- by Marcus Browning
- The Guardian
- Issue #2171
Photo: rawpixel.com (CC0)
One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.
Of physiology from top to toe I sing,
Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse,
I say the Form complete is worthier far,
The Female equally with the Male I sing.
Of Life immense in passion, pulse and power,
Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing.Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass
Poetry’s subjects are many – love and death and nature. And work, that fundamental activity carried out daily by people around the world – labour and the means to have shelter, food, warmth. As poet Tom Wayman put it, “Any literature which omits this governing experience of daily life is a literature with an enormous hole in the middle.”
It is not my intention here to discuss individual poets. I have used the opening lines of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass because of the poem’s epic proportions in recounting the emergence of the nation that is the USA. The poem’s 10,500 lines are unified by the poetic techniques of succession, cataloguing, cadence, structure and symbolism.
Whitman (1819-1892) had this to say about his purpose in writing it: “It was a feeling or ambition to articulate and faithfully express in literary or poetic form, and uncompromisingly, my own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual and aesthetic personality … tallying the momentous spirit and facts of its immediate days, and of current America …”
One hundred years after Whitman’s death another US poet, Jessica Greenbaum, complained that contemporary poems made the reader feel like a beggar at the idea of a banquet.
“We feel lost not only regarding the direction of ideas – what does the poet mean, where is the poet going, can I come? – but also regarding the subject. What was that all about? we often ask.” All good questions.
We live in a society that promotes the absolute predominance of the individual, while at the same time depriving individuals of the economic and aesthetic means for satisfying their aspirations. Capitalism thus produces poetry that is full of contradictions, the source of Jessica Greenbaum’s annoyance.
People are individual. They differ from one another because of inborn characteristics, and this individuality is stimulated and developed as society develops – this development becomes the means of realising individuality.
We express our perception of the world through language, and measure the power of the word by the degree of perceptual change that results for the reader. The word, like money, is the expression of a transfer between two people – commodity with the former, ideas with the latter.
Just as commodity production brings with it the concept of “value” so the word brings “meaning,” “emotion,” and “enlightenment.” It can also mislead and confuse.
Because of the complex and contradictory social relations that have developed – and the corresponding growth of the inner world and imagination of the individual – there is simmering anger about the way society crushes the individual.
There are endless possibilities for self-realisation, but there are forces preventing this from happening: primarily a system which enriches the minority through exploiting and depriving the majority, arising out of the relations of production under capitalism.
Art can change the consciousness and emotions of the individual, allowing for a deeper understanding of the world (art could be defined as organised emotion attached to experience). This may, in turn, act on others and raise a collective understanding that this, and all other achievements, come about when people work together in common.
Art may also obscure the reality of the world. It may mislead and be used to promote the concept of individualism or to divide and even justify war and killing.
Art is then propagandist, because the rhetoric of propaganda appeals to the day-to-day needs, activities and demands of people. Just as rhetoric can be false, hypocritical and misleading so too can art.
WORDS
A poem is made up of words and is condensed and rhythmical. Each poem is a world of its own. Its dialectic is composed of two main elements – form and content.
Its form relates to its rhyme, rhythm, and – the words. Without the presence to varying degrees of rhyme, rhythm, and repetition, one may have a fine essay or editorial but not a poem.
Poetry will endure if it gives meaning to contemporary experience, conveys vision and the aspirations of the reader. Because a poem’s content is organised emotion it creates for the reader something like a real emotional experience.
The need for self-expression of inner feelings and personal experience – and the fact that these are also the result of the artist’s social development and experience – come together to form the contradiction which causes the movement and dynamic of artistic expression.
The best poetry may be abstract and generalised but is also concrete and specific. Inner feelings and experience are unique because they are the product of an individual consciousness and imagination but are, at the same time, generalised because of their social nature and origin. Many may share the same inner feelings because they share the same social experience.
A work of art is the social expression of an individual’s experience – it becomes part of the social world as a work of art.
The art world is changed by this, as is the artist who becomes more deeply aware of the world. So, in dealing with the emotional the artist will give expression to the experiences and unconscious instincts of people in general, exposing the timeless instincts and aspirations beneath the surface layer of culture and civilisation.
Art is also specific to time and place which is why we can find an immediacy and a kind of self-recognition in contemporary works, including poetry. This is because art reflects social relations in a given period and expresses the general experience of specific classes.
There are also “timeless” art contributions because they reflect the historic experiences and aspirations of humankind over a period of history.
The artist records these experiences as an everyday member of society. Artists may also present an amalgam of unique inner feelings and broad social experience, embrace the strange, the unexpected, the new and those phenomena marginalised by the predominant class’s social, moral and economic edicts.
This means the artist is not merely an individual, separate and apart from society but, on the contrary, is very much an active participant in the entire social and class relationship, as in this poem by Roque Dalton:
LIKE YOU
Like you I
love love life, the sweet smell
of the earth, the sky-blue
landscape of January days.
And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the buds of tears.
I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for
everyone
and that my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone.
