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Poetry Book Causes Dissension On The Left

category national | miscellaneous | feature author Wednesday July 30, 2008 22:53author by Andrei Zdhanov Report this post to the editors

featured image
I'm a poet and I know it

The new book of poems, Time Gentlemen Please, by Galway poet Kevin Higgins, which was published this March, is causing consternation and disagreement on the Left.

Some in Galway Alliance Against War are not at all happy about Higgins’s satire on their protest against the Salthill Airshow.

The Galway Branch of the Socialist Workers Party have, as has already been covered on Indymedia, taken issue with another Higgins poem, ‘Firewood’. The poem takes issue with their stance on Darfur.

"The least controversial definition of poetry is ‘writing that doesn’t go all the way to the right-hand side of the page’ — which, given the parlous state of the rainforests, demands a greater justification for publishing it" - From Red Banner

Some in Galway Alliance Against War are not at all happy about Higgins’s satire on their protest against the Salthill Airshow. The poem at issue, titled ‘The Annual Airshow Protest’, can be read here http://www.nthposition.com/stageleftbookshop.php just scroll down.

The Galway Branch of the Socialist Workers Party have, as has already been covered on Indymedia, taken issue with another Higgins poem, ‘Firewood’. The poem takes issue with their stance on Darfur. For more about that see http://www.indymedia.ie/article/88324 and http://www.hurryupharry.org/2008/07/22/the-socialist-wo...itic/

The controversy was sparked off by an interview Higgins gave to Kernan Andrews of The Galway Advertiser back in March. It can be read at http://www.galwayadvertiser.ie/content/index.php?aid=11220

Higgins is also interviewed by Dave Lordan in Verbal magazine. To read that interview go to http://www.verbalartscentre.co.uk/verbalmagazine/assets...4.pdf

Higgins was a supporter of the Militant Tendency in Galway and later in London and was active in the anti-poll tax movement there. Another poem in the book is titled ‘My Militant Tendency’ http://invereskstreet.blogspot.com/2008/06/my-militant-....html

Red Banner, the “magazine of socialist ideas” dissents from the SWP/Galway Alliance Against War view and gives ‘Time Gentlemen, Please’ a pretty glowing review in its latest issue.

Here it is.

Poetry of our own
Review by Joe Conroy in Red Banner 32

The least controversial definition of poetry is ‘writing that doesn’t go all the way to the right-hand side of the page’ — which, given the parlous state of the rainforests, demands a greater justification for publishing it. But this book would pass any such test without breaking sweat, containing a substantial range of poems that bring a smile to the lips and a spark to the imagination. Readers of this magazine will know of Kevin Higgins in poetry and in prose, and his second collection confirms him as a poet the left should be listening to.
Often he deals with the usual material of poets always and everywhere: love requited and unrequited, the successes and failures of human relationships, nature, death and the rest. Anyone who avoided these would be no poet at all, and these eternal themes are treated here with an originality born of having lived and considered experiences, an originality that evokes recognition.
It is an unusual but quite refreshing thing to note about a poet of the left, but in his first collection The Boy With No Face (also published by Salmon, in 2005) Higgins actually succeeded better with such ‘non-political’ poetry than with the ‘political’. (Those quotation marks are there to signify the fluid and ultimately invisible boundary between the two, but you know what I mean.) Here, however, no such dissonance can be heard, and his political poems break higher ground. It’s not just that he avoids the pitfalls of versified sloganeering — although that is still something to be grateful for in itself — but that he doesn’t become any less poetic for being political.
Poetry dealing with the milestones and millstones of your life is nothing new, but it is rare to read poems that openly deal with the specifics of a socialist’s life. All of us go through more or less the same kind of things, but you go through them a bit differently if you’ve been determined since your youth to turn the world upside down. ‘My Militant Tendency’ (p 33) talks of being a teenager, but not by the commonplace reference points of songs on the radio or fashions followed:

It’s nineteen eighty two and I know everything.…
I’d rather be putting some fascist through
a glass door arseways, but being fifteen,
have to mow the lawn first.…
Instead of masturbation, I find socialism.
While others dream of businessmen bleeding
in basements, I promise to abolish double chemistry class
the minute I become Commissar.

