When is poetry political?

[graham]

As you know the relationship between Poet in the City and Amnesty is now firmly established. We are about to hold an exciting Anna Akhmatova event there on 18 Sept, organised by Daniel Macadam. We have previously held successful events, one about Sufism and one entitled Tortured Language featuring poets formerly imprisoned or exiled from their homelands.

As you know Poet in the City is a non-political organisiation. It is a broad church, including many individuals with a variety of political views. I think that this is important. The charity is about the promotion of poetry and needs to retain this broad and open-minded approach. On the other had I have always taken the view that there is nothing political about human rights. This mirrors the attitude of Amnesty itself, which does not advocate any particular system, but merely seeks to protect the human, and in particular to campaign against wrongful imprisonment, torture and the suppression of freedom of expression.

However every year when we hold the Amnesty-based event someone accuses PinC of being 'too political'. Someone has already rung up to complain about the current Akhmatova event because - as usual with these events - an Amnesty action card was contained with the invitation. Last year one correspondent even suggested that the Sufism event was giving succour to terrorists! Should this be a source of concern? It is surely an important thing for PinC to remain studiously apolitical or even (like Caeser's wife) above suspicion? Or should we see it as evidence that poetry has the ability to touch upon almost every subject, including some of the most pressing issues of today's world?

When is poetry political, and when is it just poetry?

[post-futurist1]

It's great to hear that we've already been accused of being 'too political' - all publicity is good publicity when done well and any company associating themselves with Amnesty could never exactly be called an extremist now, could they?

To answer your questions, Graham: I don't think that this should be a cause of too much concern for us because, as you said, Amnesty is not a directly political organisation and neither are we - if we were, we wouldn't even consider talking to some of the companies and sectors that we work with due to so many large companies investments. This alone proves us apolitical and simply a charity organisation.

I agree that this is evidence of poetry's importance and effect - throughout history, poetry has had an even more important and direct role up until the 18th century. I would however, posit that this doesn't mean we should try to curb any of the poets we use from expressing their political views after their reading at our events. I may be wrong but, I'd hope, as soon as they're finished on our podium, they can express whatever they so wish to whomsoever they wish. Would you agree?

[post]

This is rushed: I apologize. I might respond to Post-Futurist with the question, 'when is poetry not political?' to Graham with 'what is just poetry?'. At a simple level, politics is rooted in rule: the word has developed into being ruled, managed and, the supposed compensations, protected as an individual and provided with a concept that individuality is inconsequential. What supposedly matters is something broader, ideas perched on nationhood or the paradoxes of liberty. J.H. Prynne, back in 2000, touched on how it is through language that the social conscious is mounted into action, that language is no victim, no innocent detachable construct, twisted out of shape by statehood (‘A Quick Riposte to Handke’s Dictum about War and Language’ Quid, 6 (2000), 23-26).

When we fall back on nationalism, often we are confronted by a linguistic sphere; when on liberty, freedom of speech, of belief framed in language, are top of the list. Moreover, a speech act is the very moment of conformity or dis-. Poetry, at some base level, suggests that an individual has something to say or do. It is a disagreement with the polis [in the massy sense it must lean towards in the mutation of terms like political, thus representing something along the lines of the tension between the individual and the community] or it is a detachment from such in the moment of offering: the poet slips into the hierophantic role. There is a necessary dialectic between, in both instances, serving the community and rejecting the community (a dialectic faced in the details of implication in a language).

With reference to the use of language, the POEM suggests levels of care, knowledge, thought, focus and decision. In the sacerdotal or renegadary position, every phrase is assumed to be crucially weighted. Every phrase condones, condemns certain spheres of life. A poem which, to the casual glance, looks to be 'Un-political', must surely, for that casual glance[r], embrace the political system within which it has been written: in accepting linguistic codes, the poet refuses to condemn and thus agrees with the persistence of the current market economies (tied up with language, to give simplistic examples, in the phraseology of advertisements, tabloids, music industries, film industries); in not addressing them, the poet tacitly accepts the conditions of government, foreign policy etc.

We credit the poet with care and intellect and thus assume a consideration of the present in all its extensions. Of course, this is only a shallow look at the poem at hand. Closer analysis should hopefully reveal focus: why certain linguistic structures have been used, why the events recorded in The Times that morning were not important to the writer, why something else is at stake. But I can't really see how poetry, or language at every turn, can avoid the world for even a second, a minute, let alone for the hours of writing, and thus not-be-political. That 'they can express whatever they so wish' suggests politics should wait until after the poem. 'I mean, how silly'.

[Gerontius]

Not a structuralist, then?

[RehanQayoom]

We place too many placards and labels which results in prejudice and ignorance. Sufism being connected with a promotion for terrorism is purely farcical. There is no connection at whatsoever, again the person that made this complaint must be anti-Islamic if not totally ignorant of the true Islamic ideals rather than the ones portrayed or attributed to Islam on TV.

[penny]

"You cannot find the news in poetry, yet men die every day for lack of what is found there"

Adrienne Rich
"What is found there"

[danielharrison]

Hello all.

The comments above have been very thoughtful. But aren't we forgetting why we pay attention to poetry in the first place? The context argument has been, as we all know, fully worn out by recent movements away from form. If poetry is man-made, then so are its consequences. I would suggest that politics and poetry are, although not indivisible, closer than we have previously conceded.

'"Politics have no relation to morals." -

-- Niccolo Machiavelli

All the best,

Daniel Harrison.

[goodgod]

I like the thought..The Times that morning were not important to the writer, why something else is at stake. But I can't really see how poetry, or language at every turn, can avoid the world for even a second, a minute, let alone for the hours of writing, and thus not-be-political.

[Arnold60]

"Political" poetry. All human activity is political because it takes place in a context--the context of history. Sending someone a recipe for crab meat salad is one thing if you work food prep in a restaurant kitchen. It means something else if you're Nancy Reagan.
Poets have been political, in some sense of the word, from the earliest beginnings to the present. Enheduanna, Sumerian poet, priestess of the moon goddess Inanna, the earliest poet whose name is known. The Chinese government compiled collections of popular folk songs--for example, the Shih Ching, the Book of Songs--as a way of learning something about what the people were thinking. (Did Nixon listen to Bob Dylan or Joan Baez or Pete Seeger? Does George Bush listen to Billy Bragg or Tracy Chapman or rap music?)
Homer was political. (George Bush on the walls of Troy.) The Bhagavad Gita (which J. Robert Oppenheimer quoted as he watched the first atomic bomb explode in the New Mexico desert) was and is political. The plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripedes were defining forces in Greek society. Dante and Shakespeare and Milton were all political. (If Dante were writing today, who would he consign to the ninth circle of Hell?) The great flowering of art and culture in medieval Spain grew originally from the founding of a new Umayyad dynasty in exile by survivors of the conquest of Damascus by the Abbasids.
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