In the title essay from her book Civil Wars (1985) June Jordan writes that ‘In the context of tragedy all polite behaviour is a form of self-denial.’ She goes on to say that ‘The courtesies of order, of ruly forms pursued from a heart of rage or terror or grief defames the truth of every human crisis.’ This provocation poses a question that strikes me as being at the heart of contemporary poetry: how can we negotiate between the instrumental eloquence of a hegemonic language like English, and the inarticulate fury we feel in the face of a violently unjust world? How can poetry, which must necessarily sit within the orderly, ‘polite’ realms of publication and peer review, encompass an honest howl of rage or a gut-felt moan of sorrow?
Thinking about what poetry is, what it can and ought to be feels especially pertinent in light of the recent closure of Smokestack Books. As Andy Croft, founder, editor, and publisher of Smokestack writes in the introduction to his recent collection of essays The Privatisation of Poetry (Broken Sleep, 2024):
In the last forty years large sections of British economic life have been moved out of common ownership into private hands, rationed by price or simply closed down. The democratic process is blocked by inequality, authoritarianism, deceit and a narrow ideological consensus. British cultural life is blocked by the values of big business and show business. The result is an atomised, unwelcoming, and unfriendly poetry scene, driven by the operating logics of capitalism and celebrity.
Since 2004 Smokestack has laboured to make space for those voices writing ‘outside the centres of cultural authority’, the radical, the unfashionable, the unapologetically political. The closure of the press is a significant loss to the field of contemporary poetry, in the wake of which many of us are asking ourselves: What’s left? What now?
In an era where funding for arts projects is haunted and cowed by the spectre of “reputational risk” – to quote Arts Council England’s bizarre advice to arts organisations earlier this year, suggesting they treat with caution “overtly political or activist” statements made by individuals who may be linked to them, or place their funding arrangements in jeopardy – poetry is in peril of becoming ever more politically toothless; a politely self-policing enclave where work is selected and opportunity awarded on the basis of corporate compliance as opposed to originality, conviction, or artistic merit.
A literary culture in thrall to what Croft – quoting from Jonathan Davidson – calls “the poetry industrial complex” further circumscribes the discourse of dissent, creating as it does ‘a tightly controlled market in which high-profile prizes “help select the most profitable lines of investment” for corporate publishers’, exiling other voices and perspectives to the margins and leveraging both success and fear of exclusion in order to silence and delegitimate criticism. Such an atmosphere is not conducive to exciting or vital poetry. It produces an ascendancy of the safe, of the comfortable.
And this at a time we need fearless poets, and fearless poetry publishers more than ever. Not only to champion individual voices who might not otherwise be afforded a seat at the table, but to radically reframe the kinds of conversation we are having about poetry; to challenge the metrics upon which worth is ascribed, and to shift our collective focus away from the winning of competitions and the celebration of individual exceptionalism, to the expansion of imaginative horizons, political and social solidarities. We need poets and publishers willing to assume the risks of failure to bring us sometimes difficult (perhaps even unpopular) work that is not beholden to the whims of the marketplace or the caprices of industry tastemakers. How else will we ever find a collective language appropriate to the state we are in? How else to avoid poetry as a politely behaving gated community that regards nothing so much as itself?
Machine /.Language by Martin Hayes is available in the Books section
Vivid, class-conscious writing
The poems I want to share today come from two poets who have both published with Smokestack. I wanted to share their work not only in celebration of a significant small press, but because in their continued commitment to vividly class-conscious writing, their work can be seen as carrying the torch and continuing the fight for marginalised poetic voices, and for more expansive ways of doing and thinking about poetic traditions and practice.
‘the worker writer’ by Martin Hayes is a deliberately disorderly sonnet; it conforms to the structural and thematic strictures of the sonnet just enough to comment on and subvert the form. As with a traditional sonnet, the poem uses the pastoral scene as a space of reflection on the relationship between art and work; on the pleasures of making and the difficulties and demands of labour. Unlike the traditional sonnet, the poem does not seek to valorise rural labour, or to set apart the writing of poetry as an exceptional category. Instead,
Hayes creates a direct link between how the urban worker occupies the national landscape and how he occupies the intellectual space of elite verse tradition: as a trespasser, or as a thief.
