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The
quotation chosen by Robert Sheppard as the epigraph for Warrant Error is by the late Bill Griffiths
-- 'What better disguise for evil than sonnets?' It's an appropriate question
given that Sheppard's subject is essentially that of 'The War on Terror', as
suggested (undermined?) by the
punning title, and that his formal experiments within the sonnet form
foreground the aesthetic aspect of his writing. Other poets currently working
within what I'd broadly call an aesthetic/ethical framework have often used
the sonnet as starting point for their material, notably Ken Edwards and Tony
Lopez. So the questions are, is it possible to combine a sense of play and
of pleasure with a serious critique or engagement and how far is it still
possible to write political poetry? If we accept that the work of Tony
Harrison, for example, has its place but also its limitations and has pretty
much run out of steam, how else to use language in a manner which is
engaging, critical and able to take some measure of complexity without
becoming a blunt instrument or a ranting clichˇ?
There is a sense of the epic about Sheppard's poetry in that he works with
the long sequence and with major projects -- Twentieth Century Blues, for example -- and his work as
teacher, critic and essayist obviously informs his notion of what a
contemporary theory of poetry might be and conditions his practice of writing
poetry. If his theme is that of contemporary and recent history, combining
the 'big events' with everyday and localised experience, there's also an
erotic charge to his writing which fuels its 'awkward dislocation' yet gives
it an energy which often throws up uncomfortable feelings in the reader. There's
a sense of provocation in his work, a questioning of the 'macho' within his
own writing which feels ambivalent and tender at the same time. Sheppard's is
a writing which attempts to 'get inside the language', to force a critical
process in the reader while also enjoying the pleasurable nature of writing
itself, even where the subject matter is at the extreme end of human
experience. The work of David Harsent comes to mind though I suspect that
politically there is little common ground.
The compression of the sonnet form combines with a cinematic snap-shot
technique and a liking for puns is evident throughout the book. Sheppard's is
a poetry which is witty and alliterative, playful and hard-hitting, using the
news report and media coverage as a starting point for his assault upon the
citadel. That he also manages to be questioning and quizzical as well as
hard-nosed in his investigations is a tribute to his tenacity. Art may not
take the place of journalism where the latter has become meek and tamed, not
to say world-weary, but it's arguable that the aesthetic has a vital role to
play in our challenged and fragile democracy. Take this sample from the
sequence 'Off the Books':
Self-protection was self-consumption scared
Or sacred
it's eased into the holiest story
A sonnetized
account with the biggest screen test
Local colour
was masked by raw
Overheads and
the heresy was mere hearsay
When
evidently witless their mouths agape they rose
At bungled
bugle-blasts jamming Agape and Eros
In the ballad
of the blade she bites him
Obliged
attack he shoots mightily back in
Terror or
error she tries to send the message
From
compassion back to passion
She writes
releases for rouged regimes
When she's finished
she pulls the plug
And he spills
the viscous liquid for her
You could read this as an encapsulation of the events post September 11th,
suggesting a history of the relations between East and West or about the
challenged supremacy of American domination behaving irrationally in confused
disorder. This might be a charitable way of putting the matter, depending on
your viewpoint. The play on 'agape' and 'Agape' hints at the long history of
religious conflict and there's a skewed narrative discourse derived partly
from snippets of reportage and language culled from press and media
throughout the history of 'The War on Terror', a term which clearly has
ironic implications in this context.
Much of Sheppard's critique/response is filtered through the way we receive
information about events via the visual media. There's a distancing,
pacifying element to this which is such a common experience now that the
virtual world is almost more real than the 'real' world. You could argue that
by 'going with the flow' Sheppard's technique is complicit but what choice
have we got other than to be perpetually angry and full of rant. Sheppard's
aim is more deconstructive, more Brechtian, and it's arguably a much more
effective way of dealing with madness and 'irrationality'. There's a strong
surreal streak within his work which is also an appropriate response. Adorno
was wrong, if we take him at 'face-value', -- art is even more necessary at
times such as these:
You are
neither inside the room nor outside. You melt
in piny
breeze from unlatched windows catching
shadows, a
hint of coffee from the cafetiere
Consultant to
this enterprise, you deconstruct from history,
decapitated
consciousness: the eyes the ears
the brain
collecting fitful data still from the world
as it's lost.
The fateful apologia of the mob fades.
Azure is pure
message behind choking smoke.
Heads bow
over the human mess they've made.
The poet
leads the service of remembrance
Within
minutes they've forgotten. Nothing. The prince
waggles his
ears as corpses are pulled out of nowhere.
Personality
teeth gleam from his chattering person
his coiffure
set atremble like a tea-party jelly.
('Black Flower')
A number of
these poems are like news reports filed from different locations: so we get
'Night vision green flecked with sparks / And clouds of vectoral vapour
pouring across / Sun-baked gravel where a human head severe/And severed
scarved in crackling plastic ...' ('Afghanistan'). Sheppard plays with the crisp
style of the tabloid journalist just as he utilises the language of
pornography and the overall effect is both disturbing and humorous. 'The new
twenty-pound note feels crisp as a fake / As Adam Smith lectures us on
division / Over a Chelsea bun and a white plastic knife' ('London').
I'm reminded of
Sheppard's stacatto, fast-forward reading style as I'm skipping through these
poems again and it strikes me that one way of responding to them -- to their
condensed, snapshot sense of movement -- is to see them as being almost like
speeded-up cubism, where different perspectives are juxtaposed and where a
kind of overall viewpoint becomes just about possible. If this is a method
inspired by visual media and particularly by film then it's arguably one
which is more able to deal with difference and with complexity than with the
more usual linear poem structure which can often only handle one idea at a
time. This sense of being overwhelmed, of struggling to take on all this
information (disinformation!) and competing viewpoints and having to come to
a conclusion of sorts, often at short notice, is a common feature of modern
life. Sheppard's style is thus far more 'social-realist' than
actually-existing social-realism and this fact in no way compromises his
critical stance. Warrant Error
is a challenging and ambitious collection of poems and one which deserves
wide attention.
In his recent critical work Modern English War Poetry, Tim Kendall takes to task
those 'anti-war' poets who have little or no experience of the actual war
zone (Tony Harrison comes in for particular flak here) and while Kendall, a
careful and insightful critic, forces you to confront your own 'prejudices',
writing such as Sheppard's, less immediate and more ambitious in scope than
Harrison's 'liberal humanist' response, deserves a more considered and
reflective approach. Surely the merit of Warrant Error is that Sheppard is attempting
a large-scale response to recent catastrophic events in a manner which is
critical, if sometimes oblique (all the better for it, some would say) and
yet substantial and important. If poets aren't allowed to deal with big
issues any more, if 'The War on Terror' is somehow out-of-bounds or beyond
discussion then we're heading towards a serious period of censorship and/or
self-censorship.
© Steve
Spence 2009
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