Contemporary British and Irish Poetry

An Introduction

Sarah Broom

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN:
  9781403906755
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350308763
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Sarah Broom provides an engaging, challenging and lively introduction to contemporary British and Irish poetry. The book covers work by poets from a wide range of ethnic and regional backgrounds and covers a broad range of poetic styles, including mainstream names like Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy alongside more marginal and experimental poets like Tom Raworth and Geraldine Monk. Contemporary British and Irish Poetry tackles the most compelling and contentious issues facing poetry today.

1

‘Wanna yoo scruff’: Class and Language

Tony Harrison, Tom Leonard, Don Paterson

The poets included in this chapter all come from working-class backgrounds in which poetry seemed a most unlikely career choice or leisure pursuit, but whereas Paterson’s first memorable experiences of poetry as an adult were encounters with the poetry of Tony Harrison, and in particular his sonnets about his working-class family background, Harrison himself saw no such role models around him, and had to work out for himself that the Cockney Keats and the Northern Wordsworth could be used as models in quite different ways than had been suggested to him hitherto. For Leonard and Harrison, the sense of the necessity of battling against a class-bound literary establishment has been a dominating and driving force. Paterson’s poetry, with few exceptions, takes on a much less confrontational stance, something which may be partly due to his sense of coming after poets like Harrison, Leonard and Douglas Dunn, and may also be related to the very different political climate of his formative years.

‘Class’ in recent years has started to sound like a rather old-fashioned term, as politicians avoid it and Marxist class-based analyses have fallen out of fashion in academia. But although the discourses are changing, economic and social stratification remains, and for this reason it is interesting to compare Paterson, a working-class poet who grew up in the Thatcher years, with Harrison and Leonard, two poets who experienced the heyday of working-class activism in the 1970s. The 1970s were also a time of innovation and excitement for theorists interested in the role of literature in society, as Marxist theory began to engage with structuralism. Raymond Williams’s Marxism and Literature (1977) and Terry Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology (1976) were just two of the books that reflected and inspired a new commitment to reading literature in relation to its particular historical and material conditions. Recent cultural materialist critiques of poststructuralism, heavily influenced by Williams, reflect the continued strength of this critical tradition in Britain and Ireland. ‘Class’ may be a more problematic concept than it once was, but the social and historical orientation associated with the Marxist critical tradition is still a vigorous force within literary and cultural studies.

Tony Harrison

Tony Harrison is a poet unlike any other on the contemporary scene, not least because of his ability to make verse work in genres and arenas in which it has recently had very little success. His contribution to the revival of verse drama has been enormous, and his success in producing ‘film poems’ for television is a lesson in what can be done with and for poetry with vision and determination. In recent years he has published very few collections of stand-alone poetry, but has produced verse in plenty for theatre and film works. It is necessary, then, to consider Harrison’s poetry for film and theatre, but at the same time his oeuvre has become so extensive that it is only possible to do justice to a small number of his works in the space of this chapter. In order to give a sense of the range of his work, I will discuss, alongside a number of his shorter poems, the long poem V., which was made into a film-poem and broadcast on television, and I will also briefly explore one of Harrison’s theatre works, The Big H. Harrison is also unusual among contemporary poets in Britain and Ireland in his dedication to metrical, rhyming verse. Looking back to models like Donne, Marvell, Milton, Gray and Wordsworth, rather than to his immediate precursors in the twentieth century, Harrison has shown incontestably that metrical rhyming verse can be forcefully contemporary and can work strikingly in contexts such as television that might seem inherently opposed to such ‘old-fashioned’ forms. In a society that was perhaps in danger of forgetting the power, in performance, of poetry that exploits aural effects, Harrison has been a welcome presence.