In Hayes’ hands the sonnet becomes a tool for interrogating the ways in which the urban working-class subject is denied an experience of nature, and how the urban working-class writer is similarly excluded from full participation in culture. Throughout the poem, the speaker’s range of experience is circumscribed both by the material conditions and daily demands of capitalism (‘the shrill bell of his alarm clock and the tube map’), and by a mutually exclusive set of assumptions about what poetry is and who workers are.
The poem opens with a question ‘what does he know’, challenging the right of the speaker to have written the poem we are reading at all. Hayes’ absence of punctuation ensures that the question is not definitive, rather that it remains an implied presence throughout the poem; that it becomes a lens through which we read the speaker’s declarations, and the poet’s stylistic choices.
As the poem plays fast and loose with the sonnet’s formal features, eschewing iambic pentameter (where each line has ten syllables in five pairs, the stress falling on every second syllable), and rhyme, the piece invites a comparison with a traditional, or “proper” sonnet beside which Hayes’ poem may appear poorly put together or “unskilled”. Closer reading, however, reveals the poet’s range of dexterous and intentional decisions: that extraordinary long second line, which performs the speaker’s rude awakening and rushed journey into the world of ‘dirty work’; the delicate sonic linking of ‘shrill’, ‘limbs’, and ‘ilk’ across lines and between stanzas, connecting the machinery of capitalism, the body of the speaker, and the collective body of the urban working-class subject. Then there’s the lyric flourish of ‘with crafted pen or plough/ heaven’s true story’, a line – itself beautifully crafted – that might have come straight out of a Seamus Heaney poem, yet savagely undercut by its surrounding linguistic architecture of regurgitation and mud. Such high-toned lyric work is denied to us, Hayes seems to say, or is in itself a denial of truth.
Finally, I am struck by the penultimate line, where ‘everyone’ is set apart. I find myself drawing a comparison between ‘everyone’ and ‘ilk’, and the very different communities these words summon. That ‘everyone’ is isolated on a line by itself emphasises its exclusiveness as a category; it’s separation from the speaker’s reality. I am reminded once again of Andy Croft’s introductory essay from The Privatisation of Poetry, and his description of a contemporary poetry landscape ‘whose inaccessibility is hardly disguised by ritual declarations about diversity and inclusion’. Hayes’ poem feels like a shot across the boughs of this same in-group, and the speaker’s final statement has both its triumphant and defeated aspects: this work is not work undertaken for the pleasure of it. The poem does not belong in the idealised realm of art for art’s sake. Rather, it is a staple of the speaker’s survival, and a middle finger to those who believe he, and that the working classes and the work they perform, do not belong within the precincts of art and literature.
the worker writer
what does he know
apart from the shrill bell of his alarm clock and tube map
that gets him in to do their dirty work
there are no fields for him to saunter
or drag his limbs through their poetic mud
or regurgitate with crafted pen or plough
heaven’s true story
his is more a theft from the earth than a sharing –
when you’ve been used for so long
it’s not such a leap to become a user –
and no joy does he get from it either
other than paying the rent and showing
everyone
what he and his ilk are capable of
Poetry should belong to all of us
‘The Other World Inside My Car’ by US poet, Fred Voss, also offers a window into the world of the writer worker. As in Hayes’ piece, the poem explores art within the scene of labour, but from a very different angle, taking the form of an extended poetic meditation. What I relish about this poem is that such a meditation does not emerge from leisured contemplation of a peaceful rural landscape (nor indeed from the seclusion of a fully-funded sinecure), but comes in the midst of the speaker’s working day, on morning break between factory shifts. The poem thus gives the lie to a still prevalent unspoken assumption about the conditions under which poetry is created, and (consequently) who has the ability to access and create it. If poetry does not require hours of silence and space, then it is not, after all, the sole fruit of middle-class literary production. It can – and it should – belong to all of us.
