Beyond Identity: New Horizons in Modern Scottish Poetry 9789042027879, 9789042027886, 9042027878, 9042027886

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Beyond Identity

Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature Volume 13 Series Editors Rhona Brown University of Glasgow John Corbett University of Glasgow Sarah Dunnigan University of Edinburgh James McGonigal University of Glasgow Production Editor Ronnie Young University of Glasgow

SCROLL The Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature publishes new work in Scottish Studies, with a focus on analysis and reinterpretation of the literature and languages of Scotland, and the cultural contexts that have shaped them. Further information on our editorial and production procedures can be found at www.rodopi.nl

Beyond Identity New Horizons in Modern Scottish Poetry

Attila Dósa

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

Cover image: © East Lothian Museums Service. Licensor: www.scran.ac.uk Cover design: Ronnie Young The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2787-9 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2788-6 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in The Netherlands

In loving memory of Dósa Ottó (1939–2001) and Ifj. Dósa Ottó (1961–2005)

Contents Acknowledgements

9

Introduction: Scotland, Poetry and Other Realities

11

Edwin Morgan: Our Man in Glasgow

35

Douglas Dunn: A Different Drummer

59

Robert Crawford: The Emphatic Soul

79

John Burnside: Poets and Other Animals

113

Kathleen Jamie: More Than Human

135

Don Paterson: The Music of Consciousness

147

Tom Leonard: The Sound of Poetry

167

Frank Kuppner: The Pragmatism of Profundity

189

W.N. Herbert: The Poetry Game

221

Kate Clanchy: The Sister Art

243

Kenneth White: A Strategist of Mutation

259

Aonghas Macneacail: Land, Language, Memory

281

Richard Price: Signage on the Super Highway

301

Index

325

Acknowledgements I am grateful to all the poets for their generosity with their time and knowledge while making this book. Individually, I wish to express my thanks to Douglas Dunn for his friendship and I am indebted to Robert Crawford for his long-term encouragement and invaluable scholarly advice. I thank Edwin Morgan for his prompt correspondence and for always being available, and Frank Kuppner for being my guide in Glasgow. I am grateful to Richard Price for his willingness to share his views on recent Scottish writing, and so helping to provide a knowledgeable summing up of the main issues discussed in the book. I wish to record my thanks to Dr Lawrence Normand and Dr István D. Rácz at the universities of Middlesex and Debrecen respectively for commenting on the introductory chapter and in particular I want to thank Dr Normand for giving me an opportunity to rehearse my ideas at a research forum talk in London. I want to say thanks to Professor Anthony Johnson at Oulu University for drawing my attention to Bachelard; and to Dr Tom Hubbard for pointing out certain problems of modern Scottish literature in informal conversations. I am sending my warm recognition to the helpful staff at the Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh, and my appreciation, in particular, is due to Dr Robyn Marsack. I gratefully acknowledge the receipt of an ORS Award between 1998 and 2001 at the School of English, University of St Andrews, where this project started. I am also pleased to acknowledge Mr Nigel Bellingham’s assistance at British Council Hungary for providing a grant to visit the 2003 Edinburgh Book Festival, where I had the opportunity to meet Kate Clanchy, W.N. Herbert and Kenneth White. I am grateful to the editors of the various scholarly journals and poetry magazines where extracts from some of these interviews first appeared in English or in Hungarian translation: Poetry Review, Scottish Studies Review, Nagyvilág and The Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies. Finally, I save my deepest gratitude for Nora; she knows where it all began.

Introduction: Scotland, Poetry and Other Realities Attila Dósa I always liked Scotland as an idea, but now, as a reality, I like it far better. (Charlotte Brontë, from a letter dated 20 July 1850)

In his “Defence of Poetry” Shelley suggests that poetry is “at once the centre and circumference of knowledge” (1821 [1931]: 155), a judgement with which a number of poets in this book would probably agree, albeit with varying degrees of emphasis. As a form of knowledge, poetry seems both central and marginal and, as an utterance, it takes place both at the focal point and at the outer limits of understanding. Poetry operates in the focal centre because, historically speaking, it is the common source of all kinds of different narratives that record human wisdom. It reflects on universal feelings related to the most significant moments of life. At the same time, poetry reaches out to the periphery of language, and extends its power beyond the normal capacity of words. Every successful line is an experiment with what can be said, often just within the boundary of verbalisation, while the poem itself becomes part of a constructed verbal reality. But questions remain regarding the “universal” in a post-modern age. Is poetry really part of a broader non-verbal reality that it translates into words? What is common between poetry and reality? Can poems ever contain different realities? If yes, what is the relationship between poetry and other realities (political, social, economic and religious), the realities of the natural world and the metaphysical world? The poets in conversation here provide a response to these and a number of similar questions. At the same time, through a focus on the “constructed verbal reality” of their work, they remind us of the range of technical, theoretical and practical considerations that are involved in the act of writing. Expressing diverse views on the aims and functions of literature, these poets provide a valuable guide to contemporary Scottish poetry in its social and political context. This specific context for the present book has to do with current re-interpretations of Scottish identity. All the poets featured in this book were born and, at least for some period of their careers, have been resident in Scotland. The main aim in conducting these

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interviews has been to extend or, in some cases, readjust current perceptions of Scottish poetry within the accepted critical consensus as expressed in the work of Cairns Craig, Douglas Gifford, Roderick Watson and others. This is a relevant undertaking at the start of the new millennium because, for all the institutional efforts that have been invested in the re-shaping of Scotland’s literary identity over the past few decades (including reconsideration of the literary curriculum in Scottish schools and the gradual building up of subsidies in Scottish arts and letters), Scottish poetry continues to be a somewhat problematic notion for a number of reasons. As most of these reasons are directly related to historical matters, they often fail to address the altered desires and circumstances of Scottish culture and therefore they demand further interrogation. In this introduction I wish to touch upon some of the most important issues that have clearly affected the making of Scotland’s self-image: the linguistic situation of Scotland; the predicament of Scottish literary education; and literary perceptions of Scotland’s political existence. History has provided plentiful evidence that what most noticeably defines national identity is a distinctive speech form. J. Derrick McClure has described the intricate co-dependence between language and political borders: a connection at first merely incidental between a polity and a language may be deliberately raised to the status of a close identification; or a common identity inhering in, or at any rate underpinned by, a common language may lead to the political definition of that language’s territory either by abolishing political boundaries within the territory or by establishing them around it. (McClure 2000: 1)

In some countries, language functions as a solid basis for some kind of national bond. In these communities (modern France and modern Hungary could be listed as examples) there is often a speech form that is most widely accepted socially and is used in official communications. For historical reasons, this is regarded as being more significant and also more prestigious than other national languages or other varieties of the same language. Grammarians, linguists and critics regulate its development; its syntax and spelling are codified in grammar books and orthographies; and the meanings of its words are recorded in dictionaries. In short, it becomes the standardised speech form of a nation. But it is also more than that: it is an identity code for a community of speakers. If you share this code, you will instantly

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recognise other members of your community even though you have never met them before. It is a form of communication that is not available to people of other nationalities in the same way as it is available to you and therefore, in most such countries, language has been a deeply felt political issue, seen as the foundation stone of nationhood as well as a guarantee for the survival of national identity. But in multi-lingual and multi-ethnic societies (like the nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian Empire or modern Britain) language does not quite possess the same function. In these countries linguistic boundaries do not necessarily coincide with ethnic and political borders. In fact, they very often overlap, intersect with or extend beyond each other, and normally there are several language varieties or even several languages in competition. In most countries of the Englishspeaking world, probably not excluding England itself, language does not automatically operate as an identity code and neither is it the basis of national affiliation in the same way as in so-called nation states. For instance, the average Scot will be in possession of standard English to more or less the same degree as other native speakers of English from Canada to New Zealand. At the same time, the place of one’s origin within these countries is signalled by dialect, accent, intonation and voice. With the most notable exception of American English and perhaps some attempts that have recently been made in Scotland, varieties of accent or voice are not typically codified in dictionaries. The ascendancy of a standard speech form is frequently seen as a symptom of colonial or other forms of political imposition, and may therefore be subject to cultural resistance. Varieties in the use of language may overtly evoke questions related to power and economic ownership, and will be indicative of debates about the right of access to high culture. And if the common speech form of a community is no longer available as a fundamental and felt determinant of its identity, then serious doubts might also begin to arise about other, alternative, modes of self-definition. In consequence, one of the most important causes of the uncertainty that may arise in discussions about the distinctiveness of Scottish poetry may be attributed to the country’s complex and perhaps even confusing linguistic situation. Edwin Morgan reminds us here that since ancient times Scotland has been a multilingual territory where Pictish, Gaelic, English, Scots, Irish, Welsh, French, Latin, Norse and their various dialects were spoken in different periods of

