Optional Poetry? It's your funeral Ofqual

Rachel Searle of Blakefest suggested that as curator of the festivals's Corona Visions show, I respond to the ruling that Poetry will be optional in the next GCSE syllabus:

This sylla-bus is a coach driving through the boundless Amazonian forest via the wilds of Siberia with a well-tended bed of specimens and flowers down each side of the interior. The people on the bus believe this is the limit of knowledge, after all you could spend a life time analysing the bus’s botanical cargo. Poetry has been a lifeline during the lockdown and presumably most people have accessed it via their computers and yet the reason given by Ofqual is that respondents to their consultations have “highlighted the difficulties for students in trying to get to grips with complex literary texts remotely”. What they mean is that there is difficulty translating the individual responses to observable measurements. You see there is a limit to what observable measurements can tell us otherwise why not just have a brain in a vat at the Globe theatre permanently reciting Shakespeare? Or are we all placebo suckers fooled by our prehensions and feelings? Poetry goes down well at funerals because like the grief experienced during lockdown, this is a situation where observable measurements fall short of the mark. We feel our guard drop and a sense of our interconnectedness outside of the Hasbro game of life is revealed. By coming closer to death, we perhaps feel a sense of how we are all immersed in life. Observable measurements rely on the observer being separate from the thing they are observing and poetry is all about creating a realm where the observer is part of the region they are witness to. Poetry is not a subjective response to the primary material of rational life; it is in fact the union of percipient and the terrain they inhabit including the audience. The brain in the vat model of humans hasn’t gone away and the paradox of how a data processing technology has given us renewed access to the ineffable seems to have passed the exam boards by. You see our culture of separated-ness through measurable-observations means that the growth of the human spirit is not high on the agenda of the exam board. They have the specific and discrete task of setting exams to be marked. We here at Blakefest like to speculate about a model of human relations based on our immersion in life together. Imagination is the ability to think of something new, something other than. Depression could be linked to the suppression of the imagination because we find it hard to imagine anything other.* By hanging onto measurable observations and constantly assessing through comparison, it seems increasingly that we are intent on building The Empire of Like** rather than allowing difference to emerge in all its misshapen and multi-sensory glory. 

I’ve worked with art students during lockdown and many of them have seemed to make enormous creative breakthroughs and benefited from the virtual contact with their peers and tutors. Passion, engagement and comprehension are all perfectly translatable to the virtual realm so could it be that the exam board sense that poetry itself creates a disruptive interrogation of the supremacy of observable measurements in our lives? Blakefest is here for anyone who wants to share their singular plurality and speculate about being immersed in life. This year our show is virtual and how appropriate is that when the analytical mind perceives anything beyond data-based information as “virtual”. This relationship between the digital and the analogue is one we must grasp with conviction and intensity rather than, as Ofqual seem to be doing, retreating into the certainty of metrics. Blake is known for being visionary but first and foremost he is passionate about humanity fully embodying their capabilities, “Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that called Body is a portion of a Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.”

 *Blake described Joshua Reynolds as the man sent to depress art because of his dogmatic approach to historicised methods. **Brian Massumi: Parables for the Virtual