{"id":11485,"date":"2021-05-20T12:13:20","date_gmt":"2021-05-20T11:13:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=11485"},"modified":"2021-05-20T12:13:20","modified_gmt":"2021-05-20T11:13:20","slug":"thrills-difficulties-a-marxist-poet-in-ireland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2021\/05\/20\/thrills-difficulties-a-marxist-poet-in-ireland\/","title":{"rendered":"Thrills & Difficulties: A Marxist Poet in Ireland"},"content":{"rendered":"

for Susan Millar DuMars<\/span> <\/em><\/p>\n

More than a quarter of a century ago a man-child called Kevin retired from politics as he turned twenty seven. He had joined the then somewhat notorious Trotskyist group, the Militant Tendency[i]<\/a>, at the age of fifteen.\u00a0 After twelve years of activism, which began as a member of Galway West Labour Youth the month the Falklands War kicked off and fizzled like the saddest of fireworks in London in the aftermath of Mrs Thatcher\u2019s Poll Tax, against which he had been a somewhat obsessively focused campaigner, it was over. \u201cRetirement\u201d was the face-saving word he used to describe his departure from politics. From the inside it felt like a personal tragedy. And it was. After more than a decade as a fiercely loyal \u2018comrade\u2019, Kevin had had enough of Militant and they had had enough of him. Dialectics being the contradictory beast it is, a total exit from active politics may have been the best thing that could possibly have happened to him right then. But it didn\u2019t feel like that to him. Instead of world socialist revolution, with which history had refused to oblige him, the spectres haunting the little part of Europe with which Kevin was then mostly concerned were, from his point of view, disappointing: Tony Blair and the Celtic Tiger, which got given its name the same year Blair became UK Labour leader: 1994.<\/p>\n

Kevin sloped back to Galway from London via the Holyhead ferry that April with a mouthful of bad teeth; he wasn\u2019t much of a one for looking after himself then.\u00a0 Though would march to defend the NHS for other people until his shoes disintegrated; he did not partake of such services himself. Kevin arrived in Galway with no particular plans, apart from a notion that he might do something artistic. Not artistic in the prettifying sense; he had no interest in describing the rocks around Connemara and the like. Indeed, he had little interest in any kind of beauty. Or so he thought. He wanted to express things he had been unable to say during his years as a (partly-self appointed) leader of the vanguard of the North London semi-lumpen proletariat. Mostly, this would involve going into some detail about all the people and ideas and institutions he was against. It was no small list. High on it was his endlessly self-sacrificing former self, who had worked himself some of the way towards a possible early grave, in an attempt to fight the political tide of the early 1990s that was, in the end, more about masochism than socialism. By \u201cdoing something artistic\u201d, he meant stuff to do with words \u2013 songs, poems, maybe plays, novels… In the last years of his activism, when he was Chair of Enfield Against The Poll Tax in the North London Borough then represented in the House of Commons by, among others, Michael Portillo[ii]<\/a>, he had become increasingly focused on how best to say what needed to be said. It wasn\u2019t enough to say it. It had to be said well. And, if possible, said wittily. He didn\u2019t know it at the time but writing political letters with a satirical bent to the local papers in Enfield in the very early 1990s was his beginning as a poet.<\/p>\n

