invested with little ‘effort’ the epithet of ‘effortless’ is simply to state the unremarkably obvious.
Of course, it’s also trite to point out that if such a book as 81 Austerities was truly, authentically subversive, politically radical and genuinely challenging to hegemonies, a) it wouldn’t have been published by Faber, and b) it certainly wouldn’t have been hyped up to the euphoric degree that it has been in the national supplements. But what almost all these reviewers appear to be praising isn’t actually the poetry itself, but the concept to which the poems are entirely subordinate. And some of these ‘critics’ unwittingly reveal their hands all too transparently as they, like Riviere himself, betray their own commoditised perceptions as to what constitutes artistic ‘product’ of any lasting and endurable quality or importance.
This was glaringly apparent in the almost self-contradictory piece by Elleen E. Jones in The Independent (13 September 2012), who wrote, seemingly without any real sense of self-searching irony, ‘His [Riviere’s] balance of accessibility and formal invention is what makes Riviere marketable, even in austerity Britain’. Is this meant to be slightly tongue-in-cheek satire, or self-parody? One might ask precisely the same questions of both Riviere’s volume and much of the incomprehensibly jubilant journalistic-‘critical’ response to it. One plus-point of inflicting these supplemental excerpts on readers is that they provide sufficiently extensive excerpts from Riviere’s verses to save me the chore of having to plough through the volume a second time to extract some myself –but one tends to notice the marked lack of any obvious evidence to vindicate the hyperbolic tone of the ‘review’ in any of the actual extracts from the verse excerpted:
Sam Riviere was one of the four young poets to benefit from the Arts Council-funded Faber New Poets scheme. Judging by this follow-up to his debut, the investment was a sound one, so it’s apt that his collection takes austerity policies as its inspiration.
Only, it doesn’t!
Riviere’s work is certainly not “austere” in any other sense. Mostly written in the first person and full of chatty run-on lines and zeitgeist-y references, his poems read like an on-going conversation between friends.
‘Premises, Premises’ reports back on a gig, ‘Nobody Famous’ is a series of captions from holiday pics on Facebook or Instagram: ‘This is me eating not 1 not 2 but 3 pancakes / this is me having Breakfast in America in paris’. Are the repeatedly mentioned Jennys and Emmas current or former girlfriends we’re supposed to remember? Savvy readers know better than to confuse author and narrator, so why do these poems seem to invite that very confusion?
In 81 Austerities, it’s not just that the poems appear to communicate in the poet’s own voice, it’s that this voice (which even pops up in the idiosyncratic index) is often the subject of the poems themselves, as if trying to convince of its own authenticity.
Another ‘critic’ falls again for this synthetic hankering after authenticity – there appears to be no clear sense in which these verses are trying to convince us of anything at all. Nevertheless, according to Ms Jones:
Several of the poems comment on poetry and culture. ‘The Sweet New Style’ is sniffily sarcastic about the contemporary fondness for twee things. There is suppressed professional rivalry in ‘Adversity in the Arts’ and anxiety about funding sprinkled throughout. ‘Crisis Poem’, which opens the collection, asks whether capital is the ‘index of meaning’, while ‘Dream Poem’ even includes its own in-built literary criticism (‘In my dream the poem didn’t have / this assonance that’s creeping in’).
Self-reference may be par for the course for contemporary poets, but Riviere’s has taken his engagement with the modern world beyond posing and into formal experimentation. ‘Year of the Rabbit’, a description of a trailer he’d make for an Updike book, if he was a conceptual artist, is as multimedia as ink words on a paper page can get.
But Riviere is a conceptual artist! And there is no clear evidence of any ‘formal experimentation’ in the poems, which, at least ostensibly, appear very much as ‘posing’.
It’s a sexy book – not only in the Coalition/Blair spin doctor sense of attractively modern, but literally too. Several poems, like ‘Clones’ borrow and remodel the language of internet porn to occasionally shocking effect, but Riviere is at his cheeky, charming best when, as in ‘No Touching’, his language takes the long road round: ‘We will appear at the weddings/ of people we don’t care about / our faces radiant from fucking.’
The very commercially savvy, advertising-style phrase ‘sexy book’ is particularly telling – to quote from S.I. Hayakawa again, speaking of the copywriter whose job it is to ‘“poeticise” or glamorise’ (even fetishise) ‘the objects’ up for sale by giving them brand names and investing those names with all sorts of desirable affective connotations suggestive of health, wealth, popularity with the other sex, social prominence, domestic bliss, fashion, and elegance’. Here Jones is doing much of the copywriter’s job under the subterfuge of critical journalism. But, more pertinently, is Riviere a poet dreaming he is a copywriter, or a copywriter dreaming he is a poet? Is he a kind of Gordon Comstock in ‘virtual’ reverse?
Quotable and funny, this is the poetry of online dating profiles and witty Facebook status updates. His balance of accessibility and formal invention is what makes Riviere marketable, even in austerity Britain, but it’s also what makes him good.
The earlier asserted non-sequitur that Riviere’s work is ‘certainly not “austere”’ seems somewhat bizarre given the distinctly unadorned, pared-down, casually conversational, image-impoverished, un-evocative, un-descriptive, adjectivally arid shavings of ‘verse’ provided, almost all of which read indistinguishably from prose –and a markedly flavourless stripped-to-the-bone prose at that. It’s also hugely ironic in itself that someone who makes so many claims of merit in the book seems so oblivious to the most marked textural feature of the work: its blatantly ‘austere’ style, which is, after all, pivotal to its entire conceptual purpose!
Before 81 Austerities had even seen print, and based entirely on an implied, near-mystical ‘sense of momentum’ based around its then-exclusively ‘virtual’ debut via its own website, I remember coming upon a rather lazy and disingenuously titled piece by one Daniel Barrow in The New Statesman, ‘The poetry of austerity’, sub-titled with optional inflection, ‘A response to the cuts in verse’ (which might have been phrased, ‘A response to [pause] cuts in verse’, or ‘A response to arts cuts, in verse’), which began, obliviously:
Art, relatively speaking, is slow. Representation needs time to mirror real events, and little work has emerged so far in reaction to the coalition government’s austerity programme since it took power last June.
I say ‘obliviously’, since Mr Barrow –and, indeed, The New Statesman– seemed to be completely unaware of the otherwise pretty well covered Emergency Verse, the 111-poet strong, emphatic response to the cuts, which I’d selected and edited, which had been published in e-book form and emailed to all MPs the previous summer (in direct response to the ‘Emergency’ Budget, hence its title), and launched in print form at a packed Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre in January 2011. By the point of Barrow’s promotion-cum-article, summer 2011, review copies of EV had been distributed to all the progressive paper and magazine outlets, including the NS, which, however, had seemingly completely ignored it (as it would also, the following year, ignore The Robin Hood Book).
EV had been covered by Guardian Society, the Big Issue, The Independent, the Morning Star, and even picked up by Reuters, and yet, Daniel Barrow (and The New Statesman, a magazine which one would have presumed would be the first to cover an anthology against the cuts, which also included many poets previously published in the NS, such as its one-time own resident poet, Bill Greenwell) seemed completely unaware of the anthology. Indeed, unaware of pretty much anything other than a much-hyped solo volume more riffing on the abstraction of ‘austerity’ than actually ‘reacting’ to the coalition government’s ‘austerity’ programme, and which just so happened to be published by the most prestigious poetry imprint in the land. In this context, the second sweeping trope of the above excerpt would seem wilfully blind, if not criminally negligent. Nevertheless, to the oblivious Barrows of this world, Riviere’s volume was the first significant verse intervention against the Tory-led government, in spite of being neither significant, nor an intervention.
It was this apparent prestige-based disingenuousness, unrepresentative selectivity, even irrelevance, and synthetic, purely titular associating of 81 Austerities with a wider and more authentic insurgency among the poet’s cuts-capped generation, which really rankled at the time. The somewhat solipsistic Barrow continued:
There was the so-so Theatre Uncut initiative earlier this year, but over the last couple of months another project has emerged out of the unlikely world of innovative poetry to deal with the cuts.
Only, once again, it doesn’t actually ‘deal with the cuts’ at all, only utilises them for a conceptual conceit which has little, if anything, to do with austerity, nor with the catastrophic cuts announced in the ‘Emergency’ Budget, nor with the trebling of student tuition fees and the student riots, nor with the then-announced dismantlement of EMA, but very much to do with Sam Riviere, his quotidian text messages, allusions to internet porn, and constant preoccupation with his own fledgling ‘poetry’ career and embarrassment of associated riches. All of this might not be so offensive if it wasn’t for the fact that the book was attempting to palm itself off as something of poetic-political import.
If there is any sociological significance to 81 Austerities, it is purely in its emphatic expression of a kind of i-pod-plugged solipsism prevalent among vast swathes of the Noughties’ postgraduate generation (born in the Eighties –Riviere was born in 1981, hence, perhaps, the reason for his numerical choice of austerities by way of birth-reference) who just escaped the clutches of trebled university tuition fees at the cusp of the Tories’ ‘austerity capitalism’; and, bizarrely, it seems most of the contemporary poetry that does appear to be addressing the unprecedented dispossession of the upcoming ‘Generation Rent’ (or ‘Tent’ as the case may be) is coming more from the pens of those born between the late Sixties and the late Seventies, educated in the Eighties and Nineties, refuseniks of the Thatcher era, of whom Niall McDevitt is one example.
However, this early coverage of Riviere’s project is now, retrospectively, of interest, purely because it includes some attempts at exposition on the purpose of the verses quoted from the author himself:
Poet Sam Riviere, winner in 2007 of an Eric Gregory Award and author of a pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series published last year, has been working on a web-published sequence of poems entitled 81 Austerities. It consists of 9 sets of 9 poems each, published on a weekly basis from 12 May. In Riviere’s words, “The brief is to publish a passive/aggressive response to the ‘austerity measures’ implemented by the Coalition government in the UK in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis. The collection aims to apply such ‘cuts’ to poetry itself, experiencing this deprivation primarily on the levels of sentiment, structure, and subject matter.”
Wow, how conceptual! And note the very telling phrase, ‘The brief’, again betraying a very conscious corporate approach to the project, as if it’s some kind of advertising assignment.
Riviere trained at the Norwich School of Art and Design, and the conceptual, process-oriented character of art education leaves its mark in the work. Each section incorporates photographic materials, and includes a number of visual poems and the use of innovative typography; the Tumblr version includes a number of video-poems assembled from scavenged footage, photographs and collages. The sequence was written systematically, following 8 different and intertwining themes. The overall tone takes its cues from the drollery and deadpan neutrality of internet discourse, the new-bureaucratic language of advertising and PR, the monologues of the bored and perpetually dissatisfied. It follows on from the high-velocity, obscurely logical language of Tom Raworth, the Language poets and the British poets who followed in their wake.
In Riviere’s poetry, austerity figures as a revocation of generosity, a violence done to form, a grain to the surface of language that resists easy comprehension. As he writes in ‘Cuts’:
very soon the things we cherish most
will likely be taken from us the wine
from our cellars our silk gowns and opium
but tell me what do you expect Chung Ling Soo
much ridiculed conjurer of the court and last
of the dynasty of brooms to do about it?
The poems, when written as monologues, present difficulties for the usual forms of biographical or dramatic reading. They denaturalise and call attention to, the language that they hoover up from the wider culture – an important gesture when the cuts are justified by the government and media by the neutering and abuse of language into doublespeak.
Yes, but on the evidence of the verse, it remains just a ‘gesture’: where is the imaginative engagement with language, the satire, litotes, the pastiche of government spin and PR, the play on tabloid dysphemism and propaganda, the polemical dimension…? They just aren’t there!
The publishing strategy of 81 Austerities – publication for free online, although a number of the poems have appeared also in literary journals – presents an obverse to the subject matter: a potlatch, an assurance, when everything is being cut, that some activities free of the suffocating logic of exchange are still possible.
Until they’re repackaged in a Faber paperback for £9.99, that is! And note, again, the very business-like phraseology: ‘The publishing strategy’: time after time this reviewer of the work, as well as a welter of others after him, continually betray what is their shared sense, tinged with a strange admiration, of an opportunistic and shrewdly marketed publishing confidence trick, which is itself a paradox: the efficacious promotion and selling of a paper and card product, a perfect-bound commodity, on the basis of its purely superficial, posturing, counterfeit ‘dissention’ against austerity and the spiel of both government and advertising that tries justifying it, and, to put the icing on the fake cake, through precisely those same cynically commercial means that the book pretends to be subverting. What a hustle!
Another hyperbolic response to the volume came from one Phoebe Power in Cambridge University’s student magazine, Varsity (November 2012), which stated:
81 Austerities is Riviere’s stunning first collection, published by Faber and winner of this year’s Forward Prize. When I heard the poet read at St Catharine’s College a couple of weeks ago I was amazed by the refreshingly modern, accessible and self-aware quality to these poems.
And then, more tellingly:
The book started as a blog responding to cuts in arts funding, with poems appearing every few days.
The emphasis that 81 Austerities was specifically focused on ‘cuts in arts funding’ appears to diverge from the near-universal ‘line’ on the volume that it is about the austerity cuts in general (which it demonstrably isn’t), bandied about by besotted reviewers in order to make it seem more relevant to a wider readership. Powers’ next trope is particularly bizarre, seeming less a back-handed compliment than a front-handed insult:
The digital origins of the poems reflect their form: pithy, glancing, non-punctuated, ephemeral.
And yet not too ‘ephemeral’ to warrant enshrining by Faber! Is ‘ephemeral’ something to be aspired to in poetry, let alone praised? It might explain the flash-in-the-pan prizes and plaudits, yes, but is this really what contemporary British poetry culture has come to now: the veneration of poetic ephemera as if it’s some implicit mark of distinction? The point should surely be to comment in poetry on the ephemeral aspects to consumerist culture, but not to, almost symbiotically, produce poems that are themselves mere ephemera in the process. Again, this only feeds back into my contention that 81 Austerities is its own conceptual victim; and perhaps it is intended to be, and I’ve been missing the point all along. But then I’d add that if that is the ‘point’, I think it’s a point worth missing. As for the verb ‘glancing’ –it only strengthens my impression that much of the book is extemporised. Then the loaded statement:
The ‘austerity’ of the book’s title is less a political statement than an expression of the loss of artistic authenticity.
But something’s really going wrong here, both poetically and hermeneutically: many might argue the book’s title, and indeed its content, is not ‘an expression of the loss of artistic authenticity’, but more just a demonstration of it. ‘Authenticity’ is not a term I would have brought into a review on this volume if it is intended to be positive; it is, in this context, a ‘hostage to fortune’.
Riviere’s poems reject themselves because they are unable to exist in the contemporary age, or as Faber’s blurb puts it, the poems ‘analyse their moment of creation, then weigh their worth, then consign their excess to the recycling bin thereafter’. Sometimes this ‘anti-poetry’ stance is explicit, as in ‘Loosely Spiritual American Poetry… vs. tensely materialistic british poetry… vs. poetry evocative yes but *of what*’…
Well, perhaps ‘evocative’ of something worth evoking, rather than being consciously non-evocative of something disputably not worth not evoking (we’re getting into circumlocutory Inherit the Wind territory here)! It’s interesting too to note the use of the term ‘anti-poetry’, one which I’ve already used elsewhere in this piece, though before I’d discovered Powers’ perplexing panegyric –which went on:
Elsewhere Riviere’s concern is with representation more generally, expressing art’s essential disjunction from reality, which the best poets since Shakespeare and Spenser have always been aware of.
Yes, but Shakespeare and Spenser didn’t express this artistic ‘disjunction from reality’ by overemphasizing it in their actual poetry.
‘Nobody Famous’ describes a life constructed from photographs, where the speaker shouts: ‘this is me in public putting on a 2nd pair of sunglasses’ and reveals that ‘here I am defining my personal space’, in the distinctly Facebookian sense.
Oh God, now even Facebook has been apotheosised into its own conceptual noun!
Riviere is obsessed with the way we perform our lives according to pornographic norms – ‘guys love latina virgins in swimsuit’ (‘Clones’) – or film scripts, such as in ‘Fall in Love All Over Again’. Such a title would be cringeworthy in an un-self-conscious poem, but here it is deliberately ironic…
There we go, I was wondering when the old ‘ironic’ chestnut would crop up; irony is so over-used in poetry these days that it’s almost in danger of becoming its prime modus operandi. But poetry which continually mocks itself is destined to hit the rocks of its own jokes sooner or later. And what on earth Powers means by ‘an un-self-conscious poem’ is anyone’s guess.
– girlfriends are brands, her face is a ‘magazine’, ‘the pupil a blot of blackest inkjet ink’ (‘My Face Saw Her Magazine’). To cap it all, Riviere includes a summary of the poems in the back of the book where he mocks his whole collection with wry annotations such as ‘poetic bits will be highlighted in yellow’.
Oh how hilarious, how ‘self-conscious’, how ‘ironic’!
But here, the worth of the ironic stance itself is analysed.
Oh how counter-ironic!
The summary includes the words ‘scepticism gets stifling’, and Riviere retains a voice beyond his poems –an awareness that poems may be ‘pretentious crap’ (‘Closer’) but obviously not entirely, otherwise the poet wouldn’t keep writing them.
This is another very dodgy area to go into here: commenting in ‘poetry’ on poems per se being ‘pretentious crap’ is perhaps more effectively done by avoiding textual demonstration of another type while casting the aspersion.
There is creative exuberance, after all, something of the postmodern celebration that fakeness is OK, because it is the truth of the world.
Eh? Can anyone else fathom that sentence? Is it meant to be critical of the postmodernist mindset or, in some self-harming sense, laudatory of it? Is it this ‘fakeness’, then, that postmodernism indeed deems to be the ‘truth’ of things? No wonder it’s always so difficult to detect it!
Some of the poems express a sad loss of authenticity, the wish to ‘see past the dust / and your own face’ (‘Coming Soon’). But not all: ‘The White Door’ describes a beloved woman in knowingly computer-quest-game terms, his ‘svelte princess of future states’, but nevertheless, the speaker’s love remains real.
One might argue, they demonstrate rather than ‘express a sad loss of authenticity’. And, I note, not only what’s ‘true’, but also what’s ‘real’, is detectable through hermeneutical reductionism.
The cynicism of 81 Austerities is not conclusive: Riviere says his next project will not be to continue his rejection of the poetic tradition, but to oppose the anti-poetry stance he takes here.
Are readers simply interrupting some inner –but very public– Rivieran dialectic, then?
I’m deeply excited by 81 Austerities which is symptomatic of a trend among younger contemporary poets, such as Emily Berry, whose first collection will be published in 2013, and Jon Stone, who writes ‘found poems’ from manga to express the consumerism, mass digital media and ‘hypertext’ of our age. 81 Austerities is for anyone interested in understanding art, poetry, and most importantly, our lives now.
Well, each to their own –but my view is it is very much not about ‘understanding’ any of those things, only about replicating them. It genuinely feels as if Ms Powers et al. were infusing their coverage of 81 Austerities with a kind of critical wish-fulfilment, seeing in it aspects that weren’t actually there, only vaguely adumbrated, but which would be richly present –and more keenly and poetically scrutinised– in responses by other poets just a little bit further down the line… Chris McCabe’s The Restructure being one example (McDevitt accepted) plucked off the top of my head, which to my mind, partly in terms of style, conceptual approach and ‘zeitgeisty’ lexicon, is a more comprehensive and authentic alternative to 81 Austerities; and key to its efficacy is McCabe’s imaginative (albeit succinct) engagement with language, and attempt at grappling with the sub-texts not only of political Doublespeak and implicature, but of the actual events they obfuscate to governmental advantage, making for a more nourishing deconstructionist work on austerity, as opposed to Riviere’s oversubscribed reductionism.
Another ‘critic’/supplemental columnist/‘poetry judge’, Sameer Rahim, of The Telegraph, also seemed to fall hook line and sinker for the corporate wool-pulling that was the whole 81 Austerities PR package –even if, ironically, he did pick up on one of the very valid criticisms of much contemporary mainstream verse, that it is too often tiresomely reflective, quotidian, prone to pastoral solipsism (cue ubiquitous leitmotifs of ‘water’ and ‘bees’) and vicarious navel-gazing via ekphrasis:
Judging last year’s Forward Prize for Poetry, I was disheartened by how much poetry ignores the modern world. If you wanted an elegy about disappearing bees or an ekphrasis on an Old Master you were spoiled for choice; but there was little that acknowledged the diverse connections of our social lives such as the internet, email, texting. It’s a problem: how can poetry, traditionally a reflective medium, cope with the swift promiscuity of online experience?
Sam Riviere’s 81 Austerities (shortlisted for this year’s Forward Prize for best first collection) began in 2011 as a blog in protest at the Government’s spending cuts, and now nestles between classy Faber covers.
Only it wasn’t ‘in protest at the Government’s spending cuts’, was it?
Riviere’s language is pared down and deadpan, with no punctuation.
Is this something to praise? And is this something in any way unusual or original in today’s generally ‘deadpan’, pared-down verse-trends?
The collection opens with ‘Crisis Poem’: ‘In 3 years I have been awarded/ £48,000 by various funding bodies/ councils and publishing houses/ for my contributions to the art/ and I would like to acknowledge the initiatives put in place/ by the government and the rigorous/ assessment criteria under which/ my work has thrived since 2008’.
The above poem-excerpt –its thinly ironic self-advertorial statement apart– is an almost classic example of ‘poetry’ as ‘chopped-up prose’ which is so frequently cited as the (understandable) bête noire of contemporary poetry-sceptics.
This is a joke at the poet’s own expense as well as the taxpayers’ – teasing the state patron with ironic sincerity.
Excuse my interpolation at this point, but is it only me who can make absolutely no sense whatsoever out of the last sentence? What on earth is ‘ironic sincerity’? Surely that’s oxymoronic? It would seem to me that the only ‘joke’ here is more at the reviewer’s (and taxpayers’) expense than the poet’s, because Rahim is falling for a ‘joke’ which isn’t actually a joke, nor any other recognisable form of satirical joust or litotes, or anything so apparently thought-through and convoluted as the reviewer seems to be projecting into it. Rahim seems to be uncovering not the poet’s but his own ‘knights move thinking’: his own hermeneutical flights of fancy which bear no clear relation to the poem excerpts themselves.
Is it not insulting our intelligence to suggest that a poem so blatantly self-promoting and self-amplifying as ‘Crisis Poem’ is actually intended to give the complete opposite impression; that this is somehow a young poet being self-deprecating about his achievements in verse to date and his meteoric rise on so shallow a wave, by ‘mimicking’ the kind of self-aggrandizing careerist narcissism he perceives as so endemic to contemporary poetry culture, thereby obviously being ‘ironic’, and, by some mystical implication completely unapparent in his actual words and tone, sending himself up in the process…?
Does it not occur to those such as Rahim that perhaps, just perhaps, this is a double-bluff of the author’s: that he is actually genuinely indulging in self-promotion under the thin guise of ‘irony’ and ‘self-parody’…? Because the upshot is, any sense of ironic self-parody appears to be purely cultivated in the hermeneutics, and conspicuously un-signposted in the poem itself. At the end of the day, the poem, like a piece of self-publicising spiel, is impressing on the reader, with or without ‘irony’, that this is a highly ‘successful’ young poet who has in just three green-eared years procured what by any average poet’s reckoning is a very handsome amount of artistic sponsorship; if Riviere didn’t intend to flag this up for its own sake, then why the need to emphasize the precise total sum of said gratuities? There are an incredible amount of contemporary poetic peccadilloes glibly excused by the much-abused word ‘ironic’.
The sadness of failed love affairs and the boredom induced by internet pornography are recurrent (and interrelated) subjects. How to dream of a beautiful girl when you can see 10,000 images of her on Facebook? You look at your phone and think it’s ‘as if everything on earth were texting/ furiously everything else I could feel’. The haunting banalities of email etiquette: ‘I dreamed I wrote a poem/ beginning ‘Hi!’ and ending ‘See You Later!’
The self-deprecating endnotes that accompany each poem (‘a bit too up itself?’) are too harsh. But self-punishment is part of Riviere’s poetic personality, as shown in the splendid ‘The Council of Girls’, where he imagines being put on trial by old girlfriends, his text messages read out and analysed.
Affecting ‘self-deprecation’ after the fact of a poem imparting the complete opposite impression seems to me to be trying to have one’s ‘cake and eat it’: a sort of narcissism with disclaimer.
‘Adversity in the Arts’ cuts up and collects phrases from book reviews in broadsheet newspapers. I’m sure Riviere wouldn’t mind my taking, with the utmost sincerity, the final line to describe his poems: ‘it’s no exaggeration to say that there are not enough minutes/ in the day to give each the attention they undoubtedly deserve’.
Well, each to his own; taste is, after all, ultimately subjective, and smitten Rahim’s (and Padel’s et al) perplexingly gushing praise for Riviere’s volume just goes to prove this, being so vastly removed from my own, or, for that matter, from those of the two senior editors at the Oxonian Review; and from that of Rupert Loydell, editor of Stride magazine, who managed to confine his (excuse the pun) 81% negative review of the volume to just one stripping-down paragraph:
I thought, when it arrived, that I could co-opt Sam Riviere for my post-confessional narrative poetry campaign (see the Smartarse anthology) but 81 Austerities is a typical example of a mainstream publisher’s version of the experimental. Riviere is mostly a straightforward narrative poet who tells anecdotal stories; there is little of the slippage or fragmentation required to truly evidence or evoke contemporary life; and the images and jokes are mannered and forced. In ‘101/1’ Riviere comes close to tenderness when his answer to ‘…feeling depressed about the inconstancy / of meaning in the world’ is to consider the face of a loved one (or perhaps the reader) in slow motion thought, and compare it to the moment when he is ‘…looking up to see /a train has pulled alongside / mine I’m swapping eyes / with the eyes I met.’ I find this much more moving and interesting than the surface gloss of poems about the surface gloss of the contemporary world.
And what, in the end, have I been doing mostly here with regards to 81 Austerities? I’ve not so much been ‘reviewing’ the verses themselves as reviewing the reviews of the verses –you might call it ‘vicarious reviewing’. But this in itself emphasizes much of my point: 81 Austerities is not so much a book of verse as a concept, an installation in the form of a frustratingly evasive volume, a kind of arrested event, or media-hyped proleptic event, a volume which, according to all the promotional spiel and sweaty-palmed anticipation which preceded its actual print publication (inclusive of Riviere’s own online sneak previews of the verses at the virtual component of the work), was already and would prove to be something of significance, even if it never actually went into print at all.
