David Grundy, “A Voice from the UK…” continued
It didn’t. Parliament voted to increase tuition fees that December. Anti-austerity marches continued in the months that followed, before dying down, and it was the August 2011 riots that begun in Tottenham in protest at Mark Duggan’s murder by police and its coverup that were probably the most vital display of public grievance until the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020. Student fees have become a part of how things were, their abolition no longer even a horizon. Ten years of Tory rule in the UK have decimated welfare provisions, as well as having created the conditions for thousands of avoidable deaths from a catastrophically mishandled pandemic. Tory rule has also generated the neoliberal retooling of universities as consumer entities, with students in debt and teachers on precarious contracts. The socialist experiment of Corbynism is over, as the Labour party courts the nationalist right. Responding in part to last year’s BLM protests, the Tory government is staging a “culture war,” attempting to use free-speech laws to clamp down on dissent. The universities, particularly within humanities disciplines, have been targeted as a key battleground.[1] US higher education, with its adjunct crisis, its struggles for the recognition of unions’ rights to exist, and its mounting burden of debt, sometimes suggests to students and academics in the UK a sense of where we might be ten years down the line, as the neoliberal marketisation of the university gathers pace.
That moment around the UK student movement—Occupy in the US, anti-austerity protests in Europe, the Arab Spring—comes through vividly in an online newsletter designed for printing, distribution and flyering by anyone who wished. Eirik Steinhoff’s A Fiery Flying Roule, named after Abiezer Coppe’s visionary English civil war text, juxtaposed poems, revolutionary quotations, images, and pieces of news, serving as a kind of alternative newspaper. (Steinhoff followed up last year with a series of COVID-era booklets called The Crisis Times).Filled with suggestions, prompts, dispatches that helped the situation to cohere differently, A Fiery Flying Roulewas not quite a magazine, nor a curriculum, but pedagogical, poetic, mobilizable. Likewise, Micah Robbins’ Sous Les Pavés includes a variety of materials in dialogue—work by Tyrone Williams, Rob Halpern, Susan Howe—or moments such as an exchange between poet and printmaker Richard Owens with Amiri Baraka on the role of students in relation to activism: Baraka suggesting that students risk becoming the future management class, Owens arguing that mounting debt and precarity marks a class shift in the nature of being a student. A key presence in both journals is the UK poet Sean Bonney, whose work registered this moment with dialectical clarity and perception, and it is to Bonney I turn now.
Bonney, who died in November 2019, completed a PhD on Baraka’s poetry at Birkbeck College, University of London—the only UOL affiliation to offer evening classes, in a tradition of worker education—and a postdoc on Diane di Prima at Freie Universität Berlin. He was a brilliant, original writer and scholar who worked within the academy but was never fully incorporated by it. His book Happiness: Poems after Rimbaud, largely written in 2010, is a vivid document of what it was like to live through the student movement. From 2011—the summer after the student movement of the preceding autumn—through to 2014 or so, he wrote a series of letters to an imaginary interlocuter, published as Letters Against the Firmament. These letters address a bourgeois liberal, academic poet whose real commitments are tested in times of political crisis as their friends go under: The first of these letters, the “Letter on Poetics,” written on June 25, 2011, echoes Rimbaud’s famous “Lettre Au Voyant”. Rimbaud’s letter, written at the age of just 17 to his teacher Georges Izambard during the months of the Paris Commune in May 1871, criticises Izambard for his recuperation into the position of a teaching professional and his emphasis on “subjective” over “objective” poetry. In Rimbaud’s letter, Izambard tells his young protegee that “we” (poets) “owe a duty to society,” manifested in his role as teacher—“You belong to the teaching body: you move along in the right track.” However, for Rimbaud, “in reality, all you see in your principle is subjective poetry: your obstinacy in reaching the university trough—excuse me—proves this.”[2] Bonney’s addressee is similarly someone with revolutionary sympathies who, like Izambard, has moved up the teaching career ladder, to whom the speaker sends requests for money, threats, and castigates their selling-out of politics for stability and comfort. By contrast, Bonney goes on to argue that Rimbaud’s later poems are subjective reflections of objective defeat:
The sound of the return to capitalist business-as-usual after the intensity of insurrection, the sound of the collective I being pushed back into its individuality, the sound of being frozen to fucking death.[3]
Likewise, the poetry Bonney wrote since the horizon of 2010 faded was a detailed and painful inhabitation of the retreat back into subjectivity. Bonney’s speaker emerges from a whole class of subjects who are atomised, who suffer the effects of mental illness, precarious employment, anxieties about having enough money to feed themselves day to day, struggling to pay rent on a flat they’re too scared to leave. In these poems, the mapping of personal suffering and political defeat become part of a nightmarish, paranoiac cosmology.
