Communist Poetry

What on earth are you talking about? In the early twenties (1922 to 1925 to be prescise) his poetry was pretty anti-Kemalist, he actually calls Kemal a dog in one of his poems from that period. He became a communist when he went to Russia to study, he was obviously a nationalist before he went there. He joined the Communist Party of Turkey in Russia and when he returned to Turkey, he joined the right wing of the party.

As for the poems, they were both written well after the forties, when Kemal was dead.

It is true that Nazim Hikmet himself was a rather fickle Stalinist for the most of his life, but his poetry is generally considered within the boundaries of futurism and the "Turkish avant-garde" rather than "socialist realism", and in any case what is actually Stalinist while looking at arts is to base the evaluation made on the politics of the artist.

Perhaps you should be if you have spent such a large amount of time drafting a hysterical response to someone who posted two poems on the internet.

Who is trying to draw attention to themselves, or who is boring for that matter, is pretty obvious. Seriously, get a life...

A poem recently published on the ICC website, about the feelings of a returned soldier:

 
A soldiers tale

 All the endless anticipation could not prepare you

All the training casually comes and goes

If you have been pulled and stretched in every way

Have been sent to the edge of the crevice

and been tempted to look down,

All the while feeling yourself on the crest of

grim madness and bloodthirsty insanity

If you've had to kill or be killed and so killed 

in anger and hate and blind panic,

When friend and foe alike blur

with barely time to register or regret,

To try and duck something that could kill you

before you'd thought to duck

If you've had to carry someone in your hands

as their life dribbled away with every jerk and heave

Heard the last exhalations of two hundred

cursing and shouting the name of their most beloved 

Maria or Mark or God

Have fought the protestations of your innards

ejecting themselves at the visceral scenes

(now safely locked away)

After all of this, and all of that  -

what does a return to normality mean?

I thought that was pretty good, sort of reminds of this song by Eric Bogle:

The version I would recommend if anyone wants to listen to the actual song is by Dropkick Murphies, and the songs called "The Green Fields of France".

Haven't heard Dropkick Murphies', but heard June Tabor's version - which is very good.

BTW did you hear about the riot when Korn came to Caracas? Loads of dudes ripped up the fences and stormed the VIP section. At least one rich insurrectionist called it "class warfare".

That is your opinion. However, Nazim Hikmet Ran is quite widely recognised as being a great poet. If you don't like it fair enough, but others do.

I don't think the ones above are great poems, or great translations. There was one that I posted previously that a lot of people seemed to like:

Nice is either 'Hoş' or 'Güzel' in Turkish, both of which are quite widely used for a variety of things that wouldn't be described as 'nice' in modern English. One of your main points seems to be about 'nice', which in my opinion is pretty poor. How would you feel if somebody laied into you about using an adjective in not quite an appropriate way in French, which I believe you speak, as you live there, and then remember that Leo hasn't even been to England as he can't get a visa, like most people here.

As Leo pointed out Hikmet was a nationalist at this point and became a 'communist' later. Are you implying that if people once had nationalist politics then whatever they do later is implicitly discredited.

Nazim Hikmet was a man, who spent a large proportion of his adult life in prison, and most of the rest in exile. He was stripped of his Turkish nationality and died in Moscow. Yes, he was a Stalinist, so was my father and grandfather. They were both people who spent their lives fighting for what they saw as the cause of the working class. It doesn't make their politics any less reactionary, but I feel that we should at least have some sympathy on a human level.

Hikmet was this sort of nationalist:

I thought that he did. The OP said this:

He replied to the OP. What are you so upset about? That he wasn't interested in what you were discussing? To be honest I have just read through it and I didn't really understand what you were talking about. What would it be useful for? Personally I would rather read the poetry that others liked. However, other have put up poems on this thread and no of them received the barrage of vitriol that you reserved for Leo. What is the problem?

Ah, I see. He is a member of the ICC, so has to be criticised whatever.

To be honest I think that you were well out of order and that you owe him an apology.

