Communist Poetry

“Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

E. V. Debs
Statement to the Court Upon Being Convicted of Violating the Sedition Act
September 18, 1918
http://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1918/court.htm

Is Gorky any good? This is some good political poetry:

You know, it's the old glass box at the—
At the gas station,
Where you're using those little things
Trying to pick up the prize,
And you can't find it.
It's—

And it's all these arms are going down in there,
And so you keep dropping it
And picking it up again and moving it,
But—

Some of you are probably too young to remember those—
Those glass boxes,
But—

But they used to have them
At all the gas stations
When I was a kid.

WH Auden. Not sure about the title and only fragments of it are online.

"Visions of Poesy" (An Anthology of 20th century Anarchist Poetry) edited by Clifford Harper and published by Freedom Press for those interested in the subject...

First Hugh McDiarmid was a Stalinist and an obscurist with his made up "Scots" but he writes beautifully and about real things- OK a hymn to Lenin (yes a hymn to Lenin it is called that) shows his dyed in the wool Stalinist nature of his thinking and his elitism comes through in some poems and bugs the fuck out me but there is enough there to keep me coming back to his work for over 25 years now.
Tom Leonard is well worth checking out-His 'weegie language is a bit of a barrier but if you keep going (or hear him talk it) it is so good it hurts. http://www.tomleonard.co.uk/main-publications/intimate-voices/the-six-oclock-news.html
this didnt copy right but anyway

this is thisix a clocknews thiman said nthi reasona talk wiaBBC accentiz coz yiwidny wahntmi ti talkaboot thitrooth wiavoice likwanna yooscruff. ifa toktabootthi troothlik wanna yooscruff yiwidny thingkit wuz troo.jist wanna yooscruff tokn.thirza rightway ti spellana right wayto tok it. thisis me tokn yirright way aspellin. thisis ma trooth.yooz doant nothi troothyirsellz cawzyi canny talkright. this isthe six a clocknyooz. belt up.

we did that poem at school my bristolian english teacher trying to read it in a glaswegian accent was amazing.

I can understand about 70% of that. what's "yooscruff"?

you scruff.

d'oh!

http://leonarduk.com/tom/audio/6oclocklow.wav
this might help

euro-communist / a gucci socialist

for a modern home and cheap electricity streamlined functional neat simplicity put yourself on the slum clearance list dial a dialectical materialist find out what your net potential is get married to an existentialist don't doubt your own identity dress down to a cool anonymity the pierre cardin line to infinity clothes to climb the meritocracy the new age of benevolent bureaucracy i like to visit all the big cities museums and municipal facilities i strive for critical ability i thrive on political activity i'm alive in a new society i arrive quickly quietly the car that i drive is the family variety roman catholic marxist leninist happily married to an eloquent feminist a lapsed atheist all my memories measure the multitude's deafening density psycho citizens are my enemies crypto nazis and their remedies keep the city silent as the cemetery's architechtural gothic immensity a new name on the less-than-kosher list the euro-communist / a gucci socialist

John Cooper Clarke (un-released)

If you like,

Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt part

Linton Kwesi Johnson's dub poetry is also fantastic which has various communist themes.

iirc Linton Kwesi Johnson wrote very contemptuously in The Observer in early 1981, about 8 months after a big riot in Bristol in 1980, of "white anarchists" who'd written something up something fairly poetic on the walls of Brixton, "Bristol Today - Brixton Tomorrow!", describing them as fantasists or something similar. Just a few weeks later this fantasy became a reality when true poetry shook the streets of Brixton in the biggest mainland riot since I don't know when.

I prefer this poem, written late 70s:

Now Is The Winter Of Our Poetry

Knowing:

How to wait
and
How to negate
When to use tact
and
When to act
When to smile When to bite
When to shine in the pitch black night
When to use the transparent door
Of a pompous metaphor
When to mime and When to shout
When to rhyme and When to grate
When to use a nice neat line
And
When to

Break it up

When to scan
and When to swim against the tide of bourgeois poetic rhythm
When to stop writing poetry
And when to live it
(and for you, dear reader,
when are YOU
going to
stop merely reading and word-playing and falling in love with
a nice phrase on a piece of paper and pissing around with
opinions you never do anything with and never doing anything
but?)