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history. Today the country offers three native languages in which poetry continues to be written: Gaelic, which is a Celtic language closely related to Irish; Scots, which comes from the Anglo-Saxon language stock, and is historically linked to English; and finally English, which in its standard form is of course the language of Scotland’s bigger neighbour as well as the major means of communication in international affairs. Both the cultural estimation and the literary prestige of these languages have changed considerably over the centuries. Gaelic is regarded as a minority tongue that it is now spoken by a community of between sixty and eighty thousand people in the northwest Highlands and the Hebrides and their diaspora. As a literary language, it addresses a tiny audience when compared to English, and the limited scope of the themes and styles of traditional Gaelic poetry had, on the whole, gone unexamined before Sorley MacLean and Derick Thomson came to the fore as Gaelic poets in the mid-twentieth century. Scots was the national tongue of Scotland before the early seventeenth century but today its status as a separate language is heavily debated. Soon after the removal of the Royal Court from Edinburgh to London in 1603 its prestige went into gradual decline and it lost its earlier cultural significance. By the twentieth century it had frequently come to be described as an impure or regional variety of English. However, Scots has developed an oddly double status: it has remained a literary language inasmuch as poems and narratives are still written in it but it is not the language of any sustained literary or cultural criticism at the moment. It is not an official speech form in Scotland and neither does it appear to stand a good chance of becoming one in the foreseeable future, even though members of the reconvened Scottish Parliament are encouraged to address the Parliament in Scots, as well as in Gaelic, if and when sufficient translation is provided. So, the obvious linguistic choice for a Scottish poet seems to be to write in English: partly because of its status and partly because of its accessibility to a wider UK and international readership. This poetic language is, however, very often a version that only looks English on the page, but is in fact seasoned with a Scots vocabulary, accent and intonation in pronunciation. What Edwin Muir wrote in 1935 is still valid: “English as it is spoken in Scotland is very different from English, and certainly very full of Scottish character” (Muir

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1935: 27). At first sight, writing in English with a Scots modulation yields a very practical advantage to any Scottish poet whose first language is English, since the obvious benefit of reaching out to an international audience goes hand in hand with the open recognition of poetry’s local origins. But the choice of English may as easily become a source of further uncertainties. It has been suggested that by the eighteenth century the Scots language had lost the normative influence that is typically exerted by the speech form of a national cultural centre, and that it has since been reduced to a secondary status. During the last two centuries several outstanding critics, both within and beyond Scotland, contended that Scottish literature (even when written in one or another variety of English) bore no interest for an international audience. In the process of this critical devaluation even some of the giants of Scottish literature suffered attack. During the nineteenth century Matthew Arnold famously rejected Robert Burns because his representations of a “Scotchman’s world” fell short of any “poetic seriousness”. In the twentieth century F.R. Leavis dismissed Sir Walter Scott as a “folklorist”, while in his notorious essay, “Was There a Scottish Literature?”, T.S. Eliot disputed that a fully autonomous Scottish tradition ever existed in its own right: The first part of the history of Scottish literature is a part of the history of English literature when English was several dialects; the second part is a part of the history of English literature when English was two dialects – English and Scots; the third part is something quite different – it is the history of a provincial literature. (Eliot 1919: 681)

Here Eliot takes up the old line of argument according to which, in its various phases, Scottish literature has been defined in relation to the centrality of the English language, and maintains that the significance of a Scottish literary achievement lies in its potential adaptability or relevance to the English tradition. In more recent times Cairns Craig has tried to investigate the motivations behind the dialectic of cultural elimination and integration that has been so influential in the formation of critical opinions on Scotland’s literary tradition: core cultures operate by taking to themselves all significant achievements in the periphery that can be accommodated without too great a stress. The judgement that the periphery represents an impoverished and impoverishing tradition is therefore made inevitable. The economic and political leverage that the core culture can exert –

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however unconsciously – to draw artists from the peripheries is then translated into a cultural assimilation that subsumes those writers within the “organic whole” of the core culture, as though the “individual talents” had somehow stripped themselves of their pasts as soon as they arrive in the metropolis. (Craig 1982: 5)

In other words, both within and beyond the United Kingdom, critics and academics will often approach Scottish works with the same expectations as those springing up from the English literary tradition. This may be reinforced by the fact that the texts found to be compliant with mainstream English tradition will be made available internationally, first and foremost, through the avenues of the now mainly English or international publishing industry. Almost all of the poets featured in these interviews choose to have English-based publishers. And when they do so, they never forget to make it clear that such decisions come from practical considerations which have nothing to do with national feeling or the lack of it. Having good contacts with a major publishing house that has offices in London and New York means an excellent gateway to a cosmopolitan market. But in such cases there is always the likelihood that for their foreign readership the constituting difference of native origins, inspirations or intonations will come second, if at all. A prime example is the global reputation of the Edinburgh-born Muriel Spark as an English novelist. Other Scottish writers have also achieved wider recognition, so long as it has been possible to view them as being effortlessly accommodated to the English tradition or use of language: James Thomson, Robert Louis Stevenson, J.M. Barrie, John Buchan and Arthur Conan Doyle are but a few names in a long list of Scottish writers who made a name for themselves outside Scotland as their work came to be considered under the heading of English Literature. The rest have too easily been relegated to the convenient limbo that Eliot termed “provincialism”. But if the choice of English as a linguistic medium raises various expectations that writers want to defy, subvert or simply come to terms with, according to their own ambitions and temperaments, then often the same applies to writing in Scots. Douglas Dunn mentions the expectations that poets who decide to write in Scots may be confronted with. He calls attention to the fact that such poets will probably feel affected by issues related to accent and nationality more intensely in Scotland than when writing anywhere else:

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A Scottish accent defines itself in its own country, and, first of all, against traditions of writing to which a Scottish voice relates. There can be a certain kind of snobbishness attached to this awareness of accent and voice, most of it, but not all, of the inverted kind. When it comes to Scottishness in writing, Scottish critics can be as alert as a head waiter with his eyes peeled for the entrance of a gentleman without a tie, or, as I am talking of demotic consciousness, of a diner with a tie. (Dunn 1994: 87)

The reader expectations Dunn writes about here may take different forms, both literary and non-literary. Until recently, and probably to a certain degree even today, many readers would expect a Scots poem to employ “authentic” vocabulary, preferably originating in one of the rural areas of Scotland. Looking backward to a nostalgic past at best, and sanctioning certain types of ideals at worst, most of these expectations would put a heavy restriction on imaginative freedom. In the 1920s and 1930s Hugh MacDiarmid attacked popular expectations that still identified the diction of Robert Burns as the desirable style of modern poetry. He reached back to earlier layers of language, particularly to the late-medieval cadence of William Dunbar’s poetry, and devised a synthetic Scots poetic medium based on entries in Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language. While MacDiarmid’s attempt may be seen as eccentric, and even backwardlooking in its own way, his work drew attention to the rich field of linguistic possibilities available to the Scottish writer and tried to resuscitate the long tradition of a linguistically receptive Scottish literature. But perhaps what is more important is that it opens our eyes and ears to the existence of language in multiple locations, and brings into play the potentials inherent in the virtual, devolved, and refracted nature of the poetic word. To what extent have these expectations changed since MacDiarmid’s time? Only the writers working in the given social and linguistic environment can tell. Dunn suggests here that although it might be unwise of a poet to neglect topical issues for too long, it cannot be one of his permanent objectives to subordinate his art to political interest; W.N. Herbert also speaks for the primacy of the poet’s intellectual freedom that may or may not go along with particular political lines; and whereas Edwin Morgan is attuned to the social environment of his native Glasgow, he also goes on to celebrate an imaginary and virtual “second life” in poetry which refuses to be confined within national borders.

