[ChrisW]

To summarize what I can no longer refer you to, ewrgall posted a political poem a few days ago. This thread is now gone for reasons I won't go into here. What's relevant to me is Nigel Holt's defense of the poem.

As nyctom pointed out, and Roger Slater later showed in detail, the poem had poetic flaws usually regarded as pretty major -- used trite language and ill-considered metaphors. It packed something of a punch in that it appealed to standard images of horror: "blow the old man and the children to hell" for example. I claimed that it was manipulative in "pressing our buttons" in this way (the old man and the children are automatic objects of pity).

Nigel defended the poem as hard-hitting and successful agit prop -- in other words as a form of propaganda.

Now, from the point of view of propaganda and advertising, triteness and manipulation are not a problem -- if we assume that the propagandist or advertiser simply wants us to reach a certain conclusion and act accordingly. The advertiser doesn't care whether he uses non-rational means to persuade us to buy Pepsi; the propagandist doesn't care that he has kept the voter from knowing anything substantive about the candidate and has just fed the voters a likeable image.
Insofar as his aim is ONLY to persuade us, it makes a great deal of sense for him to press these ready-made buttons -- to be sentimental. Triteness and sentimentality are not automatically a bad thing in advertising -- so long as they work.

The scientist, the scholar, the philosopher want (or should want) to persuade in a non-manipulative way. I suggest that real poetry, though it may wish to persuade, does not attempt to persuade manipulatively. (The evidence for this is that even a well-made advertising jingle doesn't seem to be a poem.)

(What is manipulative persuasion? I suggest, as a starting point, that I persuade you non-manipulatively, if you would be just as persuaded by my case, if you could read my mind -- if you understood how I went about persuading you.)

So how does this sound?:
Poetry is essentially non-manipulative.

More questions:
1. Is there room for political poetry (i.e., non-manipulative verse with a political point) -- or is political poetry necessarily manipulative.
2 Can someone provide a good piece of agit prop verse -- other than ewrgall's poem, which might cause problems here.
3. Have I been unfair in my description of "agit prop" if so, what is it?
4. Does anyone have a better explanation of what non-manipulative persuasion is?
5. Is this requirement that poetry persuade without manipulation a moral requirement on art?

[Roger Slater]

You're more likely to convince a person about anything if you allow them to think of it for themselves so it becomes their idea and not yours.

The reason Ewrgll's poem didn't work, even as agit-prop, is that it made no attempt whatsoever to portray images or events in such a way that the reader will tend to adopt the beliefs that the author wanted to promote. Those, like Nigel, who already agree with the poem will approve of the message but, if they reflect a bit, will probably realize that the poem did not change the way they felt or add any sort of nuance or significance to their pre-existing attitudes.

Those who do not already have an opinion about the conflict will certainly not find anything in the poem to move them in one direction or the other, although many of them will presumably balk at the generic condemnation of all Jews (which would, of course, include the opposition parties in Israel as well as many pro-Palestinian liberal Jews in America).

And this is why Ewrgll's poem doesn't work even as propoganda, and why even an astute Jew-hating critic would probably reject it as poorly written. I presume that Hitler's minister of propoganda sometimes turned down poems whose message was congenial to the Reich but which were badly written and ineffectual at what they set out to do. Ewrgll wrote a poem that added absolutely nothing to the message that couldn't have been said in straightforward and pedestrian prose. That he managed to make it rhyme (by using imprecise language and cliche) did not enhance the message one iota. In fact, it cheapened his message and made the careful reader suspicious of what he said.

[ChrisW]

Thanks, Roger. I hope the discussion won't focus too much on the now-vanished ewrgall poem. Maybe someone can offer us a genuinely good piece of agit prop.

You're right that it's better to get somebody to think they thought of an idea themselves, but this can be done manipulatively -- just watch some I Love Lucy episodes.

I don't know why you are so sure that cliche is a problem for propaganda: people are touched (though not MOVED) by many a Hallmark card.

In propaganda and advertising, the main aim is usually to avoid provoking thought: You don't want somebody asking "will all the girls REALLY be after me if I just use Head and Shoulders"? -- the right cliches of feeling (father calling daughter whose away at college -- by means of AT&T long distance) might be better than something more specific or individual.


[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited July 24, 2002).]

[Freda Edis]

Chris,
People might find these agit-prop poems by Benjamin Zephaniah interesting.