Likewise, in ‘To Curran’s Hotel’ (p 34) the demolition of a local pub brings to mind left-wing meetings attended there rather than pints sunk and girls scored there. While other poems testify to someone who is no stranger to the usual ups and downs of personal life too, the particular swings and arrows of a life lived on the left are as fit a subject for poetry as anyone else’s.

A tense and awkward father-son relationship is painfully familiar, but ‘Dad’ (p 42) tells of one with politics added to the mix. Son tells father that all his ideas are wrong, to which father replies that if son had his way, Moors murderers would be let free to promote their memoirs. But in the end the son all but thanks his father for deciding to “allow me / to keep contradicting myself / until I find out what it is / I’m trying to say”.
A poet reacting to a historically meaningful site has been done many times before, but ‘St Petersburg Scenes’ (p 31) comes at it from the left:

a man, whose
role in his own Bolshevik fairytale
has long since earned him a place
on the FBI’s least wanted… gazes
meaningfully into the past.

This kind of self-deprecation in the presence of world-historic significance is rare but essential for any sane socialist, the injunction from the Parisian barricades to take the revolution seriously but not take ourselves too seriously.
Sometimes a poem here hits a nail on the head of the left’s faults. In ‘The Annual Air Show Protest’ (p 62) Higgins affirms that he would sooner campaign for Paris Hilton on a unicycle than fall in with the dreams of hoary nostalgic Stalinists. The influence of George Orwell is obvious in ‘From Grosvenor Square to Here’ (p 59):

Sentences that run on and on,
like a hacking cough. Exclamation
marks which can be seen coming
a mile off, as you load them onto
your machine gun tongue and fire!
You’ve hawked that suitcase
full of broken old slogans all the way…
if rigormortis could talk
this is how it would sound.

A wise man once said that someone who is seen on every picket is no good on any picket, because he’s only there for the sake of picketing. ‘The Cause’ (p 52) paints a cautionary picture of someone starched into the role of a professional protestor, going through the motions without feeling a thing:

Each morning he decides
what he’s against today,
puts on that screaming red beret
and goes; is years past the point
where the campaigner became
the mad fucker with the sign

But where do you go if you don’t go down these roads? ‘Death of a Revolutionary’ (p 39) describes a socialist leader carrying his “plastic bag / still packed with propaganda, / but the world going the other way”. While there was a time when “My every thought [was] part / of your master-plan”, the poet sits and concludes that “I do not say, as you did: / ‘We have kept the faith.’” Is this a rejection of a specific type of socialism, or of the whole idea of it? When you listen to The Who’s classic ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, you ask yourself whether this embittered look back in anger at 1968 and all that is a denial of revolution or a call for a better one. As the sublime Keith Moon drumming duels with the intelligent synthesiser, you draw your own conclusion, whatever Pete Townsend intended notwithstanding. It is only right that poetry throws up tough questions without easy answers, the ambiguity forcing you to think for yourself — and the poet’s own reading is not the only one possible.
Higgins’s criticisms of the left pave the way towards its renewal, not its repudiation, impetus for creating a left that is honest and liberating. Other poems show how little time he has for those who go over to the dark side. If there are fifty ways to leave your lover, there are many more ways to leave socialism. ‘Betrayals’ (p 50) tells witheringly of someone who takes refuge in a detoxed lifestyle when the workers refuse to play the progressive role allotted to them. ‘Page From The Diary Of An Officially Approved Person’ (p 57) is the story of a bought-and-paid-for poverty industrialist whose “new blonde hair / and state-sponsored smile are twin planks / in the Government’s anti-poverty strategy”. A revolutionary swaps his principles for a suburban marriage, a career in management and an early death in ‘Ending Up’ (p 53-4):

Catastrophe comes in many guises
and not always with the strident voice
of a doomed member of the Baader-Meinhof.
It also arrives, more quietly,
on the Essex side of the M25.

