Tag Archives: UK

Political poem: appallingly bad verse apparently in favour of Liz Truss

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Bizzy lizzy will win by a.mile
She has got a lovely smile
Brians to match her lovely face.
She will win this pm race
Sunaks a snake
A back stabbee he is
He turned on boris
And will turn on liz
She will be a great pm
Not as good.as maggie but no one could be
Mrs thartcher mach 3
Liz will stand proud over our lands
Holdinh out her hand
If we wotk to gether we can
Get rid of the woke
And watch them. Cry into there cornflakes
As liz makes our country great.
In liz we trust god speed to our new pm

*****

In honour of Liz Truss’s trip to Balmoral Castle to be named Queen Elizabeth’s Prime Minister, I looked for poems by or about the new PM. The above is the best I could find, reposted in the Yorkshire Bylines by Jimmy Andrex under the heading Has the emergence of Liz Truss stimulated a new type of poetry?

Jimmy does a good serious job of discussing modern political poetry… sort of. But he fails to note that the quoted “poem” by “Bill Sutton” originated as a post to the Facebook group ‘Liz Truss Supporters (no trolls)‘ which is loaded with sarcastic commentary on the British Conservative Party in general and Liz Truss in particular.

So the answer to Jimmy’s question is No, of course. Scathing poetry, good or deliberately bad, has long been used as a political weapon. Bill Sutton’s post may be amusing, but is unlikely to resonate for as long as, say, Shelley’s rant the year before George III died: “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king, –“

Good luck, Liz; hope you’ve got a thick skin.

Review: “The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp” by W.H. Davies

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Hobos

Hobos, US Library of Congress. Unknown date. Likely 1880s – 1930s

W.H. Davies was a poet whose best-known piece begins

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

Born in Newport, Wales, in 1871, he was raised by his grandparents. As a boy he fought a lot, and at 13 was the leader of gang, was arrested for stealing handbags, and got twelve strokes of the birch. He read enthusiastically, disliked being apprenticed to a maker of picture frames, and at 21 took passage to America. His years of wandering provide a fascinating view of the US over 100 years ago, with chapters on jails, thieves, cattlemen, race issues in the Mississippi area, and so on. He worked his way back and forth over the Atlantic, lost a leg hopping a train in Canada and thereafter limited himself to England where he began writing his poetry and memoirs in doss houses in between bouts of tramping and begging. Eventually he was noticed, published for his poetry first and then for his autobiography–with a preface by George Bernard Shaw–and became famous.

His autobiography is frank, amusing, informative, insightful and naive all at the same time. A unique book, and a good accompaniment to his poetry (the link is to an 11-slide deck) which is also insightful and naive and oriented to observing life outside, whether in city or countryside. This is from “The Sleepers”:

As I walked down the waterside
This silent morning, wet and dark;
Before the cocks in farmyards crowed,
Before the dogs began to bark;
Before the hour of five was struck
By old Westminster’s mighty clock:

As I walked down the waterside
This morning, in the cold damp air,
I saw a hundred women and men
Huddled in rags and sleeping there:
These people have no work, thought I,
And long before their time they die.

Sonnet: “Flags We Have Feared”

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The Swastika, that ancient Vedic sign,
the lightning wheels with which the Aryan bands
in lightning war overrun other lands,
wheeled juggernauts that crush, self-claimed divine.
Hammer and Sickle, commoners’ work-tools;
weapons for rising up, and tearing down
the castle of the rich, the bourgeois town;
fake honour to the poor the Party rules.
A flag with Stripes, memorial for flogged slaves,
striped jail clothes for resulting underclass;
and Stars like bullets through the windshield’s glass
for leaders by the CIA shot down,
star earned for each election overthrown,
star for each land the flag invades, or ‘saves’.

This sonnet was originally and ironically published in Ambit in the UK. The irony being, of course, that the Union Jack is viewed by much of the world with as much fear and hostility as any of the other three flags. But you don’t learn that, or the reasons for it, in school in the UK–at least not in England. The British (at least the English) have a warm and fuzzy feeling toward their flag, and are innocent or puzzled that anyone else should find it negative. Similarly in the times of the other three flags, the Germans (at least the Aryans), the Soviets (at least the Russians) and the Americans (at least the whites) have been happy and proud of their flag, puzzled that anyone else should fear or dislike it.

Another irony: the jury is still out on to what extent one of the leaders shot down by the CIA was their own.

Technically it’s a sonnet with a non-standard rhyme scheme: ABBA CDDC EFFGGE. But the rhymes and the scansion are OK. As for the volta, the requisite turn of mood or argument between the octave and the sestet… well, after dealing with the two great enemies of western democracy, you weren’t expecting me to pick on the US, were you?