In Part 1 of this article, I outlined my reasons for not punctuating my poems and glanced, towards the end, at the presence of politics in my work. Here I’d like to enlarge that glance a little.
A long time ago I took a decision to make politics and political theory a significant part of my work both in poetry and prose, or rather I decided to stop avoiding it. I laid out my reasoning in an article called ‘Riding Against the Lizard’ (2009) which was first published in the late and much-lamented The SHOp magazine and which can be read on my own website at http://www.williamwall.net/ewExternalFiles/Riding%20Against%20The%20Lizard.pdf.
At the time poetry, as written in Ireland, showed very little evidence of engagement with politics. Now, I’m glad to say, there are many poets who take politics head on, but at the time it was considered ‘bad form’, a little too Left, a little strident, distasteful. It was difficult to find places to publish poetry that was overtly political, (and, in fact, it is still not welcome in certain quarters). Heaney’s liberal balancing act was the model, whereas Montague’s Rough Field was considered an intemperate aberration. My own position (as argued in that essay) was a simple one: we are all citizens and as citizens we are obliged to engage with the political in whatever way we can, otherwise we resign it to those who can wield it with power. A poet has no special dispensation to be outside of the political. Maintaining a strategic silence is not particularly brave or admirable.
Naturally, there is some truth to Auden’s ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ (though that can be read in two ways), but equally, abandoning the field of politics entirely will certainly make nothing happen. What’s more, the old adage that ‘silence means consent’ is completely true, at least in the political as opposed to the personal sphere. If writers do not engage with politics in whatever way they can then writers are assumed to be happy with the status quo. And just to remind ourselves – the ‘status quo’ is a permanent housing crisis, a healthcare system that can barely cope in a bad winter, overcrowded prisons, gross dereliction of duty with regard to the climate and a politics that is driven by the ideology of the vulture fund.
So my decision to ‘be political’, in reality a simple decision not to exclude my political views as unfit subjects for poetry, brought with it the imperative to render political thoughts in ways that are accessible. At its most ironic there is a poem called ‘A Riff On Marx’s Theory of Surplus Values’ which goes:
the philosopher makes ignorance
and the poet makes silence
the priest makes sinfulness
and the criminal makes the criminal law
The last line of the verse, a refrain in fact, is a quotation from Marx. By contrast there is a longish sequence called ‘Via Antonio Gramsci’ which moves between countries, places and ideas with fluidity and which an Italian critic called ‘un modo di ragionare in forma di poesia’ (a type of reasoning (or argument) in the form of a poem). It has, as an irregular refrain, the words ‘someone singing bandiera rossa/sotto voce’ (Bandiera Rossa is the Italian Communist Party marching song). The poem considers the rise of neofascism in Europe and links it with early Italian and Irish fascism and ‘fatherland’/‘mother Ireland’ imagery, the whole undercut by irony and personal or familial connections such as:
better my sons
freewheeling after midnight
down Tottenham Court Road
or watching the bankers
waving fifties
at the G20
face to face with the police cordon
and the simple structural
violence of the state
Here, I think, the narrative requires no punctuation. Each line carries a ‘unit of sense’, a clause in the story, and the closing lines contain a classic leftwing view of the role of the police – the enforcers of the state, the visible expression of the state’s structural inequality as expressed by the G20 meeting in London in 2009 which drew enormous protests at a time of economic crisis.
At a more direct level are poems such as ‘The Ballad of Lampedusa’ written in Sicily at the peak of the refugee crisis (unless we say it is continually at peak) and at the same time that Syriza in Greece was struggling with the EU and Wolfgang Schauble in particular:
a cold storm throws foam and stones
on the coast of Sicily
a grecale blows
nothing to hinder it
between here and the Peloponnese
and I sit by a window translating
a poem about people drowning
half-way to Africa
almost in Tunisia
in Lampedusa
Or the poem ‘Ghost Estate’ which was considered safe enough to be on the Leaving Certificate course (and ultimately on the exam paper), about the economic crash of 2008 and the proliferation of so-called ‘ghost estates’ around the country. That housing crisis is still with us in one form or another. The refrain is from an advertising hoarding I used to see regularly at the time. The last two lines are intended to suggest that we have been ‘sold out’ by our politicians, or that the ‘first republic’ (thinking in French terms) has been sold out:
Ghost Estate
women inherit
the ghost estate
their unborn children
play invisible games
of hide & seek
in the scaffold frames
if you lived here
you’d be home by now
they fear winter
& the missing lights
on the unmade road
& who they will get
for neighbours
if anyone comes anymore
if you lived here
you’d be home by now
the saurian cranes
& concrete mixers
the rain greying into
the hard-core
& the wind
in the empty windows
if you lived here
you’d be home by now
the heart is open plan
wired for alarm
but we never thought
we’d end like this
the whole country
a builder’s tip
if you lived here
you’d be home by now
it’s all over now
but to fill in the holes
nowhere to go
& out on the edge
where the boys drive
too fast for the road
that old sign says
first phase sold out
(c) William Wall
Author photography (c) Liz Kirwan
Read Part 1 of this article here.
About Smugglers In The Underground Hug Trade:
Surprised by how few literary references exist for the Spanish ‘Flu pandemic of 1918/19, William Wall made a conscious decision to document the experience of ‘the strangest year we have lived’. In a poetic journal, Wall captures the roller-coaster of emotions from the first terrible days in Italy to the highs and lows of the lockdown in Ireland, culminating in the frightening increase in numbers at Christmas 2020.
But this is not just a book about the plague: the author turns to nature, to love, to his beloved Cork coast and sea-swimming for solace. There are many tender memories, moments of personal inspiration, humour and hopefulness—the whole suffused with an acute awareness of the historical context. There have been other plagues and pandemics, the poems say, and we have survived: we will survive this too.
Order your copy online here.
