This brief survey of the past of Socialist poetry has found two strands: of the simple and songlike, intimate and down to earth; and of the sublime, dazzling and precipitous, dissolving everyday awareness in abstract ideas. We could compare the first to Tony Harrison and the second to J.H. Prynne. Although the renewal of Left poetry at the end of the fifties came largely from foreign sources, we can identify in Charles Madge a third strand: of investigating the rules of perception, by which the data of the senses are transformed into social meaning; as a way of solving arguments where the sides refused common terms, or of safeguarding the beleaguered and wandering soul against illusion. This was to become central in the seventies and eighties.
In the fifties the leaking-out truth about communism, before and after Khrushchev's destalinisation campaign of 1956, discredited radical Leftism in an atmosphere of Cold War. There is a general disgust with propaganda, after 20 years of mobilisation; Christianity makes a big comeback in poetry, often mingled with existentialism. The reception of Brecht in England takes place largely through two poets: Christopher Logue and John Arden, and represented perhaps the conquest of the old sentimental-moral pathos of centuries' standing by a critical view of identification. At the end of the decade, a new wave of protest poetry, apocalyptic and simplistic, is typified by Adrian Mitchell; following the first squeaks of youth culture and anticipating the protest song; the far subtler cognitive criticism of a Roy Fisher is also, bizarrely, heard on the same stages.
Christopher Logue (1926- ) debuted with Wand and Quadrant in 1953. Devil, Maggot and Son (three things that pursue the hero), of 1956, is still in a New Romantic idiom which resembles D.S. Savage:
The pigeon's blood delights the peregrine.
Beezled in his scepter to be the faggot
Of a King's word. Colour of lust, mine
Accidentally with sight and range beyond
The Asian river where, gently, I washed
For centuries. The Knave my paramour;
Dyed by my signet all powerful his finger
I match the vellum that he daubs with blood.
Or on the apron of her breasts I crozier.
('A Suite for Jewels'; and scil. bezelled; the speaker is a jewel.) Logue's cynicism is cast as a country dance for characters from playing-cards, or characters from mediaeval tiles; it is sharp, bawdy, theatrical, picaresque, quite uncontemporary. It is not yet political; although the fake mediaevalism of Elizabeth's coronation ('Elizabeth Persephone, envoi and chorus') is not of Logue's couture. Rhyme, as a set of arbitrary rules, fits these characters who are trapped in the roles which their costumes announce. His evolution towards simple, rhythmically bound, forms parallels the evolution from neo-romanticism to the stilted regularity of The Movement. His model was Brecht's songs; of course Brecht's model was Kipling. Songs (1959) still contains interesting neo-romantic gestures:
So twenty weeks went by and by,
My back was straightened out my eye
Dead true as any button shone,
And nine white-bellied porpoise led,
our ship of shillings through the sun.
(...)
And three by three through our curfew,
Mother we marched like black and tan,
Singing to match our captain's cheers,
Then I drank my eyes out of my head
And wet Her shilling with my fears.
('The Song of the Dead Soldier') but is also full of committed poems; the playing-card world is by now the whole bourgeois social order, admittedly shaky at that time. In the 1950s, Logue and Barker were the rakehells of English poetry, giving off a hot breath of sexuality which revealed the grey pallor of virtually everything else. Neither faction - left-wing satirists or The Movement - can have realised that the jingling efficiency of rhyme and stanzaic form was about to be exploited by the new English pop song, drowning them both. Logue's recycling of old English folk songs is rather overshadowed by Bob Dylan's. Song, rebellion, lechery, immediacy: this formula was about to be taken up by people whose surnames were Jagger or Morrison. Brechtian populism was outbid and bought up.
Lucie-Smith credits Logue with starting the poetry and jazz series of live events. In this sense, one would say that the popularity of his own idea destroyed him; the association with a live audience and popular music produced a world of bad poetry. Logue watched the pop poetry of the sixties, for which he was the inspiration, knowing it had gone terribly wrong, but not able to redirect it. A link - a kind of waste pipe - connects Songs to the Liverpool Sound. His natural environment was political cabaret; something which probably reached its peak in the twenties: although he wrote the songs for The Establishment, a satirical nightclub flourishing around 1962. Although he has expressed his enthusiasm for the era (not necessarily for its poetry), I am tempted to say that everything from the fifties lost its value in the sixties, including the Berliner Ensemble - and including Logue. Adrian Mitchell's 1964 volume must have looked equally exciting. Logue gave many live readings, published poster-poems and several more books; became a distinguished Bohemian and a popular rebel.
