“If one of the things poetry can do is exceed its historical limitations, it's also bounded by them”: An Interview with David Grundy

We sat down to talk with David Grundy about his recent book A True Account delving into the relationship between poetry and politics in the wake of the 2010 student protests, as well as touching on the themes of aesthetic form, the Black Radical Tradition and Corbynism.

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Kashif Sharma-Patel:

I was reading through A True Account and I was struck by the opening poem ‘Arc Poetry’. It reads like a statement, a preface. You are talking about positioning your work between poetry and politics, the moment, subjectivity and so forth. Where do you position yourself in these concerns? Do you see that poem as a statement of intent, or does it function more speculatively? I am also thinking about how you compose your work more generally. This book was written over a period 2013 to 2020 - were your ideas changing, is this a crystallisation of your ideas or more of an interrogation?

David Grundy:

As it was written over a period of time—and this relates to the title, A True Account—it ends up being a retrospective account rather than immediate eye-witness account. The architecture of the book and the ordering of individual poems and sequences within the book becomes a way of reflecting on that period from a later point in time; not necessarily as a rewriting of earlier texts, but how it is positioned as a book overall. 

‘Arc Poetry’ was originally written as a polemic in response to a set of debates regarding the relation of poetry and politics that were prevalent in places such as the UK Poets listserv, which was an important place of discussion around that time. It consisted mainly of US and UK poets of a wide age range, from more senior well-known figures to people like myself – I was 21 or so – having these quite fractious debates. I can’t remember the exact substance of these debates: I think they were sometimes quite silly, but they were also serious engagements with what was going on politically, and how that might relate to poetry. In relation to ‘Arc Poetry’, I can’t remember exactly what the original polemic was intervening in, so that which animated the text as a polemic or manifesto kind of disappeared. So I rewrote it a little bit, taking out specifics to make it read more generally. As you say, it is there as a kind of preface, a kind of statement. But, particularly with some of the poems in the first section of the book, which were written ten years ago now, reading them out recently at the book launch at Café Oto, they seemed to be more like political speeches that didn't quite make sense. There is a tension between the desire to make these statements, these political claims, while also holding an obscuring function, or a lyric function, or a poetic function, which you could maybe read as a political function in its own way, in that it opens up space. I included notes in the back of the book which are a way of framing the work and providing some context, but I also want to leave it open to a certain extent. So it’s not like the notes ‘explain’ the poems: the poems should be autonomous and the reader’s reaction shouldn’t be overly guided by hem.

KSP:

I am reminded of the recent John Wilkinson review in Blackbox Manifold. He was interestingly comparing your work with Sabeen Chaudhry, making an argument that your compositional form felt more pared back, though not necessarily any less political. Yet rereading your book I felt there are quite clear, non-abstract lines of political and poetic thought that you present. I wondered what you made of that.

DG:

I thought it was interesting. I recognised a lot of the poetry in it. Of course, it’s interesting to see someone else give an account of your work. In a sense, they can sometimes give a clearer account from the outside. One thing that review did was that it made me think about Marxism in ways that were clearer than when I was writing the poems, perhaps. Particularly thinking about traditions of thought regarding subjectivity in Marxism. So he identifies this self-questioning, where the poem is always catching itself. The “I” says something, the “I” has to be questioned, and the thing that the “I” says has to be questioned. The poem gives you a metaphor and then says, “yes, but this is a metaphor, what is it doing?” 

So there is one current in Marxist-influenced Anglophone avant-garde poetry circles, say in Language poetry or other modes where there is a suspicion of the enclosed bourgeois subject and an avant-garde dispersal into form. But then there is another Marxist suspicion of the bourgeois subject which becomes State policy with the Zhdanov Doctrine and the Yenan Forum and socialist realism. So both forms distrust the subject, but the difference between those two is a question of form. So, for the avant-gardist tradition form is part of that questioning: you question the form and you question subjectivity. For the Maoist or Stalinist position, form is a vehicle to get a message across; it is instrumentalised. The way I’m approaching it, or the way that review says I am approaching it, seems to be between those two points. 