Because it was the concept (no matter how evasive), or, if you like, the ‘brand’ of 81 Austerities, and less the actual associated written material itself, which was the real ‘selling point’, the pivot to its perceived ‘marketability’, invested with a momentum based on pure misinterpretation due to the very opportunistic timing of its’ disingenuous title –part of the author’s –partly conscious– confidence trick? I think it would be unfair to place that responsibility entirely on Riviere’s shoulders: his publishers, who had groomed him through their mentorship programme and already inscribed his name on one of their near-legendary, elegantly plain, tri-toned card jackets for his debut pamphlet, had much to do with this packaged legerdemain. And, yes, even austerity can be packaged and marketed: debatably 81 Austerities marked an abstract semantic ‘grab’ fairly typical of our acquisitive culture, leaping in to appropriate the term ‘austerity’ itself for the postmodernist canon, then formulating it into an expedient brand-name for pressing under an esteemed imprint, in order to promotionally target a potential readership of politically disaffected youth, and thereby also make Faber look less ‘establishment’ and more ‘beatnik’ (this is just by way of conjecture, you understand).
As is the way today in our sham-culture of ‘instant fame’ (e.g. ‘reality’ celebrities etc.), where indiscriminate people are apparently ‘celebrities’ just because we’re told they are when they suddenly turn up on some television panel game, rather than from any obvious evidence of achievement, merit, or distinction (or even in some cases mere indications of these), where some people are famous before they’re famous (i.e. ‘famous’ simply through media exposure, even if they’ve not yet seemingly accomplished anything warranting such fame –a breed of ‘proleptic celebrities’; or, in terms of apotheosising already famous popular culture figures to higher realms, the case of Morrissey’s Autobiography being published as an instant ‘Penguin Modern Classic’, before it’s even been given sufficient airing over time to be assessed as fitting ‘classic’ status, notwithstanding any tangential poetic qualities it may have), so too was 81 Austerities, through no fault of its own, famed and feted before it had had a proper opportunity to demonstrate that it merited it. If a poetry volume was ever the inanimate –or ‘virtual’– equivalent of a ‘reality’ celebrity, it is arguably this one.
Not wishing to sound patronising here, but I firmly believe that Riviere is in some ways the victim of this corporate ‘packaging’ of his volume, and it’s not entirely the fault of his actual writing therein that his attempts to adumbrate a primitive satirical statement on commoditised language and all its ‘economies’ on ‘truth’ and ‘authentic expression’ through a form of ‘verse’ which in many ways mimics advertising vernacular (i.e. a reflective ‘advertising verse’) fall rather flat, all said, due to the fact that they –whether inadvertently or not– give off the very same effects, or verbal vibrations, as actual advertising ‘verse’. The volume’s concept, or conceit, vague though it is, is almost there, but the polemical force and satirical astuteness needed to effectively put it across seem, at best, only adumbrated. And this stylistic deficit is, in my view, a result of an insistence at a kind of slavish ‘poetry workshop’ approach to the overarching concept: that every single sliver of verse has to formulaically conform to the pivotal premise of ‘poems’ composed with the absolute minimum of vocabulary, adjective, image, sense-impression, metaphor or any other form of, well, ‘poetic’ embellishment. And thus, from the very outset of the exercise, the author constricts himself, and condemns his own verses to a thematically dictated evisceration.
It is perhaps itself skirting mystification to keep talking of certain absent satirical and polemical qualities without giving an example of what I mean. So here is an excerpt from ee cummings’ ‘Poem, or Beauty Hurts Mr. Vinal’ (which S.I. Hayakawa also happens to quote in his book):
take it from me kiddo
believe me
my country, ’tis of
you, land of the Cluett
Shirt Boston Garter and Spearmint
Girl With The Wrigley Eyes (of you
land of the Arrow Ide
and Earl &
Wilson
Collars) of you i
sing:land of Abraham Lincoln and Lydia E. Pinkham,
land above all of Just Add Hot Water And Serve–
from every B. V. D.
let freedom ring
amen. i do however protest, anent the un
-spontaneous and otherwise scented merde which
greets one (Everywhere Why) as divine poesy per
that and this radically defunct periodical. i would
suggest that certain ideas gestures
rhymes, like Gillette Razor Blades
having been used and reused
to the mystical moment of dullness emphatically are
Not To Be Resharpened. (Case in point
if we are to believe these gently O sweetly
melancholy trillers amid the thrillers
these crepuscular violinists among my and your
skyscrapers– Helen & Cleopatra were Just Too Lovely,
The Snail’s On The Thorn enter Morn and God’s
In His andsoforth
do you get me?) according
to such supposedly indigenous
throstles Art is O World O Life
a formula: example, Turn Your Shirttails Into
Drawers and If It Isn’t An Eastman It Isn’t A
Kodak therefore my friends let
us now sing each and all fortissimo A-
mer
i
ca, I
love,
You. And there’re a
hun-dred-mil-lion-oth-ers, like
all of you successfully if
delicately gelded (or spaded)
gentlemen (and ladies)– pretty
littleliverpil-
heated-Nujolneeding-There’s-A-Reason
americans (who tensetendoned and with
upward vacant eyes, painfully
perpetually crouched, quivering, upon the
sternly allotted sandpile
–how silently
emit a tiny violetflavoured nuisance: Odor?
ono.
comes out like a ribbon lies flat on the brush
Submitted by foolish Paeter
Sponsor
Some might argue that aspects to this admittedly quite bizarre, almost stream-of-consciousness outburst from cummings adumbrate Riviere’s own latter day attempts; but apart from the obvious –and, in terms of how far mainstream verse has regressed experimentally-speaking, instructive– heightened ‘avant-garde’ quality of cummings’ poem, there is also a much more imaginative engagement with language, semantics, images and symbols, and a deeply polemical grappling with the hypnotic power of advertising as emphasised with the constant interpolations of commercial spiel (and, in these aspects, it is not Riviere’s verse but Niall McDevitt’s that is more demonstrably of the ee cummings lineage). Riviere’s defence is that it is his stylistic ‘brief’ to render his verses as linguistically austere as possible (a kind of verbal Brutalism) but the risk –and, I’d argue, the result– of this is verse of virtually no aesthetic appeal whatsoever.
But all this said, and in spite of Riviere’s verse (in this volume: I’ve not yet read his previous pamphlet, nor his latest collection, which I’ve heard is meant to be a kind of ‘antithesis’ to the ‘thesis’ of its predecessor) approaching something of an aesthetic anathema to me, I suppose the initial approach to the poem sequence as originally facilitated through a website was a potentially interesting one, and could well point towards a future trend among younger poets to do similar –since, after all, love or loathe the internet, it is about as close as we’ve come so far, and since the corporate appropriation of print literature some three centuries back, to a more ‘democratic’ and spontaneous publishing medium.
However, those even more cynical than myself might further argue that such ‘democratically’-tinged choreography was itself part of a vicarious corporate marketing ploy, an empty gesture towards mass inclusiveness and reader-engagement (hermeneutics again!) through appended comment and forum, all intended to create a ‘radically’ new and more ‘interactive’ proleptic experience in relation to what would eventually mutate into a publication under poetry’s most prestigious imprint, and hence, by implication, a new ‘opening up’ of the seemingly impregnable Faber ‘brand’ (as with its Arts Council-funded mentorship programme through which Riviere and his volume were sieved)… but I’m prepared to give Riviere, and Faber, the benefit of the doubt on that particular quandary.
But to turn now from a disputable synthetic substitute to something, to my mind, much more resembling the authentic article: Niall McDevitt’s Porterloo. This is a volume of an entirely different order on practically every level, and, I think, more likely to last the test of time and changing values and attitudes, and to earn, incrementally, critical vindication for its very brave statement in –broadly avant-garde– verse against the iniquities of late-capitalist depersonalisation. McDevitt’s polemical spade spares no contemporary political offence, and leaves no Tory unturned. Particularly targeted are the tabloid and government-generated neo-fascist attitudes that (inevitably?) germinate in periods of austerity to distract the public from the true culprits of their reduced circumstances (the unfettered forces of anarcho-capitalism), by channelling their anger towards more tangible, visible and vulnerable targets (tactics which indicate that we are today witnessing our own attitudinal “1930s moment”), such as the unemployed, themselves the most abjectly hit victims of the same austerity. Basically, these are the hoary old automatic levers of ‘divide-and-rule’ –historical default mechanisms of the political Right, whether fascists or Tories, or, in the case of today’s government, a medley of the two.
Whereas Riviere throws the splinters of austerity up in the air to play ‘pick up sticks’ with them for a spot of conceptual ‘cut-and-paste’, McDevitt, writing from the perspective of a poet-agitator, gets down and wrestles with the very rudiments of a highly selective and discriminatory austerity culture, of which he himself has previously been one of countless impecunious cuts-targets, not to say scapegoats for Tory and red-top stigmatisations (as have many contemporary poets, whether before or after establishing themselves through publication). But to better contextualise the perspective from which McDevitt writes, it’s instructive to excerpt the most salient bits from the detailed blurb which accompanied the original promotion of Porterloo at the International Times webzine (which I’ll continue to quote throughout this review for contextual reference points as I comment on each poem):
Irish poet Niall McDevitt has seen through the English tradition of ‘courtly poetry’ and demonstrated how a self-respecting poetry need have nothing whatsoever to do with it. Foul language, ritual magic, anarchist politics, experimental forms serve to hex the body politic while warding off ‘the gentility principle’.
The collection is an epic response to the return of the Conservatives to power in 2010 – albeit hamstrung by coalition – and the shock of not only observing how Conservatism treats human beings but of suffering it first hand. (As an immigrant who experienced long term unemployment and who has since ‘graduated’ to low income self-employment, McDevitt was among the lower echelons of the 99% whom the Tory whip was lashing.)
Other pursuits were abandoned. McDevitt began writing a new type of poetry to counteract the sheer psychic harassment he was being subjected to by Con-Dem rhetoric and policy-making.
…Some of the satire is a Jarryesque gob-in-the-face of the British establishment. A new level of vituperation is evident; McDevitt surpasses even the Tony Harrisons and Peter Readings…
In contrast to the ‘blue meanie’ parade of Conservatives that feature in the book, there is a bohemian backdrop of culture heroes such as Heathcote Williams, Amiri Baraka, Naomi Klein, David Graeber, Jeremy Reed, and Allen Ginsberg. The 20th Century English poet David Gascoyne is re-appraised in an essay in the appendix.
The next trope is particularly interesting and important:
What McDevitt takes from Gascoyne is that there is a ‘third way’ in poetry. One doesn’t have to choose between the solipsism of personal expression or the agitprop of political expression…
I can certainly detect this Gascoynean sensibility in McDevitt’s oeuvre, though I would argue that there is a very tangible aspect of poetic ‘agitation’ there too, of a very instinctive and individualised kind; and one which is emphatically not agitprop in the true sense of the term, which implies artistic production which is partisan, or even state-sponsored/supporting (and even in the looser modern day definition of the term, to denote any art or literature that puts across an explicitly political message, McDevitt’s work still avoids such categorisation as although it is in many ways ‘political’, it is not geared towards communicating any ‘explicitly political’ point. ‘Agitprop’, a portmanteau of ‘Agitation and Propaganda’, after the Russian Soviet Department of that name, was originally coined to denote artistic productions –pamphlets, plays or films– which partly served to promote Soviet State ideology, as most famously manifested in the socialist realism of Maxim Gorky (awarded the Order of Lenin by Stalin in 1932), the more dissenting ‘agitprop’ theatre of Bertolt Brecht in 1920s Germany, or later, in the 60s and 70s, through English political playwrights such as Caryl Churchill (author of, among many plays, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976), the depiction of the Iver Digger commune of 1649-50)).
There are many contemporary British ‘agitprop poets’, almost all on the fringes of the mainstream and published through the smaller presses and journals; but McDevitt is not one of them: he is, if anything, more a poet agitator, or ‘agit-poet’, in that his poetry has a demonstrative spirit of protest –but it is protest smelted in the kiln of the poetic imagination rather than the political cooler of the social planner; more Shelleyan than Audenic. But, pivotally, McDevitt is literarily militant, and, at his most vitriolic, is to poetry what Jack Cade or Wat Tyler were to social agitation –which is meant as a compliment. In attitudinal terms he has a fair bit in common with the muscularly polemical poetry of Alexis Lykiard and Barry Tebb, while his Beat sensibilities, Dadaist and ideogrammatic inclinations draw some comparisons with Michael Horovitz.
It’s perfectly true that there can be many middle ways between mainstream poetry solipsism and the other extreme of the spectrum, ‘agit-poetry’ of a particular ideological view or movement; perhaps something approaching the mythical ‘Auden Country’ which Auden himself found easier to map out in his poetry and polemics, than to poetically ‘occupy’. And certainly the Gascoynean influences in McDevitt’s oeuvre also account for some of its more surrealist elements (though an area in which Auden, particularly in his Thirties’ verse-drama experiments, such as A Dog Beneath the Skin and Paid On Both Sides, also dabbled, in part influenced by the satirical grotesquery of Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward’s deeply surreal, neo-Freudian Mortmere stories). The International Times promotional piece continued:
Porterloo is personal-political poetry at its wittiest and McDevitt’s trademark shape-shifting is everpresent. The poems are multi-stylistic with language games shifting from Biblical to Elizabethan to corporate to cloacal Englishes with ease, all in the creation of what American poet Clayton Eshleman calls ‘freed speech’.
The book covers a crucial period in modern history – one on a par with 1848 or 1968 – which includes the year of the riots in 2010, the international year of the Occupy movement in 2011, the symbolic year of 2012, and the year of Margaret Thatcher’s demise in 2013. No book of poems will come close to reflecting the political scene of this period in England as vividly as Porterloo. Its detail and humanity serve to signpost history.
The final Norman Cohn-inspired poem ‘A Thousand’ orchestrates the dying monologues of a Jew, a Christian, a Marxist and a Whore into a millenarian hymn of disappointment – that of the multitudes who live and die without ever seeing the social change they dreamed of and fought for – and has been praised by the eminent writer and critic Anthony Rudolf as ‘amazing’.
…If you hate the Conservatives, vote ‘agin’ them by getting your hands on a copy of Porterloo.
This compendious promotional piece is then followed by more a ‘declaimer’ than a disclimaer, which, although not specifically partisan, is certainly anti- one particular political party, and no prizes for guessing which one it is; this hilariously pugnacious statement also adorns the back of the book’s cover, in place of what would normally be an author’s biog, directly under a photo of McDevitt brandishing a copy of b/w from which he is declaiming a poem through a loud-hailer mouthpiece – the epitomy of a poet ‘activist’:
GOVERNMENT WARNING:
Porterloo is the most lavatorial offering to date from malcontent poet Niall McDevitt. This temporary public convenience stinks of vulgarity, resentment, poverty and insolence. Its assault on Conservatism is tinged with the rancidity of a low-flying Irishman. No friend to the Windsors, the Daily Mail, the London Met or Tesco, he in fact seems to be entirely friendless, one of those unenviable men who sits alone in Wetherspoon pubs, looking for someone to grimace at. His squibs seem like elegies for a Welfare State that makes possible such substandard books. May this be his last! Hark as he rants on about ‘social cleansing’, lamenting his inevitable fate and just desserts. But: do not pity. All that will happen for certain if you buy this ‘pot-boiler’ is that you’ll be £10 poorer, and he won’t pay any tax on it. (10p would be a more appropriate price) . Oh yeh, and he has delusions of mysticism. Who else would entertain a cosmic vision of Dame Shirley Porter as Tory pissenfrau-cum-war goddess?
And certainly in terms of his themes and means of communicating them, there is in McDevitt’s verse a vehement strain of activism, which is broadly defined as ‘efforts to promote, impede, or direct social, political, economic, or environmental change, or stasis’, often through means of protest and demonstration; in a more aphoristic sense, the term ‘connotes a peaceful form of conflict’ –and this is in many ways the kind of temperament I would most closely associate with McDevitt’s poetry. But if ‘peaceful conflict’ is a cardinal characteristic of McDevitt’s poetics, it is not one without humour –and humour can of course be a potent weapon, which McDevitt uses to devastating effect. In his own inimitably witty but caustic manner (my only point of reference would be the appositely outspoken and recalcitrant Morning Star columnist Paddy McGuffin), McDevitt takes on all the virulent memes and proto-mythological shadow-projections of our contemporary ‘Welfare Hate’ with irrepressible word-play, formidable grasp of both the folkloric and zeitgeist, prodigious engagement with the full gamut of language, and an almost Pied Piper-like mummering.
McDevitt’s verse-invectives are invested with an anti-advertorial viscera, are emphatically ‘anti-capitalist’, and, in the particular case of Porterloo, vehemently anti-Tory. So while Riviere’s verse is arguably advertorial, McDevitt’s is adversarial, and in this sense, Porterloo gets to grips with the urgent issues and events of our time, which 81 Austerities –in spite of its title– only liminally brushes up against for vague points of reference. If McDevitt was a ‘brand’, his advertising slogan could be something like: ‘McDevitt: Reaches the Parts Other Verse Circumnavigates’. Had Cyril Connolly been here today, he would have given a thumbs up to McDevitt’s polemical approach, since he’d no doubt see in it something in accordance with his cautionary statement to ‘political’ poets 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.
Connolly saw ‘politics’, along with ‘the pram in the hall’, as ‘more dangerous to young writers than journalism’ –all three were ‘enemies to art’ or artistic ‘promise’ (hence the intriguing title to his polemic). No ‘pram in the hall’ or journalese to hamper McDevitt –but plenty of politics, even if markedly non-ideological and deeply idiosyncratic, but which empowers rather than hampers; this ‘political’ aspect is also its own self-protection –but one uncluttered by any ‘personality’ trappings of self-promotion. McDevitt’s volume is its own un-vaunted event, recalcitrant entity, thrown gauntlet, and to have been preceded by a trumpeting promotional fanfare would have simply cheapened its purpose. But, put more simply, Porterloo doesn’t need a plethora of supplemental damp praise and trophy-hooping hyperbole to interpolate on its and the public’s behalves that it is something of merit and importance. Like all authentic work, it does this by in and of itself, and in spite of mainstream promotional myopia.
All the plaudits and prizes in the world won’t make an inauthentic work anything more than inauthentic; just as a dearth of establishment recognition and associated awards can’t in any way detract from the self-evident value of an authentic work. As Alan Bold put it in his Introduction to the Penguin Book of Socialist Verse (1970), ‘…it is wrong …to imagine that the currently fashionable and approved constitutes the work of permanent importance’. The poetry establishment might sponsor a specific type of poetry all it likes, along with all the temporal accompaniments of damp praise and flash-in-the-pan ‘fame’ –but posterity makes its own judgements independent of the trends of any given period.
McDevitt’s formidable debut volume, b/w (Waterloo Press, 2010), was a significant critical success, and deservedly so –but, perhaps inescapably for such authentically ‘radical’ and subversive verse, was conspicuously absent from that year’s prize shortlists, and, indeed, from the kind of high profile supplemental auspices which later heaped such praise on Riviere’s word collages. Porterloo was published in the same year as Riviere’s (which had however appeared earlier as an online sequence not long after b/w was put into print), but was promotionally eclipsed by the superimposition of what to some might be deemed a ‘topical pretender’. But we can console ourselves by remembering that such travesties of contemporaneous cultural omission are, historically, pretty typical, and really nothing so new or surprising; the work which is often of lasting importance is more often than not almost completely overlooked in its own time; gimmicks make for better ‘copy’ and always occupy more column inches than authentic works.
And even if one takes an historicist perspective on artistic criticism –itself, implicitly hermeneutical (there it is again!), and, as with dialectics, also rooted in the hugely influential thought of Hegel– through which works are interpreted and judged in the context of their periods rather than according to some timeless immutable qualitative acumen, it is, in my view, more likely to show that Porterloo is a demonstrative volume of its time in its thorough thematic response to contemporaneous vicissitudes, while 81 Austerities might –opportunistic title apart– have been written in the previous decade, or even –if one removed its Facebook, Twitter and texting leitmotivs– conceivably the one preceding that: since its air of postmodernist complacency is pretty much indistinguishable from the type of poetry that emerged in the ‘New Generation’ of the Nineties, and the ‘Next Generation’ of the Noughties. These two ‘schools’, of course, merged into a verse hegemony which later acquired the euphemism ‘mainstream’, still applied today as a term of mild disparagement by those poets whose own work deviates into different and less ‘fashionable’ styles. To my mind, McDevitt is one of a number of contemporary poets departing from the staid trends of the last two decades, in his case, by composing what might broadly be described as ‘polemical concrete poetry’.
Porterloo in many ways picks up where b/w left off, but expands on its themes and in many ways makes for a more implicitly political poetic statement against the intransigent right-wing hegemonies of Tory-imposed “permanent austerity” (for the poor) –and McDevitt quite openly pointed out in the e-flyer for the Porterloo launch that the volume was very much one of explicitly ‘anti-Tory’ verse (McDevitt, an Irishman, is no doubt uncomfortably aware of the Irish etymology of the term ‘Tory’: Middle Irish tóraidhe; modern Irish tóraí: outlaw, robber or brigand, from the Irish word tóir, meaning “pursuit”, since outlaws were “pursued men”).
McDevitt’s poetry is every bit as ‘conceptual’ as Riviere’s verse, but its Dada-esque appetite for typographical experiment (a tendency to vary font size and typefaces, or shape text into patterns a la concrete poetry), mixed medium of word, graphic and collage, and perambulatory Beat adumbrations (aspects which also echo Michael Horovitz’ oeuvre, particularly marked in the long poem ‘FUCKU’, pace, Horovitz’ similarly sprawling, rangy page-formations in A New Waste Land) exempt themselves from any aspersions of gimmickry or pretension simply in the sense of passion, force and conviction with which they are put across; and key to this is a demonstrable love for and almost compulsive engagement with language, the lifeblood of poetry, which McDevitt plumbs and pumps and punches into shape with chutzpah.
One of McDevitt’s most arresting features as a poet is that very rare thing almost entirely absent from the more gentrified formulas of supplemental verse today: anger. But, crucially, this is anger dextrously regulated and imaginatively channelled through the muscular use of language. In other words, McDevitt uses the poetic language to act as a conductor for the charge of this anger, to mould it and give it shape, so that we never feel we are reading versified tirades, but more carefully structured poems that harness these primal energies and hammer them into more disciplined shapes; sharp and precise sculptures that point and thrust and jut but without ever being too obtrusive or off-putting.
McDevitt’s verse might sometimes wear esoteric patterns on its sleeves, but they are never obscurantist brocades, and are always of an experiential patina: they are the robes of a distinctly shamanistic, even mystical, poetry; kaftans of a poetic ‘sensibility’ –as opposed to the designer-labelled, ‘radical chic’ v-neck and crumpled flannel-suit of the 81 Austerities ‘brand’. (Indeed, these two books very much symbolise the cultural antagonisms of sensibility versus brand, substance versus label, bruise versus badge, authentic versus synthetic, natural versus artificial, spiritual versus physical, mystical versus visceral, revolution versus conservatism, and, more specifically in this particular context, authentic verse-activism versus sponsored poetry-trustafarianism –in shorthand: ‘McDevitt versus Riviere’).
And ‘sensibility’ is the operative word in McDevitt’s case: ‘sensibility’, as in the sense Alan Dent of The Penniless Press meant it in relation to the poetry of another authentically ‘radical’ poet writing today, Paul Summers, when reviewing his collection union (Smokestack Books, 2011); though in terms of a certain ‘graffiti lit’ quality to some of McDevitt’s oeuvre, I’d be more inclined to compare him to another Smokestack poet, Sean Burn, whose dante at the laundrette was a strikingly polemical collection in a similarly avant-garde vein –as well as to, in some thematic senses, the exceptionally gifted Andrew Jordan, author of Bonehead’s Utopia (also Smokestack) and the more recent, labyrinthine conceptual masterwork Hegemonick (Shearsman) (all three latter titles previously reviewed on The Recusant).
Like the wizard or magician, McDevitt demonstrates a shamanic veneration for the resonant vibrations of words, and many of his poems have an incantatory mystique reminiscent of magical spells –in these senses his poetry, potent in symbols, is a kind of symbolic dabbling in ancient ‘grammarye’ (from which the word ‘grammar’ originates), or ‘magic/occult learning’. The influence of the Symbolist prodigy of the French fine de siecle, Arthur Rimbaud (i.e. Les Illuminations, ‘Une Saison en Enfer’/ ‘A Season in Hell’ et al), often adumbrates McDevitt’s oeuvre –and is most marked in Porterloo’s prose poems ‘Manna’ and ‘The Pharaoh’; as does that of the mid-twentieth century British surrealist poet, David Gascoyne (McDevitt includes at the back of this volume his own extended retrospective tribute to the latter poet, which begins with an aphorism from Gascoyne’s poem ‘Eros Absconditus’: ‘In blind content they breed who never loved a friend’).
The title of Porterloo is a portmanteau and pun on the neologism ‘portaloo’ (a portable loo/toilet of the likes often encountered at outdoors music festivals) with the superimposition of an ‘er’ over the ‘a’ to signpost the surname of the notorious former Conservative leader of Westminster City Council (1986-1991), ‘Dame’ Shirley Porter. This thoroughly odious woman masterminded the clandestine operation euphemised as ‘Building Stable Communities’, but exposed publicly for what it actually was, the ‘Homes for Votes Scandal’, which was very much a template for the kind of “Kosovo-style social cleansing” (Boris Johnson) the Tories are perpetrating today on a national scale through the pincer-movement of the Local Housing Allowance caps, Legal Aid cuts, bedroom tax, and anti-“squatting” legislation.
The so-called ‘Building Stable Communities’ programme did very much the opposite, in the tradition of duplicitous Tory-ese: it was essentially an undemocratic campaign of gerrymandering via ‘gentrification’ of the poorer districts of Westminster, which involved, amongst many other scandalous aspects, the selling off of vacated council houses, rather than re-letting them out to new tenants –which also paved the way towards today’s catastrophic housing shortage, which in turn prompted the Tories to dream up the reprehensible and instantly obsolete “spare room subsidy”, or bedroom tax, in order to trigger an “urban churn”, whereby those living in so-called “under-occupied” social and council houses are forced out by government-imposed rent shortfalls so that larger families presently trapped in cramped accommodation can move into them (rather than simply building more social and council housing). Basic human morality apart, the major practical flaw in all this is that there isn’t enough smaller and/or affordable accommodation available for the ‘smaller’ families to move into themselves (even if, on paper, the Tories’ probably presumed the whole thing would pan out like some national house swap –but with such a massive surplus of people needing homes at this time, the street homeless and temporarily accommodated included, the demand outstrips the supply).
