As a poet, I’ve regularly railed against war in general, and specifically against the current War On Terror as instituted by the Bush hegemony after the attacks of September 11, 2001. In February 2003, the invasion of Iraq by the United States was pretty much in the bag, provided ‘legitimacy’ by the fillip of a UN endorsement for its bogus reasoning (ie. ‘weapons of mass destruction’).
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| Poet Vince Tinguely photo© Marie Addison |
The U.S. government simply steamrolled everybody into submission. In the context of this otherwise depressing scenario, I had the privilege of attending an enormous anti-war rally in downtown Montreal that gathered tens of thousands of people in the bitterest cold, joining in a global protest of ten million souls against America’s drive to war. By some uncanny miracle, Prime Minister Chretien was paying attention, and emboldened by the popular opposition to war (and perhaps with the knowledge that he was soon going to be forced out of power by Paul Martin’s faction) he chose not to commit Canada to the token ‘Coalition Of The Willing’.
That same month, I’d been chosen to ‘compete’ in CBC Radio’s Poetry Face-Off event. The ‘contestants’ were each commissioned to compose a new work on the theme of ‘Escape’; the new pieces were to be performed at Casa del Popolo during the Voix d’Ameriques spoken word festival, with the winner going on to the national round. I remember being quite taken with the notion of ‘escape’ – specifically, with the concept of escapism. So I wrote a piece that I felt quite good about, but when it came to performing it, I found a great deal of resistance to it from the audience. Maybe it was partly due to the absurdly frigid conditions both outside and inside the Casa del Popolo that day. But I couldn’t help feeling that I had somehow transgressed an unspoken code of conduct, simply by making an attempt to address the actual conditions of living in our times. The general tenor of the event was, like most things ‘CBC’, quite ‘light’. I had a sense that we ‘contestants’ were expected to be witty, intelligent (but not too intellectual), knowledgeable, entertaining ... but that my piece was overstepping the line of good taste by actually asking the audience to feel something. Feel something about the times we were currently living in ... feel something about the undercurrent of totalitarianism rumbling through our media, our government, our zeitgeist. Question.
Which is what I thought poetry was supposed to be about, frankly, so I was a little disappointed. And I couldn’t help drawing a parallel between the lead-balloon reception of my ‘political’ poetry by a mainstream audience, and the near-complete shutting-out by the powers that be, of the global outpouring of protest against the invasion of Iraq. In both cases, there seemed to be a profound disconnect.
I must speak here in defense of poetry in general. This disconnect isn’t the fault of the poetry. Many poets were speaking (and continue to speak) out against war, and it’s not just ‘the usual suspects’. One example: I chanced upon Erin Moure’s Little theatres at the remaindered books store in the Faubourg, about a month ago. The poems were written during the period I am writing about, 2003, leading up to the invasion of Iraq. And consequently the reader finds poems referring to war. Now, Erin Moure’s reputation is that of an experimental poet, a language poet, and not a political poet. But as a poet, she was sensitive to the tone of her times, and she responded to it as she should.
There are any number of poets responding to war in their work. I hosted a Montreal launch for the anti-war anthology edited by Todd Swift, 100 Poets Against The War, in March 2003, and had no difficulty tracking down a hefty roster of local poets keen to air their thoughts on the topic. In the ensuing six years, I’m convinced most, if not all of these poets would be as opposed to the current war effort in Afghanistan as they were to the invasion of Iraq. The problem remains the chasm between their thoughtful attempts to address the issue of war, on the one hand, and their potential audience.
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| Officer Cadet Vince Tinguely |
The first hurdle, as I have outlined in my experience with the CBC Face-Off, is the problem of what an audience is prepared to hear. In 2003, with the jingoistic drums of war being sounded far and wide, my message of forboding sounded a jarring counter-note. However, the mood and the receptivity of people has been shifting ever since. Today, most people are fed up with war, and furthermore, they are far more informed about the unjust underpinnings of the War on Terror than they were six years ago.
Simultaneously,however, there seems to be fewer venues than ever for poets to be given a platform in the mainstream media. The Poetry Face-Off is long gone. Where is our CBC radio poetry programming today? Why wasn’t Lillian Allen’s spoken word poetry show renewed? Why is there so much stand-up comedy, and so little real cultural meat? It’s not like poetry is hugely expensive to produce for broadcast – all a poet needs is a microphone. Is there simply a reluctance to have some out-of-control character, lord help us a POET, unleashed on national airwaves?
Part of the problem is our conceptualization of the role of the poet in modern society. In our culture, poetry is considered largely irrelevant, even in progressive circles. Yet it wasn’t very long ago that poets like Allen Ginsberg, Michel Garneau and Leonard Cohen (yes, I agree... where were the women?) brought the complexities of poetics (and politics) to broad, mainstream audiences. Their success depended, at least partially, on the openness of the cultural infrastructure to voices of dissent and innovation. That is the nature of the poetry beast ...and if anyone wants to argue that poetry is marginal, that nobody listens to it or reads it anyway, they ought to check out a show at a poetry festival like Voix d’Ameriques or The Calgary International Spoken Word Festival or The Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, where audiences are as good as any that turn out at comedy and theatre festivals of similar scale.
Vast economic engines have trained young ears and eyes to engage with Imax movies, ‘first person shooter’ video games, and online entertainment, and so we have the antiwar message travelling through vehicles like Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9/11, and environmentalism and anti-imperialism is served up by Avatar. Poetry could well join the chorus, if our cultural elites had any interest in promoting it.
Let’s get more ambitious. Let’s ask – no, let’s tell mainstream media to make room for the uncontrollable, unfettered voices of poets. Let’s have uncensored poets on commercial radio stations, on CTV and Global television, addressing the topics of the day. Because poetry can do what nothing else in the mainstream media has ever done – it can start the conversation.
Open the floodgates. We need change and we need it now.
Vincent Tinguely is a Montreal writer and poet. His work has recently appeared in Four Minutes to Midnight no. 10, Canadian Poetry no. 64, and two prose anthologies: The Portable Conundrum and The Art of Trespassing. He is the co-author of Impure — Reinventing the word, a book about the Montreal spoken word scene. He frequently writes about spoken word and literary events for the free weekly Montreal Mirror.