Ode to a Dodo, a very selective collected poems, appeared in 1981. War Music, his heroic translation of books 16-19 of The Iliad, was published in 1981; Kings, an account of books 1 and 2, followed in 1991; and Husbands, treating books 3 and 4, in 1995. Since there is a substantial extract from Book XXI (the combat of Achilles and the Scamander) in Songs (1959), he has been occupied on the project for almost forty years. Although Logue claims not to know Greek, this is not an independent creative work (something publicity agents frequently claim for translators who can scan), but is a splendid book, with a wonderful variety and flow. The logical development into narrative verse, capable of depicting a society rather than just a few images, which was sketched out in a couple of poems in Songs, took this form, of a Bronze Age translation.
Logue dislikes the autobiographical touch; not out of repression, but perhaps out of a dislike for introspection - he prefers action; his irony has a sharp point. The tough and death-touched heroes of War Music are the warrior figures that Thom Gunn never could bring off. Logue hasn't written his life story; it's all there in his style. One has to admire Logue and Barker for writing about sexual immorality in the first person. The reader is left to muse on the similarity between the discretion of the homosexual, in an era of illegality, and the inability of the conventional English academic poet to signal feeling. Both groups edge away from lyric contact towards lessons in civics. The Iliad is built up on androktisiai, the death of heroes in duels: in due form, fulfilling civic obligations, they forfeit biological success. Looking at his ballads about patriotic soldiers dying, such as 'The Song of the Imperial Carrion', one is tempted to link his Iliad to the irony of his modern-day poetry: the bourgeois hero fulfils social obligations, apparently wins, but finds his real wishes flouted. But the connection is strained. It is but a short step from Logue's ironic dialectic around the slip between purpose and outcome to the structurally discrepant montage effect of the 1960s, which also had an anti-bourgeois tendency at its outset.
His poems, too, are perhaps closer to Greek anecdotes of the philosophers, as in the well-known book by Diogenes Laertius, than to the knock-down late-night communist cellar cabaret they superficially resemble. If we envisage the sophist as someone who wandered around, gathering audiences at crossroads or in marketplaces by wit and verbal skill, naturally in compressed and salty form, then Logue is a sophist.
The juxtaposition could take three forms: the uncovering of absurd positions (the USA bombs Vietnam to protect it, Wilson's socialist government fi ghts to defend capitalism); the moment of dissociation and drift, letting go of rationality; and the arduous and far-reaching building-up of new poetic associations, replacing collapsed systems with a journey into the unknown. Strangely enough, Logue was closest to the latter in his first published work, the title poem of Wand and Quadrant: a lush narrative poem of constantly shifting levels and times - including the Island of Prospero, characters from the Odyssey, and fortune-telling. He chose instead the sharp lucidity which wins political arguments.
John Arden (1930- ), from Yorkshire, a playwright and recently a novelist, has never quite taken the plunge into fully fledged verse; none the less his plays, apart from passages in formal verse and songs, are written in poetic language - 'the richest in the contemporary theatre', as Martin Seymour-Smith remarks: 'King Johnny of Eskdale indeed! King Curlew of the barren fell. King paddock of the wowsie mosses. Ye squat on your blood-sodden molehill and ye hoot, Johnny; and naebody in Scotland considers ye mair than a wet leaf blawn against the eyeball on a day of September wind.' ('Armstrong's Last Goodnight'.) Immediately, the concept of theatre seems wholly superior to that of personal poetry: as characters are externalised, forced to interact, multiple voices are heard, events are followed through time and forced to rise to crises, the author is forced to create tangible, autonomous agents outside his own personality. Personal, autobiographical poetry could give a convincing and exciting account of existence, but so rarely does it have any drama, so rarely does the poet have the brains to concentrate on a turning-point or create any uncertainty. The convention of the single speaking voice flattens everything, as it is so hard to convey any situation through one person's eyes. Narration is always less interesting than dialogue. Perhaps the escape into truth we are all looking for lies simply in reducing the protagonist from a total environment to a character who has to move through external space and relate to other, autonomous people: entering the condition of drama. It's not hard to explain why Arden wasn't interested in being a poet.
