Where now for poetry and political culture?

Mmmm! The old public poetry chestnut raises its head again via a meeting held at the Poetry Society, led by John Walsh and Blake Morrison. Walsh post-publicised his activities with a piece in the Independent on Tuesday, 28 October, entitled Why shouldn’t newspapers print odes to Obama or about the banking crisis? M. Apache couldn’t be there, unfortunately, but he would have had something to say about these two stars’ assertion that there is no worthwhile public poetry at the moment. As for not putting it in newspapers, what about Tom Paulin and Andrew Motion? – they’ve had plenty of stuff on the newsprint in recent years.

The crux of the matter seems to be that Walsh and Morrison don’t see much political poetry around, and what there is isn’t epic enough to take on the big issues – war, the economy, etc – and certainly won’t be given space in newspaper columns.

The truth is that they don’t know what’s going on.

Walsh refers to the sixties as a golden age of political protest, and by definition political poetry, and he wonders where the big hitters are now. Let’s pause for a second and consider how long it’s been since poetry took centre stage in the arena of political debate and protest. Tony Harrison’s magnificent V was published in the Independent in 1985, and dealt with “the state of the nation” through the author’s view of the miners’ strike. He followed this up in the early 90s with two much shorter polemics dealing with the first Gulf War. Adrian Mitchell also had two poems on this issue published in newsprint, the most notable of which, “Blood and Oil”, was more agit-prop than epic – but it was an effective protest.

Then, I guess, there was Heathcote Williams, with his powerful, majestic crusades in favour of the natural world – Whale Nation, Sacred Elephant and Autogeddon – which were big-selling books whose profits were largely donated to Greenpeace, at great personal sacrifice to the author, it needs to be said. Surely that was an effective intervention on a grand scale?

In more recent times political protest has shifted away from poetry and into the arenas of film and stand-up comedy. But there’s still a lot of poetry being written and published which responds, analyses, and protests – and is related to the big issues of the day. Let’s get real and name some names. Michael Horovitz may be another renegade from the sixties but his recent book – A New Waste Land: Timeship Earth at Nillennium– is a huge rant against the misdemeanours of Blair and Bush, and the reader is left in no doubt about where Horovitz stands. For all its faults, this is an impassioned intervention in public debate. Andy Croft, a traditionalist in formal terms and closely allied to Tony Harrison in stance, has written reams of political poetry, ranging from anguished reflections on the ‘failure’ of socialism in practice, to more hilarious and jaunty pieces – “Comrade Laughter Tries Stand-up” - for example. His “rewriting” of Shelley’s “The Mask of Anarchy” is a classic of contemporary political literature and should be widely anthologised. Perhaps the reason the Independent wouldn’t publish such a poem is that it was too critical of the west’s military intervention in other countries post-Second World War, and – unlike Harrison –didn’t aim at some sense of unity or healing. This is controlled anger at its most fruitful.

Gordon Wardman is a fine, largely unrecognised, poet of the left who has a canny knack for dialogue and is hilariously funny as well as being sharply satirical and direct. His trilogy of chapbooks dealing with the life and times of two post-Thatcher “English Cowboys” (Tam and Hank) should be republished in one volume and distributed widely. That this isn’t happening may have something to do with the failure of “the left” to get a grip on current poetical culture; but we live in interesting times and there is surely some turbulence ahead.

Then there are those poets who inhabit academia and who attempt to document the changes in education after the adoption of a business ethos during the closing years of the last Tory administration. People like Tony Lopez, whose montage techniques (see False Memory, published by Salt) give us the feel and texture of political and social change, while expressing unease and critical distance. Lopez’s work proves that it’s possible to mix social concern with an aesthetic sense, something which poetry, at its best, often manages to do. Finally (the list is too long to be inclusive here), there’s Robert Sheppard, another academic who has written on poetry and politics for magazines such as the New Statesman, and whose poetry – in Tin Pan Arcadia, for example – is both savage and hilarious, dark and political, in all the best ways.

What Walsh and Morrison seem to be missing is that there is a wealth of what we might call Political or Public Poetry out there, being written and published and commented on. It’s just that they don’t know about it. It’s various, from the political ranting (and we should be pleased that Horovitz is still out there, doing his thing), to the more subtle investigations of power and its (often) unaccountable nature. Walsh and Morrison are both Establishment figures – Walsh once edited the Sunday Times books section, and so helped to keep John Carey active, itself a crime against humanity. Very recently, he devoted part of his column to speculation about Edith Sitwell’s underwear.

Morrison is ex-TLS, and was literary editor of The Observer at a time when further crimes were committed – oh, and literary editor of the Independent on Sunday too. Didn’t notice too many leftist poems being published by him when he had that opportunity.

That the serious newspapers and journals don’t very often pick up on actually-existing political poetry is perhaps as much to do with the question of politics (note the little ‘p’) as the poetry. Think about it, John.