Poetry in the dystopia [Katy Evans-Bush]

Photograph by David Secombe, via Esoteric London

Hello, Best American Poetry World! I guest-blogged here a couple of years ago and am delighted to be asked back.

Last time I spent my week developing a little theme about a particular strain of "formalist" (though we don't really call it that here) poetry in England that emanates, if you trace it back, from the old vaudeville-style (for want of a better comparison) music hall tradition. That was fun, and included some YouTube work, and  amusing photos.

This time I was thinking about micro-reviews of some UK poets, and I still plan to do that; but I see that Todd Swift has pipped me to the post with an excellently comprehensive roundup of some current poets over here. So I'm going to go straight in on an up note, spreading cheer around me like a veritable Jonny Appleseed.

The big news in the UK right now is a cataclysmic government spending review, announced last Wednesday, which stripmines the UK's public purse of over 20% - the biggest cuts since 1918. That's the umbrella figure; the details are just too horrifying to go into, whether or not you agree that radical action was necessary to deal with the (banker-induced) deficit. Even PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the gigantic corporate consultancy firm, predicts a possible million jobs lost. (And England is smaller than New England.) So it's very scary, and that's before you talk about the services that will be cut. But I'm not here to talk politics. What I want to do - or have to do, really - is to ruminate on how, in a daily, practical way, poetry (and one's almost mystical belief in its power) will coalesce in this brave new world.

I ran into a friend in Whole Foods yesterday (I know: the neighbourhood grew pretensions around us, and it was raining and I couldn't face the trek up to Morrisons), and she made me laugh. She said: "It's - it's like a dystopia!" Funny thing when that's funny: I was so happy she said it!

I mean, it would be one thing if even the tubes wereworking properly. In my part of London there have been many days recently when an hour and a half to get to work seems almost reasonable. Last week there was a power cut on the soi-disant Jubilee Line, and 4,000 people were stuck in the tunnel for nearly three hours. Pitch black. People were fainting, panicking, falling ill. 2,000 of them made it out by walking along the (non-electrified, thanks to the power cut) rails.  When they finally staggered out into the ticket hall, they found staff on hand to remind them to touch their travel cards to the machine to pay for their journeys!

So how does our little flower, poetry, manage in a dystopia? I mean, it managed in the old Soviet bloc, even while its practitioners were being shipped to the mines. It manages in certain parts of the world today where people can be imprisoned for taking certain names in vain. It manages under harsh repression precisely by being  a metaphorical form of thought. The forms of words become overarchingly important, as image and symbol come to stand in for empirical subject.

That's not really going to be our problem, though; it's going to be more that everyone's in a state of panic and dismay, walking in tube tunnels and struggling to pay the rent when both the housing benefit and the jobs have been cut. We're talking about "the New Austerity," as if it were wartime again: we're being asked to Make Do and Mend.

There are worries about arts funding, though I personally feel that's a little last week, except where it impacts on jobs. I've been saying for several years that I could see poetry going samizdat, and slipping back under the main, money-feeding stream - and that's happening, with tiny presses springing up all over. There are constant debates about the role of these little publishers, and what structures would best serve the artform.

Normally I'd spin out some words and end with some lovely little rounding-out anecdote proving that yes, poetry is going to blossom like a Shakespearean rose in this hard, dark time. But I guess right now I'm actually asking. I've been struggling for words all week. How will it?

Will it politicise UK verse? Will poetry carry on the same as ever? Will we all, as I've done this week, clam up while we process the new reality? Will the social divide ("Tories" and "everyone else," as in the eighties) be played out in poetry, with technique once again being seen as retrograde and elitist? Will it be impossible to get published at all?

There is one criticism of English poetry these days, that it's insular, unambitious in its cosy addiction to anecdote and quotidian epiphany. Will this tendency be swept away on the tide of mounting fervour? Will my versification class at the Poetry School be mobbed with students who all want to know the rhetoric to create truly ringing stanzas and clarion refrains?

Will we put our faith in poetry, because we have nowhere else to put it?!? 

Last week, on the night before the spending review was announced, my class spent two rather thrilling hours reading and talking about trochees. Two things were for sure. One: with a trochee you certainly have sómething yóu can cóunt on. Except when it gets slippery, and puts on a yellow tie and joins a coalition and starts facing the other way so it looks líke a héadless íamb. And two: when I was reading out to the class to demonstrate the stresses, it felt great banging the table.