Arden has been clearly more successful than any contemporary poet, perhaps excepting David Jones, at dealing with history; poets in a lyric tradition, which they are deeply inhibited about breaking out of, may wish to talk about history, but they end up presenting dry conclusions rather than narrating a series of events, round and uncertain. Black Torch is the most significant exception, and even that has remained incomplete. The Island of the Mighty, written with Margaretta D'Arcy, is an account of Arthurian Britain (the title is a mediaeval Welsh kenning for 'Britain', Ynys y kedyrdon), suffering from incongruity and a lack of poetic high points, but still a remarkable depiction on a broad canvas of themes (to do with Britain in a stage of primitivism) which have never worked on a small canvas. Recently (1988) D'Arcy and he have written at epic length about the Nicaean Council and the formation of an official Christian creed. Rather than rail about the State, Arden has covered defined steps in its evolution: Island of the Mighty about the arrival of the Saxons and the drawing of the Saxon-Celt frontier, The Workhouse Donkey about local politics, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance about imperialism, Armstrong's Last Goodnight about the struggle of the Crown against militarily expert feudal nobles.
Arden's characters pursue self-interest, checked by the cunning agency of the other characters; this uncertainty and motivation give the plays their interest. So often personal poetry has neither motivation nor uncertainty, hoping by this vacuity to be ingenuous and attractive. How do you write about politics without writing about self-interest? The poetic fondness for delicate, static images, in the Imagist tradition, is perhaps a guarantee of inauthenticity, eliminating any kind of engagement with social processes as the poet turns aside into a moment of unruffled sensitivity.
Arden's plays are not great poetry, partly because the functional members of interaction and plot exegesis are so visible all the time. They don't transcend the best poetry of their time. The faculty which makes language into an adornment is no doubt related to the obstinacy which confines poetry to a single voice, and prevents expansion into a social scene. His awareness of the limitations, in the current climate, of poetic drama, is reflected in his choice of two sixteenth-century poets, Skelton and David Lyndsay, as subjects for plays: poetry at that time was groping around, unfinished, inept, overreaching itself, but full of possibilities; Arden hopes that contemporary poetry can reach its new age by experimenting, in spite of likely failure. He typically chooses eras of change, when the value of people's actions and words is uncertain; this supplies the drama and points up the deadening effect of the lyric poet's need for certainty, assuring us both that he is emotionally pure (and unambivalent) and that he is in undisputed control of the poem, by means of 'technique'. Arden has denounced attachment to technique in favour of emotional commitment and experiment. This is the New Left attack on fi xed procedures again; perhaps British actors and directors are sufficiently skilled not to need to start from zero, but I would never say this about British poets.
The point at which I give up abusing poetry for not being drama is the importance of individual expression and introspection within drama. These supply the high points of a play, although they need not be verbal in nature; drama cannot scale the heights without passages of personal inner experience and revelation. The reason why Arden is so much better than other British playwrights has to do with his language, by which his characters externalise themselves:
'Lady. There is in me ane knowledge, potent, secret,
That I can set to rin ane sure concourse
Of bodily and ghaistly strength bet with the blood
Of me and of the starkest man alive. My speed
Hangs twin with yours; and starts ane double fl ood:
Will you with me initiate the deed
And saturatit consequence thereof - ?
Crack aff with your great club
The barrel-hoops of love
And let it pour
Like the enchantit quern that boils red-herring broo
Until it gars upswim the goodman's table and his door
While all his house and yard and street
Swill reeken, greasy, het, oer-drownit sax-foot fou-
Gilnockie. Red-herring broo -
Lady. In the pot. On the fire. All the warm sliden fishes, Johnny, out of the deep of the sea, guttit and filletit and well-rubbit with sharp onion and the rasp of black pepper...'
(Armstrong's Last Goodnight)
and clearly its peculiar virtues could be developed more fully off stage, in a poem. But on stage, we see the necessity of the emotion, we have all the information needed, we have the other people to whom emotion inevitably refers, we have the pressure of events forcing the character to feel and speak: how often does a poem attain this clarity and urgency?
