Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Masque of Anarchy” (“Ye are many – they are few!”), written in reaction to the Peterloo massacre of 1819, is arguably the greatest political poem of all time. However, it was not published until 13 years after Peterloo and its most striking impact came almost a century later, in the New York protest marches led by Pauline Newman. The timeline for Labour’s current leadership election is rather tighter in comparison.
Publishing Poets for Corbyn was never intended as hagiography in rhyme, but rather as a collection of poems celebrating and supporting our chance to reaffirm Labour’s historical values. On Corbyn’s nomination, I invited some of my favourite left-leaning poets to contribute. A few of the more hard-line turned down the offer, seeing little hope in parliamentary democracy. But Michael Schmidt, general editor of PN Review and one of the contributors, put me in touch with a number of enthusiastic Corbynites. WN Herbert and Andy Jackson’s New Boots and Pantisocracies was an invaluable source, alongside Jody Porter’s Well Versed series in the Morning Star.
The book, featuring 20 writers including Michael Rosen, Pascale Petit, Nicholas Murray and Ian Pindar, opens with Tom Pickard’s caustic assessment of austerity Britain. I felt this reflected where much of the support for Corbyn’s leadership run stems from: not only a hatred of Tory attacks on the poor, but also a growing dismay with a Labour party acquiescent to the prevailing neoliberal narrative. Through a mixture of new and republished poems, the rest of the book attempts to strike a balance between enthusiasm for Corbyn and more general calls for a return to humane politics. Allegory is, of course, a powerful tool for the political poet as evidenced in the macaws, lobsters and dolls that populate the book. Here poetry has a real advantage over potentially hectoring op-eds.
As is clear to the reader, many of the poets harbour a strong anti-Blair sentiment. Ian Birchall serves a warning to (Blairite) Labour politicians of a career ending in the House of Lords “Sans teeth, sans brain, sans guts, sans principles”. Nick Telfer continues the theme, editing out an obscenity from his poem pleading for “NO BLAIR”. We couldn’t get much further from Cool Britannia, that unbecoming moment when celebrities and artists embraced George W Bush’s pal.
Erin Belieu’s darkly comic “Poem of Philosophical and Parental Conundrums Written In An Election Year” closes the book. Belieu, a Hilary Clinton supporting American, transforms the political into the personal with her look at divorce and parenthood. It’s well-known that Corbyn divorced his second wife following a dispute over where to send their son to school. Indeed, an alternative title considered for Poets for Corbyn was A Comprehensive Divorce. Corbyn’s followers, analogously, are hoping for a comprehensive divorce with New Labour ideology.Reaction to it has ranged from the mocking to the well considered. Patrick Kidd, cricket writer and diarist, called it “ear-bleedingly awful” in the Times. Howzat for an endorsement? The irrepressible rightwing blogger Guido Fawkes declared it “beyond sublime, this is peak Corbynismo”. The Spectator’s Steerpike emphasised Corbyn’s distinctive facialhair, a visual trope picked up in cover design by Evan Johnston. Joe Linker’s The Coming of the Toads saw parallels with the songs of Woody Guthrie. Harry Giles’s review in the politics section of Prospect asked ‘What can poets really add to an ongoing political debate?’ His piece concluded that poets are reengaging with politics through inventive agitprop, powerful polemics and just a little humour.
As a free ebook, Poets for Corbyn lends itself well to sharing through social media at a time when speed is of the essence as the leadership vote gets under way. After all, there really was little warning given to the literary community of Corbyn’s rise to prominence. He’s only been an MP for 32 years.
• The PDF is available at berfrois.com/poets-for-corbyn.
