This land might just be cinched too tight
for a population of humans and gods

Darwish was six in 1948 when his family fled their village in western Galilee. When they returned a year later they found the village destroyed and their land occupied. Since they had missed the census they were denied Israeli citizenship and declared ‘present-absentees’, an ambiguous status that Darwish was to transform into a metaphor for Palestine and much more.
He was 22 when he read his poem ‘Identity Card’, with its defiant refrain ‘Record: I am an Arab’, to a cheering crowd in a Nazareth movie house. Repudiating Golda Meir’s assertion that ‘there are no Palestinians’, his poems played a key role in the Palestinian movement that emerged after 1967, fashioning a modern Palestinian identity using traditional poetic forms in a renewed, accessible Arabic.

Repeatedly arrested and imprisoned, Darwish left Israel in 1970 and remained in exile for more than a quarter of a century. His political journey led from the Israeli Communist Party to the PLO, which he joined in 1973 (penning Arafat’s famous ‘Don’t let the olive branch fall from my hand’ speech to the UN). He settled in Beirut, from which he was expelled along with the PLO following the Israeli invasion of 1982, the subject of his inventive and harrowing prose memoir, Memory for Forgetfulness.

In the years that followed, Darwish wandered – Tunis, Cyprus, Damascus, Athens, Paris – broadening his poetic scope and deepening his insight. He was elected to the PLO executive committee in 1987 but resigned in 1993 in protest at the Oslo accords. ‘There was no clear link between the interim period and the final status, and no clear commitment to withdraw from the occupied territories,’ he explained. It’s said that when PLO leader Yasser Arafat complained to Darwish that the Palestinian people were ‘ungrateful’, the poet (remembering Brecht) snapped back, ‘Then find yourself another people.’

Oslo did allow Darwish to return to Palestine and in 1996 he settled in Ramallah, only to find himself under siege again six years later. In his last years he wrote more prolifically than ever, responding to the tragedies of Iraq, Lebanon and the violent conflict between Palestinian factions:

Did we have to fall from a tremendous height so as to see our blood on our hands … to realise that we are no angels … as we thought?
Did we also have to expose our flaws before the world so that our truth would no longer stay virgin? How much we lied when we said: we are the exception!

When Darwish died in 2008, thousands joined the cortege and there were candle-lit vigils in towns across the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian Authority declared three days or mourning and issued a series of postage stamps in his honour.

Being the Palestinian national poet was a heavy burden, one that Darwish bore from an early age, and though he chafed under it he never shirked the load. Instead, he succeeded in transforming the Palestinian experience into a universal one. The themes of loss, exile, the search for justice, the dream of a homeland, the conundrum of identity: all became, as his work evolved, human and existential explorations, without ceasing for a moment to be rooted deeply in the vicissitudes of Palestinian life. For decades he mourned Palestine’s losses, denounced its tormentors, celebrated its perseverance, and imagined its future.

And we have a land without borders, like our idea
of the unknown, narrow and wide
… we shout in its labyrinth: and we still love you, our love
is a hereditary illness.

Though preserving Palestinian memory and identity was his life’s work, Darwish conceived of this as a creative act of self-renewal: ‘Identity is what we bequeath and not what we inherit. What we invent and not what we remember.’ Among his last verses was this admonition:

We will become a people when the morality police protect a prostitute from being beaten up in the streets
We will become a people when the Palestinian only remembers his flag on the football pitch, at camel races, and on the day of the Nakba

Darwish was a ‘national poet’ who challenged as well as consoled and inspired his national audience. As he moved away from his earlier declamatory, public style towards a more personal idiom, elliptical and oblique, and at times (unpardonable sin for a ‘national’ poet) obscure, he met resistance. ‘The biggest achievement of my life is winning the audience’s trust,’ he reflected in 2002. ‘We fought before: whenever I changed my style, they were shocked and wanted to hear the old poems. Now they expect me to change; they demand that I give not answers but more questions.’
Even in translation, where we miss so much, Darwish’s voice rings clear. In his mature style there’s a seductive fluidity: he moves lightly from realm to realm, pronoun to pronoun (‘I’ to ‘we’, ‘I’ to ‘you’, ‘us’ to ‘them’), from the intimate to the epic, past to future, abstract to concrete. Metaphors topple over each other, abundant and inter-laced. This is poetry that fuses the political and the personal at the deepest level.

Throughout, his evocation of loss and exile, of coming from ‘a country with no passport stamps’, is poignant, elegiac but open-ended, conjuring resolution from despair: ‘We travel like everyone else, but we return to nothing’; ‘There is yet another road in the road, another chance for migration’; ‘Where should we go after the last border? Where should birds fly after the last sky?’; ‘In my language there is seasickness. / In my language a mysterious departure from Tyre’.

Guests on the sea. Our visit is short.
And the earth is smaller than our visit
… where are we to go
when we leave? Where are we to go back to when we return?
… What is left us that we may set off once again?