Poetry and the modern Left
Minimal Chronology
1946- 72 (or even 1989) Cold War
from circa 1952 a uniquely drab, self-righteous, and flat era in British poetry
1951-64 Conservative government
1956 Khrushchev's "secret speech" at the 20th Party Congress reveals the extent of Stalin's crimes; its leaking and publication around the world splits the "external" Communist Parties. part of the seceders join the so-called New Left of the late Fifties. the obvious failure of the Soviet project leads to a realisation of human fallibility and of fixed systems of knowledge, and to the re-evaluation of centralised, spontaneous, improvised, and non-hierarchical types of power
from 1962 explosion of poetry magazines, linked to expansion of higher education and student numbers.
an unofficial poetry world emerges, and a new informal style of direct address
(continuously) flow of university graduates gradually increases educated portion of population, and so the composition of the poetry audience
1964-70 Labour Government. manages serious reforms this time, but preoccupied by exchange rate problems and prices and incomes policy.
bulk of decolonisation over by 1967
1968 upsurge of student militancy throughout Western world also brings a new aesthetic militancy. a Utopian moment named the Counter Culture or the Underground (amongst other things) believes generally in what is spontaneous, egalitarian, non-hierarchical, collective, and joyful. becomes compulsory to be "against the System", although the ideas only affect perhaps 1% of the population and the Conservatives make big gains in local elections. British art quite generally refounded on a new basis. the era also produces a swarm of drug-hippie-mystics who believe in Jung and are against reason.
1968 start of a new feminism, initially on a revolutionary Socialist basis and in reaction to the self-seeking machismo of male leaders of the Counter Culture. "the personal is political"
1970-74 Conservative Government. spectacularly loses two confrontations with the National Union of Mineworkers
1970 "ecology" becomes a household word and the finitude of natural resources enters mass awareness
1972 start of a boom in commodity prices, probably a sign of overheating due to the demands of the Vietnamese War, which leads to uncontrolled inflation in the UK, unbearable pressure on price-wage agreements; and also, peripherally, a boom in the price of paper which, like a similar boom circa 1950, leads to a wholesale reduction in the number of poetry magazines. over several years, disappearance of the classic independent poetry publishers
1974 (? 76; dates vary) reversal, probably worldwide, of Leftward drift of opinion. loss of belief in a specific future. collapse of Utopian trip of 68 results in scaling-down to more controllable patches of Utopia; e.g. personal and single-issue politics. also a cultural hangover. it is in higher education that the radicals of 68 really take root; perfecting books instead of society.
throughout the 1970s flow of amazing books of poetry bursting with the new ideas which had been floated, apparently beyond human reach, in 68
1974-79 Labour government. has a minority in Parliament. no major reforms; Cabient's time all taken up with making the prices and incomes policy stick, and with the Left-Right split within the Party. the possibilities of legislation are apparently exhausted, and this breaks all inhibitions on non-electoral politics
1976-7 fracas at the Poetry Society ends with resignation of the progressive members; symbolic end of the attempt to make the new poetry into the mainstream. virtual stop of new recruits to this experimental poetry. probable start of neo-conservative reaction in poetry.
1976 start of Punk, partly as a response to youth unemployment, which seems to have grown in every year since
(debatably) 1980 (and to present day) reduced grants and a sticky recruitment market for graduates diverts the attention of students towards their courses and CVs and away from student politics
continuously impact of feminism tends to discredit version of Leftism based on male craft unions, with emphasis on confrontations, test of strength, and de-emphasis on the low-paid and on housework. also tends to undermine the credibility of male poets, e.g. as moral authorities or political leaders, although the net effect of this is rather unclear. women poets definitely more vocal and self-confident than in previous decades.
1979-present day Conservative government
New Right is the source of intellectual innovations; concurrent strong drift to Right of all European Socialist parties. main plank of the government and their media jackals is the execration of the radicalism of the 1970s.
1983 Benn-Hattersley contest for Deputy Leadership represents high water mark of the Labour Left
1983 Neil Kinnock elected leader of the Labour Party; undertakes an unceasing campaign of centralisation and 'mediatisation'. the fight with Trotskyite 'entryism', Militant Tendency, is the most visible one.
