This book, edited by Hamish Mathison and Adam James Smith, well - I spied it in a lefty bookstall in the Winter Gardens and knew from the title* that it was a book I needed to read. It's a collection of poems printed in the Sheffield Register, a more-or-less radical (in that it espouses basic civil equalities and liberties) paper that was hush-forced out of existence in the late 18th-century.**
There are ten poems, mostly published anonymously or under pseudonyms: they deal with matters ranging from slavery and the (still quite young in 1793) British abolitionist movement, income inequality and the corrupting power of wealth, the futility of patriotism in a country fighting a war which made no sense to the common people, the fundamental necessity of individual freedom to think for oneself, and such things. The poems vary a great deal (considering they're all from the same city in the same couple of years during the early onset of the Romantic period, that is) in style and tone, with some being borderline polemical and others veering playfully into ironising or picking up metaphors and running off into the horizons with them; also, each poem is discussed in a short reflective essay later in the book, placing its content and themes into social and historical context so as to better explore their potentcies and intents. There is also a longer essay about Joseph Gales (who founded the Register) and his apprentice who was also an influential poet James Montgomery (who later also founded the Iris), their work and its impact on the artistic side of things but also how meaningful it was for the establishment of publicly-available socially-conscious information in the form of non-conservative newspapers; Sheffield has a deep and strong history of progressive grassroots movements and the work which the contents of this book barely scratch the surface of has a significant place in the history of my city's development of such a community tendency. Finally, there are contained in appendices a handful of readers' letter to the Register, as well as another two poems, and some speech extracts and editorials by Joseph Gales and James Montgomery both.
Excellent little book.
By means of explicating my personal reflections on this book, see the asterisky bit, and note that I have since finishing it not only found myself experimenting with writing poems that actually rhyme, I've even [self-censored in case any deep-state intelligence agencies are surveilling this blog to find out what I, a known rampant (if relatively eloquent, and, some would even venture as far as to say, well-informed) anarchist, am up to on the whole subversive collective action front]. Just joking. I'm going to a fracking site next Friday but I was doing that anyway before I read this book and it's hardly my first encounter with that kind of thing. I have however written a poem about fracking in a similar style to one of the poems in this book, which I will not hesitate to whip out into action should I manage to trap one of the rig-site staff in conversation. That's how you get to them, you know.
* Poetry is my craft, radicalism is more-or-less my politics, Sheffield is my home, and who doesn't love the excitement of a good conspiracy from time to time?
I'm properly just on a hype for the intersections of these things at the moment anyway - there's an exhibition in Weston Park Museum about Sheffield's over-200-year history of radical collective action movements, and another in the Millennium Galleries about the power of art and activism drawing on and enriching each other. I'd feel spoilt - if I enjoyed it for its own sake only, but such delightful overlaps remind me of the call to action that creativity is; art which is not perceived with moral-political consciousness becomes mere production/consumption rather than the gorgeous messy explosive collaborative dialogue about what is true and beautiful and good and what this means for us; art which is perceived with moral-political consciousness, even if it wasn't necessarily created with the same, gains the capacity for inspiration beyond abstractified*** arguments about detectable stylistic influences or liable auction values - inspiration for concrete acts of moral-political creativity, which of course take place in the grandest medium of all, human society.
** Fortunately a more tentative (but with just as much emancipatory intentionality in its long-term sociocultural subversiveness) paper, the Sheffield Iris, replaced it.
*** Is this a synonym for bourgeois? Not sure I'd stretch that far, but maybe.
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