Sounding the alarm
In 2001, Jo Shapcott asked me to send her a poem for an anthology she was editing for the Royal Institution. Contributors were to take as a subject any lecture recently given at the RI. I chose "From metals with a memory to brilliant light-emitting solids", not least because the commission was obviously a challenge and it seemed the least hospitable subject on offer. We were bombing Afghanistan at the time and images of that conflict were everywhere. My poem changed, under my hand, from something chipper and defiantly inconsequential to a piece in which "metals with a memory" were smart bombs whose targets (people) became "brilliant light-emitting solids". It was an ambush; I'd never written anything like it before.
The principal sequence in my new collection, Legion, consists of voices from a war zone. It must, I suppose, have had its origin in the RI commission, though the English versions I made of Goran Simi's Bosnian war poems might have been at the back of my mind. Most significantly, perhaps, the sequence was begun shortly after we invaded Iraq; even so, as with "From metals with a memory", the sequence took me by surprise.
There's a real sense in which all poems take poets by surprise; but what I mean is that I have never been a "public poet" and never had any ambition to be. Quite the opposite: I've taken the view that poems with an agenda tend to look a lot like propaganda; in fact, I still think that and the Legion poems have nothing about them of protest or rant. They are an act of the imagination: discrete fictions linked by oblique, fragmentary "Dispatches". I was not, of course, writing out of personal experience; it simply seemed that the incidents, the images, the landscapes and the voices were there to hand. I can't quite say how that happened, or why, except to conclude that public events had become so pressing as to be unavoidable.
Whether or not direct experience is the only entitlement for art that deals with extremes such as war, torture, starvation, is open to debate; all I can say is that I neither willed the poems in Legion, nor resisted them. What, though, of the entitlement given to victims by themselves? What of the orchestra in Auschwitz, of eastern European poetry during the cold war, of Vedran Smailovi playing his cello in the rubble-strewn streets of besieged Sarajevo? There are those, I suspect, who would think even art of that sort a betrayal. In Joshua Sobel's play set in the Vilna ghetto, a character produces a poster that reads "No theatre in a graveyard". His point: art is an indulgence when it displaces direct action.
Beyond entitlement lies the thornier issue of effectiveness and beyond that, I suppose, the unanswerable question of what art is for. I think of Akhmatova's famous encounter with the starved woman in the queue outside a Russian jail during the terror. The woman recognised Akhmatova and said: "Can you describe this?" When Akhmatova said, "I can", a ghost of a smile passed over the woman's face; in some small way she was consoled. Akhmatova went on to write "Requiem"; but that didn't stop the terror, any more than Susan Sontag staging a performance of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo lifted the siege, Daniel Barenboim taking his Israeli-Arab orchestra into Ramallah will bring down the wall, or the piece of street theatre outside George Bush's Texas ranch recently will stop Americans dying in Baghdad.
No poem ever kept a Jew from the gas chamber. No lyric has ever stopped a tank. These axioms (Auden and Heaney respectively) came to mind when, a short while back, I attended the same conference on climate change that Robert Macfarlane mentioned recently in these pages. The idea was to bring together people from the sciences and the arts, all of whom believe that global warming is the single most pressing and terrifying problem facing humanity, and to look for some productive interchange between two groups which, all too often, seem to eyeball each other across a deep cultural divide.
The scientists know just what kind of danger we're in, but worry that the message isn't getting across; that those who foster denial are having a tranquillising effect; that politicians lack the will to legislate; that multinationals will only act out of self-interest. Could art - could artists - do anything to make a difference? Was the language of art a better medium than "scient-ese" for alerting people to the fact that we are staring catastrophe in the face, that certain crucial "tipping points" - points of no return - are either in sight or, worse, might already have been passed? The question of entitlement didn't arise, since climate change is a global issue and no one is unaffected. Similarly, misgivings about public art are likely to evaporate when public issues become intensely personal. Speaking of those European poets who lived under totalitarian regimes, Ted Hughes remarked that if you lie in a doorway watching bullets chipping fragments out of the pavement in front of your face, you write a different kind of poetry.
It wasn't so much a matter of whether art could prevent - the first world war poets didn't stop the second world war (and so on) - as whether it might, more effectively, alarm and inform. My own feelings were mixed. Legion was written (I suppose) as a result of something like cultural pressure, so perhaps artists will discover climate change displacing other subjects as more Katrinas make landfall, more polar ice falls into the sea, more harvests fail and water-war becomes a buzz-word. I hope so. I hope that writers and artists will find those bleak rhythms and shapes, narratives and images, coming instinctively to hand. The problem is that there's so little time, and art - especially poetry - is a matter of seepage, of slow accumulation; it doesn't warn, it laments. Other forms, drama in particular, might be quicker to respond and, in the short term, be more effective (which is why I've begun a play on the subject: the short term being all we've got).
It's a nightmarish thought that, even if the urgency of the situation does press artists into service, by the time "tipping point" has the power to scare us witless, the meltdown of the Siberian permafrost might have happened, the beginning of the end be under way and writing a poem be nothing more than spitting in the face of the executioner. For my part, public poet or not, I'd spit.
© David Harsent, 2005
· Legion by David Harsent is published by Faber