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‘We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.’\u00a0<\/em>\u2013 Ursula K LeGuin,\u00a0from her acceptance speech for The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, 2014.<\/p>\n \u2018Are you a political poet?\u2019 is something I occasionally get asked. My two favourite conversation subjects are politics and poetry (plus religion\u2026perhaps this is why I never get invited to dinner parties!) I am definitely political. And poetical. But am I a political poet?<\/p>\n I never set out to write political poetry. I just write about the things that matter to me, the things that grab me by the heart and twist it, the sorts of things that if I didn\u2019t write them down would bubble around in my head and probably explode. My husband says I am becoming angrier as I get older. He blames it on the Socialism and the Poetry. But it\u2019s not that. It\u2019s just that there\u2019s so much to be angry about right now, I can\u2019t help it. The chaos and mishandling of the Covid pandemic, the massive inequalities in society, a rising acceptance of food banks as the norm, soaring energy bills, job losses, mostly among the working classes, public sector pay freeze and strikes, the aftermath of Brexit and looming spectre of climate change. Trump and Boris. In such a world, how could anyone not be angry?<\/p>\n At times such as this, all forms of art \u2013 and poetry in particular \u2013 are a way of dealing with and responding to the brokenness of the world. We tell our truths because we have to, because (to quote Martin Luther):\u00a0\u2018here I stand, I can do no other.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n The best political poems convey a kind of truth which is timeless and universal. They go beyond the time in which they were written and reach into ours. They invite us to question universal, fundamental truths: What is our place in the world, and who decided it? Does our society create the realities we strive for, and if not, how can we make things better?<\/p>\n Leon Trotsky writes, in Art and Politics in our Epoch (1938):<\/p>\n \u2018Generally speaking, art is an expression of man\u2019s need for an harmonious and complete life, that is to say, his need for those major benefits of which a society of classes has deprived him. That is why a protest against reality, either conscious or unconscious, active or passive, optimistic or pessimistic, always forms part of a really creative piece of work. Every new tendency in art has begun with rebellion.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n It is this restlessness \u2013 this call to rebellion \u2013 which fires us into self-expression. Art, and poetry in particular, is both a response and a challenge to the world we find ourselves living in. It can never be unbiased, because the very act of writing creates our own reality. The very best political poems both challenge the reader and inspire us to new visions. Nietzsche, in his 1873 essay Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense argues that there is no such thing as absolute truth. People create the concepts through which they define what is good or just, and these values are changeable as they adjust to shifting cultural values and belief systems. We create our own \u2018truth\u2019 about the world through our use of metaphor, myth, and poetry.<\/p>\n Truth, fact and fiction<\/strong><\/p>\n We live in what\u2019s often referred to as a \u2018Post Truth world\u2019. Post Truth is described in the Cambridge Dictionary as: ‘relating to a situation in which people are more likely to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs, rather than one based on facts.’ A classic example is Tony Blair’s justification for the invasion of Iraq despite having found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction: \u2018I only know what I believe<\/em>\u2019.<\/p>\n At a time when politicians routinely lie, change their minds and manipulate data to suit their own agenda, we are rapidly approaching what the writer Hannah Arendt (Lying in Politics, 1972), termed defactualization \u2013 a point at which falsehood becomes so commonplace that it is impossible to distinguish fact from fiction:<\/p>\n
Whenever I try to define what is meant by political poetry, I keep coming up against this word: Truth. What is meant by truth? Are certain truths universal, or is the very nature of what we understand as \u2018truth\u2019 always changing?<\/p>\n