Devrim

Erm, I was very dubious about this. Poetry is a bit of a dead medium in English. In Turkish it is much more popular. We use poetry in our stuff. For example at the start of this leaflet on the TEKEL strike:

http://tr.internationalism.org/ekaonline-2000s/ekaonline-2009/el-tutusa-tutusa

I am a bit doubtful about it in English though.

Devrim

Samotnaf - your reproduction of Blake's The Tyger:

I won't offer an exegesis of The Tyger, but some random thoughts around Blake's 'kind of critique of God' which tend to come to me at this time of night after a few glasses of Guinness Foreign Extra Stout and Grolsch Weizen.

There is a kind of critique of God, evident when you look at poems like The Chimney Sweeper, which chides those who 'are gone to praise God & his Priest & King / Who make up a heaven of our misery'. The Garden of Love describes 'Priests in black gowns... binding with briars, my joys & desires'. Blake believed in some kind of God - as Saree Makdisi puts it: 'Blake repeatedly stresses an immanent conception of God, and hence a human potential for the infinite: "He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only. Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is" (from No Natural Religion)' (Makdisi 28).

I think this is where the figure of Urizen comes in. He's depicted by Blake as the classic white-bearded, transcendent God, sat up in the clouds, clutching a pair of dividers, in the picture known as The Ancient of Days. The name Urizen, I think, was intended to evoke the finitude of the horizon, as well as - in an anticipation of txt-spk - 'Your Reason', that is, the rationality of the emerging industrial world, of which Urizen is the God. He is "the great Work master," who absolutely dominates an industrial and commercial mode of productive organisation in which "each took his station, & his course began with sorrow and care / In sevens & tens & fifties, hundreds, thousands, numberd all / According to their various powers. Subordinate to Urizen" (The Four Zoas) (Makdisi 117-118). Urizen's role as 'work master' is inseparable from his self-proclaimed role as God - "Am I not God said Urizen. Who is Equal to me". A "Conqueror in triumphant glory", Urizen builds his universal empire:

First Trades & Commerce ships & armed vessels he builded laborious
To swim the deep & on the Land children are sold to trades
Of dire necessity still laboring day & night till all
Their life exctinc they took the spectre form in dark despair
And slaves in myriads in ship loads burden the hoarse sounding deep
Rattling with clanking chains the Universal Empire groans.

E P Thompson speculated that Blake came from a Muggletonian background. In fact, it's since been found that both Blake's parents were members of the Moravian Chapel in Fetter Lane, off Fleet Street, which was destroyed in the raid of May 10th 1941. Blake is likely to have drawn much of his religious language, symbolism and inspiration from here. On a bit of a tangent, I think the Moravian connection - between Blake's outlook and Afro-Caribbean radicalism from the 18th century to the present (the 'discourse' on Babylon, for example) - would be worth investigating. That's prompted by reading the obituary in today's Independent for the actor, Cy Grant, who voiced Lieutenant Green in Captain Scarlet, amongst other things. The great-grandson of a slave, he was born in British Guiana in 1919, one of seven children of a Moravian minister and a music teacher. His minister father impressed upon him that Toussaint l'Ouverture, who led the revolution in Haiti, was a great leader. I remember one of those Who Do You Think You Are? TV programmes where a black British athlete (Colin Jackson?) went to Jamaica to see where his mum had come from and there was a plot of land owned by the Moravian church which had been given to freed slaves.

PS The Makdisi book is William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s Uni. of Chicago Press 2003 - reading it still 'in progress' (though rewarding) - E P Thompson is a doddle in comparison.

Devrim wrote

and

This is interesting and probably needs a thread of its own. A few years ago I read a newspaper report rehashing some 'scientific research' into language and psychology which remarked on how different languages appeared to be conducive to different ways of perceiving and acting in the world (not to be confused with so-called 'national characteristics', presumably). That's about all I can remember, I'm afraid, other than that it was observed that the English language was conducive to free market capitalism. Perhaps another stimulus to James Joyce's FinnegansWake - 'I am at the end of English'. Any thoughts?

I tend to disagree with the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, and think that thought does not have a strong influence on cognition. I think that thought goes on at a more base level than language and that we then internally 'translate' to the language we use.

Devrim

Thanks for clearing up that little mystery.