But the most despicable aspect to the BSC stratagem was the mass ‘removal’ of ‘homeless voters and others who lived in hostels’, those very people most devastatingly hit by Thatcher’s atomistic social policies; most markedly, the equally euphemistic and duplicitous ‘Care in the Community’ (an imposed Diaspora of mental health patients following the cost-cutting mass closures of ‘Victorian’-style psychiatric hospitals), which, in itself, helped inflate the already mushrooming epidemic of street homelessness (mostly because there weren’t any actual communities left intact to care for them, as a result of several years’ Tory atomisation, and associated skyrocketing unemployment, as if to prove Thatcher’s pernicious dictum that “there is no such thing as society”, read ‘community’) –something never before seen on such a scale in this country, culminating in the national disgrace of ‘Cardboard City’, just outside Waterloo Station.
Porter, also heiress of the rapacious Tesco dynasty, added further cultural blight to her already ignominious CV by expanding said company’s presence so ubiquitously throughout the country that today you’re more likely to have a Tesco store on your local high street than a newsagent or post office, let alone those countless old independent grocers that have long been transplanted by the parasitic supermarket giant whose strap-line ‘Every Little Bit Helps’ is about as duplicitous and open to interpretation as the Tories’ ‘We’re All In This Together’. The only retail sights perhaps approaching the omnipresence of the deeply dispiriting red white and blue of Tesco today are the cultural detritus of 99p, pay day loan and Cash for Gold stores, and the less flashy Trussell Trust food banks (some volunteers of which, with monumental irony, are permitted by Tesco to pitch outside some of their stores and ask customers for donations of tins of food and the like purchased under the Tesco brand). The cover to Porterloo depicts Porter’s haloed head on the body of a falcon, a kind of ‘Dame’ Porter Harpy, or a malevolent thought form.
But Porterloo is also a part pun on and portmanteau of ‘Peterloo’, the bitter sobriquet given to the 1819 protest at St Peter’s Field, Manchester, commonly known as the Peterloo Massacre, in which up to 15 Chartists –protestors against high unemployment, the corrupt scourge of ‘rotten/pocket boroughs’ (tiny and under-populated constituencies which were effectively ‘bought up’ by local landowners –mostly Tory– through bribery of voters, electoral advantage and familial nepotism, during the 18th and early 19th centuries, not abolished until 1867), and for greater representational democracy and wider male suffrage (the right to vote)– were killed, and 700 injured, by a sabre-drawn cavalry charge. By way of emphasizing the battle-like nature of this confrontation on domestic turf, and only four years after the famous British victory against Napoleon at Waterloo, ‘Peterloo’ was itself both a pun and a portmanteau of ‘Peter’s Field’ and ‘Waterloo’ –thus making Porterloo a pun on a pun, and a portmanteau on a portmanteau.
But I’d argue this adds extra dimensions to the title’s resonance, not just in terms of its political and social historical references, but also in its linguistic signification of how history repeats itself. Indeed, the only real difference between Peterloo, and the horse-charge by the metropolitan police against the student protestors in London 2010, is that the electrical lashes of tasers have replaced the more fatal lashes of sabres; it is, therefore, not at all hyperbolic of McDevitt to, at least symbolically, link these two vicissitudes. The Peterloo Massacre was also made famous in literature, being the prime inspiration for Percy Bysshe Shelley’s revolutionary rallying-call in verse, The Masque of Anarchy, subtitled ‘Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester’, but which wasn’t actually published until 1832, after restrictions on the political presses in England were finally relaxed, when it appeared in radical periodical The Examiner.
Poignantly, Porterloo is dedicated to McDevitt’s recently departed father, ‘Michael McDevitt (1926-2012), Irish liberal, who passed away on William Blake’s birthday’ (28th November) –a date of great astrological significance to the son, being himself hugely influenced by the Blakean canon of poetry and mysticism. Porterloo is introduced by Heathcote Williams, veteran playwright (most famous for the groundbreaking, R. D. Laing-antagonising stage play, AC/DC), actor, poet, verse-maverick, and ex-Grand Vizier of ‘Frestonia’, a 120-strong squat on a patch of lawn in 1970s West London which declared its independent sovereignty from the rest of Great Britain (and counted among its illuminati the late great David Rappaport –most famous as Randall in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits– as its Foreign Minister). Williams is himself a prolific contemporary ‘agit-poet’, a self-proclaimed rhyming ‘refusenik’, and a regular contributor to the recently revived International Times, which he and McDevitt co-edit.
Williams’ intro, titled ‘Insurgent Poetry’, contextualises McDevitt’s place in the evolving lineage of protest poetry, suggesting at one point that this type of verse might be called ‘Peterloo poetry’ (emphatically not to be confused with Harry Chambers’ Peterloo Poets in Cornwall). But McDevitt’s oeuvre also incorporates something he and Williams have at certain points alluded to as ‘pidgin’ poetry, from the phrase ‘Pidgin language’, referring to a form of ‘simplified’ lingo between certain groups who don’t share a common language –it’s of course meant largely figuratively, though occasionally there are certain words and phrases which recur throughout McDevitt’s work that bespeak this itch towards some form of abbreviated counter-hegemonic lingo, and these aspects mark a potent form of verbal subversion.
Williams’ intro also highlights a press cutting detailing McDevitt’s spirited attempt at interrupting a public lecture by insidiously right-wing historian Niall Ferguson –Niall versus Niall– whose chief accolade, as Williams reminds us, is to have with a grating crassness, insisted that the concept of “conquest” is misguided, since Ferguson regards imperialism as liberation’:
“Security men removed a self-styled ‘shamanistic poet’, Niall McDevitt, from the lecture, when he accused Prof Ferguson of trying to ‘alleviate guilt’ [about the empire], while reciting a poem in pidgin on the imperial legacy in the New Hebrides islands in the Pacific”.
Williams’ intro –which also cites the Peterloo Massacre, emphasizing that it occurred, funnily enough, under another Tory government– serves as a compendious précis on the volume, and its last few paragraphs warrant quoting in full:
A Neil Oram quote was once used as epigraph to an anthology of contemporary French poetry which simply said “What is going on is a war between those who believe in poetry and those who don’t”. Niall McDevitt, also, is a staunch believer in poetry as an instrument of change, poetry designed to create a new mindset where, for example, the homeless in ‘tent cities’ being blasted by water cannons can be firewalled by poetry.
In this collection there’s a sonnet to a delusional monarchist; a compassionate poem to a boy wrongly imprisoned for being disrespectful to a nation’s fetish object sacred to militarism; a report on the essential blasphemy of a coke-sniffing Tory coming to Avalon, to “take the air Tories want to sell”. McDevitt singles him out in his pin-striped suit quixotically trying to bludgeon the spirit of Glastonbury into re-accepting the Norman yoke and then fatefully dying in the festival’s notorious toilets. There’s a fine reappraisal of the radical surrealist Christian poet, David Gascoyne who was snubbed by stiff-necked Eliot. “True Christian poetry is a critique of Christendom” as McDevitt says, “which is, after all, the superstructure of capitalism.”
And in ‘THE HUMAN ELEPHANT (in the inhuman room)’, the poet makes a plea for the “socially cleansed”, by declaring war on those who declare war on underclasses whom they dehumanize with varying expressions of contempt such as ‘nutters’ ‘sickos’ ‘ferals’ ‘sluts’ – thanks, in McDevitt’s telling phrase, to their “mindcuffs of conservatism”. The tone is irrepressibly zestful, savagely witty, and often gleeful. If Porterloo’s title subject were ever to return she couldn’t begin to recognise how the country now ferments, nor how it is being fuelled by poetry, the country she absconded from but still profits by, the country that does not wish to be a supermarket carpark stretching for as far as the eye can see.
There’s a sticker currently which depicts a rat and the anarchist logo. It reads “You’re never more than ten feet from a Tory.” Never far, in McDevitt’s words, from being “stopped searched and stripped of benefits by Gradgrinds, Scrooges and Dedlocks”. Hence these insurgent waves.
As opposed to the political imposture of 81 Austerities, Porterloo is emphatically a poetry manifesto of its times. It’s set out in four sections titled, respectively, “P” (no doubt standing for the book’s title, but possibly also a part-riposte for Tony Harrison’s iconic Thatcher-era political poem “V”), ‘The Quibbala’ (which sounds as if it’s probably a pun on the Kabbalah), ‘Fucku’ and ‘A Thousand’ –the latter two both partitioned longer poems. The first section kicks off with a contemporaneous poem on the Occupy encampment outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, ‘The Early Christians’, subtitled ‘Tent City 2012’. This is an apposite and provocative poem, juxtaposing the largely youthful Occupy movement –very much the modern day equivalent to the seventeenth century radical Christian and proto-Communist ‘Digger’ movement of the likes of Gerard Winstanley– with the early, recalcitrant cult of Christianity, though McDevitt’s ethical refuseniks are a more visceral breed, and evoked in visceral language:
too exotic for graphs or stats, and originally from republics,
we burn in the latest mathematics, angry with the kabbala,
ten trees chopped down. we see through cheap
disguises to what we are: the poor. look at our tents,
blue-red-green domes, tattered copies of the gold.
poor, but we fuck in the streets. no one~
can measure the emotions here. contrary to right-wing fallacy
we are not envious. of them?
for manna, try ideas.
for integrity, look at our sores..
ever heard of dissentiment?
we are karaoke politicians, earning eloquence
as voices from passing taxis
call us
‘lazy arses!’ and ‘divas!’.
…
there’s no more dinner parties, nothing bourgeois,
illusions clog the portaloos.
we are what we have always been,
early christians.
provocateurs come with free industrial-strength lager:
a miracle. …
The de-capitalisation of the first letters of each sentence might be interpreted as a kind of textual recalcitrance complementary to the recalcitrance of the poem’s polemical context. It’s a technique reminiscent of, among other exponents, the aforementioned Sean Burn and Paul Summers. I do also note the influence of David Gascoyne in this and many other poems throughout the book, mostly in phrasal and aphoristic terms, as well as in keen imagistic and colouristic qualities; McDevitt is somewhat less ‘surrealist’ as Gascoyne, though his imageries are no less vivid, striking and refulgent, and his descriptions often have a graphic quality. But McDevitt’s verse is driven by a very visceral energy, which is less Gascoynian than Lawrentian.
‘The Early Christians’ is in many ways a series of aphorisms spliced together, but, impressively, without any sense of breakage in the polemical narrative. The last trope excerpted comes across as an irreverent riff on transubstantiation, but a poignant one given the context; as well as touching on the irony of alcohol as a kind of chemical conductor of radical tendencies, since arguably it is also their inhibitor, and, from such an angle, a cynical product of capitalist production –the ‘liquid opium of the masses’.
‘Letter to Charlie Gilmour’ (aka ‘The Cenotaph Yob’), as its endnote informs, is a poem which was ‘sent to Charlie Gilmour in Wayland Prison, Norfolk – a fortnight before his release – as an antidote to all the hate-mail he was receiving)’, the eponymous youngster being the stepson of Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour (and biological son of Heathcote Williams). Young Gilmour was imprisoned for swinging from the flagpole of the Cenotaph during the student riots against trebled tuition fees in late 2010. In something of a riot of verse, McDevitt takes his verbal scalpels to the Establishment cadaver, which he depicts as a grotesque amalgam of dead things, an immovable Leviathan petrified in time’s taxidermy, like the mummified auto-icon of Jeremy Bentham still exhibited behind glass in its wooden cabinet at University College London:
the great red bus of freedom that this country really is
in its Green Man soul, its fish belly, its ales and Mab dispensations.
The statues, limousines, wigs and truncheons who’ve trussed you up
have no human souls, no animism, are but ghoulish things, doomed to
flaw-haunt
their bleak houses of law, their Dickensian Chancery morgues
The poem is an almost stream-of-consciousness tirade, rich with potent symbols and animalistic images:
It seems you asked a long-deceased statue for the last waltz,
maypoling about a war memorial without due solemnity or sobriety,
displaying, rather, all the body language of a circus chimpanzee,
later hopping onto the bonnet of the royal dodgem-car
as it was trying to enjoy an impromptu black bloc safari…
I particularly like that latter image, which ingeniously depicts the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall on an ‘impromptu’ tour of the riots in their limousine, as if on some kind of ‘sociological safari’ to witness ‘feral’ youth in its urban habitat through the safety of a windscreen; or like visitors to Windsor Safari Park, winding up their windows as the monkeys jump up, only to suddenly have their bonnet leapt on by one particularly wild human-‘monkey’, our young Mr Gilmour. This inspired juxtaposition jumps into the reader’s view too, and is nicely framed in aphorism without being over-emphasized. There follows the parenthesised trope, ‘(Sorry if I’ve got it all wrong. I have only militant media reports to rely on)’, the first clause of which becomes a part-refrain throughout the poem. The declaratory, or exclamatory tone of ‘Letter’, its almost tangential style, and rangy lines, is –as with some others of McDevitt’s oeuvre– reminiscent of both Arthur Rimbaud and Howl-era Allen Ginsberg:
Ah drunkenness, ah dancing in the puckish and syrupy streets
is what the youth should be striving to excel at. Ah leopards!
Ah Mrs. Windsor, goddess of the slot-machines, dumpier in the jowl.
Today l’Anglaise—as Verlaine called Victoria—has changed the law
to allow little cot-queenies aspire to the throne, ‘a female vote-catcher’
said a demobbed soldier to me, chez Wetherspoon,
and speaking of wendy palaces, today they also talked of changing the law
to allow ‘tent cities’ to be blasted by water cannons. It’s weird.
As with Ginsberg’s verse, and that of much of the Beats (e.g. also Lawrence Ferlinghetti) –all of whom owed much debt to Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Arthur Rimbaud, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane– McDevitt’s verse is oratorical: for reading, or howling, aloud. Its occasional mantra-like aspects are often combined by McDevitt with the iambic beat of his hand-drum when he performs them in public, more palpably emphasising his shamanic sensibilities. Here, as in others of his poems, the mystical aura of William Blake is summoned –for Blake is very much the psychopompos of McDevitt’s poetry:
Another law they changed—not today—was that of hanging the young
at Tyburn, ‘fatal brook’ of Blake:
18th century hoodies good for nothing but breeding
19th century hoodies good for nothing but breeding
20th century hoodies good for nothing but breeding
all the usual chavs and chav-nots
Tory druidry Tory grotesqueries
where a cabal of brandy-drinkers has the right to dispense with the lives
of people they know nothing about and like even less
McDevitt is a peripatetic apostle of psychogeography (pace in prose: Iain Sinclair, Ken Worpole etc.) and regularly conducts tours of those parts of London most resonantly steeped in the ectoplasms of poetic histories. An imbiber of the capital’s vast urban environment, McDevitt is almost the psychical composite of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Pepys and the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and might, in part, subscribe to a subverted paraphrasing of Samuel Johnson’s famous aphorism: when a man is tired of life, he tries out London. It is this deep, curatorial reverence for the past, a tangible nostalgia, which leavens the avant-garde architecture of McDevitt’s verse, and raises it above the flat-back vistas of rootless postmodernist experiments:
After they changed that law, they also changed the place-name
from Tyburn to Marble Arch, from Tyburn Road to Oxford Street,
airbrushing 700 years of human sacrifice under the historical carpet
and sluiced the Tyburn river of blood underground,
symbolically, for they are fish-hooked on symbols. (Sorry if
I’ve got it all wrong. I have only militant history books to rely on.)
Here, as elsewhere, McDevitt rips up the polished granite paving slabs of urban gentrification to remind us of the skeletons buried underneath. It’s a kind of verse-archaeology –McDevitt is the poet with a pen in one hand, and a trowel in the other (while a quill is firmly clenched between his teeth). He is as outraged at the Judge Jeffreys-style “exemplary sentences” (Cameron) dished out to the rioters of recent years as the rest of the poetry world should have been, and rightly rails at these natural injustices –since law is one thing, but justice, certainly natural justice, is quite clearly very much another:
This year what they’ve done to the student rioters, the London rioters
and the English rioters, is an echo of Tyburn—as is the word Taliban—
not fatal
not yet
(though the pro-capitalist punishment lobby are working on it)
but still an all-too-public punishment, all-too-out of proportion,
a fundamentalism of window-dressing, a paganism of scapegoating,
a Puritanism of dirty linen Daz-washing, an oxymoronic
hanging the young out to spin-dry,
But this surging wave of a poem ends on an almost rhapsodic crescendo:
but the dragons in the underbelly don’t mind them
for the gods of the hop are the goldest in this hemisphere
and the youth will grow his clipped wings back whiter
to swan-beat the drums of Thames-consciousness…
Here is the poem’s contextualisation from the original promotional article for Porterloo:
The first subject he found to treat on a bigger canvas was the imprisonment of Charlie Gilmour in 2010 for swinging from the Cenotaph flag. Sentenced to 16 months, Gilmour was being vilified in the Daily Mail and deluged with hatemail from its readers. As an antidote to this hatemail, McDevitt wrote an epistle, ‘Letter to Charlie Gilmour (aka ‘The Cenotaph Yob’)’, a poem in four sections which catches the mood of the 2010 riots but also meditates on one of the darkest episodes in English history i.e. the public hangings at Tyburn.
The Rimbaudian ‘THE HUMAN ELEPHANT’, subtitled ‘(in the inhuman room)’, aptly quotes from Rimbaud, and is inscribed ‘for the socially cleansed’ (a now commonly used phrase taken from, ironically, Tory London Mayor Boris Johnson’s comment that he’d have no “Kosovo-style cleansing” on his watch, referring to the Tory-driven welfare caps and bedroom tax which constitute a mass Malthusian ‘gentrification’ of the poorest districts of Britain’s cities on a scale which dwarfs that of Shirley Porter’s Westminster-concentrated monstrous misnomer, ‘Building Sustainable Communities’). Here’s the contextualisation from International Times’ promotion of the volume:
Other poems lament social cleansing in London and the banishment of the underclass from their homes, their boroughs, their city. ‘THE HUMAN ELEPHANT (in the inhuman room)’, a concrete poem with verses shaped like council-housing mansion-blocks, has been widely praised.
The title of this poem is no doubt an allusion to the phrase ‘elephant in the room’, which is a metaphor for a crucial, highly contentious and sometimes perceptibly insoluble issue, wilfully ignored, in spite of its huge and ubiquitous presence, by those responsible for its resolution. McDevitt’s numbered stanzas are in the form of poetic prose (with the emphasis on poetic), chunks of poetic text shaped into near-prose paragraphs, with sentences, again, of de-capitalised first letters. In an endnote McDevitt describes the layout as a ‘‘concrete poem’ …inspired by the depopulated Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle… first performed in situ at an event organized by the Urban Forest’ –and in terms of the typographical arrangement or shape of text on the page, much of McDevitt’s oeuvre comes under a broad ideogrammatic umbrella. Both in terms of the importance of its contentious subject –paramount to all humanitarians today– and its approach to the subject, ‘THE HUMAN ELEPHANT’ is a potent and purposeful poem. Here are some excerpts of what for me are the most striking tropes in the six stanzas:
1
it is come, the time of our decanting. …
…
…goodbye to our streets in the air, hello
to pound shops and charismatic chapels. we had mystical mansions, we
had 1000 keys, so they jealously took it away, who cannot understand
our tribal croaks, our medicine men, our ghetto aromas, our pirate
smiles. six castles of communism loomed worryingly large for them. six
ships we sailed into bureaucratic, pea-soup seas. six rectangles of Hel
2
only Glasspool is left…
…
…our houses, our shops were illumined by the original
planners who had based everything on light, on sunlight, and we could
buy anything, the spices of earth, from neighbours who lived in the same
lighting, whose living-rooms were also chemists, launderettes, hairdressers,
shebeens. ‘environmental determinism’ says Glasspool. verily, the
overclass envies the underclass, covets what the other doesn’t have
3
when the communal heating system stopped, we resorted to small
convector heaters. they trash any commune, any communing. the big
dystopia kills off little utopias. when the communal heating system
stopped, we felt the Cold War creeping back under our psychedelic
snake draught-excluders. did you know the anti-pyramidal city had
been built by gypsies, riding on Indian elephants? …
4
nor were we decanted politely. no pinkies were extended to us. the war
on brutalism was brutalist. savagely they gentrify (never once suspecting
how nice we are). the streets in the air are an empty estate, a flotation
jerusalem. …
…
…we fondly remember the vomit running up
our oesophagi, his tigrish chrism. but as his hug was the beginning
of the end for Gaddaffi, his eulogy was a kick in the balls of Cockaigne
5
here the human elephant (inhuman castle) in a graffiti-rich greyness,
a welcoming Hel, empty rooms in the endangered species, showroom
trials, rigged judges, juries, developers, developers, the development’s in
the detail (so the thesis goes). national salvation, sociopolitical failure,
the 40-year day, an affordable toilet, a criminal idyll, more robinhood
than neighbourhood (so the thesis went …
6
…
…oh the flushed ova!
‘shooting an elephant’ wrote Orwell, a guilty authority. we have been
dispersed, …
…they are only killing our living-rooms, amazing as they were.
let the ill-affordable houses come, clad in trespa, and let those who can illafford them piss into ladyporterloos. …
I’m sure McDevitt will forgive the ellipses throughout these excerpts but, apart from space limits, I’m sure he’d not want his poems from Porterloo extracted verbatim page by page as then it’d start to undermine the point of the book version. But what can be gathered from these extensive quotes is, again, this poet’s prodigious investment in figurative language, image and symbol, in order to put across what is not simply a ‘polemical argument’ but a ‘sensibility’, an individualised yet community-oriented system of thought and perception –a ‘philosophy’ in a sense– in which an inalienable vocabulary of the culturally and/or socially ‘alienated’ (if that’s not a contradiction), or a marginalised ‘pidgin’ lingo (‘tigrish chrism’, for instance…?), is symbiotic to its communication –as is the ‘concrete’ typographical shape; and this method of communication is one of ‘signification’: the use of ‘signs’.
In a similar manner to which some of the poems in McDevitt’s debut b/w (most blatantly the brilliant ‘ODE TO THE DOLE’) cultivated a kind of satirical counter-stigmatisation on behalf of the ‘lumproletariat’ (or ‘lumpenpoetariat’ as the case may be) by presenting unemployment as some sort of unapologetic ‘bedsit capitalism’, thus employing the dysphemisms of ubiquitous anti-“scrounger” rhetoric from the stigmatising red-tops as weapons against them (in a similar way to how some mental health groups, for example, re-appropriate such terms as ‘mad’, or gay groups, the term ‘queer’, as means to self-empowerment and dialectical self-assertion; since, as in accordance with ancient ‘superstition’, but still, unconsciously, the case in ‘scientific’ culture, the ‘owning’ of a name or noun, as a descriptor of an object or person, carries with it a kind of ‘magical’ power, or psychical advantage) –in ‘THE HUMAN ELEPHANT’, McDevitt subverts the topic of the poem by acting as a verse-ventriloquist, throwing through the mouths of the impoverished victims of ‘urban redevelopment’/‘gentrification’/‘eviction’/‘social cleansing’ a tone of entitled loftiness in poverty, and a sense of superiority to their corporate persecutors, which is completely at odds with their actual victimisation and vulnerability. As with the lines
we’ve been decanted and pepperpotted–in spite of because of our ‘iconic’ status–
from our gridded elevations, from our streets in the air, having refused to hand in identities, or give DNA samples
the phrasings imply that the vulnerable inhabitants of the soon-to-be-‘depopulated’ estate are being evicted by a remorseless drive of envy, and also that they have somehow had some choice or say in whether or not to conform to punitive police checks (by dint of their fancied impunity of elevation). The effect of such satirically charged ‘arrogance-in-adversity’ is to re-emphasise the injustices perpetrated against these people, in light of the circumstantial absurdity of their sanguinity.
Another key aspect to McDevitt’s significations is the sprinkling of ‘brand’ names –in this poem’s case, ‘trespa’ (Trespa), brand name of a type of high-pressure laminate (HPL) plate used in modern interiors. This particular brand name is semantically serendipitous, since it happens to be formed from the first six letters of the word trespass, which in the context of this poem, has much symbolism (is it the corporate ‘depopulators’, or the recalcitrant tenants, who are the trespassers?). This satirical receptiveness to brand names and commercial memes again recalls ee cummings’ ‘Poem, or Beauty Hurts Mr. Vinal’, as well as echoing some of Louis MacNiece’s anomic poems of alienation in consumerist society from his Thirties period.
There’s also the curious name ‘Glasspool’ mentioned a couple of times in the poem, and which, after having done a bit of Googling, I assume refers to RL Glasspool Charity Trust, which provides ‘small one-off grants to individuals in need’…? I might be wrong there but it’s a guess. Ultimately, the title ‘THE HUMAN ELEPHANT’ would seem to point towards the fact that the real ‘elephant in the room’ for capitalism is, indeed, the ‘human’, or at least, the ‘authentic’ human personality (or human potential), and hence its auspices have to try and repress and arrest its development by training it towards material acquisitiveness, thereby enabling a stunted form of individual expression to be vented vicariously through objects, property, things –all so the prime capitalist purpose of material exchange and transaction in the pursuit of profit towards ever more acquisitions can operate predictably and unhindered (albeit, in all spiritual and metaphysical senses, futilely).
‘Let Us Celebrate Dickens’, subtitled ‘The Charles Dickens Bicentenary 2012’, was introduced in the IT blurb thus: ‘surgically exposes the hollowness and hypocrisy of the Dickens celebrations in 2012’. It is a sharp and succinct satirical verse which could well have been called ‘What the Dickens!’, or even ‘Carry On Dick’, given the grotesque, almost blackly comical spectacle of the Capital rapidly returning to a similar state it was at the time of Dickens’ birth, thanks to the Tory cuts and fiscal cleansings, as if by way of ‘interactive’ and ‘experiential’ reconstruction of London 1812. Indeed, when one considers the escalating street homelessness piling up rapidly under Tory policies and platitudes, and the scandalous exploitation and humiliation of scores of unemployed claimants bussed into the capital in a mobile workhouse and left overnight under a rain-dripping bridge to be ready and alert in tabards to compulsorily ‘volunteer’ as ‘stewards’ during the Ruritanian spectacle of the Queen’s Jubilee that same year, the Dickensian parallels seem more and more apposite and less and less hyperbolic.
