Poetry, politics and the left: An interview with Kevin Higgins

We Publish here an interview with Irish Poet Kevin Higgins by Red Banner (click on Salmon Poetry under links in the left column for more on Kevin Higgins)  Kevin also dedicated one of his poems, A Brief History Of Those Who Made Their Point Politely And Then Went Home to the students of California who have been struggling against the attacks in education and in that state.

An interview with Kevin Higgins

Much of your poetry deals with overtly political subject matter, so you obviously don’t subscribe to the view that ‘poetry and politics don’t mix’. Does that view persist, or is there a level of openness to political poetry in Ireland today?

I think there is no small amount of confusion on this issue. It would be fair to say that most poets, most readers of contemporary poetry, and the majority of those who attend readings have a vague idea that the role of poetry is to question and oppose things as they are, rather than to support the status quo. In the majority of cases, this tends to amount to little more than the requisite poem or two about Palestine or the Iraq war in collections that are mostly made up of what has been uncharitably called the poetry of personal anecdote. This is a huge generalisation, of course, and as with any such generalisation, is more than a little unfair to many. There are a minority of recently emerged poets for whom poetry and radical left wing politics of one variety or another are inseparable. In a word, yes, there is openness to political poetry in Ireland today. Whatever you have to say on whatever subject, as long as it’s well said, people will listen, and the poems will make their way out into the world and find a readership.


So if poetry is open to politics, is politics open to poetry? Do you think there is a recognition among left-wing activists that poetry has a meaningful role to play in the socialist project?

If by left-wing activists you mean those who are involved in organisations proposing a transformation more radical than installing Éamon Gilmore as Tánaiste or Mary Lou McDonald as Junior Minster for Nothing-in-Particular, I’d have to say that the answer would be more No than Yes. Certainly there are those active on the left who have a real appreciation of poetry and the arts in general, and some recognition of the role that poetry can play in sharpening one’s understanding of the world as it is now, has been and will come to be. But these tend to be people who are either on their way out of active involvement, certainly in terms of being members of organised groups and parties, or are in some sense dissidents within these parties.

The organised far left is, as I have learned from bitter experience, still pretty much addicted to the idea that poetry is only of use when it has an obvious and immediate propaganda value in the campaign of the moment. They view with suspicion people who think for themselves and also tend to see activities such as writing poetry as a diversion from the ‘struggle’. I would have been pretty bad on these issues myself back in my workerist days, so I do cut them some slack. But my work teaching poetry workshops and creative writing classes has really brought home to me that any attempt to force on a poet an agenda with which he or she isn’t imaginatively engaged does more than diminish the poetry. In the end it destroys it. The only real role the organised far left seems to see for poetry is the usual one or two suspects reading a poem at the end of the demo type of thing. Culture isn’t a peripheral thing: it is central. And anyone who wants to control the arts for narrow political ends would do very bad things indeed if they ever came to power.

Surely there will always be some kind of tension between political activists trying to offer straightforward answers to political issues on the one hand, and poets trying to explore ambiguities in life’s nooks and crannies on the other? Is it not necessary—or even creative—for those imperatives to clash from time to time?

I agree that such a clash could potentially be very creative. There will be tensions between those primarily involved in writing political statements and those involved in writing poems. They are very different activities. Writing a political manifesto or a leaflet necessarily moves one in the direction of simplifying the issues rather than going into the complexities. Also, a leaflet is not the opinion of one person but of a group, and would obviously be very different to, say, a poem or short story, which if it is to be any good must necessarily be the independent creation of one person’s imagination. But that’s not the issue here. The real problem is that most of the organised far left groups run their internal affairs in a very cultish way—small groups of people endlessly engaged in convincing themselves that they are absolutely right and everyone else absolutely wrong—with the result that many of their members, and I’d say their entire leaderships, have no use for anything that doesn’t further the building of the party. For them culture is not a separate zone in which what you describe as “life’s nooks and crannies” can be creatively explored, ambiguities and all. For them culture has no role at all other than to confirm the points of view they already hold dear. It is a given that when there is an immediate public issue on which a leaflet or press release needs to be written or a speech has to be made, straightforwardness is to be favoured every time over ambiguity. But a society without the ability to question and criticise itself, which is precisely what the best poems and plays and films do, is a profoundly dysfunctional society. And even small left wing groups are their own kind of society.


So is the problem here not so much that the left suffers from bad cultural politics, but that it suffers from bad politics, full stop?