There is an article about brazilian anarchist poetry here. In portuguese, the most know anarchist poets were José Oiticica and Roberto das Neves.

It's kind of heroic and manichaeist, but it's nice!

In Brazil there is cordel, a form of popular poetry really big in the northeastern. No academic crap, it's an authentic folk art, based mostly on story-telling. There is some interesting political cordel (none anarchist, though).

Dano, thanks for the Brazilian poems. Do you know if any of these were set to music or whether it was just written poetry?

I don't think they were set to music. Most of them were only published in the anarchosyndicalist newspaper A Plebe. Almost all of the songs sang in the anarchist movement were translations of other country's stuff (like The Anarchist International, Primo Maggio and Hijos del Pueblo), specially because of the high number of immigrants. There's an article on brazilian anarchist music here, and another one about poetry here.

By the way, Edgar Rodrigues wrote a book in 1992 called O Anarquismo na Escola, no Teatro, na Poesia (Anarchism in School, Theater and Poetry). I don't have it, but it looks interesting.

I didn't understand the hostility towards poetry in here. The maoist guy was right in this aspect, it is really important in some cultures. Poetry can be a wonderful form of popular expression.

Dev, I wouldn't say the poetry is a 'dead medium' in English. As I understand it, it's very much alive and kicking, especialy amongst young people - rap music anyone??

The other point I would make is that poetry can and will be more significant, but as with most art, you can't divorce it from the wider state of society and the state of the class struggle. So you can see from the examples of Russia 1917 (Proletkult) and, more recently, the uprisings of May 68, that artists can flourish in line with upsurges in the struggle. Indeed, it is also the case that the division between 'artists' and all others, itself begins to breakdown...

It kind of reminds me of the bit in the German Ideology where Marx talks about to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

Personally i don't see the problem as poetry per se, more that - as here on this thread - it's being read, whereas poerty demands performance.

Whether it's good , bad or indifferent is another question.

Samotnaf-

I was being slightly snide to be honest but it could be seen as kind of a compliment, alluding to your impressive general understanding and critique of a wide range of subjects that pop up around here. I had already read your Closed window...I've been trying to work through your uploads since you made some insightful comments about the nature of some of the discourse around these parts. I also recognise the role some posters take in closing down discussion, others putting their 'seal of approval' and some posts which are left of the left if that is the right term? Being shot down before they even get a conversation started. I have further criticisms but I won't go into them here. They certainly combine to put people off posting, including myself especially if you are not as well read for example. I also enjoy the situationist style of writing if I may call it that which you often delve into. It tends to cut through the bullshit so to speak without losing its relevance. However, I recognise others disagree entirely. I agree with your criticisms of 'my' cut up, it clearly means very little to anyone apart from myself as I was able to read it in its original form even though my intention wasn't to be 'artistic' it was to stimulate a reaction. Your points about using techniques, their limitations, aims etc are interesting and a useful guide. So thanks,I appreciate someone putting in detailed effort to what was essentially a mediocre post at best by myself. So, my new and improved Revolutionary soap powder:

We revolve in the historical
and the temporal.
Convulsed between Samotnaf's
subversive.
And the sleight of bourgeois individualism.
One ends up in cultish, esoteric shamanism.
The other, The Icey Sea.
We dance and we slog...
and therein lies the separation.
The freedom of our collective labour,
will be won through struggle!
In the Bedroom!
In the Kitchen!
And in the Forums!

Bedrooms, Kitchens, Forums!

I'll post the 'annotations' in a while...
If this comes across as infantile/utter shite so be it.

Heres some parts of a Nazım Hikmet's The Epic of Shiekh Bedreddin, about a proto-socialist rebellion in the 15th century Ottoman Empire. I translated these, so I hope it doesn't sound too bad.

BUMP I WANT TO SEE SOME MORE COMMUNIST POETRY!

you want communist poetry ... so you get Herman Gorter!

found at https://lostupabove.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/zie-je/

Gorter would make a great worryingly eccentric cat owner

I looked for some more poetry but wasn't satisfied so I wrote my own after reading DH Lawrence's poems posted earlier in this thread. TO THE STRAWBERRY FIELDS!