The crowning irony being of course that among the first people who would have howled with outrage at such inhumane treatment of the poor and unemployed would have been Dickens himself, who was in many ways the ‘social conscience’-through-fiction of his times (bar George Eliot and Thomas Hardy in the more rural spheres). Suitably, McDevitt peppers this verse with Dickensian allusions, couching them amid contemporary terms and acronyms –to emphasise just how interrelated 2012 and 1812 actually are. I excerpt this poem in full, as it’s only four stanzas, but due to formatting limitations I’m unable to present it with the strikethroughs –another ‘McDevittism’– which are supposed to spear through ‘NEDS’ and ‘fit as fiddlers’:
let us celebrate Dickens—England’s conscience—
as young NEDS (sorry) NEETS have no prospects
but to be stopped searched and stripped of benefits
by Gradgrinds Scrooges and Dedlocks
let us commemorate all things Dickensian
as the ‘Kosovo-style’ clean-up commences
and losers are mopped off the A to Z
to make his London fit for gold medallists
let us sentimentalise Dickens’ creations
as the disabled are forced to take physical tests
and—in a warped schmaltz denouement—
declared fit as fiddlers
able-bodied men and women
let us even enshrine Dickens in moral law
as legal aid is withdrawn from the poor
and Kafkaesque barriers are erected
saying: NO ROOM AT THE INNS
The punning phrase ‘fit as fiddlers’ is particularly topical in our current ‘scroungerphobic’ climate of purportedly ubiquitous “welfare fiddlers”. From Her Majesty’s scapegoated ‘subjects’ to a verse missive written to an unnamed ‘poet’: ‘Sonnet to a Monarchist’, which a footnote mentions ‘…is a footnote to Heathcote Williams’ ‘Royal Babylon’ but is addressed to a very different poet’ (and which the IT promotion of the book contextualised criticising ‘a poet who has fallen under the spell of Prince Charles’) begins:
Dear Poet,
your dream of Arthur, Merlin and Taliesin
is a fantasy island, Conservatism in fancy dress…
and ends with suitable jab at establishments:
Wake up and see Arthur, Merlin and Taliesin
come back as Prince Charles, Paul Daniels and Andrew Motion.
Continuing in the anti-establishment vein comes ‘Elegy for Mrs Thatcher’, a Ginsbergian stream-of-consciousness anti-Tory mantra presented in a concrete block of text, which incants its way through the surnames of various leading Tories, past and present, pluralizing them as if talking of different species of true blue Lepidoptera:
pitts clampdown. thatchers detach. edens evict. pitts execute, pitilessly. edens
execute, edenically…
…thatchers don’t. edens evict from eden. porters socialise, porters clean, porters clean toilets, porters clean portaloos. porters, thatchers also suffer. porters port, thatchers thatch. thatchers milksnatch, thatchers semi-detach. camerons milksnatch, camerons fully detach. porters gerrymander and embezzle, embezzle and gerrymander. porters abscond to the holy land…
…ids calculates how to be less beneficial…
…borises bluster. borises blub. borises bikeses are brought to you by barclayses bankses. freudses **** their motherses….
…Tories prefer the adams family to gerry adams. (torieses are the adamses.)
…porter is, thatcher is, ids is. ids is and ids isn’t. mays scare, mays scarify, mays are much scarier than muslims with hooks…
…porters inherit more tescos. thatchers wither. the withering away of the thatchers. thatcher is and isn’t. there is no such thing as
mrs t******r.
‘Description from a Red Bus’ (For Mike Lesser) is verse as image-deluge, rich in contemporary urban symbol and commercial meme of brand advertising, reminiscent in some stylistic aspects to ee cummings and John Ashbery, via Jeremy Reed’s contemporary hyper-metropolitan dystopian poetry, as well as recalling, again, the rangy lines and commercial images of Louis MacNiece’s Thirties period –but McDevitt’s very alliterative and assonantal tangible-language has its own distinct energy and texture:
a gaggle of police at Western Circus adopting an aggressive, goose-like
stance
of parted legs and forward-thrusted loins
but their body mass indexes are comically dwarfed from the top deck
vantage-point
recycling banks, cranes, New and Used Buildings Materials warehouses
in this industrial zone, north-west, rolling
and then a Thames-wide stretch of railway lines and wires, shining,
humming
billboards reflect the fashionable corporate fascisms, the bullying
omnipresence
of SKY, Gordon Ramsay, talktalk etc.
competing for mass attention, on rented plinths, levelling the rest
of the conscious universe
suburban shopfronts, though, are not so glamorous or opulent,
just about owned by their smallholders, seedily stylish,
ethnic cafés and hairdressers, imitation Kennedy chicken joints…
sudden colours of fruit-and-veg piled in plastic bowls—yellows,
greens, reds—
outside Turkish or Pakistani or Iranian cornershops
flash like flags or rainbows in the drabness—glimpses of Rastafarian
bohemes
two monolithic chimneys—smokeless—are dominant on the Church
Road horizon
of council houses, disused sites and playing fields
as robed women wheel their prams meditatively, some species
of dark bird, homing
African men, Somalis or Ethiopians, in assembly by a halal store
smoke, talk and smile, clenching bunches of khat, mostly elders
with tight curls greying,
semi-Westernised, wearing suit jackets over light-coloured, flowing,
knee-length shirts
this zone with HOMEBASE, scrapyards, and assorted construction
companies,
car showrooms, garages for M.O.T. and repairs, is dull but
nominally exotic:
a minicab firm called ‘Cheetah’, a café called ‘Tabriz’, a ‘Taj Mahal’
the large-scale swathe of graffiti on a red-bricked rooftop
of Harlesden
is a meaningless tag, white and bubbly, just something
to do for an hour
for a kid with nothing to do, a narcissistic scrawl with no
message for the ages
another river of rail-lines by the beautifully named Walm Lane
as the bus judders downhill, following a concrete mixer
along Walm Lane into Chichele Road… clumsily… bumpily…
clownishly… as in a silent movie
where the younger bloods are sprucely turned out, and pavanine
with it,
displaying a higher class of casualwear-cum-sportswear—
too good to fight in—
grinning from earplug to earplug as they strut, unworriedly
and who cannot savour the pax of these ramshackle suburbs
with all their dilapidated ghettoes, malls, gas-towers, chapels
and simpleton signs: ‘Great Deals Available’, ‘Jesus Loves You’,
‘STOP’ etc?
plenty of cars, carparks and carwashes—where cattle markets
once stood—
close to The Tavern by Dersingham Road
with its wooden emblem of horses and carriages, mirroring the past
(more recent than distant)
the bus rides the tarmac road, glides on Golders Green rays
softening the tarmac road to liquorice as a senior citizen crosses
—to elsewhere, evidently—with stick and an orange recycling bag
swinging anarchically in wind
Such an agile, bounding, almost terpsichorean engagement with language as excerpted at length above is suggestive of a poet who immerses himself to saturation-point in the rudiments of modern life, so that the verse has the sense of having been lived; while the barrage of urban and commercial imagery –acutely observed and replicated– that snags every line, is everything that 81 Austerities could have been, but glaringly wasn’t. ‘Description from a Red Bus’ is an exceptional urban sprawl of a poem with a MacNiecean assuredness of phrase and image –to my mind, one of the most accomplished poems in Porterloo.
‘Mindcuffs’ is a kind of companion-piece to ‘Elegy for Mrs Thatcher’, another anti-Tory concrete poem that takes a semantic mallet to traumatise the traumatising ideology:
the cloud with mouths
conservatism
utopias caged in books
conservatism
sunlessness
conservatism
wrexham mugwumps
conservatism
language loses its flavour like pieces of chewing gum
(That’s a brilliant image!). Again, there’s an almost mantra-like quality here, with the incantatory repetition of conservatism, uttered like a malevolent whisper –the poem is almost an anti-mantra. There’s a quote included which might have come from the lips of Aneurin Bevan or the pen of Clement Attlee, but is actually from a more recent anonymous source, an irony-proof Tory ‘grandee’ who was apparently overheard –by socialist writer and columnist Owen Jones– saying this at a meeting:
‘What you have to realise about the Conservative Party is that it is a coalition
of privileged interests. Its main purpose is to defend that privilege. And the
way it wins elections is by giving just enough to just enough other people.’
conservatism
And, aptly, the poem comes to a close focusing on the (in-)convenient evil of privatisation, which incrementally and systematically alienates us from our own national resources through profit-driven partitioning, decreases efficiency and accountability of so-called ‘public services’ (cue the arrant hypocrisy of the Tories arguing that the London Underground should be exempt from the ‘right to strike’ by dint of being an ‘essential public service’, following the recent tube strike in protest against Tory-imposed redundancies of tube staff –but if the Tories truly think this to be the case, they’d not be cynically selling it off, ticket office by ticket office, to the private sector!), and, even more ruinously, determines government green policy through private sector corporate lobbying/bribery, continuing to pollute our natural environment, not for increased efficiency of services but simply for customer-fleecing profit:
tarzan’s yodel
privatised forests
goliath the philistine
the fruit-voiced liars
the woolly monolith
nation of tagged children
onshore winds
the pitts
conservatism
air, I need air
sea, I need sea
meet the frackers
conservatism
His ‘finger on the pulse’ as ever, McDevitt highlights the potentially catastrophic environmental hazard of ‘fracking’, perhaps the ultimate act of natural vandalism by the auspices of anarcho-capitalism to date –but what’s a couple of tremors or minor earthquakes between elections? And, the activist village in Tory Sussex apart, there’s always the largely Labour-voting “barren North-east” to plunder. Of course, not only are we currently ‘governed’ by a bunch of Etonian ‘social cleansing’-deniers: they are also mostly inveterate dissenters of the otherwise watertight scientific case for global warming, violently reconfirmed in recent years through escalating tsunamis, earthquakes, floods and, oh yes, the small matter of rapidly melting ice caps!
[On the subject of the England Floods of early 2014, there could be no more absurd apocalyptic farce as the sight of scores on scores of petrol-guzzling, carbon-spewing four-by-fours being hurriedly guided onto lorry trailers throughout a waterlogged South of England. But the political Right will blame anything and anyone other than the blatant evidence of the environmental catastrophe caused largely by the emission of fossil fuels into the atmosphere from the ubiquitous automobile (Heathcote Williams’ Autogeddon having been a highly prescient titular neologism): so while the prime minister –posing in his Wellington-booted PR offensive– blamed Labour (perhaps indicating the Tories’ next electoral slogan: Blame the weather. Blame Labour), a UKIP member blamed the recent passing of the gay marriage bill in Parliament. Anything to pointing the finger at the world’s inalienably greedy and acquisitive ‘petrol-heads’ for incurring the wrath of the biosphere.
Add to such wilfully blind dialectics the continual societal emphasis on the human damage caused by tobacco smoking with a new –reasonable in itself– parliamentary call for a ban in cars with children inside (following the arguably more punitive and uncompromising ban in all pubs, all public spaces, and even on open-air station platforms –we’re rapidly heading for the kind of scenario when only the richest person on the planet is able to procure a single tailor-made cigarette which she has to keep illicitly enshrined inside a gold keepsake under lock and key in a dressing-table drawer, pace, the late chain-smoking Denis Potter’s prophetic, posthumously broadcast Cold Lazarus), as if the world’s health and pollution problems can be solved not by radically limiting car use or introducing mandatory recyclable fuel or electric-powered vehicles, but simply by making car-driving smokers stub out their habit while driving –which is rather like asking someone in a burning building not to strike a match.
While there is a reasonably strong case for the effects of passive smoking, there is a much stronger case that the biggest cause of respiratory illness among humans is actually petrol pollution –oh, and add to that the fact that, unlike tobacco smoking, petrol pollution is also seriously altering our climate, puncturing the ozone layer and poisoning the planet’s very atmosphere, which seriously threatens the very survival of the human species. And yet, apparently the cure to all our ills isn’t a radical crackdown on industrial pollution and excessive car use, but just further moves towards an all-out ban on tobacco use. Perhaps one day, if, for instance –and to indulge my own wish-fulfilment for a moment– we had a part (i.e. a Green-Labour Coalition) or entire Green Party government, we may start to become accustomed to such terms as ‘petrol abuse’, whereby car usage is restricted to only essential journeys, and no individual or family can own more than one vehicle each. But of course, in our acquisitive, individualistic culture, this is highly unlikely to ever come about, even if we’re eventually in a situation where all cars have to be fitted with inflatable floats, like hovercrafts, in order to negotiate a permanently submerged landscape].
Now we come to the crie de Coeur of the volume in the anti-prayer that is the title poem, a kind of Porter-repelling spell dripping in the refulgent language of Roman Catholic rapture:
Our Lady (of tesco
and of the tescolonies
and of the tescolonisation
of the Matters of
Britain and Europe
and its botched grab
at Chindia
nay
and of the Great Mind,
th’Astral
Dame de la Sainte Terre
(and of
the B.E.
mystical files mystical dossiers
built up about you
are legion are legendary
and thus I quote (from one:
Milady may the covings of the heavenly malls
descend to the glorifying
of thy name and of thy
necklaced lipsticked shoulderpadded
aura
(and the smileyface emblazoned on thy pendant
of—in your case—Sol the bad loser)
to be an icon of conservatism
for the generations hereafter,
the new Devil’s Dam
o’ Porterloo
‘Porterloo’ is, demonstrably, another concrete piece, broadly in the ee cummings mould, but the poem goes far beyond mere satire: it is, at heart, a deeply impassioned plea for the zombies of consumerism to wake up to the ‘tescolonisation’ not just of our high streets but of our entire sense of cultural consciousness, which is, at present, little more than a hypnopompic stupor of superfluous appetites and spoon-fed opinions. And it is here that, for me, the quite primal but at the same time spiritualistic recalcitrance of McDevitt’s oeuvre really packs its punch, particularly because it doesn’t enslave itself to any doctrinal rigidity –is implicitly and explicitly ‘anarchic’– and is more dialectically immaterialist than anything else, though absolutely ‘anti-capitalist’.
There are shades of George Orwell’s Gordon Comstock from Keep the Aspidistra Flying to McDevitt: his recalcitrance in the face of intransigent authority, and his insistence on doggedly living what for him is an authentic life, irrespective of material siege; but this is not so much a conscious choice as a way of being, and a way of being true to himself and his nature; a sensibility. It can only be framed as some ‘choice’ in the sense that a refusal, or inability, to conform to rigid dictates as to what constitutes ‘occupation’ in capitalist society, inescapably results in the rationing of benefits and, thereby, a passively-aggressive state-imposed poverty in the absence of any alternatives perceived as viable (often the only recourse for the nonconformist is ‘self’-employment, to which McDevitt himself has lately taken refuge). So, unlike Comstock, whose poverty is elective –and who was, in any case, a fictional character, albeit autobiographically cobbled together from Orwell’s own hobo days, and who had a financially fruitful career as an advertising copywriter to fall back on, as in the end he does– McDevitt is doing more than just making a stand or statement against the tyranny of materialism, he is personally demonstrating that the individual human will, or personality, if strong or inspired or determined enough, can not only triumph over diminished circumstances through the power of self-expression, but can actually amplify itself in spite of societal fetters, and in a way which capitalism, for all its inanimate mesmerisms, cannot do.
And here we hit the vein of a form of Vitalism in McDevitt’s verse –what we might term ‘McDevittian Vitalism’ (though I am sure McDevitt himself is temperamentally resistant to any attempts to tag his verse with an ‘–ism’ or any other kind of deterministic reduction). This ‘McVitalism’ has some of the surface characteristics of early-twentieth century Vorticism, most famously expressed in the dynamic 1914 verse-manifesto BLAST (of which the iconic jacket design, in its explosive starkness, with the title writ diagonally in big thick letters across a plain tomato-coloured cover, was such an essential part) edited by the movement’s doyen, Wyndham-Lewis. But McDevitt’s verse is really a kind of anti-Vorticism, a verse-reaction against materialist dogma; and one which, pivotally, arms itself in the type of nomenclatures reflective of such auspices which it holds in contempt, by means of rebutting these brutalisms with their own blunt –and sharp– semantic instruments.
McDevitt is neither celebrating the crane nor the wrecking-ball, but is very much sending his own verbal wrecking-ball swinging through the forever arrested scaffolding-consciousness of a property-worshipping culture, to which ‘gentrification’, ‘depopulation’ and ‘social cleansing’ are part of a hyper-materialist, Malthusian ‘work ethic’; an anti-culture wherein bricks and mortar are the means not to building homes for human beings, but for building up expanding portfolios and capital for property-speculators –cement being, effectively, the new currency. Not simply a society of depopulation but also of dehumanisation: a society where prospective rental tenants have to jump through hoops of ‘personality profiling’ before being permitted to pay exorbitant rents to keep a roof over their heads (almost to a point when soon landlords and letting agents will be requiring them to have DNA tests to check whether or not they are genetically predisposed to defaulting with rent). Shelter now being a ‘privilege’ rather than an entitlement or basic human right, and, increasingly today, a sanctuary to which receipt of any form of state benefit, particularly Local Housing Allowance –in spite of many recipients actually being in work but on poverty wages– is, opposite to its fundamental purpose, proscriptive rather than in any sense beneficial (and this isn’t even to touch on the recent criminalisation of “squatting” in derelict empty buildings –those jutting Easter Island corpuses of property speculation in lieu of human habitation), since most private landlords will no longer even consider LHA claimants as tenants.
Curiously enough, during my break from writing this review, there was an item on Channel 4 News about the dangerously inflating property price bubble artificially created by the scabrous Osborne’s duplicitous ‘Help to Buy’ scheme, which (quite apart from its deeply irresponsible, politically opportunistic calibration of what is potentially another sub-prime mortgage scam under a different name), due to including no safeguards to limit its scope to genuine first time buyers looking to secure home mortgages, is leaving itself wide open, like every other property initiative, to rapacious opportunism and abuse by the ever-increasing parasitism of buy-to-let private landlords. And this was in part what this item was tackling, with some sharply insightful and apposite interpolations on the housing crisis by Danny Dorling, author of the not-before-time polemic, All That Is Solid –The Great Housing Disaster (Allen Lane).
Dorling –and his book– argue that simply focusing on the supply side of the housing issue by building more homes on a 1930s or 1960s scale will not in itself solve the catastrophic contemporary housing problem of high demand, low supply, and the continual hiking of private rents by landlords to capitalise on the high demand, which in turn prices hundreds of thousands of people (if not millions) out of the private rental market (most direly, those who rely for all or some of their incomes on state assistance, mostly in LHA, in order to, paradoxically, top-up said increasing rent shortfalls). The reason it won’t is because of the scandalous absence of any proper regulation of the private rental sector. Dorling is arguing what many have for some time now –and I myself have argued at length through polemic both on The Recusant in the two Caparison anti-cuts anthologies– that the only viable and immediate way to solve the lack of available and/or affordable rental accommodation is to reintroduce private rent controls, those perpetually prevaricated ‘elephants in the room’ of the rental issue which are today spoken of in tones of dread, as if they are an entirely new and radical concept, a hitherto ‘untried’ and un-trusted ‘Stalinistic’ default-mechanism that would arrest ‘enterprise’ and ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘dis-incentivise’ private landlords from ‘investing’ in more rental housing stock, thus, in the long-run, reducing supply.
This is the deeply disingenuous type of capitalistic claptrap and scaremongering that Dorling had to endure from a representative of the ‘business community’ on the C4 News who was, nonetheless, making a great effort to appear ‘open-minded’ and ‘socially concerned’ by occasionally widening his eyes, speaking in a conciliatory tone, and fidgeting with his designer-framed glasses. But as anyone with an ounce of knowledge of twentieth century political history will know, Britain used to have a system of rent controls, first introduced in 1915 under prime minister Lloyd-George (the “Welsh wizard”) and further strengthened in his Rent Act 1920, which capped private rents at acceptable levels –in part inspiring A.J.P. Taylor to hail the new “principle that housing was a social service” (something all but extinct in post-Thatcherite society)– and sustained almost without interruption (any interruptions being, of course, under Tory governments), actually strengthened as protections for tenants by the mid-Seventies’ Harold Wilson Labour Government, until gradually phased out under Margaret Thatcher, and ultimately abolished, reprehensibly, during John Major’s premiership.
Of course, for all those whose consciousnesses are conditioned purely by the post-Thatcherite de-regulatory ‘consensus’, such things as ‘rent controls’ sound dangerously socialist, distinctly European, if not faintly Soviet –which shows how risibly low in the trough of regressive right-wing ‘thinking’ British culture has sunk in the past three decades or more. But Dorling is absolutely right, the most vital and long-belated imperative at this time of escalating rents and escalating evictions and homelessness, is for urgent and radical state intervention in the regulation of the private rental sector. Bluntly, to do anything short of this is to be politically complicit in the mass-pauperisation and decanting of entire sections of society onto the streets (oh, wait a minute, that’s precisely what the Tories are trying to facilitate!).
It’s a constant source of perplexity to me that these days so few political commentators, including many on the Left who are otherwise very insightful on other social issues, simply miss the point time and time again on the housing crisis, by constantly banging on about increasing supply and building more but, inexplicably, rarely arguing for a combination of this with the reintroduction of private rent controls! Most of Europe has private rent controls; Scandinavia, particularly conscientious in this regard, has managed to sustain the principle of ‘housing as social service’, which Britain threw on the pyre back in the Eighties –and in Sweden, buy-to-let (or ‘bet’) landlordism is not only extremely rare, it is even commonly frowned upon, in keeping with the cultural Swedish ethic of lagom, which translates as, ‘the right amount’/‘just enough’, and precludes any rapacious behavioural acquistiveness –the diametric opposite to British ‘Thatcheritism’, ‘greed is good’ (the Swedes also refer to their welfare state as folkhemmet, meaning ‘the people’s home’ –difficult to imagine any unlikelier moniker for our welfare state, which most red-top-spoon-fed Britishers would more likely call ‘the scroungers’ home’).
Then, of course, even trying to ‘opt out’ from the whole bricks-and-mortar trap today and cultivate an ‘alternative lifestyle’ is practically impossible, thanks to the recent criminalisation of squatting, even in empty properties, and even prosecutions of many street homeless too. Nonetheless, I was recently encouraged to find a group of dreadlocked squatters ‘camping in’ inside one of many derelict empty shops on my local high street, their front window display, like some polemical conceptual art installation, draped with a black and red anarchist flag, and wrapped in all kinds of dissenting statements, almost all insightful, if slightly callowly expressed. It was my misfortune to have been stood sympathetically reading these shop-window polemics just at a point that a half-inebriated conventional looking thick-set man stopped to shout through the glass at the squatters, ‘WE ALL HAVE TO PAY RENT! GET OVER IT! GET-A-FUCKING-JOB!’, pathologically missing the point of the enterprise of course, for being consumed with such chest-swelling masochistic pride at living out an entire life as a depersonalised, alcohol-placated pawn of capitalist exploitation.
Among the petitions pasted up in this ‘pop-up polemical emporium’ was one hastily scribbled notice pointing out that occupation of abandoned land/space was practised in the seventeenth century by some radical groups (alluding to the Diggers, but without naming them); and some more pithily, felt-tipped slogans such as HUMANS ARE THE ONLY ANIMALS THAT HAVE TO PAY FOR THE RIGHT TO EXIST, and RENT IS THEFT. Arguably this has always been the case, rent being a kind of ancestral tithe levied on the dispossessed classes of society (actually the majority) by capitalists, property speculators, and, of course, the hereditarily propertied (the Camerons and Osbornes of this world), whose own ancestors effectively thieved the birthrights of many of ours’ through the land grabs, clearances and enclosures and industrial displacements, reducing most people to rootless human-commodities whose only ‘possessions’, their labour power, had to be sold in return for the ‘privilege’ of a ‘wage’ designed at just the right level to keep workers perpetually at one remove from poverty, in order to make them materially dependent on ‘employment’. That’s the standard Marxian take, anyway; and it’s one which I subscribe to myself.
Rent has ever been the extra ‘yoke’ for the worker, monthly soaking up any potential surplus he or she might otherwise have had left over from their ‘wage’, for saving, for instance –and just as many wages can never stretch beyond month-to-month material survival, so too is rent, a perpetual pouring of monies into the pockets of property owners/landlords, a hiding to nothing for the tenant; at least, nothing other than keeping a roof over their heads from one month to the next. From this angle, one might legitimately argue that housing and subsistence benefits are a kind of incremental ancestral reimbursement for the interngenerationally dispossessed classes, and the welfare state, a structural payback apparatus. (But not a substantial payback: that would be a Universal Basic Income along the lines that the Green Party have proposed, and something which McDevitt himself believes in, as do I).
And yet today, even more so than in the latter half of the past century, such ‘fiscal karma’, if you like, is now being comprehensively dismantled by the Tories (whose very name, as previously mentioned, derives from the Irish word for ‘outlaw’), who are after all the traditional party of the landed classes, on the mean-spirited premise that even such paltry state compensation for capitalism’s inability to provide all its citizens with secure employment paid at sustainable wages is indicative of a “culture” of “idleness” and “entitlement” among its ‘recipients’; even if this is a distinctly impoverished “culture” compared to the luxurious indolence of the inherited rich (e.g. the aristocracy and monarchy etc.).
So the Tories attempt a ‘moral’ justification of systematically pulling the rugs of basic subsistence from under the poorest in society by arguing it’s somehow liberating them from “benefits dependency” –but the trouble is, of course, it’s not so much ‘liberating’ as simply decanting them from relative pauperisation to abject pauperisation, in the marked absence of any authentic or sustainable alternatives, such as proper employment for a living wage. And here we hit the crux of Iain Duncan Smith’s so-called ‘welfare reforms’: the reduction of poverty via a reduction of the poor. There appear to be two ‘ends’ to the Malthusian ‘means’ of these ‘reforms’: to put people “back into work”, or, if that can’t be achieved, to put people into the ground; tip them into ‘employment’, or, failing that, tip them into premature graves (along with their cradles). This is not hyperbole when one considers clinical facts and figures: in 2011 alone, 10,600 sick and disabled claimants died within six weeks of being stripped off their benefits by Atos.