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This Kevin, who was of course me, hoped to escape politics via poetry but also harboured illusions that he might somehow find a way of combining the two. It is a contradiction I have been working out ever since. From the inside it has felt more to be a case of this obvious contradiction working itself out using me as a somewhat extreme public example. Of late this contradiction has grown starker and as a result perhaps been somewhat resolved. In the course of my work as a poet, I regularly meet that strange creature, the literary liberal, who ascribes to themselves every progressive and humane value while at the same time apparently finding no place in their imaginations for even the possibility of a world not run in the interests of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Apple Inc. They are the sort of people who, if they didn\u2019t necessarily agree with her, would at least have understood where artist Tracy Emin was coming from when she called David Cameron<\/a><\/span>\u2019s coalition of 2010-15 \u201cthe best government…that we’ve ever had\u201d. Politically, Emin may be an ignoramus. But her incontinent mouth is useful in that it makes her spell out what others in the arts are only brave enough to occasionally think. It has been my experience that, post 2008, most established literary creatives cannot imagine as possible a world in which a substantial percentage of the populations of countries such as Ireland, Britain, and the United States don\u2019t live in Victorian levels of poverty. Just look at the queues of homeless being fed each Friday night outside the GPO in Dublin by the charity Muslim Sisters of \u00c9ire. Despite such images, the idea of properly taxing the super-wealthy, and making sure they don\u2019t find a way of avoiding that tax, is seen by your average sensible member of the literary classes as a notion only seriously held by annoying teenagers and people who think it\u2019s still 1975. According to this broad school of thought, if it can be called thought, there never was any other possible solution to 2008 but spending less on the lower orders and using that money to bail out JP Morgan, Anglo-Irish, and the Royal Bank of Scotland in the hope that the pre-slump status quo could somehow be restored. So your average literary stuffed jacket, or pants-suit, tends to quietly cut characters such as Varadkar, Obama, and Cameron a huge amount of slack. As long as they give them things like a side of same-sex marriage to go with all those hungry schoolchildren and people sleeping in wet cardboard boxes. The same lit-libs who, should your criticism of things as they now are become too harsh, will leap to list off the (actually very short) list of good things people like \u2018Barack\u2019 and \u2018Leo\u2019 did while leading their respective countries, and then pull the sort of face one does while having a catheter inserted if you dare suggest some bit of communist craziness such as that, to pay for the Covid crisis, Ireland should consider increasing its notoriously low corporation tax rate from the current 12.5% to, say, 13% for the next five years. An increase of just 0.5%. Once the pain of the metaphorical catheter insertion passes from their hugely tolerant face, it will be replaced by the faraway, superior look of a 1980s Irish religion teacher trying to move past the appalling fact that one of their students just said the word \u201cabortion\u201d. Then they will look at you and say something like:\u201cbut you\u2019ve always thought that, haven\u2019t you.\u201d It\u2019s a variant of Mandy Rice-Davies\u2019[iii]<\/a> \u201cHe would say that, wouldn\u2019t he.\u201d<\/p>\n

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David Cameron<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

They offered similar responses if they thought one was getting irresponsibly enthusiastic about the movements around Jeremy Corbyn<\/a><\/span> and Bernie Sanders, or Syriza in Greece in 2015, or the successful anti-water privatisation movement in Ireland or, if they are that particular sort of American, the idea of Medicare for all or a minimum wage of $15 per hour. It\u2019s a way of reducing what the person to their left is saying to a collection of perceived dogmas they no doubt think one has held to fanatically, like some dusty bedsit socialist ten commandments, since Arthur Scargill[iv]<\/a> were a lad.<\/p>\n

Nothing could be further from the truth. Marxism is something I spent several years actively trying to get away from. But couldn\u2019t. Precisely because the ideas that dominate the mostly middle class poetry world, in which I have been immersed for two decades, are so absurd in comparison. It is precisely because of this lack of intellectual seriousness, which looks increasingly obscene set against events; \u00a0not to mention its by product: the almost comical chancerism and opportunism which literary liberals call \u201cnetworking\u201d, that has led me to start acting and thinking in an overtly Marxist way again, since around or about 2014. The networking phenomenon lately reached possible apotheosis with one of Ireland\u2019s premier literary resource organisations using its website to advise beginner writers to get a professional headshot taken and some business cards made. It went on to suggest new writers take a course with said organisation which would, among other things, help them in building their \u201cbrand\u201d as a writer. Marx predicted capitalism would, in time, magic everything into a commodity. And now an Irish state funded arts organisation proves him right by overtly urging young writers to see themselves as commodities from the start. I am though a different kind of Marxist to the one I was thirty years ago, far less party orientated, far more concerned with the broader movement. I again have people all around the world who I consider comrades. People who, though their faults may be many, try to resist the current fashion for putting oneself up for sale at what usually turns out to be a pretty low price.<\/p>\n

