I initially had no idea if I would have anything to say about President Michael D Higgins’s new spoken poetry project, Against All Certainty, but after a day absorbed in it this is what I want to say: We are lucky to have had an arts president.
The arts are sometimes dismissed by political materialists as a flaky elitist pastime or reduced to an opportunistic branding exercise. Yes, art can be produced by disconnected pseuds in ivory towers or used as marketing bumf but anyone who has ever loved a ballad or a book or a film or a comic or a football chant knows that the real thing is where you find the grit and empathy and meaning of life (and anyone who thinks that works of art that reflect what’s beautiful, strange or sad about humanity aren’t for the average person has a low opinion of the average person).
Mario Cuomo apparently once said you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. To which I say: you don’t understand poetry, Mario Cuomo. Govern in poetry, you cowards. The old chieftains would have told Cuomo that it was poetry all the way. To hell with policy wonks, get a few bards.
It’s all prose in contemporary politics. If you’re living in that world, whether as a practitioner or a journalistic observer, you tend to reduce the world to tactics and argument. That’s why the opinion column is the traditional home of the political veteran, which is fine, I guess, but thanks to social media everyone is an opinion columnist now (I mean look at this article). There’s too much prose. What we really need are more poets.
RM Block
The poetic imagination is a specific filter for the universe. It rejects the certainty of ideology and the cynicism of political strategy and focuses instead on the texture of lived experience – of hurt and pain and love and death and all the stray details in between. It’s the stuff that both transcends ideology and policy and also informs the best of it. Art helps us understand reality while resisting the urge to resolve it into something neat and simple (this is sort of the theme of Higgins’s title poem Against All Certainty). The best art is clear-eyed and lived and true and, as he says in his introduction, “it has a life of its own”.
Against All Certainty is a series of 10 poems drawing from Michael D Higgins’s own personal history. It’s a personal history that reaches back into the country’s past in a way that’s deeply moving. In his high, clear voice, cloaked in Myles O’Reilly’s beautiful accompanying soundscapes, electronics, strings and horns, he takes us back to an era of scarcity and warmth and narrow prospects and unspoken love.
In The Betrayal he tells us about the way in which his father was betrayed late in his life by age and infirmity and earlier in life by the idealistic state he literally fought to build. Elsewhere he tells the stories of the strong rural women he knew when he was young. In Stargazer he talks of how his mother-in-law recited Dickens while milking cows and gazing at the stars and in The Death of Mary Doyle he tells of a country woman who goes out to the barn to die among the smells and sounds of the animals she tended. In a sort-of afterword to the latter he calls it “a kind of pagan poem, in honour of rural women and in honour of the experience of life in rural Ireland before the electricity came too late to straighten women’s backs”.
In both Dark Memories and My Mother Married my Father in Mount Melleray, he tries to understand his parents and their disappointments and their relationship across decades. Throughout it all he shows us it’s okay to reflect on our own personal history and that doing so is not a product of solipsism but of empathetic curiosity. The specifically personal is universal if approached in that way.
He is not an ivory tower poet – he knows people and loves people. Like his protagonists he has dirt under his fingernails (well, maybe not literally these days). He understands that for all of us life is peculiar and specific and difficult and tender. “Why is it not allowed to remember, why is it required to forgo small and sacred moments, scarce and precious things from the spaces of between those iceberg times of forbidden touch, the slightest signs of tears and love,” he says.
I’ve got a theory that the Irish people vote for the president based on the more aspirational way we like to see this country and vote in general elections, a little more greedily, based on what we want for ourselves. We want to see ourselves as passionate, altruistic and kind and then we falter at the ballot box and prioritise self-interest. But there’s a reason why we’ve not yet had a business mogul president (though not for want of business moguls trying). We might all be fumbling away in the greasy till, but we’d prefer our head of state didn’t remind us of that banality with a PowerPoint presentation and some branded hats. No, it’s far better to have Michael D prompting us to empathy, reflection and care with some beautiful art.
President Michael D Higgins’ spoken word album Against All Certainty (Claddagh Records) was released on September 5th
The Truth of Poetry
By Michael D Higgins
for Mark Patrick Hederman
the truth of poetry is a light,
sheltered,
yet no mere spark of a moment,
exhausted,
ephemeral.
The truth of poetry flickers
as the fire takes.
Truth-making feeds the flames,
that blaze again,
become beautiful in the light,
and in the fire is seen,
for a moment,
possibility
unquenchable,
transformed,
reborn out of time,
out of decay.
As the flames rise,
the turf expires.
Not yet is this an answer.
Such fire as truth requires
is from a source inexhaustible.
Such fire as would make of hope
a possibility made inevitable
awaits the lighting
Then let us pray,
for those who hope,
that from the raking of the ashes,
and the placing of the sods,
for a new fire,
and a new day.
In eternal renewal,
such a fire may come,
as lets them see,
even for a while,
the fragile truth of poetry,
revealed,
enough for the going on.