And it’s the same Malthusian rationale with regards to renting: the housing benefit cuts and the bedroom tax combined to make it almost impossible now for hundreds of thousands of pauperised households to keep roofs over their heads, not only in the private rental market, but also in the once ring-fenced social and council housing sector. And rather than reintroduce the basic sanity and rudimentary ‘fairness’ of private rent controls, the Tories leave the sphere unregulated, so that, inevitably, rents increase exponentially with reductions in state provision to enable tenants to pay them. This then can be seen as another mass-displacement and dispossession of the already hereditarily displaced and dispossessed classes; a second historic wave of clearances and enclosures. Unregulated private rents today are truly extortionate, and the complementary parasitism of letting agency fees and administrative charges, equally pocket-crippling, make the whole private renting apparatus nothing better than a state-sanctioned extortion racket (and, to add further insult, one which is now increasingly excluding those tenants most in need of shelter, simply because the state provision they receive to pay their rents is being vindictively reduced).
But off the soapbox and back onto ‘Poterloo’: McDevitt includes two quotes from one Peter Bradley, Labour MP, who, according to his Wikipedia entry, ‘As a member of Westminster Council and deputy Leader of the Labour Group… was a leader of the campaign to expose the ‘Homes for Votes’ scandal which led eventually to the surcharging of the former Conservative Council Leader Dame Shirley Porter and colleagues’; the second quote excerpted is particularly illuminating as to the judiciary’s heel-dragging approach to punishing the rich and powerful (when, oddly enough, it is much ‘swifter’ in its athletic meting out of ‘justice’ to the poor and underprivileged), and reads almost like a politically satirical version of ‘A Partridge in a Pear Tree’:
‘If I have an obsession, it was probably nurtured during my time as a councillor
in Westminster. That is why, some 18 years after the events of which we
complained began, 15 years after we registered our objection with the auditor,
10 years after he produced his provisional findings of “disgraceful, improper
and unlawful” gerrymandering in Westminster, eight years after he published
his formal findings of “wilful misconduct”, seven years after the High Court
endorsed those findings, three years after the Law Lords pronounced on what
they judged to be “a deliberate, blatant and dishonest use of public power”
amounting to “political corruption”, and a year after the European Court of
Human Rights rejected Shirley Porter’s final legal campaign as “manifestly
ill-founded”and “inadmissible”, we still seek justice…’
McDevitt’s bravura verse-missive ends with virulent irreverence, the subversion of the Tesco slogan ‘Every Little Helps’, particularly apposite:
O Milady of the 5p cemeteries, asbestos dream-homes, and gold rimmed
chaise de
(euphemism
thine acquilinity ravens us
(oh every little hurts
from the Holy Land to the Everglades
ee’n in the Great Vault
ineffable and unutterable
of thy 24 hour
t***o
Again, it’s instructive to see its contextualisation from International Times:
Porterloo’s title is a multiple pun on portaloo/Waterloo/Peterloo and which alludes to the disgraced ex-Tory councillor and Tesco heiress, Shirley Porter. Though her reputation was destroyed by her misbehaviour as leader of Westminster Council, the Conservatives continue to misbehave in exactly the same way, having learnt nothing from her nemesis. Tory hubris rides high and, once again, social cleansing, asset-stripping and gerrymandering are the order of the day. The ‘porterloo’ imagery is sustained through the volume, from the portaloos of Tent City to the discovery of a dead Conservative in a portaloo at Glastonbury. Here, McDevitt provides a masterclass in unsentimental storytelling, as published in Alan Morrison’s The Recusant.
Porterloo thus becomes a codeword for the latest class war to be unleashed by the Tories, their first large scale mobilisation of the 21st century. In the climax to the first section of the book – called “P” – McDevitt envisions the precarious situation in which millions of people find themselves as ‘waiting to be flushed down the Porterloo’.
‘The Labour Mart’, subtitled ‘(after ‘Morning Dissertation’ by David Gascoyne)’, is an exemplarily composed poem on the weekly dehumanisation of the unemployed via mandatory job centre appointments to ‘check up’ on how voraciously claimants are chasing those all-important phantom job opportunities or poverty-waged zero hour contracts that are supposed to act as life-transforming miracle cures for all their circumstantial poverties and personal ills –all hail the new elixir of ‘Work’, any work, it doesn’t matter what, whether it be well-paid, poorly paid, or unpaid, no matter how insecure, mind-numbing, humiliating, dead-end or ultimately debilitating, any work is better than no work, anything is better than no work, and so on and so forth (in fact, exactly the same penal attitude that deems putting prisoners to hard labour morally reconstructive, is applied to today’s unemployed, who are not seen as the victims of economic failure, but of their own “fecklessness” and moral ‘deviancies’, guilty before proven innocent, “scroungers” before proven legitimate claimants).
McDevitt subtly polemicises today’s cynical misappropriation of humanistic ‘occupational’ theory (as expounded through occupational therapy, which, in its organic form, makes a differentiation between ‘occupation’ –something which employs one’s natural faculties and is fulfilling– and ‘work’, something which is more often performed through demands of economic necessity, mere survival, ‘to earn one’s living’, than through any authentic choice or conscious expression of one’s personality or talents) as a means to promoting the notion that any occupation/paid employment/‘job’ is implicitly of not only material and ‘moral’ but also therapeutic benefit to the human personality. McDevitt caricatures the deeply duplicitous auspices of the likes of fraudulent corporate carpetbaggers A4e whose ‘employment advisers’ present themselves as svelte temptresses of mythical vacancies –rather like desk-bound suited Sirens, “creaming off” the more employable ‘clients’ for quick-fix work placements for which the company receives its government bounties, while “parking” the less employable in piles of ring-binders– as the ‘human faces’ of
new companies of caring thaumaturges
tapping compositions on keys…
(Arguably, most of the ‘authentic’ occupations in society are not facilitated through employment, but through unpaid volunteering, which is, in its purest form, an altruistic expression of the human personality, through the exercising of free choice, to contribute something to its community, un-sullied by the grubby bartering of the ‘wage’ negotiation –but capitalism has even muddied the one oasis of spontaneous human social expression, community volunteering, by making it mandatory… at least, for the long-term unemployed; thereby cheapening such authentic gestures of citizenship as a kind of paying back ‘in kind’ to the taxpayer for receipt of state benefits).
It is this capitalistic bastardisation of occupational theory which informs the apocryphal morphology of DWP mythmaking, and of our culture’s entire ‘work ethic’, or ‘work myth’: the ‘myth’ being that all work, any work, is of inalienable benefit to the human organism, and is, moreover, the prime purpose and supreme expression of one’s existence, which must take precedence over everything else. That to be ‘in work’ today is the first and most fundamental self-justification for existing, and, like some axiological antinomianism, a job automatically bestows on a person an implicit moral superiority over those without one, and a government-extended moral prerogative to judge those who are not in work, even to subject them to all manner of verbal and attitudinal stigmatisation, or in some cases, the sticky end of petit espionage (i.e. ‘tipping off’ the DWP as to suspected “benefit cheats”) –all this being a kind of state-granted (anti-)‘karmic’ payback to the “hard-working taxpayer” who resentfully and involuntarily subsidises a tiny percentage of benefits for the working-age unemployed.
But if ‘work’ is such a panacea for human personality, so infinitely rewarding and fulfilling, then why is that so many of the working population resent the fact they have to do it, and begrudge the pittance in benefits paid to the minority who, for whatever reasons, are currently not doing it (or at least, not doing paid and taxed work, but who most undoubtedly have their own forms of personalised ‘occupation’ –for ‘man is an occupational being’). If ‘work’ is its own reward, then why are so many who are in work constantly resenting the paltriest scraps of tax that, very circuitously, go towards keeping those who are (largely) being denied work alive; and even partly –and entirely on false premises spun by Tory and red-top– envying their poverties, not only for their mythically “over generous” benefits, but for a perceived abundance of spare time (itself increasingly a myth since now unemployment, along with sickness and disability, are, as far as government is concerned, ‘time-limited’!)…? Are they not happy enough in their work to not care about how many crumbs get chucked to the workless?
I am, of course, playing devil’s advocate here, especially since there are so many living and struggling in “working poverty”, which is an equally dispiriting state to having to endure stigmatised workless poverty. But I’m trying to challenge the ‘Work Cures All Ills’ cult of today. Certainly ‘occupation’ might cure most ills, but only in its authentic sense, which is the employing of one’s full faculties, talents and personality in the performance of a task useful to the community, and by ‘useful’ I don’t only mean in the utilitarian sense, but also in the humanistic paradigm. The arts, for instance, of vital importance to the psychical nourishment of society, much of which is produced by the ‘unemployed’, or the ‘lumpenproletariat’ (much poetry, by the ‘lumpenpoetariat’ –and that is not meant in any way disparagingly, it is simply a cultural reality which society refuses to accept or accommodate).
It’s instructive to reflect that disputably the only political system to date which not only materially accommodated but also culturally venerated its poets was Soviet Communism, under whose auspices it was not uncommon for artists, writers, playwrights and poets to receive state stipends to sustain them while they pursued their crafts, without constant pestering from chalk-striped atomists trying to get them to stack shelves instead (although I will not feign disingenuousness by omitting to recognise that to some degree such Soviet litertati were perhaps pestered by State apparatchiks to punctuate their productions with agitprop). Here is a glaring contrast between the cultural ambition of communism, and the abject philistinism of capitalism –two types of materialisms, but with very different cultural priorities: one for authenticity of production, the other, for cheapness of production as dictated by the profit motive.
And in ‘The Labour Mart’ we have one brilliant example of a poem, an unsponsored product, which would more than merit in itself a giro payment than the signatured list of Mcjobs applied for in the past fortnight, and demonstrates the utter absurdity of capitalism, its materialist contempt for any accomplishments which it can’t commoditise and turn to profit, its deeply ironic incapability of actually capitalising on authentic human capital as encapsulated in the natural talents of the personality. Not to mention the crowning irony and hypocrisy of capitalism, of all creeds, aspiring to the notion of “hard work” when its entire point is to secure a position, through ownership of the means of production, serviced by the sweat of the workers, for a tiny minority to exploit others’ labour –and even poverty– to accrue idle gain, and surplus leisure to speculate on accumulating further assets, all organised in order to enable capitalists to be in a position where they do not have to work themselves! Capitalism is, quite simply, labour-parasitism.
This is the vicarious ‘work ethic’ of capitalism: get others to do your work for you, slap them with a bare subsistence wage to keep them out of abject poverty, then pocket the rest of the profits in order to keep you from having to work yourself. Speculation is not work by any definition; it is gambling; and speculation is the modus operandi of capitalists. It is not “hard work” that capitalists and those who ascribe to the capitalist creed aspire to: what they actually aspire to is a state of privately-maintained unemployed ‘grace’, subsidised by others’ grateful labour (we ‘ragged trousered philanthropists’), rather than by subsidies circulated through tax, as in the case of the common unemployed. Capitalists are the real “scroungers” of society. That’s precisely why they and their political representatives get so incensed by any even vague signs of ‘illegitimate’ benefit-claiming, or “cheating”, “fiddling”, “scrounging”, as is their crude nomenclature for corner-cutting of the desperate: because they believe such ‘deviant’ behaviours should only be permissible for their own rich and propertied class, those whose material ‘status’ entitles them to euphemistic impunity for venalities which are not only equally illicit, but actually far more morally inexcusable, since rather than being driven by the necessity of survival, they are being driven by pure undiluted greed, avarice, acquisitiveness and an almost antinomian arrogance.
In the deeply twisted, almost satanic, capitalist mentality, claiming benefits due to poverty and dire need indicates a “sense of entitlement” and “something for nothing”, while speculating on shares, properties or others’ labour to accrue profits not personally earned through one’s own effort, conversely, is indicative of a canniness to “opportunity” and a ‘sense of ‘entrepreneurship”; what’s more, such behaviours, apparently, also create wealth –albeit mostly un-redistributed and just kept by the “wealth creator” through industrial-scale tax avoidance and evasion. Capitalists create wealth, perhaps, but only vicariously, and primarily for themselves; and very rarely generate it through wider society.
And even if they do generate some of the wealth, it’s only done so as another form of speculation, and any apparent philanthropic outcome that results –Adam Smith’s old “invisible hand of capitalism” (‘invisible’ for a very good reason: it’s a complete myth)– is purely accidental and still ultimately motivated by the clincher of ‘a return on investment’. Though, interestingly, in this sense, those who argue for some ‘philanthropic’ effect in capitalism use the same ‘means justify the ends’ argument of many Marxist revolutionaries for the opposite objectives. The difference is, the only revolution the capitalist is seeking is that of the pound in his pocket doing an investment turn around to duplicate itself several times over; the old ‘make your money work for you’ chestnut –and why not, since they’ve only made others’ work for them to get their money in the first place, they might as well get that same money to work for them too. Human flourishing, or nourishing, has little if anything to do with any of it.
Moreover, capitalism is not only the prime generator of unemployment –through commoditisation of labour, monopolisation of resources and the inescapable labour surplus– but is also dependent on it to an extent, in order to keep wages down and to have a convenient, defenceless section of the population on which to direct all frustrations and resentments of the employed, underemployed, and particularly the ‘working poor’, through the persecutory pincer-auspices of Tory politicians and capitalism-propping red-tops. This endemic exploitation of limited employment opportunities to repress wages and thereby increase corporate profits is commonly euphemised as “competition”; and current athletic attempts by the Tories to neutralise what little employment protections remain for workers, such as recourse to unfair dismissal tribunals, is, by extension, and implicature, euphemised as “making it easier for businesses to employ [i.e. exploit] people”.
McDevitt’s choice of title is also apposite: for capitalism does indeed facilitate a very literal ‘labour market’, and the American abbreviation of ‘Mart’ is also instructive, given the UK’s increasingly Americanised brand of capitalism. Job Centres used to be called, at least more honestly, Labour Exchanges, and capitalist society is indeed a system of mass ‘exchange’, albeit lopsided, and in entirely material senses –and perhaps one notion of socialist society would be one in which there are much greater, deeper and more authentic ‘exchanges’, not simply of material goods or services, but of those human qualities and faculties that can’t be so crudely commoditised, such as spontaneous emotional and creative expressions unfettered by the depersonalising protocols of material and nutritional demands.
But, those aspects to society which were once conducive to more authentic forms of human exchange, of authentic expressions of personality and gestures of community spirit, have long been bastardised by capitalism, and most grotesquely and lastingly eviscerated by the cultural cross-stitch of Thatcherism (we are still attitudinally, if not behaviourally, an acquisitive Thatcherite society). Vast swathes of the English today are so many emotionally constipated, socially petrified, culturally paralysed, stuffed exhibits of Thatcherite taxidermy, rather than anything approaching authentic individuals. Thatcherism, like all capitalist mutant-strains, could only offer a one-dimensional form of ‘individualism’ procured through purely material acquisitiveness and expressed vicariously through such material acquisitions; the authentic personality and fulfilment of personal potential had nothing to do with it: now people could ‘express’ their sense of accomplishment and significance through property, cars and other capital –but all to the detriment of their own human capital, neglected and left to rust.
In his follow-up polemic to Illusion and Reality (1937), Studies in a Dying Culture (1938) (which was also expanded on in Further Studies in a Dying Culture, published almost a decade later), Christopher Caudwell was astonishingly prescient –especially since these works were actually written earlier than dated, in the early to mid-Thirties, published posthumously, as almost all his polemics, Caudwell having been killed in action in Spain in 1937 –as to the incipient shape of a commoditised form of human consciousness and marketisation of culture which, already putting out its feelers in the decade of his commentary, arguably wasn’t fully distilled, at least in Britain, until the Thatcherite ‘revolution’ of the Eighties. Thatcherism systematically uprooted post-war communitarian aspirations with the atomisation of social bonds (“there’s no such thing as society”, “I set out to destroy socialism because I felt it was at odds with the character of the [British] people”) through the planting of a new acquisitive, materialistic ethic (‘greed is good’). Ironically, it served in the end as a far greater tyranny over the authentic expression of human personality and individuality by constraining its remit purely to material acquisition. But Caudwell’s take on capitalist society in Thirties Britain (also blitzed by Tory austerity policies, under the right-wing Stanley Baldwin) reads uncannily today in our post-Thatcherite early twenty-first century (almost as if Caudwell had mentally rocketed himself to a futuristic corporate-planet Mongo like Buster Crabbe in the contemporaneous film series of Flash Gordon):
Man cannot strip himself of his social relations and remain man. But he can shut his eyes to these social relations. He can disguise them as relations to commodities, to the impersonal market, to cash, to capital, and his relations then seem to have become possessive. He owns the commodities, the cash and the capital. All his social relations appear to have become relations to a thing… By shutting his eyes to all the relations between men that constitute society… man has enslaved himself to forces whose control is now beyond him, because he does not acknowledge their existence.
He is at the mercy of the market, the movement of capital, and the slump and boom. …Blind Fate, in the shapes of war, unemployment, slumps, despair and neurosis, attacks the free bourgeois and his free followers. His struggles put him into the power of finance capital, trustify him, or, if he is a free labourer, he is herded into the mass-production factory. So far from being free, he is whirled like a leaf on the gales of social change. And all this anarchy, and impotence, and muddled dissension is reflected in his culture.
And this is precisely what Thatcherism, as an ultimate attitudinal and behavioural expression of the most philistine aspects of capitalism, actually managed to achieve: the trustification of human individuality and identity into a corporate cult of capital-worship –almost like a bizarre subversion of the collectivist stratagems of the very trade unionism she so aggressively overhauled; but, conversely, applied to a new ‘collectively’ incentivised cultural imperative of unlimited individualistic acquisition (a kind of reverse-Marxism). Someone I used to know once expressed his own absorption of this contradictory ‘spirit’ of individualistic aspirations and materialistic competition as some kind of perversely ‘unifying’ meme: “In a way, capitalism unites us all in a kind of common purpose towards achieving our individual aspirations” –which is, to my mind at least, a dialectical cul-de-sac.
Trustification is not collectivisation, it’s concentration, monopolisation –an agent to plutocracy; and in this sense capitalism is really just a secular application of the antinomian principles of Lutheranism, but applied in purely material terms, where one’s capital is symbolic of moral impunity (just as today it is constantly implied in political rhetoric that being in employment and paying taxes also infers, if not a moral impunity, then at least a moral prerogative to judge those who are not, even verbally persecute them (i.e. the cult of ‘Scroungerology’); while the sanctity of property is paramount, and to be protected at almost all costs –i.e. criminalisation of squatting in empty derelict buildings, the increasing empowerment of occupiers and owner-occupiers to use considerable physical violence, if needs be, to expel intruders, with more impunity than ever before etc.– and the basic human necessity for shelter, re-branded from ‘right’ to ‘privilege’ (no longer the “social service” which A.J.P. Taylor once identified in the housing policies of Lloyd-George).
As to any aspirations of cultivating any even remote form of authentic human consciousness, capitalism can only grant a synthetic ‘individualism’ (which is, manifestly, almost diametrically opposite to actual individuality), which, ironically, most often manifests as a kind of commodity-acquiring homogeneity (the privet-hedged uniformity of suburbia, “keeping up with the Jones’s”, and so on). At the other end of the spectrum, there are those who have long argued that only a certain form of socialism could ever grant sufficient freedom for the human personality to cultivate actual and authentic ‘individuality’; such as unlikely ‘red’ dandy, Oscar Wilde, wrote in his little-known 1891 essay, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’:
‘With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbol for things. One will live. … Most people exist, that is all.’
As a cultural cynic associate of mine from years back –who was emphatically not a socialist, and an anti-Christian, since he completely rejected any notions of human capacity for ‘universal love’ or ‘fellowship’, which are prime components to both Socialist and Christian thought– once quipped: “Capitalism offers us the freedom to be a shopkeeper or to open a bank account, but that’s just about it”. And I think in his own circuitous way he was partly expressing what I’m trying to here: that capitalism, by commoditising every aspect of human life into a process of material exchange and barter, can only grant us the symbols of ‘individuality’ and ‘freedom’ –i.e. the home with mortgage, the car, the money in the bank– but not the actual authentic and immaterial ‘things’ themselves. In fact, by shackling us to material obligations, capitalism intrinsically precludes any such sense of authentic individuality or freedom (except perhaps for the super-rich who can afford the time and space to start concentrating on what little might be left of their ‘spirits’ –cue the white-robed Messrs R. Murdoch and T. Blair gathered for one of the rapacious capitalist brood’s baptism on the banks of the River Jordan where Christ is thought to have received his; a laughably hypocritical spectacle not entirely different to if King Herod and Pontius Pilate had taken a dip with John the Baptist).
So, under capitalism, human exchange becomes shabby transaction; labour becomes commodity; personality is expressed through spending power; individuality through acquisitiveness; and soul-nourishment is forgotten in it all –though religion and poetry both do their best to provide some. In Das Kapital, Karl Marx focused on this almost satanic capacity of capitalism to subvert authentic living into something only symbolically resembling it, a synthetic, counterfeit ‘reality’, a cross-cultural dehumanisation that resulted from the system of money, itself a tangible symbol for trade, literally a paper or metal metaphor, intrinsically worthless except in its signification of spending power. So that capitalism is a kind of secular apparatus of anti-transubstantiation: turning mind, body and spirit back into their symbols or tokens.
In an exceptional chapter of his classic 1940 polemic, To the Finland Station (1940), deceptively titled, ‘Karl Marx: Poet of Commodities’, Edmund Wilson wrote on Marx’s observations of the profounder domino-effect of money, itself a purchasing symbol, a transactional voucher exchangeable for a physical or comestible commodity, that it becomes, almost by perceptual proxy, a commodity in itself, an end in itself:
‘And the greatest of the commodities is money, because it represents all others. Marx shows us the metal counters and the bank-notes, mere conventions for facilitating exchange, taking on the fetishistic character which is to make them appear ends in themselves, possessed of a value of their own, then acquiring a potency of their own, which seems to substitute itself for human potency…’
(Christopher Caudwell applied this Marxian analysis to poetry under capitalism, describing it as “commodity-fetishism” (i.e. “art for art’s sake”*)).
Indisputably, the ultimate ‘festishisation’ of ‘money’ came through the now-opprobrious “Big Bang” of the de-regulated stock markets in 1986 under Margaret Thatcher, and a simultaneous vandalism of the British manufacturing industries, which resulted in an economy disproportionately centred in the banking sector of the City, which, as we know, eventually let to the economic meltdown of our economy in the “Great Recession” of 2008 onwards. This whole Thatcherite-monetarist process –which, with thumping irony, today’s neo-Thatcherite Tory-led Government is now claiming to be remedying through austerity, blaming it entirely, of course, on Labour, as with the weather, both economic and meteorological etc. (though ‘New’ Labour were culpable for irresponsibly accelerating Thatcherite de-regulation of the financial sector)– constituted perhaps the world’s most glaring realisation of Marx’s fiscal bête noire, ironically engineered by the very right-wing ideologues who were simultaneously proclaiming the diagnostic inaccuracy of Das Kapital’s analysis of the innate instability of capitalism and predictions for its future collapse through intrinsic contradictions (which, I personally believe, we are beginning to witness today).
But returning, briefly, to To the Finland Station: Wilson quoted Marx directly:
All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.
(Substitute the word ‘spiritual’ for ‘intellectual’ in the latter trope and you pretty much have a Christian statement –or what Marx might have called an ‘opium trope’). Indeed, one glaring example of this commoditisation of human identity and function is in the universal term ‘consumer’ –as opposed to the moderately more tolerable ‘customer’, which at least used to imply some kind of individual spontaneity and conscious ‘choice’ in transactions– which seems to imply that human beings in capitalist society are just so many cattle to be fed, which in a way we are; it also inhibits inclinations towards creativity and self-expression, and to be ‘producers’ –and, through the parasitical societal disease that is euphemised as ‘privatisation’, what were once ‘services’ are now ‘commodities’, all differently branded under ‘private providers’, and we can apparently ‘choose’ from a tantalising menu of uniformly profit-motivated, unaccountable and extortionate replica companies. Privatisation is the synthetic substitute commodity for the authentic service of nationalisation.
In his own metaphor, Wilson also referred to this materialistic masque as ‘the dance of the commodities’. Wilson alluded to Marx as ‘Poet of Commodities’ in the sense that he saw much poetic expression in the prose style of Das Kapital, in spite of its ostensibly ‘dry’ economic themes –which contradicts the common preconception that belies its reputation as an inescapably ‘dry’ read: he remarks that ‘Marx has… in common with Swift that he is able to get a certain poetry out of money’ –Wilson actually meaning here, ‘out of the subject of money’. Certainly Wilson isn’t implying, as the elliptical chapter heading might seem to those glimpsing it, that Marx was some kind of ‘commodity-poet’, as is, in the lowest common denominator sense of the phrase, an advertising copywriter. Which brings us back to Hayakawa’s ‘sponsored’ (i.e. copywriters) and ‘unsponsored’ (i.e. authentic) poets again. And, above all, McDevitt’s verse draws attention to the perennial plight of the ‘unsponsored’ poet in capitalist society, whose ‘product’ is near-impossible to commoditise towards profit, and so is depreciated, grossly undervalued, even misperceived as somehow outdated and irrelevant –but is anything but.
McDevitt is a very rare example of a contemporary ‘unsponsored’ poet who is prepared to very openly and explicitly speak out against the iniquities inflicted on, if you like, ‘unsponsored’ people: the unemployed, the poor, the socially marginalised etc. And these poetic depictions are drawn as much from observation as past experience, McDevitt having been one of countless contemporary poets who have at certain points in their lives found themselves in such impecunious circumstances (our nation’s unspoken ‘lumpenpoetriat’) as to be at the unenviable mercy of the state. But on behalf of all those currently negotiating an existence under the dangling Damocles of Iain Duncan Smith’s punitive benefits regime, McDevitt figuratively challenges all the ‘scroungermongering’ hegemonies that besiege them: his myth-busting poetry forges its own oppositional ‘mythology’, a kind of refusenik system of thought and symbol –an insurgency of shadows. In these senses, McDevitt’s is the verse of adversity; and, fortunately for all of us, has that distinctly Irish recalcitrance and revolutionary verve to actively confront and arraign the very administrators of of his once parsimoniously rationed promise.