1984-85 traumatic and finally defeated strike by NUM amid notable silence from Labour Party
1985 accession of Gorbachev; begins to introduce glasnost policies planned by Andropov.
circa 1987 emergence of a new group of formally radical poets, e.g. DS Marriott, Andrew Lawson, Drew Milne
November 1987 Black Friday (crash on stock exchanges), can be taken as the end of the New Right ascendancy. the fab new ideas of 1979 have had their wings broken by contact with economic reality
1989 collapse of Communist governments throughout Eastern Europe
1991 Presidents of constituent Soviet Socialist Republics agree to break up the Soviet State
continuously because the organs of the Welfare State are largely manned by Labourites, they are not only the front line facing social misery but also the containing wall making sure they get their legal entitlement, i.e. less than they need. teachers and welfare services are there managing the poor. with spending limits brutally imposed by central government, and the increase of poverty due to partial economic collapse, the Left is increasingly in a state of siege; exhausted, confronting its supporters, and saying nothing but "you can't do that". practical action is all too intrusive.
from 1992 new wave of 'productionisation' of higher education (more students, fewer staff) tends to wipe out the spare time in which staff had formerly written or reviewed poetry. the decision to double the number of students in higher education has to be applauded.
1993 Yeltsin dissolves the Russian Communist Party
1992 Conservatives win parliamentary elections for the fourth time in a row
1990s the electoral failure of Labour makes it hard for them to mediate political involvement for a new generation. the disenchantment takes various forms of: utter cynicism; dropping out and New Age religiosity; anarchist beliefs and non-party activism (Poll Tax protests, anti-road protests); personal politics scaled down to the interests of a single person.
1995 Tony Blair elected leader of Labour Party; beginning of new round of mediatisation, centralisation, rightward movement of policies, attempts to silence everyone except the leader; as if Party HQ hadn't been pursuing those policies since 1983
1995 the survivors of 1968 by now middle-aged, concentrated in higher education, and distinctly well-off. political frustration can go along with leading the good life. some of them are tired, cynical, and even hedonistic. links to younger groups of activists are strained; sometimes the temporary plan of having pure theoretical ideals which are detached from daily life is taken by the young as a model; the only social element is competing in the purity of their disdain.
list of Left-Modernist poets
Charles Madge Edwin Morgan Christopher Logue Ian Hamilton Finlay Eric Mottram Roy Fisher John Arden J.H. Prynne Ken Smith John James R.F. Langley Tom Raworth Anthony Barnett Wendy Mulford Jeffrey Wainwright Tom Pickard Allen Fisher David Chaloner Iain Sinclair Denise Riley Ulli Freer Alison Fell John Welch John Ash Bill Griffiths Barry MacSweeney Michael Haslam Gavin Selerie John Seed Nigel Wheale Martin Thom Adrian Clarke Peter Middleton cris cheek Rod Mengham John Wilkinson Maggie O'Sullivan Kelvin Corcoran Ian Duhig John Goodby Robert Sheppard Michael Ayres WN Herbert Norman Jope Andrew Lawson Drew Milne D.S. Marriott
Again, there are possible sources of error in these attributions. I must admit I've never asked Anthony Barnett what his politics are, but I can't suppose my guess is far wrong. I've never asked David Marriott, either; I guess that his Catholicism dictates a lot of his attitudes, but I can't think he'd be hanging out with us if he didn't share these basic left-wing attitudes. It's clear, though, that the contents of Angel Exhaust are dominated by these poets, who are mainly clustered (by date of birth) in a small chronological band, and that I as editor find it relatively difficult to get on with poets born after about 1956; or, more relevantly, who weren't affected by the primary wave of radicalisation which was already subsiding in 1977. To put it another way, if you examine the 7 issues of Angel Exhaust I've been involved with, you will find coverage of most of these poets. Another way: the magazine exists to publicize and comment on these authors and their congeners; more precisely, to set up contentious and simplified models, as a challenge to both poets and other theorists, which will stimulate the process of reception and interpretation. This, then, is the magazine's policy. It's no secret that the Jungian, ritual, mythic, credulous-fantasy style has made more running than a more cerebral and documentary Leftist, poetry in the past 15 years, or that I am not very happy about this. The named poets are divided between Marxists, Labourites, anarchists, or libertarian Left. Many of their attitudes could be found in religious activists with no political philosophy.
