A blog post from Jay Ramsay
It was the experimental poet Allen Fisher, back in 1983 at an Angels of Fire London Festival gig, who first introduced me to the phrase ‘post-experiential innocence’ and I’ve remembered it ever since (evidently!). With all the hopeless sheenanigans of Trump (here alluded to) and general political egotism, Corbyn is outstanding because he is what he says, and says what he means … I also wrote this as one in the eye for the right-wing media that seem determine to run him down – and are failing miserably!
Photo credit: Chris Beckett, available under a Flickr Creative Commons Licence. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/legalcode)
FOR JEREMY
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
W.B. Yeats, ‘Among School Children’
There must be another way, he’s saying
and there is: only the man grown child is wise
as the ancient Chinese Taoists knew
and the triumphal trumping ego will never—
so here he is on the 6pm News, among school children
playing djembe as if for the first time
tentatively with his fingertips
sing-saying Harmony as the kids join in,
the word so lightly engraved on their T shirts
that is the truth from spirit
of a radical innocence, transmitted—
through these beings of the future, if there is to be,
if there is another way, which only the heart knows:
that after experience, innocence returns
and is a new day as far as the eyes can see.
Jay Ramsay
27 September 2016, first published in the International Times, 13 October 2016