‘Rage, rage…’

In 2005 poet David Harsent won the prestigious Forward Prize for his new collection, Legion.  The poems consist ‘of voices in a war zone’ and Harsent reflected interestingly in The Guardian on the effectiveness of poetry in the face of catastrophe.  Whether or not direct experience is the only entitlement for art that deals with extremes such as war, torture, starvation is open to debate, he writes. What of the orchestra in Auschwitz, of Eastern European poetry during the cold war, of Vedran Smailovi playing his ‘cello in the rubble-strewn streets of besieged Sarajevo?  There are those who , I suspect, who would think even art of that sort a betrayal. He goes on: Beyond entitlement lies the thornier issue of effectiveness and beyond that, I suppose, the unanswerable question of what art is for. I think of Akhmatova ‘s famous encounter with the starved woman in the queue outside a Russian jail during the terror. The woman recognised Akhmatova and said: “Can you describe this?”  When Akhmatova said, “I can”, a ghost of a smile passed over the woman’s face; in some small way she was consoled.

Although no poem ever kept a Jew from the gas chamber and no lyric has ever stopped a tank, Harsent hopes that what gets written in extremis might at least hope to alarm & inform. However, the problem as he sees it is not so much one of entitlement or expressive effectiveness, but one of time scale. …Art – especially poetry – is a matter of seepage, of slow accumulation; it doesn’t warn; it laments…and writing a poem (may) be nothing more than spitting in the face of the executioner. For his part, the tendency of art being to react to disaster rather than acting as some kind of preventative force, David Harsent would settle for spitting.

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A week or two ago I made some revisions to some spitting I did in 1985.

MISERERE

A spectral choir, surpliced
in cast-offs – a Pepsi t-shirt,
print-dress flippant
with daisies – moves across

African sand. Adored at
a distance by cameras,
they falter and stop, grouped
like charcoal scratches on

bright paper. Microphones
on stalks cast skinny shadows,
kissing cracked lips.
Thirty voices rise like

rustling wings, singing the
songs of plenitude from
times before borders. Harmony
drifts in the blue heat,

its lie a palliative: with
art intact, the soul must
thrive, hope must prevail.
We feel your pain,

so beautifully framed.
Then rising through
the specious order of
those thirty voices,

winding up the lattice
they have woven, is
the acid edge of
a baby’s cry. A single

treble, freed from the
sugar bonds of melody,
out of a black hole
in the front of a

bird skull, rising,
rising, wordless –
this is the purest
music of all. It sings

of chaos and the
end of times and,
hearing it, we shrink
back to our roots.

pic from: www.brunijazzart.com/