Freda
Blue Text
Blue Text

White Comedy

I waz whitemailed
By a white witch,
Wid white magic
An white lies,
Branded by a white sheep
I slaved as a whitesmith
Near a white spot
Where I suffered whitewater fever.
Whitelisted as a whiteleg
I was in de white book
As a master of white art.
It waz like white death.
People called me white jack
Some hailed me as a white wog,
So I joined the white watch
Trained as a white guard
Lived off the white economy.
Caught and beaten by the whiteshirts
I was condemned to a white mass,
Don't worry,
I shall be writing to de Black House.
Blue Text
Blue Text

Neighbours
from 'Propa Propaganda'


I am the type you are supposed to fear
Black and foreign
Big and dreadlocks
An uneducated grass eater.

I talk in tongues
I chant at night
I appear anywhere,
I sleep with lions
And when the moon gets me
I am a Wailer.

[Robert J. Clawson]

THE UNITED FRUIT CO.

When the trumpet sounded, it was
all prepared on the earth,
and Jehovah parceled out the earth
to Coca-Cola, Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other entities:
The Fruit Company, Inc.
reserved for itself the most succulent,
the central coast of my own land,
the delicate waist of America.
It rechristened its territories
as the "Banana Republics"
and over the sleeping dead,
over the restless heroes
who brought about the greatness,
the liberty and the flags,
it established the comic opera:
abolished the independencies,
presented crowns of Caesar,
unsheathed envy, attracted
the dictatorship of the flies,
Ubico flies, damp flies
of modest blood and marmalade,
drunken flies who zoom
over the ordinary graves,
circus flies, wise flies
well trained in tyranny.

Among the bloodthirsty flies
the Fruit Company lands it ships,
taking off the coffee and the fruit;
the treasure of our submerged
territories flows as though
on plates into the ships.

Meanwhile Indians are falling
into the sugared chasms
of the harbors, wrapped
for burial in the mist of the dawn:
a body rolls, a thing
that has no name, a fallen cipher,
a cluster of dead fruit
thrown down on the dump.

Pablo Neruda

Translated by Robert Bly

[Nigel Holt]

It's very late here, but I will come back to this later. In the meantime - something for you to read and think on:

<A HREF="http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/ridge/politics.htm" TARGET=_blank>Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney
Excerpts from the Introduction to An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry</A>

Nigel

[ChrisW]

Thanks, Nigel. I'm still fighting my way through all the purple in the prose in that article, but here is one passage that seems relevant to my point:

"Poetry and propaganda are two sides of the same shield. Without passion there can be no poetry, and all who feel strongly burn with a zeal to have others share their feeling. True poets are also propagandists, even though their propaganda may be simply for the love of life and the life of love."

I maintain that a poet ought to be an inquirer/lover of truth first, and then a TEACHER-- NOT a propagandist. A good teacher may hope that you will reach his conclusions, but, if he is a good teacher, he should be much more concerned about HOW you reach your conclusions. He should be more concerned that, after being presented with the facts and all the relevant arguments, you reach your own conclusions by the exercise or your own reason (not by way of some fallacy or lack of attention to facts). If your opinion and his ultimately coincide, so much the better, but if you have dealt with all his facts and his arguments rationally, then he has done his job.

The propagandist has a conclusion ahead of time (which he may well believe to be true) and his aim is to get others to believe (passionately believe, as the authors of this essay might add) in that conclusion. The authors of this piece are pretty clear what this conclusion is.

The poet, I suggest, is first of all, trying emotionally and imaginatively to grasp the truth -- to get a real sense of reality, not just be able to regurgitate "the facts."
He tries to achieve this partly by making sure that this grasp of the truth can be reproduced in others (like the confirmation of an experiment).

Given this aim, it's obvious why triteness is beside the point to the real poet -- dead language doesn't help the imagination grasp the truth. But from the point of view of propaganda and advertising, cliched language and sentimentality and other "cliches of feeling" might be extremely useful in getting people to adopt the desired conclusion.

The fact that we tend to regard triteness as a serious flaw is, I think, explained by this conception of the aims of poetry -- and therefore tends to confirm this view of what poetry aims at.

Well, all of this may be a little grandiose if you compare it with my own doggerel, but I'm trying to see what poetry ought to be, not examine my own practice.


[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited July 25, 2002).]