From about 2006 to at least 2012 I was what can best be described as a collapsed Marxist. Not collapsed (and also a little bit Marxist) in the sense that Brendan Behan sometimes was due to the presence of too little blood in his Champagne. Rather, still Marxist in the way I viewed the world but collapsed in the sense I could see no way of applying it to the stuff happening around and about me. Socialism, what little remained of it, appeared to have fallen in love with its own marginality. A good minority of those who remained on the socialist left on the eve of the global financial coronary of 2008 seemed to me to be oddballs and cranks who had nowhere better to be; or, at the very least, to have developed an excessive tolerance for such refugees from reality. This perception was hardened greatly by the fact that a couple of stage four literary cranks with leftist pretensions happened to operate right here in Galway. And the pre-2008 Left locally was only delighted to opportunistically clutch said oddballs to its haggard bosom.<\/p>\n

Every time the Arts Council declined to fund some bit of pseudo-literary crankery –\u00a0 the sort of events to which no one turns up and then someone runs screaming out the door – \u00a0the Left lined up to sign petitions and letters protesting this outrage. It was one of those classic romances between two lonelies, driven primarily by the fact that almost no else wanted to know either of them by that point. I know my reaction to it was excessive. It led me for a period to dismiss everything the Left, which at bottom was still my tribe, had to say. Hugo Chavez<\/span> and Eva Morales[v]<\/a> clearly weren\u2019t to blame for weird letters every other week in the Connacht Tribune from minor poets with issues. \u00a0Yet, in my mind, the two became conflated. My reaction did spring from material reality. I felt let down by the obvious stupidity of what was supposed to be, broadly speaking, my own side. \u00a0Why should I believe a word they said about Venezuela or Bolivia or Iraq when they talked what I knew to be raw horseshit every other month in the local media, and online, about funding for the arts in Galway?<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t just little local neuroses that made Marxism seem inapplicable in the pre-2008 world of up, up and away capitalism. As Terry Eagleton wrote in his introduction to Marxist Literary Theory<\/em> in 1997: \u201cMarxism, then [after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991] was taken to be less disproved than discredited, out of the question rather than out of arguments.\u201d This was the intellectual atmosphere in which, by then, twenty eight year old me, who\u2019d spent 40% of his life as an active Marxist, began writing poetry. My first two poetry collections The Boy With No Face<\/em> (2005) and Time Gentleman, Please<\/em> (2008), which established me as a poet, whatever \u2018established\u2019 exactly means in this context, were both entirely written between 1996 and 2007, years when the neo-liberal strain of the capitalist virus was the only ideological infection in town. To such an extent that one hardly ever heard anyone saying the c word. Capitalism wasn\u2019t a system particular to a time and place, in which we just happened to be living. Rather, it was just how things are, and how they would always be, like the Divine Right of Kings in seventeenth century France. Only more so. For in the mid seventeenth century Louis XIV[vi]<\/a> for a time faced a formidable challenge across the Channel in the form of the republican government in England, in which the poet radical John Milton was an advisor and was commissioned by Oliver Cromwell to write Defensio Secunda<\/em>, a pamphlet in defence of\u00a0 Parliamentary government. When I started writing poetry, even to say the word \u2018capitalism\u2019, or to write poetry which acknowledged said system\u2019s existence marked one out as some sort of ex-Marxist peculiarity because if you knew the word capitalism you could only have been taught it by socialists. One felt like an alien. I remember attending an open-mic poetry reading at the Apostasy Cafe in Galway in 1998 and talking to an alluring young lady with a gold standard south of England accent. She informed me, without blinking once, that she and the then recently late Princes Diana shared the same astrological sign and that, as a result, she had a profound and personal connection with the late Princess\u2019s soul. I said nothing. But looked at her and then around the room at the assembling crowd and knew that my ideas about the world would, to most people there, have seemed far more eccentric than hers.<\/p>\n

