Language Studies student Fiona Wilson wrote this analysis of Janine’s poem ‘p.p.e.’ for her degree, scoring a distinction.
Introduction
p.p.e.
personal protective equipment
proves particularly effective
preventing pandemic excretion
polluting public environments
profit pursuers expect
priority, private enterprise
prevails: purchasing essentials
proves prohibitively expensive
production postponed, exhausted
public protectors endangered
political patent expired
pay packets empty
premier’s proxy explains
‘patience, please, everyone’
pen and paper exercise
piss poor excuse
This author has chosen to use the poem “p.p.e.” by the poet and political activist Janine Booth to illustrate her response to this question (see Appendix 1). This text was created as a response to political events in the UK in March 2020 and can be described as a political text in the broader sense of Bahktin’s definition (Hann 2016g).
In the first instance, this piece will be contextualised into the national situation within the recent global pandemic. A short background to the author will also be provided. The text itself will be analysed to determine creative features from a stylistics point of view, while also considering Carter’s ideas on playfulness within the text (The Open University 2022). The author’s intention for this as a spoken word piece and its multimodal nature will be briefly considered.
This piece will then discuss the poem using the concept of the Three Ps of Product, Purpose and Process, linked to Kaufmann and Sternberg’s (2010) definition of creativity (Demjen 2017a). Following on from these considerations, the work will be put into a wider context using the Three Lens Approach (Demjen 2017b).
It will then conclude by examining the author’s own view of the creativity in the chosen piece and what may have been achieved.
Background and Context
In January 2020, a respiratory virus began to spread across the world. Governments of all countries put plans in place to cope with the effects of this virus, which became known as the Coronavirus or Covid-19. A global pandemic was declared on 11th March 2020 (WHO, 2020). On 16th March, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, made a statement on television (BBC, 2020a). In this statement, he asked the people of the UK to stay at home and avoid unnecessary contact with others. A further statement on 23rd March 2020 introduced a legally enforced “Stay at Home Order”, which banned unnecessary travel and contact with others, and closed gathering places such as schools, businesses, and venues (BBC, 2020b).
During the first week, on 18th March, a poet and activist, Janine Booth, created an experimental Facebook Group entitled “CoronaVerses – Poems from the Pandemic” (Facebook, 2020). In this online group, members were invited to post works that were to be written during and about the Coronavirus. The contributors were generally left wing, anti-Government, and anti-Establishment, which made the Facebook group a place to protest various news items as they appeared in the media and against the Government’s perceived handling (or mishandling) of the Pandemic and its associated social effects. Later in the first year of the Pandemic, an anthology of some of these contributions was published, collated by Booth and another poet, Attila the Stockbroker, real name John Bain, using the name of the Facebook Group as the title (Booth, J and Bain, J 2020). Booth herself also published a collection of her own work in 2021, entitled “Unprecedented Rhymes – verses versus the virus” (Booth, 2021). The text selected by this author has been taken from “Unprecedented Rhymes” and was originally posted in the CoronaVerses group on 11th April 2020. It is simply titled “p.p.e.”.
In the 1980’s Janine Booth was a prolific poet and performed under the name “The Big J”. She took a long break and did not return to performing in 2014. She is an active Trade Unionist and performs on picket lines in solidarity with strikers. She has been described as a Marxist and socialist feminist. She is also a tutor for Trade Unions including the RMT (Rail, Maritime and Transport) and PCS (Public and Commercial Services) Unions. This author met Booth in 2018 when she tutored a two-day course on Neurodiversity in the Workplace and has followed her work since that meeting.
Style
At the time that “p.p.e.” was published, UK media was reporting on shortages of essential personal protective equipment across all of the NHS and Care sectors (BBC 2020c and 2020d). The Government was urging everyone to cover their face as a method of restricting the spread of Coronavirus, to protect yourself and others.
However, they appeared to be unable to provide adequate protection for the NHS’ healthcare staff who were dealing with Coronavirus patients. The poem is Booth’s response to those perceived Government failures in provision. The acronym for personal protective equipment is usually capitalised, as PPE. Booth has chosen to use lower case, perhaps as a reflection of the Government’s deprioritisation of the need to provide adequate stocks for users in the healthcare environment. Each line of the piece is made up of three words, with the initial letters of each word spelling out the acronym p.p.e. It could be said that this choice takes the more well-known style of acrostic poems, where words are spelled vertically using initial letters, and updates the format with language play that reinforces the word formation and poetic style to keep attention on the title.
