Nonviolence and Peaceful Disposition

"but all these Vs: against!  against!  against!

  --Tony Harrison, "v."

When striving for a nonviolent treatment of people and animals, it is too easy to argue with anger and hostility.  Discussion of violence against humans often takes place in political argument, which splits into a contentious side-against-side debate without movement.  This is doubly true regarding animals: if you are arguing for nonviolence against animals, not only are you are in conflict with the vast majority of the culture, but you are fighting with people over very real, personal, day-to-day values and behavior.

I find myself wanting to avoid this contentiousness.  I want to strive for nonviolence, but I also want to strive for internal peacefulness and a peaceful relationship with other people.  To argue against warfare and against killing of animals, it is rather too easy to be angry and contentious, rather difficult to find that internal peacefulness and a peaceful way to communicate with fellow people.

I argue about other topics.  I argue about sports, but try to do so in an analytical manner, addressing the available data.  And I argue about literature (though that, too, can get too close to contentious argument over deeply held values).  

The hostility in discussion over nonviolence (against humans and animals) sometimes makes me want withdraw, to immerse myself into poetry, or into religion.  But does a peaceful disposition require one to leave the real striving to others?  Is quietude an abandonment of the effort against violence?

I hope not.  It is impossible to be entirely non-confrontational on these subjects--to say it is wrong to kill animals is a confrontation.  But I find myself wishing to have discussions based on reason, using rational argument to avoid contentiousness, avoiding insult or inflammatory language.  I hope to strive for nonviolent treatment of people and animals, but to treat opponents with dignity and to still seek an inner peacefulness.

The first stanza of "v."

"Next millennium you'll have to search quite hard

to find my slab behind the family dead,

butcher, publican, and baker, now me, bard

adding poetry to their beef, beer, and bread."

Tony Harrison's "v." contains 112 four line stanzas.  When I come back to the poem, I'm struck by how succinctly the first stanza reveals the major subjects of the rest of the long poem.

One of the elements of the poem is the pit underneath the cemetery, a "rabblement of bone and rot,/ shored slack, crushed shale, smashed prop."  This pit is a part of the discussion of the process of nature making "coal, that began, with no man here at all,/as 300 million-year-old plant debris."  It is in the creation of this coal that the "v." represents victory "For vast, slow, coal-creating forces that hew the body's seams to get the soul."  The useless dead bodies, through hundreds of millions of years, are turned into something useful (in fact, coal is warming the poet's home at the end of the poem).  It is a long process, requiring time.    And the first line of the poem subtly puts us into the the mindset of long periods of times with the reference to "millennium."

The poem is partly about the poet's relationship with his family, which is also about his relationship to class.  And so his "slab behind the family dead" puts us into that context.  The poet will share memories of his father, and wrestle internally with his class and the relationship of poetry to class.

The sounds in the next two lines are harsh but alliterative; they share similar sounds, but they share harsh beginnings and endings that require distinct pronunciations.  The key words in the third line are the job titles (and job titles, we find, are listed on the gravestones in the cemetery): butcher, publican, baker, bard.  the fourth line features nouns that are produced by those workers described in line three: poetry, beef, beer, and bread.  It's also worth noting the simple words beef, beer, and bread also seem to connote the food for working class people: simple, hearty, affordable.   Beer has class associations, and beef and bread are food provided for us by a "butcher" or a "baker."

And it's hard not to see the strong contrast between "poetry" and "beef, beer, and bread."  The sounds themselves are different: three single-syllable words, beginning with "b" and also ending with a consonant, against "poetry."  The different sounds remind us in the major difference: beef, beer, and bread are tangible and useful.  They provide something for people.  We can consume them.  What's poetry to that?  Hollow and empty.  "Poetry" can sound grand, but when you set poetry next to "beef, beer, and bread," it becomes nothingness both of sound and content.

And Harrison seems to recognize that; after all, later the skinhead voice tells him "it's not poetry we need in this class war."  Poetry is ultimately ineffectual.  The poem is partly about class and material conditions, about poverty and social place.  The beef, beer, and bread can provide something concrete and useful; poetry is air.  So in the first stanza, "now me, bard/adding poetry" to those useful consumables, comes off as sort of silly, frivolous.  But "poet" will be the label on Harrison's gravestone.

Perhaps we as readers don't see the deprecation there.  After all, would a poet minimize the use of poetry within a poem?  And would we as readers, obviously seeing some value in poetry since we are reading it, perhaps consider poetry loftier, nobler, more meaningful than the rougher, more common "beef, beer, and bread"?  Maybe.  But the material conditions of poetry are emphasized in the poem's final line, where Harrison's epitaph tells viewer that if they want to seek where poetry comes from, they should "find the beef, the beer, the bread, then look behind."  This last stanza again reminds us of the pit under the graveyard (evoking the process of turning decay into something useful), and then tells us the poetry comes from those tangible products, those useful edibles, food and drink.

