I had taken part in a celebration in the use of
the arts as a means of comprehensive education at the University of
East Anglia, Maxine was returning from an Epping council meeting on
regeneration, and Pete and Fiona were hand in hand from Michael
Moore's film 'Fahrenheit 9/11.' We sat together on the train back to
Lowestoft. Fiona spoke enthusiastically about Moore's film but felt
the audience were a bit churchy - a preacher preaching to the
converted, as it were. Maxine, razor suited, wears lots of hats. She's
an Eco research fellow at the UEA, a regeneration officer, is active
in CND, The Green Party and a leading member of 'Theatre of War.'
Theatre of War have led every demonstration
"Against the War" for two years in Britain with their agit-prop
theatre. Most notable was their golden George W Bush statue toppled in
Trafalgar Square earlier this year. A great achievement for a small
group from the Suffolk market town of Beccles.
Off the train, Pete and Fiona went home, the
corruption of world leaders thumping in their heads. Maxine and I went
for a drink. I so admire this young woman for cutting wires at
airbases and undertaking street die-ins in London and Beccles. We
argued about agit-prop, saw each others' views, then her boyfriend
turned up.
Arriving home the poetic hero of my youth had got
through my front door before me. Adrian Mitchell. His latest book,
'The Shadow Knows: Poems 2000-2004' was quickly lifted from my mat and
speedily torn from its package. There, on the cover, a picture from
above of the biggest protest march in British political history - the
anti-war march of February 15, 2003. It stands as a moving force in
politics and British society still. Nothing is resolved. I'm sure I
can just make out the top of my head...
Adrian Mitchell was invited by Red Pepper Magazine
to be 'Shadow Poet Laureate' to the British establishment, given
Andrew Motion's support of New Labour and his dull poetry and voice.
Mitchell was central to the explosion of a powerful
alternative movement in the 1960s - against the Vietnam War, against
oppression and injustice globally, and for democracy and freedom from
below.
'The Shadow Knows' is full of jewels. Mitchell's
voice is sharp and satirical when laying into the British ruling
class, their wars and a poetry scene which adorns a Laureate:
Unjubilee Poem
Liquid sunshine gushing down
To dance and sparkle on the Crown.
I see the Laureate's work like this:
A long, thin streak of yellow piss.
This ditty sets the mood for half the collection -
angry, committed political poems, often in rhyming couplets or
structured forms for comic and satirical effect. They are obviously
for mouth and ear, rather than the page, but an essential record of
Mitchell's velvet oral delivery. Roughly half the poems in the book
turn more to friends, friendship, family, love and children as
subjects, and, without the need for frontal humour or irony hot enough
to cook eggs on, these poems tend to explore the language more
informally, like a jazz quartet tentatively breaking from a tune.
Surprisingly, as I don't like dogs very much, one
of my favourites here is Thanks To My Dog in An Hour Of Pain.
It opens thus:-
weariness
blankness in my bones
tears like molten lead shoulders down my throat
a dead white pebble
in the left side of my chest an empty fur glove
where my heart
should be sitting
the clock strikes and won't stop striking
striking the time of grief
weariness
blankness in the bone
It ends with the "deep down toffee eyes" of his
dog. Put the sentimentality aside a moment, the poem contrasts quite
markedly in its structure with his publicly committed poems. It is
fluid as opposed to crafted.
Rightly, like many of the poets of his generation -
Michael Rosen, Adrian Henri, Jeff Nuttall - Mitchell places his poetry
at the centre of society. If poets are the 'unacknowledged legislators
of the world' this should be so. But like Pete and Fiona out of
"Fahrenheit 9/11," who had rejoiced in the film, but were
then surprised by the sense of religiosity in the cinema, having ones
beliefs reinforced can leave an aching gap between 'answers' and
'questions.' That is, I worry when poetry
and art illustrate reality. In British theatre there are increasing
tendencies to create plays as journalism - often political, well made
and knowing - like many of these poems.
Let me illustrate the essence of my thoughts with
Mitchell's poem First Publications
My poems were first published
on lavatory walls
down in the Gents
where the girl I loved could never see them
of course I didn't use her name
or sign the poems
Sometimes people smudged my words out
with piss or shit or snot
I didn't mind the piss so much
and the smudged poems
looked sort of streamlined and alive
when their blue letters became
soft streaks across the pockmarked yellow
plaster
I would rather engage in the 'streamlined and
alive' broken poem which is the subject of Mitchell's
social commentary than 'First Publications' itself. This style
of social observation, like a newspaper report, evokes how a poem is
interacted with by an audience, but seems to achieve the reverse: as a
reader (as audience) I am not party to the lavatory wall poem, before
or after its reworking in bodily effluent. Like the girl, we too are
locked out of the lavatory and the poem. Yes, Mitchell asks us to
consider the relationship between poetry and society, but by dint of
his 'social commentary' it is what educationalists term a 'closed
question.' Isn't there also an underlying sentimentality in the
poem's closure? In this broken world, we are neither engaged with the
'broken' people or in the 'broken' poem, just in the thoughtless
interaction.
In my view, in the British humanitarian pacifist
movement there is a kind of sentimentality, which also touches many of
these poems. I think this is not only a trait in poems of social
commentary but in writing for specific audiences - children, lefties,
poetry followers and Guardian readers. I've never quite understood
writing poems specifically for children. It seems like
another division and diversion which assuages the guilt of
adults. Mitchell's demand that none of his poems are ever to be used
in an examination is admirable. However, in his book, there is a
curious 'advert' for Education Otherwise who teach children taken out
of state schools by their parents. Here is a sentimental notion of
self help when so many disaffected young people have no option but
their horrible sink school. It is the same curious sentimentality I
find among Theatre of War, who am-dram a 'die-in' in Beccles Market
Place and wonder why passers by are not suddenly 'awakened' by this
act of reality, of knowledge!
However, Adrian Mitchell is a colossus on the
British Poetry scene and was the first poet I read - for his
rebellion, humanity, wit and ease of style. The master retains many
of his powers. Yet, as I grow older, I prefer poems more broken,
begging more questions of emotions and intellect (and poems free of
pets).
August 2004