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Spanish Arch, Galway<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

These days, I often have a similar feeling of being a strange life form who has somehow landed in the Irish poetry world from another dimension. But I view the fact that I am now semi-detached, some days almost entirely detached, from Irish poetry, while also being in a sense part of its establishment, via the readings I co-organise, the reviews I write, and the workshops I run, as a radical success, and an outcome my much younger self would have enthusiastically endorsed. About eight years ago I began publishing more and more poems, especially contentious political poems, online, usually on political and news websites and blogs, places in which poetry is unusual. I couldn\u2019t see the point waiting weeks or, more usually, months, for a journal editor to get back to me when the poem seemed to demand that it get out into the world more urgently than that. Plus, the internet now offered the possibility of thousands of readers for a poem, particularly through building a connection with people interested in political action as well as talk. In 2013, five years before the 8th<\/sup> Amendment was repealed here, I published my then new poem \u2018Irish Government Minister Unveils Monument to Victims of Pro-Life Amendment\u2019 on the website of Dublin Fingal TD, Clare Daly[vii]<\/a>, who has been a friend of mine since our time together in Militant. I wrote the poem shortly after the death of Savita Halappanavar who died after being refused an abortion in our local hospital, which you can see from our kitchen window. The poem has been re-published many times and in 2014 I was passing a small boarded up building at the very bottom of Quay Street in Galway and noticed that someone had, without my knowledge, made a poster of the poem and pasted it onto one of the boarded up windows. The fact that whoever it was went to the trouble of printing the poem out and pasting it there clearly meant that it spoke to them, independently of the gatekeepers who like to think they decide what poetry is. I was happy to bring poetry into the heat of what was then a contentious political battle. I could have sent this poem, which later appeared in my collection The Ghost In The Lobby<\/em>, to Poetry Ireland Review or some other top magazine. But what would have been the point? I know that there are many poets who take the opposite view and think it better to be read by less people, if said people are of a \u2018better quality\u2019.<\/p>\n

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A mural outside the Bernard Shaw Pub in Portobello<\/a>, Dublin<\/a> depicting Savita Halappanavar<\/a><\/span> By Zcbeaton<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Walter Benjamin wrote of the Surrealists, who began as a movement of poets, that they sought to construct a literature where \u201cthe \u2018best\u2019 room is missing\u201d. My grandmother\u2019s house had a best room which always seemed cold because a fire was hardly ever lit in there. It was where her dusty fine China cups resided. When she had the Stations Mass in the house every few years, as was the custom at the time, the priest and the men were always served breakfast afterwards in that best room. These days when I pick up quality literary journals, or read the programmes of literary festivals that consider themselves \u2018elite\u2019, I think of my grandmother\u2019s version of Walter Benjamin\u2019s best room and update it to have some poet, who everyone else in that chilly little room agrees is marvellous \u2013 for that is the price of admission \u2013 taking the place of the priest.\u00a0 If the choice is to either have one\u2019s poems pasted illegally on boarded up buildings or to be well thought of by those who inhabit that room, I\u2019ll choose the former. Though, such binary choices aside, if you run a literary festival, or top magazine, and wish to invite me to dine, I will likely accept and my table manners will be impeccable. I will eat everything you put before me.<\/p>\n

Increasingly, though, what first strikes me when I read contemporary poetry is not that it is either particularly good or particularly bad but that it mostly doesn\u2019t matter. It is of course hugely important to the participants in the poetry networking game in the way that the Best Kept Garden competition is of great import to those residents of Midsomer[viii]<\/a> who participate. Much contemporary poetry seems to me to be paralysed by an absurd respect for existing institutions and, in particular, the sacred institution of private property. This didn\u2019t matter much in the pre-crisis years, when history was supposed to over and socialism in the cemetery. But it matters now. Most of a century ago, the French poet Paul Eluard, who was first a leading Surrealist then a committed Communist, wrote the following, the translation is by David Gascoyne:<\/p>\n