McDevitt –who, as mentioned, believes in the principle of a Universal Basic Income– would almost undoubtedly identify with some of the equally unconventional but sublime notions on the nature of ‘work’, its obduracy towards full expression of personality and talent, and the unforgivable waste of human potential that shrivels up in its sacrosanct shadow, as argued by Bertrand Russell in his 1932 dialectic, entitled, with breathtaking satirical antagonism, In Praise of Idleness:
In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it… Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. …Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia.
But surely many of us can see in this profound –and poetic– statement something in itself every bit as inviolable as the British ‘work ethic’.
Nevertheless, ‘The Labour Mart’ is one of McDevitt’s less vitriolic verses: it is, in fact, one of his most meditative and moving poems, important not simply for its polemical message, but for the experiential nature of the polemical message, from past first-hand experience, and thus much more affective and soul-nourishing than the vicarious ‘virtual-verse’ of Riviere. In terms of the dispiriting picture it paints of the material, physical and psychical punishment that it is to be (or to have been) a benefit claimant in today’s begrudging and aggressively judgemental climate, ‘The Labour Mart’ reminds me, at least tonally, of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s little-known poem on poverty and unemployment, ‘‘A Tale Of Society As It Is: From Facts, 1811’ –from which I excerpt below:
And now cold charity’s unwelcome dole
Was insufficient to support the pair;
And they would perish rather than would bear
The law’s stern slavery, and the insolent stare
With which law loves to rend the poor man’s soul–
The bitter scorn, the spirit-sinking noise
Of heartless mirth which women, men, and boys
Wake in this scene of legal misery.
Now back to McDevitt’s ‘The Labour Mart’:
in rooms you sadden, or stretch, in the rooms of our solitude
and touched, maybe, with a butterfly-coloured crisis
fountaining from the crown. a green tea assuages
the blueness of veins. there is calm to intellectually cross
bridges—engineered of finesse—to where who you are
finds itself in new companies of caring thaumaturges
tapping compositions on keys for you to apprehend
how keys are keys in and out of customary cells
in rooms you have no say, negatively capable,
even as you spy on a green-tabarded builder
crossing the scaffold of the opposite semi-detached house
confidently, but in a white helmet. he can see you
also. his task is not alchemical or philosophical
though in dreams he has built an upside-down pyramid
balancing on its tip, spinning like a top,
as you’ve laid words menially as bricks.
your consciousnesses have intermingled. he works in the sun
cutting a black bin-liner into squares for his colleague
squatting behind the chimney, drilling, fixing tiles.
they move about the roof’s slant with a panther’s agility
in the few hours of daylight left to them, unprecious.
they won’t—they can’t—be there by night. even if you look
the men in their decades will disappear.
work if you can
The language and style are of course radically different, but the slightly despondent, alienated tone of dehumanisation is remarkably similar –albeit Shelley’s is purely observational and empathic– which also serves as an indictment of the criminally small ground British society has covered in terms of common perceptions of unemployment and its causes in the past two centuries. Indeed, after what might retrospectively be seen as an historical oasis, the Attlee Settlement/Welfare State and post-war consensus of 1945-1979 (a time span of just thirty-four years –though one might also add on to that a couple more years for the period of the Liberal Party’s People’s Budget, 1909-1910, through which Lloyd-George introduced the first incipient system of universal unemployment benefit and welfare relief, the ‘dole’ thereafter referred to disparagingly as “going on the Lloyd-George”), British treatment of the unemployed has been relatively uninterrupted in its attitudinal brutality since industrialisation intensified the societal prevalence of worklessness through land-dispossession and commoditisation of labour.
What is also particularly incisive and quite profound in this snatch of McDevitt’s verse, is the juxtaposition of the unpaid occupation of (‘unsponsored’) ‘poet’ –an occupation –at least, in the organic/holistic sense of the term– in spite of often not paying anything and many poets being officially ‘unemployed’– with that of paid manual labour, as in the brilliantly symbolic line:
as you’ve laid words menially as bricks.
That line has to be one of the most sublime metaphors on the nature of poetry and labour I’ve read anywhere in years. That McDevitt chooses the word ‘menially’ –as opposed to, say, ‘laboriously’– is a quite marvellous serendipity since it, paradoxically, possibly unconsciously, implies that composing poems, itself a highly specialised pastime (especially in creatively-stunted consumerist society), can be perceived as as ‘menial’ a task as laying bricks: when one considers the definition of ‘menial’, which means, essentially, activity or work which is somehow ‘lowly’ and/or ‘degrading’, then we’re given a glimpse of the occupation of poetry as something of much effort but little reward, as indeed, in a purely pecuniary sense, it is. This is a kind of Marxist-materialist depiction of poetry, as something which brings no material benefits. It’s a symbolic –and probably consciously ironic– conceit which Christopher Caudwell would have had much cause to analyse and deconstruct. Though, in spite of his dialectical materialist/Marxian frameworks of cultural analysis, he would quite probably have argued that composing poems was every bit as vital to society as laying bricks, and that, moreover, the only type of poets comparable to a paradigm of ‘poetry as menial labour’ would be, ironically, those who were overspecialised, what he termed the ‘bourgeois’ or ‘capitalist’ poets, whom, just as their occupational parallels, advertising copywriters, only appear to write poems in order to ‘advertise’ themselves; whose esoteric works are of no essential value to wider society because they don’t address wider society, are socially irrelevant, therefore of limited cultural value, and therefore ‘degrading’ in the sense that they serve only the purposes of expressing and indulging the isolated individual ego.
McDevitt’s ‘poetry as menial task’ is a paradigm designed almost to antagonise modern day attitudes towards those who ‘choose’ certain ‘lifestyles’ at the expense of the state, and one which no doubt Bertrand Russell would have gleefully relished for its audacity. But is it really audacious? When one thinks of the amount of effort that goes into producing poetry –that is, authentic, accomplished poetry– then it seems less so; then, the only argument against such a vocation might be purely materialist: i.e. but what does it actually ‘do’ for society? Is it a product of necessity, in the same way that laying bricks is? Some would argue that, culturally and spiritually speaking, it is; but poets are sometimes the greatest devaluers of their own medium in that many –and often, ironically, those who associate themselves with the Left politically, through some sort of Marxian-materialist sense of guilt and inadequacy– would probably, if pressed, confess that they do not feel their product to be as necessary, vital or important as those who build the buildings around them (or, indeed, those who wrecking-ball them down). But whatever anyone says, there is much more to the true condition of ‘unemployment’ than meets the eye, in that mostly everyone, whether in work or not, has some kind of private pursuit or ‘occupation’ –and in the very special cases of poets, they are ‘never knowingly unemployed’.
Unemployment is never more vilified than today by its inveterate generators, the Conservatives; but is generally the political punch-bag of all neoliberal governments, Gordon Brown’s fag-end of New Labour having reintroduced the Calvinistic –even mediaeval– dichotomy of “deserving” and “undeserving poor” into the (anti)-dialectic of the issue (while ‘enlightened’ society, only recently near-bankrupted by the City, has yet to draw up a dichotomy between the “deserving” and “undeserving rich”! One which I suspect would be disproportionately tilted towards the latter). To which, the next poem, ‘A Tory in Avalon’, is a sardonic take on the rather bizarre death of the Chairman of David Cameron’s local Witney Constituency Association, Christopher Shale, who was found dead in a portaloo at the 2011 Glastonbury Festival; apparently he’d died from a “heart attack”, but it is thought to have been induced by a cocaine overdose, and suspected by many to have been suicide. Shale was discovered in his lifeless state only an hour after receiving two phone messages from Downing Street operatives reprimanding him for having publicly criticising his party for being “graceless, voracious, crass, always on the take” (so basically, for having stated the facts).
The irreverent ‘A Tory in Avalon’ starts off with the hilarious disclaimer: ‘The Tories in this poem are fictional. Any resemblance to Tories, living or dead, is purely co-incidental. The ‘memo’ is reconstructed from newspapers’. This is one of the longer poems in the first section of the volume, and tackles its delicate subject matter with respectful detachment mixed with empathy for the unnamed Shale, depicting him as a Tory who has experienced a sudden life-shattering Damascene moment as to the deeply unattractive private and public character of contemporary Toryism; while, by implication, impeaching those Party apparatchiks who leapt on him like the proverbial pack of wolves, as soon as he publicly voiced his revelatory insights (quoted verbatim in excerpt from the poem below):
A Tory in Avalon has been having bad thoughts.
The cocaine and alcohol
douching his disused right-brain
have been sprinkle-systeming new ideas,
new flowers, from his own intellectual
soil. ‘Why this piranha-like morality?
Why this razor-toothed voracity?
In rituals, virtue has been hailed.
The Cathars we love were perfecti.’
He has sent out a ‘strategy document’
expressing the conscience-prick.
Here, music stimulates finer feelings.
He takes the air pulsed with English song.
A Tory in Avalon has been rather candid:
‘When we come together in groups,
we are not magnetically attractive.
We morph into something different,
and not an appetizing proposition.
They will not join. Why should they join?
There’s no reason to, lots of reasons not to.
For years, we’ve been seen as graceless,
crass, voracious, always on the take.
They think we’ll beg from them, even steal,
and they’re right. We must do something.
We must look different, sound different…’
He takes the air of solstices, of henges.
The poem closes on a poignant variation on the part-refrain:
He takes no air. The air is taken back.
‘Royal Pocketmoney’, subtitled ‘for the nation’s favourite ‘dependent family’, is a relay-race of parallel verses jostling all manner of meme and word-play associated with the almost taboo Republican shadow-sport of anti-monarchism, batting back and forth with reverberating verbalism. ‘Processed Words’ is a poem-polemic on mainstream and ‘literary’ journalism –that supplemental pain-inducer with built-in analgesic; appositely, the poem is composed in deliberately restrained language, with much emphasis on the self-betraying journalistic term ‘copy’. McDevitt’s evident disdain for this profession would seem to encompass every title from The Guardian to the Tory-er-Times Literary Supplement, and, among other aspects, comments on journalism’s seemingly endemic need to inflict misery on certain people and minorities, and its deeply unimaginative, miserablist conflation of ‘newsworthiness’ with crushingly ‘negative events’:
(N.B. It is important that no one is offended;
although, now and then, a little controversy
or frisson is a useful selling-point).
Almost always in a poem by McDevitt, there is at least one prominent ideogrammatic signature, and in this it is a random emboldening of sporadic words and phrases. ‘The Pharaoh’, subtitled ‘Assange at the Ecuador Embassy’, is composed in Ginsbergian poetic prose, and depicts the designer-greyed Australian figurehead of whistle-blowing website Wikileaks as a metaphorical pharaoh trapped in his own tomb, and takes a very circumspect approach to his true motivations, not to say highlighting some tell-tell signs of a degenerative verbal insurgent gradually becoming more adept at managing his own media image:
…his hieroglyphs, his trigonometry are no longer the liquid bread he gifted to the breadless. his hair is agon-bleached, whale-white. in the formless darkness he gropes for machines.
the pharaoh no longer feels his own solidity or liquidity, but only his gas,
his miasma. even as he thinks, he seeps. he hears nothing in the silence from
Thoth or Imhotep, former advisors whose former advice he ignored. ‘it is not
death, more of an antechamber’, he thinks of his environs, missing what was
palatial, the great house of etymology. his anubi are the journalists he feeds,
patting their gloss-black shanks, and who lovingly nibble his hands as he does
their cynical gratitude is canine to the bone.
his pharaonic days are done. there is no sun. the scarab is dead beneath his
ball of shit. he breakfasts on law who used to break it, as once he broke the
curse of the sphinx. now he is the sphinx. …
This piece is erudite in both Egyptian and Greek mythological imagery, and it’s ostensibly fitting –if only to indulge Julian Assange’s projected self-image– that he’s juxtaposed with Prometheus, the Titan who stole ‘fire’ from the Olympian gods and gave it to the mortals so that they could progress to civilisation and self-determination:
a giant arm and fist from the British Museum is punching his glass jaw,
pounding his liver.
The latter trope appears to refer to the gods’ punishment of Prometheus for his act of altruistic theft, which was to chain him to a rock and have an eagle peck away at his liver for eternity (for he was immortal), the liver regenerating every night to be devoured afresh the following day. This is a sublime mythological choreographing of the Assange enigma, not least in its own playing on the self-generated mythopoeia (or mythmaking) of the man himself: but what more apt figure of myth to mingle Assange with than Prometheus (whose name means ‘forethought’), both having been punished by inscrutable and invisible ‘powers’ for having, unauthorised, disseminated to mortals/the public jealously guarded, illuminating sources of power/information. And the sublimeness of this juxtaposition lies in that of symbolically similar punishments: for what else has happened to Assange but to have been chained to the rock of the Ecuadorian Embassy to have his figurative ‘liver’ pecked at continually by the eagling media, while the shadows of hawks encircle him from above should he put one foot outside his bricked prison of political asylum…? Moreover, in relative terms, Assange’s ‘asylum’ would seem to be of potentially sempiternal duration, given the unlikelihood of the lingering threat of his extradition to Sweden to answer to charges of sexual assault being lifted (and which, in turn, could automatically trigger his secondary extradition to America, which he fears would lead to his permanent impounding under draconian US anti-espionage law, or something even worse).
Interestingly, Assange-as-Prometheus crops up again, but in a more sympathetic context, in the following poem, ‘Umpteenth Epistle to the Marxists’ (which starts with the quote, ‘I am not a Marxist’ – Karl Marx):
and I see Assange mythopoeically
not reasonably
but as people will see him 1000 years from now
not with the cynicism of — to use Gascoyne’s phrase —
‘callous contemporaries’
not as Jesus, but as receiving the same treatment as Jesus
or actually as Promethean
and see the vultures swooping in to gnaw his liver…
‘Umpteenth Epistle’, a missive to an unnamed poet, highlights in its first stanza much of which I’ve been previously discussing as to how I interpret McDevitt’s own highly idiosyncratic anarcho-politics, based more on feeling, perception and impression than any doctrine or rigid ideology; and here the poet expresses what feels to him to be his own authentic dissent, a kind of humanistic resistance to materialist modes of being. Significantly, he brings into this his own specific ‘identity’ as an Irishman in London, and interestingly contrasts differences in attitudes between Celtic and Anglo-Saxon mentalities (the former more inclined to the intuitive and mystical, the latter, to the ‘rational’ and scientific), even if some on both sides of the paradigm are broadly allied in terms of what they perceive to be the obstacles to authentic living peculiar to capitalism, memes that replicate human personalities and thus impair their full development and growth:
Dear Fellow Poet
I am not right-wing
I am stung-wing I am stung-wing
by our failed friendship
by the jellyfish ribbons
of misunderstanding of obviousness
of a brick-wall English Marxism
that seems to exclude
Celtic blow-in would-be magic-thinkers
too unsaxonic for words
or wyrds
or a single good word from you (though Anglo-Celtic
as the island itself)
that misreads the mind
thinks aiming your sights
is perception
and what is someone like you doing anyway
in a thought-policeman’s uniform? that blue-black
and the ever-ready charge-sheet again:
‘brutal’ ‘ill-read’ ‘right-wing’ ‘Christian’
denying me my individualist anarchist
anti-status…
I confess –my ‘hermeneutic’ antennae not what it was these days– to not completely comprehending precisely to whom the second stanza is referring by the phrase ‘Afro-US witchdoctor’; I’d initially thought perhaps this was a snubbing of Obama, but then the verse seems to swerve its invective in what seems to me a very different direction (but I could be wrong, or rather, partly right in my initial assumptions); but what’s interesting here again is McDevitt’s emphasis on his sense of ‘racial’ displacement as a London Irish:
when who is as brutal as the Afro-U.S. witchdoctor
whose own magic extends to making you a doctor — congrats,
for what it’s worth —
who brutalises in writing
Jews whites women, sometimes, when the black bile overwhelms
but gets through it anyway
without doing 14 years in a madhouse like Pound
because he knows—a racial outsider in America—
what I know—a racial outsider in England—
political correctness can be challenged from the left
and the collective unconscious can be conscience-pricked
by the medicinal individual
the lower-than-lowcouping trickster
with the right serums in the right syringes
to pin
smug bubbles
not right-wing
What is evident in this verse-tirade (which is not meant in a negative way) is that McDevitt has no truck with ideological dogma, whether right or left, but, most explicitly in this poem, with textbook dialectical materialism, bourgeois Bolshevism, or any other type of ‘vicariously revolutionary’ viewpoint:
I don’t want to read all of Adorno!
I want to read all of Elizabethan theatre not all
the theory in Frankfurt
but it is no crime to criticise an idea in isolation
when, you must already know, a single idea can be very dangerous,
and of lefty bibles
I favour the bohemian, say Benjamin and Debord,
to the academic flat-liners
and anyway as Ken Campbell said
‘I’m not mad, I’ve just read different books’
and the brick wall of English Marxism
is a book wall
and man cannot live on frankfurters alone
It is hugely significant here, however, that McDevitt mentions his craving for ‘Elizabethan theatre’: Marxist polemicist Christopher Caudwell highlighted Elizabethan theatre as the last example of truly community-oriented, participatory public art, which he believed expressed not individual ‘bourgeois wills’ of isolated playwrights writing completely apart from their publics, but a ‘collective spirit’ encompassing playwrights, actors and audience; W.H. Auden also argued along similar lines, but referred back much further in time to Ancient Athenian theatre which was explicitly participatory and interactive. McDevitt, also an occasional actor, might well identify with the –albeit less ethical– sentiments of a character from Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, as referenced in this context by Caudwell:
‘…the meanest creature, the empty, Braggart Parolles, realises this unbounded self-realisation to be the law of his stage existence and in some sort the justification of his character: ‘Simply to be the thing I am/ Shall make me live”…
(Caudwell, Illusion & Reality, 1937)
And isn’t this, in essence, exactly what McDevitt is asserting in much of his poetry: the personal will to authenticity, warts and all…? And that ‘authenticity’ is one’s own felt sense of individuality, of identity. If McDevitt’s verse serves any ‘therapeutic’ purpose for its author other than a vent for his very real sense of grievance against an intransigent, illusively oppressive consumerist culture, it is as an amplification and protection of his own sense of identity. In many senses, this is a spontaneous Teflon-coating of authentic personality against the all-proliferating infringements perpetrated on it through the depersonalising auspices of hyper-capitalist society, and its analgesic hypnotism through advertising. In a psychopathological context, such capitalist auspices play a very significant part in melting the already fragile ego-defences of individuals prone to the schizophrenic spectrum, which often involves a sense of depersonalisation, a displacement of one’s personality; a defragmentation of the ‘self’. Just as capitalism is succoured on the atomisation of social relations, including relations with one’s own authentic self, schizophrenia is symptomatic of an atomisation of the ego. We might ask, is schizophrenia, in part, a cognitive response to the contradictions and irrationalities of capitalism?
Capitalist society is certainly deeply schizophrenic in nature: most noticeably, in its’ –albeit superficial and untypical– ‘aspirations’ towards ‘philanthropy’ (both corporate and individual) through private charity donation in order to help alleviate the very social and economic miseries it inflicts on a vast section of society, the ‘non-consuming consumer’ culture which is unable to afford to purchase its products and includes many people who actually make those products! The old ‘poverty amidst plenty’/ ‘over-production’ but ‘under-consumption’ contradiction peculiar to capitalism. Of course, ‘consumer’ is the operative word of capitalism, its ultimate meme, which has many meanings at many levels, the most disturbing one being that capitalism itself is the ultimate ‘consumer’: it feeds off human labour and consumes human vitality and personality, only to repackage it and sell it back to people as inauthentic product, a synthetic alternative to the ‘real thing’, a substitute for ‘being’. Further, by persuading –or hypnotising– people into being consumers with ever more predictable responses to promotions and commercial spiel (‘Pavlovian advertising’?), capitalism inculcates a form of mass depersonalisation which is disputably at some levels commensurate to the individualised depersonalisation of the schizophrenic.
In diametrical contradiction to the deeply deceptive Thatcherite dictum of ‘individualism’ –emphatically not individuality– anarcho-capitalism not only threatens but actively inhibits authentic human identity. It does this through various means, each of which depends on the ‘social class’ of its targets: the middle classes are inculcated through material temptations and fiscal acquisitiveness; the working classes, through the depersonalisation of employment, which, in the capitalist form, and to take the broad Marxist line, alienates them from the ‘means’ of their own ‘production’; and the non-working classes/unemployed/‘lumpenpoetariat’, through the material and psychical depersonalisation of poverty. And on the latter point, the type of ‘poverty’ can vary hugely –abject (i.e. literal hunger), or more relative: nutritional, environmental, architectural, educational, and in terms of opportunities, or even awareness of such opportunities.
Indeed, in many ways ‘relative poverty’ is one of the most insidious and alienating types of human privation, not only because it is constantly antagonised by propinquity to others’ plenty (which can in turn induce a sense of isolation), but also because it is more ‘invisible’ than abject poverty, and is more easily camouflaged behind idiopathic mystification and spurious ‘moral’ rhetoric (as we see today in our culture of ‘Scroungerology’). But above all, its relative invisibility –and thus the many invisibles of its chronic effects on human beings– preclude a sufficiently informed and wide enough public knowledge of it to carve out a path to its fundamental and comprehensive alleviation:
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.
It might surprise some readers to learn that the source of the above quote is the seminal physicist and lesser-known Marxist thinker, Albert Einstein. As Einstein insightfully points out to us, much of the damage done to those living in relative poverty is of an invisible psychical nature: it is the ‘crippling’ of their ‘identity’, which is capitalism’s most effective secret weapon. Stripped of identity, it is then much harder for the impoverished to bring attention to their plight, many perhaps not even completely aware of it themselves, while it also makes it extremely difficult for sympathetic outsiders to identify their true nature and the causation of their privations. And even those who do become aware of the iniquities inflicted on so many by capitalism, dampen out their ‘Damascene’ moments with quick-fix rushes to judgement (cue IDS), basically ‘shadow projections’ (see Carl Jung’s On Scapegoating) of their own nearly surfacing but swiftly repressed sense of some personal and/or societal culpability for the poverties they uncover. The myth-construct of the ubiquitous “scrounger”, then, protects the majority from its own guilt, which itself projects the opprobrious social-grotesque; and this orchestrated shadow-projection enables the rich and powerful to continue enjoying their earthly monopolies without interruption from incipient consciences. When poverty and unemployment become too widespread to ignore, such robust idiopathic stigmatisation of the poor and unemployed is made priority number one for politicians and newspapers, the mutually supportive props of capitalist mythopoeia.
And capitalism is spectacularly architected on the template of myth; it is an adumbration of human society, a prefabricated replication of authentic culture, no stone of human community left unturned and unbranded or without its own specially formulated, inhibitive meme. Christopher Caudwell often depicted capitalist society as a kind of flat-back stage-set representation of ‘reality’, rather like a film set –and many aspects to our urban environments do actually partly resemble a film-set, only with advertising hoardings instead of false house-fronts. Though, having said that, there is at least one street on the outskirts of London with a gap between some of its houses filled by a fake blow-up image of bricked houses mounted on a giant hoarding in order to give the impression it is continuous –scrape away at man-made physical realities and they peel away to reveal metaphors!
In many ways it seems to me McDevitt in some senses perceives outward commoditised ‘reality’ very much as a kind of stage-set with fake shop-fronts, a substitute-reality, in which he finds himself a strutting anti-actor who alone recognises that he’s inhabiting a societal façade while everyone else around him unwittingly thinks it the ‘real thing’. In this sense, a certain ‘theatricality’ to some aspects of his poetic technique can be seen in a similar satirically antagonistic light as his ‘we’re being evicted by others’ envy’ ventriloquism in ‘THE HUMAN ELEPHANT’. McDevitt battles the ‘enemy’ with their own weapons (rather like, in a very different sense, certain rogue Middle Eastern states that ended up fighting the West with the very weapons they’d supplied them; so McDevitt’s figurative insurgency equips itself, in response, with salvages of the very weapons originally intended to deter it –a kind of boomerang effect).
There are references in ‘Umpteenth Epistle’ to –as previously mentioned– a distinctly Promethean Julian Assange, Naomi Klein, and poet John Kinsella, who sticks in my own mind most commendably for having withdrawn himself a T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist of not so long ago, as a principled, “anti-capitalist” (his own wording) statement against the Arts Council-cut Poetry Book Society’s taking up an offer for funding from a hedge fund firm. McDevitt’s defiant and feisty refusal to be ‘pinned down’ politically, or in any other sense, finds full and almost rapturous expression in the sixth and final stanza of this poem:
Baraka was dispensing manna on Sunday
— if I use Xtian imagery, forgive me —
not making left-wingers feel like right-wingers
or sinners or lepers or tax collectors or
the whites we are
advising us not only to talk of revolution
but to sit on the railtracks, stop the trains, elect black mayors etc.
and to be honest
and not to feel the need to use flower-language
when the language of the mouth says it all
of even downturned mouths
and of course he is still asking who
is doing the evil
and of course the answer is still
the humanity in inhumanity
but he danced for us anyway
—mostly whites—
(and seemed to shadow-box)
The Gascoynean trope, ‘and not to feel the need to use flower-language/ when the language of the mouth says it all/ of even downturned mouths’ encapsulates so much of McDevitt’s sensibility as a poet and protestor. ‘The Shoppers of Oxford Street’, which poises itself on a quote from Shakespeare, ‘Thou makest the triumviry, the corner-cap of society,/ The shape of Love’s Tyburn that hangs up simplicity’, is a deftly written poem decrying the historical ignorance of British mainstream culture, the disregard for the richness of common heritage and the municipal rape and plunder that is urban ‘redevelopment’, or ‘gentrification’, which paves over the relics of our commonality. But on another level, McDevitt juxtaposes the thronging shoppers of Oxford Street with the crowds that thronged there centuries before to witness public hangings on ‘the Gallows tree’, when the street was known by the name of Tyburn Road. The poem is an apposite juxtaposition of past and present, abundant with historical and biblical allusions –here are of some choicest excerpts:
1
the shoppers of Oxford Street live in a different lighting-system
—though Christian—
to the humanities of bygone times, they are other pilgrims
than the pilgrims who came for a vision of God or the relics
of saints, they are almost like miners chiselling in darkness
for a darker matter, hammering for invisible masters
who reward with tokens, shunting up and down material halls
chasing shoes, jewellery, suits etc. speaking in tongues,
the pidgin Englishes of the four-cornered empire, they flaunt
their shopping bags and tetragrammatons, they think
of this as play though it’s much more like work, they think
of this as leisure though it’s really overtime, they come in thousands
and swarm in the street as bees—especially in the sales
of bi-polar Januaries…
[The term ‘tetragrammaton’, from Ancient Greek meaning ‘four letters’, is a descriptor for the Hebrew theonym (name of a god) transliterated into the Latin letters ‘YHWH’, standing for Yahweh (the name the Hebrews gave to ‘God’, which was forbidden to be spoken on pain of stoning).]
