The shadow knows
by Todd Swift
[ bookreviews ]
With its Ralph Steadman artwork (the signature spotty ink spilled like blood across a blood-red Stop The War banner) and knowing title, this latest collection from the "shadow laureate" - Adrian Mitchell, the UK's best-known protest poet - is a textbook case of preaching to the converted. That is to say, there is a snowball's chance in Iraq that anyone even slightly in favour of armed solutions to conflict, global capitalism, George W Bush, Tony Blair or the Royal Family is going to pick this glorified, glossy pamphlet up and be won over.
The press material that came with my review copy clearly states: [Adrian Mitchell] "believes that the public or political poet should be a non-conformist nuisance and a stirrer, voicing popular dissent, and never toeing any official lines." Fair enough, although surely there might come a time (as with Mayakovsky, say, the agitprop precursor par excellence of this sort of work) when the political poet in question is called in to support the radical regime when the revolution is won, and needed to toe some line - perhaps not.
At any rate, if only the poetry in this collection - some very witty, some moving, and some simply doggerel - were in fact as free from "any line" - but the line here is surely that of the extreme, republican left; nothing wrong, again, with this, except to say that let's be blunt: one man's spin is another man's ideological axe. All poetry is inherently political despite the claims of those poets who seek a formalist higher ground - and - also - despite the claims of those who might resist conformity - conforms to the prejudices and desires of the poets who create it.
Mitchell, when he supported the necessary political opposition to the Iraq war by tirelessly appearing at event after event and reading his poems, was, in fact, less of a nuisance, than a droll, warm and strong figure of intelligent, humane resistance. It is somewhat disconcerting to see this book try to repackage that commitment as some sort of comedy act. That is, the interstitial sections with their prose remarks diminish instead of enhance the force of the argument.
Surely, only the most die-hard anarchists and socialists (such as those at Red Pepper magazine, who dubbed Mitchell with his progressive non-title) will be interested to learn that the "official" and supposedly-reactionary Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, has a nemesis in the shape of a gadfly.
More importantly, this somewhat obscures the very real good and public work Mr. Motion himself has done to support poetry - after all, Motion wrote anti-war poems for the Guardian, and appeared at the Oxfam poetry festival to raise money for the Sudan: hardly the profile of a rabid fascist. Is it not perhaps overly simplistic to suggest that only those acting in a non-official capacity can do good in society? Next time I take ill, I will prefer to see the "official" doctor and not the shadow one.
More worryingly, there is a kind of peculiar British cruelty masquerading as humour in some of the animus here that mirrors directly the boorish Boris of The Spectator who mocked Liverpool for mourning the beheading - after all, why should the death of Princess Margaret occasion the mean-spirited "A Refusal to Write A Royal Elegy"? Is not every human life worthy of an elegy?
Of course, the argument is clear. Mitchell is giving us popular ballads and jaunty satire, designed like a smart-bomb to hit the target with maximum efficacy. Obviously, war and Bush and Blair, and pompous, lying elites make easy to hit targets, so the temptation which any good political poet (on any side) must resist is to go over the top. When Mitchell reins his raillery in just a bit, the poems make things happen not just with ideas and good intentions, but words as well - the final measure of any poet.
Given the resounding and shocking rise of the moronic evangelical tide in America that swept no-abortion Bush to power recently, the dates that sub-title this book, 2000-2004, seem like an era that has ended, one more innocent, even naïve, like the dates 1933-1939. The often very powerful and accomplished poetry of protest that is gathered in Mitchell's book has historical heft - these are the records of a conscientious poet who refused to stand by while his nation committed war crimes.
As such, anyone with an interest in the politics of poetry, and the poetry of politics, leading up to, during, and after, the Iraq War, should buy, borrow and read this rude, zany, angry, untidy, ultimately moral book.
