Douglas Oliver's New York Poem

Abstract

Douglas Oliver. Penniless Politics. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Bloodaxe Books, 1994. Penniless Politics, a long by British poet Douglas Oliver, could be called a quintessentially York poem, if by New York poem were understood result of necessary changes in that genre in late 1980s and early 1990s. Under pressures of deregulated capitalism and multinationalism, multiculturalism and immigration, an attempt to write seriously in and of York could only result in something different from predecessor poems. Serious predecessors would include poems by Whitman, Crane, and Ginsberg, as well as poems by various generations of York School, which I have recently defined as successive groups of poets responsive in their writing to York as a community and as an international city. As a community York is still unique, still that in-your-face place where you are free to do what you want but are also accountable to strangers for it, are anonymous but never alone. As an international city York is simply an example, one of many which reflect moment's economic and cultural forces, complications, paradoxes - all those fuzzy words which any would ignore in order to tell what's going on. Oliver lived in York on Lower East Side between roughly 1987 and 1992, having previously lived in various English cities and then in Paris; and having recently written a called The Infant and Pearl, a satire on Thatcher's England, new England, based exactly on rigorous verse requirements of medieval The Pearl. Oliver's theory had been that if a political satire were written in a form such as that of The Pearl, it would be dignified and permanent as well as satirical, with kicker being The Pearl's rigid use of alliteration. (Alliteration in Oliver's turns out to be loopy: dreamy and joky and lacy.) The had been a great success in England. By not writing from England but from France, Oliver had had distance enough to see before other poets how England had changed; moving to York he perceived same forces at work there when (believe me) hardly anyone else did. Bogged down in a life in one's city, one often sees it in way of art often, twenty years ago; movies sometimes keep up better by depicting world as it looks but are always constructed around same perfectly stupid stories. Poets often aren't looking because they're looking inside themselves; it's rare to catch a moment when things are changing. Oliver's Penniless Politics catches its moment in detailed accuracy, through an unusual and deliberately idealistic story, but it's fun. Penniless Politics abounds with tenements and streets, references to likes of Leona and a Sharptonesque Reverend, Rainbow Coalition, crack (refigured as ultimate drug Behemoth), and recognizes arrival of new immigrants, as exemplified in takeover by Koreans of bodegas and corner stores. That is its moment, though its real moment is future since new immigration was and is just starting. The is set in a moment of transition when York once again appears to be crumbling, downsliding from some previous glorious era into a dirty chaos, an inferior monument full of a more ordinary vitality than that of the arts (New York and its painting, architecture, literature patronized by its elite and often celebrated by York poets.) In Penniless Politics York means a lot of immigrants trying to get by, a lot of loud and lively people grubbing for money. The form of is meant to sound like streets, like York speech, and a bit like rap: an eight-line stanza - modified from Tasso's ottava rima - with end-rhymes and internal rhymes, long talky lines that turn surprisingly: All politics same crux: to define humankind richly. No one non-populist or penniless can found a viable party though most religions have such saints. …