Yet, convinced that ‘Out of the earthly/ the hidden heavenly commences’, Darwish affirmed the richness and beauty of life, especially life in its ordinariness:

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: April’s hesitation, the aroma of bread at dawn, a woman’s point of view about men, the works of Aeschylus, the beginning of love, grass on a stone, mothers living on a flute’s sigh and the invaders’ fear of memories

In one of his late poems, Darwish pays tribute to his friend Edward Said, putting this advice in Said’s mouth:

Do not describe what the camera sees of your wounds
Shout so that you hear yourself, shout so that you know that you are still alive, and you know life is possible on this earth.

But still I am turned off by it. It shouts, it sloganises. It pretends to be daring, but usually it just confirms, rather than challenges our stereotypes, our politics, when it’s those stereotypes and prejudices of ‘ours’, not just ‘theirs’, that need challenging.

I have the suspicion that some of the people who trumpet radical poetry don’t really like poetry, just radicalism. They’re just putting a poet on the stage to prettify their causes. ‘You think we’re nasty people? We have William Morris, whose News From Nowhere and other medievalist prettiness justifies our socialist dreams.’ If we’re communists, we can take pride in Alexander Blok’s bizarre poem ‘The Twelve’, comparing a group of Red Guards to Christ’s apostles.

Imitation Woody Guthries

We idolise Auden’s declaration that ‘Yes, I am Spain’ because it celebrates the cause of anti-fascism with the sense of immediacy of the idealistic young radical looking to end evil. That it carries the seeds of the more emotionally complex later poems such as ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ is overlooked. We have our imitation Woody Guthries, who flatter our sense of combat and commitment, and we have our alternative poet laureates who read their odes to modern disasters. It’s an alternative culture that creates its own rules, tells us what we’re supposed to like … and dislike.

Bob Dylan was an imitation Woody Guthrie, the radical hero of the early 1960s, but at the end of 1963 he rejected the smiles and applause of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, denouncing them as old people putting him up for sale. It was only at that point that he started exploring a poetic world of his own, rejecting songs about the Klan to write the dreamy poetry/music of ‘Visions of Johanna’ or strange word games of ’4th Time Around’. To point this out is not to reject radicalism. The Civil Liberties Committee were idealists, deeply involved in progressive causes, but they were libertarians, not poets. It’s for their advocacy of civil liberties, not for their poetry, that they earn respect.

Radical poetry is too often the self-proclaimed voice of the people – it borrows too heavily from Mayakovsky’s belief that poetry is a megaphone. And that’s the problem. The megaphone blots out complexity of feelings.
Even Trotsky, whose Literature and Revolution avoided the rigidities of historical materialism when it came to poetry, denounced Anna Akhmatova as a silly woman who just wanted to write about love and relationships when factories were waiting to be built. Yet it was Akhmatova who wrote ‘Requiem’, memorising each line painfully at a time when a poem written on a scrap of paper could mean a death sentence: ‘I was where my people were/Where, alas, they had to be.’

Its power will last long after the socialist-realist poems and Stalinist wall murals about tractors and factory committee meetings have faded.

The need for the poetic

Now we’re being asked for new protest poets – look at the recent issue of Poetry Review, in which the literary editor John Walsh bewails the absence of political poetry and tells us that all that is needed is the words and the passion. But it’s not.

Adrian Mitchell’s ‘Tell Me Lies about Vietnam’ has lost much of its contemporary force; we don’t live in that world any more. Our rulers are no longer those hypocrites of the 1960s, pretending to be more than US stooges, lecturing us about the family while indulging in their expensive sexual orgies. Now it’s not hypocrisy, but a near-universal cynicism – murder with a smile, the celebration of gulling people as you advance in your career, pull a trick on your opponent, sell your car to some poor mug.
A new rhetoric is needed, not that punk spitting at the world, which long ago become a pose. And it needs to be poetic. In a time when a lot of young people write ‘sincere poetry’ but not nearly so many read it, poetry – classical as well as unorthodox – needs to be read to see what makes a poem tick. Of course, young people should be encouraged to write poetry, but they should be encouraged to write good poetry, and that means reading – even the classics.

For poetry is more than rhetoric, more than words and passion. There’s a reason for those lines being divided from one another, even in the most irregular, the freest verse. A lot of techniques are needed, as in music, not just shouting out sincerely.

When Allen Ginsberg electrified the US literary world in 1956 with his cry that ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness’, the poetry lies in the length of the line – Ginsberg said that the length of his line was measured by each breath in his body. It’s a technique he derived from Walt Whitman, and the result, as in Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’, is a heady, ecstatic feeling, heightened with each verse. That is why the line is so powerful, not just the words.

I do not wish to over-generalise. Gwendolyn Brooks expresses the silent contempt and pain of her race in ‘The Lovers of the Poor’. The sufferings of war, too, have proved a crucible for poetry, which can’t escape being political. The moving poetry of Mahmoud Darwish expresses the alienation and suffering of the Palestinian people.

