David Parry: SMPBI Cultural Officer, on 'Caliban'

Editor's note:

SMPBI is proud to welcome on board the Reverend David Parry.  David is a Priest, a Poet, a Man of Culture.  He joins us as our Cultural Officer, bringing with him a broad experience of the arts and of the soul of the struggle.  Socialism is not merely economics, it is the pursuit of all that is good for the people.  Those who have a purely material outlook are as much victims of the degrading degenerate world of globalisation as are the Capitalists who profit by it.  Culture comes from the people.  The idea that it is something of the bourgeois classes is the result of anti-Working Class propaganda.  Like everything else, Culture is created by us, and like everything we create, the Ruling Class lay claim to it, in the manner of thieves who have the arrogance to take credit for that which they have no right to. 

Welcome David!
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The phrase "Proletarian literature" refers to those writings by working-class authors intended for a class-conscious readership. Clearly, even though the Encyclopædia Britannica comments this genre "is essentially an intended device of revolution", these manuscripts are not merely published by the Communist Party, or sympathetic left-wing activists. Rather, the "proletarian novel" - as a narrative about working-class life,reflects a deep cultural difference between American, Russian and other traditions of penmanship to that of Britain. Indeed, British folk scribblers were not especially inspired by the Communist Party per se, but instead found their roots in the Chartist movement, along with idealist Anarchism.

Concerning the book, Caliban's Redemption:

In this collection of occult poems Parry's alter-ego Caliban muses on sexuality, seclusion and Shakespeare. Moreover, by trying to capture the dark dwarf's metaphysical lyrics moment by moment, the author slowly confronts himself as a willing prisoner on the magical island of violence and desire. After all, Caliban would claim that neither Browning nor Nietzsche had fully grasped the ethics of redemption which can only be found in unadulterated selfhood.