Why ‘conservative’ poetry is only one thing, not the other

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

I find myself almost mortally offended by the discovery I made today that someone can take the words ‘conservative’ and ‘poetry’ and put them together to form a pretender to the title of genre.

I’m not in the habit of dissing other peoples’ blogs because there are so many I like and so many more I don’t like or even find utterly objectionable in content, but I make an exception today. Take a look at this one.

Scary.

The title of the blog differs from what’s in the URL. You see that what we’re presented with as a given is allegedly ‘Canadian Political Poetry’. All caps. Now, I do believe poetry can be political. Absolutely it can. You only need to check out hundreds of poems in my archive to find topics such as taxation, debt, public smoking bans, sexuality, greed, global warming, Iraq and more being ruminated on in verse. Poetry is inherently political both in the widest sense of the word, and the narrowest.

I find it impossible to believe that the catch-all title of the conservative poetry blog is true. If this blog were titled ‘English Poetry’, would you believe my work to be the be-all and end-all? Neither can we be expected to believe that a site going by the name of ‘Canadian Political Poetry’ offers everything the title implies. Judging by its content, it is a minority sport at best, at worst an affront to Canada, and Canadian poets, and poets in general. Whether left- or right-wing, intelligent and excellent poets on all sides of the political fence don’t like to read bad poetry. I know many other poets who share my view that it is simply a profoundly depressing experience to put yourself through. You might think it instead to be encouraging for us, but no: good poetry does that job.

Poetry is not exclusively owned by the left-wing, the libertarian, the minority groups, either. One of the most influential modern poets, Ezra Pound, was an absolute fascist – who, it has to be said, spent time in a lunatic asylum as they were called back then. After the war he was charged with treason back home in America, but was declared unfit to stand trial and sent into the white room for twelve years. There is a lot of debate today over whether he really was insane. His writings don’t indicate that he was, and the insanity plea was part of a plea bargain designed to save his sorry ass.

This famous poet supported Hitler, he was arrogant, he hated Jews, he was a decidedly unpleasant genius who, despite his unquestionable poetic abilities, has never done anything for me. Believe me, I’ve tried to read his work – I’ve got a copy of his Selected Poems – and have always found it exclusive by design. You need a code to decipher the best of his stuff. At worst, you need degrees in Latin and Greek. Now, Ezra Pound was indisputably a great poet. But he wasn’t popular with the people. He was popular with critics, with those who liked word-games. In the period of time in which he was prominent, sales of poetry books nose-dived and have yet to recover. He wasn’t, however, entirely to blame for that by any means – much of the poetry of his day had moved away from being immediately accessible, though due in part to his influence.

Hardly anyone reads Pound these days, other than academics and those required to do so in order to pass their university exams. Right-wing poets as we would understand the term today are actually quite rare, and it is even rarer that they connect to a mainstream readership. Carol Ann Duffy, Sharon Olds, Simon Armitage… All these and many more are leftwards-leaning, if the content of their poems is anything to go by, which I think it is. It would be unfair to extend an analysis of right- or left-wing tendencies to poets of bygone ages, although it is interesting to note that many had lifestyles outside the socially accepted ones of their day. Byron, for example. Man, he was a real wild child.

Sharon Olds in particular is a hero of mine. I don’t use, and strongly dislike, the word heroine and, as an aside, words like actress . I mean, why give gender to vocation? The worst of all is poetess. Ugh. I love Olds for her poetry first and foremost, but this love was compounded when she wrote a public letter to Dubya, refusing to attend some gathering over the invasion of Iraq. She’s also a damn fine poet. See, I think in most but not all instances, poets are found to have sensitivity to not only language but the world around them. They generally care.

Another great usurper of establishment values is Benjamin Zephaniah, who refused the OBE because he wanted no association with the imperial past of Great Britain. As he is a British Rastafarian, it came as no surprise to me, and perfectly understandable, that he was offended by the title of the award. It reminded him, he said at the time, of ‘thousands of years of brutality… of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalized’.