Even so, the sickly romanticism used by Wilfred Owen to describe the horrors of war, which attracts so many adolescents to poetry, can serve to conceal the less well-known and more complex poem about the Somme, ‘In Parenthesis’, by the Christian poet David Jones. Bertolt Brecht’s sense of irony led his actors to blow dog whistles at the audience, and his bitterness fuelled poems such as ‘What Did The Soldier’s Wife Receive?’ But even there, the poetry is harmed by the Stalinism – Brecht’s reputation as the poet of the KGB qualifies much of his work, despite his later condemnation of East German Stalinism.

The most complex of poetry is often only obliquely political. W D Snodgrass’s ‘Heart’s Needle’ expresses the feelings caused by separation from his young daughter through rhyme and rhythm : ‘Child of my winter/Born when the new fallen soldiers froze/In Asia’s steep ravines and fouled the snows.’ It’s the curling, near-cruel insolence of the sound of Benjamin Zephaniah as he tells us that he is mugging the Queen’s English that gives that poet’s words their power. It’s more than the words; it’s the beat, the line, the sound to the point where the words have meaning only in the sound, expressing dream-worlds in order to explore the full complexity of human emotions.

‘As to poetry/it just ain’t till it is lived/Best of it has to be knocked out of a man/at the end of his tether’ – thus Ezra Pound in 1936. He wasn’t left-wing, he was a fascist and blatant racist, anti-semitic to the core, supporting Mussolini in the dying days of the Salo Republic, imprisoned in a cage in Pisa by US troops, shunned by the orthodox thereafter. But in the Pisan Cantos – with the heart-breaking evocation of ‘a man on whom the sun has gone down’, the intelligence of ‘Here error is all in the not done,/all in the diffidence that faltered’ – we have the word-hoards stored up from his youth and unlocked as he stalked his cage.

Just posh poetry? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s among the finest writing of the last century. His friends, Louis Zukovsky and Basil Bunting, denounced Pound for his anti-Jewish comments, but they worshipped his poetry: ‘There are the Alps, fools/Sit down and wait for them to crumble.’

Poetry that doesn’t fit in

I like the one who doesn’t fit in, not even with the poetry industry. I like the doubter – ‘some who are uncertain compel me’ (Delmore Schwartz). I laugh at ‘Every Word Counts’, Gavin Ewart’s parody of a feminist poem. I am intrigued by John Ashbery’s ‘Girls on the Run’, looking at the world through the art of Henry Darger, a school janitor whose paintings of young girls menaced by the dark clouds of puberty are so genuinely ambiguous. I’m drawn to Geoffrey Hill’s meditations on ‘The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy’.

And I love the poetry of James Merrill, the sort of poet that radicals are not supposed to like. Born wealthy (Merrill Lynch RIP), gay without writing ‘gay poetry’, he was apolitical, certainly not particularly radical. In ‘The Changing Light at Sandover’, his readings of the ouija board with his lover summon the dead to care, be cared for, and to warn of the world’s fate. He didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve and he didn’t wave any flags; he doesn’t write self-centred poems, like those written by the Confessional poets – but their lyrical beauty, their evocation of memory and place have a genuine touch of humanity.

I don’t think that radical poems should be applauded merely because they are radical. We should read poems because they are poems, with the sounds and techniques that involves – not manifestos. Good radical poetry, like that of Mahmoud Darwish, is good because the politics is made interesting by the poem.

So I am totally in sympathy with the Palestinian people, but that is my politics; my liking of poetry is different. The instinctive dislike of many on the left for conservative, even classical poems – derided as ‘Oxford poetry’ – is nothing but an obstacle to good poetry. An understanding of the human condition can be found in Donne and Sexton, in Tagore and Akhmatova; it’s not the monopoly of radical poets.

‘Brigg57′ is a regular contributor to the Red Pepper forums, where the idea for this article originated in the course of a discussion about poetry and the left. Join us at: http://forums.redpepper.org.uk

On Adrian Mitchell’s answerphone -

Blake works a miracle,

Big Ben sounds hysterical,

the world waxes lyrical!

On Adrian Mitchell’s answerphone -

the passwords sigh,

the terrorists cry,

the children fly!

On Adrian Mitchell’s answerphone -

leave plenty of love -

after the tone!

By Keith ArmstrongDoctor Keith Armstrong – the jingling geordie http://keithyboyarmstrong.blogspot.com/

The opportunity to say exactly what you wanted existed in poetry for obvious reasons – hardly anybody read it, or those who did took very little notice of it. But it did offer the possibility of making a small stand against the prevailing onslaught on civil liberties.

Hearing Eye

Hearing Eye started almost by accident, when John Heath-Stubbs came and read at Torriano in 1987. He read his marvellous sequence about death: death and the politician, death and the washerwoman, and so on. I suggested to him that maybe that sequence ought to be published – not necessarily by me.