Pivotality
A basic question is how the experimental style of these poets reflects their political commitment, or indeed whether it can be made to coincide with political statement at all. Are they poets who just happen to be of Left sympathies, or do they write Socialistic poems? Following this, if we identify certain traits of style as Left, indicating a critical attitude towards the established order, a belief in equality, etc., are these diagnostics reliable, or do we also find the same traits being used by people who are in reality conservative or smugly centrist in their politics? An ancillary question is the rules of interpretation being applied by readers, possibly meaning that the poet's subtle anti-authoritarian gesture is lost on the reader; as in practice Left activists are mostly not inspired by contemporary poetry, and don't see it as a spiritual resource.
To understand the possible politicisation of poetry, we have to imagine the existing sociopolitical system as being on trial. All the readers can be assumed to have heard the evidence given in the first few years of the trial; it is wearisome for a new publication to repeat evidence we have already heard. In the course of the trial, quite obscure points assume major importance; because they shed light on the credibility of a witness, because they are inconsistencies which hint that somebody is lying, because the point has become to prove, not damage, but the wilfulness of that damage. In exact step with the boredom of the jurors at hearing basic facts again, they become sensitized to new but peripheral facts, and value them highly, and are acute at working out their implications for central issues. If we imagine the case for the existing order as an array of definite tenets, then disproving one of them, or undermining the evidence which does justify it, can upset that tenet and change the apparent value and solidity of the others, which related to it. If the effectiveness of a certain group as governors is in question, to demonstrate their failure at point A may cast doubt on their effectiveness at point M. If the news media largely give the version which the governors themselves either believe, or disbelieve but like, then presenting information or interpretations which have been excluded by the news media can raise doubts that the governance of society is pursuing the right criteria. The quality of the poetry which did this would depend on its being original, and acute, and rapid in making its points. The limits to the effectiveness of this kind of radical criticism are not really within the text, but in the eagerness of the audience to respond to the invalidation of a certain world-picture by devising new ones, testing them by the available evidence, and working out their details. A new society can only start in the imagination, its pre-existent state is nothingness. Fatigue, satiation, perhaps also anxiety about one's own ability to make headway in a new society, deprived of existing advantages, can sap one's ability to build new interpretations of society. At such times the search for radical change has to be suspended, while one recovers; it is predicated on strength and intellectual coherence. The operation of the radical, social, imagination on an unvitiated possible state is perhaps the most enjoyable experience there is.
The definition states that a program is data plus procedures. We live in an excess of data, due to mechanical capturing and storing devices such as cameras and printing presses; but the procedures for discovering reality and policy within this excess are less conscious and perhaps less evolved. I find that the radicals of the 17th century believed in the secrets of time being hidden in nature, in holy scripture, and in the stirrings of the human heart, and were obsessed by the laws of interpretation by which they could be disengaged. In Morgan Llwyd's Llyfr y tri ederyn (1666), we read: "(Eagle): But what is the Ark, do you say, in secret? (Dove): Immanuel. The Saviour. In this ark were three cells (that is the sum of every nature); as are spirit, soul, and body. (...) If it had not been for him being immured in the flesh of a man, and withstanding the flood of malice, there would not have been one flesh preserved, nor any man nor animal keeping their breath until now. Out of this Ark of truth all the evil birds flew, as the angels formerly fell into the great sea (that is the spirit of Nature) to glut on the dead carcasses which are the souls of miserable sinners." In this practice of typology a new text is revealed under the bare, explicit, text of the Scriptures, and this new text includes the present time and ourselves. Analogy is beyond the simple evidence of the senses. In the 19th century phase of Socialism, the stress was on self-taught working men, raised to a state of high excitement by the knowledge and ideas available through reading, and liberated by their ability to read critically, to pry apart and dismantle the archaic, seamlessly integrated, story of how things are, which was told by clergy, politicians, approved books, and newspapers. The Left activist remains someone who reads a lot, perhaps too much, and who disbelieves a great deal of what he-she reads. The staple of the Left, arguably, is both primary evidence and critical procedures; the reportage of what is really happening in Liverpool, Petersburg, or Guatemala tends to come in prose, or film; modern poetry has specialised in the analysis of procedures. The Left's intensification of reading has distorted and destroyed poetry, and forced it to transcend itself. The computing analogy