It's not William Blake or Shelley or early Brecht, but...

Who wrote it? Ian Bone?

Still my favourite

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you and me
Said I, but Joe you're ten years dead
I never died said he.
I never died said he.

The Ballad of Joe Hill, by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson

Try Shelley and other of the Romantics, Julian Beck, Hugo Ball, Tonu Trobetsky and some would say Henry David Thoreau.

Richard wrote:

No - I did.
I find almost all 20th/21st century poetry that I've read pretty dire, particularly the political stuff, which is often far too worthy, tub-thumping. But if you have to have something that rhymes - this, a piece of graffiti written on a wall in Sheffield during the Gulf War of 1991, is pretty good:
"High-tech war kills and maims
The media shows us video games".
(and no, I didn't write this one)

Poetry as a specialist activity is a product of the division of labour - I prefer Lautreamont's "Poetry must be made by all - not one". Or, as an American Indian said,
“In my tribe there are no poets. Everyone talks in poetry”. (quoted in Howard Zinn, “A People’s History of the United States”).
As Vaneigem said "poetry rarely involves poems these days. Most works of art are betrayals of poetry."

I like LKJ. I like the sound and rhythm of his work, and when I met him, very briefly and casually, but often, I used to be his postman, he was a very pleasant man.

Devrim

Just read Maldoror, fucking amazing book. My edition also had his poems at the back, but they were just mental and not in a good way. I like LKJ as well.

Farce wrote:

I don't think his book "Poesies" ('Poetry") are really poems at all; read some of it sometime ago but can't remember much - but not all of it is mental in a bad way. Debord's thesis 207 from Soc of the Spec is: "Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea." I think all of this is plagiarised from Lautréamont's "Poesies", if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah, "plagiarism is necessary" is def a Lautreamont line. It's possible that he was doing something really clever that I just didn't appreciate, but it didn't read that well to me.

Seeing as he'd be 252 today, here's a little gem from William Blake:

The Chimney Sweeper

A little black thing among the snow:
Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!
Where are thy father & mother? say?
They are both gone up to the church to pray.

Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil'd among the winters snow:
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

And because I am happy, & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King
Who make up a heaven of our misery.

And now to crack open a bottle of London porter for a toast...

Ah Blake! beautiful but at the same time so bloody obscure in places, But always worth the read.
Farce, who is Maldoro? I have vaguely heard of him.
Agree with Devrim and others on LKJ

The Chants of Maldoror is a long proto-surrealist prose poem written by the Uruguayan-French poet Isidore Ducasse (aka the Count of Lautremont)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Chants_de_Maldoror
It doesn't really have anything to do with communism, but it is a wildly original work (esp. for its time) and challenges conventional morality.

Weird, I hadn't seen this thread but was thinking about Blake today as a result of listening to a Fall song that (mis)quotes his "I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's".

Tom Wintringham wrote some lovely stuff, if a little formally niave, but from the English public school 'war-poets' tradition.

Mayakovsky I suppose would be the classic avant-gardist-

who was, incidentally, a big influence on a lot of the German visual artists that followed Dada.

It depends what you'd call poetry but a lot of English/Scottish folk songs come from the balladeering tradition, originally an accompanied spoken poem. I like a lot of the stuff Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger recorded with folkways for their lyrical content. Blast Against the Blackguards is a current favourite-

Obviously the tempo of the accompaniment gives it something....