He misheard what I was saying, and in the next post we received a manuscript called Cats Parnassus. It was only a few poems, but after they were beautifully illustrated by Emily Johns and published, Peter Levi reviewed it in the Times. That edition went into three printings within two months.

Other titles followed, with us thinking they would all have the same success. Alas, we had to wait until Heath-Stubbs’s translations of Sulpicia, the only known female Roman poet whose work has survived, caught the Guardian’s eye and again went into many printings.

Before Hearing Eye came into existence, I had been an editor of the anarchist Freedom newspaper. So when, in 2005, I was asked to edit a poetry column for the Morning Star (‘daily paper of the left, incorporating [former Communist Party paper] the Daily Worker – for peace and socialism’), I was conscious of the fact that something had substantially altered in the political climate if an erstwhile editor of an anarchist paper should and could be entrusted with the task.

Anarchist communism

For me, the words communism and anarchism are interchangeable; cooperation is the main core of my philosophy. It is unthinkable that humans could have survived since Palaeolithic times if they had not willingly helped each other to survive. Even today, there remains the trace of anarchist communism within each home, where there is no exchange of goods for payment, and each person has their own free will and choices. If at home, why not in public? I say this so that the reader may know my criteria in choosing poems.

The column, called ‘Well Versed’, first appeared in the Morning Star in January 2006. The first poem I chose was by Arthur Jacobs, and I hoped it would set the tone. Re-reading all the poems for a new anthology, also called Well Versed, I am very pleased with the result. Poets have the knack of dealing with the unexplained and unexpected. Somehow, here in this book, with an introduction by Tony Benn and illustrations by the artist Emily Johns, there can be heard a constant, confident voice, always eloquent, quirky and wise. The poems hint at a new age, when the cooperative ethics that pertain behind closed doors at home suddenly, as if by a quantum leap, will take over the public domain.

There are no role models from the past that we can follow. There has never been a poet who wasn’t also a sovereign individual. But that they all, without exception, gave their pearls of wisdom freely to be included in this volume is another proof that a new age is gestating in the womb of the old.

As reported in the Guardian (21 July 2008), the Well Versed column has helped to raise the circulation of the Morning Star by 2 per cent on Thursdays ‘with 200 more copies sold on that day. For a paper with a 10,000 circulation (15,000 readership), that’s a big leap.’ It is the longest-running national newspaper poetry column currently in existence. I have chosen four poems to give Red Pepper readers an idea of the range of the poems that have appeared in the column.

Grand families
Louis I

Louis II

Louis III

Louis IV

Louis V

Louis VI

Louis VII

Louis VIII

Louis IX

Louis X (the Quarrelsome)

Louis XI

Louis XII

Louis XIII

Louis XIV

Louis XV

Louis XVI

Louis XVIII

and nobody, nothing more …

what’s with those people

who can’t bloody well even

count up to twenty?

Jacques Prevert

(translated by Sarah Lawson)

Yes madam
‘Fetch your blanket,’

she said to the houseboy,

‘and sleep in the kitchen

till the boss comes home.’

‘Yes, madam,’ he replied.

The Mau Mau

was spoken of

at bridge and tea parties.

Father would be late back

from his Masonic lodge.

Uneasy, she asked the boy:

‘If your brothers

in the Freedom Movement

told you to kill me,

you wouldn’t do it, would you?’

‘Yes, madam,’ he replied.

Wanda Barford

What are you talking about?
Afterwards, as we know,

There are those who virtuously

Declare: We didn’t know.

Things happened somewhere else,

Or didn’t happen like that,

Or we weren’t really told.

Anyway, we had no power

To alter or divert

What did or didn’t go on.

It’s a familiar sound

To be heard among us now,

The deceiving whine of those

Who participate and know.

A C Jacobs

Days like this
We’re running, head thrown back so we can see

how fast we are, faster than the clouds

(today’s windy) and faster than the police

whose cordon we broke through at Waterloo

There’s so many of us and the sun is hanging

so low above York Road and is bouncing itself

off so many windows it has made a long

gold tunnel that none of us could resist.

I have the megaphone. This is not normal.

I’m usually the one with the banner,

windsurfing to rallies with someone smaller

than me, but not today – today I can see

my long voice spreading out in front

shimmering like a heat haze towards

the bridge where it blends with others

and we look like one, we believe we can fly.

We’re heading for Westminster Bridge and later,

after the stand-off and riot (which will begin

when some drift home and the crowd gets smaller

and we’re stuck and night’s wet-blanket takes

the shine off our skins, just before that woman

from Tottenham – Maria, I think – has her leg

broken by a police horse) will it prove

worth it? We won’t get to win this one,

but we ran, heads back, down that road and now

on days like this, in a certain light, I’m weightless.

