Today I have been thinking about class. I have been thinking about how class identity affects and interacts with poetry; how class identity intersects with and complicates racial identity, and Iāve been thinking about my writing life.
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Iāve been thinking about absolutely the most hurtful experience of what I laughingly call my poetry ācareerā to date. Ā This was having the original ms for āThe Mystic and the Pig Thiefā returned to me by the editor of a small but well-regarded press (nameless here forever more) with some pretty snide commentary to the effect that my poetry did not āauthentically representā working-class voice or working-class experience. I was told I was ventriloquising, āspeaking on behalf ofā communities I knew nothing about, in a way I had no right to do. I read this snotty email through a number of times, and I sat at my desk shaking and blinking back tears, just boiling with rage. I cannot ā and I donāt think I will ever be able to ā adequately express the pain these comments caused me. Itās not just anger at the asinine entitlement of a man who thinks that there is only one proscribed way for working-class people to write and to sound, and that he knows definitively what that is. Itās not just anger at his presumptuous and dismissive statement about me, my text, or what I intended with the work. Itās not even that this is a publisher of many wannabe ābeatā writers, English men who have co-opted the language and thematic concerns of sixties Americanaā¦ and garnered praise for it, not an inquisition into their class and cultural credentials. No what hurt, what makes me furious even now, is the idea that all the effort I put in to get to where I am ā to āearnā the right to even submit my work to these people, to hone my craft, to struggle through an educational system designed to exclude me, to refine and slog and turn myself inside-out in order to have a book I could be proud of, that did justice to the people and the experiences it describes, that all of that is ā has been ā will always be ā essentially meaningless, because of the mouldy little dog-shit assumptions middle-class editors and publishers have about the way working-class people are allowed to express themselves, are capable of expressing themselves. It was the denial of my existence, my voice, my personhood. It was his telling me I had no right to the language Iād come to love, to the poetry that gave sweetness and meaning to my life, that redeemed and allowed me to write that which ordinary language disallowed or denied. It was his saying āI donāt want to hear this from youā. It was his saying āyou donāt existā. And if I didnāt exist, then āPig Thiefā didnāt exist either, and you cannot begin to imagine how much worse that felt. Worse than feeling like nothing myself, worse than Iād felt since the height of my illness, when I first started coming apart.
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Iām not trying to elicit either sympathy for myself or condemnation for this prick. I moved on, eventually. Salt published Mystic, I had the best editor I could wish for, and frankly it was dick-bagās loss. Iām just trying to give my following remarks some context, because this kind of blinkered, routine dismissal is, I think, by no means rare.
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Donāt get me wrong, I think there are lots of publishers, journals and organisations out there working hard to give working-class writers a platform (Smokestack Books, and the always fantastic Proletarian Poetry spring most immediately to mind), but when weāre looking at the established āPoetry Communityā, I think certain ingrained assumptions about class identity and poetic voice circumscribe the ways in which working-class poets are allowed to contribute to the discourse.
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Thereās what youāre allowed to say, and then thereās the way in which youāre allowed to say it. Ā This is something Iāve become increasingly aware of in recent years, and Iāve written on the blog before about the way in which āslamā is increasingly hyped as āthe poetry of the peopleā with anything else seen as elitist and deliberately obscurantist. This irritates me. It irritates me because it imposes a false dichotomy on poetry, it takes a patronising attitude towards āthe peopleā and what they are capable of understanding and enjoying. It irritates me too because it pre-supposes people ought to fear poetic difficulty, rather than finding it challenging and stimulating. It irritates me because āthe peopleā covers a multitude of sinners, with wide and varied approaches their reading and writing. The current trend seems to want to homogenise working-class poetry, and under the guise of challenging the dominant culture, it weakens working-class imagination, sets proscriptive limits on the way we are allowed to access poetry. This is dangerous and impoverishing.
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And Iām waiting now. Iām waiting for some smart-arse to trot out the big establishment names, as if thatās proof of anything. And I mean whoop-de-do that Simon Armitage is Oxford Professor of Poetry and everything, but a post-war northern male working-classness is one of their acceptable versions of class identity, and it presupposes a nostalgia, a looking back, that defuses potential threat (social or poetic), softens the language of experience, and makes safe what might otherwise be challenging to the cultural status-quo. And itās not that Iām saying there is anything wrong with poetry that does this, merely how it is used, and how it is used to the exclusion of other voices, other narratives. A poetry of / about working-class lives located in current working-class experience is a rarer beast indeed.
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Harder yet for black working-class poets. A friend of mine was ultimately discouraged from writing his nuanced experimental work because he could no longer cope with the hostility that came when peopleās expectations of him were defied and defeated. Because God help the āurban black manā or woman whose poems donāt riff on contingent reality in ā and I have genuinely heard this expression used before now ā āthe language of the street.ā
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It is frustrating. It is beyond frustrating. I want to write from inside my reality, inside my skin, but I donāt want to do it in the expected or obvious way, and I donāt want to do it from a distance. I have zero interest in rising above my class. Iāll rise with mine or not at all. Iām neither ashamed nor nostalgically fond of who I am. My feelings are ambiguous and shifting, complicated, compounded of both joy and pain. But I knew before I began that this wasnāt going to be acceptable to most people. That those who control the cultural agenda will either exclude me or, which is worse, suck me in through a duel process of absorption and fetishisation.
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What scares me is that sometimes I can feel this happening. Education became my ammunition, my way of forcing people to take me seriously, but a creative writing MA is a process of continual normalisation. And when I first started out I would RP my voice because I thought I had to, to get gigs, to be seen as a valid and viable voice. When this began to feel like obscure betrayal, I stopped. It took a lot of nerve to be myself, on stage as well as page, but I got there, only to witness the way in which people co-opt otherness, my otherness. And Iām damned if I do, and Iām damned if I donāt. People who have no idea what itās like to live with the unacknowledged burden / the unacknowledged labour of class and cultural identity, chide you as āinauthenticā if you write other than your roots, Ā and haul you over the coals for āfixatingā on or āexploitingā your history if you do write them. I still recall an event I was at where I overheard my co-reader (whose experimental work I greatly admire) laughing with her friend about me in the ladyās loo. The gist was the magazine in which weād both been featured had only featured me because Iād āplayed the gypsy cardā, that my work was faddy, and sloppy to boot. This hurt. Not least because none of the poems in that particular issue had anything to do with traveller identity. They were experimental prose-poem pieces dealing with toxic sexuality. The only time Iād mentioned travelling at all was for historical context to one of the poems I read from Mystic. But because my thematic concerns are now broadly known, I run the risk of everything I write beginning seen- and judged- through the lens of that otherness.
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Disturbing to relate, there is probably some truth in what she said. Not that her comments speak to the quality of my work, but I know full well that writing from āoutsideā the way I do, or at least about the outside, my work has novelty points, affords a clumsy sort of kudos for those who choose to publish me or book me for gigs. And for me the crowning irony is still this: that Iāve worked for years to exist as part of a system designed to exclude me, without the connections, inside-knowledge or resources necessary to meaningfully participate or compete, but now that I have āarrivedā, so to speak, now that Iāve got my foot in the door, I am held up, along with all the other token outsiders, as an example of how wonderfully inclusive the Poetry Community is.
2087
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