The milk jug is for sharing.
The egg basket is for sharing.
The strawberries are for sharing.
Let's all just share and stop bickering.
Let's throw out the police
from our windows and our doors.
And the tax-collector too,
with his grubby hands and fat face.
And let's build a new City.
Where doors need not be locked.
Where the clock is but an ornament,
and not the tyrant of the daylight.
Where we are not mindlessly
lugging ourselves about
in order to earn a penny or two
for some fathead.
A city of light-
not of heaven, but of earth.
Out in the strawberry fields
we shall all work, and sing,
together.

some really bad maoist poems: https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-3/lc-poetry.pdf

A Limerick

There was an Old Man called Gaddafi
Who blew up a train load of navvies;
The people went barmy
Because of this swami
And next day Spain pulled out its army.

cresspot I like the ironic style of your poem but I didn't like this line:

I know that communism breaks down the barrier between town and country so is a new City really our aim.

Legal Midnight Hour

Well, the dying time came, the legal midnight hour,
The moment set by law for the Chair to be at work,
To substantiate the majesty of the State of Massachusetts
That hour was at hand, had arrived, was struck by the clocks,
The time for two men to be carried cool on a cooling board
Beyond the immeasurably thin walls between day and night,
Beyond the reach of airmail, telegrams, radiophones,
Beyond the brotherhoods of blood into the fraternities
Of mist and foggy dew, of stars and ice.
The time was on for two men
To march beyond blood into dust -
A time that comes to all men,
Some with a few loved ones at a bedside,
Some alone in the wilderness or the wide sea,
Some before a vast audience of all mankind.

Now Sacco saw the witnesses
As the straps were fitted on
Tying him down in the Chair –
And seeing the witnesses were
Respectable men and responsible citizens,
And even though there had been no introductions,
Sacco said, “Good-evening, gentlemen.”
And before the last of the straps was fastened so to hold
Sacco murmured, “Farewell, mother.”

Then came Vanzetti.
He wished the vast audience of all mankind
To know something he carried in his breast.
This was the time to tell it.
He had to speak now or hold his peace forever.
The headgear was being clamped on.
The straps muffling his mouth were going on.
He shouted, “I wish to forgive some people
Or what they are now doing.”
And so now
The dead are dead? ? ? ?

Carl Sandburg

Mockeries & Phrase

Blessings flow:
The reason for life is love
And even before there was
My hands stretched forth up above,
Zion we love.

Mockeries and phrase, Babylon applauding for building an evilous world;
Follies and craze, ghetto youths skylarking, not seeing all dem twist & twirl.
Mockeries and phrase, states and church applauding for building
the Western World;
Follies and craze, ghetto youths skylarking, not seeing Mystery Babylon.

Where do you go from here,
Rasta found you guilty on the points of care?
Atomic energy fuel your ego cheer,
Manufacture machine based upon your nuclear;
Your human family been dragged to warfare,
In the children heart you try to drive all your fear.
Can be recognized from the clothes you wear
Yet we nah judge your seam dem, neither your tear.

I tell you now:
Living in this polluted hemisphere, youths hold strong,
judgement again!
The works of the wicked never will prevail for long;
Where you belong, Ethiopian? Babylon me tell yuh say yah.

Me tell dem, the youths in agony, organise proper thing
Ay! Channel the only way dey go.
So-called authority giving us brutality,
I fight for my rights also
Nothing to eat, we hungry; no clothes fi wear, we hungry;
Bullets will never stop flow!
Selassie I -- love and mercy inna the crumbling city
Protect us all! Ah tell you now, oh, oh, oh,
Living in polluted hemisphere, people hold strong,
judgement again!
The works of the wicked man never will prevail for long.
Where you belong?
Give us repatriation!
Selassie I done know say ah.

Mockeries and phrase, Babylon applauding for giving such
an evilous world;
Follies and craze, ghetto youths skylarking, not seeing all dem
twist & twirl.
Kill we fi days, Babylon applauding, cause him dunk we inna the
evilous world.
Follies and craze, ghetto youths skylarking, we'll be strong all you
boys & girls!