Anna Robinson

A C Jacobs
A C Jacobs died in 1994 in Madrid, aged 56. He was a respected translator and poet but most of his work has been published posthumously. I’ve chosen this poem for its social concern, although it did get published in the poet’s own lifetime. It is a poem that ought to be memorised by people in and out of authority. Jacobs’ entire output can be found in his Collected Poems and Selected Translations, published by Hearing Eye/The Menard Press, £13.99.

Jacques Prevert
Jacques Prevert (1900-1977) is a widely-read poet in France but he is hardly known in the English-speaking world, except perhaps as the screenwriter of Les Enfants du Paradis. He was anarchic, whimsical, erotic, childlike and, as the poem indicates, politically committed. This poem is from Jacques Prevert: Selected Poetry (Hearing Eye, £8.95), translated by Sarah Lawson, a Poetry Book Society recommended translation.

Anna Robinson
Anna Robinson’s poems explore the themes of home and rebellion within an urban dreamtime. Her first pamphlet, Songs from the Flats, won the Poetry Book Society’s pamphlet recommendation. This poem is from Songs from the Flats (Hearing Eye, £3).

Wanda Barford
On retiring from teaching music, Wanda Barford decided to put poetry at the centre of her life. She has had four collections published by Flambard: Sweet Wine and Bitter Herbs; A Moon at the Door; Losing, Finding; and What is The Purpose of Your Visit?

With thanks to Richard Bagley, features editor of the Morning Star. For more information on Hearing Eye go to www.hearingeye.org

I walked out of the smoky streets

To enjoy some country air,

But when I came to the crossroads,

I saw a weird sight there –

A man in a silver business suit

Swivelling in a black leather chair

He jumped right up and shook my hand

and giggled with mysterious glee.

Then he stared and said: ‘Old Labour,

I can tell your destiny.

I’m the Great Political Entrepreneur –

Would you like to do a deal with me?’

Well, the style of his smile and the size of his eyes

Made him look like a shopping mall.

I told him straight: ‘I’m a socialist,

I support fair shares for all.’

He said: ‘Capitalism means fair shares,

Provided that you play ball.’

I said: ‘I can think of something

Capitalism can’t arrange

And that’s the common ownership

Of the means of production, distribution and exchange.

And war makes so much more profit

That the idea of peace is strange.

‘I was born for peace and justice

For every race and nationality

I’m for people, not for profit,

I want to see the children free

With no more than 12 kids in a class

Revelling in liberty.’

‘But let’s not talk about the people,’

The sophisticated stranger said.

‘You must have targets of your own -

Let’s talk about you instead.’

And my brain was enthralled by his silver voice

Though my heart was filled with dread.

‘I know you have a heart,’ said the shining voice

‘And I know you have an excellent mind.

Why not become an Entrepreneur -

Leave those people of yours behind?

You shall live in mansions and grand hotels

And be constantly wined and dined.

‘You shall have your own island and bodyguard

And your own show on TV,

And a heated pool and a gymnasium

And become a powerful Celebrity.’

‘I think I could fancy that,’ I said,

‘But what’s the cost going to be?’

Well, I knew. But I signed – in my own life-blood.

He extracted my soul with care

and placed it in his credit card case

And gave me his black leather chair

Then he laughed and said: ‘You are New Labour now.’

I said: ‘Thank you, Mr Blair.’

Castle Greyskull with mom as the Sorceress

of course, things changed

people died, people left, people lied some turned strange

outside became home

two steps from fully grown,

running with a crew but in truth all alone

sitting in the park hitting spliffs and getting high

not really fitting in, but not really knowing why

different, only thing in common was boredom

keeping score of how many lips and trips they’d had

it went bad, the same old role play

picking up the dole pay and smoking to find home

inside and outside got blurred

so when he got hurt the only places to go

were the dark rooms

now he’s sitting in, going out less and less

smoking sess got in a mess internal voices

blames himself for bad choices and

with only himself to convince it’s a cinch to hear voices

no outside inside became both

one minute haven, next second a nightmare

the whole world is right there

one third of an inch of that same glass is now too much to ask

now it’s grey on both sides

and nothing tastes worse in this world than wasted time.

at this point the narrator steps up out of the paper and slaps his face to wake himself it’s now ten years later

days rolled like snow, avalanches of years

tears run off flushed cheeks and drown in his beers

it appears that things change and people move on

but if you just squint your eyes that perception is wrong

inside to outside it’s nobody’s choice

but what better way of getting out, than using my voice

from inside me to outside then inside you

from inside me to outside then inside you

You can hear (and see) some of Polarbear’s performance poetry at:
www.myspace.com/polarbearspoken

The noise of the sea slapping against the walls of Cape Coast Castle. The sound of many different African languages, talking fast, scared.

ANNIWAA:
I am a girl. I am in the dark. I don’t know how long I’ve been kept in the dark. High above me, there is a tiny crack of light. Last time I counted, I was eleven, nearly twelve. I am a girl. Last time I saw my mama, I was carrying a water gourd on my head. The water was sloshing-sloshing all over my clothes. Mama was clapping her hands and laughing at me. I am frightened of the dark. I don’t know where I am. I don’t even know why I’m here.

