Modern Ireland, it seems, has no time for poetry. While oppressed people look to poets for sustenance, here there is a censorship of indifference, writes John F. Deane.
I have laboured in the cabbage-garden of Irish poetry for many years, watching it move from dark rooms in the backs of pubs where the till's shrill whistles interrupted the flow of verse and where the poet was thankful for a pint as reward, to the development of Poetry Ireland, through the sure hands of Rory Brennan, Theo Dorgan and Joe Woods, into a national and highly respected institution. I have seen the end of the Dolmen Press and the flowering of new small houses of poetry publishers.
It has been a slow and sometimes disheartening development, but poetry in Ireland has taken a high place in the consciousness of the nation. Or has it? It is boasted of in international circles; presidents quote bits and pieces of it in their speeches; institutions around the world honour the Irish poet. And yet, today, this appears to be a tinsel bell, an empty gourd, a glitzy show full of empty platitudes and sounding brass.
I have never found poetry more ignored in actuality than I do today.
I feel sad and strange to find myself offering a defence of poetry once more. Ireland seems to have lost that sense of its value that it boasts of holding. But before I can pray for the buoyant sense of poetry's worth to return to our country, let me state some of the reasons it must hold that worth.
Literature imposes an order on our experience, even those forms of literature that treat disorder in a seemingly disordered way, such as Beckett's work, such as the late Joyce. The reproach offered to all forms of culture has been, and remains, that it does impose such an order, determining a map of meanings and symbols that create a screen to hide the horror and disorder that is reality. Give us reality TV is the cry; take away the unreal world of the imagination! If poetry speaks, by being poetry, of the dignity of mankind, how we are created in God's image and likeness; if it speaks of beauty and truth and goodness, while wars and horrors abound at the same time, then it is poetry that appears to be offering a loud and cantankerous lie.
Homer, in his epics, outlined an order imposed on warring humans and warring gods. The Iliad and the Odyssey, while being huge tales of battles and conflict, suggest a reigning plan and order underneath the murdering and betrayals. The Bible offered a similar order. Between them they form the basis of European culture. When this order fell apart, irreparably as it appears, when the machine age found its legs and started to move, God died and European culture lost its hold.
War continues to show up all the inadequacies in our living and places the greatest possible stress on our forms of culture and our power with language. The war in Iraq, 9/11, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and above all, perhaps, the recent and unacceptable obscenities of Fallujah, leave us all with a sense of staining, and of helplessness. If noble intentions were enough, we would have a magnificent literature to counter war, but it has been seen that coldness and distance are required to form a literature, while the outpourings of fact and witness often remain in the realm of reportage. This, of course, is wholly valid in itself, for such works may well serve as testament, and are salutary, whereas a literature born of retrospection may serve as monument to our experiences of elemental horror.
All our literatures, our philosophies, our religions, are built with the bricks and mortar of language and therefore the purity and truth of words remain crucial to our wellbeing. If the general sense of a loss of confidence in literature - demonstrated by the indifference of the greater part of humanity to poetry and "serious" or "literary" fiction - has resulted in a two-tiered humanity, perhaps literature remains in a realm apart and distinctly ineffective. And to this must be added the comparatively recent phenomenon (recent because of the proliferation and power of mass media) where language has been stolen by people in power who have a certain control over the media, and who manipulate words to suit their own agendas.
Then a third tier of culture emerges and the "common" man, pressed to believe he relishes a lower grade of literature, continues to lose all his autonomy as an individual, while the more educated and discerning reader or viewer finds himself at odds with government, out on a limb, lost to both power and audience.
Already in the 21st century there are disasters and realities that language cannot encompass: Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, many more; the only way to come at such vast events is to approach them at an angle, by a roundabout way, reflecting an individual's actual experience, a personal subjectivity. After the Holocaust, Adorno said, and we all know the phrase, poetry is not possible. Yet poetry continues to be written and often now it may take the form of Job's cry of despair, and develop into the cry of the survivor.
Humanity is in the process of becoming. Objects do not become, they are - the stone, the goat, the rhododendron - it is the becoming that is difficult. In the process of this becoming there is a line beyond which nothing but silence exists and that is the line that poetry must brush up against, a line that the greatest poetry peers beyond.
In the approach to the subject and fact of contemporary warfare, poetry is constantly shoving up against that line. Perhaps the surest way to peer over is to do so in the circumventive way suggested, by touching on individual experiences and writings. The act of writing will change depending on the writer's awareness of actual background reality surrounding them. And today's realities? The frailty of our systems of government, of our systems of values, the immensity of the war machine wielded by a powerful few, the use of language as a weapon of deceit. In our time nothing is guaranteed.
Czeslaw Milosz writes of the horrors of Auschwitz and the ongoing efforts of the human heart to mask its brutal urgings and then goes on to say, with a nod towards Adorno's phrase, that "gentle verses", though they be written in the midst of horrors, "declare themselves for life". In this way, poems of lyrical grace, written about swans or roses or crocuses, declare themselves as anti-war. Each lyric produced and published may be placed on that great weighing-scales of justice and peace, the other side presently heavily loaded with humanity's disgrace.
