Violence in Poetry

Can poetry use violence in similar ways to other media?

Note: rather than directly quote violent poems, I have placed links within the text. This means that the reader should be able to read through without the risk of being traumatised by descriptions of violence. This content notice therefore refers to the embedded links themselves. If you’re into that kind of thing then click away, you sick freak.

Back in the mid 90s, when I was starting out in the world of poetry, I’d get a train into central London, have a snoop around some of the big bookshops and their comparatively massive poetry sections. When the choice seemed a little too dizzying, I’d pick up one of the poetry magazines and see if there was anything in the reviews or published poems that might inform my next purchase. Most of us didn’t have internet access back then and it took me another few years to find out that there was an actual poetry library at the Southbank Centre.

One of the reviews that caught my eye was for Les Murray’s long narrative poem, Fredy Neptune. The review, which I have no chance of digging up all these years later, centred on how Murray’s epic resembled a Hollywood blockbuster, with its action packed scenes from the conflicts of the first half of the 20th Century and his unflinching descriptions of the violence of those times.

I loved the idea of a poem going to the same places that big budget movies went to and felt a curiosity about how a work of poetry would approach and portray acts of violence. Part of this came from my own enjoyment of violent films, anime, comics and video games. Could a poem imitate the violence of other media in a way that could be just as entertaining while maintaining the qualities that most of us look for in a poem?

I bought and enjoyed Fredy Neptune. As is the case for a lot of the books I read a quarter of a century ago, I can barely remember a thing about it. It certainly influenced me. In the years that followed I would sometimes bring acts of violence into some of my narrative poems. One of them, The Father in Law, was highly commended by the Forward Prize judges so it can’t have been that bad. The poem was definitely intended to disturb but there was a vein of dark humour throughout that I think created an acceptable space in which the fictional act of violence could happen.

Using the words “acceptable” and “violence” in the same sentence feels strange. Violence itself, while sometimes necessary within an emancipatory context, is not something that we should ever view as acceptable. But fictionalised violence can be entertaining and, as Tarantino once described in relation to the violence in Django Unchained, cathartic. While many of those within the gun lobby have tried to scapegoat violent video games in response to mass shootings, there is no good evidence to support this claim.

Poetry has existed within a highly moralised space for a while now, not just in how it is written but also in how it is read and criticised. This has been going on for a lot longer than the current zeitgeist. Carol Ann Duffy famously had a poem about knife crime removed from the GCSE syllabus in 2008. She then wrote a poem in response about all the despicably violent acts that take place within the works of that central pillar of English literature, William Shakespeare.

It is through looking back into the past that we see a common thread of violence running through the earliest known works of poetry. From Homer to Beowulf, conflict would form the main narrative thread of epic poetry. The Middle English Romances continued the tradition, perhaps most memorably in the “beheading game” that kicks off the events of Gawain and the Green Knight. While more genteel courtly affairs may have influenced the celebrated poets from the renaissance onwards, the ballad tradition would ensure that terrible events would continue to be retold in verse.

It’s no coincidence that violence within contemporary poetry will revisit the violence of antiquity through new translations such as Heaney’s Beowulf, Christopher Logue’s War Music or Alice Oswald’s Memorial — a version of the Iliad that casts aside most mentions of the main characters to focus on the descriptions of the deaths of minor characters. History will also provide the context for excessive violence within modern works, the Old West forms the backdrop for Michael Ondaatje’s masterpiece, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Ondaatje’s book, as well as the works of Cormac McCarthy, inspired Todd Moore’s focus on the Great Depression as the backdrop for his poems about John Dillinger. While these poems are often graphic and repulsive in their detail, they nonetheless generate a level of excitement in how they are able to entertain our expectations of violence from the cinematic traditions of westerns and gangster flicks.

If there is a contemporary equivalent to the violence described within the Border Ballads of the 15th and 16th Centuries, it would be the stories about inner city crime and gang violence that we find in the forms of rap that have developed over the last few decades — often to great moral outrage from those who do not live similar lives to the speakers within the lyrics. One bona fide masterpiece from this time would have to be Rewind by Nas, a typical tale of a gang related shooting reframed as a film playing backwards.

It seems, from this quick survey of violence in poetry, that the poet often has to find a way to step outside of the moral space that poetry exists within if they want to evoke violence in a similar way to other art forms. Sometimes this might involve locating the poem within a historical or fantastical genre in which the presence of violence is more readily associated with entertainment. Violence is a part of the world that we live in and to write about it is not necessarily an act of advocacy or instigation.

In a later blog I might delve deeper into why we often look to violent art in order to be entertained. Maybe it forms a kind of catharsis of the kind that Tarantino talks about when describing his own work? Maybe it takes something terrifying about the world and makes it less terrifying? Or maybe violent art really does take advantage of our darker instincts, albeit in a way that doesn’t lead to us taking action on them?

There are numerous expectations that a human might have for a work of art. For some, the foremost function of art is to inspire and inform others in a way that might lead to us creating a better world. For others, art is a gateway to myriad emotional and sensory experiences, not all of them running along tidy moral boundaries, where the act of imagination itself is warrant enough for wherever the artist wants to take us. I like a lot of violent art while avowedly remaining a nonviolent person. So why does it still feel like some terrible confession when I apply this same standpoint to poetry?