When it’s hard to get through the week without another half-wit/tabloid mindlessly using the slogan ‘Big Brother Is Watching You’, I think ‘George Orwell has a lot to answer for.’ But when I see the abuse of the English language in so called ‘high-brow’ press, I think, ‘academia has a lot to answer for.’ Namely, in not reading Politics and the English Language.

The latest PoemTalk podcast (slowly taking over my life) features the Canadian poet Fred Wah walking in halfway through a discussion of his poem Race, To Go (read here and listened here). It’s a good enough poem which creates wordplay between food and race. It’s angry and personal, and like I say, it’s good. It’s not great.

So Wah walks in and Al Filreas asks his other three guests if they have any last thoughts. This is what Lisa Robertson, another Canadian poet, has to say (or not say) for herself:

One of the things I absolutely love about this poem is the way it repeats these really banal racial slurs and clichés that would be very typical and still in many Canadians’ speech happening at the level of meals et cetera, but in taking up these slurs and jabs and turning them around into a melodic orality so I’m interested in how this poem is running with orality as a charged political speech and how the power of this oral reappropriation of everyday racial interpolation is carving out an alternative agency.

I mean, really. So maybe it’s unfair to take this from, here we go again, an ‘oral’ recording rather than a drafted essay. But really I’m only trying to play devil’s advocate because my word, what a mess. Not that any of it makes any sense, but kudos to whoever can figure out what the phrase ‘alternative agency’ especially means.

And this is what George Orwell had to say for himself, sixty-five years ago:

The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.

So these three of his six rules seem especially pertinent to Robertson:

 (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

Do your homework. Learn to speak like a human being. Because this kind of talk is the reason kids hate poetry, hate comprehension. Maybe they always have and always will, but I promise that you are not helping.

I’m of half a mind to send this to her. Or maybe her editor.

Wah I don’t see what’s so difficult [Laughter]

Al Filreas About the poetry? Or about getting to that utopian thing where you chatter and we warm?

Wah To tell you the truth, I have no idea what’s going on here.