Wasted Lives

Background Notes

I still can’t believe the impact this poem has had since the time it was written in the winter of 2002-3.  It amazed me that 10,000 copies of it went out in hard copy within two weeks of the first performance.  After the first reading at the Council House in Birmingham I was asked by leaders of various groups if I’d allow them to make their own pamphlets/booklets of the poem so that they could send it out to their members. I was happy to allow people to do this. I couldn’t quite believe how quickly the poem channeled its own way into the world.  Most of those who reproduced it, with my permission, sent me copies of their pamphlets. Within a few weeks these pamphlets had been distributed and happily, in the versions I saw, everyone had ensured that the text remained intact. Most had tried to set the poem out exactly as I had given it to them but there were variations in the size of the booklets, the quality and colour of paper and a few versions were illustrated or had symbols inserted between stanzas.  The Birmingham Council of Faiths printed 2,000 copies and a short while afterwards Birmingham libraries emailed it out  as their poem for World Books Day.  The poem was also printed in the Sutton Coldfield News where almost an entire page was dedicated to it.  I’m told that some people took this page from the newspaper with them on their protest marches and that photocopied versions of the poem were also spotted on some of the coaches going to London.  I never made it to London on the day of the protest as I was booked to do a reading in the Midlands where I included a reading of Wasted Lives in the set. 

People in Britain were angry at the time because they did not agree with the government’s actions and many felt that Tony Blair was just not willing to listen to them. These feelings of anger and frustration did not go away and this poem has continued to strike a chord with many people around the world.  When reading the poem locally in theatres and public house upper rooms there has often been a powerful silence before the applause and on a number of occasions people have come up to me with tears in their eyes to thank me for writing it.  On one occasion, in a tent on the Tolkien Festival field, a tall and hefty chap approached me to tell me he was a lorry driver, didn’t usually like poetry but he just wanted to say thank you because the poem had moved right through him and had made him cry. He thanked me for saying what he would have loved to have said if he’d been able to express his feelings in a poem. When people make the effort and take the time to thank you like this it is really humbling and moving and I have to confess I often walk away with tears in my own eyes too. 

The demand for copies of the poem continued and people who had printed off copies of it asked if they could buy a ‘proper copy’ of it too.  In response to this a Pontefract Press version of the poem was printed in 1000 copies in chap book form.  Half of these disappeared very quickly and so, for a while, I included the poem on my website in order to allow people to access it directly from there. If I hadn’t put it onto my website, some friends have argued, the other 500 copies of the Pontefract Press version of the poem would have sold more quickly. It is true that around 150 copies of this version are still available for sale but Amazon stating that my books are temporarily out of stock, when they’re not, has confused things a little I think.  I’m happy for people to make copies of my poetry to show to other people and to read themselves – especially poems like this that were driven by a desire to give a voice to a people who were being ignored by their political leadership. This poem was never about monetary gain; poems rarely are. It was a poem that was commissioned as part of my laureateship, without fee, for the Holocaust Memorial Day event. As with many commissions, I had to try to find a way into the subject I was being asked to write about so that I could write my own truth.

Before continuing to talk about how this poem has carved out its own way in the world let’s briefly address the problem of whether poems should be freely available on the internet.  In redesigning my website in 2008 we wondered whether to include access to some of my poems or not. Wendy Cope’s article in the Guardian is pertinent to this question.  She headed her article: You Like my poems? So pay for them and in the article she expressed how outraged she was to find her work all over the internet. Her article began powerfully with the anecdote of her strolling through a cemetery with her partner and discussing what they would like on their gravestones. He suggested hers would read: "Wendy Cope. All Rights Reserved."  I can understand this. It is difficult to eek out a living as a poet  -  I’ve been doing just that myself for the last ten years. I fully agree with her that poets should be paid for their work and that in an ideal world people would always pay for your book if they’d like to read one of your poems and yet, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. In practice I’ve found that some of the people who were originally given copies of a poem have gone on to buy a book and, monetary issues aside, I have to say  I am a professional poet because poetry is what I do for a living but I’m also an amateur poet in the sense that means  -  I do it for the love of it, because it burns in my bones and because it is the best way I can try to communicate my own take on this world we live in.  It is amazing and moving when people email you to say how a poem you have written has helped them in some way.  An email I received after Memories in a City Café had been played on Radio 4’s Poetry Please told how I’d expressed someone’s situation …  in a way I couldn’t have done. How did you know what I was going through? Thank you so much.  It is moving when people approach me to say how much the writing of other poems -  including Wasted Lives - has meant to them too and so, after much thought, I have decided to continue to make a selection of poems from the various collections available on the internet. I know making poetry available like this butters no parsnips but it will enable a wider audience to read the poems and hopefully some of them will also decide to buy copies of the books.