What is particularly striking to me about this poem is that a moment so spatially and temporally enclosed (within the confines of a car, at the back of the factory, in the short span of a morning break) opens the speaker so expansively and so intensely to the wider world. The speaker connects sensually to their own body through the taste of apple, egg sandwich, and chocolate, but these experiences of taste also become somatic spurs to memory, intimacy, and global solidarity. The juice of the apple in particular creates a complex interplay of associations where the speaker recalls his wife’s kiss in a moment of domestic tenderness; this memory leads him to imagine her life before they met, as ‘a baby watching her mother pick dates in Indio, California/ after leaving dustbowl Texas’. The apple is also connected to present global crisis via the radio. An otherwise innocuous reflection about ‘the sun on the tree/ where it ripened’ is given new importance and political urgency by being sandwiched between news reports on the bombing of Gaza and the melting of icecaps. This small sliver of space and time is a site of profound connection for the speaker.
‘I am as far away from the dark shadows of the factory as I can get in my mind’ writes Voss, in lines that explore the speaker’s own experience of art: ‘as the sun floods my car and I turn off the radio and turn on my Beethoven CD/ to the last movement of his great Ninth/ where you can hear humankind cry out that it will never stand/ for tyranny’. This isn’t music as cathartic release, distraction, or mere mental escape, but a way into imagining an otherwise. In the line that follows the speaker is thinking about his own volume of poetry: not in terms of recognition or awards, not even of writing something to rival the genius of Beethoven’s Ninth, but of sharing with that work the modest yet momentous aspiration to ‘someday begin to nudge the world an inch closer/ to justice’.
Back within the factory, the speaker’s world shrinks, becomes ‘no bigger than a blueprint/ and a block of steel’. It is a world the speaker can shape by shaving ‘one thousandth of an inch’ off that steel, yet it is also a smaller, more circumscribed and tightly delimited place. While the poem seems to suggest that this closed world has its own form of meticulously focussed poetic beauty, it is through access to imagination – through poetry – that the speaker can engage with and share his full humanity.
To quote once again from Andy Croft’s introduction to The Privatisation of Poetry: ‘Poetry is a way of knowing ourselves and others better, of sharing and extending the common ownership of experience, feeling and language, of resisting the forces that divide us.’
To write keep writing our lives, taking up space, telling our stories, making space for each other, this is how we keep poetry alive.
The Other World Inside My Car
At my morning break I walk out into the parking lot in back of the factory and sit
in my car
and turn on the radio for news
bombs fall on Gaza as I bite into an apple
and think of the sun on the tree
where it ripened
a man on my radio talks of melting icecaps and falling civilizations
Trump smiles at himself in the mirror as he waits to step into the White House again
and Europe trembles at the thought
as the man on the radio says goodbye to democracy
I swallow juice from the apple sweet
as the kiss of my wife when she whispered goodbye into my ear in the dark this morning
as I lift the egg salad sandwich she made me off the wax paper on my lap
I am with her
she is a baby watching her mother pick dates in Indio, California
after leaving dustbowl Texas
in 1940
so she can meet me and marry me under a eucalyptus tree 50 years later
I am as far away from the dark shadows of the factory as I can get in my mind
as the sun floods my car and I turn off the radio and turn on my Beethoven CD
to the last movement of his great Ninth
where you can hear humankind cry out that it will never stand
for tyranny
and I dream my next volume of poetry
will someday begin to nudge the world an inch closer
to justice
and the clock ticks down on my work break
and people in Detroit stare at the murals of Diego Rivera who dreamed of workers
someday rising to power
and I swallow a big bite of chocolate for dessert
and I am back in Whittier, California with a chocolate bunny and an Easter egg hunt
at the age of 4
when finding an Easter egg felt like the most important thing
on Earth
then I switch back on the news to make sure they haven’t dropped
the atom bombs yet
and the timeclock buzzer blares from the factory ending my breaktime
so I head back into the factory to stand at my machine
where my world is no bigger than a blueprint
and a block of steel
and all I can do to shape that world
is try to shave that steel
down to one thousandth of an inch
perfection.
Robots Have No Bones, by Fred Voss is available in the Books section
