Can poetry give you an identity? Last week's Poet in the City event at the National Portrait Gallery put that question to three poets working in Britain - one born in Jamaica, one in Hungary, and one in Essex. The answers that emerged were a curious mixture of the personal and the political, in which individual memories were blended with wider questions of immigration, asylum, and a Britain of surveillance cameras and identity cards. For each poet, writing had been a means of establishing an identity, but was not without its pitfalls; as the broadcaster Peggy Reynolds put it in her introduction, "poetry creates identities and unmakes them all the time".
The first reader, Linton Kwesi Johnson, came to Britain from Jamaica in 1963. He began by reading an elegy for a nephew killed in a rail accident, whose own dream of going to Jamaica had been fulfilled only in death with his burial on the island. Johnson, who is known as the first dub poet, has a slow and deliberate reading style, which quickens in the closely-rhymed sections of his poems and expands out again in the longer lines, "How big and broad in love you was", "They just call it accident and close your file". A second poem, License For Kill, explored the question of black identity through the recent rise in the death of black inmates in custody, Johnson insisting that "You can't ask" the victims about their abuse, but "You can ask Jack Straw about the rule of law".
The second reader, George Szirtes, came to Britain as a Hungarian refugee in 1956, and much of his poetry deals with his response to this new country, with "your short afternoons, your six o' clock news" and "the sheer tastelessness of your dinners". As well as bringing an immigrant's sharper eye to the peculiarities of British behaviour, the poems Szirtes read also explored the experiences of British natives themselves, such as the inhabitants of the Norfolk fens for whom identity is a question of local isolation: "We're years behind / Even our vowels sag in the cold wind."
The plurality and instability of British identity was also explored by the final speaker, the singer and activist Billy Bragg. Introducing his new book, The Progressive Patriot: A Search for Belonging, Bragg described the importance of poetry both to his own sense of identity and to his lyric writing. The greatest influence on his own work had been the poet Rudyard Kipling, a much-maligned writer whom Bragg praised for his "sense of place" and for his ear for the speech of the music hall. Avoiding - perhaps a little too neatly - some of the racist elements readers have found in Kipling's work, Bragg praised the poet's awareness of Britain's multicultural pre-Christian heritage, and quoted from Puck of Pook's Hill: "Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease / And thus was England born!"
Bragg closed with a plea for and end to the "us" and "them" approach to immigration, and pointed out that the issue of national identity was everyone's concern, rather than a source of political capital for the far right. Between them the three readers suggested that poetry has a vital role to play in this debate, bringing individual stories to light and setting recent experiences against those of other nations and other eras. Yet the final word went to Johnson, who confessed, "I've always been a little wary about discussions of identity". For this poet, national identities have their limitations, and are less important than the things we all share. "Jamaica for me is home, London for me is home. But my first allegiance is to the human race."
The next Poet in the City event is a drop-in reading evening on the theme of Secrets and Lies, at David Keltie Associates, 2 Fleet Place, 5 December, 6.30pm. Tickets are free and can be booked on 07908 367488.
