The drunker I become the more I mix things up
Today, for example, I confused Iain Critchton Smith
with Max Stafford-Clark, who had been the Artistic
Director of the Royal Court Theatre in London
when it banned Jim Allen’s play Perdition, which
was being directed by Ken Loach, after coming
under pressure from people who believed it to be
inaccurate, inflammatory, bordering
on the blasphemous. Shameful. Anti-semitic
in the way it examined Zionism
An insult to those who had died in the Holocaust
Critchton-Smith, writing about Hugh MacDiarmid
in The Golden Lyric says that Hugh’s imagination
saved him from communism. The poems he wrote
about Lenin are (fortunately) more about himself
than Lenin.
A man may say, says Iain, that he is a communist
and (yet) in the recesses of his imagination not be so
Ken Loach accuses Max of the Royal Court
of appalling moral cowardice
Steven Taylor
Illustration Edward Gage
# the title references MacDiarmid’s poem
A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle
.
Enjoyed this poem. Very relevant today.
Comment by Ms Angela P Birtill on 22 March, 2024 at 4:11 pm