suggests that it's just as valuable, in the search for understanding, to spend a man-year probing and improving procedures, as to spend a man-year "in the field" collecting raw data. Moreover, it's quite reasonable to suppose that John Major, or Michael Portillo, are in possession of raw data which is the same as everyone else's, and of quite high accuracy; the operation of secondary analysis, in the form of buried assumptions, teleologies, ideals, and projective stereotypes, may have more to reveal than simply accumulating figures about poverty. This line of argument declares poetry which is technically innovative, or which puts the conventions of reading and writing in question, as socially radical. This is rather permissive; one has to add that, in the era being considered, thinking people generally considered that the existing power order was inherently fragile - any challenge to its props would result in an understanding of the world, or in a social order, which was more radical. It's like the falling vase: when it breaks, it can never be restored to its original shape; which, in system space, is surrounded by thousands of other vase configurations, all equivalent (it's in pieces). One intact state is surrounded by an endless variety of broken states. If society is fragile, then however you break it, it's going to become more equal, happier, more Socialist, more feminist, more decolonized, more free. Breaking up the cognitive and lexical order of the poem was felt as a kind of rite to bring this process about, also as a foretaste of it. Now, someone whose beliefs are Fascist or Social Darwinist or Hobbesian may be equally radical, but in the expectation that the natural state towards which a destabilised society will flow is one of outright domination of the weak by the strong; I am here to record that the form-questioning poets of this period did not interpret the hydrography in that way.
The bridge between the large space of Society and the small space of the poem, also between the large space of History and the small expanse of the poet's personal experience, is analogy. An observation point anywhere on the Earth's surface is adequate to obtain a great deal of information about the Sun; and a poet in any locality may be able to catch valid information about Society. Even a short stretch of speech contains hundreds of verbal gestures; it is reasonable to suppose that these exhibit analogies to social processes, and so that ideas about what Society is or should be can be encoded in these numerous gestures by analogy. The language structures of a poem represent, we may think, both communication, the basic social act, and thought, the basic individual act; as, how could they not. The design of these gestures is a pivot linking the two objects of verbal act and image of Society; what we are looking for is pivotality. Presumably, it's more effective if the political notions are encoded into the elemental structures of language, since these are most frequent, rather than into the top-level structures, while the simple structures remain conventional and traditional. If your rhythms, vocabulary, imagery, etc., are traditional, then you are plumping for conservatism even if your overt beliefs are radical. One way of expressing belief in a new, deliberately designed, society is to write poetry in a new and deliberately designed form.
System limits
Contest, advocacy, uncertain outcomes
Naked and repetitive as sensations might be, ideas can only enter poetry under certain conditions. The emotional interest of a train of argument seems to depend on the equal matching of two advocates of opposite opinions, and the continued uncertainty about which will overcome. The most palpable limit to the project is the existence of the Right, as body of people. The precondition of the Socialist analysis being true is the conservative analysis being false. It seems to me that the confrontation between two sets of ideas, or two sets of people, is generally avoided in our poetry; which, in fact, is attractive partly because it offers us the company of attractive people, i.e. those of our persuasion. I guess that the scope of a modern poet is limited by their ability to let in the negation of their basic ideas, to create voices and logical positions of the Right within their work which have real flesh and blood; without regressing into despair or losing sight of Socialist essentials. If the contest between Left and Right is so chancy in the real society we live in, at least in between poems, surely we can face some uncertainty, some anxiety about the outcome, inside the poem. Surely a poem which doesn't show the contest between ideas, and doesn't let them show their paces, and let the opposition on stage, although they bluster and scowl and strike little children, can't be a political poem. The besetting weakness of modern poetry has been to restrict the right-wing enemy to a puppet caricature, although these people run the economy and the political system. The result? poetry expels politics and economics from its boundaries. The reasoning is that creating credible right-wing figures would absorb energy, which would mystically weaken the life-energy throbbing in the positive, pro-humanity, parts of the poem; but really this simplification drains most of the energy of the poem. Where there is no opposition, there can't be a victory. If a certain kind of poetry relies on the attractive narrating person being centre stage the whole time, and on that person's voice going on the whole time, this seems to be individualistic, and not Socialistic; and lyric, but not political.