Lastly I'd echo the sentiments above who said Brecht. My personal hero, he developed the earlier, sometimes crude possibilities of avant-gardist poetry and shaped it into a more cohesive political-aesthetic practice, theatrically in verfremdungseffekt.
Oh his theatrical work I like The Causcasian Chalk Circle and The Threepenny Opera, but most of all The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (once played by Pacino apparently), an allegory for the rise of the Nazi Party which puts the blame full square at the door of capitalism-

I really like Blake's Songs of Experience (1794) which are not at all obscure, unlike some of his other stuff - eg
The Garden of Love:
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And “Thou shalt not,” writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

Or this, from The Human Abstract:

Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody Poor

and most of the other stuff from Songs of Experience.

Apparently he participated in the destruction of Newgate Prison during the Gordon Riots of 1780.

Although I quite like "Dirty Old Town" and some other songs by Ewan MacColl, we shouldn't forget that he was a Stalinist, who wrote dreadful sick rubbish like The Ballad of Ho Chi Minh (which is well-known in Vietnam) and The Ballad of Stalin ("Joe Stalin was a mighty man and a mighty man was he/ He led the Soviet people on the road to victory").

And it should be pointed out that Brecht was pretty much a CP fellow traveller, and owed his theatre in East Berlin to the support of the Stalinist state. It’s well known that when the steelworkers rose up in East Berlin in 1953 and went to Brecht’s theatre to ask for help in supporting them he refused. Fear had nothing to do with his failure to support the steelworkers: Brecht’s international reputation put him in the unique position of having nothing much to worry about. What’s not well known is what my dad (who'd known Brecht a bit because he'd been an actor in Berlin up until Hitler came to power, and continued to keep up contact, mainly with Brecht's wife, I think) told me about him: he felt so guilty and ashamed after the steelworkers were crushed by the tanks of the Stalinist leader, Ulbricht, that his health suffered, and it led to his death in 1956, at the age of 58. If nothing else, this shows how a being a professional specialist in the culture of 'proletarian politics' usually has nothing to do with its practice, and that those who consider ideas as something separate from real life risk are pretty useless when it comes to any genuine struggle against this world.His only response to the uprising was to write a brief poem after it was all over -The Solution - which, though written in verse form, I reproduce here as a statement,because the verse form adds nothing to it: “After the uprising of the 17th June, the Secretary of the Writers Union had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee stating that the people had forfeited the confidence of the government and could win it back only by redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”. Neatly put, but too little too late, and no use in stemming that dreadful feeling of self-betrayal, betrayal of everything he’d apparently held dear to him, that must have torn and worn away at him until death.

And, by the way, I remember, in 1968, seeing "Arturo Ui" when I'd just turned 18, in East Berlin's 'Brecht Theater', and that quote at the end of the play:

was used by the performers as a warning against the rise of the ultra-right in West Germany, at a time when Ulbricht's soldiers were still shooting the occasional escaper from the East. The pot calling the kettle black.

As for Mayakovsky - the above poem (which is usually translated as "the boat of love breaks up on the reefs of everyday life", but I suppose the translator above wanted to keep the rhyme) was his suicide note.
For an interesting take on him, see: http://libcom.org/library/occupation-art-gentrification
"By 1923, when the success of private industry was seriously threatening the state's profits from the sale of their own commodities, Mayakovsky, a poet, and Alexander Rodchenko, a Constructivist photographer, combined to form an 'advertisement constructor' team to promote state goods. So for the next two years Constructivists dedicated themselves to not only promoting Bolshevik economic policy as a progressive force in the formation of a new social order, but also acted as an advertising agency with the state as their major client."

I think that poetry is, however, a craft. I think that one can learn to become a good poet through training and practice, and that everyone should be able and actively encouraged to write and read poetry. However, even if I spent a long time learning carpentry, I know that I would still make pretty inelegant and remarkably shit tables due to the fact that I'm massively cackhanded. Individual excellence in craft is something that can be celebrated as a communal achievement.