Critique of Poetry<\/em><\/p>\n

Of course I hate the reign of the bourgeois<\/em>
\nThe reign of cops and priests<\/em>
\nBut I hate still more the man who does not hate it<\/em>
\nAs I do<\/em>
\nWith all his might<\/em><\/p>\n

I spit in the face of that despicable man<\/em>
\nWho does not of all my poems prefer this Critique of Poetry.<\/em><\/p>\n

It is impossible to imagine any member of the self-selecting Irish poetry top table publishing such a poem. And the idea that such a poem would ever be allowed pour its glorious contempt from the main stage at any of our posher literary festivals is laughable. In the crisis years since 2008, literary festivals have, among other things, become places Irish Times readers go to be reassured that, despite Trump, despite Brexit<\/a><\/span>, despite the yobbos of the anti-water charges movement, everything is going to be alright. Such gatherings are increasingly the intellectual equivalent of a pampering spa with a seaweed bath, places people with above average incomes \u2013 and sometimes sons and daughters of theirs who aspire to be writers – go to retreat from ugly realities and remind themselves how progressive they are.<\/p>\n

There are recent poems which resist this trend. \u2018The People Died\u2019, from Dublin poet Karl Parkinson\u2019s most recent book, Sacred Symphonies<\/em> is a most blatant example:: \u201cThey died eating Coco Pops, and starting the day with an Actimel\/…They died while tweeting lies about immigrants and queers\/…They died jerking off to Tik Tok in their one bedroom council flat\/…They died of cervical cancer they were told they did not have…\u201d\u00a0 And then Parkinson takes fabulous aim at the current occupants of the best room: \u201cYou are the murderers of poetry: \/ your lines wait like creeps in alleyways, \/… your stanzas so boring they make a glory of ironing…\u201d It is those later lines that will most likely debar Parkinson from the room, though he is, in truth, generous in his judgement, for the typical literary networker is in all likelihood far more mercenary than the average creep in an alleyway. Working class poets will be allowed in, as long as they ditch barbed critiques of the Parkinson\/Eluard variety, acquire an agent, and join what I call the My Old Man’s A Dustman school. The government funded bouncers who guard poetry\u2019s best room quite enjoy non-threatening verse anecdotes about life among the lower orders, especially when told in a suitably charming inner-city accent.<\/p>\n

Other poems, such as Jane Clarke\u2019s \u2018Who Owns The Field\u2019, from her debut collection The River<\/em> (Bloodaxe, 2015) \u00a0and Ruth Quinlan\u2019s \u2018The Corrib Great Southern Hotel\u2019 which appeared in the most recent edition of The Stinging Fly<\/em><\/a><\/span> challenge the assumptions of the occupants of Irish poetry\u2019s best room, particularly those who consider themselves to be in favour of equality, and are, as long as that equality remains entirely abstract and doesn\u2019t get in the way of their quiet worship of those who own things. Clarke\u2019s poem is influenced by Kavanagh<\/a><\/span>, for sure. But, to me, the question it politely, but directly, asks has as much in common with the radical realism of 19th<\/sup> century French painters such as Millet:<\/p>\n

Who Owns The Field<\/em><\/p>\n

Is it the one who is named in the deeds
\nwhose hands never touched the clay
\nor is the one who gathers the sheaves,<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

