POETRY PS: WHAT’S SO FUNNY ABOUT PEACE, LOVE & UNDERSTANDING?
I’ve just finished listening to a half-hour programme on BBC 4 about young people’s poetry. Potentially very interesting: therein might be found a freshness of theme, vision, vocabulary, style & general content that would put weary adults who have laboured with pen & keyboard for too long in the shade. Not the case here & the sadder for it since these young poets were Israelis & Palestinians & their theme was Peace. In a hushed & awed voice the presenter read poem after dreary poem, all of them asking the querulous questions, Why can’t we have Peace between peoples? Why did s/he have to die? What does it matter that I’m Jewish & s/he’s Moslem? Why can’t we all be Brother & Sisters together, walking hand in hand, smiling towards a New Dawn etc. etc.
God knows, I don’t blame the kids for writing this awful tosh. Their sincerity is unimpeachable & their passion beyond doubt & creditable. And God knows, wouldn’t it be wonderful if it really were that easy? But somewhere along the line something has come badly adrift that a.) kids are producing such vapid & formulaic stuff in the service of the noblest of causes, & b.) some sanctimonious zealot is given airtime to pass it off as deeply meaningful & evidence of times that are a-changing.
Maybe the choice of theme was where the trouble started. Ever since the 1960s the two words Love & Peace have been part of successive generation’s lingua franca &, if the words did have any serious & specific focus in the first place, they have certainly lost it now. They are upper-case-initial-letter daubs, the stuff of graffiti & street chants, so familiar to eye & ear that they are nothing more than shapes on a wall, sounds in the air.
If, for the sake of some sort of symbolic clarity, one wants to identify a moment in cultural history after which the currency of those words was forever devalued it would be for me the release in 1970 of John Lennon’s second solo album, ‘Imagine’. Whilst there’s some excellent material on that album the title song is no example of it. However beguiling the tune & however effective the stripped down arrangement, the lyrics suck with a vengeance. We are asked to imagine some pink & frothy future utopian era in which Love’n’Peace have somehow triumphed over venal greed, political corruption & religious bigotry & everything is, at last, just fine & dandy. At around about the time of the album’s release John & Yoko (sustained by wealth beyond the dreams of avarice) embarked upon a series of high profile publicity events comprising their addressing the global media from beds situated in various world capitals. The burden of their message was essentially (in fact, solely) Love’n’Peace. Everybody should love everybody else & when they’ve got that sorted out then there will be World Peace.
The perceptive amongst you will have noticed that this hasn’t come to pass. The shit that flew towards the fan in 1970 is still in the air & heading in the same direction. Now this might be because we just didn’t try hard enough. Maybe my generation should feel the burden of shared guilt: we had the chance to love each other & thus usher in World Peace & we blew it. If we’d only put in that little extra bit of effort & held hands with our brothers & sisters a little tighter for a little longer then maybe Protestant & Catholic in Northern Ireland, for example, would have lain down together like the lion & the lamb & all those horrid deaths wouldn’t have happened.
Alternatively it might just be because the world isn’t a kindergarten playground or a dope smoke-filled apartment & people kill each other because it might make them richer or it might make them powerful, or because their sergeant told them to, or because they just fucking well enjoy doing it. The best poetry faces up to a world of near-unmitigated savagery & it rings the bells & blows the whistles loud & clear. Our vision of the First World War as a conflict of unprecedented cruelty & stupidity was not provided by historians but by poets. Our images of the calculated, systematic horrors of the Holocaust & of Stalin’s domestic genocide come not from the newsreels but from the quiet dignity of those who suffered & survived to write it all down.
It both saddened & angered me that these Jewish & Palestinian school students, caught in the midst of a bloody cycle of attrition & vengeance, should have been provided with the empty blatherings of 35 years-worth of pop sociology & not the steely & uncompromising voices of the great poets. Without a doubt there are great poets writing in Hebrew & Arabic & some of them are incubating their craft as students in schools threatened daily by tank shells & suicide bombers. But maybe their words are a little too steely & uncompromising in a world alternatively cowed by, servile to
or cynical about the concentration of executive power in so few hands.
Maybe Bertold Brecht was right when he saw in the emotionally focussed, cathartic naturalistic theatre of his time a deliberate establishment-orientated programme of bread & circuses. Drench them in sentiment; seduce them with romance; tell them the old, old stories & they’ll never look beyond the makeup & the costumes. Nowadays the multi-billion dollar popular culture industry looks after all that. And as long as our cultural impoverishment leads us merely to ‘imagine all the people sharing all the world’ then Love & Peace – whatever those words really mean in the world – will be ours tomorrow.
1:31:26 AM 
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