EVERYWHERE WE GO TODAY we hear the word ‘recession’. Even if we were to go nowhere at all but instead cower at home, trying to keep a sound grip on the few small things we feel we’ve retained direct control over, even still the word ‘recession’ would find us out: it whispers in our ears from the radio and the tv; it’s part of every second newspaper headline or report, making us feel guilty or angry or heart-broken all over again. It seems to order us to regret those few moments earlier when, against the odds, we managed to forget it, to forget ourselves, to live in the world of the moment. It is as if it is somehow unpatriotic not to be at its mercy at every moment of our waking, and very often even of our sleeping, lives.

There has always been for citizens of a democracy a difficult tug-of-war between exercising the freedom to go inwards, to be elsewhere, even temporarily, out of reach of distractions, and, at the other extreme, the duty to look outwards, to engage with and in the world, to use whatever strength and voice one has toward the common good. The danger with our whole culture now describing itself as ‘in recession’, shaped by recession, is that those many elements which are in fact in growth, engaged in change in the near or long term, are almost completely overlooked and certainly undervalued.

Are the arts in recession? They are not. Again I have to remind myself that I am not taking about funding for the arts but about the arts themselves. Too often we make the mistake of equating value with monetary worth. We must insist on the distinction. Though we have already handed over financial independence to the same reductionist thinking that left us bankrupt in the first instance, surely we are at least able to reject the reductionist language that goes with it? Are poets withdrawing, giving up? Are painters hanging up their brushes or sculptors their aprons and chisels or young and old musicians their instruments? Who was it decided that ‘recession’ is a fair description of our country, of our culture, of our spirit, despite the grave financial situation we find ourselves in? Accept ‘recession’ as a description of where we are and all we do is accept the fact that the power is elsewhere, in some other’s hands.

Tags: poetry, recession, arts, survivalrecession, publishing