poetry and freedom: 1

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Okay, I had started a little homily on the subject. I was asking some searching questions. “Go in fear of abstractions,” says Ezra Pound, and of course “Freedom” is a pretty damn big abstraction.

As this big abstraction is the theme of this year’s Poetry International festival at the South Bank, and I’m a blogger in residence, it seemed to me that the first thing to do was to reflect on what this could possibly mean – especially as “blogs” are themselves closely associated in the public mind with “freedom,” even though it is of a political kind.

Is there another kind? What is political? I asked. “Freedom of speech.” The right to political dissent, clearly, which must contain within it (the dissent) the right for others not to agree with the dissenter. What is personal? Freedom from what? Or for what? What does “free” mean? It’s just not a word you can really work with, is it.

What are the examples? Many of our heroes of freedom are simply heroes because we agree with them. There is a danger of “freedom” yipping over into orthodoxy. George Bernard Shaw said, “No Englishman will ever be a slave. He is free to do whatever the law and social convention allow.”

So I thought the first thing I’d better do was try to deal with this abstractness. I put “freedom” through its Google paces, both “web” and “images,” and what I found was relatively interesting. First, I get the impression the word was patented in 1941 by Franklin D Roosevelt. And why not use his vision as a guide? His Four Freedoms – of speech, to worship God as you see fit, from want, and from fear – are still, 67 years later, nowhere in evidence in much of the world.

So I looked for pictures. What does freedom look like?

Most of the “Freedom” images on the web are American patriotic images. So “Freedom” is enshrined visually as an ideal of the Enlightenment, as manifested within a particular set of values, for which we might be best not turning to Norman Rockwell for explication. Basically, when he illustrates “Freedom from fear” he makes it look a little like that Hillary Clinton campaign ad, the one that got her in all the trouble… I don’t want to go into it. But these pictures, especially the “right to worship” one, portray a very parochial view of how “freedom” looks, and while America has changed, is changing, all the time, the images themselves still pack a hell of a punch. Aside from that, it looks like a flag, or an eagle. Not much use to us.

Thinking about the Four Freedoms, and the unassailability of the Constitution which was written to protect freedom itself, well, look at the state it’s in. The cynical adage that a democracy gets the government it deserves is actually not much use in practice, is it. It has also given rise to “the right for any asshole with a chip on his shoulder to bear a gun,” which surely does compromise other people’s right to a freedom from fear? So we do need to keep thinking, I’m afraid. It’s partly going to be about what freedom looks like to people who aren’t in America, and who aren’t, perhaps, children of the Enlightenment.

Though the Enlightenment is, after all, the sponsor who brought us “Freedom” in the first place! But this is politics again. What’s it got to do with poetry?

After all, poetry makes nothing happen, you’re not going to shoot someone with a poem. In fact, in our Western climate of total freedom of speech, no one thinks poetry is very interesting, or even very important. Not when you could be inspecting Paris Hilton’s new handbag. No, poetry seems to come into its own only when the right to say things straight out is gone, and the ability to capture something else – something in code, something symbolic, or a feeling – becomes much more important to ordinary people.

Of course, in other places it’s different. Islam Samhan, a 27-year-old Jordanian poet (and journalist), was arrested two weeks ago and appeared in court on Sunday, charged with “defaming and insulting religion.”

Nabil Momani, director of the state-run Press and Publication Department (PDD), said Samhan had “violated laws that ban insulting the prophets.”

What did he do? The poor shmuck? Eight months ago, his first collection came out, called In a Slim Shadow. Well done him, congratulations! I also had my first collection out this year. As you know. Apparently, In a Slim Shadow contains – or one of the poems in it contains - “lines comparing his loneliness to that of the prophet Yusuf in the Quran.”

Noah Alqdah, Jordan’s grand mufti, the kingdom’s highest religious authority, says Samhan is an apostate and enemy of religion. Apostasy carries the death sentence.

So what does freedom look like?

So this is serious. But freedom can’t be all just about getting arrested or not getting arrested. I wanted more, more. These political examples, they only get you so far. We haven’t read the poem, and the poem is clearly only the vehicle, though the tenor is clearly very important: we’re talking about “the freedom of figurative thought.” The tyranny of empiricalism cannot be overestimated, and I do think this figurative-thinking thing is vital. Figurative language, too: the simile, the metaphor, the comparison. What Samhan is being denied right now is the right to have learned from the example of Yusuf, to have extrapolated, to have aspired to carry any of Yusuf’s qualities within him.

So what is freedom in poetry? Besides freedom to extrapolate, and from rhyme? Can it manifest itself within the actual poem, is there a quality that can be apprehended as such, or is it just (I say “just”) about the poet’s right to write? You could say that the most political writers of all in the Soviet Union, after all, were those who never addressed political subjects.

This reminds me of something I read with some astonishment when I was about eight, in a copy of the great prophet Bob Dylan’s book Tarantula, which was sitting in our bathroom. He wrote, “The only way you can live outside the law is to live within it.” But that rather predicates the need for a law it is possible to live within.

Duh! Sorry.

So anyway, my Google “web” search turns up, a few items down on page one, a promosing – an aptly-named – maybe a too aptly-named – essay called “Poetry of Freedom“. This looks interesting. It’s on the website of the Objectivist Center, and in case you’re wondering who they are, as I confess I naively was for a moment, I’ll give you their phone number. It’s 1-202-AYN-RAND. Ha! Oh, dear me. It’s all Milton, Blake, etc. Talk about insulting religion. Apparently Milton Devil bad, because he recognises heirarchies. Oh my aching sides! The end of the essay is so delicious I scrapped my entire previous post for it (though this one is now longer) (and incidentally more cohesive):

“The British author G. K. Chesterton was being very European when he said that ‘freedom is the right to be your potty little self’. For Americans, as for Objectivists, freedom is glorious because it allows one the liberty to achieve excellence.”

Go away, Spirit of Suburban School Librarians Past! We all know that the good enough is the enemy of excellence. Just as the pram in the hall is the enemy of promise. (And I love that “very European” – we all know what those dirty garlic-eaters are like – and they have very un-American teeth. Even worse than the Jordanians.)

Of course, any sane person would say: “Give me GK Chesterton any day.”

Hmm.

I think that’s it, then.

See you on the Southbank blog tomorrow.

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Filed under America, Living With Words, Poetry international 2008, poetry, politics, religion