‘The Candidate’ (p 58) saw only the choice of “making up worlds that will never be… or grow up to be / Junior Minister for Counter-Terrorism”. He chooses the latter, and dreams of persecuting those who didn’t.

‘Firewood’ (p 61) is a good example of poetry reaching the parts that prose cannot. Eyewitness accounts of the genocide in Darfur are interspersed with glib comments from the wings (the left wing, unfortunately) like “It’s problematic to describe this as genocide. / The solution is not military intervention.” The common response to such horrors calls out for something or someone to go in and do something. While the US Marines are unlikely to improve anything they touch, the simple humanitarian instinct is ultimately far more worthwhile than the unfeeling rehearsal of pat slogans from a safe distance. To express the contradictions, doubts and tensions involved here is difficult, but this poem does a good job of it.
‘Careful Driver’ (p 84) provides the one line that exhibits a plain lack of imagination: “a bad week in Bognor Regis”. Now, I’ve never been to Bognor Regis, but I’ve a feeling that Kevin Higgins hasn’t either. To employ that much-maligned English seaside resort to conjure up humdrum mundanity smacks of the tired clichés of 1970s comedy with all its frilly shirt fronts and inaccurate Frank Spencer impersonations. But the fact that this slip stands alone among seventy-odd poems underlines that here is a poet who sands and polishes his words, who probably has a load more not yet finished enough to earn the light of day.

There are a couple of poems here just for us. The images and references will go over their heads in Poetry Ireland, but us socialists can catch them if we keep our eyes open. ‘The Interruption’ (p 16) stands in a long line of poems inspired by works of art, but the picture brought to life here (without being mentioned) is Boardman Robinson’s 1918 cartoon where a dinner party of capitalists is interrupted by the hand of Bolshevik revolution.
In ‘Kronstadt, Winter Song’ (p 32) “ghost insurgents / wander the white, / chasing remembered sparks / of Aurora”. This image of Aurora works (as all the best literary critics say) on several levels. The aurora borealis is a fantastic natural light show, of course, and Aurora was the goddess of the dawn. But a socialist reader may remember that it was the ship Aurora that launched the attack on the Winter Palace in 1917. The Kronstadters longed again for the spectacular dawn, but it was a spectacular dawn of real workers’ revolution.

The left should hurry to welcome this collection. Here is poetry that we can identify with, that tells of our hopes and fears and doubts and questions, that puts our lives on the map too. The fact that one of our own can tell such stories in a way that is so powerful and satisfying is something to be proud of. Anyone who responds to good poetry will find in Time Gentlemen, Please a collection to read and enjoy, but socialists especially can learn more from it of what we are and what we need to become.
from Red Banner 32 http://www.redbannermagazine.com

So who is right? Is Higgins just another ex-left turncoat? Or is he is telling some home truths?

Related Link: http://www.salmonpoetry.com/timegentlemen.html
author by don't support the warpublication date Thu Aug 07, 2008 12:01author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Some of the anti-Higgins comments, such as Malachy's, are way OTT. A member of Galway Alliance Against War was cautioned by Galway Gardai for an attempt to physically intimidate Kevin Higgins a couple of months back. In this light a more measured tone is definitely called for.

author by Malachypublication date Tue Aug 05, 2008 18:49author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Did Rita Ann Higgins not take part in a GAAW demo in Galway streets and read out poems from Guantanamo, and did the organiser of the Amnesty readings not attack street demonstrators in print, among whom she was one? This took place long before his Amnesty allegiance took flower. Amnesty do good work, undeniably; but what he is after is political street-cred, and the cause is irrelevant. Worse than any of this, he wants and craves respectability, and Amnesty are respectable. He wants to be seen as the sort of prudent supporter of causes Galway City Council and others would not be embarrassed by. Facing down Councillors and police is not for him. Let him deny, then, that he attacked people who had demonstrated against Guantanamo and who had read out Guantanamo poems in the streets. Be it Zhdanov, Higgins, or some other alias - let him deny it.

