Condemned Poem Ascends Into Heaven

On March 27th 2008 I was interviewed by Kernan Andrews in The Galway Advertiser in the lead up to the launch of my second collection of poems, Time Gentlemen, Please. In that interview I expressed an opinion or two about, well, things. One of the more measured responses was this letter which appeared in the following week's paper (April 3rd) having apparently been collectively authored by the Galway branch of the Socialist Workers Party.

'Dear Editor,

Having read the article in the Galway Advertiser about Kevin Higgins, we wish to address his quote from “Socialist Worker” concerning Darfur. We are sorry that an “acclaimed” Galway poet would use a quote out of context.

The Darfur war was being depicted as genocidal “Arabs” slaughtering “black Africans” –this bore little relationship to facts. However, the depiction fitted the Islamophobic view of Arabs as violent aggressors and the portrayal of Africans as “ever the victims”.

It was problematic to label the conflict “genocide” in as much as such a term did not convey the complexity of tensions, political overspills, civil war, shifting alliances.

Creating ‘Arab’ versus ‘African’ was bogus, but powerful – in whose interests? We are alarmed that Higgins would disingenuously use a quote – for his own interests.

“Socialist Worker” aims to give readers a greater understanding of world politics than the controlled mainstream media. Socialists deplore war — the senseless killing, suffering and waste — and the agendas hiding behind military interventions.

Is Higgins a self-professed socialist, just like an Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, if he thinks that, “the society we have is far preferable to anything the comrades would bring”. So, children living in poverty denied adequate housing and education, people dying from curable diseases or on hospital waiting lists, and millions of innocents being slaughtered in resource wars, are acceptable?

Maybe Higgins had an unhappy childhood in Militant, or maybe he would have been better off if he had found masturbation. He definitely didn’t find the socialism that many on the far left in Galway envisage and work towards: true democracy, peace and equality, whether one lives in Ireland or elsewhere. Thankfully, he doesn’t take himself too seriously.

Yours Socialist Workers Party

Galway Branch'

As you read the above quoted letter the word 'measured' is perhaps not the first that floated to mind. But trust me, other responses to my comments in that interview were altogether less mild, as was recently alluded to in David Wheatley's quite detailed examination of my favourite subject. 

But I digress, the good news is that the poem which so vexed the hard arsed revolutionaries of Galway SWP is on its way to achieving- if I might be so immodest as to type the word - immortality.  

Said vexacious verse is included in the anthology The Hundred Years' War - Modern War Poems, Edited by Neil Astley.

Other contributors include: Anna Akhmatova, Yehuda Amichai, Guillaume Apollinaire, W.H. Auden, Aleksandr Blok, Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Brodsky, Paul Celan, Jean Cocteau, Mahmoud Darwish, Keith Douglas, James Fenton, Federico García Lorca, Zbigniew Herbert, Geoffrey Hill, Miroslav Holub, Philip Larkin, Denise Levertov, Primo Levi, Robert Lowell, Louis MacNeice, Antonio Machado, Derek Mahon,  Eugenio Montale, Pablo Neruda, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, W.B. Yeats & Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Taking Requests For Golden Oldies, Obscure Classics, Or Poems That Just Annoy The Hell Out Of You

I have published three poetry collections with Salmon Poetry to date: The Boy With No Face in 2005, Time Gentlemen, Please in 2008 & most recently Frightening New Furniture in 2010.

My next collection of poems, The Ghost In The Lobby, will be published (also by Salmon) early next year.

Over the next few weeks I will publish ONE poem from each of my three published collections on this blog, starting with a poem from my debut The Boy With No Face.

Which poem do you think it should be? I'm talking requests here. What is your most or (even) least favourite poem from The Boy With No Face. Be it a golden oldie, an obscure classic, or a poem that really annoys you but which you'd like to see published and discussed online because you secretly like being annoyed, let me know at kphiggins@hotmail.com and the collective weight of public opinion will be my command.

My Militant Tendency: me at a meeting addressed by Peter Taaffe in 1984

Dr. John Cunningham who teaches in the History Department at NUI Galway sent me this photo via Facebook today. It shows part of the audience of a public meeting here in Galway addressed by Peter Taaffe, the leader of the Militant Tendency in Britain. That is me scratching my neck and yawning slightly. I have to say, I don't remember being bored. The meeting took place in the Atlanta Hotel on Dominick Street in the Spring of 1984, just before the Miners' Strike began in the U.K. I was a couple of months shy of my seventeenth birthday and a fifth year student at the Bish secondary school. Here is a relevant poem:

My Militant Tendency
It's nineteen eighty two and I know everything.
Hippies are people who always end up asking
Charles Manson to sing them another song.
I'd rather be off putting some fascist through
a glass door arseways, but being fifteen,

have to mow the lawn first. Last year,

Liverpool meant football; now
it's the Petrograd of the British Revolution.
Instead of masturbation, I find socialism.

While others dream of businessmen bleeding
in basements; I promise to abolish double-chemistry class
the minute I become Commissar. In all of this

there is usually a leather jacket involved. I tell

cousin Walter and his lovely new wife, Elizabeth,
to put their aspirations in their underpants
and smoke them; watch

my dad's life become a play:
Sit Down In Anger.

 

'My Militant Tendency' is from my 2008 collection Time Gentlemen, Please which is available from Salmon Poetry here http://www.salmonpoetry.com/details.php?ID=35&a=108

The poem also features in the 2009 Forward Book of Poetry which is available from Faber & Faber here http://www.faber.co.uk/work/forward-book-of-poetry-2009/9780571243969/

Ted Grant Remembered

Ted Grant (1913-2006)

Ted Grant was born Isaac Blank in South Africa in 1913. He spent most of his life in Britain and was a key leader of the British Trotskyist movement, a founder of the Militant Tendency which grew to be, by the mid-1980s, perhaps the most successful Trotskyist organisation in history.

Ted died six years ago this month. You can read his Guardian obituary here http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/jul/27/guardianobituaries.southafrica

Ted was always predicting another 1929 style economic slump. It's ironic then that in the same issue of The Guardian in which his obituary appeared, there was an article about the record profits which a certain British bank had just announced. That bank  was Northern Rock, which was one of the first to topple when the present crisis began the following year.

Members of Militant (in the UK) included such well known names as Derek Hatton & Tommy Sheridan. Members of the organisation's Irish section included the T.Ds Joe Higgins, Clare Daly and Joan Collins.

From 1982 to 1994 I was a member of the organisation myself, at first here in Galway where I was a Militant supporter within Galway West Labour Youth and later in north London, where I was chair of Enfield Against The Poll Tax. For my trouble, I was expelled from the British Labour Party in 1991.

When I heard about Ted's death, it inspired this poem http://www.nthposition.com/deathofa.php

The poem is also available in my 2008 poetry collection Time Gentlemen, Please which can be purchased directly from the Salmon Poetry site. http://www.salmonpoetry.com/details.php?ID=35&a=108