Harrison was born in 1937, and his poetic career kicked off with The Loiners, published in 1970. In a later autobiographical poem Harrison’s mother is remembered as weeping for weeks after she saw the collection, exclaiming ‘You weren’t brought up to write such mucky books!’.¹ The Loiners (‘Loiners’ means people from Leeds) is important in that it reveals a Harrison who is more modernist, less direct and less evangelical in his approach than the later and more well-known Harrison. The collection also reveals Harrison’s early preoccupation with themes he was later to develop: social inequality and marginalisation, sexuality, colonialism, imperalism – and the anger and violence that are linked to all of these. There is, however, a much greater focus on sexuality than in later collections, and as Luke Spencer argues, The Loiners demonstrates very clearly a problem that persists in much of Harrison’s later work. Despite Harrison’s attempt to consider the linkage between colonialism and sexuality in poems like ‘The White Queen’ and ‘The Song of the PWD Man’, there is still a failure to address the overlap between sexuality as a liberating mode of self-expression and self-expansion, and sexuality as a mode of domination and oppression. As Spencer comments, ‘“The Nuptial Torches” is the only poem which treats a woman as a moral subject with her own voice; in many other poems, such as “Newcastle is Peru”, ‘the woman’s body functions as an object of his gaze and as a terrain for his appropriation.’² Like Spencer I would argue that this issue of the treatment of women in Harrison’s poetry is an interesting fault-line that emerges in much of his work, and does at times undermine the persuasiveness of his efforts to confront other issues such as that of class.

Rather than discuss The Loiners in any detail, however, I would like to move on to the constantly metamorphosing sequence whose core was originally published as From The School of Eloquence and Other Poems in 1978. In 1978 the sequence contained eighteen sonnets, and this was expanded to fifty in Continuous and sixty-three in the Selected Poems of 1984. The core of eighteen poems contains what came to be iconic lines like the scholarship boy leaning out his window to shout to his friends, ‘Ah bloody can’t ah’ve gorra Latin prose’ (SP, 116). This line takes us directly to what I am most interested in pursuing in relation to Harrison’s poetry: his exploration of the relationship between language, literature and power. Harrison’s poetry draws persistently on his own experience as a working-class boy who gained a scholarship to Leeds Grammar School and was thus thrown into an environment dominated by upper-middle-class values in which his accent and his origins were viewed as ‘vulgar’ and ‘low’. His ambivalence about the effect that his subsequent education had on him (he went on to study classics at Leeds University and began a PhD) provides the material for many poems and the emotional fuel for much of his writing.

One of the epigraphs which Harrison chose for The School of Eloquence comes from E.P. Thompson’s book The Making of the English Working Class, and the quotation explains the origin of the phrase ‘The School of Eloquence’ as one of the cover names for the London Corresponding Society, an eighteenth-century radical working-class organisation which had as one of its aims the development of literacy among the working classes. In using this phrase Harrison is aligning himself with a long tradition of republican and reformist working-class movements, and drawing attention to the centrality of language in the struggle for political power. The sonnets from The School of Eloquence reveal Harrison’s ambivalence towards the lack of eloquence and literacy in his family and community background; on the one hand it is experienced as frustrating and disempowering, while on the other hand it is celebrated as an unpretentious and energetic directness:

What t’mob said to the cannons on the mills,

shouted to soldier, scab and sentinel

’s silence, parries and hush on whistling hills,

shadows in moonlight playing knurr and spell.

It wasn’t poetry though. Nay, wiseowl Leeds

pro rege et lege schools, nobody needs

your drills and chanting to parrot right

the tusky tusky of the pikes that night. (SP, 113)

