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The verse of a Muslim woman who dubbed herself the "Lyrical Terrorist" has been compared by her defence counsel with the First World War poet Wilfred Owen.
"His [Owen's] poetry was stark and deliberately shocking," her lawyer told jurors at her trial last week. "His poetry was such it was to change the style of all that came after it."
An extract from one of her poems was then read out in court: "Kafirs, your time will come soon, and no one will save you from the doom!"
Whatever the truth of this woman's alleged terrorism offences, her real crime is against poetry. Indeed her hackneyed verse is enough to make you protest against protest poetry. For the Lyrical Terrorist illustrates a wider point: most protest poetry isn't very good.
Why? Mainly because the point of the exercise is the protest, not the poem. It aims to shock the reader into political action and often resorts to profane language to gets its message across. Take Harold Pinter's anti-war poems. Many are just smutty doggerel ("There's no escape/The big pricks are out/They'll fuck everything in sight/Watch your back"). The most charitable thing to say is Pinter's heart is in the right place even if his stanzas aren't.
And if there has been any good poetry to come out of the Iraq war, I have still to find it. It is no accident that the anti-Vietnam war songs of Bob Dylan put Ginsberg and the Beat generation to shame.
Political poetry is written out of short-term outrage rather than longterm reflection. It is usually of its time and rarely stands the test of time. What's more, anti-war poets are usually agitproppers on the home front rather than front-line veterans.
Can protest poetry ever be any good? The war poets such as Owen are the exception that proves the rule. They experienced the pity of war and responded to it in their own individual way. Good poetry must be true to the experience it communicates and not in service to a political agenda.
Yeats was another who wrote lyrically about terrorists and terrorism (Easter 1916). Whatever your political views, the poem is stunningly powerful: "All changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born."
But poetry is pretty impotent when it comes to changing minds. As WH Auden wrote: "No words men can write can stop the war/Or measure up to the relief/Of its immeasurable grief."
By the same token I doubt the Lyrical Terrorist's words would start a war. Instead, the onus is on all poets to find ever more terribly beautiful ways of expressing resistance - to save us all from the doom of banality.