takes a scythe to the thistles, plants the beech,
\n<\/em>digs out the dockweed, lays the live hazel<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Most of those who dwell permanently in Irish literature\u2019s best room will listen to this poem, while sipping sugary tea from a fine cup, and pretend they side, obviously, it goes without saying, with the one who \u201ctakes a scythe to the thistles\u201d. In reality, if someone like this turned up at a poetry reading, their skin would crawl just a little. Even if he had the manners to leave his scythe at home. And if someone with such an obvious lack of bourgeois refinement were given a spot at a poetry open-mic to read one of his own poems, they would discover they urgently had to leave. As they swept out the door, probably sporting some sort of cloak with a Celtic design on it, they\u2019d make a mental note to remind themselves to suggest at the next meeting of the arts organisation board they are a member of that \u201cthe one who is named in the deeds\u201d, mentioned at the start of Jane Clarke\u2019s poem, be invited onto said board as a representative of the \u201cbusiness community\u201d. Quinlan\u2019s \u2018The Corrib Great Southern, 2020\u2019 takes a look at the catastrophe sometimes imposed upon communities by \u201cthe one who is named in the deeds\u201d. The Corrib Great Southern was a huge, successful hotel on the eastern outskirts of Galway City. It was originally one of a chain of state owned hotels. As well as being a hotel, its bar and restaurant were much used by people on Galway\u2019s east side, which is not very well served in such matters. Then it was sold off because that was the Progressive Democrat[ix]<\/a> thing to do. In 2007 it ceased to be a functioning hotel because the dashing local entrepreneur who bought it had better ideas. But then 2008 came and said entrepreneur was much in need of government help, which he got. But the Corrib Great Southern, which you can\u2019t miss as you enter Galway via the Dublin Road, was left to rot. It is now to be demolished but its demolition has been delayed due to Covid. During its almost decade and a half of dereliction, it has been stripped of everything of value, and become a favourite haunt of arsonists:<\/p>\n

The scavengers come, Egyptian plovers
\n<\/em>that pluck debris from between the teeth
\n<\/em>of this bloated, stranded reptile,<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

this grounded giant that bequeathed its wings
\n<\/em>as verdigris sails to the building next door.
\n<\/em>It has surrendered to waiting for death<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

by a hundred attempts at arson,
\n<\/em>until the inferno that cracks its bones
\n<\/em>back down to the rebar marrow.\u00a0 <\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Quinlan\u2019s poem is an Irish \u2018Ozymandias\u2019. But unlike Shelley\u2019s Ozymandias, whose power was so distant as to be beyond memory \u2013 the Pharaoh\u2019s monument to himself sinking into the sand vainly shouting: \u201cMy name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; \/ Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!\u201d \u2013 the developer genius who shut the Corrib Great Southern down in 2007 still stalks the business community like so many other zombies and has lately been chosen as the \u201cpreferred bidder\u201d for Galway\u2019s proposed new \u201cCeannt Quarter\u201d on land currently owned by CIE[x]<\/a>. This development may, apparently, include some \u201carts space\u201d. Ruth Quinlan\u2019s poem works in the negative, it doesn\u2019t envisage alternatives, but it takes the first crucial step by graphically imagining this giant local symbol of the existing Fine Fail\/Fianna Gael order going up in flames its owners brought upon it.<\/p>\n

Most of the poems that have emerged from Irish poetry\u2019s best room over the past decade imagine no such flames. It is a failure of the imagination, a sign in some cases of terminal decadence, that after more than a decade of economic and social crisis most \u2018serious\u2019 contemporary Irish poetry appears unable to imagine any possibility other than the ongoing rule of people like the aforementioned \u201cpreferred bidder\u201d. For the most part, the question seems not to even cross its mind. The only explanation for this is a Marxist one: the literary wing of Ireland\u2019s establishment, deep down in its faintly pumping heart, agrees that there is, in the words of the late Margaret Thatcher, no alternative. Yes, there will be occasional bleating about the need for better ethics legislation and the like. And poems about the undeniable sins and abuses of the Ireland of yesterdecade are available by the truckload. But when it comes to our actual present day rulers, people like the guy who made the Corrib Great Southern a place fit only for rats and arsonists, a hush falls over most of the distinguished occupants of Irish poetry\u2019s best and, if truth were told, silliest room. The result is a lot of well written poems which mostly seem to me to be beside the point. Contemporary Irish poetry is very brave when it comes to kicking long dead Archbishops.<\/p>\n

\n

Just passing the Corrib Great Southern on bus now. Made me think of @RuthQuinlan<\/a> 's brilliant poem about the place which was in recent issue of @stingingfly<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/IcaMzJMtjg<\/a><\/p>\n

— Kevin Higgins – poet (@KevinHIpoet1967) April 9, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n