author by on topicpublication date Tue Aug 05, 2008 16:18author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Malachy misleads to the point of lying. Rita Ann Higgins took part in the Amnesty Guantanamo poetry event which was mced by her surnamesake. See here http://www.galwayindependent.com/entertainment/entertai...ding/

Amnesty have a credibility when it comes to the issue of torture, which some in Galway Alliance Against War lack. Amnesty speaks out against all torture, whatever the complexion of the regime. Galway Alliance Against War does not. One of the controversy causing poems in Higgins's book, The Salthill Airshow Protest, talks about "the guy who every chance he gets ticks you off for bearing false witness against east Germany." People were tortured in east Germany. Maybe that's why Higgins chooses to work with Amnesty and not Galway Alliance Against War.

As for the rest of Malachy's comment, it's just a typical Fred Johnston-style rant.

author by timmypublication date Tue Aug 05, 2008 16:07author address author phone Report this post to the editors

To scrap the war machine and its manufactury, is to open the paths of liberation towards true freedom. Stalin knew that materialism and in accord with the soviet foreign policy of peaceful co-existence, he handed the knowledge of nuclear technology to Mao. That event guaranteeing that nuclear disarmament will happen globally. Contradiction proves that sometimes the negative can teach positively what needs to be done. Plus and minus. The goal remains the complete, total, thorough , dismantling of all nuclear weapons globally, and is stated so on the sign marking the 1964 explosion of Chinas' first nuclear bomb.

author by Malachypublication date Tue Aug 05, 2008 13:46author address author phone Report this post to the editors

It is a fact that this individual courts publicity like few others, and it doesn't seem to matter if he uses the Left to get it. He piss-took the real activists in Galway, including such as Margaretta D'Arcy and even poet Rita Ann Higgins, and in particular those who organised street-level anti-Guantanamo poetry readings and then cynically went and organised the same gig for Galway's Amnesty. This is not speculation. Every activist in Galway was witness to it. Shameful, of course. And I can only agree - too much Indymedia time and space, which is valuable, has been wasted on a self-interested, cred-desperate individual who cannot even pen a letter to a paper under his own name for fear of upsetting someone. Someone get The Irish Times review of his first collection. His political 'awareness' is stated there in spades. For God's sake, at this time when the world mourns the loss of a REAL poet, why are we even discussing this space-waste????

author by questionpublication date Tue Aug 05, 2008 12:16author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Okay, but how does the 'cynic' label fit with the sentiments of a poem such as the one reffered to here?

" ‘Page From The Diary Of An Officially Approved Person’ (p 57) is the story of a bought-and-paid-for poverty industrialist whose “new blonde hair / and state-sponsored smile are twin planks / in the Government’s anti-poverty strategy”. from the Red Banner review

or with his Darfur poem which provoked the wrath of the SWP. Aren't the SWP even more cynical than Higgins in that they want to fob the people of Darfur off with a few meaningless slogans?

And who is this 'we'? Does it include the entire left spectrum from left libertarians all the way over to those who still secretly yearn for the Berlin Wall?

author by Shakes.....publication date Tue Aug 05, 2008 11:04author address author phone Report this post to the editors

I have read the above review from Red Banner. Kevin Higgins is not giving an honest insight to the workings of the left, he is just another cynic. Someone who was involved in left politics, decided to give up and has turned into a cynical critic who takes pleasure from putting down the work and activities of others. This should not be praised it should be criticised and placed in the large pile of critical work written by our opponents!!!!!!!! Is that enough exclamation marks for you...

author by trying to make sense of last commentpublication date Tue Aug 05, 2008 03:39author address author phone Report this post to the editors

