From: "George Simmers" <[log in to unmask]>
> > Where there's no power play invoked in poetry (however minute) you have
> > simple-minded sweet talk, no?
>
> The trouble is that this sort of argument is generally invoked to bring
> simple-minded politics into poetry - or to justify political rant by
poets
> with small knowledge of the real world.
Some poetry is more (overtly) political than other (and not always simple
minded, unless you want to describe Zbigniew Herbert as such). But it
seems to relate (it seems to me) very much to the situation -- Shelley's
"Mask of Anarchy" came out of the Peterloo Massacre.
But as a touchstone of propagandist/political poetry, how about
Mayakovsky's "The Red Passport", and (or versus) Yevtushenko's poem on a
young boy coming on the body of a dead soldier after the Battle of
Stalingrad, and finding his Communist Party Card ... ?
And both as a whole (though perhaps he might be open to the accusation of
"simple-minded", though I'd argue against this) Hugh MacDiarmid, among much
elsewhere the three "Hymns to Lenin", and the treatment of the General
Strike (which seems to be a large black hole in the English [sic! -- not
British] imagination) in +A Drunk Man looks At The Thistle+?
And among us now, would Tom Leonard separate his poetry from an overtly
political purpose?
Not to mention (though I'd rather not) Tony Harrison writing on the Gulf
War for +The Guardian+.
Robin Hamilton
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|