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Writer's pictureAnthony Nanson

For Jeremy

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)

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

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