I think that the bad cultural politics is important, because it gives us a taste of the type of regime the organised far left would impose were it to come to power. For example, I doubt we’d be having this conversation in such a public and open way if the people in question were ensconced in government buildings. The way the organised far left deals with internal issues is cavalier in the extreme. They don’t even abide by their own stated rules half the time, and there is a huge amount of cynicism in the way that people are dealt with: again and again, people who have given these organisations decades of their lives are just tossed aside. The internal regimes of the far left organisations are inherently undemocratic, hence the constant splits and denunciations of former members. I’ve even heard of people being expelled by text message! I’ve known too many cases involving too many people over far too long a period of time to believe that this is anything other than a systematic failure, rather than the result of the shortcomings of this or that individual or group of individuals. This next statement will no doubt cause steam to start emerging from some comrades’ ears, but it seems to me obvious that Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Labour Party are infinitely more democratic organisations than any of those on the organised far left. They can tolerate internal dissent in a way that the far left cannot, and that is a great strength.

The cultural issue leads straight to the democracy issue, which in turn leads right to the disaster that was the aftermath of the Russian revolution. What Russia proved is that, without the active participation of the majority of the people in the decision-making processes, socialism cannot work. If you’re going to abolish the market, which at least tells you something about what people want, albeit in a very distorted and anarchic way, you must allow people the freedom to tell you what they want and how they want it. Otherwise socialist planning is entirely impractical.
I know I’m not the first to say this, but it is obvious now that the beliefs (1) that socialism is in some sense historically inevitable, (2) that it will solve all of the world’s problems, and (3) that it can only be brought about by a tightly organised group which does not tolerate public dissent from the party line, will always lead to disaster and probably to the restoration of capitalism as happened in Russia and eastern Europe. After all, if you believe you have all the answers to the world’s problems and can create a heaven on earth, then it is possible to justify any number of lies, any number of purges of deviant petit-bourgeois elements to achieve such an end. Trotsky and Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg and Co. did not have at their disposal the information we now do. They did not know that the limits placed on internal dissent and free expression generally in what was a time of civil war in Russia, far from being a bulwark against the restoration of capitalism, would turn out to be the first step in the long journey back towards capitalism. And I’ve no doubt that Marx would run screaming in the opposite direction from most of those who today claim to be his followers. Saying this sort of thing causes me something close to physical pain. I don’t want it to be true. Over a period of many years I have tried every other way of looking at it. But I can no longer avoid the obvious which has stared me in the face every day for at least the past five or six years.


Some people reading comments like this from you, and even some of your poetry, will conclude that here is a disillusioned former socialist who has turned renegade. You obviously reject the organised far left as it is currently—but are you rejecting revolutionary socialism as a political philosophy too?

I know there are many who’ll react to what I’m saying in the way you describe. In the past, I would have taken that line myself. Now I tend to view that as one of the ways the far left dodges valid questions: instead of bothering to come up with a proper answer, they attack the questioner. To put it at its bluntest: even if I am now in the pay of Dick Cheney and the Israelis and Galway Chamber of Commerce, that doesn’t absolve them from having to answer the points I’m making. The organised far left are meant to be the vanguard of the international working class, the most advanced and forward-looking people in the world. So come on, boys and girls, step up to the plate and demolish my argument.

I am in favour of all of the things that revolutionary socialists pretend to be in favour of. Refusing to stay quiet about flagrant hypocrisy on the left certainly has nothing at all to do with “rejecting revolutionary socialism”. What I really think is that if there is to be any hope at all of a better and workable and democratic version of socialism, then the far left needs to undergo a complete reformation, and to this end its nose has to rubbed in all its worst mistakes. A society in which all the vast resources of the planet were under the democratic control of the man and woman in the street would be infinitely better than what we have now. The fear, the insecurity which is affecting almost everyone you meet at the moment is truly awful. A truly democratic socialist plan implemented on a global scale would have to be better than this. However, no one, and I include myself in that, will be convinced to support, or even to tolerate, a system in which there is a one party dictatorship and the whole country is run like a big fat FÁS scheme gone mad. We will not go gently into that good night, because that would be much worse than what we have—yes, worse than NAMA and Brian Cowen. But saying no to all the prospective Dear Leaders doesn’t in my mind amount to “rejecting revolutionary socialism”.

If we can focus on a specific example, ‘Firewood’, a poem in your last collection. Some people believe you were advocating military intervention in Darfur under cover of the UN, or at least tacitly supporting the idea. Where do you stand on that issue?

