At the end of the 15 February march in London, I sat in Hyde Park in the afternoon sun. It felt strange that the world before me appeared so beautiful. The marchers had walked against the tides of events and rhetoric to be there. We carried placards or shouted and whistled. Things can only get bitter (disenchanted Labour voter against the war), Stop the dim reaper, a quote from Gandhi about how the good achieved by war was temporary while the evil was permanent. Wordplay and humour as well as serious arguments had brought verbal and intellectual imagination onto the streets.
Speeches broadcast from the stage reached the spot I had chosen under a tree. As I listened to them I felt a dissonance. I realised that their words were not reflecting the meaning of the march. These rallying cries were words of aggression to the ears of an audience that needed support and hope for what we were truly standing up for. They were appropriating our energy, celebrating us for causes we did not believe in or had not as a body come to march about.
On the way to the march a few hours earlier, a neighbour had come over to talk. He too was going to the protest. He spoke with deep feeling about the war, saying that the planned attack is not against just one man, but against everyone against everyone it is intended to cow. This was mirrored in a placard I saw later: shocked but not in awe. Yet most of what I heard of the rally and its speeches was also intended to awe and dominate, though on a very different level. This too was a violation of my humanity and linguistic integrity. An opportunity to speak unspoken common ground was missed.
Poetry and people
The mixed nature of the crowds attending the huge London protests mixed in generation, affiliation, style, background is itself revealing. Minorities accustomed to political action because of their lack of public voice were undoubtedly there. But there are many thousands more who have also discovered themselves to be voiceless at this time and who have been marching because of this. What is it about a march that it draws such people? It is an opportunity for those without a voice, those who are normally inaudible and invisible, to create a public presence for themselves.
This presence may not be highly eloquent or persuasive that is what debate is for. Nor need it be a thoroughly realistic process one symbol cannot express the depths and intricacies it conceals. But it is a lever, which can open a crack in the illusions we use or are given to find our way around the world and bring an unrecognised element into it. Though this can involve the surfacing of powerful and dangerous emotions hatred, resentment, fear its primary driving force is deeper and more complex.
Douglas Murray appears to miss all this. He takes the part (the driven, the political, the formulaic) for the whole, and fails to recognise that as individuals not members and spokespeople of one minority or another we can have views that are unrepresented. Splintering the mass that came together, in the way that Murray does, is a false mode of comprehension that drains the event of its true profound meaning.
This meaning is not something that each of us individually could express that is why we came together. In our various ways we disagree with what is happening in and on behalf of our country. The experience for me on these protests, above all on the 15 February march, was the safety in returning people in all their complexity to the place that they inhabit. People were able to look around them and see that they had desires and doubts in common.
Poetry and politics
This is where poetry connects with public events, and can resonate with the silent majority of marchers far more than do the political slogans of activists. Poetry is, indeed, protest in the first place, a speaking out. (The very word protest comes from the Latin protestari pro forth, publicly + testari assert, from testis witness). Poetrys practice at speaking out is one part of the reason that those left voiceless in politics turn to the authority of poetry to speak for them. What is this authority? Again, words are revealing authority lies, at its origin, in authoredness itself, in the creative power of the human voice.
Poetry is the use of words to express things that language hardened by overuse and misuse has blocked out of everyday verbal experience. It is the reassertion of inner life and voice too often silenced under a myriad of social, verbal, intellectual and temporal pressures. This also makes it attractive at a public level in times when dialogue and imagery are reduced to extremes: patriotism being defined for us against our instincts, images of bombs striking a city, talk of victory and defeat.
Poetry must, of course, be distinguished from individual poets. Not all the latter are against the war. They are divided and debating like any other group pro, anti and unsure. There is no given political stance that will unite all poets bar, perhaps, opposition to the banning of poetry itself.
After the public refusals of many American poets to attend a poetry event at the White House, Stanley Kunitz told the New York Times that the administrations program of attacking Iraq is contrary to the humanitarian position that is at the centre of the poetic impulse. Like most generalisations, this statement obscures even while it tries to clarify. I dont believe that one landscape maps directly onto another the political onto the poetic or vice versa. Rather, poetry resists the brutalising of language, while peaceful human interaction and growth on the geopolitical level is ultimately what is needed to help us resist the brutality of war.
