'What can writers and poets possibly do in the age of Trump, Farage and Starmer?'
Having been invited by Andy Croft to take part in the launch of Release the Sausages!: poems for Keir Starmer (Culture Matters), an anthology of poetry that contains no poems, I was curious as to what the event would include and said yes. A follow-up email from Andy revealed that a small panel of non-contributors including myself, Tom Kelly, Bill Herbert and Jo Colley would be asked to discuss the question, 'What can writers and poets possibly do in the age of Trump, Farage and Starmer?'
In order to avoid waffling on and rambling, which I am at risk of doing in such situations, I decided to give the question some thought and wrote a response which I read out during the launch. Having done this to lay the ground, I was then more able to join in the general discussion with a more improvised and intuitive approach. Here then is the piece I wrote to set out my initial thoughts to the question:
What can writers and poets possibly do in the age of Trump, Farage and Starmer?
We must write because that is what we do. I think writing and reading poetry in such times becomes ever more vital and valuable because it is in poetry that the personal and the political are able to merge into an articulation of the social. Caroline Forche, in the introduction to Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, discusses the 'social' as a third space that exists between the state and the 'supposedly safe havens of the personal'. Most forms of expression are either one or the other, but poetry in weaving the personal with the political eases the effect of individual isolation which the state employs as an ideological tool to inhibit our sense of personal agency.
For me writing is bound up with resistance, struggle, opposition and protest. Writing is an act of resistance to apathy and compliance, as well as a way of processing the emotional and psychic impact of events, whether these are immediate, local, national or global or a combination of them which all too often reflect one another in their injustices and the exercise of authority. Adrienne Rich said: “Poem are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.' This is often an unacknowledged truth, an insight or epiphany that comes, like divination, through the process of making.
While a poem cannot combat the capitalist state apparatus and is unlikely to hold the attention of a committed Reform supporter or change the opinion of a member of Maga, that does not render a poem as useless, nor as Auden famously noted "make nothing happen".
It is important to see a poem as an act of witness, and as a trace of the truth. As an attempt to wrest the things silently and often conveniently gone out of mind. A poem can be an expression of solidarity in the spirit of community that transcends boundaries of race, faith, gender, national borders. A poem can function as a counter-point to the onslaught of info-tainment, disinformation and mainstream media distraction. A poem is a commitment to a forecasted act of remembrance and as such it carries forward a sense of hope. A poem is never just a response to an event. Walter Benjamin claimed a poem is in itself an event and as such it opens up a shared 'social' space of understanding and mutual opposition.
Poetry in this sense opposes the use of language that seeks to achieve, maintain or exercise power, to accumulate obscene wealth or to normalise atrocity and naturalise experiences of extremity.
Building upon the statement attrubuted to Socrates that ... the misuse of language induces evil in the soul, Ursula K le Guin points to the language employed by politicians and advertisers as the antithesis of poetry and literature because its function is to deaden language and smother thinking.
Bertolt Brecht reminds us that under exploitative systems thought itself is considered base. The last thing an autocrat wants is a critically informed population, and the level of anti-intellectualism within our society is the result of decades of cultural theft, and a growing dismissiveness toward specialist skills and knowledge – especially for fields not seen as immediately useful to the economy, such as Culture, Arts, Humanities.
In 2016 Conservative minister Michael Gove, in the run-up to the Brexit vote, famously said: "Britons have had enough of experts." Similarly, I recall the Conservative Party's crass reskilling campaign poster from 2020, featuring a ballerina with the caption, "Fatima's next job could be in tech”, which was an explicit attack on culture and the arts.
The last 30 years have also been a gradual erosion of any sense of shared community and collective endeavour, the frontline youth and community services have been decimated, branch libraries closed, adult education services slashed, a huge reduction in available funding for community cohesion projects. All this is an intentional policy-driven programme of managed decline to isolate individuals within a curated hostile environment with disastrous results, increased deprivation, social tensions, a rise in anti-social behaviour and the race riots of 2024.
In the wake of the riots Middlesbrough council received £225,000 from the government's Community Recovery Fund, with which it engaged community organisations, neighbourhood associations and small constituted groups to deliver a range of creative projects that tackle some of issues and challenge the sentiments that fuelled the disturbances and rioting. While this is a recognition of the impact grass-roots creative engagement strategies can have it is also a reminder that these kinds of projects need to be a staple element of community activity and not just a knee-jerk reaction to violent outbursts of frustration and misdirected anger. As I said before, creative writing and poetry opens a space in which to process the emotional and psychic impact of events and situations and allows for the re-visioning of circumstances and alternative outcomes, and I have witnessed this transformational phenomenon while working with various groups of people and disparate communities.
In the age of Trump, Farage and Starmer it is worth reminding ourselves of some of the points Brecht made in his essay Five Difficulties When Writing the Truth, which I combine and summarise here:
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Finding the courage not to cringe away from the mighty
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Along with the courage not to betray the weak, even though it is highly advantageous to betray the weak.
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Finding the courage to focus on particulars: low and ignoble matters and the materialistic conditions and difficulties of current life, the nuts and bolts of poetry, rather than lofty generalities, bigly abstractions and ambiguous universalisms which are all features of dictator- speak.
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To remember that language, knowledge and truth are weapons that can spur action and facilitate change by identifying the historical and economic causes of suffering rather than just the immediate symptoms.
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To keep in mind who it is we're writing for and who we're writing to,
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To be clear about what truths we are telling and who is ready to hear them, and to show cunning in the way the truths we write can be spread to bring about social and political change.
I want to finish on a slightly different point though, one that returns to my initial statement that 'We must write because that is what we do.' In his essay Poetry & Thinking, the Canadian poet and anthropologist Robert Bringhurst tries to redefine poetry. He talks about humans receiving two modes of heredity, one being endogenetic and is passed through to us through our gene pool, and the other is the exogenetic code which is culture, and the way this code has been transmitted for thousands of years is through poetry, poetry as a store of communal knowledge and shared values.
A couple of short and thought provoking quotes from this essay, Poetry and Thinking, are:
“Poetry is a quality or aspect of existence. It is the thinking of things.”
and...
“Poetry has been here ... as long as things have been thinking and dreaming themselves.”
TOP PHOTOGRAPH: THE WHITE HOUSE
PHOTOGRAPH (right): ROBERT SMITH
R A Porter
Mon 4th Aug 2025 13:31
This is such an interesting ,wise and inspiring article. I found myself copying and pasting piece after piece to my Notes app to refer to again. Sparkling stuff - and so timely. Bravo!