2
they come, they come, not knowing of the poetic Jerusalem
—the Blakean—
that was envisaged along this meridian, seeing only
the lower case jerusalem of outlets, retail and price-tags,
not knowing the street’s former name was Tyburn Road
or how the throngs of former times would swarm in
not for bargain goods but the public hanging of felons
tied to the Gallows Tree, the triangle of execution,
a triangle they do not see in the traffic island—ghosted—
or in a pub called The Tyburn which has slyly expelled
images of history from its walls (too unappetising
for punters!)…
…
…
…they shop, they shop
under the xmas lights, on the killing grounds of shoplifters
and on culverted sewers, and on diverted rivers, they run…
they don’t know what’s going to happen
(to them or anyone)
The penultimate poem in this section, ‘Millbank’, is one of its longest, a kind of polemic-cum-poem-eulogy to the Tory HQ-rocking climax of the student tuition fee protests of late 2010. An historic episode in the history of British protest and agitation it undoubtedly was, and on a scale and level of collectively expressed antiestablishment (or more specifically, anti-Tory) fervour and direct action not witnessed in Britain, arguably, since the Poll Tax riots of 1990 –though certainly adumbrated in some key aspects by the pretty tempestuous G8 protests in London of 2008 (the most memorable sight of which was a masked protestor smashing a window to an RBS building with shattering symbolism). Before going into my own take on the poem, here is its contextualisation from the International Times’ promotion:
A later companion piece to this was a self-questioning celebration of the 2010 storming of the Tory H.Q. at Millbank by students protesting the rise in tuition fees. McDevitt is honest enough to examine his feelings of jubilation at hearing the news and wonder if those feelings are unworthy. He concludes, with irony, that they are not. The poem was published in the Spring edition of the radical new magazine STRIKE!
Certainly there was a sense of some national psychical release valve being vented through this vicissitude, even if, for many, vicariously experienced via television coverage, and there’s no denying that the sound of hundreds of young people chanting TORY SCUM, TORY SCUM as they broke into Millbank was –in spite of the very lively vandalism on display– though nothing any worse than the “we love the sound of breaking glass” Bullingdon Club escapades of Oxford-undergraduate millionaire heirs Cameron, Osborne and Johnson, with perverse irony, prime minister, Chancellor and Lord Mayor respectively, at this time– actually quite rousing to the ears of those to the Left of my own markedly less radicalised generation, who were too young to be politically active during the Thatcherite Eighties, and, by the time they were old enough, found themselves attitudinally marginalised, even perceived as obsolete, amid the long ideological hangover of the Nineties.
That politically exhausted, rather hedonistic decade culminated of course in the final capitulation of the Labour Party to capitalist values, thinly disguised by an all-to-smooth –and bogus– ‘societal transformation’ facilitated by ‘New’ Labour and the ‘Third Way’. This ‘gathering in the centre’ was ectopically presaged by the equally superficial, tokenistically ‘retro’ and wholly derivative ‘Brit Pop’ scene, which, like Blair’s counterfeit makeover of the Opposition, managed to be an object of mass-projection for a growing but unfocused hunger for cultural regeneration, a more ‘progressive’ hegemonic direction, and a new form of patriotic expression which could be accommodated within the parameters of ‘political correctness’ (itself a glaring misnomer and source of semantic pedantry which was absolutely not indicative of any authentic ‘politically’ or socially progressive evolution in British thought), but which had attached to it the condition of a ubiquity of emphatically non-jingoistic Union Jacks (rather like a national Modism). Of course, eventually we all discovered that any Trojan Horse of ‘New’ Labour had long bolted by the time new young Greeks bearing gifts decamped at Downing Street for thirteen years of pink capitalism, which ultimately served as an incubation period for what would eventually be a resurgence of unreconstructed Tory Thatcherism, and its swift mutation into a vicious and more aristocratic form of ‘fiscal fascism’.
But to return to the poem ‘Millbank’, in which McDevitt praises the energy, guts and esprit de corp of the youthful protagonists who besieged Tory HQ, though not without occasional digressions almost seeming to justify his positive responses to the riots: there is one part of me which thinks and feels, and certainly did at the time, that this was a hugely significant and entirely justifiable outburst of student protest against an intransigent and duplicitous policy, which has absolutely dire ramifications for the future ability of those from poorer backgrounds in society to be able to afford a university education (effectively privatising the university sector), and certainly something stirred in me at the spectacle of so many of today’s youth making a very public and robust statement against capitalism as represented by the Tory party –a sight and sound which would have been almost unthinkable back in the nihilistic Nineties, or even during the analgesic Noughties.
And this was, after all, a policy which was a manifest betrayal of the youth of the nation by the Tories’ partners in office, the ‘Fib’ Dems, whose leader had publicly pledged –replete with signature!– to abolish tuition fees altogether in order to cynically accrue the student vote just before the last election; not only had Nick Clegg gone back on his pledge, he had supported through parliament not simply a retention of these fees, nor merely a doubling of them, but a trebling! That’s betrayal three times over! This was beyond any reasonable definition of political compromise in coalition –it was quite simply unscrupulous and unprincipled treachery, one of the worst examples of political duplicity and opportunism since Labour’s first prime minister, James Ramsay MacDonald, ‘betrayed’ his party by forming a National Government with the Tories, way back in the early 1930s. What’s more, this grave solecism doesn’t only spell the likely abrupt end of Clegg’s career come 2015, but also that of the Liberal Democrats as a significant political party.
But then there’s another part of me, admittedly the smaller part, which can’t help feeling a very slight sliver of cynicism –possibly ill-founded and not really worth all that much attention– towards the better-heeled student activists and self-proclaimed ‘anarchists’ to whom, to some degree, such mass-amplified ‘high spirits’ and throwing of fire extinguishers off balconies is perhaps, in part, a sort of ‘trustafarian’ sport, too spasmodic and unfocused to indicate something more deeply and authentically ‘political’ in terms of aspiring to a wider ‘revolutionary’ transformation of society. But as I say, that’s just a very small part of my retrospective view on the events, and my sense of solidarity with and respect for the gutsy show of protest by so much of today’s truly embattled youth is still primary in my impressions and perceptions of the student riots.
Nevertheless, I’m inclined not to take quite so lionising a tone towards the student protestors as McDevitt appears to in ‘Millbank’, and would also mildly disagree with his somewhat over-emphatic demarcation between direct action, or ‘sedition’, as he aptly terms it in this context, and less demonstrative, creative or vicarious forms of protest as expressed through poetry, literature or music, which he seems –almost in spite of himself and his own participations– to perceive here, by contrast, as a kind of milky bourgeois substitute for the ‘real thing’, which ‘transcend(s) the artistic, the aesthetic’. It might seem an odd irony that a poet so immersed in the potencies of symbol and signification should suddenly ‘attitudinally’ discard the ‘artistic activism’ at which he is, himself, so accomplished, for placards and squibs. But my having said all this –so what? We all have our contradictions, just as has, glaringly, the capitalist society we protest against. And, in any case, ‘Millbank’ is goes much deeper than panegyric:
1
It’s challenging to think the most politically joyous day
I remember
—and the most ecstatic news bulletin I’d turned on in years—
was that of the young marchers ransacking Millbank
in the late autumn of 2010. This, I felt, was sedition… at last!
No, not drawing a brilliant cartoon of some Tory basilisk,
or writing an iconic protest song, or devising a modern dance,
or even finding the just words for a literary satire
…
but an action that transcended the artistic, the aesthetic,
a replay of Bastille. That I laughed and cheered on 10/11/10
so fulsomely, so earnestly, drunk on nothing but the facts,
…
later made me ask myself if something was amiss.
Perhaps I—or many of us—had been warped by the control-machine
of Conservatism, and made incapable of finer feelings?
Those last two lines emphasize McDevitt’s self-questioning on his own visceral responses to the events, and this auto-interrogative vein runs through the poem.
2
To hear the young had smashed into the Tory forcefield
—think of the name Millbank, the very concept of Millbank:
a fusion of Blake’s satanic mills with the banking system—
seemed like an orgiastic victory. They’d struck a blow,
ferocious cherubs with Asian bows-and-arrows,
not by throwing eggs at individuals or fire extinguishers at no one
but by attacking the furry, malodorous Ubu of an institution,
punishing an office ceremonially, humiliating a party HQ
…
by assaulting Tory architecture in black hoods and leopardskins
along the chameleon smile of the Thames.
McDevitt continues to search himself, and others, for an authentic assimilation of the student riots, as if to justify his own euphoric sense at something of seemingly huge political significance:
3
The students shocked everyone out of their automatism
that day. Authority was rug-pulled. That night: masterless revels
in an upside-down realm, with a cavalcade of royals and retainers
looking a thousand years old in slow-rolling contraptions,
and a palpable mass joy not felt in years. London throbbed
with frisson, and the vibration of the island was raised.
So McDevitt, quite rightly, interrogates the armchair cynics:
Those hecklers who cavilled of ‘self-interested students’
had missed the point that—while the sad majority
have become inured to suffering Tory-dealt attritions
retaliating at best with cartoons, songs, dances, poems
or, at worst, buying shares in loss leader alcohols—
a new generation had stood up to Goliath and hurled
the full force of its slingshot, right at his walnut brains.
Images of the spiderwebbing glass, the spray-painted A s
and youths kicking and chanting at yellow phalanxes
of Met baboons, seemed to my bruised and fragile psyche
a vision of the coming Eros and redemption
Finally, McDevitt closes on a kind of apologia:
4
(even if there’s something wrong with me for thinking it
or something wrong with you for reading this)
In spite of my mild quandaries as to the tonal approach to the subject –which, like McDevitt, are largely ones more related to my own personal responses to the student riots, sort of internal interrogations– McDevitt certainly has nothing to apologise for, unless it is for being, like all of us, a human, an ambiguous animal, and one who, like many of us, has a thirst for authenticities forever replicated in appetite-protracting synthetic substitutes.
The final poem in this section, one of the pithiest, makes an extremely important statement, particularly given our contemporary cultural stigmatisation of the poor and unemployed. “P” is a six-line epigram which pinpoints another past episode of British persecution of the poor, as the Note at its close elucidates: ‘recipients of Poor Law Relief were forced to have a “P” stitched onto their clothing. A “P” in the margin of a parish burial register meant the person named had died a pauper’. The 1832 Poor Law, to which, presumably, McDevitt is referring in the poem, was itself, in part, a reactionary Act brought in to curb a new surge of ‘radicalism’ among the lower classes, such as the machine-breaking of the Luddites, and was a parliamentary response to the Swing Riots of 1830; most notoriously, it summoned in the monstrosity of the ‘workhouse’. But the nineteenth century Poor Law was a modernised form of a series of punitive edicts dating right back to the fourteenth century and the Poor Laws of Edward III’s reign, via the punitive Tudor Poor Laws which, similarly to the later ‘P’ fashion, had ‘V’ for ‘vagabond’ stitched to the clothes of the poor and homeless within its auspices.
This topic, and thus poem, are important because we currently live in a society in which it is deemed ‘acceptable’ to casually refer to the unemployed, irrespective of their genuine need and legitimacy of claims, as “scroungers”, and in which a punitive Tory administration has made many attempts to more visibly stigmatise the unemployed by replacing cash payments of benefits with plastic pre-payment cards proscriptive of any ‘non-essential’ purchases (such as cigarettes etc.), and/or food vouchers for food banks –both of which are means to a more visible stigmatisation than the current dysphemistic lexicon employed with impunity by Tory politicians and right-wing newspaper columnists.
“P”
born the wrong side of Plebgate
to 40 years of Pauperization
subject to the whim of Poor Laws
and waiting to be flushed down the
Porterloo
I am a microphone
who has problems with the letter “P”
The second section of the book, ‘The Quibbala’, starts with ‘The Broken Heart’, dedicated to Jeremy Reed: it’s a kind of perambulatory stream-of-consciousness poem which seems to meditate, or ruminate, on the sense of displacement and almost schizophrenic occupational ‘status’ of the poet in modern capitalist society, often in official terms ‘unemployed’ and yet in a much deeper, authentic sense, more ‘occupied’ –or preoccupied– than most people; but yet, of course, chronically undervalued by materialist culture for his/her frequently ‘unmarketable’ talents. This poem is composed in an almost hypnopompic –or hypnagogic– semi-dream language reminiscent in some aspects of its technique, particularly in the agrammatical first line (‘but a mere david a man a man but harpless’), of John Berryman (The Dream Songs), James Joyce (Finnegans Wake), even David Jones (In Parenthesis), while also echoing the more fragmentary parts of Eliot’s The Waste Land, and, again, David Gascoyne’s oeuvre –as in the following excerpt from the first stanza:
I have appeared on walls in paints in a purple robe
anointed by samuels surrounded by lookalikes
I have appeared intoned disappeared reappeared
into this jerusalem (the broken heart)
as the light falls to touch the bodymind—again!—
on the city that is called the heart of the world
among them among them we walk among them
for a glass of grapefruit ale
The absence of both punctuation and capitalisations –even of names– seems complementary to this kind of dream-like experiment. Of particular interest to my mind is the third stanza, which touches more emphatically on what I previously referred to as the ‘schizophrenic occupational ‘status” of the ‘poet’, being, in the purest sense of that often-abused and indiscriminately applied term, a kind of apprentice to a ‘calling’, or an apprentice to inspiration, an impecunious employee of the zero hour contract Muse, the ‘unsponsored’ holder of an ‘unemployed occupation’ –an oxymoronic ‘function’ which capitalist society has long discarded, unless it is to attempt to corporatise it as a ‘packaged product’ of some kind. So, in this stanza, we get some empirical sense of this anomic ‘occupational’ status, its strange melange of Micawberish shabby gentility and sartorial hand-me-down bohemianism. Here, as in many other of his poems, McDevitt’s trajectory is often towards a kind of metaphorical peripeteia (a figurative ‘reversal of circumstances’), which gives his own poetic persona a kind of Dick Whittington quality:
we live the life are employed and unemployed
buried under obelisks buried under stars
and in hearts broken inwardly to be perfected
in their humility to dwell therein
as a davidic king if you could be
even in charityshop clothes even then to be
surrounded by giant symbols
running under or across or around or through
them
(just to get to the charity shops!)
as the giant symbols are exuding their magic
their brainwash their magnetism
There is a very druidic quality to ‘McDevittan Vitalism’, apart from the shamanic aspects, and this poem in particular makes much ‘unsympathetic magic’ with the manufactured smoke and mirrors of consumer culture, satirising the neon hypnotism of the Tesco logo as if corporate brands exude some kind of magical power –which, in terms of consumer-mesmerism, they do; McDevitt is cleverly sending-up the Pavlovian persuasiveness of advertising by presenting it as some kind of modern day supermarket thaumaturgy:
in the sacred space in the round earth
ball of the city or its pilgrim hills
in the third heavenly temple in the 24-hour tesco
I find this quotidian life too magical to move in
with cars and planes and planes and cars
who yes are enemies and must burn off
but their noises are lulling as sea-wash
in the third heavenly temple in the 24-hour tesco
The title of the next poem, ‘Leun’Deun’, has an almost druidic –or Gallic– sound to it, as if to attempt to imbue the more stolid-sounding name ‘London’ with some sort of Celtic mystique or phonetic chic; the style of the poem is similar to its predecessor, and again there are afterglows of ee cummings, and of T.S. Eliot at his most fragmented:
jobless
I inhale the sun
(honey guillotines)
in the Sumerian city I walk upside down
by a noiseless river
trees
with noises of rivers
bluebottles
dove o’clock
two testaments
ark and cross
on the
intellectual skyline
people on their own wings fly
public buildings sold off
public houses closed down
buy-curious
bored to debt
ears
take us to the core of the city’s layers
the tombs
the feet of joggers
as the bells call
we look to Jerusalem south of the river
in a grapefruit panorama
The second stanza is particularly affective in its staccato aphorisms:
‘la Londonisation’:
a non-conformism
of coffee-shops
an anabaptism of adverts
but in towers
doors slam (echo)
of a mystery people
and in the airplanes I hear Charles Ives’
‘unanswered question’
Slide
security van LOOMIS
pigeons lapping vomit
streets carpeted in newspaper
But arguably the fourth and final stanza is the most powerful in its uncompromising contemporary depiction of a deeply traumatised and atomised capital –the ‘Unreal city’:
aggiorniamento / approfondimento
rays
eyes
look into a thousand windows
sacred space
‘TO LET’
unhappy hour
the giant ‘insane’ rastafarians
lounge on flags
as ambulance crews
come to inject them
this altitude
is best for peregrines
black-yellow-grey
tyres rub the tar
to fat
comfortable as token animals
under a
VEDETT parasol
the city’s inert honeycomb
foxes jump fox corpses
to a tenement drum
jobless
I inhale the sun
limbs lit
(rivered)
this ‘peace’ astounds
this haunted
‘leisure’
That last phrase is particularly resonant, even profound, and, I assume, is a gnomic allusion to unemployment, as well as a part-allusion to the Welsh ‘Super Tramp’ poet, W.H. Davies’ much-anthologised poem ‘Leisure’, almost the ultimate plea of the poet-of-no-fixed-occupation:
WHAT is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?
Next comes McDevitt’s panegyric, ‘To the Left Honourable Allen Ginsberg (in his knifeless realm)’, which is composed more in the typographically acrobatic mould of ee cummings:
to the night zenith to the knifeless realm
I have to follow
the nightwatchman and the beetle’s hum
into a
poet’s
O
blivion
to be examined in the lens
of a magnifying-glass
moon
for indebtedness and pettiness
The second and third stanzas, centred and italicised, are of a more lyrical timbre:
2.
I have to cough a London toxin
in thanks
who made the ball of London roll
brought to the apex of Primrose Hill
by the glass-eyed Merovingian
adding to the lore
…
3.
but in the night zenith
when I look at the thousand-windowed hospital’s
invisible stars degenerating into mad gleams
somehow free in physical and metaphysical health
I feel the gold gratitude again—in lieu—
for thine Alvah Goldbook-cum-Carlo Marx
diagnostic of the codes
fired from the city
as dragon-noise
or the hum of
the thousand CCTVs under Eros
you as Leo Moon Leo Rising
to heal
knots in godly shoulderblades
and flower the tombs
of Dies and co.
The poem ends on another interesting phrase denoting perhaps the aforementioned anomie of ‘poethood’: ‘our/ ‘queer’/ careers’. The markedly pithier ‘The Gentile’ comprises four short haiku-like lyrical aphorisms; the first appears to allude to McDevitt’s own origins:
I am bred in the darkness
of an Irish hotel-room
to drink to Jesus
always
The fourth is an aphoristic anecdote of one of life’s quirkier moments, the poet ‘dreaming’
of a Jewish woman
who bought a box
of assorted fruit condoms
for me
The third section of the collection comprises one long and typographically explosive poem, titled with the graffiti- or text-like abbreviated expletive, ‘FUCKU’, attitudinally elucidated by its subtitle: ‘A year of Conservative-Liberal Government from the Hung Parliament to the Royal Wedding’. It alludes to David Cameron as ‘king david’, emphatically as an antipathetic pun on his Christian name and power status, and keeps with the biblical paradigm:
david sings a psalm: ‘we’re all in this together’
royal we (that’s us!)
McDevitt has much sport with word- and name-play here, while also picking up on the rampant implicature of Cameronian Toryism, and the purely abstract bastardy of the emphatically anti-Thatcherite-sounding but entirely nebulous and opportunistic concept of the ‘Big’ Society (which, by profound irony, Cameron and his fellow Tories continually attack whenever aspects of it manifest in society through volunteerism and altruism; especially in the case of the Trussell Trust, chief provider of food banks, besmirched by Iain Duncan Smith as “partisan” and run by “scaremongering media whores” simply because some of them spoke up against the devastating effects of the welfare ‘reforms’ and the Government’s abdication of responsibility for supporting the most vulnerable in society and effectively leaving it to the charity sector to construct its own ‘shadow’ or ‘alfresco welfare state’. McDevitt cannily emphasises the rhetorical sleight-of-hand of contemporary Toryism (which is essentially a form of social fascism), while also emphasizing a semantic post-Thatcherite circumlocution:
‘there is such a thing as society’
(u-turn…)
‘and what’s more it’s BIG!’
The ‘Big’ Society of course being one of the most heinous misnomers in modern political history, since it is actually extremely small, at least in terms of provision, vision, cohesion and organised application –not to say, mythical as well:
big society’ also known as
lilliput
small minds rule okay
The poem has the appearance at times of that contemporary trend of ‘found’ poems, a kind of randomising textual ‘cut and paste’ technique which, outside the poetry sphere, and back in the early Seventies, David Bowie used to sometimes use to form the serendipitously surreal lyrics of his Ziggy Stardust phase –but McDevitt’s textual material is far from random, or ‘found’: it is very deliberately and appositely sourced from the plethora of contemporary political Doublespeak, whether straight from the mouths of Daves, political commentators or newspaper columnists, and is bitingly polemical:
king david is chic male model for tesco
‘every little hinders’
*
torydactyls back
sadly they are not extinct
see the fossils fly!
*
the ‘nasty’ party
did someone say ‘nazi’?
no! no! nasty party
aneurin bevan: ‘scratch a tory
and you’ll find
an itchy
fascist…’
*
ideology
the
ELEPHANT
in the room
thatcher
ism
….
citigroup leak: ‘we’re not an economy…
we’re a plutonomy’
‘equilibrium’
does not mean equality
hail the money czars!
…
arts cuts:
grim reaper
is grimmer when he swinges
The polemical puns come thick and fast throughout the poem:
lumpen freudoisie v. lumpen doletariat… who’s the daddy?
IDS a new disease: irritable dole syndrome
…
compassionate conservatism’s
new poor law: ‘no more legal aid’
(compassionate conservatism: all signifier
no signified)
(Tories deconstruct public services with the help of linguistics)
compassionate conservatism: who says tories don’t give ATOS?
The punning phrase ‘chav-nots’ is particularly astute. But as ever with McDevitt, history, by way of adumbration, is always catching up with the present –as with this aphorism from a past not-so-‘compassionate’ Tory prime minister: ‘famous words of pitt/ asked about youth employment:/ ‘yoke up the children”, which, had it not been uttered by a Tory, might well have been a satirical quip in the style of Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal…’. In Orwellian mode, McDevitt ingeniously abbreviates the ‘Big’ Society as BIGSOC, pace, the INGSOC ideology of authoritarian Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-Four; this is followed with the punning legend:
the
incredible
shrinking
big
And, almost as an afterthought:
society
liverpool
opts
out
Thatcher is alluded to as ‘the handbag yahwe’ (a truncated tetragrammaton for a demiurge), while her ethically illiterate heir –and unwitting ideological plagiarist: ‘cameronism: defrosted thatcherism reheated blairism’– makes figuratively gory gestures at her altar:
david’s sacrifice
burnt offering to darwin:
roasted jobseeker
McDevitt picks up on sporadic hypocritical exhortations from Tories having sudden and brief Damascene spasms:
‘euergetism’
boris greek tory greek: ‘philanthropy’
(rich giving to rich)
The right-wing press isn’t spared the swingeing McDevittian swipe:
daily mail torah:
‘adam and eve on the dole
expelled from eden!’
*
‘no votes for unemployed!’
telegraph
(telegraphing its ignorance)
But the vitriol is primarily aimed at the blue torch-bearers themselves, whom the red-tops prop up, and their world-beating line in Doublespeak:
‘boundary reform’
tory euphemism for
gerrymandering
…
dave on arab spring: ‘petrol-pump attendants
getting uppity what!’
king dave warns arabs: ‘do not oppress your peoples
with
british weapons!’
(‘yes we sold tear-gas
but there is no evidence
our tear-gas was used’)
david multi-tasks
arms dealer-cum-peacebroker
man of many
parts
…
chancellor quotes marx
smirking at his own joke
as
he scraps workplace rights
‘TORIES ARE US’ is another gem of a McDevittism. A Note at the end of this typographically athletic marathon elucidates: ‘The fucku is an Hiberno-Japanese poetic form invented in 2011’, the name presumably being a pun on ‘haiku’ –in many ways ‘FUCKU’ is almost like reading a poetry sprint of the political vicissitudes of 2010-2012 in a kind of imagistic shorthand. It’s certainly a bold creative statement in its collage-like typographical cascade. I again excerpt from the promotional piece which accompanied Porterloo’s launch for some further contextualising of this poem:
After attending a reading by the veteran Afro-American poet Amiri Baraka and particularly enjoying the sequence of political haiku called ‘Lowcoup’, McDevitt wrote a lengthy 30-page sequence of anti-Conservative haiku which he called ‘Fucku’, satirising the daily minutiae of Tory power games, mind games and language games with the assistance of the invaluable Facebook page Nobody Likes a Tory.
The fourth and final section of McDevitt’s volume comprises, again, one long poem, titled ‘A Thousand’, and is split into four titled sections: ‘1. The Jew’, ‘2. The Christian’, ‘3. The Marxist’ and ‘4. The Whore’. ‘The Jew’ is an exquisite lyrical poem dripping with aphorism:
1 The Jew
though the Book was
My portable city, a Yrslm
Moved by me into many cities,
My soul and belly-button have not intersected
At the navel of the earth.
From the yellow-blacknesses of Galicia
I came to know London, New York and—surprisingly—Berlin
Where writers and journalists were Isaiahs about town
i.e. analysts of the present
But I could not cleave to God.
Other syllogisms swayed me. I was for revolution,
One of the spectral
But birth was the flood
From which I couldn’t recover
Even as I thanked England
For putting Darwin on its ten pound note.
Matrimony happened. Children came.
Decades were Polaroid-framed.
I imbibed my own shotglass
Of the Davidic, the Solomonic.
I end. It ends.
The mind is more than this
But extinguishes
As a candle is extinguished
By a human breath.
The disappointment was in seeing no angels.
No one had wings!
I was too realistic.
Once, an amazing profile butterflied
Among heliotropes
And I hung on her tones as on a meathook.
