I’ve spent enough time both on this blog and elsewhere talking about poetry reflecting the world around us, being therapeutic, entering us into the lives of others, so you probably don’t want to read it now. However, I don’t yet know where this post is going to go and there’s a very good chance that we’ll end up there, so if you’re finding that all a bit repetitive, I’ll apologise now.
I’ve never been one of those people who baulked at obscenity. I mean, I was hopelessly innocent when I started secondary school, but within about a year I went from being shocked at the occasional “shit” to effing and blinding with the best of them. The golden rule is to think about your audience- don’t present them with things that will offend them. That’s why I’d never swear in front of my granddad.
When it comes to art, of course, that principle can’t stand. Be it language, sexual or violent content or whatever, the creator loses control over reception and interpretation as soon as a piece is offered to the world, so there’s no way they or anyone else can determine who will come across it. HBO can’t help it if an elderly woman knocks the remote and finds herself horrified at a Game of Thrones sex scene. The responsibility has to lie with the consumer. If you’re going to be offended, don’t engage with the art. Change the channel, don’t go to the gallery, don’t buy the album. But absolutely respect the right of the artist and other consumers to appreciate that which is not to your own taste.
There are some dramatic moments in the history of censorship and obscenity that I wish I’d been alive to see – Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the fights of Shakespeare’s contemporaries to get plays past the Master of the Revels – but one of them is the Early Day Motion brought in Parliament against the broadcast of the 1987 filmed version of V, Tony Harrison’s 30-minute long poem which features 17 uses of the word “cunt” and 25 of “fuck”.
V is probably Harrison’s most famous work. Written about a visit to his parents’ graves in Holbeck Cemetery in Leeds, it describes the realisation that drunken football fans on their way back from yet another dire Leeds United performance (it’s not new) had been taking out their frustrations by spraying expletives on the headstones. The worked-out coal pit beneath the cemetery means the stones are subsiding anyway, so you’ve got the perfect starting point for reflections on class, social change and the role of the poet dramatised in the most arresting way possible. Much of the poem is a brutally sweary confrontation between the narrator and – well, is he the imagined skinhead who desecrated the graves, the voice of what the narrator could have become without his grammar school education and Greek, or both?
And for the first time in over 25 years, somebody has the balls to broadcast it. It’s going out on Radio 4 on February 18th, preceded by a documentary on its reception, introduced by Blake Morrison, and read by Harrison himself.
Beneath your feet’s a poet, then a pit.
Poetry supporter, if you’re here to find
How poems can grow from (beat you to it!) SHIT
find the beef, the beer, the bread, then look behind.
Source:
http://genericenglishgrad.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/53/