The Artist's Eye: Lewis Parker on the 'Art' of the Idiot
It’s fair to assume that every idiot and sadist that walks the earth will at some point make art or write poetry. In certain circles it’s possible to obtain a copy of gentle verse by the racist Conservative politician Enoch Powell. With its nostalgic poems set in the English countryside, Powell’s Collected Poems is an amusing contrast to the historical image of the man who also wrote the “Rivers of Blood” speech.
Similarly, the right-wing media personality Milo Yiannopoulos once published a poetry collection comprising “remixed” Tori Amos lyrics whose maroon cover bears a strange resemblance to Powell’s – it wouldn’t surprise me if it was a genuine homage – and it too has become a collector’s item among people who are not fans of either Milo or his poetry. Of all the artworks by political figures, including Hitler’s paintings and Saddam Hussein’s novels, however, it’s the former Conservative MP Anne Widdecombe’s poetry that I find to be the most startling.
Here is a memorial poem Widdecombe published on her website about her two dead cats:
Goodness gracious what is that
It’s Mr. Pugwash my black cat
Good gracious are there others?
Yes indeed my cat Carruthers!
More so than a hundred of her newspaper columns ever could, these four lines reveal something striking about Anne Widdecombe’s worldview. Her psyche seems to be stuck in the goo-goo ga-ga stage of greeting cards, nursery rhymes and baby talk. Like Powell’s poetry it’s not about the animals in the poem; it’s an unintentional portrait of a person who doesn’t feel at home with modernity.When we read bad poems in conjunction with the author’s biographies, we may feel anger or spite that these are the minds that vote on whether the county goes to war. A more cynical response would be to encourage them to write more of it, as it’s a harmless distraction from their other, more dangerous activities.
As tempting as it is, treating art as nothing more than a kind of secure compound where idiots can roam free is to vastly underestimate the potential contributions supposedly lesser mortals than T.S. Eliot and Pablo Picasso can make to the fields of poetry and art respectively. (Although aren’t some Eliot’s cat poems also a bit, well, daft? And isn’t The Waste Land rather, um, dull?)Rather than mocking or hating, we ought to be heartened to learn, as I was, that in a book of literary attempts by the TV gardener Alan Titchmarsh called Fill My Stocking, there is some poetry.
In the blurb, we learn the compositional method that Titchmarsh used was to “get together every Christmas with family and friends to celebrate the season and perform much-loved anecdotes, stories, poems and sketches.”Titchmarsh’s book doesn’t appear in “good” bookshops or galleries. It’s sold in supermarkets and bargain bins. This is probably because, as Titchmarsh himself writes in the prologue, it’s idiotic:“I am determined, along with my friend[s], that Christmas, even more than any other time of year, is a season for being stupid or, perhaps more accurately, childlike.”Some of the poetry books I publish are sold in “good” bookshops.
Yet Titchmarsh’s “stupid” project is almost identical to mine, which was openly inspired by the Surrealists and the OuLiPo movement: Last Christmas I too got together with some friends – none of whom identify as poets, all of us idiots – and we wrote a collection of verse called 100 Haikus about Haemorrhoid Cream. It was, as Titchmarsh describes, a kind of party game, a direct affront to the polite, serious, bourgeois tastes that dominate culture.This is a culture overly indebted to the Romantic notion that artists have divine powers or “talent”. Andre Breton, leader of the Surrealists, was right to call talent a sign of “extraordinary vanity.”
Talent is also a myth borne out of economic self-preservation. You only have to read the awful poems churned out by professionals, such as the poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s dreary, it’s-like-the-1960s-never-happened ode to gas meters, to see that they have no special talent or even aptitude, but their income relies on others believing that they do. Ultimately, Breton said that everybody is capable of revelation, so everybody is capable of emancipation. (Even Alan Titchmarsh! Even Carol Ann Duffy!)Breton was also a homophobic, elitist bully, and by that measure, a hypocrite and, if you read some of his work now, an idiot.
But if his automatic writing exercises demonstrated nothing else, they showed that no matter who you are, if you keep chiselling away with the right tools, you’re capable of shattering the walls of consciousness. The problem, of course, is knowing what those “tools” are. Paintbrush? Razor blades? Poems about cats? Only an idiot or a sadist would claim to have the definitive answer.
Lewis G. Parker is the founder of Morbid Books, an experimental poetry publisher based in London. He runs workshops based on Surrealism and appears as a “Poet for Hire” at events and on the streets, where he uses automatic writing to create poetry to order. His nonfiction has appeared in the Guardian, New Statesman, Dazed, and his fiction/poetry in Minor Literature[s] and Numero Cinq!