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On the whole it seems now that the modern Scottish writer is living and working among a variety of inputs as far as register, vocabulary, voice and social background are concerned. The dealings between and across languages and cultures are coming to be recognised as a source of inspiration and creativity in the same way as abundant sea life is likely to be discovered where different currents meet. Bringing foreign cultures to the attention of readers through literary translation has a distinguished history in Scotland: it goes back at least to Gavin Douglas’s pioneering translation of Virgil’s Aeneid in 1513, which, as Edwin Morgan reminds us, was the first of many similar attempts made in the British Isles. Through the individual achievement of thinkers, writers and scientists during the Scottish Enlightenment and after, cosmopolitism developed into a distinctive feature of Scottish culture. A self-assured internationalism penetrates the achievement of nineteenth-century writers like Byron or Carlyle and a similar internationally-minded outlook remains the hallmark of Scottish poetry today. Morgan’s prolific work as a translator of József, Montale and Mayakovsky is a case in point, and so is Don Paterson’s “versioning” of Antonio Machado, or Liz Lochhead’s adaptation of Molière’s Tartuffe. The international circulation of Kenneth White’s work in several European languages similarly reveals the cosmopolitan weight that modern Scottish literature adds to cultural exchange, and such artistic activity may be seen as an emphatic disproof of Eliot’s line of reasoning. What is equally visible to the observer of Scottish life and letters is the presence of a genuine poetic dedication to the interaction between the native speech forms of Scotland. For Scots-speaking poets, what seems to be a native version of Bakhtinian “heteroglossia” comes as naturally as breathing. As Dunn puts in the Introduction to his survey of modern Scottish poetry: Conventional opinion invites us to believe that a poet can write in only one language – the language of a life’s lengths and affections, experience, memory, and dreams. Conventional belief may well be right, but only for those born and brought up in a rigidly monoglot environment, which, in the British Isles, is likely to mean a middleclass background and notional RP from birth. Poets drawn to write in Scots do so on a basis of childhood acquaintance with its residual, colloquial forms, or what, for practical purposes, might best be described as a strong Scottish accent of one kind or another. (Dunn 1992: xxvi)

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In general terms, the opinion that “cultural proliferation is a source of fertility and strength” (Crawford 1997: 91) is shared now by most of Scotland’s poets. An important aspect of cultural proliferation is, of course, linguistic diversity, and recent writing has tried to make use of the interaction between speech forms in a number of ways. W.N. Herbert subverts linguistic expectations in a style which is sometimes playful and sometimes cheeky, but always comes from his eccentric way of associating ideas, words and textual references. Don Paterson has an ambition to use in his lyric verse his best English, into which he mingles the occasional Gaelic or Scots words or idiom. Robert Crawford wants to “blast” various registers of Scots in his earlier work but now seems to be striking the quieter and more lyrical notes of an English diction that is remarkable, however, for its Scottish infusion. Aonghas Macneacail’s bilingual poetry in Gaelic and English is an exceptionally graceful meeting ground for languages. Another problematic issue that is closely related to language is the traditionally marginal place of Scottish literature in Scottish education. The study of contemporaneous literature as an academic subject has a distinguished history in Scotland. The first proposal to set up a Chair of Eloquence with the purpose of teaching composition and reading at academic level was submitted at St Andrews University as early as 1720, with a view to possibly including Scottish texts in the curriculum. At the same university between 1747 and 1756, Henry Rymer, Professor of Logic, Rhetoric and Metaphysics, gave lectures on contemporary writers with the aim of improving the style of composition in polite English. During the same period Adam Smith taught the subject of rhetoric firstly at Edinburgh University and then, from 1751 onwards, at Glasgow University. He was followed by Hugh Blair, who was Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh University between 1762 and 1783 (Crawford 1998: 4–11). In most of these courses, the professors liberally augmented the prescribed list of Roman and Greek texts with samples of modern readings – by Scottish as well as English authors. But while Scottish writers often made up a part of this curriculum, it may be said that from its beginnings literary education in Scotland has developed in the shadow of English literature. Within educated society in Scotland, it seemed as if an embarrassment with their own linguistic difference from the norms of polite English led to an attempted eradication of their Scotticisms, at least in formal writing. The Union of Parliaments led to the wide-

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spread conviction among literati that advanced language skills in English would help them come by administrative positions and business connections in the newly created state. It is quite similar to today’s situation when, attracted by EU governmental salaries and relying mostly on their expertise in different languages, public servants and translators from new member states swiftly relocate to Belgium and Luxemburg. Although Scotland may boast of its own tradition of education which has remained distinct from the English educational system, in Scottish schools, too, the literary curriculum tends to concentrate on English writers and it was only fairly recently that works by living Scottish writers have been included in the literature syllabus, or modern Scottish poems and stories have featured in the school-leaving examination – as is mentioned in Tom Leonard’s and Kate Clanchy’s interviews. At university level (with the exception of Glasgow University’s distinctive Department of Scottish Literature), contemporary literature is generally taught under the heading of English Literature, with only a relatively marginal presence of Scottish writers. Why? Dunn blames Scotland’s troubled political self-image for the fact that the teaching and studying of Scottish literature was slow to gather weight even in recent times: “Scotland was neglectful of its poets and artists, chiefly, it would seem, because as a non-nation it was scarcely aware of possessing any” (Dunn 1992: xxxiv). There have been earnest attempts made by Scottish cultural organisations in recent times at restoring the prestige of Scottish writers in the literary education of the younger generation. For example, the Scottish Arts Council expressed the ambition to “[m]ake the case for the importance of Scottish literature in improving literacy” as well as to “[s]eek to secure the place of Scotland’s literature in the curriculum as an essential foundation of learning” (Literary Strategy 2002: 4). But when the subject of English itself may be seen as undergoing a rather complex transformation from a text-based and conventionally academic subject into a computer-led and interdisciplinary training of “a labour force of proletarianised ‘intellectuals’, replete with ‘employable skills’” (Kayman 2004: 8), the role that the country’s literary talent is supposed to play in Scottish schools needs to receive careful consideration in planning the future curriculum. But of course there may be other, more heartening, reasons for the comparatively modest appreciation of modern Scottish verse. As

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anywhere, public opinion may still be stuck with older notions because it just cannot keep pace with the latest developments in literature. The shape of Scottish poetry, too, changes with extreme rapidity, now more than ever. While fundamental changes to Scotland’s political structures have clearly had a strong external impact on the course that poetry has taken in the last decade or so, Scottish poetry also changes from the inside: new voices appear; young talents become established poets; poets move from one region to another; they relocate to Scotland or they leave the country; and they find new subject matter to think about. Sensing these tensions as a foreigner resident for several years in Scotland, I felt a great necessity to produce a book that would familiarise readers with contemporary Scottish poets working in Scotland and elsewhere. I invited each poet to speak about his or her most recent writing in some detail. I also questioned them about issues relevant to modern Scottish life and letters: the future of the Scottish parliament; the circumstances of publishing; discrimination based on social background, accent and racial origin; literary education in Scotland; and so on. But apart from the primary purpose of raising an awareness of the current concerns in Scottish verse, the book also seeks to convey something of the pleasures of reading. I think that learning to appreciate poetry is best achieved through experiencing the grasp and enthusiasm others show for this artistic form, and so I wanted to create an intimate bond between the makers and readers of poetry through these recordings of conversations. While the book’s format is meant to reflect the lively exchange of ideas that characterises real life rapport, it is probably best read as a collection of personal or philosophical reflections by established writers on various realities, virtual as well as more evidently tangible ones: identity and nationhood; regionalism and European unification; places of origin and crossings of borders; human beings and the natural environment; the world of computers and the spiritual world. The title of this Introduction echoes that of Edwin Morgan’s 1997 collection, Virtual and Other Realities. Morgan is a poet whose work has been characterised by a strong interest in virtual realities. He has explored the subject in his science fiction poems about imaginary alien encounters and time travel; and in poems inspired by recent developments in scientific discovery, as well as in his celebrated “computer poems”. But besides the less directly observable realities to