This is not to say that the two realms cannot have points of connection (the names of Bertolt Brecht, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, or Pablo Neruda are enough to indicate this); nor that they should be held apart against the reach of imagination. I say these things to make it clear that the anti-war stance is not a mere extension of a (hypothetical) poetic lifestyle or attitude.
Poetry and language
So what can poetry achieve? The outpouring of emotion is not something peculiar to this medium. Nor is the opportunity to express a political impulse in practice poetry can often prickle against the suggestion of political will in its voice, unaccommodating. One poet against the war, David Harsent, asked by an interviewer on CNN why it was people turned to poetry in times of stress, quipped that he thought they turned to drugs. Poetry is not a high to block out lows and it is not a megaphone simply amplifying ideas that could equally be expressed elsewhere. It must be distinguished from versified argument.
Those caught in the currents of political or academic exchange may miss what is unique to poetry while they sift it for their own language. But the currents they miss are those that bring people to poetry, rather than academe or politics, in the first place. Voice, ambiguity and dignity, playfulness, regeneration and reinvigoration of language, storytelling, forms of thought and feeling that elude words, phrases and syntax exhausted by routine or misuse, or elude a language not yet evolved to encompass them.
Marching in protest, then, is more subtle and nuanced than the no it expresses. The wordplay and humour of the banners and placards testifies to an intelligent sense of voice and to the recognition that the dominant voices in the public arena are in their way as crude and flattening as the bombs raining down on Baghdad. Puns and wordplay words used as levers on the illusions of language in the debate show that there are many more dimensions to the issue than are being heard.
To anyone on the street in such an event it is clear that the carnival impulse is also present. Straightforward opposition to a policy can walk hand-in-hand with creative subversion of the voice in authority. The problem in the domain of politics is how to translate this impulse into constructive action. And it is creative, constructive engagement that Martin Shaw calls for from the marchers now, on the political level.
Poetry and protest
Poets thinking publicly about the Iraq war have chosen various ways to express dissent. Michael Rosen initiated a petition by childrens writers, illustrators and editors protesting against the killing and maiming of children and their carers, as well as the spending of money on war that could be used on education and care for future generations.
In the United States, Sam Hamill began www.poetsagainstthewar.org after refusing Laura Bushs invitation to a poetry event at the White House. A UK site also sprang up. And 100 poets against the war started life on www.nthposition.com, spreading poetry via downloadable chapbooks, crossing continents and seas, far surpassing the number of contributors in its title. It has been one of the most successful e-books ever, with tens of thousands of copies downloaded.
From novices to well-known poets such as Adrienne Rich and CK Williams, many have chosen to contribute poetry under the heading against war. Others have expressed themselves in prose. Faber responded with an anthology of existing poetry called 101 poems against war. Elsewhere, bloggers have been collecting poems about war, or arguing about war, without necessarily taking a definitive position. At a recent anti-war reading in London, George Szirtes made it clear that he felt no great sense of moral certainty. But he was there among poets acting as witnesses to this time.
Todd Swift, who edited the book version of 100 poets against the war, described the process of its growth as living, organic, grassroots. On the same day as the launch in London, other readings were taking place across the world. Poets in the room in London had come from Paris and Ireland and further afield to be there. The international character of the movement was in evidence on the ground as well as in the electronic sphere and the different language versions of the e-book. Unescos World Poetry Day, 21 March, also became a time of poetry for peace.
This is a movement embracing the internets potential. Though the technological context has changed, the process is reminiscent of the 18th century culture in Britain of pamphlets and coffeehouses enabling the exchange of ideas and political argument, for voices to be heard and dialogue held person to person in public. It challenges atomising ideas of individualism with gatherings that embrace, value and encourage the individual voice and diversity of experience.
Poetry and war
The idea that the public engagement of poetry is important to the vigour of democracy may come as a surprise to those who believe that most voices already permeate to the political consciousness. The fact that poetry has come out once more as political over recent months does not mean it is offering itself as a vehicle or point of generation for political arguments that aim to influence those in government. What it does mean is that many people feel that politics needs to be reminded of the starting-point, the originating voice, the real experience, behind the discourse it is allowed to continue in political language humanity.
Poetry needs, now as much as ever before, to keep the breathing-space open for the expression of humanity. Its impulse to communicate, to examine language and thus examine reality, what we think is natural, is what makes it so important to the anti-war movement now.
This war does not express us. When the implications of this are so great people dying, grief and hatred growing we must express ourselves, with all the ambiguity, ambivalence, complexity, dignity, clarity and honesty that we need.