In the US, the electorate braces itself for what may be the nastiest and most bizarre presidential election in living memory. The Brexit referendum in the UK has taken on the characteristics of high (or low) farce. Meanwhile, here in Ireland, a centrist party that won less than a third of the total seats in the March general election is trying to cobble together some kind of minority government with the tacit support of another centrist party that refuses to enter coalition as junior partners. If there was ever a time for a politics-themed Poster poems, this is it.
Matters political of one sort or another have exercised the minds of poets in various ways down the ages. At times, the poems they produced have been pithy and epigrammatic, like EE Cummings’s A Politician – possibly the most succinct political put-down in the history of the art – or Langston Hughes’s prophecy of change in Black Workers.
Cummings also satirised the political abuse of language through hackneyed cliches in Next to of course god America; the poem is a technical tour de force in which he weaves the commonplaces of political discourse into a perfect rhyming sonnet. In Iphigenia: Politics, Thomas Merton draws on classical matter rather than classic form to base his critique. Merton’s political stance may be more subtle than Cummings’s, but the poems are linked by a shared distain for how our “leaders” are prepared to abuse both language and innocent people in the pursuit of power.
John Clare’s famous poem The Fallen Elm is a protest against the felling of trees in the name of profit and enclosure. Clare views this act of vandalism both as an attack on community and on the very language he uses to protest against it. In a sense, the poem is a prefiguring of Auden’s “poetry makes nothing happen”; despite Clare’s powerful utterance, the trees, and the way of life they stood for, are gone.
In many respects, The Fallen Elm is also echoed in the great poem Bagpipe Music by Auden’s friend Louis MacNeice. MacNeice’s poem marks the destruction of the culture of highland Scotland at the hands of contemporary commercialisation.
While Clare was lamenting the destruction of his rural world, Blake was bemoaning the rise of urban poverty and oppression in the poem London. His political poems are visionary, but can seem a little light on detail. The same cannot be said of Irish-born New Yorker Lola Ridge who documented, in poems like The Ghetto, the effect of political disenfranchisement and neglect on the urban poor. Ridge’s ghetto dwellers are afforded a dignity in poetry that the political reality of their situation might otherwise have denied them.
Although he may well never have read her, Linton Kwesi Johnson’s political poetry is closer to Ridge’s work than might first meet the eye. He, too, gives a voice to the marginalised who live in the neglected corners of the urban environment. His Sonny’s Lettah is not just a protest against the politically motivated SUS laws that were used as a weapon against young black men in the UK in the late 1970s, it is also a glimpse into a different kind of social organisation that existed alongside the mainstream, one that is deprived of political power but is strong in other ways.
Johnson’s work bridges the gap between poetry and song, performance and the page. Another politically engaged writer to achieve this is, of course, Bob Dylan, whose work continued to have a political edge long after he purposefully abandoned overt protest. However, his most direct and powerful political statements are to be found in his earlier songs, and few are more powerful than his dissection of the politics of power, money, justice and class in The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.
And so this month’s Poster poems challenge is to write poems that engage, in one way or another, with the political sphere. You may be in satirical mood, or you might want to document the impact of politics on society. You could even be straightforwardly angry. However you feel, please share your political poems here.