The simple three-word lines also echo the incessantly promoted slogans and mantras used by the British Government throughout the pandemic. The most memorable of these is “Hands – Face – Space” (Ali 2021), closely followed by the three phrase “Stay Home – Protect the NHS – Save Lives”. This recontextualisation echoes the shift from Obama’s “Yes We Can” to the Anti Erdogan “Yes We Ban” seen in The Politics of Language and Creativity in a Globalised World (Hann 2016b). While the use of three words and three phrase slogans was not new to the Government communications during the Pandemic, Booth’s poem takes this style and proceeds to use it to protest the way the Government had been dealing with this particular issue.
The work by Booth falls easily into the forms of linguistic creativity that Carter (The Open University 2022) has extolled. The repetition can be seen in the constant use of three words, and the constant use of the three first letters, in every line. Booth also can be seen to usurp a readers’ expectations in a playful way with the use of different words as an alternative to the expected “Personal Protective Equipment” that arises out of the more general use of the acronym “p.p.e.” What Carter (The Open University 2022) describes as a pattern break, a break from the expected, can be seen to be both playful and critical while serving to make the author’s point in a way that is more memorable.
Jeffries and McIntyre (2010a) discuss graphology (how a poem looks) as a written form of phonology (how a poem sounds). This perspective can be applied to “p.p.e.”, since Booth made a deliberate choice to limit the lines to three words and using lower case letters throughout her piece. The poem could be seen as an example of concrete poetry, where the layout helps to reinforce the words used. By using the three-word lines, the acronym in the title is foregrounded and kept in the reader’s consciousness throughout any reading of it. Booth also plays with syntax, mainly keeping to standard verse-form but using enjambed run-on lines where her sentences require more than three words (Jeffries and McIntyre 2010b).
Many examples of the power of three could be seen during the pandemic. The three-word slogans and three phrase mantras have already been discussed. The daily briefings provided by the Government also had three key speakers, at three separate podiums, bringing together the three strands running through each briefing. The political rhetoric, tempered by the science and supported by details of how the health sector was coping served to reassure the public that by “coming together” and “fighting the virus” the nation could pull through the dark times.
Booth, as a ranting poet more usually seen performing her slam poetry at spoken word events, disagreed regularly with the Government stance. She openly wrote about things that the Government could improve or were able to do in a more effective way. It should be noted however, that many texts were posted in the Facebook group, very few of them have comments from other members of the group. Could this be viewed as a sign that while contributors were happy to share their own work, they were not so comfortable providing any form of critique to the work of their contemporaries?
Cook’s (2016) discussion of multimodality in literature comes into play when the piece is considered in its intended form of a spoken Slam Poetry piece. Visitors to the Facebook page, it could be argued, would probably be familiar with the author and her work. The poem would instantly become a multimodal piece since any reader, whether on the social media page, or in the published collection of her work, will be considering how it would sound, should the author be reciting at an event. Individually, each reader may have a different concept of how it would have been performed outside of the lockdown caused by the pandemic. However, the source material, written for the social media page, and its intent remains constant.
Kaufmann and Sternberg
The E302 module materials begin with the definition of creativity put forward by Kaufman and Sternberg in 2010. Their idea of creativity is that something should be novel, of high quality and appropriate to the task at hand. Booth’s poem is certainly novel, as it is a response in real time to the events of the day. Almost before the issue of PPE shortages were highlighted in the mainstream media, Booth and other poets in the CoronaVerses group had begun writing about that very topic. When considering the quality of the work, we need to consider who is making that judgement of value. It is likely that anyone who follows right-wing Conservative politics would dismiss the poem as the rantings of an opponent. However, left-wing Labour party supporters would welcome the protest as another way to damage the reputation of the Government. This author falls into the latter category and finds the poem amusing, while also carrying an important protest message.
Can Booth’s poem be considered appropriate to the task at hand? It was written as a protest and attempts to sway the public point of view against the Government. This author feels it has achieved this, by keeping the issue to the forefront and making the poem available on social media as a means of allowing the message to spread more widely by means of posting and reposting across all social media platforms.
Three Ps: Product – Purpose – Process
Within this framework, the poem itself is the product, created by Booth to express and share her dissatisfaction with current events. This dissatisfaction becomes part of the purpose of the poem, its reason for existing. While Booth is a prolific poet, she may well have chosen not to write on this particular topic. She may also have chosen other forms of creative writing to express her thoughts. However, as a left-wing supporter, her need to protest against anything that the Conservative Government does is strong, these needs again feeding into the purpose of the poem.
The process taken to write and then share the work is also unusual. Since face-to-face contact with others was effectively banned, many groups and communities moved online, using Internet-based applications like Zoom to maintain contact with each other. Booth chose to create the Facebook group to allow her own work, and the work of fellow writers, to be shared with the world in a statement of solidarity with other dissenters. Subsequently, she then made the choice to publish the CoronaVerses book but the fact that she did not include this work in that publication is interesting. This could indicate that she assigned a lower value to this work when compared to those that were included in the anthology. The physical publication of “p.p.e.” did not happen until almost a year later, in a separate publication of Booth’s own work, “Unprecedented Rhymes”. Is “p.p.e.” “just” a protest poem? We may never know, but the fact that Booth chose to share this work with the Facebook group and later in the published book suggests that she feels a sense of community in a group exerting centrifugal force on the Government (2016g).