So in a text like ‘Arc Poetry’, for example, some of the exhortatory statement is maybe closer to something like Hard Facts by Amiri Baraka, the collection he writes when he becomes a Stalinist effectively (though I’m not quite sure you could ever call Baraka a socialist realist, even if he seems to be following those arguments in a poem like ‘Against Bourgeois Art’). I don’t mean this so much in the specifics of the politics but in terms of making a statement—like you say, “clear, non-abstract lines of political and poetic thought”, when the default position of the avant-garde poetry scene that Baraka was coming out of earlier would be suspicious of that concept of form. But I don’t think the poetry is really that much like Hard Facts! And on the other hand, there is subjectivity in, for example, lyric forms, which are something that I’m attracted to, and this New York School focus on subjectivity that you can’t really avoid thinking about if you’re looking at twentieth-century Anglophone poetry. The title of the book, A True Account, is actually from Frank O'Hara, but it’s not the more familiar ‘I do this I do that’ side of O’Hara. It’s from O'Hara talking about Mayakovsky, so that is a different kind of O’Hara—an O’Hara who is explicitly connecting to a revolutionary tradition. And with Mayakovsky you have a poet who is adjusting his work to the demands of a new social situation, pre-Zhdanov but with certain aesthetic imperatives or diktats already coming into play; you have a poetry that is about subjectivity as well, subjectivity that becomes so big it is the size of the revolution, but it is also going to explode the subject: say ‘A Cloud in Trousers’ as a kind of anticipation of the revolution through subjectivity, and then the post-Revolutionary poems like the big Lenin poem which are negotiating between this subjective voice and something broader, more collective or objective. 

Now of course there are many other ways to write poetry, and for poetry to be political, than this. I think Denise Riley has been a really striking example for a lot of poets in the UK, if you think of a collection like Marxism for Infants and the way it comes out of the women’s movement and has this theoretical lens from Marxist-feminism, through to the way her later theory and her poetry think about the self and the way it is constructed through language. Muriel Rukeyser’s work too, and a poem like ‘Poem out of Childhood’.

But I think at the time I started writing there was a tendency in UK poetry of an inflated, Mayakovsky-esque subject that was mashing up with this Adorno-esque suspicion of the subject. You were getting this heroic male subjectivity that was saying, "My feelings are as big as political action.” It was ironised, but it was still there and I disliked it, and to a certain extent I was reacting against that. I should emphasise here that this is my retrospective thinking about it as well, trying to look at it from the outside. But those are the different traditions and trajectories at play. 

KSP:

I have been thinking a lot about that period since 2008 from the crash through the student protests of 2010 and riots of 2011, and the influence that had on politics and poetics that emerged right in their wake – which was my moment and yours too. Your retrospective thinking makes me think about historicisation and periodisation. I wonder how conscious you were in 2013 and 2014 of those debates in that moment. You are also a theorist and know the discursive field well. It does seem that the innovative poetry scene was transformed dramatically in that period. It reminds me of Luke Roberts' Glacial Decoys (Free Poetry, 2021, p.46) about disappointment. None of the old guard were able to rise to the moment, and obviously Bonney is this Mayakovsky-esque figure.

DG:

I was aware of it at the time. When you are going on protests a lot that becomes part of your subjectivity, and the way you conceive of writing. If we think about periodisation and we stick to the 21st Century, 9/11 is the beginning of a particular conjuncture: 9/11, the war on terror, the war on Iraq. Those were formative experiences for lots of people. The 2003 anti-Iraq war march was pivotal and sits in the background of people's political subjectivity. Poets like Sean Bonney and Frances Kruk were responding to that at the time. Then the Tory takeover with the UK election in May 2010 and the coalition government’s apparent fragility in the face of the student protests that emerged that autumn, when there was a belief, for a long time, that the government might collapse. But then, of course, it doesn't and they are still in power today. 

Back in 2010, I was signing on at the dole office in Swindon, then getting up on the train – which was cheaper back then – to go to the protests in London. And reading E.P. Thompson in the dole office. And those protests—the student movement, anti-austerity protests—slowly carried on through 2012 and 2013, but a lot of the action felt like they were trying to reduplicate that sort of energy, that sense of a mass movement – if that is the right term – you found at symbolic actions such as Millbank. 

In late 2013, for example, there was a demo called Cops Off Campus to protest the police being called in on students in London—and this was what the title poem responds to. In a way, the demo felt like an attempt to reproduce a kind of energy that had already dissipated. It was quite performative in that sense, not that it was illegitimate or anything. It just felt like a desperate gesture. The Mark Duggan verdict was happening at the same time, so everybody was running over there and a kid set a bin on fire. Then we went to a poetry reading organised by Veer books, I think, for the launch of a book by Steve Willey, and then climbed a fence and went into a park where we ended up meeting some Italian anarchists who were really high. We started talking to them about fighting the EDL - because it was the EDL back then, the fascist group, the English Defense League. So that particular confluence of things perhaps gives you an idea of how poetry might relate to politics in that period. 