Here, in ‘The Rhubarbarians’, a kind of alternative eloquence is proposed, linked to violent rebellion as well as to the drive for reform and social change. Against the ‘tusky tusky’ of the pikes are set the drills of Greek and Latin grammar which shaped Harrison’s life at Leeds Grammar School. The dense, jagged, alliterative lines of the first two stanzas and the lyricism of the third (‘parries and hush on whistling hills, / shadows in moonlight playing knurr and spell’) evoke the complexity of the poet’s emotional investment in the history of working-class collective action. Interestingly, the attempt to convey this in a poetry which leans in the third stanza towards romanticism is itself undermined by the brusqueness of the fourth stanza which rejects this poeticisation: ‘It wasn’t poetry though’. The poem is complex in its ironies; while one might not need the ‘drills and chanting’ of a grammar school education simply to ‘parrot’ the ‘tusky tusky’ of the pikes, the poem itself, with its supple variations on the iambic and its poised sound effects, has clearly benefited from that very classical education, and its evocation of working-class resistance cannot be classed as simple ‘parroting’.

Harrison’s attitude towards his grammar school experience, which he explores obsessively in the The School of Eloquence sonnets, has been considered by Ken Worpole in the broader context of the impact of the grammar school system on working-class communities. Worpole argues that the scholarship system could be seen as ‘one of the most effective pre-emptive attacks on the possibility of a popular working-class socialist politics in this century’, and backs this up by quoting from various mid-century teachers who saw grammar school education as a way of ‘communicating middle-class values to a “new” population’ and by noting that most of the scholarship children moved away from their roots in the Labour party to become Conservative voters.³ The overall positive or negative impact of the grammar school system on working-class communities is clearly a contentious issue, but Harrison’s poetry certainly reflects his ambivalence towards the system in terms which match Worpole’s description of the ‘11-plus’ examination as something which ‘swept through hundreds of thousands of homes each year like an icy wind, and which in many places destroyed the cementing ties of family and class relationships, literally dividing families and friends against each other, sometimes forever’.⁴

Harrison’s poetry is deeply marked by the sense of a permanent division between himself, as only son, and his parents, which he sees as produced by the way in which his grammar school education changed him. As ‘Book Ends’ puts it, ‘what’s still between‘s / not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books’ (SP, 126). His poetry also reveals a preoccupation with the way in which the grammar school teachers denigrated his own working-class roots, particularly with regard to language. Along with the television play The Big H, which I will be discussing later, ‘Them & [uz]’, from the The School of Eloquence sonnet sequence, is Harrison’s most forthright approach to this experience. The poem recounts the refusal of a school English teacher to let the young Harrison read Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ because of his regional accent with its dropped ‘h’s, glottal stops and flat vowels. He begins ‘mi ’art aches’ only to be cut off by the English teacher with ‘Mine’s broken, / you barbarian, T.W.!’ (SP, 122). The teacher relegates the young T.W. Harrison to the ‘low’ end of literature: ‘Poetry’s the speech of kings. You’re one of those / Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose’. In response, the poem’s speaker declares his determination to ‘occupy / your lousy, leasehold Poetry’ (123). As many critics have noted, the poem’s very form achieves a radical challenge to the conventions of the tradition which Harrison seeks to occupy; a line like ‘RIP RP, RIP T.W.’ clearly aims to startle, while the use of phonetic spelling for the word ‘us’ draws the reader’s attention cleverly to the issue of the kind of pronunciation he or she is using in reading the rest of the poem either silently or aloud.

Like many of Harrison’s poems, ‘Them & [uz]’ puts its erudition on display as a kind of taunting gesture towards the school-teachers and other authorities who relegated him to ‘the comic bits’. Harrison has said that he began to use metre as a way of occupying literature; as Douglas Dunn puts it, the ironies of Harrison’s poetry derive from the application of

pentametric metricali...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Wanna yoo scruff’: Class and Language
• 2 ‘My tongue is full of old ideas’: Race and Ethnicity
• 3 Gender, Sex and Embodiment
• 4 ‘Widdershins round the kirk-yaird’: Gender, Sexuality and Nation
• 5 ‘A fusillade of question marks’: Poetry and the Troubles in Northern Ireland
• 6 ‘A rustle of echoes’: Self, Subjectivity and Agency
• 7 The Tribes of Poetry
• Select Bibliography
• Index