I don’t think that people who read this poem as me “advocating military intervention” really understand what poems are and how they are born. For a while I had been of the view that sections of the left had been accommodating themselves to Islam in a way that is not at all socialist. Obviously, one has to oppose any type of religious discrimination against any group, and I always will, but the use of the slogan “We are all Hezbollah now!” during the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006 was not good. Sections of the left seemed all too willing to act like cheerleaders for what remains an Islamic fundamentalist group—with no offence at all intended to actual cheerleaders, most of whom have never committed such serious political mistakes. Anyway, when I read the article which contained the fatal few words “It’s problematic to describe this as genocide” something snapped in me, which is the way a poem is usually born. I saw that article as amounting to a kind of apology for the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed. The glibness of the language seemed to indicate a wish that the difficult issue of what has been happening in Darfur would go away so that the writer could go back to his preferred subject: George W Bush and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I know that the situation in the Sudan is horribly complicated, with Muslims massacring other Muslims and so on, and that there are no easy solutions, but the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed are clearly the bad guys, and this article was trying to muddy the waters. When you come across a phrase as glib as “It’s problematic to describe this as genocide”, dodgy politics is never far behind. To me, this was a section of the organised far left just shrugging its shoulders about a conflict that had seen the government-sponsored murder of tens of thousands and the displacement of many hundreds of thousands.

 I have no answers in relation to Darfur: the poem is not about that. I don’t think a UN-sponsored invasion would make things better, but I would not actively oppose such action if I thought it was the least worst option. I understand the left’s desire to maintain its independent political position on these issues and to offer its own uniquely socialist answer, which obviously has no role for the UN or liberal interventionism of the type that took place in Kosovo. However, I have no time at all for the meaningless sloganeering that often goes on in these situations: the appeals to the phantom armies of the Bosnian and Rwandan working classes which were the response of some left groups to those situations. If you have no real answer, then far better to admit that rather than trying to bullshit your way to a unified theory of everything. The writer of that article had nothing to say about Darfur, and he missed an excellent opportunity to say it. Every possible pressure should be put on the Sudanese government in relation to what it’s been doing in Darfur. And the effect of that article, if it had any effect at all, would have been to take the pressure off. It amounted to scabbing on the people of Darfur in their hour of great need: that’s what provoked the poem.

The rapid move from economic boom to bust has shaken a lot of certainties in Irish society, and opened up space for questioning and for potential alternatives. What role do you see for writers and artists in that process?

Last year I used a few pages from The Great Gatsby, the scene in which the narrator describes the night he first went to one of Gatsby’s lavish gatherings at his mansion, as the basis for a writing exercise. Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy the day that course began. I always give the historical context when I’m introducing a piece of writing to students, and mostly it seems to float over their heads. This time when I said that what was being described in this book, the jazz age of the 1920s, was an era very similar to the one which had just died a very sudden death here in Ireland, for the first time since I started teaching writing, I got a real sense that what was happening outside—in what Marxists like to call ‘the real world’—was in the room with us and influencing how we talked, not just about the literature of the past, but also the stories and poems the students were writing themselves. That is a big change and will I’m sure in the long run, or perhaps even in the short run, change Irish writing. My own guess would be that there’ll be a lot of novels taking to task the Celtic Tiger era in the next couple of years. Now it’s over, the boom era is somehow more digestible.

Also, though, there may be less outlets for new writers. Certainly publishers will take less risks and the arts sector in general will have less funding. I think that if the grassroots literary events which have grown so dramatically in the past few years all manage to keep going, and the signs are that they will, then they’ll become forums where the tangible discontent and anger that’s out there about what has happened and is going to happen will be given literary expression. This will especially be the case if we don’t see emigration starting up again in a serious way, as it did during the 1980s. Either way, things will not be as they have been. There was a brashness about the Irish literary scene before last year which fed into some of the writing, an idea that crisis was something you only saw on Reeling in The Years, that had nothing to do with where we thought we were. I think there will likely, as time goes on, be new literary magazines which reflect the turn world events have taken. This happened during the 1930s when magazines such as The Partisan Review became very important. There is a crying need for new literary magazines run by younger writers with a fresh way of looking at things. No one will, nor should, listen to the rants and gibes of cranky old literary gents who’ve never got over the fact that Neil Jordan and Paul Durcan are more successful than they are. But I would be most interested to read the reflections and rants of writers in their twenties, the new generation who will eventually put me in the old peoples’ home.

In terms of what role writers should play, I don’t think a writer can be judged by the number of demos he or she goes on or the number of angry letters he or she writes to The Irish Times. These things may make the person in question an excellent activist, but tell us very little about their writing. The writers I am always interested in are those who see everything in the world as their subject, and ruthlessly write the truth as they see it, come what may. Far better to do this than become a yes man or woman for this or that popular front.

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