[ChrisW]

[quote]Originally posted by Robert J. Clawson:
[b]THE UNITED FRUIT CO.

When the trumpet sounded, it was
all prepared on the earth,
and Jehovah parceled out the earth
to Coca-Cola, Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other entities:
The Fruit Company, Inc.
reserved for itself the most succulent,
the central coast of my own land,
the delicate waist of America.

I like this one up to about this point -- 'entities' is witty in the context, and 'delicate waist of America' seems to me a good image.
Then the whole creation myth switches over to talk of comic opera and flies -- why? Maybe it's just that I don't get all the significance of the flies, but it seems like he's switching allegories in midstream. Then the flies are abandoned and we've got falling Indians.
I think I'd have preferred a continuation of the creation myth. I guess the idea is to keep up a flow of prophetic images, but I'd prefer a consistent working out of the first idea.
The first part is interesting -- the last part seems to want to be moving, but it just seems like an odd picture to me -- maybe because I'm not sufficiently aware of the context.

How effective can agit prop poetry be, I wonder. This piece avoids some of the worst problems with it, but then it doesn't seem very directly connected to action.
If you want to change things, wouldn't it be better to write a book or make a documentary?
Poetry isn't good at the back and forth of good journalism, so it isn't going to be able to reach people who disagree -- or if it does so, it may be doing so by irrational means.
Neruda attributes certain evils to the Fruit Company. Others will claim that the country would be worse off but for the outside investment of the Fruit Company, etc. etc.
A poem is a rotten place to try to hunt down the truth between the competing claims.
Nor does poetry seem like the right place to work out options and decide among them. You could versify such an essay, but the effect would be an awful essay and awful verse.
The article Nigel posted suggests that poetry provides the connection to the emotions. Poetry is connected to the emotions, but it doesn't have a monopoly on emotion. A documentary which shows the sufferings of these Indians and then traces their suffering back to the Fruit Company WILL be moving -- and besides that, it will persuade us rationally of its factual assumptions.


[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited July 25, 2002).]

[VictoriaGaile]

Roger, you wrote something about the poem failing as propaganda because it makes not even the slightest effort to convince.

I think you're overlooking the "agit" part of "agit prop".

A poem like that is quite effective for stirring up the passions and giving a voice to the people who already agree with the poem at some level. It gives them something to chant, something to put on bumper stickers and posters,
something to email each other, something to mobilize around. It can potentially convince a person who was undecided, or who didn't care that much, to become more active. It can even cause a person who didn't *realize* that they identified with a cause or a group, to begin to identify with the group, if the poem tapped some hidden anger or depth of feeling. I have had this latter experience myself, although it was a song, not a poem.

As far as "real poetry" is concerned, I personally see no value in identifying certain pieces, let alone whole styles, as "real poetry" and "not real poetry". That was part of the point I tried to make in "13 Ways of Looking at a Poem". Clearly many of those 13 ways would not be welcomed here, and are not appropriate here. Does that mean they aren't "real poems"? Some here obviously would say (and have said) yes. I disagree. I think poetry has many valid modes. Erato is devoted to only some of them, and quite properly so.

It seems to me that discussions of "real poetry" and "what poetry ought to be" are essentially elitist, and only result in making some people feel good and other people feel bad about what they write. I do not mean this as an accusation or an attack: simply as an observation. I have never seen any other product of such discussions. I would be interested in hearing any observations to the contrary.

I would much rather frame the discussion in terms of "what does poetry have the *potential* to be", or "What does poetry do when it is at its best?"

Victoria Gaile

[ChrisW]

Victoria, Thanks for responding -- I was worrying that no one else was going to come along.
I agree with your reponse to Roger -- good points! (Lest I seem to contradict myself, let me clarify my last post -- agit prop poetry might be effective, but I'm inclined to think it can do only half the work that a good documentary can do -- if you had a documentary to demonstrate the truth of your assertions about United Fruit, the poem could then stir people up about it -- still, the documentary itself might do a better job of THAT too.)

I had no intention to be elitist -- at least not in a bad way. (Sometimes having any standards at all is regarded as elitist.) I'm really sorry to have phrased this question in a way that might put people off.

I think I may have put people off in a number of other ways at the beginning of this thread.
I'm going to start a new thread with three general questions having no reference to my own thoughts or recent events on Eratosphere and see what that elicits.



[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited July 26, 2002).]