Though rarely named as such, the academy looms in the background. Sean’s ‘"Letter against Sickness", written in June 2013, is about going up for a job interview in a British seaside town—a job he didn’t get. He sees a seagull tear apart a pigeon on the seafront outside, then in his hotel room, the voice of then chancellor George Osborne on TV becomes a kind of monstrous force, proclaiming the words “our NHS”: the rhetoric of inclusion while the actual provision of state care is hollowed out—something even more dramatic that is occurring in the current pandemic. The letters are full of such points of concentration—an isolated figure in a room accessing a kind of negative cosmology, “some kind of knot or eclipse,” both a zone of defeat and a space of possibility. “Letter against the firmament” was included in an anthology produced by activist organisation Arts Against Cuts in 2015 called Bad Feelings—an anthology addressing “negation, negativity, and a bottomless catalogue of negative emotions.” The poem similarly describes a time “packed with unfinished events: the Paris Commune, Orgreave, the Mau Mau rebellion. There are any number of examples, counter-earths, clusters of ideas and energies and metaphors that refuse to die, but are alive precisely nowhere.”[4] This is not utopia but a kind of negative space that might be activated: hell and heaven at once. Liberty or death. Socialism or barbarism.
The atmosphere of such poems vividly attests to the anxieties of this political moment, of those on the edge of the university—in a climate of diminishing state provision. And the experience of my generation is of being on the edge, being inside but not exactly of the academy, exploited by short-term contracts or in hourly paid or sessional gigs, performing care for damaged students they don’t get elsewhere. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call the academy a place of refuge—an encampment within a hostile environment—but this is a diminishing horizon.[5] Looking back at two decades of activism, from the Poll Tax revolt to Millbank Tower, Bonney writes:
All of that stuff is piled up like a heap of expressionist rubble in a semi-imaginary alley somewhere far away. [...] Let none of us claim a difference between day and night, between nightmare and daily routine.[6]
*
We received news of Sean’s death just before the election of 2019, while we were out canvassing in a desperate bid to stop another Tory government. It was like the final knell on that moment, exacerbated by the election result and by the pandemic of early 2020. But I don’t want this just to be a story of defeat. Sean’s poetry provides alternatives, even if its spaces, its zones, its knots, its eclipses, can go either way. In late 2011 and early 2012, Sean taught a semester’s workshop at the University of Cambridge, where some of us were students. He had been up for a one-year writing residency he did not get, and this workshop was a kind of consolation prize. The fall after the 2011 riots, we would discuss revolutionary poetics and go to marches in London together, and together feel antagonised against the institutional space we were in. I learned more in Sean’s workshop than in virtually any of the official seminars at this time—this workshop, half-way in, half-way out, the academy door. Once I had to let him into the teaching room because he had not been provided with key-card access. On another occasion, none of us could get into the room and we held the seminar in the deserted faculty building by the vending machines, discussing the march we were going to attend the next week. It felt surreal, satirical, all too real. On alternate weeks, everyone at the workshop would present their poetry. In these sessions, Sean built on his experience in poet Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum workshops—an open space in which everyone read their poems, free of criticism. In other weeks, Sean presented readings in revolutionary poetics—essays and poems by Brecht, Baraka, Debord, and so on—and we discussed how this work related to current struggles. Lenin on slogans might be followed by Lorenzo Thomas on the 1963 Birmingham Civil Rights campaign; Mayakovsky’s “Cloud in Trousers” by a Situationist tract. These workshops were engaged spaces, enclosed by the dead air and corporate sheen of a hostile neo-liberal university, literally underground.