One notes the unusual –for McDevitt, and other poets of similar stylistic–capitalisation of all first letters (bar the first of each stanza), which gives the visual form of the verse an Eliotic quality and, perhaps, is partly employed to emphasise the aphoristic import of each line:
2 The Christian
to look into the cross-shaped hospital is to know myself in Christendom,
The mind of Kierkegaard,
A Black Death map.
Once, we were linked in Catholicity like a television audience.
Today in the conurbations of Christendom we walk
On cement-mixer films above the mass dead,
Media phantoms in a hades of screens,
Fingers blackened by newsprint, ears tinnitused with jingles,
Eyes dazed by electricity;
Our hearts have been told too many things.
The cross has ceded to the Diogenes barrel
And the sky is a mirror-ceiling we study human sex in.
This place was supposed to be left-wing.
Au revoir. My ascension is privatised.
My ascension is privatised. Au revoir.
To my own personal tastes, I prefer this slightly more formalised –in style and tone– approach of McDevitt’s, and find it more affecting and impressing on first reading (and further ones) than some of his more typographically experimental pieces. The aphoristic profundity of much of this fascinating poem needs no concrete acrobatics to get its points across. It is perhaps my very favourite poem sequence in the entire volume, and so, for me, a fitting one to end on. McDevitt demonstrates a masterly command of tone and phrase throughout, without exception; some of the aphorisms and turns of phrase are truly exceptional. Aspects to the poem, its phrasal lyricism combined with sharp aphoristic imagery, recall David Gascoyne again, particularly his ‘And the Seventh Dream is the Dream of Isis’ –and ‘A Thousand’ certainly does emit some of the reflectiveness of that poem, even if McDevitt is more likely to speak of ‘red drapes of vituperative spleen’ than Gascoyne would his more internalising ‘white curtains of infinite fatigue’. Perhaps my favourite verse of ‘A Thousand’ is the following one:
3 The Marxist
I have run out of materials except for those of the coffin
I must build in an ark-shape to sail into the sun
Where no man may exploit my personality or handicraft
But a lit country, a workshop without hierarchy.
Here, I have always lived underneath money, somehow
As under a sea, working on the sea-floor
Thinking I was on land, looking up
At the passing seaweed, imagining it as cloud
As my lungs and mind were salt-poisoned,
My limbs and heart were pressure-crushed
And my back was dismantled and reassembled daily.
I saw the Leviathan of history cruise by
Smiling a lees-red smile, a human blood smile.
The sun warms my back as I hammer the wood
Into the belly-shape of a hull to hold
The emotions we earned proudly, not the emotions
Of the dishonest exploiter but the honest exploited.
I have lived in the rich shades of goldmines
And will be weighed as usual on the way out.
While the final verse is a virtuoso figurative lyric:
4 The Whore
I am the whore of Joseph Salmon
And in the waters of Joseph Salmon
I laid my femininity
Uniting mercers coopers scriveners
Imprinting their auras onto my aura
(Unknown to Mr Salmon, I found a way back into the garden)
Protestant, a traitor to my race,
But yet a protestant against
The iced boundaries here
Salting my wound with money, and the wounds of men
With deference and technique
Milking their glands religiously
I have spawned poems as salmon
I particularly admire the aphoristic precision of this poem; and the alliteration of the beguiling phrase ‘Milking their glands religiously’ is beautifully wrought. It makes for an unexpectedly dulcet close to the collection, a glorious crescendo, and the very final line is a fascinating phrase to end on, salmon having a very curious, almost mysterious lifecycle whereby, apparently, they always ultimately return to the same brackish waters of their birth, where they end up effectively committing suicide by leaping into the shallowest parts –that is, unless they’ve already been snatched mid-leap by the paws of bears anticipating on the bank. Perhaps here McDevitt is implying that, in the end, poems return to their source: the poet.
Is this a way of suggesting that, ultimately, in spite of a poet’s best intentions to compose work of universal relevance, the polemical poet, as much as the esoteric poet, or indeed most other types of poet, still writes primarily for his or her self? That hoary legend “art for art’s sake” (“L’art pour l’art”), a phrase made into slogan by French poet and dramatist Théophile Gautier, and repeated in the prose of Victor Cousin (French philosopher), Benjamin Constant (Swiss political writer), and Edgar Allen Poe, who couched his own definition of the principle in his essay ‘The Poetic Principle’ (1850):
We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem’s sake […] and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force: — but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem’s sake. [2]
S.I. Hayakawa also pointed this out in his Language in Thought and Action, ‘Poetry and Advertising’: ‘true poets don’t write to ‘satisfy any external demand, but to satisfy themselves’ –and this would seem to be a pretty apt depiction of the McDevittian verse-imperative.
But here we also enter a Caudwellian paradox –or one of the allegedly legion dialectical flaws of the kind of Marxist criticism Caudwell attempts in Illusion and Reality (which has over the decades drawn quite scathing criticisms from other Marxist and socialist polemicists such as Raymond Williams, Maurice Cornforth, E.P. Thompson and Terry Eagleton, along the lines of the book’s dogmatic rigidity on the subject of ‘bourgeois poetry’, its general muddled-headedness and contradictions, and a legacy of it being perceived as a kind of ‘vulgar Marxism’): since Caudwell perceived the esotericism, specialisation and individuation of poetry (i.e. art for art’s sake) in a bourgeois capitalist culture as being, by dint of its gradual distancing from its audience or readership –i.e. the public– and fragmentation of its pre-capitalist ‘social/community function’, a manifest form of inauthentic artistic expression, he thus equated it with ‘commodity fetishism’, being an inauthentic state of social relations. This was something observed as long as 1945 by George Thomson in his polemical pamphlet Marxism and Poetry:
Our poetry has been individualised to such a degree that it has lost touch with its source of life. It has withered at its roots…
However, in the case of contrasting the verse of McDevitt with Riviere, it’s not completely clear, in Caudwellian terms, how we should define their diametrically opposed oeuvres, since both seem to overlap spheres. With McDevitt, we have a robust spirit of universal communication on social and political themes, which would appear to be operating at a level of authentic interaction with the reader; but then we have the avant-garde, esoteric, symbolist and ‘pidgin’ aspects to how it’s communicated which might draw more comparison with l’art pour l’art principle (i.e. if the reader ‘gets it’ then good, but there’ll be no aesthetic compromise to help him/her in the hermeneutic process).
While with Riviere’s volume, we have an evasiveness of tone and an elliptical conceptual thrust which give the surface impression of an individuated and, thus, in Caudwellian terms, inauthentic theme (in spite of the synthetically ‘universal’ title); but then, conversely, there is the sense that its’ verse style –even if elusive and elliptical, nevertheless– is broadly conforming to a certain ‘fashionable’ strain of conceptual postmodernism for which it is implied –by the sheer gusto of the book’s promotion– there is a fairly wide readership (thus, in some aspects, it is formulated with a target audience in mind).
However, we might equally argue that, since the majority of today’s poetry readership is made up of poets, any such anticipated readership is, far from being indicative of contemporary poetry’s retention of authentic social ties with a broader public, actually just further evidence of the intensification of its own specialisation to the exclusion of wider society –poets have long been the consumers of their own output (veritable cannibals!) which takes us back full circle to John Hartley’s contention that ‘poetry becomes more specialized, until at last it has no subject but itself’, and, by extension, no readership but itself (poetry will eat itself!). This also taps back into George Thomson’s thesis in Marxism and Poetry (1945), in which he argued poetry had become a commodity, the poet a producer for the open market, and with a decreasing demand for his wares.
Ultimately, as discussed at the beginning of this two-book review–and-interpolative polemic a la the Caudwellian line, aesthetic taste and thus critical responses are subjective, and, in that, simply opinion, not statements of any unverifiable objective fact or hermeneutic monopoly of ‘truth’, even if given more verisimilitude of incontrovertibility by being leavened with supportive snippets of ‘peer review’ –and in my capacity here as a ‘reviewer’, and not some living satellite of divine insight, I have given my subjective verdict on two books both published in the same politically tumultuous year (2012) within ostensibly similar thematic remits. The first of which has left me poetically cold, and with a mental impression akin to a sour aftertaste, a bit like manila on the tongue, since it is as far as I can fathom something of an empty package, a conceit-as-end-in-itself, of counterfeit zeitgeist, a volumed opportunism, with a Trades Description Act-busting title; a prestigiously liveried synthetic substitute for the authentic dissenting verse it should have been, and in many ways, inadvertently no doubt, a distillation of what Christopher Caudwell meant by ‘capitalist poetry’.
The second volume, however, is to my mind a much more authentic entity, since it is a more passionate and experiential work, and this empirical quality authenticates and vindicates the avant-garde flights of its concrete wings; but, most pivotally, McDevitt’s volume is absolutely about the ‘austerities’ inflicted on all of us in the first two critical years of the ConDem Coalition –austerities not only in material but also in moral and spiritual terms; those very Austerities which Riviere’s volume almost entirely avoids, revealing as it does inside its covers more 81 verses of self-advertising than anything resembling a satirical or polemical poetic critique of our currently embattled culture, wrapping it all up in an opportunistic conceptual ‘workshop’-like exercise, which, for me, is unrecognisable in the broadly hyperbolic praise that couched its reception. That might still sound very harsh, but these are harsh times, and such harsh events as are evoked in the term Austerities deserve much more sincere addressing in verse than simply being exploited for poetic conceit and vicarious navel-gazing.
So, as to the final score of McDevitt versus Riviere:
Poterloo 8/ 81 Austerities 1.8.
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.
Alan Morrison
The Poetry of Common Ownership: Against the Notion of Poetry as Property (Propetry)
Andy Croft’s essay against the implicitly capitalist notion of poetry as ‘property’ (what we might call ‘propetry’), The Privatisation of Poetry, opens up a much-needed debate on the contention that poetry and all literature is essentially a communal phenomenon, since its prime purpose is (surely) to communicate as widely as possible and share ideas and experiences.
These are notions unfashionable in a capitalised postmodernist poetry ‘mainstream’ often perceived to be epitomised by one-upmanship and individualistic careerism (though also, ironically, a kind of unconscious communism of style) and sponsored by what are effectively ‘poetry corporations’ or ‘poetry monopolies’: the hedge-funded PBS, the all-encompassing Poetry Society, the ‘top’ metropolitan imprints, and, most pervasively of all, the poetry prize and competition circuit.
But Croft’s communistic premise is one with which great literary thinkers such as Christopher Caudwell and W.H. Auden would have been in complete simpatico, back in the Thirties, the most pronouncedly ‘political’ period of British poetics.
That there is a germ of commonality in literature is indisputable, and the heartening notion of what might be termed a ‘poetry of common ownership’ is not so quixotic as it might sound when one explores the too-often obscured and ignored ‘shadow lineage’ of proletarian poetics throughout British literary history. In particular, the explosion of polemical poetry of the Industrial Revolution, most notably among the Chartist movement (1838–1858) whose political cause became almost inseparable from the prolific school of polemical poetics it inspired (in these senses the Chartists were de facto ‘poet-protestors’).
Words belong to all of us, and, ultimately, what is poetry, or any other form of literature, but the creative rearranging of words into particular combinations? While the nuances of these verbal rearrangements and phrasal orderings may be claimed as the expressive property of the word-arrangers, the words themselves cannot be, since they are formed from the common tongue, or lexicon, the lingua franca. And who has ever claimed proprietorship over words? Not even seminal lexicographer Samuel Johnson claimed that.
Poets are magpies
Poets are magpies: attracted to phrases like shiny objects from which they most often fashion other phrases, or variations of phrase, and, sometimes unconsciously, ‘lift’ or ‘borrow’ phrases. To ‘borrow’ in this way is not to claim something belongs to one as much as it belongs to everyone, and can be reused or imbued with new meanings in different contexts. Within reasonable degrees, this is also complimentary to the original ‘phrase maker’. Moreover, what are poets, artists, but creative baton-carriers who are inspired by former works of predecessors and then in turn reshape these influences to the expression of their own personality? And is ‘phrasal borrowing’ less taboo in titles to poems, which can in turn also shape their concepts or themes?
This from T.S. Eliot, one of the most distinctive and individualistic voices in poetry of any period:
Traces of Kipling appear in my own mature verse where no diligent scholarly sleuth has yet observed them, but which I am myself prepared to disclose. I once wrote a poem called ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’: I am convinced that it would never have been called ‘Love Song’ but for a title of Kipling’s that stuck obstinately in my head: ‘The Love Song of Har Dyal’.
Should Eliot be accused of plagiarism, of leaching off Kipling’s imagination to come up with his poem’s title? Few poets wrote so aware of poetic canon and tradition, and of their temporal place in the poetic continuum, as T.S. Eliot. Indeed, his aforementioned poem, a ‘seminal’ one for Anglo-American Modernism, is laced thickly with allusions that frequently melt into full-on phrasal borrowings from previous poets and writers, from such ‘common-held’ or ‘folkloric’ sources as the plays of Shakespeare and the aphorisms of the New Testament.
For all Eliot’s own genius –which was considerable– he was one of the most thoroughly-sourced poets of them all. He was very much a polymath scholar-poet, as James Joyce was in poetic prose, and both of their writings, significantly, steeped in Greco-Roman mythological allusions.
Indeed, so rich in allusions to previous works of literature, not to say, actual quotations couched in the poet’s own tropes, was Eliot’s most celebrated poem, The Waste Land, that he specifically furnished it with detailed annotations ‘with a view to spiking the guns of critics of my earlier poems who had accused me of plagiarism’. As Hugh Kenner puts it in his brilliantly insightful and beautifully written The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot, ‘Cities are built out of the ruins of previous cities, as The Waste Land is built out of the remains of older poems’ (W.H. Allen, 1960)..
Hence, without its sources, The Waste Land, that ‘heap of broken images’, couldn’t have been written, at least, not in the distinctly splintered, aphorismic and fragmentary way that it was, which was an enormous part of the mystique which came to surround it and fascinate poets and scholars for generations afterwards. Is Eliot the sum of his sources? Eliot was part of a poetic pattern, and he knew his place in that pattern, and might well not have become a poet at all were it not for his keen awareness of it.
The Waste Land was Eliot’s definitive expression of this sense of literary inheritance and curatorship, and is in many ways a work of poetic archaeology dealing as it does in poetic relics and ruins, just as Ulysses, published the same year (1922), was for James Joyce. It was also Eliot, of course, who coined the contentious aphorism: ‘Good poets borrow, great poets steal’. (But we’ll leave Eliot and Joyce there, minded as I am as to the irony of discussing two of the most accomplished exponents of the ‘Mandarin’ (Cyril Connolly’s phrase from Enemies of Promise (1938)). tradition in literature in a proem to a monograph on a much earthier proletarian poetic tradition).
Ploughing the common language
The literary scholar Hugh Kenner, then, gifts us a fitting metaphor for the nature of poetry, indeed, of all literature and creative human work: ‘cities built out of ruins of previous cities’.
No poetry can ever be truly original, and that’s as much to do with the fundamental homology of language as it is the inheritance of the literature sprouted from it. In this sense, then, and to use a more natural metaphor, every new poem is a transplanting in place of a past crop: the soil that nourishes all crops belongs to no one, hence to everyone; it is not up for grabs, only for refurbishment. Language is common land –the common tongue– and poetry is its most beautiful flower.
All poets are part of a pattern, inspired by their predecessors, thence continuing the creative process and thereby contributing to the ongoing reinvigoration and reorganisation of the common tongue; like ploughing the common land. It is also disputable as to whether any poets, any creative persons, are actually the architects of their own talents or simply the vessels through which transcendent creative powers are operating. Poets might be mediums, temporal receptors and scribes of an immortal Muse; ever reverberating echoes of an ancient all-creating spark, or Creator (but that’s an entirely different topic and more in the Gravesian vein – See Robert Graves’ The White Goddess (1948)).
After all, inspiration is a prime component to creativity. The etymology of ‘inspired’ comes from the word ‘inspirited’ i.e. to inspirit, to put spirit into something; while the commonly used term ‘gift’ to describe a talent is too often overlooked in its implications: what else is a ‘gift’ but something given to someone? Creativity might be partly inherited, partly self-nurtured, but can never be entirely self-nurtured: one cannot create oneself, hence cannot create one’s own creativity.
Of course, it’s only polite for the ‘borrower’ to acknowledge such borrowings, but to neglect to do so is more impolite than impious. Don’t all poets begin by borrowing, even sometimes by some subtle form of plagiarising? Some of the most highly respected poets of the past began writing that way. (And should a particular poetic metre be the property only of its inventor? If so, Keats’ Spenserian stanzas are metrical theft!).
Nothing can get us away from the fundamental fact that language belongs to all of us. Its cogs might be oiled by wordmongers in order to rescue them from neglect, even retune and neologise, but ultimately no one can claim copyright of the common tongue. The egoistic urge to do so is what Christopher Caudwell would have termed a ‘bourgeois’* one wrapped up with impulses to oneupmanship and self-promotion, of which all poets can be guilty at times. But if those are the prime urges of any poets, then it’s perhaps better they don’t write poetry at all, but instead set themselves up as private landlords and deal in bricks and mortar rather than iambs and metaphors, since seeming more concerned with impressing themselves and asserting property rights over peers and readers than attempting to upkeep the poetic soil and continue nourishing common consciousness.
*(or, more specifically, ‘petit-bourgeois’; poets as ‘unacknowledged shopkeepers of the world’, to part-paraphrase Percy Shelley mixed with one of Napoleon’s aphorisms about the English, is perhaps a more accurate epithet. Surprisingly, in the past, there were one or two shopkeeper-poets, most notably Robert Clemesha (1737-1793)).
Humility is the compost of poetry
There must be humility in the poet –without it, the poetry simply moulders into ornamental solipsism. To extend the agricultural metaphor, and at the risk of sounding crass, humility is the compost of poetry.
The notion of literature as private property, or ‘intellectual property’, is not only a relatively recent thing historically-speaking, but also a distinctly bourgeois concept. Tellingly, much of the ‘common’ poetry of the 17th through to the early 19th centuries was often published anonymously or under pseudonyms, which in itself emphasised a sense of shared ownership in the poems. They were often spread by word of mouth as much as by pamphlet or broadside, tipping them into the common psyche in the same way that common prayers and anthems are, and thence entering into a kind of proletarian folkloric cannon. This act of committal to folk memory has, however, been historically obscured by the self-appointed keepers of British literary ‘polite society’; the plenipotentiary of poetic posterity.
This anonymity of authorship not only emphasised a sense of common ownership of poetry and literature, it also hinted at a contempt for notions of property, especially that of creative expression, and, just as impressively, an indifference towards posterity. Indeed, as the fittingly anonymous Introduction to The Common Muse – Popular British ballad poetry from the 15th to the 20th century (ed. V. de Sola Pinto and A.E. Rodway; Penguin, 1957) puts it [my bold italics]:
The ballad-monger was mobile and difficult to regulate; the ballad poet (often the same person) was usually anonymous. Hence, he was not overawed by Authority –legal, clerical or critical– or by Posterity. Though the limitations of his outlook bound him to his own time and place, he was in all other ways free…
In every sense then, this proletarian poetry by and on behalf of the un-propertied was symbiotically anti-property.
Of course, it would be naïve not to also point out that no doubt some of the reasons for the anonymity of polemical poems and broadside ballads of the past were in order to keep the authors safe from any repercussions due to possible inflammatory or seditious messages in their verses. In this sense such widely distributed polemical poems served as anonymous versified Round Robins.
Building Jerusalem
But the signature of a name to a poem hasn’t always carried with it all the rights-asserting implications and trappings of proprietorship. Why is it that so many English poets and readers feel somehow that Blake belongs to them, personally, as much as to everyone else? It’s because Blake’s implicit humanity, humility, compassion and universalism of sentiment implicates all of us, at least, all of us who are exposed to his work. We become a part of it, and so Blake’s works become a part of us; part of our ‘Englishness’, if you like, but a very radical, half-buried timbre of Englishness (though one thankfully resurgent in some).
It’s not just the sentiments but also the anthemic, hymnal quality of ‘Jerusalem’ which binds its readers and singers together in poetic fellowship, in much the same way as a common hymn by sundry ‘Anon’ hymnodists. Hence Blake, his work and his evocative Anglo-Saxon name (meaning, depending on the root, ‘pale/fair’ or, alternately, ‘dark’), which becomes a kind of adjective descriptive of his special type of poetics, of his aphorismic ‘Songs’, enter into the folkloric fabric, become part of our cultural character. Blake belongs to us (i.e. the English), just as Burns belongs to the Scots, Yeats to the Irish, and Dylan Thomas to the Welsh; though all of those poets, bar the mostly dialect Burns, also share a transnational reach.
That politics is not only compatible with poetry but actually an implicit component of it is a mode of thought institutionally shunned today by much of the poetry establishment. Yet it was once a commonly held view: throughout the centuries poetry, in this instance English poetry, has demonstrated abundantly in multifarious forms that poetry and politics are interrelated, even if that interrelatedness is often a thorny one. In the past, poetry, or poetic language, was often employed by orators and politicians to reinforce their arguments and ideas, and to such a degree that much historical oratory is often a form of public or declamatory poetry, sometimes rich in aphorism and apothegm.
One only has to think of such eloquent and poetic statesmen as Solon (lawgiver and poet of Ancient Athens), Demosthenes, Pericles, Cicero, Seneca, Thomas More, Oliver Cromwell, Walpole, Napoleon Bonaparte, Benjamin Disraeli, Lloyd George, Keir Hardie, Churchill, Roosevelt, Martin Luther King et al. Or political pamphleteers and ideologues such as John Lilburne, Gerrard Winstanley, Robert Owen, William Morris, Bertrand Russell, Max Weber, even Karl Marx (whose Das Kapital Edmund Wilson, in his seminal work To The Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940), lauded as every bit as poetical as it was polemical, in the chapter ‘Karl Marx: Poet of Commodities’).
Oratory, an art form in its own right, has always shared much in common with poetry, and in many respects is the poetry of administration. The roots of much oratory are in Rhetoric, itself rooted in philosophy, and the language of much philosophy is deeply poetic and aphorismic –think Kierkegaard and Nietzsche– as is religious writing. These interrelations are explored in depth in a compendious essay by Nigel Smith, ‘The English Revolution and the End of Rhetoric: John Toland’s Clito (1700) and the Republican Daemon’, in Poetry and Politics (ed. Kate Flint, 1996).
Another note is that frequently by the term ‘politics’ or ‘political’ in terms of poetry, the implicit meaning is inextricably linked with socialist or communist thought, since much of the focus of the monograph is on neglected or forgotten poets of the British proletariat and artisan classes, as well those whom Marx would have termed, somewhat impolitely, the lumpenproletariat (e.g. street sellers, the unemployed, travellers, tramps, hobos etc.). Thus the ‘politics’ of such poetics, almost entirely informed by empirical privation and dissatisfaction with established social hierarchies, is invariably radical, anarchic, militant, revolutionary. The monograph in part attempts to trace much of this neglected genealogy of English proletarian poetry, as well as that of political poetry in general, across the social classes, and across approximately four centuries, since the inception of the mass printing press.
Indeed, even still today, much ‘political’ or ‘radical’ poetry, especially the most empirical, that written by those on the margins of society, by those from less privileged backgrounds, the unemployed or precariously employed, and those who are marginalised due to mental health issues, is poorly represented by the poetry publishing world, in spite of spin to the contrary and overtures to synthetic inclusiveness and box-ticking on the part of ostensibly ‘liberal’ literary ‘elites’. We are today in very much a parallel malaise to that which Scots poet Alan Bold addressed in his superlative Introduction to The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse, which more accurately served as a polemic on the parlous apoliticism of the then-British poetry scene:
What I do believe is that the contemporary poetry that gets most attention, in Britain at least, is technically inadequate, thematically limited, and socially soporific. At its best it is pleasant, at its worst pathetic. It may be that it is able to hog the spotlight because our leading critical sensibilities have so much irony in their souls they recoil from a direct and explicit mission of concern for other people. It may be that in order to consolidate the rather trivial work that they have championed they refuse to discuss art that would jeopardise this. This operation is not confined to the weekend critics. There is a rather perverse abdication of the critical faculty…
That really could just as easily apply to the poetry scene of today, particularly the epithet ‘so much irony in their souls’, which sums up so depressingly the oh-so-predictable postmodernist ‘twist’ on poetry that still dominates the poetry mainstream now, well over forty years from Bold’s embattled lament.
Andy Croft’s own imprint, Smokestack Books, remains perhaps the foremost champion of left-wing political poetry in the UK. Its mission statement expresses this explicitly and in keeping with the ethical communism of its founding editor:
Smokestack aims to keep open a space for what is left of the English radical poetic tradition in the twenty-first century. Smokestack champions poets who are unfashionable, radical, left-field and working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority. Smokestack is committed to the common music of poetry; is interested in the World as well as the Word; believes that poetry is a part of and not apart from society; argues that if poetry does not belong to everyone it is not poetry.
In the poetry journal scene, a thin red line of journals keep up this tradition on the fringes: The Penniless Press and Red Poets, as well as Mike Quille’s ‘Soul Food’ columns in The Communist Review, and the ‘Well Versed’ columns in The Morning Star. There are also some other poetry imprints in political simpatico with Smokestack: Flambard, Red Squirrel, Shoestring and Waterloo Press et al. Significantly none of those imprints could be classed as ‘mainstream’ or among the ‘top’ metropolitan imprints. Lastly, webzines such as The International Times, Occupy Poetry, Proletarian Poetry, Prole, Poetry Republic and this writer’s own The Recusant and Militant Thistles help to keep the ‘radical poetic tradition’ represented online.
The emphasis on poetry being ‘a part of and not apart from society’ is both a Caudwellian and Audenic sentiment, one also strongly endorsed and exemplified by the poetry of Jack Lindsay, and French poet Frances Combes, both published under the Smokestack imprint (Lindsay posthumously).
The phrase ‘common music’ is emphatic of universality and inclusiveness (although, unlike music, poetry is inhibited in its reach by the frontiers of different languages, the ‘passports’ of translations often furnishing at best adumbrations of the source texts).
And that final clause, ‘if poetry does not belong to everyone it is not poetry’, cleverly inverts the notion of ‘poetry as private property’ by arguing that any poetry that is the private property of the poet is therefore not the property of anyone else and thus socially –and culturally– redundant: it confiscates itself from the common consciousness.
Originally published in Culture Matters 4/4/2016 and in The Morning Star 2016 under a different title.
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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