Douglas Oliver:
Penniless Politics
Douglas Oliver, Penniless Politics. Bloodaxe Books, 1994. 80pp A5. ISBN 1 85224 269 8.
Some co-ordinates: Oliver is Anglo-Scots, exhibited among the Cambridge poets (he's in the anthology A Various Art), lived in New York's Lower East Side, married the American poet Alice Notley, now lives in Paris. Not an identikit Bloodaxe writer, though the recent squib in Angel Exhaust magazine about Bloodaxe only publishing bad poetry when it is English, Irish or American wasn't meant to be fair.
Penniless Politics arrives framed in Howard Brenton's foreword/review (first printed in The Guardian), which unhelpfully compares the poem's impact on him with that of The Waste Land on it's first audience - forgetting that that audience included Williams, Zukofsky and Crane, for whom the Eliot seemed to unwrite their first essays at an American (and possibilistic) Modernism. Oliver, at any rate, steers far closer to Brenton's Scylla, Paradise Lost, with his "ambitious-as-Milton" first line:
All politics the same crux: to define humankind richly.
Richness Oliver can do. The poem treats of the 'Voodoo-Haitian' Emen, her Anglo-Scot poet husband Will Penniless, and the birth of "Spirit", a new political party for the non-voting U.S. majority ("Make material wealth for other people, spiritual wealth for ourselves"). The first months of the movement, from a simple chain letter to widespread media curiosity, are stage-managed with often breathtaking skill - the rumour of voodoo working as potently in the public sphere as its grounded reality does in the private lives of Spirit's (largely female) prime movers. The narrative is thick with set-pieces whose internal logic seems, in context, impeccable: from the 'Wall of Women' used to besiege local drug barons to Emen's possessed incarnation as the voodoo "Hooman" (it's all done with mirrors), everything points inevitably to the final secession of "District A1, New York State, United States of America" - a district provided, unlike some, with its own Constitution. Hilariously triumphant as the unprevented election of Emen to district president is, the poem turns, in its Coda, on the "hypocrite reader":
You want some opiate, a poetic abracadabra
so your ordinary responsibility for our ordinary political failure
can be charmed away? No.
Nothing so simple. The party "founded in a poem" dissolves, its idealism drowned in "a flotsam tide of neglect" which lets "dangerous men float into office" unchallenged. The poem's bitter conclusion is best left for the reader to discover, but it's a bitterness born of a furious, bruised faith in human (hooman) potential:
Ah! Search the past for the most ancient wisdom
in the world: that too much possession, too great a seeking of thrill,
harms the soul!
Spirit (spirit?) "endures forever". True. Even if (also true) "it can never breathe for more than a moment before // a poem is finished", Douglas Oliver has still ceded this reader a viable lungful of hope.
[Footnote: the poem is written with a virtuoso's freedom through stanzas with the intricate rhyme/repetition-scheme aabbCbaC (Oliver performs an even more remarkable feat in his 1985 satire The Infant and the Pearl, in replicating the structure of the Medieval poem Pearl - probably more complex than that of anything else in English). This doesn't make him a neo-formalist. The sheer playful excitement with which the colloquial languages of the poem bounce off the walls of the strict form betrays the presence of a writer who (like the American Tom Clark or our own Edwin Morgan) has been around the block a few times - rejecting nothing from Modernism's heritage, such writers remain free to regard formalism as a strategy, only one among many, applicable as the job dictates.]
This review first appeared in issue 2 of Southfields magazine, London 1996. Douglas Oliver died in April 2000.
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