Miguel Collins

SOoo as for 'communist poetry'

most people that try to write pol. poems suck at it. so it depends on what you're interested. if you don't give a shit about literature but wanna read some 'communist poetry' that's one thing. I owuld suggest taking a different route, since what the fuck does a revolutionary movement need poetry for anyways (ie the relationship b/w the 2 is definitely not a programmatic one, so it's not so important whether poems are explicitly political or not)

that being said, regardless of whether or not the authors were political, poetry written in/around moments of extreme political tension can be very fucking good.

an example of this would be cesar vallejos "spain, take this chalice from me" which was written spanish civil war time period. that is, however, a book, not just a poem.

the obvious other example is Rimbaud's illuminations, written during the paris commune time. this is a better example of poems written under the sway of revolution without being epxlicitly (always) political. in his poetry we can see how revolution is an active destruction of all our senses– thus the imagery, hallucinations, etc.
Anna Mendelssohn wrote brilliant poetry and was part of the Angry brigades in the UK

as for contemporary stuff, I would very highly recommend checking out sean bonney's work. his blog is here, but i would check out his soundcloud and essay on mute magazine on blanqui.

abandonedbuildings.blogspot.com
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/reviews/eternity-to-here

other, less interesting contemporary communist poetry is the stuf coming out the bay– from commune editions. Jasper & Joshua & Juliana Spahr all have books just released about the fires in the last few years. I would start with Juliana's work

a last contemporary book to recommend would be jack frost's 'the antidote' which was written about the oaklkand commune. super dope shit.

i'll leave you with this rimbaud poem, please check out sean bonney's work. i swear to god it's dope as all hell

What’s it to us, my heart, but blankets of blood
And of coalfire, a thousand murders, endless
Howls of rage, and wails of hell-pits disclosing
All order; and North-wind playing still on the debris;

But vengeance? Never! And yet we crave it.
Industrialists, princes, senators: die!
Power, justice, history: kneel! We’re due,
Due blood. Blood, and golden flames.

All in for war, for vengeance, for terror
My soul! We writhe in its Bite: O! pass away
Republics of this world! Emperors,
Regiments, colonists, peoples. Enough already.

Who will rouse these whirlwinds of frenzied fire
If not us, and those we call our brothers?
It’s our turn! Giddy friends, our fun begins.
O floods of fire, we’ll never work

Europe, Asia, America, vanish. Our march
Of vengeance has occupied everything
Cities and the countryside! – We’ll be wiped out!
Volcanoes erupt and Oceans boil…

Oh! My friends! – My heart, it’s sure, they are brothers:
Shadowed strangers, if we were to leave! So let’s go! Let’s go!
O misfortune! I’m trembling and this old earth on me
Who is more and more yours – the earth melts,

It’s nothing! I am here! I am here always!

I'm pretty self conscious about posting this but what the hell.

My most recent literary effort;

Winter sky, deep blue, high and magnificent
Sunlight reaching to Earth like great crackling shards of glass
All is paused, still in this dormant season
The oceans, flat, hard and blue, flat, hard and green
The brown and green of the land sparkling with a white bloom of frost
What perfect beauty
How sweet the universe’s gentle pleasure at being itself
This is what and this is why and this is all
Perfection hums in the contours of the hills, the softness of the mist in the valleys, in the many angles of the rocks and the black skeletons of the trees
But now something soils this perfection, mocks its magnificence, breaks the stillness with its constant scurrying, with its futile efforts to impress
Fat on self-importance, swollen with empty pride,
This thing called humanity could be a part of all there is
But instead it sets itself apart
Each cell in this sprawling creature thinks not of the whole but only itself and in doing so condemns itself and the whole to a needless demise and the few cells that know what they are and cherish the whole exhaust themselves going round and around like a fly with one wing, certain to get nowhere.
So what of the sky and the sea and the land?
Do they feel pity in their hearts at our self- imposed ruin?
Do they wish they could help us to end the stupidity and carve something beautiful from the rock of ourselves?
Not a fucking chance mate, they’ll be glad to see the back of us.