Cambridge Literary Review

CLR likes nothing better than to be timely. Modish, if you like, faddish if you don’t. Either way, because the effect of listening to election debates is verbal and visual imprisonment—and because of Thursday’s inevitable return to happier times—our thoughts turn to that thorny Arcady: the politics of poetry.

Taxonomy—though inimical to certain strands in this very area—has its benefits where category errors and talking-across abound. So, in the spirit of George Steiner’s ‘On Difficulty’, here is an experiment in poetico-political classification:

Disclaimer: We do not expect this list to be final, though we would be very surprised if any form of poetical-political nexus could be found that was not ultimately reducible to one of the lines in Joseph Walton’s proem.

1. Resistance. Pace Andrea Brady’s letter to CLR: “I would include, among my political acts, teaching, conversation, and collaboration.” Here poetry is contingent on acts of persuasion and sophisticated engagement. Teaching is the paradigm, insofar as it implies dialogue, elucidation, generosity.

2. Complicity. J.H. Prynne has provided perhaps the most succinct and eloquent passage in this vein:

Rhyme is the public truth of language, sound paced out in the shared places, the echoes are no-one’s private property or achievement; thus any grace (truly achieved) of sound is political, part of the world of motion and place in which language is like weather, the air we breathe. [...] So that if you like is the politics of truth, change & motion in the world at large and this is the order of feeling, public and private a vested patience.*

This is mildly stated, and tends away from the kind of argument that itself lives and thrives in the position(s) of aesthetic and political implication. But for that very reason it is powerful: it suggests that other forms of communication are owned, are complicit, are constrictive, suffocate.

3. Solidarity. Here is part of a description of a poetry reading given at a sit-in demonstration against funding cuts at the University of Sussex:

But for all that the mood in the theatre wasn’t, I thought, unchallengingly just grateful and benign: people were really listening, picking up on new angles and sparks in the language, their nerves and hearts really exposed to it; but also, their heads screwed on and their tactical ears alert to the front and back of the stuff, the language surface and its scintillations as well the pressures of argument deeper down.

This is closely related to (1) but differs in setting and agitation. The problems of (2) become generative of powerful disjunctions; the public setting heightens both the potential for and absurdity of poetry’s claim on politics. But the description is of an act in overt defiance of funding cuts and implicit defiance of cruel administrative threats. As such it is of the utmost importance.

4. Political Poetry Proper (PPP). No finer exercise in this execrable medium has been provided than the recent Openned broadcast by Joseph Walton. After this, no poetry with political claims can be unsullied by the drip-drip pleasurework of defamation:

“Vote, with me, for the Conservatives.”

The CLR takes its lit. crit. seriously. Too seriously? Perhaps. But that puts it in good company, and, as the man once said:

An interpreter has to have a certain civilian courage. Also in society, you have to sometimes step forward and say that ‘this is what I feel, maybe you agree with me, you don’t agree with me’.

This is both our task and the critic’s. So in issue 2 we printed Justin Katko’s meticulous tirade fired by Keston Sutherland’s ‘Song of the Wanking Iraqi’. To be sure, that title and the poem itself make us profoundly uncomfortable, but, as Katko says in his conclusion:

It is the desire for the most intensely anti-imperialist culture to be maintained with vigilance that requires ‘Song of the Wanking Iraqi’ to be widely known. The poem is a mourning song for the civilians who were tortured, raped, and killed at Abu Ghraib, and it is a protest against that more formidable atrocity, the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In line with this we speculated in CLR2’s editorial that criticism like Katko’s might offer a corrective to the government’s demented academic land-grab, to the perversity of its business-speak “impact” proposals.

Sometimes, however, that looks like desperate or perhaps even counterproductive optimism. Such negativity was recently occasioned when—in the process of hunting out business-speak—we stumbled into the extraordinary world of the Public Private Initiative. To be precise, we hit upon the website of Serco, who provide, amongst other things, the facilities and staff at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre. We know. Bear with us…

While Serco’s name has not exactly become household, Yarl’s Wood is shorthand for the cruel and violent excesses of the government’s largely privatized immigration and deportation “services”. Briefly, Yarl’s Wood’s inmates—exclusively women, children and families who are not charged with any crime, merely being held until decisions are made about their case—were alleged to have received substandard (private) healthcare, and suffered racial and physical abuse. This is the upshot of a 2009 HMIP report which can be read here.

Now, Serco’s website is a fascinating place. First, it’s hard to work out what they actually do. “Our work ranges from the management of programmes and entire services to the outsourcing of operations and even the creation of entirely new businesses.” To be accurate, it’s hard to work out what they don’t [won't] do. Self-promotion seems important to them. And of course, the language is all business-speak, all interconnected knowledge processes, process-orientated innovation partners.

But, returning and warming to our theme, Serco also has an “institute” (i.e. it offers “thought leadership in the development of sustainable public service markets”. Really.) And here, at last, Mandelson’s roving mitts can find gainful employment. The purpose of criticism? How can such lofty questions be posed at all when at least one valid answer, brought to you by the Third Way, is:

Gary Sturgess, ‘Shakespeare on Military Contracting: Lessons from History About Private Contracting‘, Journal of International Peace Operations (March, 2010).

“He may be a figure of fun, but Falstaff reminds us that incentives matter.”