Socialist Poet

We published a poem on the blog here that was written by Irish Poet, Kevin Higgins. After he read some of the accounts of the student struggles in California on this blog, he dedicated it to them and their efforts.  Below is a review of some of his poetry by another Irish writer and poet, Bridget O'Toole. You can visit Higgins' poetry and hear him reading by clicking on the Salmon Poetry link in the left hand column under links.

The Poetry of Kevin Higgins

The Boy With No Face (2005) and Time Gentlemen, Please (2008)

In the 1980s Kevin Higgins was living in England where he was active in the opposition to the poll -tax, an anti-working-class measure which brought thousands onto the streets. Now he organises poetry events in Galway. There is no contradiction here – Higgins is an unusually political poet.. He has read his poetry at a number of different venues; it also works well on the page.

His political vision takes in a wide range of subjects. He writes about the people whose situation cries out for fundamental change, those living without hope in grim rented rooms, the 'almost invisible ' man on the street corner, the inescapable quarrelling of neighbours behind thin walls. Working life, for those who can get work, is likely to be soul-destroying.

You there, with your grim cheese slices,
your tar-like tea, not liking the look,
smell, texture or sound of anything; as outside
a new calendar's first Monday comes,
like a dentist's drill, screaming to a start.
( From A New Calendar)

As well as describing ordinary lives in a way that arouses a political response, he also writes of people specifically involved in politics, or, more often, those who have a political past. He laughs at his own youthful part in the Militant, his naive version of transitional demands, how he postured, lording it over his family, particularly his father.

It's nineteen eighty two and I know everything.
Hippies are people who always end up asking
Charles Manson to sing them another song.
I'd rather be off putting some fascist through
a glass door arseways, but being fifteen,
I have to mow the lawn first. Last year,

Liverpool meant football; now
it's the Petrograd of the British Revolution.
Instead of masturbation, I find socialism.
While others dream of businessmen bleeding
in basements; I promise to abolish double-chemistry class
the minute I become Commissar. In all of this
there is usually a leather jacket involved. I tell
cousin Walter and his lovely new wife, Elizabeth,
to put their aspirations in their underpants
and smoke them; watch my dad's life become a play;
Sit Down In Anger.
(My Militant Tendency)

He is harsher with those who are stuck in ugliness and insensivity and refuse to adapt

You've hawked that suitcase
full of broken old slogans all the way
from Grosvenor Square to here.
Your imagination now a cluttered
basement. By the time you sit down
no-one will be in any doubt,
if rigor mortis could talk
this is how it would sound.
(From From Grosvenor Square to Here)

and with the eager former socialists who preach incessantly and then sell out

I got his dog-eared copy
Of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
The day he went into human resource management;
his Communist Manifesto the day he boarded the plane
for a piece of the action on the new Moscow stock exchange.
(From Ending Up)

One man who never sold out was the lifelong Trotskyist, Ted Grant. Higgins's poem, 'Death of a Revolutionary: Ted Grant 1913 – 2000' brings him back to life with his plastic bag packed with propaganda, his legendary tea mug and Kevin himself following his words: 'My every thought, part/ of your master plan.' The final lines have a bleak honesty:
'I do not say as you did
“We have kept the faith”

I'm reminded of WB Yeats's sad acknowledgement in 'Easter 1916' that the heroes of the Rising possessed a commitment that he could not share.
For all that, Higgins is a political thinker and can write sharply about a political idea. He takes a phrase used by the British Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1980s, 'the hidden hand of the free market' and brings it imaginatively to life, making the abstract real:

I set the interest rate, decide the price,
I believe in Milton Friedman
And he believes in me. I sometimes
work in mysterious ways; can
make a million bucks vanish
just like that. I made Joseph Kennedy rich,
tossed Robert Maxwell off his yacht.
I am the be all, the end all; the hidden hand
which makes you dance.
(From The Hidden Hand)

Reading these poems it's easy to believe Higgins when he says he's interested in 'the problematic intersection between literature and politics' and also in 'anyone with a black sense of humour.' Many of the poems in The Boy With No Face turn on a bleak joke. Sometimes it seems as though the courage needed for political confrontation has taken the form of a daring wit, a bringing together of images and ideas from which a conventional thinker would draw back.

Both these volumes of poetry, published only three years apart show a powerful energy. In Time Gentlemen, Pleasethe humour is more restrained but the satire still bites when it needs to. However a depth comes with a compassion that softens some of the observations. In 'Retirement' for instance, the description which might have been belittling, is sympathetic as an old man is being read to in a home and you remember when life was something dreamt up at a bus-stop on the outskirts of Athlone by a young fool who thought the rain would stop soon.
(from Retirement)

Getting close to these poems, I have become aware of the author's craft - for instance, where he puts the emphasis in a line, where he ends it in relation to others, how what appears to be spontaneous energy is, in fact, the result of careful technique. It's the energy that draws us in. The world and its inhabitants may be hopeless – Eleanor Rigby wanders into Desolation Row – but the movement of the verse is forward.Personal relationships are mostly viewed with cynicism in The Boy With No Face. But in Time Gentlemen, Pleasethere are some deft and tender love poems. The earlier 'Knives' recognises his own verbal combativeness

I come from a long line of men
who saw words not as decorations
but weapons, knives with which to cut
others down to size.
(from Knives)

but it is modified with some charm in 'She Considers His Proposal:'
That when things go wrong he turns to her
and says:”just because I'm kicking
imaginary people in the testicles
doesn't mean we can't hold hands.”

He begins to admit the possibility of happiness and in 'Living Proof' for Susan he moves from a matter-of-fact account of himself waiting at the end of an aisle on his wedding day to the lyrical last lines:

This best June day.
The sun extravagant, the music starting to play

It's obvious that the quick-witted satire and the political acumen are part of a very thoughtful intelligence. Some readers may wish his work to develop into something more weighty and serious. But Kevin Higgins's directness, humour and total lack of reverence have made him successful in performing to a wide audience and reaching people who would normally not read or listen to poetry.

Bridget O'Toole