On Bill Griffiths, Skeptical Militancy, & “Ghost Town”

Back in the early 1980s in the anathema that was Reagan-era Buffalo, “Ghost Town” was as close as it got to our anthem. “This town… is coming like a ghost town… All the clubs have been closed down…” Little did I know then that, across the pond, Bill Griffiths (who I’ve mentioned here before at Harriet in “Poetics (Mine)”) was penning a “skeptical militant” verse about parallel scenarios in Thatcher-era Britain.

Griffiths, who sadly passed away last year, is author of a wide array of sonic-social gems. From his posthumously published Pitmatic: The Talk of the North East Coalfields to a 275-page selected poetry collection The Mud Fort, Griffiths’ work unearths a lexicon that leverages everything from Old Norse to Orgreave.
Another recent publication, The Salt Companion to Bill Griffiths, initiates the process of assessing (and celebrating) the career of, as Robert Sheppard calls him, “a national treasure.” Fernanda Teixeira de Medeiros’ essay, “‘& that/that divide’: poetry and social commentary in Bill Griffiths,” examines the poet’s work as “skeptical militant”—“never obvious, never propagandistic, never simplistic…combining inventiveness with sharp social criticism.” Focusing on Griffiths’ poem “The Breed” she analyzes the poem’s (& the title term’s) dialectic of noun (breed as a class marker) and verb (to produce offspring, to give birth), showing how the poem presents (in three-line stanzas) “a chord made up of the notes of biological discourse, social intolerance, [and] sterility and violence…” To give Harriet readers unfamiliar with Griffiths’ verse a sense of his writing, here’s a brief excerpt from the seventeen-stanza poem:
Unable to guard the world-egg properly
they break again into
argument, fight.
The thing that doesn’t work,
won’t match, he
hurls it away.
How can a lady be touched
by the hand of
a labourer?
All the exhibits are cased,
glassed in, to
kill them.
The Salt Companion gathers more than a dozen writings on Griffiths, including outstanding pieces by Eric Mottram, Paula Claire, John Seed, and others—as well as an interview with the poet conducted by Will Rowe. (For those needing a Griffiths interview fix immediately, here’s a link to one conducted in Wembley Park in 1993.)
Yet it is the poems themselves collected in The Mud Fort that provide the best barometer of the “skeptical militant” that is Bill Griffiths. More often than not, I find myself deeply attuned to what I above called the “sonic-social” that Griffiths’ employs. At the very end of the book, for example, two poems (“Ballad of Orgreave” and “In the Coral Year”) provide a stunning critique of the Thatcher-led neoliberal privatization (and ensuing collapse) of the British coal industry:
To a land
that too shook,
shook, and
the hills steamed, smoked
(it was their own war-time)
The historical, global implications of these policies and praxes are likewise critiqued in a poem (“The Mineral World,” excerpted below) that pushes beyond the local, the Thatcher-era coal industries, to something closer to Neruda’s “United Fruit Co.”:
The search for aluminum
has led to the establishment of several new governments
with banana-hand corridors of Dead End
with mackerel-bright uniforms, camouflage,
with sea-salt-sting eyes on anyone not with a proper smile…
But I began with The Specials, because “Ghost Town” is not merely a tune on the collapse of certain capitalist models and their forced replacement with yet more severe capitalist models; “Ghost Town” is also a 2 Tone address to the Toxteth riots of July 1981, a “sonic-social” akin to Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “It Dread Inna Inglan” and akin to Griffiths’ brilliant 4-page montage-poem on the seventh month of 1981, “The Toxteth Riots”:
unemployment is not a defect
it is a well-tried policy
“Mercyside Chief Constable Ken Oxford denied the rioting had anything to do with race. ‘It was exclusively a crowd of black hooligans intent on making life unbearable and indulging in criminal activity,’ he said.”
First you contain
then you provoke
Shifting languages, shifting speech acts, shifting rhythms, but never shifting from the sonic-social skeptical militancy that infuses so much of his work, Griffiths’ “The Toxteth Riots” speaks to the concluding question of The Specials’ song: “Why must the youth fight against themselves?/Government leaving the youth on the shelf…”
It is a relief finally
to find the keepers of the master race
are blameless
And after the riots Mr Oxford set up the
Operational Support Division
to police the area:
“They’ve got their faces covered in white helmets.
They’ve got no numbers on their jackets
and no numbers on their vans.”
(NS&S 2Dec88)
The institution facing the future.