By the end of the book, you get into the era of Corbynism. And Corbynism is this thing that we can retrospectively see as conciliatory or a false hope, but it was also something that actually had an impact. It was interesting talking to a friend who is active now in the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) in the States who said the inspiration they received was from Corbynism. So in that sense, in a way, perhaps, Corbynism’s legacy even has a wider dimension outside of the UK. 

Occupy and the Arab Spring are in this also. Part of the energy of that moment from 2009 until 2014 was due to this discourse of a global revolution. Badiou writes The Communist Hypothesis and Jodi Dean writes The Communist Horizon, just as an example. There was a lot of writing like this at the time. And of course in the decade after that you can see with the Arab Spring how these popular movements gave way to authoritarianism and neocolonialism. These discourses and movements collapse. 

But the poetry that rises to these occasions, like, say, Bonney’s poetry, is poetry that doesn't have any illusions. It is not just that this is poetry about revolutionary hope which is then dashed and then all poetry becomes about revolutionary defeat. It is that thinking about defeat is part of poetic work anyway. In autumn 2011, soon after the London Riots, Sean gave these workshops which I found very helpful, where we looked at poetries related to different revolutionary times, and how those poems could retain energy and relevance beyond those specific moments. Mayakovsky and 1917, Baraka and the Newark Rebellion, Brecht before the Nazis. Whether the poetry gets appropriated by the state – if you think about Lu Xun in China for instance – those poems still have that original energy within them and that is something that art can do. So in that sense, all these polemics and debates about the political instrumentalisation of poetry, how we can make it intervene in or be useful for political struggles, get it slightly wrong, because that is not the temporality poetry always operates in. Or it can do that, but it can also be activated at a different time. So in a poem like ‘Black People!’, for example, Baraka is writing at a particular moment, the moment of the urban insurrections, and specifically the Newark Rebellion in 1967, but that poem could potentially be activated at another point. 

KSP:

There comes a drive to think about how we reproduce this socially, how does this keep going sustainably, while still being introspective about what is achievable. It is interesting that discussions within poetry seemed to be some of the only places still talking about that. You mention Corbynism and the critique of Corbynism was that those discussions stopped happening. The activism was led in a different, more institutional, manner. It didn't feel like those debates about subjectivity or temporality were really being had. And perhaps they do not have to have such conversations for their political ends, but it is interesting that poetic circles are in both camps in this period.

DG:

I don’t know what the poetry of Corbynism is. There is a poetry of the student movement, a poetry of Occupy, but perhaps—to be provocative—we might say that Corbynism was an anti-poetic movement. Everyone knew it was a compromise. It was social-democratic, it had terrible policies on migration, it was full of compromises and we were having to treat it like it was actually revolutionary. But also we knew that we had to go doorstepping. I just don’t think you could write a good doorstepping poem.

KSP:

Ed Luker’s poem, “How did you survive January?”, is the only that comes to mind, which is tellingly about political defeat. 

DG:

The other side to this is that when I say Corbynism was anti-poetic, there’s obviously a risk of fetishising the pseudo-revolutionary moment, say, on top of Millbank Tower with flags: to say, that is poetic. Of course part of the power of the student protests was the way they were playing with these ideas, say, the students on the protests making these Situationist shields to protect them from the cops with various left-wing book titles on them. That is an aesthetic politics. Today, we are neither in Corbynism nor that moment, so the centre feels a bit more dispersed. A movement creates a sense of cohesion which then becomes narrow and mistakes its own local context for the world, claiming it is participating in the world revolution. When something is more dispersed it can give perspective but can also lose energy. I almost feel like, at the moment, everyone has more perspective but that passionate energy is more dispersed. I think that is the historical conjuncture. The poetry that can be written at any one time is determined by its social context. And if one of the things poetry can do is exceed its historical limitations, it's also bounded by them.

KSP:

It is something like a negotiation. 

DG:

Exactly, that’s a good way of putting it.

KSP:

A lot of people moved in different directions, and you moved into the academy. I wonder what the relation is for you between the theoretical and poetic work. Your PhD was on the Umbra poets, and Baraka is a big influence for you. There is a question that perhaps reading too much is hindrance, it makes you too self-conscious of the work itself. How have you negotiated that?

DG:

I don’t think you can ever read too much poetry. I feel that poetry comes out of reading. That is the dialogic aspect of poetry. 