In Daniel Owen's novel, Hunangofiant Rhys Lewis (1885), there is a dispute in a North Welsh mine about a detested new overseer from England; while a mob pushes him onto a leaving train, a heroic Methodist, the narrator's brother, harangues them in Welsh telling them not to be so stupid; a policeman, who can't speak Welsh, mistakes the intent, bashes him over the head, and arrests him. Later, the old squire and JP sends him down without listening to any defence witnesses, stating that an example will be made or the inferior classes will lose all respect and the consequences will be unforeseeable. Owen sets his enemies up perfectly and wins the debate; no-one could maintain, at this point, that English-speaking government was legitimate in Wales or that angry old Tory landowners were fit to administer the law on people with new ideas. Surely this kind of staging of arguments isn't so difficult if you have the patience.
Pollution and mortification
The social justice promised by Socialist advance means that some interests are going to have to be sacrificed. The self, as it were, pays the costs for the prosperity of the group; the strong stand the costs of sustaining the weak. The pleasures of direct self-aggrandisement have to mutate into the pleasures of being popular and good. So one strand of Left poetry explores the psychological consequences of a shrinking self. Where this becomes dubious is where the poet is unable to express desire, and sees mortification as a form of competitive advantage, proving that this poet is cooler and more advanced than other poets who are so bourgeois as to want things. Insofar as modern poetry attributes virtue to renunciation, fasting, submission, and the avoidance of pleasure, it will repeat and recycle the moral and aesthetic system of Christianity. A test of the robustness of Left poetry is its ability to contain the idea that human behaviour, broadly speaking, can be summed up as a repeating pattern of forming a desire, purposive action to attain it, and gratification and calm on its being attained. This summary wouldn't be so hard to accept if it were applied to, say, mice or lizards. Taking the broad view, the purpose of economic activity is to fulfil the desires of individuals. Indeed, the purpose of society is to fulfil the desires of individuals. More, the purpose of Socialism is to enable the desires of individuals to be fulfilled more thoroughly. The consequences of Left political parties letting the electorate decide that this party regards the wishes of the people as sinful, and will go to lengths to frustrate them, are far-reaching. We recall the pilgrims atVanity Fair:
"And as they wondered at their apparel, so they did likewise at their speech; for few could understand what they said (...) these pilgrims set very light by all their wares; they cared not so much as to look upon them; and if they called upon them to buy, they would put their fingers in their ears, and cry "Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity", and look upwards, signifying that their trade and traffic was in heaven."
I'm afraid it's quite true that the mannerisms of this school of poets are Puritanical. They should especially beware of the vices of hypocrisy; of competing to be more righteous than anyone else, and pointing the finger at those who aren't as mortified as they are; of producing writing which shows ideal behaviour, but is thin and unconvincing because of its omissions; of primness; of psychological ignorance. I think my colleague Miss v.d. Beukel may have had something to say about this. It's important not to insist on first-person presentation; there's no problem in a poet effacing him- or herself as long as the appetites of life are visible in other characters in the poem. First-person realism is a blunt instrument. Peering into someone else's personal life in writing is only tolerable if you aren't prim and priggish.
I have left myself no space to say anything about feminism, but it's clear that (a) feminist arguments have attracted more attention than Socialist arguments in recent years (b) the two movements aren't really in competition, since it's unlikely that the female population could be prosperous in the midst of an immiserated male population (c) feminism is an outstanding source of original critical thought (d) its temporary effect has been to produce big areas of silence in poetry, making the problem of presenting accounts of desire and gratification, or any psychological process, worse than before.
Note. This section didn't make it into the printed version of AE Thirteen, because it became increasingly apparent to me that the relation between poetry and the Left was so complex and so passionately important that no detail could be blurred, and in fact that the whole series of Angel Exhaust was a sub-chapter in that story: making a sub-subsection of that sub-chapter an account of the whole generated several paradoxes and was a violation of the principles of hierarchical system design. This relation is precisely the overarching project of which every page of AE, before I arrived and after, is a part.