Fran Lock
CULTURE MATTERS | December 17, 2024
In the title essay from her book Civil Wars (1985) June Jordan writes that ‘In the context of tragedy all polite behaviour is a form of self-denial.’ She goes on to say that ‘The courtesies of order, of ruly forms pursued from a heart of rage or terror or grief defames the truth of every human crisis.’ This provocation poses a question that strikes me as being at the heart of contemporary poetry: how can we negotiate between the instrumental eloquence of a hegemonic language like English, and the inarticulate fury we feel in the face of a violently unjust world? How can poetry, which must necessarily sit within the orderly, ‘polite’ realms of publication and peer review, encompass an honest howl of rage or a gut-felt moan of sorrow?
Thinking about what poetry is, what it can and ought to be feels especially pertinent in light of the recent closure of Smokestack Books. As Andy Croft, founder, editor, and publisher of Smokestack writes in the introduction to his recent collection of essays The Privatisation of Poetry (Broken Sleep, 2024):
In the last forty years large sections of British economic life have been moved out of common ownership into private hands, rationed by price or simply closed down. The democratic process is blocked by inequality, authoritarianism, deceit and a narrow ideological consensus. British cultural life is blocked by the values of big business and show business. The result is an atomised, unwelcoming, and unfriendly poetry scene, driven by the operating logics of capitalism and celebrity.
Since 2004 Smokestack has laboured to make space for those voices writing ‘outside the centres of cultural authority’, the radical, the unfashionable, the unapologetically political. The closure of the press is a significant loss to the field of contemporary poetry, in the wake of which many of us are asking ourselves: What’s left? What now? >>READ MORE