It is, then, lines three and four of the poem that really bring us our subject.  Harrison names job titles (mostly working class job titles, put into the context of time and death), and then identifies the tangible material "stuff" produced by those doing the jobs (the nouns are, in my opinion, critical, as they require us to focus on the material "stuff").  But most importantly, he immediately places the role of poetry into this discussion.  The poem explores the relationship of language and class (the skinhead's shouting would not be the same without the cursing), but more specifically the relationship of poetry to class, to social change, to our real lives.  Harrison tells the skinhead voice that he writes poetry to give the lower class "a hearing," to "give some higher meaning to your scrawl."  The skinhead not only points out that such an effort really gives nothing to those people, but is not even in the language of those people ("Can't you speak/the language that yer mam spoke").  They talk about the cursing, Harrison telling the voice his mother didn't talk like him, and the voice responding "She didn't understand yer fucking 'art'!/She thought yer fucking poetry obscene!"  

The poem is about other things: the versus, the united, and all that.  But central is poetry, language, class.  Harrison doesn't suggest there is a simply relationship here, but he is, at any rate, exploring that relationship, and he shows us this from the first stanza.

favorite poetry (without comment)

My three favorite poems are John Milton's Paradise Lost, Tony Harrison's "v.", and Sylvia Plath's "Daddy."  My favorite poetry collections are Ted Hughes' Crow and Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife.

Reading For Oneself

My Reading Declaration in Brief
Chapter One: "Reading for Oneself"

"it's not poetry we need in this class war."
Tony Harrison, v.

Whatever you read, however you read, whenever you read, you should read primarily for yourself. Whether that means you read for pleasure or for education, for moral edification or for aesthetic analysis, for spiritual nourishment or for entertainment, for career necessity or merely to pass the time, you read for yourself. Your experience with the book is going to be largely solitary. You do not have to justify your reading to anybody else. You do not have to explain how or why you read to anybody else. What you choose to read is for you, and you needn't feel guilty if anybody else disapproves. And if you are ever required to read something, you should still read for yourself: the person requiring you to read cannot gain anything from your time with the book, but you can, and in a year it will not matter to that person whether you read a particular assigned book, but it may still matter to you.

We are not alone as readers. We can share, discuss, argue, teach, learn. But that is separate from the experience of reading (though it may be a part of the book lingering with you long after you've put it down). It is unlikely you can help anybody else by reading--there are much better ways to help others. And we read as individuals: in the great variation of humanity, we find many ways to do most everything, and that includes reading.

Loving what you do

Next up in lit class, I get to teach Tony Harrison's "v." (probably my favorite 20th century poem) and David Henry Hwang's "M. Butterfly" (probably my favorite 20th century play).

I always look forward to exposing students to these works, but teaching literature you love can be a challenge. Lit classes thrive on discussion, so I have to resist turning class into a proselytizing lecture ("This is why this poem is so brilliant. Don't you get it!?!").

Complacency, Adversity, and Art

I had a prof in grad school who said he realized he’d never be able to write fiction because his life was too normal—it was people with screwed up lives who find great material for fiction.

Another prof once suggested that the reason there are so many great writers from Ireland and the American South is tied directly to poverty. The idea is that poor individuals are closer to the hard realities of human existence, and are able to make great human insights that those in a more prosperous, sheltered life cannot.

My greatest intellectual flourishing was in grad school, when I pretty much lived on a stipend and often spent less than $30 a week on groceries. My most complacent intellectual period has been the last two years, when I’ve had a comfortable job, lots of free time, and disposable income. In a few months, I expect things to get tight again—and then, perhaps, the complacency will be gone and the intellectual flourishing can return.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but if they hadn’t been exiled from their hometowns, Dante would have never written The Divine Comedy, and Machiavelli would have never written The Prince. Milton didn’t write Paradise Lost until he was an old blind man who had seen the Puritan rule of England fall to the hated Restoration. Didn’t Cervantes spend time as a prisoner of war before writing Don Quixote? John Keats tragic early death probably cost the world volumes of beautiful poetry—but did his illness contribute to the beautiful poetry he did leave us? Dostoevsky, if I’m not mistaken, spent time in work prisons and was nearly executed (my knowledge of author biographies is shaky at best—I’ve been much more concerned with understanding the texts they left us than knowing the details of their lives).

Education matters; there aren’t that many brilliant working class writers in western history, and no peasants became literary geniuses (that I’m aware of). But do the tribulations of life contribute to artistic creation? Can prosperity, complacency, and comfort lead to brilliant art?

Or, as Tony Harrison suggests in his brilliant poem "v.", does poetry grow from shit? Harrison writes in "v." that dead, rotting corpses turn to coal, that victory is to the "vast, slow, coal-creating forces/ that hew the body's seams to get the soul." Does brilliant art grow from human suffering?