Okay, let’s get back on the main track now.  I was talking about how I had to write Wasted Lives for Holocaust Memorial Day in January 2003. It seems so long ago now since I wrote the poem but in the copy of the Pontefract Press version I included some background notes written nearer the time:

‘A few days after my appointment as ‘Birmingham Poet Laureate,’ in October, 2002, I found myself in a taxi on the way to the BBC studios at Pebble Mill having been booked by the Birmingham PR agency to appear on the ‘Late Night Currie’ show.  I was expected to serve as an advocate in Birmingham’s bid for the 2008 ‘City of Culture’ title and, not being a natural politician, felt uneasy in the task.  During the journey my nervous butterflies turned into somersaulting elephants.  When I arrived at the studio and was asked politically loaded questions I felt I’d responded badly.  What was I doing there? Why did the situation feel so wrong? Why did my throat tighten and my voice creep out with an unaccustomed awkwardness?  It was only when Edwina Currie asked me to end with a poem that my throat relaxed and my voice rang clear.  As I read, ‘I’m sick of politicians and their party politricks/Balkans, Belfast, Bethlehem’ my throat once again became certain in its role as an instrument of truth.

The experience of that night reinforced what I had already known for a long time; a poet must always speak his or her own truth.  A few weeks later I received a request to write a poem on the theme of genocide to be performed at the Holocaust Memorial Day service in January.  My initial reaction was that I was quite unqualified to do this.  How could I presume to stand up on stage and talk about genocide to an audience, some of whom would know of genocide not from books but from personal experience?  I could only speak if I believed I had anything to say.

I began to gather data and let ideas form and evolve in my mind to see if some sort of worthwhile poem would emerge.  At this time the salient topic of discussion, both in the media and amongst the general public, seemed to be the issue of whether we should allow the government to take us to war with Iraq. I, my family and everyone I knew well were strongly against the war and furious that the government was taking no notice of the massive anti-war sentiment within the public at large. I had been overwhelmed by a feeling of sadness that Christmas as the rain fell down and propaganda kept falling and had written some lines of poetry to express this in my notebook.

A few days before the service those few lines were the only words that I had written and then I realised that I did have something to say. The poem would refer to the terrible genocides of the twentieth century, but it would essentially be an anti-war poem very much grounded in the moment when it was written. My truth was there and once I started writing (working through two days and nights) the poem actually came very quickly.

I was apprehensive about reading the poem for the first time at the Holocaust Memorial Day service, not least because I was not sure how the large Jewish sector of the audience would react to the references to Sharon and Chatilla.  In fact,  I need not have worried and the poem struck a strong emotional chord with the whole audience. After the service I was approached by people from all faiths and ethnic backgrounds who wanted copies of the poem.  The poem hit the mood of the time and quickly began to circulate by e-mail and in hard copy.

At the time Wasted Lives was one tiny part in the attempt to avert the war in Iraq.  In this it failed but I believe in what it says and hope it may have some lasting value.’

I wrote these notes at the time and have been amazed at how the poem has continued to resonate since then. When you have to write a poem for a specific event you are of course bound by time constraints and when the poem takes off so quickly it means that if there are any errors or bits you’d like to change it is difficult to do as so many copies are already finding their own way around the world.  Happily, there are only two things that I have considered changing in the poem since then. The first amendment that I did make was from:

If you kept one minute’s silence
for the victims of Auschwitz and Belsen
you would not be able to speak for another
two years.

 to:

If you kept one minute’s silence
for each of the victims of Auschwitz and Belsen
you would not be able to speak for another
two years.

For clarity’s sake, after this was pointed out to me by a pupil at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, I decided to add the word each to this line. I discussed this in detail when I was a guest writer on Writers Dock. The link to their home page is given in the links section of this site.  It is well worth logging onto the homepage and having a look around there but if you have difficulty finding your way to the archive of threads that were posted when I was quest writer there a more direct link is:
http://www.writersdock.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewforum&f=356
I had thought of changing one more thing in Wasted Lives but in the end decided against it.  It was pointed out to me that one is not a prime. I don’t want to get into an argument on the primality of one. I know that the last mathematician to consider one to be a prime was Henri Lebesgue and that while one has the qualities of a prime it is not now considered to be a prime  - but the reason for writing One./A prime./ in the poem also included the fact that the number one was the prime mover in getting me counting… perhaps not in a cosmological sense … but in the sense of a tractor unit that hauls the load to follow… from one came two then three then four and so on –  and one does prime or prepare the way for all that followed it. Anyway, I kept it in!
I have included these notes on the website as I think the way this particular poem has found its own way into the world may be of interest. I’ve also included a copy of the poem itself. I intend to record a correct audio version of my reading of the poem to sit alongside the written one but I decided, despite the mistake I made in a live concert, to also include a version of the poem that was accompanied by Dutch Lewis on Bass Clarinet and Adrian Moore on organ. All the times I’ve performed this poem I have never made a mistake and yet, in June 2007, after hearing Dutch play his improvised introduction to it I was so moved that I did, for a short while, lose my way. You’ll be able to spot this mistake but I’ve put the recording of this event onto my site anyway as I was so moved by Dutch’s music and by the organ music that followed it seemed a shame not to include it.