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Readers may remember the writer Francis Fukuyama, who in the heady days of Reaganite monetarism proclaimed 'the end of history'.  It was Fukuyama's contention that the liberal capitalist Western democracy was the achieved goal of history as narrative, and that despite the odd war or natural disaster - largely afflicting the Third World - we might assume that the organisation of our society would no longer undergo radical challenge or change.  One impact of September 11th is to throw this theory into terminal doubt.  Osama Bin Laden and the al-Quaida network are seen as the monstrous revenge of those forces supposedly dismissed by our liberal democracies, striking at the absolute symbol of global capitalism - the WTC Towers.  Who said history was over?

Perhaps Fukuyama wasn't entirely wrong, however.  Perhaps rather than the end of history, what we have witnessed is a radical break - the end of a history.  In other words, the undoubted hegemony of global capitalism - and its preferred mode of Government, the liberal democracy - has been achieved, but this represents the end of a phase of history, rather than the end of the whole shebang.  Accepting this invites new and innovative critiques of the status quo, whereas merely asserting that history does still happen, in the sense of almost 'everyday' events such as war or famine, is ironically much more conservative, keeping us from addressing the fact that the terms of historical argument have changed.

This is important because those who might creatively challenge our liberal capitalist assumptions are not just Islamic fundamentalists.  Take for example the anti-globalization protestors who regularly seek to disrupt G7 meetings.  One of the most disturbing aspects of public debate since September 11th is the way in which some Government ministers in Britain have sought to identify these protestors with Osama Bin Laden himself.  Once again it is important to emphasise the terms of argument - our liberal democracy offers freedom of choice, but only on its own terms. 

How can all this relate to contemporary poetry?  On Sunday October 14th, a Wendy Cope poem in response to the World Trade Center disaster was published in The Observer.  Spared took its cue from an Emily Dickinson epigraph "that Love is all there is, / is all we know of Love".  Cope's tetrameter ABAB quatrains aim for Frostian lyric clarity, but the flatness of the language is rather closer to greeting card verse:

It wasn't you, it wasn't me,
up there, two thousand feet above
the New York street.  We're safe, and free,
a little while, to live and love...

If using those lines of Dickinson might seem apt, framing the poem as an actual love poem seems a manipulative gesture to tug at our heartstrings.  There's something slightly distasteful about such a complex disaster being reduced to a generic lover's address.  Our lucky couple has escaped a variety of horrible fates, which the poem duly lists - from phoning family on the doomed planes to death in "the blazing tower" - and finally need not

...jump together, hand in hand,
to certain death.  Spared all of this
for now, how well I understand
that love is all, is all there is.

If "love is all, is all there is", then perhaps our lovers might well want to jump "hand in hand /to certain death" in consummation as those ultimate lovers Tristan and Isolde would recommend. Spared is not a good poem but it has two interesting characteristics.  Firstly, the strange and eminently Dickinsonian fascination with death (such a poem is inevitably going to involve death somewhere, but it is the fascination with the types of death which is striking) and secondly the suggestion of a peculiar sense of guilt in Cope's choice of title.  Spared?  Sinners are spared but what exactly is the sin in question?  Could it really be the simple fact of avoiding the fate of those who died on September 11th?  There is a somewhat perverse liberal guilt implicit in these stanzas.

But then the market for poetry in Britain is basically liberal and middle class and it is no surprise that when British poets respond to world events there is often a great deal of handwringing involved.  In The Guardian of November 12th, Tony Harrison published a poem titled Species Barrier, inspired by a photograph from an Afghan village of bovine carcasses in the rubble of a US airstrike.  Apart from showcasing the impoverished texture of language that mars most of Harrison's later work, the poem's conceit is to liken one tragedy to another:

An Afghan's total herd like some gunned stray
from culled Cumbria dumped on Kabul,
the colluding cabinet of the hooked UK
still committing its 'contiguous cull'.

The rational inconsistencies and skewed sense of proportion in likening FMD to the consequences of September 11th boggle the mind.  Harrison's poem is a much more conventional example of the handwringing poem than Spared, and all the worse for it.  The laziness of the language is debilitating - note the insistent alliteration and the repetition of "culled / cull" within the stanza.  As so often, the laziness of technique here mirrors the laziness of thought behind the poetry.

Tony Harrison was famously The Guardian's Poetry Correspondent during the Balkans conflict.  One of the best public poems in recent years came from the same war and a younger poet.  Glyn Maxwell's The Altered Slightly is an excellent example of how a public poem need not simplify its message to knee jerk condemnation or evade the complexities of the situation.  The poem seems particularly apt now in the wake of the anthrax attacks on America (suspected to be the work of rightwing militias) and the biological threat also posed by al-Quaida.  With an apparent Balkan backdrop, we are invited to look under a microscope:

That's them but if you look
they've altered slightly.  Good news for the sniper
who sights the Muslim wandering up the road,

then sights the Christian limping in the gutter
and cannot choose between them or to let them
come and have each other.  The dead,

uniquely in the dark about who did it,
lie still as stone, mistaken for the hiding,
while somewhere in some dedicated rich

lab the virgin germs,
nervous in molecular pitch dark,
parachute into a slide of blood

and set to work.

The poem blurs definitions - the germs "parachute" at the end of the poem just as peacekeepers are "helicoptered into a war zone" at its beginning.  As Justin Quinn pointed out in a recent Poetry Review,
this poem is precisely about the difficulties of taking up a simple position, it is

...about the difficulty of recognition, and attendant on this the impossibility of making a moral choice. When one thing flows into the other with such ease, how can one take up a consistent ethical position?

By keeping faith to the ambiguities of the world, never more apparent than when 'normality' is traumatically disturbed, Maxwell avoids the pitfalls of Cope or Harrison.

This is not to say that a poem can't mark a position out, can't condemn.  Kathleen Jamie's A Sealed Room ends by focussing on what many saw as the unjust cause of the Gulf War, but by communicating through powerful (and simple) images - rather than hectoring - she succeeds in avoiding the rehearsed response:

Prising a stone
from your own earth your fingers
wash it in a burn.
You are stopped weeping
hold it to the light:
it is bright glass,
           which is molten sand
it is a blue bead,
like a cormorant's eye
It is your own self
             huddled in a sealed room
it is a clot of oil
             that you wash and wash but cannot rid from your hands.

The use of the third person involves us as readers and holds us to account. Unlike Harrison, the speaker of this poem avoids self-righteousness - we are all being accused here.  Even the closing image is perhaps not so simple as it first appears.  In many ways A Sealed Room directly addresses the liberal guilt implicit in Cope's Spared as we are reminded of Lady Macbeth washing the blood of Duncan from her hands and of Pontius Pilate before Christ.  By criticising us as colluding citizens - is there not a little handwringing going on in that last line? - A Sealed Room earns the right to condemn the war and its mercenary motives while still acknowledging the ever-present ambiguities.

These latter examples show us that poets need not leap in with neo-Marxist theory and vague calls for 'direct action'.  There are other ways in which the assumptions made by our society can be questioned intelligently in a poem.  As Auden, one of the greatest writers of public poetry in the last century, once wrote in his introduction to the anthology Poems of Freedom:

Poets are rarely and only incidentally priests or philosophers or party agitators.  They are people with a particular interest and skill in handling words in a particular kind of way which is extremely difficult to describe and extremely easy to recognise.  Apart from that, they are fairly ordinary men and women, neither better nor worse...

In these difficult times, it seems reassuring that people can still be ordinary and that ordinary people can still be poets.