Edvard wrote:

I find most modern poetry pretentious crap (apart from EJThribb) - it makes my stomach squirm, my teeth grit. It's a specialist form of "communication"/monologue without anything daring about it. There might be certain exceptions, but in the West, as far as I can see, there's nothing about it apart from being a career. Kid's poetry, poems to someone you love, personal stuff, and even some jokey poems are different - but then they're not surrounded by some aura of ""creativity". The comparison with carpentry doesn't bear examination (I'm not thinking of the modernist, sometimes surrealist or whatever, aesthetics of upper middle class cupboards and tables that you might get in Conrans or places like that): to make an equivalent of them, when their social function and the cultural discourse surrounding them is so different, is to ignore their very different place in the hierarchical division of labour . A chair has a real use, whereas most poems are only made for an image of sophistication (and if they say something socially significant, almost invariably this could be better said in prose, without recourse to the vagueness that most poems express). As for your cackhandedness - if it's not a physical disability, I'm sure that could be overcome given time.

I quite like what Ken Knabb said in 1970:

Knabb read this out at an open poetry reading:

I'm not exactly sure why or how prose is "better"? more concise? more "to the point"? poetry is not about those two things necessarily, just like music is not necessarily about teaching you about sounds.
Making a utilitarian argument against poetry is ridiculous.

Ironically, this is exactly the kind of grandiose "tabula rasa" bullshit that I hate about certain strands of modern poetry. In denouncing all poetry as a "social relationship," Knabb is saying something as meaningless and unimportant as the hippest L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poet.
In truth, "high poetry" like Rimbaud et al, is neither decayed bardic mysticism or bourgeois pomposity; true, some, if not most, poetry is that, but just because poetry is written by a "professional" that doesn't mean it doesn't have value for the "ordinary man." I never studied poetry at school, and I was never formally taught how to read it, and yet a single brilliant stanza (whether it is Rimbaud or Wu Tang Clan it matters too little to me) can have more impact on me than all the mediocre and concise prose of the world put together. Is that experience false, because some Situ has-been says it is? Fuck that.

Vlad said:

I was specifically criticising "socially significant" poetry - which "almost invariably" falls into hackish didacticism at best (e.g. late Brecht, or considerably worse - the unbearable cringe-inducing Pinter bollocks). Your post seemed like typical ideological communication - mis-quoting or mis-reading things said - picking up on words out of context, because the argument jars with your own ideas and you can't deal with it honestly. But maybe I'm mis-reading you - perhaps you could give me an example of a modern socially significant poem that had an impact on you.

And I wasn't trying to make a utilitarian argument against all poetry - it was more a question of analysing the separation of function and beauty - a chair can be both, but poetry never is.

This is certainly not to say that, for their time, Blake, Shelley, Rimbaud , Mallarmé etc. weren't original and subversive. I too like a lot of Rimbaud - but Knabb's take on him added something to an understanding of the limitations of poetry: he certainly wasn't simply denouncing poetry as a "social relationship" (what isn't?). Nor was he saying that what Rimbaud wrote was "false". He was specifically criticising Rimbaud's poetry, like poetry as an institution, as a social relationship inimical to "the effective realisation of the imagination in the world." - that is, Rimbaud "inevitably" failed in his genuine search for the magical through poems. It's not such a big deal. You can be moved by his poems or not - that's not the point.

And the real problem is not to put Rimbaud, or any other 'great' poetry on a pedestal but to find the varied ways of expressing yourself imaginatively, originally and passionately as Rimbaud did in his own way and time, outside of the parameters of 'poetry'. Besides, Rimbaud's poems came from him trying to live daringly - and people often verbally or in other ways express themselves imaginatively without turning this expression into a product.

As for the "Situ has-been" put-down - ironically, the stuff Knabb puts on his site is so much weaker than his writings of 35 - 40 years ago in part because he's so much more tolerant of artistic/ cultural/poetic stuff now than he was a helluva long time ago. For example, nothing of his recent stuff compares with his excellent "Bureaucratic Comix" of almost 39 years ago, which is still far better than loads of Leninist garbage that permeates the libcom site here and there. Sheer poetry.