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be found on computer screens and beyond the lenses of space telescopes, his attention is at least as deliberately drawn to the immediate reality he can see and hear around himself in Glasgow. He has a keen eye for incidents in the street and a keen ear for the characteristic speech forms of passers-by, as well as for the natural life of animals and plants within the urban environment. Like Cinquevalli, his admired acrobat, he juggles all these themes and more with smooth and constant skill (Morgan 1990: 432). In his study on nationhood, Benedict Anderson suggests that, with the rise of print culture, all modern nations have evolved to be virtual communities inasmuch as “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members […], yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson 1991: 6). Therefore a “nation” is a product of the imagination first of all, because it denotes a comprehensive agreement which has a primary residence in the thoughts and opinions of its citizens. If we accept Anderson’s argument, the only logical conclusion seems to be that any community which exceeds in size the common-sense possibility of one member meeting face to face all of its other members then has to be acknowledged as possessing a virtual existence before any attempt can made at its political definition. But Scotland in particular has come to be regarded as an “imagined community” for other, less theoretical, reasons. Although it is no longer a country without a parliament, Scotland remains a country without citizenship even after the recent reconvening of its governing powers in Edinburgh. David McCrone’s labelling of Scotland as “a stateless nation” (McCrone 1992: 197) reveals a knowingly polarised take on the subject because, strictly speaking, the “United Kingdom” is the result of a diplomatic arrangement that took place between two independent nations at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while the origins of the state go back to even earlier dynastic policies. But McCrone’s phrase does reflect anxieties that have been shared by many a Scot since at least the run-up to the Union. The political interregnum in the last three centuries has lent an air of semiexistence to Scotland in its international relations: there are no Scottish embassies to represent the country in foreign lands; there is no role whatsoever attributed to the Scottish Arts Council to counter the British Arts Council in promoting Scottish artists abroad; and, most importantly, the meaning of “Scotland” often gets lost in the concep-

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tual indeterminacy existing in the England-Britain-UK triangle of political influence. In terms of geography, culture, certain institutions, and even, to some extent, national sentiment, Scotland does make up a separate entity that seems to be acknowledged by most of its inhabitants, and appears to possess almost all the essentials of nationhood. But why is it that the country’s physical existence is not translated into a political existence and that the nation remains so deeply divided over the issue of independence? Following Anderson’s hypothesis, one answer could be that the subject of solidarity has not been defined unanimously and there is no consensus regarding exactly what constitutes Scotland as a “nation”. It is true that during the past centuries in a political halfway house, Scotland’s conceptual existence has not been described to an extent that could have met majority approval. This is not to say that it has not been identified at all – from at least Barbour’s The Bruce onwards, a great deal of imaginative energy in Scottish letters has been invested in the establishment and promotion of convergent feelings of solidarity – but no significant attempt has been made at finding a practical definition. In the nineteenth century Robert Louis Stevenson reflected on the constituting difference between Scots and the rest of the world, and saw it in possessing “a strong Scotch accent of the mind” (Stevenson [1882] 1991: 17). Stevenson’s description of Scotland as a psychological entity had proved so lasting that nearly a hundred years later Maurice Lindsay still considered it to be appropriate to render the reality of Scotland as “an attitude of mind” (Lindsay 1966: 21). Where the root of the problem lies is not that Scotland has been identified in terms of being a mental image – an object of desire, an idea, or even a mood – but that the identity of “Scotland” as a virtual reality remains in constant tension with the country’s actual existence. Scotland has come to be seen as an idea that occupies a place in the imagination of its inhabitants and is very different from the expectations of its visitors; it lives on in the aspirations of its nationalists and it is not the same as the nostalgic feelings of its émigrés; it is translated into the hope of a prosperous future which will very probably be unlike the heroic past; or, as Edwin Morgan playfully says, it exists on the planet Jupiter, and does not compare to anything at all (Morgan 1990: 456).

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Borrowing the title of Stuart A. Paterson’s poem, Donny O’Rourke named his 1994 selection of new Scottish poems Dream State. At first sight the chosen title suggests that the editor will pursue the same trail of thought as Stevenson but in actual fact the book does set out to politicise links between governmental affairs and poetic imagination. Following the re-establishment of the Scottish parliament, a second edition was published in 2002 with the intention of revising and putting into a new perspective the pre-devolutionary dreams that had proved not to be mere figments of the imagination. By collecting relevant work from younger Scottish writers, the second edition re-emphasises earlier assumptions which saw poets as having been instrumental in “dreaming up” a new Scotland. But in the preface to this edition, O’Rourke changes the equivocation and hesitancy of former attempts at reaching a consensus towards political change into a more affirmative note of desire to celebrate, creatively exploit and, most of all, translate into social reality all the promises, possibilities, hopes and aspirations that had been dreamed of regarding the country’s impending future: A stateless nation’s nightmare gave rise to various sorts of Dream States until, pinching ourselves, we woke up to find we had a parliament, one which, despite some all too predictable sleaze and parochialism, is working well and likely to demand, deserve and get more power in due course, this in the context of, and as a challenge to, our dis-united kingdom, a Britain poised uneasily between nation and federation, a country lacking some of the confidence and cohesion Scotland has begun to acquire. (O’Rourke 2002: 4)

Beyond Identity promotes no kind of political agenda (nationalist or unionist, British or European, Celtic or Anglophone), but the interviews presented here are meant to make a diagnosis of Scotland’s existence in the realm of poetry – no more and no less. It may be accurate to say that some of the poets interviewed would probably recognise themselves as republicans in due respect to the country’s democratic spirit in history, but for most poets no such political labels reflect satisfactorily enough their creative ambitions or their moral standpoints. John Burnside talks about how obsolete and empty the historical debate between political left and right has become amid the dangers brought about by environmental degradation, and as an alternative he insists on the importance of re-establishing an authentic and meaningful relationship with the land. In a similar vein, Kathleen

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Jamie has developed a new interest in revising our attitudes to realms of existence that are beyond the daily concerns of human societies. At the start of a new century Douglas Dunn admits to a certain apprehension for the future of mankind. So while questions and problems associated with current debates on Scottishness do come to the surface every so often in the dialogues that follow, it will be noticeable that nationhood, nationality or national identity only provide paradigms that many of the poets in this collection may feel compelled to transgress when creative impulse, inspiration, or moral obligations call for it. Although none of these interviews stays fully clear of public issues, the book aims to accomplish much more than simply being a record of the moment in history when Scotland is trying to come to terms with its changing political status and cultural self-image. If I say that when I was preparing these interviews I was interested in the points of exchange between poetry and different realities, it is just as reasonable to add that I also had an ambition to explore the possible links between poetry and the reality of Scotland on an abstract level. Supposing that we give credit to the concept of “Scotland” as a mental image then, by the same token, poetry, too, can be considered a “dream state”. It is a state of dreaming – it takes its origin in a form of reverie and in turn it may teach us how to dream up parallel realities that might not be imminently present. It is instructive to cite Bachelard in some length at this point: Here there appears a privilege of poetic reverie. It seems that in dreaming in such solitude we can touch only a world so singular that it is foreign to every other dreamer. But the isolation is not so great, and the deepest, most particular reveries are often communicable. At least, there are families of dreamers whose reveries grow firm, whose reveries deepen the being which receives them. And thus it is that great poets teach us to dream. They nourish us with images with which we can concentrate our reveries of repose. […] In such encounters, a Poetics of Reverie becomes conscious of its tasks: causing consolidations of imagined worlds, developing the audacity of constructive reverie, affirming itself in a dreamer’s clear consciousness, coordinating liberties, finding some true thing in all the indisciplines of language, opening all the prisons of the being so that the human possesses all becomings. (Bachelard 1971: 158; emphasis added)

Poetry is a separate country – it makes up a whole world of imagination which is complete in itself. Bachelard goes so far as to describe the poetic image as “an absolute origin, an origin of consciousness”

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(Bachelard 1971: 1). But if the world takes its origin in the poetic consciousness, it has to be acknowledged that the imagining consciousness also takes its origin in the world. It is a negotiation between the primacy of poetic subject and poetic subjectivity that probably goes back to the earliest times. In the sixteenth century Sir Philip Sidney argued that in poetry we can find an alternative reality and he bestowed on poets the ability to conceive a second nature, which is: either better than nature bringeth forth, or quite anew; forms such as never were in nature […]; so as he goeth hand in hand with Nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit. (Sidney [1595] 1967: 25)

So although the poet’s subjectivity is contained in the world, which is his poetic subject, his subjectivity will not be confined by that same world. The nature of poetry has perhaps not changed all that much since Sidney’s time, and today we cannot do much more than reiterate his view – only in different words that reflect the different worlds we live in. A modern reader could say that poetry, like all other forms of creative art, is a virtual reality: it has an existence in our imagination as well as on the printed page; it is both present and not present; we can make it real by imagining it and while doing so poetry makes us real. But who is more qualified to speak about virtual and other realities than the poet who, while living in this world, has free access to other worlds? This book is the first extensive survey of modern Scottish verse presented in the form of interviews since Colin Nicholson’s Poem, Purpose and Place: Shaping Identity in Contemporary Scottish Verse (1992). For some readers it might be convenient to approach the present collection as if it were a sequel to Nicholson’s scholarly venture and they may be justified in doing so for at least two reasons. Firstly, I intended to look into the work of the generation of poets who have established their names in the 1990s and I also took in writers who are seen as a part of mainstream Scottish writing but have received comparatively less critical attention in recent years. It is true that two major talents, Edwin Morgan and Douglas Dunn, appear here as well as in Nicholson. While including them in the present book is meant to reflect on, and give due respect to, the long and distinguished careers of both, it is also intended to mirror the changing circumstances of their writing.

