From IndyRef to Corbyn—what's the point of political poetry?

What can poets really add to an ongoing political debate? It was a question I asked myself repeatedly last year when, as a Scottish poet engaged with social movements, I was flattered with requests to contribute poems to pro-Independence publications. By the time of the vote I'd lost a sense of what the point of it all was. Was I supposed a battle bard, offering lyrical encouragement to the Yes troops? Or a jester, exposing rifts in the politics and laughing at difficult questions? Or a seer, trilling about hope and the utopian imagination? This spring Laphroaig asked me to pen an advertising jingle: on camera the producer asked, “Is it important to think about Scotland?” and I made a noise like an exhausted fart.

The truth is, the years when poets had any right to the claim of being unacknowledged legislators have largely passed—if they ever existed. While hiphop's usurpation (or reclamation for the oral tradition) of political influence goes largely unacknowledged by poetry publishing, printed poetry itself has become culturally marginal and impossibly unprofitable. So what's the point of new anthology Poets for Corbyn?

The 20 poets who have nailed their colours to Jeremy's beard are an enjoyable mix of known and unknown: prizewinners, judges and luminaries alongside so-called “emerging” writers and persistent outsiders. Their approaches to the question of how a poet can be "for" a politician are equally diverse: some pen propaganda, some pen reflective ballads, some repurpose angry reflections.

Tom Pickard's Wongawongaland and Nicholas Murray's J.C. reflect the most straightforward way to respond to the call for a poet to be political: openly partisan agitprop, condemning the unrighteous and gently lauding the solution. “Agitprop” should not be read as an insult: it takes skill, inventiveness and control to rile up the reader with the right mix of rhymes and alliterations, as well as a willingness to let loose at the necessary moment. So writes Pickard:

If he hung the hungry he'd hang the anger out, incentivise to fuck off and die or just have a jousting match of polite poetries.

Other poets reframe poems originally written for other publications. Pascale Petit's "Scarlet Macaws"—for me the richest, most fully-realised poem of the collection—was originally written for the 100 days' blog project New Boots and Pantisocracies. In its original context its birds demanding “their red back” read as both a call for and a description of the left's reclamation of hope and power:

They say their scarlet hue is life. They say that every tree is an axis mundi and all their eyes are suns. They don’t want their heads stuck on grey human bodies for funeral rites.

In Poets for Corbyn its lyrical power is given a specific context and a specific figure to pin hope to: a general wish becomes a concrete reality. A similar effect occurs more dramatically and troublingly in Marion McCready's "The Red Road." It was originally written in response to the suicide of an asylum-seeking family from the infamous Glasgow flats, but in the context of Corbyn its elliptical style invites a new reading:

Swallow this bitter butterfly, let its wings expand in your throat (as we tie ourselves together with rope).

If you didn't know the story that inspired the poem, this could read—did read, to me—like a complex exploration of the political hope of the Corbyn moment, a hope repeatedly referenced throughout the anthology: “pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will” given full force in a poem. Knowing the origin, that reading is crushed, but its awkward echoes remain. Does reading Red Road in the context of Corbyn expand the poem's possibilities, unhelpfully reduce them, or, somehow, both?

The diversity of the anthology is, on the whole, kind to its poems—at least if you are a sympathetic reader. To a mocking Tory, the context reduces all the poems to the least of their elements, as in Guido Fawkes' reading of one poem as “a list of sort of things a drunk Scottish socialist shouts in a row”. For me, though, reluctantly and ironically a Corbynista, the polemics are charitably lent depth by the lyrics, the lyrics lent power by the polemics, and all the poems rippled with the laughter of Nick Telfer's concrete flag: “For the Love of God: NO BLAIR”.

As the indyref anthologies piled up—Unstated, Inspired by Independence, Scotia Nova and more—my scepticism also increased. Could all this ink inspire anyone? Where did the much-vaunted creativity of the movement take us? But so extensive was the phenomenon that the 23rd of September sees a full-scale Edinburgh conference on “Poetic Politics”, rigorously analysing the involvement of the arts in the political moment, itself an instance of what it analyses. So now, as political possibilities expand and unthinkable things become necessary to accept—really? Labour leader? Corbyn!?—poets too are reengaging. We write quickly, we write in response to the news, we try to join in, we think we might occasionally have something to say, or an important question to ask. Occasionally it's inspiring and occasionally it's cringeworthy, but as Andy Jackson writes of the old word “socialism”, it is:

neither new nor old, not clean or compromised but human to its heart, and that could be enough.