Once upon a time, I lived in a house with a cone-shaped roof, in a big compound. My mother grew okra and pumpkin in her yard. My father shaped woods and metals.
A time now ago, I had my hair just done fresh. Pretty, my Mama say. Small sections coiled with thread. My brother and I were playing and laughing. My brother says my laugh is funny and that my laugh makes him laugh.

All of a sudden, some men come and take us. I know those people. They have the marks on the face of the enemy. I kick and scream and shout. Furious. They bundle us off through the woods. Pushing and shouting. Move. Move. Beating us. I hold on to my brother. My brother holds on to me.

We are dragged through the forest for days and nights and days. It is a long time. I am tired and heavy as an elephant. I cry loud for my Mama to hear me. I cry loud for my Papa to see me.

One day, we arrive here. A place that is bigger than the palace of the Paramount Chief. Some call it a palace, a fort, a factory, a prison, a dungeon. My brother is pulled away. I reach out but I cannot hold him. My tears dry up inside me. My mouth goes dry and my lips. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. After that, I stop talking. The words dry under my lips.

Outside this place, where I am trapped and kept like an animal, there is a sound I never hear before. A crashing and thudding. They say it is The Sea. I think it is a wild monster. I think it is coming for me.

Scene 2: Shipping news

The voice of the Shipping Forecast will be interrupted by the voices of the four black women. These women form a chorus throughout the play. Behind their voices there’s the roaring, crashing of the big Atlantic.

MACBEAN:
There are warnings of gales
In the Viking North.
The general synopsis at midday – low.
971 moving steadily Northeast and filling.
New High expected Trafalgar
By the same time.

LAMPLIGHTER:
By the same time.

MACBEAN:
Saturday, August 11, 1707
The weather in Liverpool was close.
Gales running between the south and west.
Dirty weather, the ship’s captain said.
The wild Aurora Borealis
Flew around with unusual swiftness.

The Dorothy reached Barbados, June 1709.
One hundred slaves surviving.
Veering North West 6 to 8.
Occasionally severe Gale 9.
The Duke of Argyll reached London
Eighty slaves surviving. Soon.
The moon that night was in a shroud.

CONSTANCE:
The moon was in a shroud.

MACBEAN:
The Annapolis reached London –
Less than a third of the slaves survived.
Captain’s Log: 23rd May 1709 –
Buryed a man slave No 84.
Wednesday 29 May –
Buryed a Boy slave, No 86 of a flux.
Decreasing. Rough or very rough.
The weather still dirty, the captain said.
Slow moving, with little change.

BLACK HARRIOT:
The weather filthy!

MACBEAN:
Rain then showers. Moderate or rough.
Thursday, 13 June 1709
Buryed a woman slave, no 47.
Later Decreasing.

BLACK HARRIOT:
Into the howling, moaning Atlantic.
Into the open-grave-green sea.
Into the choppy waters, another body.
Another stiff black wave into
the tight black waves of the sea.
Into the turbulent waters,
another body yet.

MARY:
If you want to learn to pray,
Go to sea.

The Lamplighter by Jackie Kay is published by Bloodaxe Books/BBC Productions, price £9.95

A debate broke out about this on the Books Blog at the Guardian website, with various positions being taken up. One line taken is that the exam board was quite right – the poem is an incitement to take up a knife. Another is that teaching poetry as if it’s about ‘issues’ is wrong, so in a way both Carol Ann Duffy and teachers teaching the poem asked for this because poems should be taught focusing on how they are written. Some said it wasn’t a very good poem anyway. And some, like me, defended Carol Ann one hundred per cent, and said that the poem was potentially a very good way of talking about a lot of things, including the ‘how’, and indeed was potentially a very good way of getting children writing themselves.

The banned poem is what might be called a ‘dramatic monologue’, a poem written in the voice of one person, either talking or thinking aloud. Traditionally, it’s been a way of writing that encourages the reader or listener to see how the speaker is apparently unaware of the contradictions of his or her thoughts, or at the very least, the speaker reveals more than he or she intends. It was Robert Browning who perfected the form – in particular, with a poem called ‘Ferrara’, often known as ‘My Last Duchess’. But it was Shakespeare who kicked the whole thing off with soliloquies embedded into the action of a play – famously, speeches such as Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ or Macbeth’s ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’.

Interestingly, Browning’s ‘Ferrara’ is the speech of a man who has given the kind of ‘commands’ that result in his wife (the ‘last duchess’) not smiling anymore. We are left to guess what that means, though we learn that this is a man who thought more of his ‘nine hundred-year-old name’ than his wife; can’t bear the fact that she smiled at others; thinks that the father of his next wife is rich enough to afford any bride-price that he, the speaker, thinks right; and probably rates objects as much if not more than people.

