Piercing the Screen of Words: Reflections on the Political Poetics of Douglas Oliver

Abstract

Piercing the Screen of Words:Reflections on the Political Poetics of Douglas Oliver Carol Watts (bio) All politics the same crux: to define humankind richly. —Douglas Oliver (Penniless Politics 17) The relation between the writing of contemporary poetry and politics, understood in the broadest sense as a formal, affective and conceptual engagement with events in the world, or with kinds of commitment to their transformation, is an intensely contested one. It opens up a space that manifests the most complex, and occasionally disabling, kinds of interpellation: freights of identifying, cartographies of silence, incontrovertible demands. Such contestation has been known to descend into fistfights, even as its networks of collaborative connection can produce work of the most profound attention to the unfreedom of our time. Currently the range of contemporary poetries is burgeoning, aided by the speed and penetration of internet exchange, rolling blogzines, the possibilities of cross-medial experimentation; reinforced by the ambitious lists of print-on-demand publishing and proliferating numbers of artisanal small presses, which keep work in circulation and bring "lost" collections into view. At the same time, the practice of writing poetry also continues to carry with it the traditions [End Page 198] and more uncertain trajectories of such a contestation, marked by what is often described as the fate of the avant-garde. These struggles—internal to form, language, and a poetics of subjectivity and action—are always in transition, sometimes re-energized, as if brought into sharp focus again by new times. Or they can remain, like the rubble of barricades when the present action has moved elsewhere. It may be that the very conceptual terms for understanding these strategies and conflicts, and their sometimes corralling orthodoxies, are themselves undergoing a major shift. In such a generative environment, when the possibilities of poetry are being broken open, there are opportunities to read—and hear—earlier work anew, loosed from critical ways of seeing that could make its tactics and choices slip under the radar. It becomes possible to make out the risk of, and the stakes involved in, unique attempts to grapple with a writing "singed by the real," as Douglas Oliver put it in the late '70s (Diagram 11). The conjuring up of the barricades is appropriate as an entry point to the poetry of Douglas Oliver, since it is a dialogue with the "whisper" of Louise Michel, from the moment of the Paris Commune, which animates his final memoir, published after his death in 2000; it is, in central ways, a dialogue with the violence and hope of political necessity sustained throughout his writing, as John Hall has argued ("Ventriloquising"). Oliver's poetry is not widely known, and yet he is one of the most significant British political poets of the latter years of the twentieth century. His work draws on earlier traditions of prosody, from the use of visionary medieval dream poems (his response to Thatcherism in The Infant and the Pearl) and lyrics informed by Blakean songs of innocence and experience, to hybrids of satire and allegory, inventive in the manner of Pope and Swift, by way of Boccacio, Burroughs and a self-dethroning angry pathos of his own, brought to bear on U.S. democracy in Penniless Politics. Oliver's experience as a journalist in a Paris news agency also opens his writing in acute attention to the circuits of mediation governing events, in which the poet finds himself "skewing off sideways" (Salvo 13), or an unreliable point of transmission, as well as encountering news of lives and experiences he has no means to comprehend through the "screen of words" (Diagram 11), nor the right to represent. From The Diagram Poems, written between 1973 and 1979, to A Salvo for Africa, published in 2000, and the posthumous memoir, there is a continual process of reflection about the relation of writing to events, and the necessity (and impossibility) of poetic engagement "in the course of a world" in Theodor Adorno's words, "which continues to hold a pistol to the heads [End Page 199] of human beings" ("Commitment" 80). Necessity, because "our greatest cruelties often arise from a failure to imagine" (Salvo 9). Impossibility, because the lyric self as a...