I’m now going to quote from the site of the ‘conservative poet’ a few lines which, to my mind, are the complete antithesis not only of good poetry but the very core of what poetry is, and should be, about:

Should these single mothers be told they need a husband man?
Is this too difficult for our politically-correct brains to scan?
And if they can’t find a man, their welfare payments should drop,
We can’t afford single mothers of the world in our welfare shop.

Putting aside the fact that these four lines qualify as the worst poetry I’ve read in quite a while – a small child could do better – there is nothing of the affirmatory in the above, is there? It’s all about bitterness and moral outrage vented against one group of human beings. This is gutter, not conservative, poetry. There is nothing conservative about letting rip against women or minorities in verse. It is akin to sarcasm being the lowest form of wit; here, we see poetry subverted and corrupted, inherently and inevitably clumsy because the practice of poetry works against such themes.

Here’s another snippet:

Homosexual bishops conducting church interaction,
Pedophile priests being caught in lots of their action,
Churches being torn down because of lack of a crowd,
Gone are the days when Christians sang and prayed out loud.

Notice the really tired and boring way in which gay people and paedophiles (we spell the word differently) are lumped together by the truly depraved in thinking, in this instance sitting one above the other in piss-poor verse. There is no link between the two, despite the best efforts of the prejudiced to find one or convince the world that one exists.

The best poetry, whatever the subject matter, is never didactic. It does not preach, it does not instruct. It informs, it helps us look at things in new ways. It liberates the reader. Good poetry is far more demanding than prose; with a novel, you can skip whole paragraphs and merrily leap from word to word. The words only serve to form sentences that are components of the narrative drive. With good poetry, every word is there for a reason. Not one word is superfluous.

This is why an 80-page collection of poems can sometimes take much longer to read and absorb than a 1,000-page novel. I’m not knocking the art of novel-writing here. I’m simply showing a big difference between two forms of creative expression. Novels can also aim to teach and get away with it, if the narratives are strong enough to carry the messages; poems inform and provide springboards for the reader’s imagination, inspiring new ideas and confirming the mystery and wonder of life. Of course, some novels do that too.

The ancient role of the poet was mystical, poetry serving as a window into other realms and providing for oracular visions. Very useful for kings and clan leaders about to go into battle. Very bad for the poet if the battle was lost. These are the breaks. Fantastic poetry is, regardless of whether it follows rigidly disciplined forms – say, out of the hat, Coleridge – or brilliantly spews out in stream-of-consciousness – again, random poet example, Allen Ginsberg – hugely dependent upon material flowing from the heart and soul. Not the mind as such. The mind is engaged in sculpting the language, but the mind itself does not, in my opinion, come up with the actual goods in the first draft stage. The input of the eye and ear impact upon the soul, which then sends out the inspiration to the mind, to translate into actual being.

Every poet has a different take, of course, coloured by education and experience. If we didn’t, then all poetry would deal with the same subjects. And that would become boring very, very quickly for anyone. But there are some places you just don’t go, some things you just don’t do, not because they offend – poetry can, rightly or wrongly, depending on the poem and the reader, be very offensive indeed in content and language – but because the art doesn’t work that way.

If this guy put less thought into coming up with rhymes to tie in with his hateful agenda of the moment, and spent time opening up his heart to show some compassion, he might stand a chance of becoming a real poet. I’m being charitable there. The truth is, I don’t think that’s possible. I leave you for now with a final extract, probably the most shockingly vile to the majority of my lovely readers. It tells us all we need to know about the man who wrote it.

Bureaucratic left-wing multicultural Charter types in charge,
Will ensure the next generation will be Islamic en large,
Because Muslims have fertility rates three times ours,
Different religion, four wives and no feminists empowered.

He does have something in common with Ezra Pound. And it isn’t good poetry.