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Secondly, Poem, Purpose and Place reflects the mood that permeated Scottish letters after the failed Devolution Referendum of 1979, whereas the interviews here are concerned with conditions of literature after the more successful referendum of 1997. The kind of optimism or enthusiasm one might have expected from having achieved, if only partly, the goal of so many decades of political struggle does not automatically appear to have countered the disenchantment which was felt after the failed attempt of 1979, as recorded in the introduction to Nicholson’s book. Most of the poets here now seem to be quite casual when asked about the current state of affairs: some of them are satisfied with the status quo; others say let’s wait and see what may come out of it in the long run; and while some demand more independence, others immediately lost interest after the reconvention of the parliament, and would now want to explore other fields. Part of the interview with Douglas Dunn was conducted just after the 1997 referendum but before the parliamentary elections, and all other poets were interviewed since the setting up of the Parliament but before the completion of the new parliament building in Edinburgh, so their responses perhaps indicate that the making of Scotland’s new self-image will always remain the subject of an unfinished negotiation of creative energies. The present selection is not meant to be prescriptive nor to suggest that this is what Scottish poetry looks like at the beginning of the new millennium. Even if it wanted to, it could not be representative of modern Scottish poetry because such a rich field could not be contained within the physical limits even of a collection more substantial than this. But as an anthology it does aim to be representative and, more importantly, inclusive of different opinions. Though not striking the perfect balance between female and male writers, I think in various ways the book does manage to reflect the fact, because it is a fact, that there is a self-confident generation of female poets that has by now established itself as a very serious counterpart to the male tradition. O’Rourke’s anthology provides clear evidence of this. Examined in a Scottish context, this comparatively younger generation in part follows the example – if not all the practices and aims, and not exclusively – of Liz Lochhead and Carol Ann Duffy. I made every effort to invite several other women poets to be included in the book but even when my invitation was accepted, I felt that they often appeared to be a little cautious when asked to share their ideas, in a

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way that only a female interviewer might manage to dissolve. Crossing cultural barriers is easier said than done and the same stands true for barriers of gender. As for other aspects of equilibrium, the book dedicates some space to all the three important literary languages of Scotland: Scots, English and Gaelic. The absence of several other Gaelic poets from this selection should not be imagined as coming from ideological considerations – it is only that a book has its own limits. Moreover, if it may be done without offending anyone, I hope that the presence of Aonghas Macneacail will compensate the reader for the absence of many other names. Several non-Gaelic speaking poets included in this collection either have translated poems from Gaelic, or provide us with important insights about the history and significance of Gaelic culture, and frequent cross-references to the interplay between the three languages of the country will help to remind the reader of the complex nature of Scotland’s linguistic situation. Of course, there are other “minority languages” in contemporary Scotland which need to be mentioned here: Chinese, Polish, Italian or Urdu. It is for others to decide whether works written in these languages belong to the heritage of the mother country, or to Scotland, or both – as in Edwin Morgan’s reference to an earlier example from Welsh poetry. While there have been efforts made at exploring, preserving and sustaining linguistic diversity among immigrant communities in certain parts of the country, poetry written in Scotland in these and other similar ethnic languages has not been mapped in detail. McClure (1983) provided an early discussion of minority languages in the context of language teaching in Scottish schools, and Lo Bianco (2001) in a wider ranging study influenced the thinking behind the Languages Strategy developed by the first Scottish Executive (2007). It is undeniable that creative work in these minority speech forms cannot compete at present in depth and scope with the riches of poetry written in the three main languages, each of which may boast of its own long tradition: those traditions look back to nearly two millennia in Gaelic; about thirteen hundred years in English (including works in Old English), and at least some seven centuries in Scots. However, I think there will develop eventually a greater awareness of literatures written in the minority languages, and sooner or later those will be more emphatically acknowledged as part of the cultural mix that Scotland has always been home to.

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I made an attempt to make this a representative book in geographical terms by including poets from outside Scotland: Kenneth White, who lives in Brittany and speaks English with a Scoto-French accent; W.N. Herbert, who has his residence in a lighthouse in the Tyne Estuary near Newcastle; and Kate Clanchy, who was born in Edinburgh but has lived in the South of England for several years now, and is less willing than many others to submit to the pull of national identity that various cultural organisations want to exert on well known artists. From within the country, there are five poets who have established themselves in Fife or its neighbourhood: John Burnside, Don Paterson, Robert Crawford, Douglas Dunn and Kathleen Jamie. The last three were born and educated in or around Glasgow but they relocated to the east of Scotland at a point soon enough in their careers to have been able to modify and expand their Glaswegian identities. Frank Kuppner, Tom Leonard and Edwin Morgan still represent Glasgow at the western end of the Central Belt – in a strictly geographical term at least, because while they consistently echo or mirror different idioms evocative of that area, needless to say their art will frequently transcend the concerns of their immediate locality. Aonghas Macneacail was born on the Isle of Skye and was educated at Glasgow University, but now has his “adopted home” in Peebleshire, while accommodating a characteristically northern vernacular to a Borders environment. Finally, there is Richard Price, who complicates nationality and place of origin even further: he was born in England but grew up in Scotland (the Renfrewshire landscape remains a basic inspiration in his poetry and fiction) and currently he lives and works in London. Of course, many of these writers have spent much time away from Scotland at different periods in their lives – in England, France or America – and while the medieval image of the “wandering Scot” still holds fast in contemporary cultural exchange, the eventual homecoming remains a shared, relevant, and at times even revealing experience. The organisation of this book reflects the shifting of Scottish poets’ attitudes across time, in the nine years since the attainment of a devolved parliament to the year of its first change of government, 2007. Their views were recorded during this time of political transition and ecological transformation, and they were encouraged to reflect on the relationship between Scottish poetry and other realities. In particular, the place of Scottish writing in a European context is

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considered through the issues of translation and artistic influence. Arranged in chronological order of their completion, the interviews cluster into distinctive groupings. Morgan and Dunn appear as two “father figures” who have influenced or supported some of the younger generation who follow, and both poets focus on Scottish and European perspectives on politics and translation. The following three interviews reveal a group of younger poets located in Fife and with strong professional links to St Andrews University (where Dunn was also professor): Crawford, Burnside and Jamie. All three are interested in northern “spiritualities”, which are individualistically defined, and in ecological issues on the margins of Europe. Although grounded in one location and landscape, their writings are informed by wide-ranging cultural reference. A group of urban experimentalists follows: Paterson, Leonard, Kuppner and W.N. Herbert. The first and last here are initially associated with the industrial city of Dundee, and the other two are both based in Glasgow. Internationalist, avant-garde, autodidactic and unpredictable, they have perhaps an uneasy relationship with higher education (although two of them are now professors in university schools of creative writing). Three “outsiders” follow – Clanchy, White and Macneacail – who experience a sense of their own difference through identity, location or language. Each has chosen to live beyond his or her birthplace. The selection ends with Richard Price, a poet who is both outsider and insider, with links to many of the above concerns or people, and with an outward-looking experimental edge to his work, as well as a detailed knowledge of the “poetry business”. Many changes have happened in Scottish poetry since the 1970s and 1980s, the period which Nicholson’s book mainly examined. Poetry is now more than ever opening up to international possibilities. It is not a completely new phenomenon of course (it is sufficient to think of Edwin Morgan’s unparalleled, industrious and varied work as a translator which he began in the 1940s and 1950s) but it is a long development that has really started to bear fruit now. Risking generalisation, it is tempting to say that there is perhaps a greater international awareness among Scottish writers and scholars today and, in turn, there is a greater international awareness of Scotland’s literary output. The recent success of Scotland in the film industry may not have done much more than deepen old stereotypes in many cases, but at least it has invited young people from around the globe to look and

