Much like its editors, I have no idea who Poetry for the Many is for. However, the choir it preaches to is quickly identified. It opens with a dedication to Julian Assange, the free speech martyr in no way a narcissist patsy for a hostile state. A member of UB40 summarises the book’s aim on the jacket: to ‘encourage the working classes to embrace and enjoy culture’. Elsewhere, in the course of four separate introductions, I divine some plan to make poetry both politically relevant and accessible to the lower orders.
This project apparently requires the literary advocacy of Len McCluskey and Jeremy Corbyn. They have written personal introductions to their favourite poems and invited ‘friends’ to do the same. These friends are mostly drawn from the celebrity class of comedians, auteurs and actors traditionally first to man the barricades (Russell Brand was dropped shortly before going to print). This notably pale group, Melissa Benn improbably claims, has often been ‘sidelined, mocked or castigated for their efforts’, and may therefore read this with a sense of déjà vu. Among the contributions are, at least, a couple of thoughtful commentaries: one from the estimable Gary Younge, and another from Ken Loach – unusual here in that his strenuously professed love of poetry seems to extend to actual acquaintance with the stuff, even if he plumps for leftie self-caricature in his choice of ‘Say not the struggle naught availeth’.
Len’s taste runs mostly to Victorian schoolbag classics – ‘Invictus’, ‘If’, and so on. He is a clever man but writes like a child. An Emily Dickinson poem is ‘so beautifully written and speaks to all of us about the greatest emotion, hope, and how fragile it can be’. Robert Frost’s nihilist masterpiece ‘The Road Not Taken’ makes him think ‘what my life would have been like had I chosen another direction’. It is supposed to make you think precisely the opposite. Jez and Len are not natural literary scholars. ‘Blake was frequently stressed,’ writes Jeremy. This is true, but needs context. ‘Who knows what he would have produced had his life not been prematurely cut short?’, Len writes of Robert Burns. I can tell you: nothing, as he’d long quit writing poetry for song-gathering. Elsewhere, we get the usual virtuous glommings of someone else’s decent pang of conscience. What do ‘the Many’ get of Elizabeth Barrett Browning? Not for them an immortal sonnet or some sublime passage from Book Five of Aurora Leigh. No: they have to chew through ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’. Other choices seem whimsical. The Many are invited to fill their boots with all 100-plus lines of Meredith’s ‘The Lark Ascending’, but they get only three stanzas of Shelley’s arguably more relevant ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, from which the book’s title derives.
Reviews of anthologies tend to consist in lists of omissions. If a poet is doing the reviewing, this list often starts with ‘me’, but here one would happily pay not to be included. All the same, where are the working-class poets, or poets who write of working-class lives? No John Clare, John Keats or John Davidson. No Robert Hayden. No Philip Levine. No Yusef Komunyakaa. No Ciaran Carson, Diane Seuss, Denise Riley or Douglas Dunn. No Tony Harrison, for heaven’s sake. Instead, we get a handful of exhausted anthology warhorses, ‘inspirational things that aren’t really poems’, lyrics and some random contemporary stuff.
At some point the left will have to reckon with the apparently devastating news that mediocrity, just like talent, is colour blind. As one of the most respected black voices included here once muttered to me at the bar: ‘The white liberal class has a lot to gain by promoting black mediocrity.’ It is a criticism the left will not understand, far less heed. Let me parse it for them: there is a class of gatekeeper whose dream is both to revel ecstatically in their guilt and remain fully in charge. Both states are required to indulge their main paraphilia, namely saviourist largesse. Moreover, the promotion of bad writing affords them a frisson of charity they would not derive from the good. Bad writing is not the fault of bad writers, which is why one never names names. It is the fault of those making you read it. Bad art actively undermines its cause. Had the editors bothered to consult anyone who knew anything, they could have furnished this book with fine, ‘accessible’ and politically stirring poems by many contemporary non-white poets – say, Terrance Hayes, Jericho Brown, Natasha Trethewey, Zaffar Kunial, Kayo Chingonyi or Airea Matthews – and at least have added some actual substance to the signalling.
I mention this because, while there’s no dodging the dead, the editors clearly got the Islingtonian memo that the live white male is best avoided. They have kept their number down to a highly commendable three, one of whom is a poet new to me, one J.B. Corbyn. And so, having begun with one narcissist, we close the book neatly with another. Jez feels that ‘there is a poet in all of us and nobody should ever be afraid of sharing their poetry’. Oh, Jeremy: be afraid. Corbyn seems to have made a late start as a poet, though to his credit he has finished almost immediately. He contributes a Thribbian effusion written ‘on a train home after a recent trip to visit the refugee camps in Calais’, making the rookie error of imagining that the intensity of a poem increases with the proximity of its occasion. Unrevised and endless, the poem is a heartfelt cry for either a far longer or far shorter journey. No refugee will be warmed or fed by its dead eye and deader ear. Pace Auden, some poems make a lot less happen than others.
The kindest thing one can say is that this book was not compiled in bad faith. The worst is that it embodies the very bourgeois presumptions it claims to challenge: proud ignorance, paternalistic saviourism and zero acquaintance with the tastes of the class to which it claims to appeal. Len wants to eliminate the stigma that poetry is only for ‘posh people’ or ‘softies’, apparently unaware that the great Kendrick Lamar won his Pulitzer years ago. Contemporary poetry has many terrible problems, but lack of popularity isn’t one of them. Indeed, some would argue its biggest problem is its failure to recruit the ‘softies’ of its natural readership – think Horace from The Broons, or indeed Denis Healey and John McDonnell: bright working-class kids on long-lost grammar school scholarships (mostly phased out before women could take advantage of them) who got to read not just Keats and Clare, but Eliot, Plath and Wallace Stevens.
More sinisterly, there is a clear line between this garbage and the post-Foucauldian assault on the humanities: both wings of the left use the tactic of cultural deletion as a shortcut to the world as they would prefer it. The bulk of the poems included here date either from before the first world war or last week, with precious little in between. Good, though, to know we can always skip the decoloniality theory and fall back on pig ignorance.
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