‘Rage, rage…’
Poet David Harsent has just won the prestigious Forward Prize for his new collection, Legion. The poems consist ‘of voices in a war zone’ & Harsent reflects interestingly in the Saturday Guardian on the effectiveness of poetry in the face of catastrophe. ‘Whether or not direct experience is the only entitlement for art that deals with extremes such as war, torture, starvation is open to debate…@, he writes. ‘What of the orchestra in Auschwitz, of eastern European poetry during the cold war, of Vedran Smailovi playing his ‘cello in the rubble-strewn streets of besieged Sarajevo? There are those who , I suspect, who would think even art of that sort a betrayal.’ He goes on: ‘Beyond entitlement lies the thornier issue of effectiveness & beyond that, I suppose, the unanswerable question of what art is for. I think of Akhmatova ‘s famous encounter with the starved woman in the queue outside a Russian jail during the terror. The woman recognised Akhmatova & said: “Can you describe this?” When Akhmatova said, “I can”, a ghost of a smile passed over the woman’s face; in some small way she was consoled’.
Although ‘no poem ever kept a Jew from the gas chamber’ & ‘no lyric has ever stopped a tank, Harsent hopes that what gets written in extremis might at least hope to ‘alarm & inform’. However, the problem as he sees it is not so much one of entitlement or expressive effectiveness, but one of time scale. ‘…Art – especially poetry – is a matter of seepage, of slow accumulation; it doesn’t warn; it laments…& writing a poem (may) be nothing more than spitting in the face of the executioner’. For his part, the tendency of art being to react to disaster rather than acting as some kind of preventative force, David Harsent would settle for spitting.
Well, does poetry have a place in the processes of protest & dissent? What poems have, for you, stiffened the sinews & summoned up the blood in respect of your own commitment to protest & dissent? You show me yours & I’ll show you mine…
11:06:33 PM 
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