Defence of poetry (1997-2006)

30 april 2015 A surprising number of poets traveled thousands of years back in time to argue for poetry’s significance today. Simic titles his defence ‘The confession of the 2000 year old poet’, and Taban Lo Liyong invokes the Classical muses in his quest ‘to soar to epic level.’ Others, rather than going back to the beginnings of literary history, recounted the trajectory of their own, personal, poetic histories – such as Tschinag, who demonstrates the connections between his work as a shaman and a writer – or structure their argument as a kind of cartography, as Krog does by presenting different facets of her defence through different regions of Africa.

These ‘Defences of poetry’ are so various and, at times, so aesthetically and politically divergent that they even occasion moments of in-fighting. Jacques Roubaud uses his ‘Defence of poetry’ as an attack on French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen and what Roubaud calls the ‘Standard Language of Pap’ – with previous ‘Defence of poetry’ speaker Les Murray making a cameo as collateral damage!

The question ‘Does poetry matter?’ has been repeated ad nauseam in the media over the last few years, and reading through these lectures might give us pause before we’re tempted to ask it again. At the very least, as Simic assures us, we might come to see that we, ‘when all’s said and done, really have no cause to fret about anything, as long as the poets are there doing the worrying for you night and day’.

DEFENCE OF POETRY

1997: Charles Simic (USA)
It’s true. It was the love of that kind of irreverence, as much as anything else, that started me in poetry. The itch to make fun of authority, break taboos, celebrate the naked body, claim that one has seen an angel in the same breath as one shouts that there’s no god, and so forth. The discovery that the tragic and the comic are always entwined together made me roll on the floor with happiness. Seduction, too, was always on my mind.

1998: Les Murray (Australia)
Who reads poetry? Not our intellectuals:
they want to control it. Not lovers, not the combative,
nor examinees. They too skim it for bouquets
and magic trump cards. Not poor schoolkids
furtively farting as they get immunized against it. 

1999: Galsan Tschinag (Mongolia)
Poetry is an enormous counter-force against the oppressing weight of the material world. It is a spice in everyday life, a sting against habit, it changes life, which is more and more outweighed by consumption. Poetry, after all, belongs to the side of the heart in opposition to the stomach.

2000: Evgeny Rein (Russia) 
According to the Homeric notion, in the future life souls lose their capacity for thought and their memory, and it is only a mortal visitor who can resurrect them through blood sacrifice. There is a certain symbolic significance in this, in that it is poetry itself that makes the dead speak.

2001: Mark Strand (USA)
Jane looked at me as though I were a curiosity and said, ‘Professor, I don't mean to press you, but what's the use of poetry? What good does it do?’ ‘Oh God’, I thought, ‘do I have to go through this again?’ But Jane's question was a good one.

2002: Jacques Roubaud (France) 
It’s most dangerous version isn’t so-called ‘politically correct’ language . . . It is the form heard when, for example, in some companies the job of dressing up redundancy schemes is called ‘Director of Human Resources’. And it also drives journalists to use the adjective ‘surrealistic’ to qualify any absurd situation. There are numerous examples. I term this ‘mueslispeak’ or, better perhaps, SLOP (Standard Language of Pap). The ears, heads and mouths of the inhabitants of modern democracies are full of it. Defending poetry also means defending language, and, in particular, defending language by using poetry in the fight against this two-fold degradation of language.

2003: Raoul Schrott (Austria)
But take a look for yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, members of the jury! Ecce homo: the defendant! Not much left of the grandeur of yesteryear, is there! Not a flicker of fashion about him: his stand-up collar and starched shirt-front look as out of place today as that waxed moustache, those sandals or tartan trousers, the tweed jacket, or the Borsalino under which he imagines he can conceal his thinning, sandy hair.

2004: Antjie Krog (South Africa)
Here you can’t fight with poetry. Here poetry is fighting with you. Here the ancient indestructibility of poetry helps you to survive in places where water, hunger and a violent death are the biggest enemies. Here a poem comes to you like the clean cut of a dune in your throat. You cannot breathe as deeply anywhere as in a poem.

2005: Lars Gustafsson (Sweden)
Rational discourse always intends to take us from the subjective space where we live to a neutral one where we can meet . . . The poet fishes out of the same stream, but without trying to generalize the original experience into something universal and of equal validity for all. Whereas physics abstracts an experience in such a way that it holds for anybody, poetry can never have any other ambition than that it can hold for somebody. If the poet tries something else he becomes a rhetorician. In real poetry there are no universal generalities.

2006: Taban Lo Liyong (Uganda)
Poetry: whether you are a born poet, a favoured child of the muses, or whether you aspired to writing poetry, trained yourself and were rewarded with a portion of poetic inspiration, I am sure you have to keep yourself in practice. Or the muse deserts you. It is said that African royal drums crave to be beaten, to be taken to the dance arena to be played. If they have waited for a long time unbeaten, they beat themselves! If that happens then one has to hold a ritual dance very quickly. Or somebody will die. So that the drum will be played. For a week, at least.