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see what lies beyond Braveheart. There has been a rapidly growing interest in post-British literatures on the Continent and in the wake of this popularity – beside the matchless appeal of Irish Studies of course – considerable attention is now being paid to Scottish subjects at university level. Apart from the new online resources provided by institutions such as the National Library of Scotland, government agencies and universities, there are several academic initiatives that arch over countries and even continents – one of them instigated by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, which is based in Scotland but through its international committee reaches out to scholars working in Scottish Studies in many countries. I started the project of interviewing poets when I was studying for the degree of PhD at St Andrews University. Having returned home soon after I finished my studies, I have managed to keep in touch with Scotland in such ways as full-time lecturing can afford. I am Hungarian by birth, which explains the repeated allusions to things and issues Hungarian in a collection of interviews that otherwise are meant to reflect on poetical and political issues in what may come to be seen, in the long run, as the post-national phase of Scottish writing. The period when most of these interviews took place saw the run-up to Hungary’s joining, in 2004, of the European Union, of which Scotland (via the United Kingdom) has long been a member country, if not a member state. That accounts for the standard question about the extension of the EU, which I deliberately put to each poet. While European statehood had justified and strengthened national and nationalist feelings in my country, I was surprised to see that the same large-scale unification had been a factor in the erosion of the same sentiments in Scotland – until, during these interviews, I understood the concerns and consequences that lie beyond Scotland’s national identity. My rather “Hungarocentric” perspective may be easily justified, however, by the long-standing literary contact between the two countries, in which Edwin Morgan’s translating of Weöres and József is but the most recent (and hence the most clearly visible) chapter. The present book hopes to add to that special relationship by shedding light on some of our shared concerns and occurrences and by extending the vision of an internationalised Scottish literature within a European context. In this book I wanted to present the opinions of poets who are interested in different kinds of poetry – written, read, performed,

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translated and sounded in different languages – and I asked them to talk about their individual considerations of the art and craft involved in the act of writing. But while each poet consciously preserves, and even guards, his or her self-identity by maintaining a strong sense of difference, I have come to believe that there is one thing they all have in common – a deeply felt humility towards the reality of poetry, which is different from any other reality, and extends beyond identity. Miskolc-Diósgyr, North Hungary, 8 May 2008

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Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd rev. edn. London: Verso. Bachelard, Gaston. 1971. The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos (tr. Daniel Russell). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Brontë, Charlotte. 2007. “[A letter] To W. S. Williams, 20 July 1850, Haworth” in Smith, Margaret (ed.) Selected Letters of Charlotte Brontë. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 168–69. Craig, Cairns. 1982. “Peripheries” in Cencrastus 9: 3–9. Crawford, Robert. 1997. “Dedefining Scotland” in Bassnett, S. (ed.) Studying British Cultures: An Introduction. London: Routledge. 83–96. —. 1998. “Introduction” in Crawford, Robert (ed.) The Scottish Invention of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1–21. Dunn, Douglas. 1992. “Language and Liberty” in Douglas Dunn (ed.) The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry. London: Faber and Faber. xvii– xlvi. —. 1994. “Writing Things Down” in McCully, C.B. (ed.) The Poet’s Voice and Craft. Manchester: Carcanet. 84–103. Eliot, T.S. 1919. “Was There a Scottish Literature?” in The Athenaeum 4657 (1 August 1919). 681. Kayman, Martin A. 2004. “English Studies in Europe: Past, Present and Future: Introduction to a Round Table Discussion at ESSE 7” in The European English Messenger 13(2): 8–10. Lindsay, Maurice. 1966. “Preface” in Lindsay, Maurice (ed.) Modern Scottish Poetry: An Anthology of the Scottish Renaissance. London: Faber and Faber. 19–21. Lo Bianco, J. 2001. Language and literacy policy in Scotland. Stirling: Scottish CILT. McClure, J. Derrick. 1983. Minority Languages in Central Scotland. Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies. —. 2000. Language, Poetry and Nationhood: Scots as a Poetic Language from 1878 to the Present. East Linton: Tuckwell Press. McCrone, David. 1992. Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation. London: Routledge. Morgan, Edwin. 1990. Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet. —. 1997. Virtual and Other Realities. Manchester: Carcanet. Muir, Edwin. 1935. Scottish Journey. London: W. Heinemann, in association with V. Gollancz. Nicholson, Colin. 1992. Poem, Purpose and Place: Shaping Identity in Contemporary Scottish Verse. Edinburgh: Polygon. O’Rourke, Donny. 2002. “Introduction” in O’Rourke, Donny (ed.) Dream State: The New Scottish Poets. 2nd edn. Edinburgh: Polygon. 1–5. Scott, Sir Walter. 1994. Waverley. London: Penguin. Scottish Arts Council. 2002. Literary Strategy: 2002–2007. Edinburgh: The Scottish Arts Council. Scottish Executive. 2007. A strategy for Scotland’s languages consultation document. Scottish Executive Publications. Retrieved 20 September 2007 from http:// www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2007/01/24130746/1

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Shelley, Percy Bysshe. [1821] 1931. “From A Defence of Poetry” in Hughes, A.M.D. (ed.) P.B. Shelley: Poetry and Prose. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 128–56. Sidney, Sir Philip. [1595] 1967. “The Defence of Poesy” in Craik, T.W. (ed.) Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Poetry and Prose. London: Methuen. 19–37. Stevenson, Robert Louis. [1882] 1991. “The Foreigner at Home” in Dunn, Douglas (ed.) Scotland: An Anthology. London: HarperCollins. 17.

Edwin Morgan: Our Man in Glasgow Edwin Morgan is a major figure in twentieth century Scottish literature. As Scotland’s Makar, or National Poet, he is held in both respect and affection for a poetic approach that can combine forthright social comment with playfully experimental work in a wide range of forms and genres. His remarkable work as a translator has helped Scotland engage with both traditional and avant-garde work in many languages, particularly those of Eastern Europe. Keywords: Language; devolution; translation; Hungarian poetry; Attila József; Sándor Weöres.

Edwin Morgan hardly needs an introduction for the poetry-reading audience. Apart from war service in the Middle East, he has never left his native Glasgow, which keeps serving as the primary source of inspiration for his urban social lyric. Yet at the same time, his spirit freely roams across virtual realities, but without ever straying into the visionary. His restless imagination translates into a practically endless variety of genres and styles: he produces concrete poems and other experimental works, and is equally at home in conventional forms such as the sonnet (as in Sonnets from Scotland, 1984) or the dramatic monologue (as in Demon, 1999). In Morgan, everything can speak and will speak (even stones or gasometers) and everything has a message to give. His interest in coding, decoding and disclosing messages lends an urgent, almost impatient, quality to his writing. To satisfy this interest, he employs countless voices and speakers (both real and imaginary, human and extra-terrestrial, animate and inanimate) in several languages and a choice of dialects. If anything, his trademark is variety: he regards art, history, culture, and different forms of existence as inestimable sources of biodiversity. Though he started writing in the 1940s and 1950s, publishing among other books The Vision of Cathkin Braes (1952) and The Cape of Good Hope (1955), his writing career took off during the 1960s Glasgow Renaissance with Emergent Poems (1967), The Second Life (1968) and Instamatic Poems (1972). The main influences on his work include Avant-gardism; the Russian version of Futurism combined with the American type of Modernism; Republicanism; Socialism; and of course the spirit of the Space Age. MacGillivray and Gifford have suggested that science fiction has a “symbolic significance”1 in 1

See Gifford, Douglas et al (eds). 2002. Scottish Literature. Edinburgh: EUP. 775.

