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 I’ve been thinking about my writing life.
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I’ve been thinking about absolutely the most hurtful experience of what I laughingly call my poetry “career” to date. This was having the original ms for “The Mystic and the Pig Thief” 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 “authentically represent” working-class voice or working-class experience. I was told I was ventriloquising, “speaking on behalf of” 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 – and I don’t think I will ever be able to – adequately express the pain these comments caused me. It’s 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. It’s not just anger at his presumptuous and dismissive statement about me, my text, or what I intended with the work. It’s not even that this is a publisher of many wannabe “beat” writers, English men who have co-opted the language and thematic concerns of sixties Americana… 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 – to “earn” 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 – has been – will always be – 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 I’d 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 “I don’t want to hear this from you”. It was his saying “you don’t exist”. And if I didn’t exist, then “Pig Thief” didn’t exist either, and you cannot begin to imagine how much worse that felt. Worse than feeling like nothing myself, worse than I’d felt since the height of my illness, when I first started coming apart.
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I’m 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-bag’s loss. I’m 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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Don’t 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 we’re looking at the established “Poetry Community”, 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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There’s what you’re allowed to say, and then there’s the way in which you’re allowed to say it. This is something I’ve become increasingly aware of in recent years, and I’ve written on the blog before about the way in which “slam” is increasingly hyped as “the poetry of the people” 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 “the people” 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 “the people” 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 I’m waiting now. I’m waiting for some smart-arse to trot out the big establishment names, as if that’s 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 it’s not that I’m 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 people’s expectations of him were defied and defeated. Because God help the “urban black man” or woman whose poems don’t riff on contingent reality in – and I have genuinely heard this expression used before now – “the language of the street.”
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It is frustrating. It is beyond frustrating. I want to write from inside my reality, inside my skin, but I don’t want to do it in the expected or obvious way, and I don’t want to do it from a distance. I have zero interest in rising above my class. I’ll rise with mine or not at all. I’m 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 wasn’t 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 I’m damned if I do, and I’m damned if I don’t. People who have no idea what it’s like to live with the unacknowledged burden / the unacknowledged labour of class and cultural identity, chide you as “inauthentic” if you write other than your roots, and haul you over the coals for “fixating” on or “exploiting” 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 lady’s loo. The gist was the magazine in which we’d both been featured had only featured me because I’d “played the gypsy card”, 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 I’d 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 “outside” 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 I’ve 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 “arrived”, so to speak, now that I’ve 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.
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