Photo by Nick Fewings

The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.

– James Baldwin, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity”

“Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.”

– Adrienne Rich, “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

This thinking about the politics of mud started in Clamour, a group of young people in Barcelona who decided to clamour for the rights of living beings and against genocide and ecocide, and to clamour against all forms of dehumanisation and despoliation of nature. But how can we clamour? With what language can we speak when language is increasingly dominated by stifling algorithms, by the addling quantification of almost everything? One answer was given by two Clamour members, poets, one fifty and the other in his early twenties. And the clamour happened in a bookshop, Librería Fahrenheit 451, which has recently opened in my street, a marvellously crazy project in the age of AI and gentrification and Airbnb, which has killed most social life in the old market neighbourhood of El Born. Librería Fahrenheit 451 is a cooperative that began as a mobile bookshop in Sitges. Its focus is independent publishing and good, non-bestseller titles, and it aims to encourage kids and everyone to read. It has a music room, a workshop space, and invites visitors “to dive into the smell of paper, get swept away by mysterious sounds, disconnect from the digital world, and embark on a sensual journey in search of lost senses”. What better place for the two Clamour poets, David Casassas and Neil Sabatés to offer a poetry recital?

And that’s what they gave in November, a poetic dialogue between two men of different generations. Everyone, a weeknight audience of about twenty, loved it and there was even some talk of producing a chapbook of the poems they offered. The young people of Clamour have lamented their “Braindead Generation” and a “lack of life”, which is in great part due to the killing of imagination, the abolition of dreaming. How can a head stuffed with useless, increasingly false information bundled in a numerical straitjacket be free to dream? But it isn’t just a personal matter. It’s political, for imagination is essential for political thought and action. My area is human rights and, here, poetry infuses universal feelings like grief and freedom with possibility instead of despair, and it brings numbers to life. The small audience in the bookshop heard the power of poetry to transform things, felt that we don’t have to be captives of hopelessness, even when normalisation of genocide and hatred is our daily bread, even when we’re obsessively trying to make sense of the “news” or to block it out, which are both ways of killing our own imagination, when others are busy killing it for us.

Palestine was with us that night in Librería Fahrenheit 451. Although David and Neil were reading their own poems, Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “The Prison Cell” was also present and resonating in their words, telling us, “It is possible especially now/ To ride a horse/ Inside a prison cell/ And run away”. In Darwish’s poem, it’s easy to understand why “The prison guard grew so sad . . ./ He begged me to give him back/ His freedom.” Our listening minds saw the chance to ride away with a freedom that prison guards or enforcers of minds can never have. That chance was also held out by Darwish’s two Catalan brothers in poetry and their kindred poetic dialogue.

David and Neil titled their recital “Poetry and Imagination in a Time of Mud”, a reference to the Catalan poet Jacint Verdaguer (1845 – 1902) who once wrote that he tilled mud like a poet, wrote like a tiller of mud, and did each task well. The son of farmers, Verdaguer revelled in the small and large details of the beauty of his rural surroundings, knew mud’s creative power and how close we humans are to it, physically and even emotionally close, a state of being that is very different from what some 25% of UK teens find when a chatbot becomes their best friend, a despot behind a cold glass screen that’s “accessible 24/7”, feeding them answers they want to hear, but noli me tangere, smell me not, taste me not, feel me not, just do as I say.

Mud is much more than a simple metaphor. It demands respect for the natural rhythms of nature and, as part of nature, behaves in ways that are not always desired, obliging humans to use their imagination and adapt to new circumstances, to be part of nature. No wonder AI is destroying nature, destroying the mud that answers back and has its own ways. Moreover, for AI, mud and its elements are simply there to be plundered as the source of its burgeoning existence and, since AI is amoral, it comes with horrible environmental and human rights abuse, especially in the Congo which holds in its mud 70% of the world’s coltan reserves. Mud expresses the realities of political power. Poor people, child miners in the Congo, Palestinians watching their babies die of cold with tents collapsing into the icy mud of what remains of Gaza, landslide victims, Indigenous people displaced when forests are flattened, know through suffering what mud can be and what mud can do when abused and misused.

In the poetic myths of origin of the ancient world, mud was the primordial material for creating life and especially human life. In Eden, Adam was........

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