Why is political poetry so hard to write?

Poetry that addresses core political news, the stuff of broadsheet newspapers’ current affairs pages.  Cuts, cuts, cuts, the financial crisis like an earthquake with a lot of nasty aftershocks, Japan, the Arab Spring... When I was in Suffolk last month I didn’t look at the internet for several days in a row.  Early one morning I logged on at Bruisyard Hall’s vast kitchen table (only place with a good signal): the UN had declared a no-fly zone over Libya, and there was a Japanese nuclear emergency.  It felt as if I’d time-travelled forward, much more than a few days – unsettling. 

Where is the poetry that can keep up with this?  I want to persuade myself that it’s still possible.  

Peterloo Massacre, published by Richard Carlile

Shelley could write political poetry. 

I met Murder on the way -

He had a mask like Castlereagh -

Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might

Be in admirable plight,

For one by one, and two by two,

He tossed them human hearts to chew

Which from his wide cloak he drew.

Next came Fraud, and he had on,

Like Eldon, an ermined gown;

His big tears, for he wept well,

Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

And the little children, who

Round his feet played to and fro,

Thinking every tear a gem,

Had their brains knocked out by them.

Clothed with the Bible, as with light,

And the shadows of the night,

Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy

On a crocodile rode by.

And many more Destructions played

In this ghastly masquerade,

All disguised, even to the eyes,

Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

Last came Anarchy: he rode

On a white horse, splashed with blood;

He was pale even to the lips,

Like Death in the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown;

And in his grasp a sceptre shone;

On his brow this mark I saw -

'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!'

With a pace stately and fast,

Over English land he passed,

Trampling to a mire of blood

The adoring multitude.

How did Shelley do it?  There’s grotesque imagery in The Mask of Anarchy, written in 1819 soon after the Peterloo Massacre.  And anger.  Both satire and mounting anger are reflected in the list-like narrative’s insistent metre and rhyme scheme.

It was easier then… to be didactic, to grandstand, to personify abstracts and use allegory, to find extreme tyranny and injustice close to home. 

It’s still possible.  NxtGen can do it.  Here’s the refrain of his rap on the NHS. 

Andrew Lansley,

greedy Andrew Lansley,

tosser!

The NHS is not for sale you grey-haired manky codger!

His smart lyrics, whose rhyme and rhythm would still stand up without the backing music, exploit the bureaucratic language of privatisation:

care will be farmed out to private companies,

who will sell their service to the NHS via GPs

who will have more to do with the service purchase arrangements 

than anything to do with seeing their patients…

Rap lacks poetic inhibitions, and has the licence to tell. 

Poetry magazines have very little political poetry: is it that they don’t get sent it, or that the stuff they’re sent is bad?  What about climate change and other environmental destruction, for example: can it only be written about well, according to today’s poetry rules, by leaving it out of the poem and instead praising what we have left? 

Carol Ann Duffy (who used to be great on gender politics in The World’s Wife, knife crime in that exam board-banned poem) commissioned poems about war for The Guardian a couple of years ago.  The result was some well-constructed poems, but they didn’t lift off the page; torn between showing and telling, they couldn’t compete with the reality we keep seeing and hearing. 

Or with ex-US soldier-in-Iraq Brian Turner’s poems in his first book Here Bullet.  (I’m not suggesting that only a soldier can write war poems.  And these count as poetry-of-witness; my definition of political poetry is flexible..)  Some of them are very good.   Here is the end of ‘The Hurt Locker’:

Believe it when four men

step from a taxicab in Mosul

to shower the street in brass

and fire. Open the hurt locker

and see what there is of knives

and teeth. Open the hurt locker and learn

how rough men come hunting for souls.

The American poet Carolyn Forché does it in The Colonel, here, which begins: 

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife

carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her

nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily

papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him.

The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house.

On the television was a cop show. It was in English. 

This prose poem builds up, from that calmly sinister start to something surreal and appalling.  Quoting from the middle or end could ruin the poem for anyone who hasn’t read it.  It was written in 1978 and the setting feels Latin American, like something out of Gabriel Garcia Marquez; but it could be now, Syria or Ivory Coast. 

Derek Mahon does it, in ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’, another seventies poem, the worst of times in his native Northern Ireland.  He triangulates – between the mushrooms locked in the shed; the JG Farrell novel, Troubles, that’s a starting point for the poem; and the politics, implied throughout until that one startling line at the end of the second passage below: 

The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling
Utensils and broken flower-pots, groaning
For their deliverance, have been so long
Expectant that there is left only the posture.

….

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!

That last line is the 54^th (of 60); by then, the poem has earned it. 

When a political poem works as well as those last two, it seems to get around, onto school syllabuses and into people’s poem repositories.  And the NHS rap has been viewed over 300,000 times on YouTube. There is surely stuff being written in other parts of the world, whether Burma or Bahrain, Congo or China, that few of us can access.

When I want a fix of really great political poetry I tend to go to those Eastern Europeans who wrote it in the Iron Curtain years of the 20^th century: Herbert, Miłosz, Szymborska, Holub, etc.  Some of them were experts on writing about things by leaving them out.  There’s an excellent anthology edited by Daniel Weissbort called The Poetry of Survival: Post-war Poets of Central and Eastern Europe.  And there are so many other great poets who did it in the 20^th century: Akhmatova, Celan, Darwish…  (World class English language writers don’t come to mind so immediately in this context: Yeats, Auden…?)  There’s Carolyn Forché’s anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. 

Maybe Brecht, who also belongs on the list, sums up what they had in common:

In the dark times, will there

also be singing?

Yes, there will be singing.

About the dark times.

But what happens when Brecht’s put against TS Eliot’s ‘raid on the inarticulate’?  Today's world of politics is all too articulate. Political discourse is often dreadful: mean, evasive and dishonest, from the Commons speech (satirised in Carol Ann Duffy’s  ‘Weasel Words’) to the Today Programme.  Political news is everywhere, fluent, vivid, exciting, appalling, updated by the minute, illustrated by the best pictures.  

How can poetry make all this new, when it’s new anyway?  When we get angry about politics, don’t we mostly get angry in prose, in words that are all too sayable?  And getting angry isn’t the way to access the place where poetry comes from.  Maybe that place has changed, from Shelley’s day.  In the western world, anyway.

The poetry rules and customs have certainly changed, to a point where rapper NxtGen can do things that the poetry establishment can’t. 

Any ideas on who's currently setting the world alight with political poems would be very welcome.