Poetic and Political Purity

For many years I've been considered a political poet by the poets I know. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that the word “anarchist” is in the title of my only book. Just a hunch. But I don’t look like an anarchist. I wear golf shirts and jeans and prefer rock music to bebop. Hell, I probably don’t even look like a poet. And I’ve never gone in for causes. My comeback to that is I’ve always been more into effects. Ba-boom, tsshhh. I am a lazy writer who is more apt to criticize than to do anything constructive.

And yet I still believe that politics has an important place in poetry and that George Orwell was right when he said that “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” But where that place is has never been fully clear to me.

It’s an article by George Eliot Clarke (“Poetic Rule”) in The Walrus (April 2006) that got me thinking about this old issue yet again. I used to be much more passionate about the connection, but now I can only read and respect the passion of other writers like Clarke. He’s a Trudeauphile, so right away I can get on board with that. And the quote he borrows from Trudeau is spot on for the pragmatist in me: “We are going to be governed whether we like it or not; it is up to us to see to it that we are governed no worse than is absolutely necessary.” This is the Trudeau I can absolutely respect. In these words you can feel that under the guise of government is force and power. Authority in society rarely exists without the potential for and tendency towards violence.

But Clarke is more attracted to the Trudeau of the Just Society and he goes on to say it is “a beautiful society because of a harmony among its constituents, one that seeks to equalize imbalances in income, representation, and power, but also one that respects and supports the arts.” That would be fine, except for the fact that it’s often my fellow citizens who are voting for the tax cuts and get tough on crime bills while opposing the kinds of things that I think are only just, such as gay marriage and higher minimum wages. After all, if you live in Alberta and you are a sensitive artist, 90% of the province’s population is likely to oppose your vision of the Just Society. Let’s face it, if we didn’t have politicians to take all the heat for us, we’d be at each other’s throats. The Just Society can’t exist because we all have a different idea of what ‘just’ means.

Another point where Clarke and I depart comes when he comments on Shelley’s assertion that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World”. Shelley’s world view, according to Clarke, makes the poet “a kind of supreme investigative journalist, finding beauty and enlightenment in the most unlikely places or revealing crime and decay where they are hidden.” I like the analogy. It gives the poet some guts and some integrity as well as an ongoing mission – although maybe these days, with journalism being not the shining knight it once seemed, the association less valid.

Or is it? Clarke assumes that the politics of writers are going to be more just or superior to those of the politicians themselves. But throughout literary history writers and artists have made questionable decisions based on staunch principles and cowardly politicking. Seneca was a good bud of Nero, for example (although that didn’t protect him in the end), Chaucer apologized publicly for the blasphemy of his Canterbury Tales, and Donne sold out his Catholic roots so he could become Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Shakespeare wrote works of genius and also the nakedly jingoistic and narrow-minded Henry V. Wordsworth and other writers of his time were enthusiastic about the French Revolution until… well, you know. Kipling was the best paid literary pundit for imperialism an empire could have. Eliot and Pound and many other writers were covertly or overtly anti-Semitic, and there is, of course Pound’s support of Mussolini - on radio no less. Big on equal opportunity, writers have been there to support Nazis and Stalin.

And among the idealistic writers there is the allure of beauty – the kind of artful beauty Clarke sees in a just society. But I think if you took all the writers in this country and put them in one room, you wouldn’t get agreement about what is beautiful, what is just, or even what is art, or what food should be served at the buffet. Clarke finds beauty and form in justice and politics – the very things he believes should be found in poetry, while I find disunity and ambiguity – the very things I believe should be found in poetry. We are each trying to impose different aesthetic visions on what it means to be human. He has purity of intent in his poetry and politics, and I have learned over the years to distrust the purifiers.

My politics are closer to those of James Joll, who Clarke quotes as saying the “tragedy of all political action is that some problems have no solution, none of the alternatives are intellectually consistent or morally uncompromising; and whatever decision is taken will harm somebody.” Add to this the proposition that writers must first look inside themselves to find the evil they want to criticize, and you have my world view. But with all this conflict, this lack of solutions, this lack of clear vision for the future, you would probably argue that it’s no wonder I don’t even bother getting involved in causes. But it’s just the opposite. It’s only when writers understand the impossibility of final victories and can accept the permanence of bittersweet coating their tongue – that is when they are ready to start writing politically.

Of course, the honesty that comes from this might get you killed. Maybe joining a march or running for the board of a non-profit organization is a safer bet. Better to be in a cause than to lie murdered like an effect some found too powerful.