Aux armes, poètes!

Comments

[Laura Orem]

Welcome back, Katy! This is (as always) a terrific thought-provoking post, and it makes me look forward even more to this week.

It sure feels like a dystopia over here, too.

[GB]

Compared to the 202 other officially recognized countries in the world, England is one of the ten most generous welfare states. There's a whole class and culture of welfare dependency, two and three generations, living in comfortable social housing and not one person dead of starvation or in fear of being abducted, tortured or murdered by the state apparatus; unlike in Iraq, say.

The problem is, the UK borrowed beyond its means and on an individual basis, we chose to believe (and communicate in) a patently transparent marketing-speak gobble dee gook nonsense language we chose to imitate, fed to us by the last lot of con-men gangsters who sold out the working class. We took on credit and were happy to build a mountain of public and private debt. Our own collective greed, driving house prices up.

Two generations ago, it was the norm to save up and then buy stuff, whereas now, we grandkids of the WW2 generation (who did experience hardship), have allowed our wants, expectations and language, to reach absurdly unrealistic levels. We want our i-pods, plasmas and all the 'essential' bits and pieces we the switched-on, carey sharey faux liberals of luvviedom, need to get through the daily 'hell' of modern life; commuting, underpaid, undervalued, all the other 59,999,999 people on the island to contend with, coffees arriving late, not being treated with the respect befitting our station by the waitresses in the cool-expensive cafes where menus are printed in French and its twenty bucks for a lotte-mocha-toa-chai with banana and watercress boulange. How dare those ungrateful Iraqis go on about being hung up by meat hooks, crying over a few broken bones. It's not our fault. We've got bills to pay, people to see, contracts to sign, poems to compete.

We get what we vote for, and New Labour chose to add layer on layer of pointless bureaucracy and create a million public sector jobs that weren't needed and have to be paid for. It would have been more productive in the long run if they just made them no-show jobs, and that way there'd be a million less publically paid busybodies inventing 'work' for themselves, whose job it is think up rules they can enforce, treat children like adults and adults like children, telling the private citizen how to behave, what to do, where we can walk, why we and not our child has to hand a plastic toy-sword to the cashier at the checkout, who cannot accept it off anyone under five, because it is a 'dangerous' item.

They're the rules and reasons thought up by a highly expert and overpaid team of consultants on the health and safety quango-think-tank. We have to be vigilant and alert to the dangers associated with a (phoney) war on terror that replaced the cold war: don't you know there's a war on terror being fought, ten thousand miles away radicalized nutters are plotting to kill the brave and free youth of England because of a highly complex series of 'difficult' and challenging reasons we, the public, the people who vote, are too thick to understand, and are classified anyway, but which are in no way related to a, quite correct and morally imperative removal of Saddam Hussein (who treated women appallingly).

The breakdown of community spirit is, I think, in part, attributable to this bloated, unsustainable nanny state model and language, in which the obvious, uncomplicated ways of behaviour and speech are not encouraged because everything has gone mad since Blair told us a pack of lies and from then on, it aint been acknowledged by our leaders, that we, England, got it wrong and need to stop conning ourselves, pretending, en masse, collectively not facing reality.

[KEB]

Wow.

[Laura Orem]

Hey, was that Jeremy Clarkson?

[Anne Caston]

Thank you, Katy Evans-Bush for a thought-provoking article on the state of poetry that actually marries its opposition - and its impetus - to the "quotidian" world.

Anne Caston

[DL]

I wonder to whom the initials "GB" belong: Great Britain! Gordon Brown! George Bernard Shaw! (But not George Bush or George Babbitt or George Burns.) You wrote an excellent column, Katy, and it's hardly surprising that it would provoke lengthy comment.
When I spent my two years at Cambridge, I felt the presence of glorious ghosts from World War II and a readiness to put up with the austerity measures of the times -- strikes, this being the 1970s: long disagreeable strikes -- proudly and with the stiff upper lip of Alec Guinness. Nice to see that some things don't change. The American press is making hay over how the Brits, bless 'em, are content with stoic grumbling while the panty-waist French are ready to storm the Bastille when asked to take a wee bit of Castor oil with their nightly aperitif.

[Jane Holland]

Aux armes, poètes!

I like it, Katy. Biscuits and sabre-rattling round at my place when the stoic grumbling proves ineffective.