A MySpace page, as yet little commented on by the media, is the hub of an international arts movement that is gathering pace. The Love Poetry Hate Racism page has inspired poets and poetry groups from around the world to come together - as poets do to fight the "scourge of racism".
Kicked off by a Belfast group of poets concerned about "a substantial rise in racist attacks on our growing ethnic minority population", April 20, 21 and 22 will see a number of live readings, slams and open mic events worldwide. The aim is to "celebrate diversity through the spoken word across the spoken world".
This is undoubtedly well-meaning. But I fear the result will be a hotchpotch of bad politics and bad poetry. With this is mind, I would like to ask the organisers a question posed by Professor Raymond Tallis: "Poems of protest may make poets, and their audiences, if they have one, feel good about themselves but do they really do any good?"
Let's start with the "warm glow" answer to that question - that poetry as a creative, communal art does indeed induce hug-a-lot politics. What's wrong with that?
Plenty. First, trite, touchy-feely ramblings such as those found on the Love Poetry Hate Racism site don't necessarily add up to poetry - good or otherwise. Next, poetry is not about making us feel nice and warm inside but about challenging us, about language in full flight and full thought. Thirdly, the notion that those involved in the liberal arts should and somehow do hold right and pure opinions about the world is simply not true.
Some great poets have had terrible politics. This is a conundrum that we shouldn't shy away from. Would it have been right and just for the fascist sympathiser Ezra Pound to have been shot as a traitor in Pisa in 1945? Yes. Is the poetic canon enriched by the Pisan Cantos written during Pound's internment in a US prison camp when he wasn't executed? Yes.
If the answer to Tallis's question is the stronger and more aggressive "we can educate people about racism through poetry - we can change their minds" my answer is that you are in the wrong job. Poetry is not an excuse to treat the audience to some extra-curricular citizenship lessons.
The pressure on poetry to say the right thing is often at the cost of poetry saying it right. Sometimes this can be forgiven as poetic and political naiveté. The lines penned by the teenage winner of an anti-racism poetry competition in Suffolk may put a smile on the face - "Hope you follow this it's rap that I'm singin/ and it's all you damn fool racists that are mingin" - but Keats or Marx it ain't.
Less forgivable are the dismal dirges produced when great writers push their parboiled polemics on us: I can't be alone in wishing to expunge Harold Pinter's anti-war poetry from my memory.
The Love Poetry Hate Racism weekend has next to nothing to do with any real struggle against racism - show me the poem that in and of itself overturned apartheid or ended slavery. On the flipside, the urge to say important things about an important issue like racism has little to do with love or understanding of poetry.
WH Auden's test of would-be poets - if they want to write poetry because they have important things to say, they aren't a poet - is on the money here. This does not mean that poetry never speaks, and speaks with force, about politics - Yeats's Easter 1916 or Auden's own Spain 1937 put lie to that - but that good poets and poetry don't start from a position of political preening. And, likewise, good politics never come from poetic posturing.