The Three Lenses: Textual, Contextual and Critical
When we consider the text used, Booth uses everyday language, with a heavy sarcastic tone. If she were reading it aloud, we can clearly hear the emphasis on the verbs in verse three; exhausted, endangered, expired, and the use of profit pursuers to described big business. This is a poem in structure, but it does not use the expected literary style of language use. Booth has written exactly as she speaks when performing. This “slam poetry” style also featured in many of the other contributions to the Facebook group and can be described as a commonality or shared quality among similar writers. Slam poetry is generally a spoken form, rather than written down, and reading p.p.e. aloud encourages the reader to decide their own emphasis.
Reddy’s (1979) ‘conduit model’ of communication explains that the method of delivering a message is as important as the message itself, which leads to the second lens, the contextual lens. During the early days of lockdown, performance venues were closed, and social gatherings were banned. Performance poets like Booth found that they had no place to share their works. By creating the Facebook group, like-minded people came together and formed an online community. It is important to note that this like-mindedness can be seen to skew a viewpoint and build a bias. There may well have been pro-Government poems, but this author does not remember reading any on the site. Within the group, most people shared the same political leanings and were a “warm” audience who did not need to be persuaded. With this in mind, all works were warmly received with no dissenting comments found within the group. Across the wider Facebook network, opinions can be seen to be extremely polarised and text arguments in some comment threads were a common occurrence. In contrast, Booth’s group felt like a safe space within which this author was comfortable to be a part of.
This feeling of a safe space feeds into the third lens, the critical lens. There has been previous mention of those with left-leaning political beliefs being more likely to value Booth’s work more highly than those whose beliefs are right-leaning. While Booth published “p.p.e.” in 2021, she had omitted it from the earlier community anthology. Did she consider this work to hold less value than other examples of her own work which were included in the CoronaVerses volume? She clearly valued it enough to publish later. This author chose “p.p.e.” to analyse because the style appealed. The brief three-word lines feel like they are almost spat out. Technically the work can be described as free or blank verse with no rhyme or meter, but it still has a form. It should also be noted that this form stood out as different from the other works that followed a more traditional form, included in “Unprecedented Rhymes.”
Conclusion
This final piece of work asks we students to consider the question “What does creativity look like, and what can it achieve.”
This author has enjoyed the works of Janine Booth for a number of years, following a meeting with her when she was asked to deliver training in neurodiversity with the local TUC training programme. The piece chosen for examination in support of the question in this final piece of work for the module fulfils, in this author’s opinion, the criteria of creativity admirably.
It shows creativity when it uses the spoken form of Slam Poetry in a written form on the social media site and, later, in her published work. Janine Booth succeeds in showing the written form of Slam Poetry losing none of its immediacy and impact when it is necessarily translated into a written form within a social network environment.
The poem uses a form that can be seen used by earlier political activists that usurps the form used by Governments and twisting it by changing the words into a more critical anti-establishment rhetoric. (Ali 2021, Hann 2016d)
The cleverness of this is shown as the use of three-word recontextualisation within a standard verse form that fulfils Three Lens Analysis and the Three P purposes in the use of only 52 words. Creativity is explicit in the work as it changes media and delivery forms but still provides impact and relevancy. Carter’s (The Open University 2022) playfulness is used to focus attention upon the form of the Government’s message but deliver a critique of that same government’s performance.
On the face of it, this short piece of work by Booth is an angry rant about a perceived failure on the part of the Government to provide adequate protective equipment to healthcare workers who dealt with a highly contagious and deadly virus during a global pandemic. However, when examined as a piece of creative rhetoric, using the academic tools to dissect it, it becomes very apparent that the poem fulfils its purpose while also proving itself to be playful and memorably provocative.
Words: 2917
References
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Appendix 1 – Chosen text
Janine Booth (2020) available at https://www.facebook.com/groups/2620006228128723/search/?q=ppe
Also published in “Unprecedented Rhymes – verses versus the virus” in 2021 by Roundhead Publications.
p.p.e.
personal protective equipment
proves particularly effective
preventing pandemic excretion
polluting public environments
profit pursuers expect
priority, private enterprise
prevails: purchasing essentials
proves prohibitively expensive
production postponed, exhausted
public protectors endangered
political patent expired
pay packets empty
premier’s proxy explains
‘patience, please, everyone’
pen and paper exercise
piss poor excuse
