In the wake of chancellor George Osborne's latest spending cuts, radical poet and editor Alan Morrison surveys the rising tide of protest poetry, and calls on all “politically-conscious” poets to come together in greater numbers to resist  “brutalising austerity”. This is his polemic:  

“Three years into the Tory-driven brutalisation of our society, there is now the very kind of far-reaching poetry opposition to austerity, which the Poets in Defence of the Welfare State (PDWS) campaign attempted to jump-start back in autumn 2010 with the advent of the nation’s first anti-cuts e-verse campaign, Emergency Verse, thus titled as a riposte to “Baron” George Osborne’s odious “emergency” budget. Thanks to donations from many of its 120 contributors, most notably Michael Rosen and Prakash Kona, the ebook migrated into print, a thick red brick of poetry and polemic, patroned by Caroline Lucas of the Green Party, and launched to a packed Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre in January 2011. The Robin Hood Book followed in 2012: an even thicker, Granny Smith-green breezeblock of a book, totalling 131 contributors, patroned by Mark Serwotka of the PCS union. An updated second edition was launched at the Bluecoat in Liverpool, last January.

There is now a flourishing crop of protest poetry campaigns – most recently, Poets Against Atos, Poets for Freedom  and Solidarity Park’s support for Turkish anti-capitalist protesters. We also have Jody Porter’s revamped Well Versed poetry columns in the Morning Star; increasingly politicised collections issuing from imprints such as Smokestack, Lapwing and Waterloo, and radical poetry from journals such as Red Poets, The Spleen, and Mike Quille’s Soul Food poetry pages in The Communist Review; a germination of alternative verse on the internet through outlets such as The Penniless Press, The Recusant, and Niall McDevitt and Heathcote Williams’ vibrant reincarnation of the counter-cultural International Times. A new breed of British oppositional poetry is currently surging past the beige banks of a broadly “liberal” poetry scene only belatedly catching up with this peripeteia.

Most of the poetic opposition to the Tories’ pincer movement on the poorest has, to paraphrase Auden, been “a way of happening” on the margins, in a “valley of its making” quite separate from the metropolitan poetry elites. There have been some ostensible debates on austerity politics in certain high-profile journals, but these occasional dialectics have come across as tokenistic and non-committal, indicative of a post-modernist quietism muttering in a clothbound comfort zone. The most glaring example of such distinguished disingenuousness was the ‘Where Is The New Political Poetry?’ summer 2011 issue of Poetry Review (under then-editor Fiona Sampson), which constituted one big, glossy non-sequitur.

Otherwise, the poetry establishments have seemed more preoccupied with constructing their own austerity survival kits than with taking any obviously active part in poetic resistance to the poisonous policies and stigmatising narratives of the most right-wing government in living memory. In this more “acquisitive” era of verse, then, should we revise Auden’s famous trope: ‘For poetry is now transaction: it survives/ In the valley of its taking where executives/ Pass round the trophy hamper…;// A way of bartering, a pouch’…?

Ultimately, it will be to the lasting detriment of not only British poetry and its perceived relevance, but of society itself, if poets with the most prominent platforms choose tactical circumlocution over more robust poetic opposition to what is happening to this country. This is a time for poets to speak up for the powerless; or, in the spirit of Christopher Caudwell’s polemic on the social role of poetry, Illusion and Reality (1937), for poets to take up their natural place as mouthpieces for the common people, and challenge the brutalism of a decaying, morally bankrupt capitalist system. For capitalism, such as the anarchic and valueless strain we live under today, is the enemy not only of all common good and social solidarity, but of poetry itself.

Could we imagine Auden or Spender having nothing to say in their poetry about the state of society if they were here today? Of course not: they’d be doing precisely what they did in the Thirties – very much the twin decade to ours – and pooling their powers into oppositional poetry and polemic. But should we really be so completely surprised at a time of peaking patriotism, at the ermine-fawning fag-end of a three-decade-long cultural decline, that the arts mainstreams should be so sloth-like in challenging the establishments that have heaped them with patronage and – to echo Caudwell again – “trustified” their art?

Caudwell argued that the more “successful” artists of capitalist societies – ie the best adapted – are stylistically incapable of dissent, even when in their interests. This might, then, explain the apparent paralysis of response among the upper poetry echelons to the government’s melting down of our social democracy.

In the meantime, the widening tide of oppositional poetry will continue to cause ripples; to pile its spines of protest anthologies on the reefs of resistance; and to continue occupying “Auden country” in the absence of its landlords, the as-yet undecided poetry-speculators. Poetry is all of our property; it is the demotic flower grown from the common tongue; it has the power to persuade, to foster fellowship; even, at its most empathic, to serve as the mouthpiece for the body politic. Shelley once wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” – such is the potential for profound influence on social consciousness that poets, at the vanguard of a changing language, possess.

It is up to all politically conscious poets to come together in greater numbers and put poetry at the epicentre of popular resistance to brutalising austerity. Losing jobs, security, benefits and homes is devastating enough, but more and more people in this country are losing hope. And, at times of lowest spirits, poetry – like prayer – has the peculiar power to rehabilitate hope. And without hope, opposition withers.”

A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Morning Star

Poet Alan Morrison is editor of The Recusant and Caparison’s anti-cuts anthologies Emergency Verse and The Robin Hood Book (highest runner up in the Morning Star Protest in Poetry award). He is also polemical contributor to Fit To Work: Poets Against Atos. A third Caparison anthology, The Rent Book – Verse for the Evicted Generation, to petition for the reintroduction of private rent controls, is planned for 2014.