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Morgan’s poetry that is similar to Edwin Muir’s use of Christian mythology. However, while the nuclear holocaust, for instance, does appear as a background in some of Morgan’s poems, the prospect of large-scale self-extinction rarely features as a distinct reality that might threaten us, as in Muir. Morgan’s work is a summing up of a variety of strands in Scottish culture and at the same time is eagerly forward-looking. His interest in various dimensions of existence is coupled with a child-like curiosity – no wonder he found Hungarian poet Sándor Weöres, whom he extensively translated into English, a twin spirit. He is probably the most versatile poet of his generation: as such, the character of Morgan’s work is difficult, if not impossible, to pin down. No wonder, again, that a major critical summary of his work has yet to be written. The interview that follows was conducted in appreciation of Morgan’s outstanding work as a translator of foreign poetry, and the conversation has a particular Hungarian slant to it. He has maintained a special relationship with Hungarian, Russian and Italian literature through his translations. Translation is a sort of playing-field for the extrovert mind: it is a spiritual reality, a virtual adventure, perhaps a useful sublimation of emigration, and presumably a version of what Kenneth White has called “intellectual nomadism”. It may not reach out as far as Saturn, but certainly crosses political and linguistic borders. Morgan’s translations extend across half a century and they include: Beowulf (1952), Poems from Eugenio Montale (1959), Sovpoems (1961), Sándor Weöres: Selected Poems (1970), Wi the Haill Voice: 25 Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky (1972), Fifty Renaissance Love Poems (1975), Rites of Passage (1976), Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1992), Sweeping Out the Dark (1994), and Racine’s Phaedra (2000). His Collected Translations was published in 1996 and Attila József: Sixty Poems appeared in 2001 from Mariscat Press. His more recent translations include Gilgamesh and Tales from Baron Munchausen (2005). I visited Edwin Morgan in his Glasgow apartment in the autumn of 2000. The interview was first published in Poetry Review 91(3), Autumn 2001.

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“1985: Morgan wins Soros Translation Award for translations from Attila József. Blows prize money on day trip by Concorde to North Pole. Meets Santa Claus”, your biography says. Well, József and Santa Claus…? [Laughs.] Yes, this is all true. It wasn’t quite the North Pole, but the North of Lapland. I saw an advertisement in the papers for this oneday trip by Concorde just shortly after I’d won that prize. I thought I just might go and try it. I’d never have another chance to do it, so I went. Yes, Santa Claus is a very tall, six-foot six Finn. Speaking of languages, one thing I learned during that one-day trip which I hadn’t known before was that Finnish and Lappish are different languages. They are related languages, but if you are interested in one, you have to learn the other. You also received the Hungarian PEN Memorial Award for your translations. What do you think of such official recognitions? It’s nice to get such recognitions from another country. I was very pleased to get that award in 1972 and later on, I think in 1997, the Order of Merit Award. It’s just the idea that your work is known and appreciated outside, perhaps far outside, your own country – there is something very pleasing about that. It doesn’t make any enormous difference. It is just an award and it’s something that you like to have, and you go on with your work as if nothing had happened in the end. Have you received other foreign awards? No. These are the only ones. You’ve translated from a range of poets whose work is politically charged, or at least in whose work the suspected incongruity between aestheticism and public commitment is an inescapable dilemma: Pasternak, Neruda, József, Brecht – to name only a few. What political concerns may literary translation involve – in either a national or an international field? I think it has something to do with the fact that at least the poets you mentioned, among the ones I have tried to translate, have a political

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dimension as well as an aesthetic dimension. I think I feel kinship with foreign-language poetry which concerns a period of change or flux in society (or perhaps even a desire for a greater change or flux that isn’t actually there). If you want change in Scotland or if you feel that changes are beginning to happen in Scotland and you want to say something about it, you’ll probably gain some kind of reinforcement from trying to translate foreign poets who have been in a somewhat similar position (obviously different but there’s something similar about that), you’ll feel sympathy with them and it probably helps you to see what you could do in your own place in your own country. Do you think literary translation furthered the cause of Scottish Devolution? It’s very hard to prove. I don’t know. I would like to think it did but these are not very palpable things, really. I was doing various translations that were published and in a sense I was contributing to the debate that was going on. I hope to have affected the outcome but I don’t think you could easily prove that. One of the translations I did in that period was St Columba’s Latin poem “Altus Prosator”, which I translated as “The Maker on High”: partly because it was a very good and not very well-known poem, but partly because it was the earliest Scottish poem, from the sixth century. I was doing it in a sense for Scotland: to try to extend the awareness of what the people of Scotland were thinking about it in writing long before the Wars of Independence in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Most anthologies of Scottish poetry before that time had begun with Barbour’s Bruce, and I knew there was good poetry written in Scotland long before that, which wasn’t well-known. It was in Latin, in Norse and in various other languages, because the language mix in Scotland was very great in those early years. And I thought: well, if I can make a good version of this which will be acceptable, it will make a statement of our Scottish culture going much further back than people had tended to assume. A recent anthology of Scottish verse, edited by Robert Crawford and Mick Imlah, starts off with this very poem…

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Yes. I was very glad to see that, because I pressed for that years ago. I knew there was good poetry, especially in Latin and in Welsh. It’s strange that although Welsh is a Celtic language like Gaelic, it’s not much thought about in Scotland. And yet, some very great poetry from the time of St Columba (the sixth and seventh centuries) is in fact in early Welsh. I was glad to see that Robert had included a part of The Gododdin, an Old Welsh poem, in his book: gradually filling in the whole picture, if you like, of Scottish literary history. Just because a poem is in Welsh or Latin it doesn’t mean to say that it’s not part of our Scottish story. You have to translate these poems obviously. You can’t expect everybody to read Latin or learn Welsh, so you translate them to bring them forward, to make them a part of the public domain of literary history. But the Welsh may argue that The Gododdin belongs to them… They probably do, [laughs] they probably do. Well, if you like, it is written in a form of Welsh sometimes just called Brythonic rather than Welsh, but in fact, yes, you could say it was. But I think these national boundaries obviously shift and change all the time and Welsh as a language (early Welsh, Brythonic) was spoken in Scotland for a long time, probably for about five or six centuries from the time of The Gododdin right into the eleventh century. It is part of our cultural baggage, which we have almost lost. So I think it was important to bring that back. After all, the poem was composed in Scotland (near Edinburgh) and it’s part of the Welsh culture of Lowland Scotland where many of the place names are not English but Welsh. So it’s quite real to say that if you are looking back through Scottish history you ought to include these things. Eventually, if they are part of the early history of the region you belong to, I think you are probably entitled to regard them as, in one sense, yours. The Welsh can talk about the poem, too. It’s Welsh in a wider sense obviously, but it is part of our history too. And medieval culture was probably much more international than we tend to think today… I think that’s certainly true, and of course Latin was still spoken, even in the sixth century. It was a kind of lingua franca, if I can use that term of Latin, throughout the whole of Europe. Yes, in that sense, it is

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international. Welsh, obviously, was not; it’s a different thing. There was a widespread Celtic culture which reached the western shores of Europe, but came from Eastern Europe or perhaps even further. There is a mixture of the national and the international. If you meet something that is international but impinges strongly on your culture, you often become interested in it and want to do something about it. To what extent can literary communication inspire or modify a larger community’s self-images in more general terms? Very often you find that when a country is trying to establish its identity, it knows it is part of a wider political context, and translation will be quite an important element in it. This was true in Elizabethan England, where just before Shakespeare’s time translators were busy at work translating from mostly French, Italian and Spanish, where Renaissance poetry had started earlier than in the South of England, so they felt they had to prove that their own language was going to be able to produce poetry as good as that produced in Continental Europe. This happens quite often. In Scotland, Gavin Douglas translated Virgil’s Aeneid – that was long before the Elizabethans – and it was a very early attempt to bring Classical culture into these islands (whatever you call them), certainly into Scotland. It’s in Scots, it’s extremely well done, and it pre-dates all the English versions of Virgil. The desire to do this was very strong in Gavin Douglas. He felt it was important to Scotland to show that you could convincingly translate into your own language (into the Scots of his time) from even the greatest writers. He went to the top: he went to Virgil. It’s very hard to translate Virgil well, but he thought he would do it. It would be different, it wouldn’t be the same, but nevertheless he would have a go, and try and bring it across into Scotland. And he did so with a great deal of vigour. The cover of your Collected Translations shows an ancient map of Europe. How important is European appreciation for a Scottish poet? I think it is important, although I don’t quite go along with the idea of being inevitably and importantly a part of Europe. You will find some slogans in Scotland which say so: slogans like “Scotland in Europe”. It’s true that we’re almost [laughs] in Europe, being a part of an island