We also discussed the Anti-University of London experiment of 1968, in which the new left, feminist and anti-war movements dovetailed with the crosscurrents associated with the Caribbean Artists’ Movement in workshops taught by C.L.R. James, Stuart Hall, Juliet Mitchell, and by poet Calvin Hernton. London and other UK institutions were the metropolitan center for Caribbean intellectuals whose education had taken the humanist, universalist dictates of the UK academy literally. Upon reaching the UK and encountering the narrow-minded, parochial and racist nature of UK education in practice, they sought to dialectally negate it in the move toward independence, nation language and left-leaning politics. Kamau Brathwaite studied at Oxford in the 1950’s and came back for his PhD at Sussex in the later 60’s, forming part of two waves of radical intellectuals in the era of decolonisation. These are not histories we are taught to pay attention to. Talk of revivals of the Anti-University has become more frequent as the crisis of higher education deepens—an online series of courses took place in 2020—but often stumbles when encountering practical issues. When teachers are so ruthlessly exploited for their labour and need to pay rent, or just to survive, how can not paying them be justified? Conversely, space for teaching, as well as teachers themselves, costs money. So how can we ensure that students have to pay no fees or only nominal fees? The original Anti-University building was owned by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, and the endeavour did not last long; evicted for failing to pay rent, the Anti-University struggled to find an alternative venue, and the collective fell apart. I visited the site early this spring in London. The venue is now a boutique bakery in the financialised skyscraper-scapes of Shoreditch, more dystopian than ever in the abandoned streets of what was then a full Covid lockdown. It looked like one of the ghostly spaces that Sean’s poems inhabit.
These are ephemeral endeavours. Endeavours like the Anti-University, or like poetry workshops that take place on the edge of the academy. Calvin Hernton’s career provides a snapshot of such moments. In the mid-1950s, he attended an informal workshop held by Robert Hayden at Fisk University; in the early 1960s, he was part of the Umbra workshops in New York, taking place at poet and activist Tom Dent’s apartment; in the late 1960s, he conducted workshops of his own on the “dialectics of ungodliness” at the Anti-University, before going on to a long teaching career at Oberlin College, Ohio. These formal and informal poetry workshops, reading groups, and study groups, are not dedicated to “professional development” but to the development of language and of social life. They are spaces to try things out, to fail, to begin again. They are everything that the target-driven university is not.
In his workshop, Sean talked of poetry as a space of reignited possibility, a performative utterance, written out of a particular moment but carried forward into the next. The dream of the alternative university, and the struggle to realize that dream, keeps us going through the university as it is today, just as the dream of the alternative society and the struggle for it, keeps us going through life.
In the academy—in a basement—on the fringes. Occupying those spaces within the academy—poetry written in the hotel room before the interview—in the basement for the term’s teaching—poetics as pedagogy in learning environments characterised by instability and precarity, in which institutional affiliation or identification can at best be provisional, can often be hostile, in which the needs of students must be balanced against the pressures of those paid what can be effectively under the minimum wage when preparation is factored in. Addressing this is perhaps a poetics too. A poetics of, in, and against the academy, a poetics born of defeat.[7]
The point I would like to make to sum up is two-fold. First, I want to emphasize the possibilities offered by dialogic spaces like workshops—official or not—and publications like A Fiery Flying Roule, The Crisis Times, Sous Les Pavés, or, indeed, Chant De La Sirène. Alternative modes of education, free universities, anti-universities, community colleges, against the privatisation of knowledge and for new pedagogical ways of figuring our way forward—these are the possibilities organised around poetry and a critical poetics, as and beyond poetry and poetics. Poetry as critical practice is what can focus our present and future: our corner of the world, our terrain, these spaces they can’t take from us.