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/from-left....html

author by trying to make sense of last commentpublication date Tue Aug 05, 2008 03:26author address author phone Report this post to the editors

The Annual Airshow Protest

"The man who, every chance he gets,
ticks you off for bearing false witness
against East Germany, hands out red balloons.
His moustache stops to congratulate itself.
His heartbeat hammers: Long Live Stalin!"
Kevin Higgins

Higgins has something in common with Solzhenitsyn? No doubt he'll be sent of to the gulag the second 'Galway Anti-War' storm city hall and declare the dictatorship of 'Galway Anti-War'.

"Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin’s slave labor camps, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89.

Stepan Solzhenitsyn told The Associated Press his father died late Sunday in Moscow, but declined further comment.

Through unflinching accounts of the eight years he spent in the Soviet Gulag, Solzhenitsyn’s novels and nonfiction works exposed the secret history of the vast prison system that enslaved millions. The accounts riveted his countrymen and earned him years of bitter exile, but international renown."
http://www.thestate.com/nation/story/479689.html?RSS=ge..._news

author by trying to make sense of last commentpublication date Tue Aug 05, 2008 03:11author address author phone Report this post to the editors

If you never heard of him, how do you know you've never seen him on a demo, because never having heard of him you wouldn't know if you did seen him? Hot air indeedy. And why are you so threatened by the publicity his book is getting? Seems like the Galway left handed it to him on a plate.

author by Galway Anti Warpublication date Tue Aug 05, 2008 02:24author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Who is this guy kevin higgins? never heard of him. naever saw him at a demo in galway or in dublin or in shannon; why are you giving this person so much publicity?

author by Scansionpublication date Sun Aug 03, 2008 18:55author address author phone Report this post to the editors

PB Shelly said: Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.
WH Auden said: Poetry makes nothing happen.

Take your choice and decide if Higgins is worth noticing.

author by Albatrotpublication date Thu Jul 31, 2008 13:58author address author phone Report this post to the editors

There's nothing wrong with disagreement in an organisation. In fact if debated in an open and comradely manner it can be the lifeblood of an organisation or alliance.

author by The Insiderpublication date Thu Jul 31, 2008 10:24author address author phone Report this post to the editors

That's the hallmark of the far left. Dissension, disagreement, splits, infighting.

Looks like this poetry book has exposed another "home truth" inadvertently.

author by Andrei Zdhanovpublication date Sun Jul 27, 2008 00:14author address author phone Report this post to the editors

There are a batch of reviews of Higgins's previous book of poems at
http://www.salmonpoetry.com/theboy.html

and his poetry is also, it seems, talked about in this book
http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isb...s=fro

author by Pound Manpublication date Sat Jul 26, 2008 21:50author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Poetry can be judged on aesthetics and hermeneutics i.e. according to the quality and aptness of the language used, and according to its meaningful importance. A Mussolini-loving fascist like Ezra Pound is considered to be one of the leading English-speaking literary figures on account of his mastery of language as well as his seminal influence on Eliot and other key literary figures who were around during the 1920s and 30s. His dotty views about interest rates and his hangups about members of the jewish faith are distasteful, often obscene, but literary critics don't estimte his permanent literary worth on these grounds alone. A conservative poet like Eliot is regarded as major on account of the culturally groundbreaking nature of The Waste Land written in 1922 and his influence on many contemporaries. His views on traditional western values and his sentimental penchant for high church anglicanism strike many admirers of his verse as archaic, but that is not the point. Those who wish to discuss a recently published collection of poems in Galway would do a better service to poetry by homing in firstly on the poet's grasp of language and awareness of poetic traditions. After that they can quibble the hermeneutics.

author by socialist potepublication date Sat Jul 26, 2008 16:20author address author phone Report this post to the editors

if you are unaware of the role of poetry within society, and or the role of literature,
then you are indoctrinated.

(((it's really dat simple, like mon))).

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