Poetry

i'll answer quickly... i'm not really into it though

no

it shouldn't be allowed in anarchist newspapers! (so i support freedom's policy)

n/a

It's like crap music, cos there's no music, or crap prose cos there's no story.

no

Of course stuff similar to poetry like rap is different...

What about the ban!?!

Devrim

Poetry in political publications always brings to mind shitty self indulgent teenage zines, wanky wishy washy feminist mags with poems about the empowerment of menstrual blood, the moon and the tears of mother earth.

Poetry is pish!

In fairness, the ban is against poetry sent in specifically for the paper, cos what we get is so often eyewateringly bad (call me a stickler is you like, but afaic ryhming Blair with Liar should be punishable by hanging from a bridge until you agree to never be so stupid ever again).

What Richard's talking about sounds more like quoting in the context of an analytical article, which would be allowable.

SMASH POETRY!

Good poetry, like any good artform, is fucking brilliant. I read a lot of it, particularly contemporary innovative poetry out of the modernist and avant garde traditions.

Protest poetry, that just rants, is shit. Mainstream poetry, especially that written by people like Carol Anne Duffy is shit (this is, of course, just my opinion, not analysis and not objective fact - analyis would show, however, that it is deeply conservative and I would argue that that is an objective fact). Poetry that thinks about politics can be very good; some of the best overtly political contemporary poetry, especially by relatively young poets, is often written by leftists such as Keston Sutherland, Andrea Brady or Sean Bonney. I don't know of any explicitly 'anarchist poets', although some poets associated with the Writers' Forum, escpecially in the 1970s have been referred to as anarchist-syndicalist (see Poetry Wars by Peter Barry, though I can't find the exact reference). Sean Bonney might seem to have anarchist leanings, although he hangs around with Trots and might be one himself.

I would suggest that anybody seriously interested in this stuff should look at http://www.barquepress.com/, http://abandonedbuildings.blogspot.com/, http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/ or http://jacketmagazine.com/00/home.shtml

I'm not going to get into anything with people who simply don't like poetry (though as my partner's dad once said, that's like saying you don't like food - there are so many different kinds of poetry the statement hardly makes sense; but poetry is mostly taught incredibly badly in schools etc). If you really don't like it, leave it alone. It's not hurting you any.

Just to quickly add, as Sean Bonney says in an essay in the magazine Quid 12, available as a pdf file free from the Barque Press website, good political poetry is written out of a social situation and is not a comment on it.

John, what do you think of the Hikmet poem I posted above.
Devrim

I think Cliff Harper was a scab, Wapping 1986. If I had seen him at the time, I would have had more than words with him.
Devrim

Partial to it. I think there's some truth to the idea - expressed poetically in Eliot and critically I forget where - that late capitalist subjectivity is basically incapable of engaging with poetry proper, that the pace of things, the superficiality of education, the brutalisation of a subjectivity which was, pace Nietzsche, of course almost always aristocratic and privileged.

I've therefore got a lot of sympathy with attempts to 'off' poetry by the dadaists and the situ idea of the need reconstruct a material basis for poetry, or perhaps - sorry - a material poetry.

Eliot and Tzara are two sides of the same critique of poetry, one tragic, the other historical and avant-garde.

Contemporary written poetry is more or less balls, pointless. The crossover of beat and hip-hop is worth looking at as a social means of communication (there are regular poetry jams in london which seem to have a crossover with elements of the hiphop scene), perhaps a democratic form of rhetoric.

Poetic or evocative prose is quite another thing, and has its place - as crimethinc have ably demonnstrated, whatever their politics. Poetry is too much to aspire to now. Even Vaneigem recognised it: beautiful books but (forgive if I'm wrong) never a published word of poetry.

hm.

I like Benjamin Zepheniah and Atilla the Stockbroker.

With both of them the enthusiasm and comic timing of the delivery adds a lot, but they're still good to read.

ASYLUM SEEKING DALEKS!
(For Ann Winterton)

They claim their planet's dying:
that soon it's going to blow
And so they're coming here - they say
they've nowhere else to go....
With their strange computer voices
and their one eye on a pole
They're moving in next door and then
they're signing on the dole.....

Asylum seeking Daleks
are landing here at noon!
Why can't we simply send them back
or stick them on the moon?
It says here in the Daily Mail
they're coming here to stay -
The Loony Lefties let them in!
The middle class will pay......

They say that they're all pacifists:
that doesn't wash with me!
The last time I saw one I hid
Weeks behind the settee...
Good Lord - they're pink. With purple bumps!
There's photos of them here!
Not just extra-terrestial....
The bloody things are queer!

Yes! Homosexual Daleks
And they're sponging off the State!
With huge Arts Council grants
to teach delinquents how to skate!
It's all here in the paper -
I'd better tell the wife!
For soon they will EXTERMINATE
Our British way of life.....

This satire on crass ignorance
and tabloid-fostered fear
Is at an end. Now let me give
One message, loud and clear.
Golf course, shop floor or BNP:
Smash bigotry and hate!
Asylum seekers - welcome here.
You racists: emigrate!

ATTILA THE STOCKBROKER
6 May 2002

Nothing wrong with poetry per se, not really my thing but keep it away from politics. The amount of bad poetry I had to listen to people read out at the G8 in scotland was unreal, worse thing was everyone expected total silence whenever a hippy showed up with their lastest offering.

Smash Poets.

I like fiction, well written (even poetically written) that has a social, economic, class context. Just finished a great novel, Freedom Road by Howard Fast, set in US Reconstruction (recently discussed at some length in the apartheid and slavery thread).

But I'm afraid I don't like much poetry anymore, political or not, because most strikes me as pretentious. Objectively or otherwise. Seems to me it would be damn near impossible to use a high highfalutin format such as poetry, to create working class art.