In Ireland, if our culture of caring for strangers, of welcome, of donating to the poor of other countries, has rapidly been giving way to a culture of business values (or lack of them), towards economic success, profit, ego: if our bookshops will not stock poetry volumes because they can sell only a handful of copies and that slowly, while they stock, display and sell thousands of copies of forest-destroying, jelly-and-custard trash fiction; if the religious imagination finds itself sidelined, ignored, mocked into a locked outhouse to give way to aggressive and emphatic scientific and technological takeovers, it is clear that our humanness is in dire trouble.
This falling away goes hand in hand with our turning our backs on Christianity. In our time, religious art in all its forms is facing incredible, even aggressive, indifference. Tradition itself has become suspect.
If, then, the artist (the poet, say) is expected still to stand at the margins, has the margin now become what used to be the centre of our living? If the poet is to be a rebel, do they rebel on behalf of the traditional values of our culture, against modern business methods? Or do they take part in the ongoing rush to wealth by tailoring the work in order to sell, in order to make a living? Do we judge the value of a book of poetry by how much hype it achieves and by how many copies are sold at a launch? Or the painter by the number of thousands of euro paid for a painting on the opening evening? Haspoetry been relegated to small intense groups in professors' rooms on the highest floors of our universities?
It appears that the way for poetry is to become more and more esoteric and, accepting its role as outside the economic lifestyles, will it be asked to lie down and die? Or will it become more and more melodramatically demotic, hoping to find its place in some emporium of "entertainment", along with reality TV programmes or blockbuster movies? Or does it become more "engaged", hoping to struggle along with the great mass of people astonished at how our world has devoted itself more and more fully to war and pre-emptive strikes?
There is an economic globalisation which either extends what we see happening around us in Ireland, or has become a muddy and sucking hole into which Ireland has fallen gladly. Yet there is - and perhaps it is in response to this globalisation - a cultural entrenchment under way. In the area of poetry it shows itself as an indifference to poetry in general, and to poetry in translation in particular. If it is simply impossible to get volumes of poetry on to the shelves of our bigger bookshops, it is utterly hopeless to try and get these shops to take poetry in translation. If only a minimum of newspapers and journals give reluctant space to the reviewing of our home-produced volumes of poetry, there is next to nothing in the way of reviews of poetry in translation. Perhaps as a consequence of our rush to cash we feel it incumbent on us to ignore, in some perverted "patriotic" way, the possible value to be discovered in other cultures?
It is a commonplace to say that countries which have suffered recently, or are currently suffering some form of oppression or dictatorship, look eagerly to poetry for spiritual sustenance and uplift. I have been in Medellín in Colombia at a festival of poetry; audiences for readings in many languages were impressive, concluding with a shifting audience in an open-air auditorium of between 4,000 and 6,000 people, many of them staying for the full four-hour performance. A great percentage of these were young people - eager, enthusiastic and grateful. At an evening of poetry in Skopje, Macedonia, during last summer, there was an audience standing near the old city bridge and listening to poetry for several hours, again in many languages; the audience was estimated at 2,000, and the event was televised live.
On the other hand I have been to a festival in Bruges, attended by a bourgeois audience - well-dressed, mostly elderly - and one got the impression that this was an occasion at which to be seen. The later slog of poetry readings without wine and finger-food receptions had nothing like so large an audience. I am not saying this is invalid; poetry survives both kinds of audience; what it may not survive is the lack of an audience. It is the censorship of indifference that is to be feared.
Where the culture fragments its traditional supports, the individual may well feel outside the shifting cultural morass and become an even more marginal figure. The equilibrium is disturbed. Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s was far from being a perfect society, but everybody knew where they stood. As that society struggled to come to terms with the new, aggressively economies the lyrical "I" tended to become estranged. Witness how Patrick Kavanagh's sense of loss imploded in anger, Austin Clarke's in satire, Thomas Kinsella's into an ever-deepening exploration of the vulnerable self.
Poetry brings us back to the object, if it is good poetry, even if the subjective "I" seems to dominate. Perhaps our times fail to view the object any more, the winter-flowering cherry in our suburban gardens, the snowberry in the country ditch, the marshalling magpies on our chimney-pots, the gangs of rooks heading home together after their day's predations. Growing aware of the earth about us again may well be part of the cure we need. Growing aware of the necessity for truth in language is also an essential element, and good poetry necessarily demands integrity in language, something we greatly miss today, particularly so in the commitments solemnly spoken by some of our public representatives.
Affirmation of the moment, the place, the here, the now - this is poetry - not the fact of its commercial or non-commercial value or use. A poem is an epiphany, interrupting the flow. A good new collection of poetry slips like the Magi into the flow of things, interrupting the destructive aims of a Herod. Do we want that flow disrupted or not? If we do, then our media and our bookshops must stop turning their backs on their native literature.
John F. Deane is a poet
