Yes. I'm just quietly delighted because poetry is now doing what I
always believed that it should do which is speak to people's souls.
For a long time poetry has had a an unfortunate reputation because of the
way it's taught in schools. And a lot of people leave school, finish from school
with the idea that poetry is difficult. But when they catch poetry on the wing,
when they catch it accidentally they hear it
going past at a literary festival or in any of the public events that's taking
place more and more nowadays, they're surprised at how accessible poetry is.
How direct it is and how it moves them and they're beginning to
think that something has changed about poetry - it's just that poetry is
now right for our times because of the upheavals, the outrages, the political
problems, all manner of things that's getting us upset and angry. We're
now beginning to find that poetry it turns out is one of the best forms of
addressing our times because of its extraordinary brevity, because of its
amazing ability to say so much that means a lot to us, very pungently, very
powerfully. very briefly. I think poetry's time is here and politics has helped.
poetry that's a poetry of message is really quite useless because you know
you could get the message without the poetry. You know, you could just rant
about something. So the message is not really the point of poetry in spite of
what a lot of people like to think. People who want to write poetry without
the effort of learning how to write poetry. What makes the poetry of any
value is its 'poetry-ness' which is the beauty, the truth, the richness, the
pungency, the resonance of its language, its extraordinary brevity,
the way in which uses sounds to infect our spirit.
It is one of the hallmarks of political poetry the h, it's one of hallmarks of true
poetry. That it's timeless, even when it was created for a very
specific time and sometimes a very specific occasion. I'm thinking of
Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy which was written directly in response to the
Peterloo massacres and you read it today and it speaks to Grenfell, it speaks to
Brexit, it speaks to Trump. It speaks to the rise of the right across Europe,
it speaks to issues of race, it's extraordinary. And that's
what poetry, that's what political poetry must do. Always resonate with the times
in which we read it, otherwise its message poetry, it's what I said earlier,
it's the poetry that somehow makes it constantly relevant, not the message,
oddly enough. And I think it's because the poetry which deals as I said in
sounds and deals with the microscopic elements of what moves us in
a poem. It's also deeply connected to the unseen elements in life that
affects us. So I think there's a beautiful resonance between the minutiae
of poetry and the minutiae of our lives. Good poetry locks both in, in a very, very
strange way. The other thing is a meditation I keep having about Shelley's
famous line about the unacknowledged legislators the poets are. And I think
it's because also true political poetry first of all deals with an issue that
the poet is addressing at any given time but underneath that, because it's poetry,
is also dealing with and resonating the primal laws that govern
the depths of humanity. And when they're contravened, poetry speaks. A very good
example is, let's call it the secret law of unity, harmony or
solidarity. When there's disunity, when there is
great division, poetry speaks. And it reminds us of what we're doing to
ourselves tearing ourselves apart.
I want to go back a few steps and just say something about why I chose to collect these
poems. I read 10,000 poems to choose 100 and it's because I wanted to also
redefine the idea of political poetry. The common idea of political poetry is
that it makes you take to the streets with banners, it makes you go on marches,
bang on doors, shouting in squares. If it does that, wonderful, but I think what
political poetry does is much more subtle and more profound and more
lasting, which is that it wakes us up. It thunders questions in us that make us
look at our lives differently. We look at our lives and look at our societies and
look at our environments look at our government; suddenly we find ourselves
looking at the world in a different way. Something in us
has been shifted by some suggested idea in a poem. I think that's more powerful
because you could go on a march and nothing may happen. And
you'd be disappointed and disillusioned and might not go on another march. But if
something new has been awoken, it kind of stays awoken and you go on asking
questions. You go on finding ways of affecting the body politic or affecting
the government as you see it. I think that's more deadly and more
fruitful in the long run. So yes I think poetry can in crude ways effect change
but in subtle, more long-lasting, more enduring ways that can actually make
change permanent because it changes our consciousness.
Rise like Lions after slumber
in unvanquishable number –
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many – they are few.