So I do academic literary criticism but I also write a lot about music. In the poetry of Umbra or Baraka or the Black Radical Tradition those things are not opposed in the way that they can often be seen to be opposed, or seen as separate disciplines in other traditions. That is something that I think about when I am writing criticism, and also something that informs the poetry I write. Baraka’s writing on free jazz in Black Music is critically-engaged, but it’s not ‘critique’, in this snobbish academic way. The relation to the subject is one of enthusiasm. I found a really nice description of Baraka’s writing at that time by Robert R. Maclean as “attempts to create a language with which to praise the music”. This is not the kind of writing where every object that you look at has to be looked at over the rim of your spectacles, that is to say suspiciously. Instead, there is this immanent enthusiasm, which is closer to poetry. It is no coincidence that the early theorists of free jazz are also poets; Baraka and A.B. Spellman for instance. And of course many of the musicians are poets too, like Archie Shepp or Cecil Taylor or Jeanne Lee.

There is a complication in that my subject position does not place myself within the Black Radical Tradition. Obviously it does not place me within the position of Baudelaire or Sappho or Muriel Rukeyser either. But there is, specifically, a complicated history of white modernist poets exoticising or appropriating race, if you think about William Carlos Williams or Gertrude Stein or Carl van Vechten or Vachel Lindsay or Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin even. There is a sense that modernism was formed in this complicated way that had a lot to with this relationship to race: Aldon Nielson writes about this, for example, in Reading Race. So, today, if a lot of the music I am engaging with is from the Black Radical Tradition, the way I engage with it in the poetry cannot be the way that it would appear in the poetry of Baraka or Jayne Cortez or Fred Moten. I am not going to write jazz poetry. I guess white poets like Christoper Logue or Michael Horowitz were doing that in the UK back in the fifties and sixties and it was a bit embarrassing. 

At the same time this relation of music to poetry is quite central. The kind of writing I am interested in working on critically at the moment – I am writing a book about free jazz, and another on classical music and new music – I am trying to think of a writing that is scholarly but doesn't have that academic distancing function. So, I have been doing journalism as well, but there are limitations to that. It is quite market-dictated – you can write a piece about John Coltrane, for example, only if there happens to be a reissue. The writer Harmony Holiday has a Substack newsletter called Black Music and Black Muses, and in the mission statement she talks about a music criticism that wouldn't be academic but would also not be driven by the dictates of the music industry, the record release schedule, this pseudo-relevance or topicality that is actually a substitute for history, but which is not actually history. And of course Harmony Holiday is a poet too.

This question of history is a question of scale. Writing journalism or writing ‘lyric essays’ – as I did in a book I wrote in lockdown called Present Continuous that Pamenar Press put out– that might have certain ‘poetic’ qualities to it, then writing poetry that would sometimes include something discursive or prosaic in it, are all ways of thinking about scale. 

In A True Account, much of the book is taken up with this sequence “The Problem, The Questions, The Poem”, which originally came out as quite a large chapbook from Tipped Press—and there’s also a cassette release where I read out that poem that came out in the States last year. So I’ll need to give a bit of backstory here. Around 2014 I started writing these poems with the longest possible line you could imagine. I was working on Microsoft Word, using A3 landscape format, and writing these lines that would go on across the width of the page and only break when they got to the edge. I can't remember why exactly I was doing this! There were poems by Oki Sogumi that were doing that, and Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge has something similar, but I am not sure if they were inspirations. I was calling them “Landscape Poems” as a joke about the format. The idea behind these was that you could add anything to them. It was an echo-chamber for all these debates about poetry and politics, but also for personal, self-reflective parts. It all went in. I did this for 6 months and I became frustrated with it. I had a poetry reading at the Sussex Poetry Festival and I decided I couldn't read these, so I sat down and wrote a self-critique. That became the beginning of “The Problem, The Questions, The Poem”.

So that self-critique became part of the method: the problem and questions that would then find its answer in the poem. But what was also important was using prose. And paradoxically, going from these long lines to a prose block actually became a way of going back to poetic forms like rhyme and meter. There were a lot of debates about rhyme and meter at the time with people asserting these conservative notions that only with poetic meter could you do poetic thinking. I had been reacting against that, and prose became a way to allow that musicality back in while still being discursive. That relation of poetry and prose, the discursive and lyrical, disjunction and something more flowing, became something I am still exploring. 

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David Grundy is a poet and scholar based in London. He is the author of A True Account (The 87 Press, 2023), and A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and co-editor, with Lauri Scheyer, of Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton (Wesleyan University Press, 2023). He co-runs the small press Materials/Materialien.