Dread Poetry and Freedom by David Austin

Author:David Austin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

Chapter 5

THE WISE OLD SHEPHERD

I believe that the distinguishing feature of the civilization of the twentieth century is the fact that the masses have entered upon the stage of history. And those people are most successful as individual artists, political leaders, etc., who recognize this.

C.L.R. James

Everything that lives, not vegetative alone, emerges from darkness and, however strong its natural tendency to thrust itself into the light, it nevertheless needs the security of darkness to grow at all.

Hannah Arendt

TINGS AN’ TIMES is ‘as far a cry as you could wish for from the narcissistic, untranslatable, apolitical and gutless “Martian-Masterclass” school that rules the roost of official English verse. As on the album’s predecessors, LKJ’s succinctly measured deep-voiced syllable sculptures are swathed in a wondrously audible sunlight by the shimmering modulations and unfaltering group-feel of Bovell and his virtuosi.’ Michael Horovitz’s review is one of the few to capture the tenor and tone of Ting an’ Times, poems that superficially appear to be a departure from his usual form and content, but that are in fact continuous with his earlier work: ‘While he explores continuing repression and acknowledges the ruthless enemies of liberation, the recording’s impact is one of sustained uplift, as rhythmically and spiritually compelling as it is enjoyable thought.’1 What this one-page review lacks in details is more than compensated for by the way that it concisely captures the spirit, rhythm and tone of the poems and their musical accompaniment.

It is hard to discern why so little critical attention has been devoted to Johnson’s socialist poems,2 but when they have received consideration the critics generally tend to ignore or downplay the politics that are embedded in his poetics. For example, in his assessment of ‘Mi Revalueshanary Fren’ and ‘Di Good Life’, Roberto Masone’s textual-linguistic analysis reduces the former poem to a celebration of the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the latter to what he describes as sarcastic praise for socialism.3 Yes, it is true that the poet celebrates the collapse of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe in ‘Mi Revalueshanary Fren’, but only in so far as it opens up the space for the genuine socialism that he describes in ‘Di Good Life’, and so to separate the sequential and contextual relationship between the two poems is misleading.

Henghameh Saroukhani’s intriguing paratextual analysis of ‘Mi Revalueshanary Fren’ presents a different problem. Her essential argument is that Johnson’s inclusion in the exclusive Penguin Modern Classics series not only expanded the poet’s audience by virtue of Penguin’s vast distribution networks and marketing, but that the organization of his verse in the Penguin selection recontextualizes the poems along transnational lines, in essence going beyond the black protest framework to which his work has historically been associated. In support of her argument she notes that ‘Mi Revalueshanary Fren’ is included in the 1980s section of the selection despite the fact that it was written in 1990 or 1991, released on the 1991 LP Tings an’ Times, and published in the eponymous collection by Bloodaxe Books. The

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