david wheatley
judge from Swift’s memorably dire collection, in which the reader is offered endless
artlessvariationsonthebadnessofwar.MarcusMoore’s‘Killer’marchesalong
to a rhythm as stiff as any goose-step: ‘a rich man owns the mill|he has an iron
will|he sits behind the till|he likes to watch the coffers filling|selling arms gives
him a thrill.’ ‘The news had been one-sided as usual’, begins a potted media studies
seminar by Neeli Cherkovski. By the time we reach Ken Waldman’s pleas to ‘make
the world more|open for children, to share understanding’, only a bed-in by John
and Yoko could make our ecstasy of righteous narcissism any more complete.^22
Much of the rhetoric associated with anti-war poetry is pitched at a level that even
Georg Luk ́acs would call vulgar Marxism. Here is Fred Johnston bewailing the
quietism of Irish poetry:
Why isn’t Irish poetry engaged, and ferociously, with the socio-political events of its
time?...If Adorno argued that no poetry was possible after Auschwitz, what sort of poetry
can be written after the deaths by sanctions...of over half a million children in Iraq? Why
aren’t we, as poets, screaming?^23
The argument could hardly be more programmatic or patronizing: the writer must
engage, on the level of content, with ‘socio-political events’, ‘scream’ in protest
and—beyond this things get hazy. The true point of Johnston’s polemic is less
the political content of any protest poem than the fact of protest itself; that is
enough. Johnston’s own protest seems addressed primarily to other poets and the
fact that, unlike him, they are not outspoken enough to protest about their fellow
poets’ cowardice.
Faced with Pinter’s and Harrison’s failure, it is important to insist that there
are reasons for objecting to their anti-war poems other than apolitical revanchism.
Launching the anti-war anthologyenoughin 2003, Charles Bernstein examined the
nature of poetry as public speech in a time of war:
If we are to talk of ‘poets’ against the war, then what is it in our poems—as opposed to our
positions as citizens—that does the opposing? Perhaps it might be an approach to politics,
as much as to poetry, that doesn’t feel compelled to repress ambiguity or complexity nor
to substitute the righteous monologue for a skeptic’s dialogue. At this trying time we keep
being hectored toward moral discourse, toward turning our work into digestible messages.
This too is a casualty of the war machine, the undermining of the projects of art, of the
aesthetic. Art is never secondary to moral discourse but its teacher.^24
One notable example of contemporary British poetry that fails to succumb, as
Harrison and Pinter do, to the blandishments of moral righteousness is David
Harsent’sLegion(2005). The volume’s opening sequence is a series of despatches
(^22) Marcus Moore, ‘Killer’; Neeli Cherkovski, ‘fromAfter the Anti-War March’; Ken Waldman,
‘Where there’s war’; available athttp://www.nthposition.com/100poets.pdf
(^23) Fred Johnston, ‘Longing for Readings’,Poetry Ireland Review, 85 (Feb. 2006), 95.
(^24) Charles Bernstein, launch talk at the Bowery Poetry Club, 9 Mar. 2003; posted on the Buffalo
poetics ‘listserv’, 10 Mar. 2003:http://listserv.buffalo.edu/archives/poetics.html