Holland's Miscellany

A brand-new site, taking my name in vain, has sprung up overnight at Wordpress.com

It will feature posts on politics, sci-fi, humanism, secularism, and 'whatever else crops up'. Unlikely to be much there about poetry or writing, though you never know.

I'd be really pleased and grateful if anyone interested in any of the above topics would support Holland's Miscellany by telling other people about it - maybe by linking to it on your own blogs, or on Facebook or Twitter, just to give it some momentum in these early weeks as it emerges into the blogosphere.

First few posts so far discuss the new Doctor Who, the paralysing effects of depression, and the ramifications of a hung parliament:

'This is how the LibDems die, not with a bang but a lapdance.'

Hope you will find time to support this new blog, and perhaps leave some comments?

Hard Times

Very disappointed and worried today that Labour failed to get a majority. We stayed up nearly all night to watch the results coming in, and it's hard to describe the despair that comes over me when I consider what may lie ahead for us with the Tories potentially back in power.

This isn't a political blog, so I won't go on about my reaction here. But I was writing something tonight on the Poets on fire forum in defence of Labour and the many good things they have done for our country - as well as their appalling mistakes like the war in Iraq - and I found myself recounting an anecdote about my life in the 'blocked' gap between my first novel and poetry collection and the day I started writing again, some five years later.

It was a time in my life I had almost forgotten about, my quality of life having improved so much since those dreadful days, back in the early years of the noughties. But that experience came back to me forcibly as I wrote about it, so I'm going to share it here as well:

In 2002-03, we were living in a tiny two bedroom rented house in North Cornwall, with a living room barely larger than a bathroom. We shared that space with four children (including baby twins) and had another child on the way, while my partner worked from 6am till late at night in a truly grim job and was too exhausted at the end of each day to do much more than sleep, just so we could afford to keep that roof over our heads.

I had no one to help me out, no relatives in England, and when I went to try and get a night shift in a meat-packing factory - one of the few night jobs available - so I could help with the breadwinning side of things, I was turned away because I was 'over-qualified'. All I had was three A levels, and I was over-qualified for the kinds of jobs you can do at night in a rural community.

Around that time, I got really sick with flu. I remember one day feeling too sick and delirious to look after the twins, but knew I had to, since there was no one else to do it. My other kids were at school, my partner was at work, and the babies were crying. I lay down on the floor next to their bouncers and started to feed them - I was pregnant again at the time; a difficult pregnancy, for we had been warned the child could be Downs - and actually passed out. When I came round, I felt completely alone and in despair, not knowing how we were going to survive.

I'm not wringing my hands over that awful time. We climbed out of it. But guess how? Child and working tax credits were introduced that year, and they made the most incredible difference to our lives.

Thanks to tax credits, we were finally able to afford to move away from that rural area in search of better work for my partner. We got a bigger place, I had my last baby, who was not a Downs Syndrome child but perfectly healthy - thank goodness I never agreed to the abortion I was automatically offered after the test results! - and I started to earn money from writing again.

I cried the day we got our first tax credits payment. That was how bad it had been for us, and how relieved I was to have money in the bank again, to be able to breathe. And I shall never forget that a Labour government did that for us.

Ecopoetics and Beyond: Can Poetry Make Things Happen?

Today on the Guardian website, the editor of Bloodaxe Books Neil Astley has some pertinent and uncompromising remarks to make about the infamous WH Auden quotation that 'poetry makes nothing happen'.

Describing an RTE radio programme last year in which he discussed poetry with leading Irish politician Trevor Sargent, Neil Astley tells us of Sargent's favourable reaction to ecopoems, including one which the former leader of the Green Party in Ireland felt should be required reading in Irish schools.

Astley writes:

"If our own politicians spent just a couple of minutes each day reading these kinds of poems, they might be better fitted to carry out their duties more responsibly. We might even be able to trust some of them then to act in our interest in what they do to tackle the problems of environmental destruction and global warming."

This article appears in the wake of a new anthology of ecopoems edited by Neil Astley, entitled 'Earth Shattering', and in promotion of a London Word Festival debate at the Bishopsgate Institute this Friday evening, when he'll be taking part in a discussion on 'Making Nothing Happen', chaired by Roddy Lumsden, alongside poets Mario Petrucci and Melanie Challenger, and Caspar Henderson.

You can find the full text of that article here and learn more about the London Word Festival here.

Personally I think poetry has every chance of making things happen, if by that we mean sinking it deep into the psyche of a country so that it emerges in other ways and places: in our politics, our relationships, our methods of child-rearing, our attempts to look after the planet, our attitudes towards foreigners and foreign wars.

Poetry can be propaganda - see much of Rupert Brooke's output, for instance - but the more complex it is, the greater its mental, emotional and political ramifications, the less likely it is that poetry will sink to the level of mere jingoism or eco-rap.

As we move out of the nebulous noughties, we may be entering a great age for political poetry. Unfortunately it's unlikely that we'll be certain of that until we're at least halfway through it, and maybe not even then. Which means that those of us who wish to write politically, who feel the need to address issues which extend beyond the home or immediate working environment of our lives - assuming we're not already living in a war-zone, that is, where politics rapidly becomes part of the daily structure of life - must press on regardless of criticism or fashion.

The proof of the poetry may well be in the way of happening, as Neil Astley's article suggests, rather than in any immediate changes brought about by individual poems.

Nail Bomb in the Haymarket, Poetry at the SBC

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to slouching behind your newspapers on the tube ... a car bomb packed with nails and explosives, which miraculously failed to detonate, is parked up outside a crowded night-club in the Haymarket.

We are no longer quite so afraid of the power-crazed politician with his finger on the nuclear button. This is the age of the suicide bomber, of the ultimate weapon against mankind: the human mind, utterly convinced of its own rightness and prepared to destroy itself in order to annoint that belief in human blood.

Today is the first day of the London Literature Festival at the South Bank Centre. Over the next few weeks, thousands of people in London will be attending literary events, readings and performances, or engaging in creative and literary activities not merely at the SBC but everywhere around the capital, as our daily fascination with the arts continues.

A few questions come to mind here. What does art or literature achieve in the face of the suicide bomber? What is its role except as a form of therapy for the survivors or the loved ones of the dead? Should poetry address that merciless desire for violence and its shocking aftermath? And is there still a place in the creative arts for political comment, or is it now just a cosy retreat for the politically apathetic or for those who feel art is tainted by any exposure, however fleeting or apparently necessary, with 'the real world'?

We've been discussing something similar to this fraught topic on the Poets on Fire forums recently, finally agreeing to disagree on whether it's possible to depict violence and cruelty in the lyric poem without losing the poetic integrity of the form ... without appearing to be celebrating violence and cruelty, in other words.

But when threats like this become a part of our daily lives, what is the poem for if it cannot address the issues surrounding the use of violence, or deal with the reality of cruelty and human carnage?

This dilemma reminds me of the London debate I heard last year on Poetry and Climate Change - a very one-sided debate, where two of the panel were unable to attend at the last minute and were not replaced. At that debate, the only speaker left, John Burnside, dismissed the concept of the political poem as an aesthetic non-starter and insisted that any action against climate change would have to take place another way. Members of the audience were barely able to challenge that attitude before the debate was brought to a swift and premature close.

So no activism to be allowed in poetry. No climate change. No violence. No cruelty. No ... you supply the rest.

But if there is no longer any place for the political poem in today's literary climate, poetry has become a dog with no teeth and should be put down at once. Humanely, of course. And without elegies.