28.10.1999
Cornered poets society
Danny Hammill reviews ‘More agitation: political satires and other poems’ by Bob Dixon More (Artery Publications 1999, pp60, £3.50)
This is a lively collection of agit-poems which primarily aims for immediacy and transparency of meaning. The book’s credo is inscribed in the very first poem, ‘From me to you’, which militantly declares: “I want my words to say what I think ... I don’t want to mean many things, to many people.”
Bob Dixon is an artist and writer whose passionate commitment to revolutionary change shines through every line. He is angered by the deleterious, streamlined and commodified capitalist educational system - a system which reinforces social conformity and is fundamentally antagonistic to the development of real individuality, whatever the popular ideologues of the day may say.
The stunting effect that capitalism - and its attendant alienation and substantive inequality - has on children and young adults concerns Dixon in particular. The pseudo-education served up to the young for generations is definitely bad for your mental and intellectual health, he says. His previous studies on this important matter have been published by Pluto Press in the two-volume set entitled Catching them young (Sex, race and class in children’s fiction and Political ideas in children’s fiction 1977). The iniquitous effect of a narrow and egotistically competitive educational approach is summed up in Dixon’s “notice” at the beginning of the book: “I’d like these poems to be read, or presented, in schools and other places of education, but I don’t want them used, ever, in connection with any examination, test or competition.” Down with the edu-crats who have been immersed from birth in the spirit of joyless pedagoguery. If they got their way they would impose the 11-plus system on children - from eleven months old, that is.
Dixon’s optimistic vision of the future, and his faith in the revolutionary potential of this and the next generation, is poignantly displayed in the very last poem in the collection, called ‘Eyes’, which reads: “I see the children in the park/From their eyes, my longed for children cry to me/The demonstrators throng the street/From their eyes, there shines a world that is to be.”
Therefore it is all the more diabolical that the edu-system actively sabotages this “world that is to be”. In ‘The sleepers of Stockwell College speak’, we hear:
“We don’t want to know about racism, unemployment, poverty, socialism, class, capitalism, communism, colonialism, oppression, change, hunger, exploitation, war, fascism, disease, misery, anarchism, slavery, ignorance - we came here to be educated.”
But the edu-bureaucratic system is more tenacious and perniciously elastic than perhaps Dixon suggests here. Subjects like racism, colonialism, slavery, etc are virtually compulsory, especially in inner-city schools - you could even argue that an inordinate amount of time is spent on ‘anti-racist’ studies. Why? The bourgeoisie as a whole want to appropriate the discourses around racism and anti-racism, and then turn them into an emotive intellectual weapon which can be turned against us. The liberalistic multi-culturalism and politically correct anti-racism preached in the schools and colleges of this land are not progressive, as some on the left insist on telling us, but are actually divisive in that they help to fudge and obscure class interests and class politics. ‘We are all anti-racists now - come and join us as supplicants’, say the bourgeoisie.
In case you think a ‘higher’ education is an escape route from the intellectual straightjacket, think again, warns Dixon in ‘The liberal academic speaks’. Our ‘liberal academic’ recommends the following lifestyle: “I always took the middle course clear of each warring faction/I carefully bestrid the fence abjuring vulgar action”, concluding that “I opted out of vulgar life on either side, drew equal breath till, in my box, I now embrace the strict neutrality of death.”
Thankfully Dixon is not suffused with his own historic self-importance, as some leftists are inclined to be on occasions. We see this in his self-deprecating ‘The poet, in capitalist society, speaks’ - a poem which also contains an insight into how capitalist society marginalises with amused contempt any artist whose name is not Andrew Motion, John Hegley or Bono:
“I am a poet and they’ve put me in a corner/as they usually do. I want to be in the headlines or the editorial or even just in the news, anywhere - but they put me in this corner, the Poetry Corner, my usual place.”
Our poet adds:
“I didn’t expect that, at the People’s Festival at the Ally Pally, they’d put me in a corner of the park, next to the electric generators - which drowned my voice/The people couldn’t hear what I had to say - at the People’s Festival/It’s hard being a poet in capitalist society, but I tell you this: a cornered animal can be very dangerous.”
In this gloomy age of monarchist poets, introverted poets and media-pet poets, let us fight for the day when poets and artists will be “very dangerous” again - playing a real educational and spiritual role in the struggle for a truly human society.
Danny Hammill