It’s a savage poem about a rich, nasty man who probably killed his young wife. I’ve never heard of this poem being banned from any exam board anthology, though I’m sure the examiner who banned Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, could, if she put her mind to it, make a case for it being removed on account of it encouraging readers to take out contracts on their wives if they’re too friendly.

Poetry is mostly (but not entirely) a suggestive, allusive form that tries to arouse feelings in readers and listeners in indirect ways. Through the sound of the words and phrases, it often tries to create a kind of word-music that runs simultaneously with and inseparably from the word-meanings. Quite often, a poem tries to suggest ideas and possibilities simply through positioning one image next to another. Poetry often uses a wide repertoire of figures of speech as a means of explaining why one thing (or feeling, person, scene or whatever) resembles another.

None of this is unique to poetry. Political speeches of both the best and worst kind adopt many of these ways of using language. Think of the repetition of Tony Blair’s ‘education, education, education’. Think of Enoch Powell’s ‘river Tiber foaming with much blood’, think of George Galloway’s ‘two cheeks of the same arse’.

Poetry will survive whatever a single examiner says. Language is the ultimate democratic force: bar the most extremely disabled, we can all use it, enjoy it and change it to suit ourselves. Poetry is one of the best ways of using language in order to mix what we mean with what we feel.

If you write it, it can help you sort out what you really think about a person, an event, a moment, something you hear, see, touch or dream. If you read it, you can find resonances in your own life in what others have written.

Poetry keeps changing its habitat. In one period or place it might be a publicly-declaimed art, in another a privately-consumed read, in another a samizdat circulation, in another an informal open-membership club. Within education, it has sometimes bored thousands, sometimes thrilled them.

Carol Ann Duffy and her contemporaries, Simon Armitage, John Agard and Grace Nichols, have moved thousands of young people in the past few years, widening their views of the world, culture and language itself. It’s possible that there is a new Puritanism about, emboldened by the examiner’s success. In which case, I think we have a fight on our hands and something worth fighting for.

Michael Rosen is the children’s laureate

Like poetry? Try some further reading by several authors mentioned in this article: New Selected Poems by Carol Ann Duffy, The Dead Sea Poems by Simon Armitage, Alternative Anthem by John Agard, or Picasso, I Want My Face Back by Grace Nichols.

But the Bloodaxe phenomenon is not just a publishing success story. Founder and editor Neil Astley has spent much of the past 30 years kicking open the dusty doors of privilege behind which poetry used to be written. Bloodaxe publishes more women poets than any other British publisher (including Jackie Kay, Maura Dooley and Selima Hill) and the most substantial list of Caribbean and black British poets (including John Agard, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Martin Carter and Benjamin Zephaniah). And Astley’s list includes many internationally-famous radical writers – such as Miroslav Holub, Paul Éluard, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Miguel Hernández and Mahmoud Darwish.

If Astley has helped to put politics in poetry, he has also taken poetry into politics with a number of high-profile interventions, notably Tom Paulin’s Ireland and the English Crisis, Tony Harrison’s V and Irina Ratushinskaya’s No, I’m Not Afraid, the publication of which helped secure the writer’s release from a Soviet labour camp on the eve of the 1986 Reykjavik summit between US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev.

To celebrate 30 years of the Bloodaxe cultural revolution, Astley and film-maker Pamela Robertson-Pearce have recently produced In Person: 30 Poets (Bloodaxe, £12), the world’s first poetry DVD-anthology containing six hours of reading by 30 poets from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, the USA, China, India, Spain, the Caribbean and Palestine.

Why did you start Bloodaxe? What was wrong with British poetry 30 years ago?

Adrian Mitchell once wrote: ‘Most people ignore most poetry / because / most poetry ignores most people.’ When I set up Bloodaxe in 1978, this was what I wanted to change. So much of the liveliest poetry was unknown outside a tiny, dedicated readership, while the main publication opportunities were being given to writers whose work was, by comparison, unimaginative and narrow-minded. Poetry publishing was controlled by a small group of men in London, who were mostly publishing a small group of poets, mostly men, mostly living in London, many of them friends or Oxbridge contemporaries. There were many kinds of poets whose startling work I felt deserved a wider readership. I saw myself as a representative reader, hungry for a much broader range of poetry.

To what extent has Bloodaxe followed the changes in British social and cultural life over the past 30 years, and to what extent do you think you have helped shape some of those changes?

I wanted to publish poets who had a strong following at grassroots level, appreciated by audiences at readings. Very few women were published in those days, which meant that new women writers had few role models. For me, one of Bloodaxe’s most important achievements has been to transform the publishing opportunities for women poets. The poetry agenda set in London seemed uninterested in what was being written elsewhere.