Second, I want to emphasize that poetry has a negativity that can absorb hurt, yet finger the wound. As UK poet Nat Raha puts it, poetry can help “to name the state of our brokenness”—to name a “constellation of affective states”, which, too often, cannot be named, or are named only in ways that pathologize and discredit them. To name contradiction, ambivalence and hurt—and to make connections—through metaphor, juxtaposition, simile and the like, grounding these “negative affects” in “a politicized understanding of our brokenness” —poetry contains these potentials. Poetry resists—or might resist—a recuperative process.
As such, poetry and poetics can play a vital pedagogical role within the academy—an openness to language and the world, a critical consciousness. To do this without taking on the language of the neoliberal, marketized academy: the CV and the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) that turn research and scholarship into management units, statistics, value: from radicalism to careerism. Instead, to emphasize poetry’s openness to the world that struggles within and against current conditions in the academy and outside it, acknowledging their imbrication and refusing separation. That poetry might carve out a space within but to the side of the academy—workshop, reading group, study group—without shifting those functions to the world of unpaid labour, away from state welfare or university provision. That, as poet Danny Hayward writes, “real life doesn’t have to be anything like this.”
[1] See, for example, the provisions recently listed in the Queen’s Speech (May 2021), which can be read in full here. The Speech is an annual formal occasion which sets out government policy with characteristically otiose ceremony, dressing up government policy under the monarchical figurehead to which Britain still clings with dreary nationalist pride. This year’s speech cemented the right-wing policies of Boris Johnson’s Conservative government a few days after its success in local elections. Amongst other measures, the speech contains a “Freedom of Speech Bill,” which plays into the government’s “culture war” against what it characterizes as left-wing “woke culture.” The bill plays on fears of left-wing students “no-platforming” right-wing speakers, leveling the threat of fines at universities if they are perceived as infringing on free speech in order to create an environment which delegitimizes protest against the presence of right-wing, transphobic and imperialist speakers on campus. These measures combine with enormous cuts to arts subjects at UK universities. The Queen’s Speech also includes the “Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill,” whose measures can be viewed here. The bill has faced widespread opposition and been the subject of a series of “Kill the Bill” demos nationwide during Spring 2021. It grants the police unprecedented powers to restrict protest—which is often already criminalized in all but name. In combination with stop-and-search powers widely deployed against people of color, and arrests made against Black Lives Matter activists under current emergency Covid-19 legislation, the enforcement of this bill will clearly be racialized.
[2] Arthur Rimbaud, trans. Wallace Fowlie, “Letter to Georges Izambard, 13 May, 1871,” in Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters: A Bilingual Edition, trans. with an Introduction and Notes by Wallace Fowlie; updated, revised, and with a Foreword by Seth Whidden (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 2005), 371.
[3] “Letter on Poetics,” Abandoned Buildings, June 25, 2011. Reprinted in Sean Bonney, Letters Against the Firmament (London: Enitharmon Press, 2015), 140.
[4] “Letters Against the Firmament (Two),” Abandoned Buildings, January 7, 2014. This text was reprinted in an anthology edited by Arts against Cuts, Bad Feelings (London: Bookworks, 2015). A dispute with the publishers meant that the book was released by those who produced as a free online download. (It is listed as out of printed).
[5] I refer here to the following passage:
The Only Possible Relationship to the University Today Is a Criminal One
“To the university I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal,” to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely borrow from us. This is the only possible relationship to the American university today. This may be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in general. But certainly, this much is true in the United States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.
See Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe / New York / Port Watson: Minor Compositions / Autonomedia: 2013).
[6] “Our Death 14 / Note on the Hallucinations,” Abandoned Buildings, October 2016, at
http://abandonedbuildings.blogspot.com/2016/10/letter-in-turmoil-14-note-on.html
See also Ghosts (London: materials, 2017), n.p.; and Our Death (Oakland, CA: Commune, 2019), 99.
[7] For recent thoughts on defeat within activist contexts, see Anonymous, “Self-Help for Revolutionaries,” Ill Will Editions, May 2021, at