My perspective was inspired by living in the north-east. Bloodaxe’s eclectic, democratic style of publishing was inspired by Newcastle’s energetic, internationally-minded poetry culture. During the early years, Bloodaxe helped redress the balance in favour of northern, regional, working-class poets and women poets. As Bloodaxe grew and expanded its publishing, it was able to be more responsive to the changing literatures of Britain and of other countries. As Britain has become more culturally and ethnically various, so writers have been emerging from all kinds of different backgrounds. Their poetry has evolved in ways which appeal to more diverse audiences, but too many poetry publishers and magazines have failed to respond to these changes in our literature and readership.

But the key change was set in motion much earlier: the Butler Education Act of 1944. The first beneficiaries of this included many people from working-class backgrounds who went on to become writers: the generation of Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Derek Mahon and Ken Smith, outsiders from Scotland, Belfast, the midlands and the north, whose first collections appeared in the 1960s. Their work influenced the next generation of poets, the so-called ‘New Generation’ represented by Michael Hulse, David Kennedy and David Morley in their anthology The New Poetry, published by Bloodaxe in 1993.

Poetry may have been opening its doors during these years, but at the same time British political life was closing down.

Bloodaxe has always provided a platform for alternative, dissenting voices. I see numerous connections between what the British and Irish poets were writing and the zeitgeist of those times: Tony Harrison, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Sean O’Brien, Peter Reading and Ken Smith, powerful dissenting voices in Thatcherite Britain; Ken Smith roaming eastern Europe after the break-up of the Soviet Union, writing from Berlin when the Wall came down; Benjamin Zephaniah, tireless fighter for racial tolerance, working with Michael Mansfield QC on the Stephen Lawrence case; Moniza Alvi, Imtiaz Dharker and Jackie Kay exploring urgent questions of cultural identity, race, gender and exile.

Many of the books are marked by particular conflicts: Tony Harrison’s The Gaze of the Gorgon, an arc of poems connecting the cataclysmic end of the second world war in 1945 with the first Gulf war in 1991; Choman Hardi’s Life for Us, charting lives marked by displacement, terror and flight from Kurdistan; Adrian Mitchell’s The Shadow Knows and Tell Me Lies, giving voice to the groundswell of anti-war, anti-New Labour feeling in Britain.

Do you think it is still true that ‘most poetry ignores
most people’?

No. Poets are now much more tuned in to how people think about the world and feel about themselves. Poets are no longer a separate species. Poets come from all kinds of backgrounds, women and men. What poets write is relevant to people’s lives and to their experience of the world, on an everyday as well as on a more spiritual level.

By relevance I don’t mean addressing the familiar or connecting with popular culture: I mean that poetry can speak to the whole human condition. On the other hand, while poets and poetry publishers have been reaching out to new audiences, people’s access to poetry has been made more difficult because of the dumbing-down of bookselling in Britain that followed the demise of the net book agreement [fixing the retail price of books] in 1995.

The flowering of bookselling in Britain led by Tim Waterstone and others in the 1980s was a great cultural event, which helped poetry publishers reach a much wider readership, along with the publishers serving other areas of culture – politics, theatre, women’s literature and women’s issues, gay and lesbian writing, black and Asian writing, and so on.

Bookshops were a key part of the counterculture that grew up in opposition to Thatcherism, but the supermarkets smashed that, so her market economy has won in the end.

Now we have bookshops that have little space for so-called ‘minority’ interests. As a result, many people who know little about contemporary poetry think it’s obscure, difficult, dull, boring or pretentious. It has a negative image with the general public, even among readers of literary fiction and people interested in theatre and film.

The Staying Alive anthology was my attempt to show all those people who love literature and language and traditional poetry that contemporary poetry is relevant, that much of it is lively, imaginative, versatile and accessible to intelligent readers who never gave it much of a chance before. And it succeeded. Staying Alive introduced thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry, and it won back thousands of readers who’d lost interest in poetry.

So why has the Bloodaxe project encountered so much
critical hostility?

The publication, dissemination and reception of poetry in Britain is still controlled by a tiny group of people engaged in protecting and promoting just one small part of contemporary poetry.

Yet the whole of modern English-language poetry is a set of multiple interconnected traditions, including the more culturally diverse oral-based and literary traditions of African-American, black British, Caribbean and south Asian poetry, with poetry in translation a parallel source of nourishment for poets and readers alike. Some of the poetry editors may be more interested in the work they’ve grown up with, but we live in a changing world with evolving literatures, and readers are much more interested in poetry by writers from all kinds of different backgrounds.

I believe that publishers have to be responsive to the readership. You have to lead the way in introducing and publishing writers you believe in, but you also have to serve the readership as well as the poets, which means you don’t ignore or exclude work by women and non-white writers, or poetry from other countries. I’ve said this on several other occasions, including the StAnza lecture I gave at St Andrews in 2005, which prompted discomfort in some quarters and even threats of legal action.

What is the next stage of the Bloodaxe revolution?

Not more of the same. More of the different.

Try Staying Alive, a collection of poems edited by Neil Astley.