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group. But it’s only part of the picture. I like it and I use it, I’ve been to most countries in Europe, I’m interested in all the languages, but there is also something else. I think especially people on the west coast of Scotland, like myself in Glasgow (not so much in Edinburgh or Aberdeen), we look west: to America – to the Americas in fact – and that to me is also very important. So I don’t feel myself to be just a European. I probably am in a way, but American writing, American art and American culture is just as important to me as its European counterpart – so I’m a bit divided that way. Would you describe your own situation as writing in between two cultures? I think it is a division. In different times of my life I found myself persuaded by one or the other. I’ve been to America several times and I have strong feelings about it, both positive and negative. It’s a place where you find you have what people call a “love-hate relationship” with it, but obviously there’s something about American civilisation: its forward drive. In fact, I find it very appealing that they wanted to get to the moon, and actually did do so. I felt it was something that interested me a lot and I couldn’t help feeling that Europe was perhaps dragging a little bit, saying: “It’s too expensive, we can’t afford that.” And, mind, the Russians would have done what the Americans did but they could not carry it forward. No, they didn’t set foot on the moon, although they have great achievements in space exploration… They did very important things technically, although it helps stamping on the moon. [Laughs.] They argued perhaps that you could do everything by probes, and you can do a lot of things by technology. But I think in the end you’ve got to go there, and the Russians were probably sorry that they couldn’t actually get there. Have you ever visited Russia? Yes, a long time ago, about the middle of the 1950s. I was part of a cultural delegation from Glasgow. We were invited there, so we were looked after pretty well, but of course very carefully. It wasn’t easy to

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wander off by yourself and find out exactly what was happening, but nevertheless we did see quite a lot. It was just after the death of Stalin and things were beginning to open up slightly. We managed to see quite a bit of the country in Moscow, Leningrad, and right down to Kiev and Odessa and the Black Sea. It was a very big tour and we could see quite a good variety of things in the country. I felt it was something I would like to have done later on, but that was the only time I’ve been there. Do you have memories of 1956? [Laughs.] Oh yes, that’s a horrible year. 1956 was quite an emotional time, following what was happening in your part of Europe and what was happening to us in the Middle East. It was hard to get your feelings sorted out, because you felt what we were doing in the Middle East was disgraceful, and we wondered in fact if we could do more for what was happening in your country. It was a very difficult time, a time of strong emotions, which you probably still feel in your own country. Do you? Absolutely. But Hugh MacDiarmid rejoined the Communist Party after 1956… That’s right. Yes, he always did the opposite of what you were expected to do. [Laughs.] I think his idea was that if you are a communist, you must stand by your friends, and if your friends are in difficulty, you just stand by them. You made your first visit to Hungary in 1966. What were your impressions? It was fascinating, as I had never been to Hungary before. This was an invitation to the Poetry Days in Budapest. I could see quite a bit of the city and a bit of the countryside too, and talked to people as far as I could. I learned a lot about Hungarian poetry, and met people who encouraged me to do more translations. I had of course done some translation of Hungarian poetry before: that’s why I was invited. I had done some translations on my own (making mistakes obviously but getting them published) and these were picked up in Hungary. Appar-

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ently, these translations were all right, and they asked me to do some more. I felt much encouragement by what they said. It was my first visit to the country but it wasn’t my first contact with Hungarian poems. This was away back in the early fifties when I first came across Attila József’s poetry in Italian translation with facing Hungarian text. I could read the Italian translation and I was greatly impressed. I thought it was tremendous poetry and it was the kind of poetry I liked: urban poetry. I also liked to look across the page and to see what the other language was like. It was my first exposure to the Hungarian language and I began to develop an interest in it from that point on. So my interest in József goes right back to those days. It was a very small book but it had some good poems, obviously: “Night in the Suburbs”, “Elegy”, “Ode” – very good poems! Hungary was then a member state of what was called the Eastern bloc and by any description those were Cold War years. What kind of political response did you become conscious of as a Western writer? It was an international conference and it wasn’t heavily underlined by politics. We were all welcome, and I think the feeling was that it was ten years since 1956 and here we are now: we’re not so bad, come and see us, we’re very friendly, enjoy your stay, and we won’t talk too much about politics. Although we knew enough about the political situation, it wasn’t particularly driven home. It was meant to be a friendly conference. You met Miklós Vajda, who was then editor of New Hungarian Quarterly, on your first visit. Who else did you meet then? I met Sándor Weöres and his wife, and also Ottó Orbán and quite a few other poets. I was encouraged especially by Miklós to investigate the matter further. He couldn’t explain it, but he felt I had a good kind of touch with translating Hungarian poetry. He said: if we sent you rough translations of poems we’d like to have translated, would you have a go and try and do that? And I said I would. That was my connection with New Hungarian Quarterly and we carried on quite a bit of correspondence about that.

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Vajda commissioned a lot of translations for the New Hungarian Quarterly and you’ve translated poetry from the Latin of Janus Pannonius to Petfi, and from Kassák to Pilinszky. You didn’t include many of these in your Collected Translations, and I particularly miss, for example, the little poem about a Transdanubian almond tree by Janus. Yes, I realised that. There was a little more I would like to have put in it, but it was becoming a very big book and the publisher was worried. [Laughs.] Yes, Petfi especially I would like to have included. I did quite a lot of Petfi. He is another poet who is very interesting from the political point of view, the first point you made. I was attracted by the fact that although he’d write other kinds of poetry as well, he immersed himself in the politics of his time to a very dangerous extent. And I liked the fact that he was able to write a poem that was very quickly taken up by people, almost became a folk poem, I suppose, the “Nemzeti dal” or “National Song”. I’ve read the story that it was taken up almost immediately, it was published very quickly and spread by word of mouth. Is this true? Yes, it is. It was the first product of the uncensored Hungarian press, and added a strong emotional element to the events of the Revolution on 15 March 1848… Well, George Szirtes has also translated from Petfi as well as from a number of other Hungarian poets and prose writers, and Ted Hughes was a dedicated translator of Pilinszky. How do you see their work from the vantage point of someone who is equally familiar with Hungarian literature, and is himself a poet and translator? George Szirtes has obviously the advantage of being bilingual, so his translations are always interesting to read and one has a kind of confidence in reading. Those of Ted Hughes are much more free and quite often they are really Ted Hughes poems. He’s doing it in his own way and I don’t know how you regard him in your own country but he seems to me to be a different kind of translator. He wants to make something of it which interests him particularly, and he’ll change things very incredibly if he wants to. But that’s just one way of doing it.

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There are two extreme uses of translation: one which wants to be as close as possible to the form and meaning of the original and the other which takes risks like Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound. Ted Hughes probably belongs to that group: he takes risks that don’t always come off. I think he misses a lot of the music and rhythm of the original. That kind of effect is not so strong in his translations, whereas in Szirtes you’ll get them because he understands the way the poem moves. But it’s just two different ways of doing it and you still get a lot of pleasure from what Hughes does. Your Collected Translations gives a fairly rounded picture of the poetry of Weöres and József. You embrace most of their canonical pieces, although there are some disputable absences. Apart from these Hungarians, Montale, Maurice Scève and Mayakovsky seem to me to be your strongest attractions. Your book includes a respectable number of translations from about seventy poets, which, however, leads me to believe that you generally prefer variety to volume. Do you like to rely on your private apprehensions of taste rather than simply accepting what literary canons have on offer in picking the poems and poets you translate? I think it varies from writer to writer and from poem to poem, and of course sometimes you are actually asked to translate something which you may or may not find easy. But if I can, yes, I do choose as far as possible the poems that interest me, and also the poems which seem possible to translate. Some of the poems are very hard to translate (well, all these poems were very hard to translate at all), although it can be a useful challenge. If something is difficult, and you know it’s difficult but at the same time you admire it, it is a good challenge to try and do something with it. I think if I chose a poem, it would be for a variety of reasons: if it was a poem with a clear thought or idea that appealed to me I would do that; if it was a poem with interesting or perhaps unusual imagery, I would be drawn to that. It’s hard to sum up exactly what the reasons would be, but there must be something in it that chimes with my own thought or feeling to some extent, otherwise it probably wouldn’t work at all. But because my own poetry is varied, I think I was drawn to different kinds of Hungarian poems. Are there any poems you particularly enjoyed working on?

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Well, “Night in the Suburbs”… I think it was very good, and most of these longish urban poems of József I enjoyed particularly – I think especially because I was brought up in Glasgow in an environment which couldn’t have been all that terribly different from the Budapest of his time. And it took a long time for a poetry to emerge from Glasgow. It should have been produced away back in the nineteenth century, but it wasn’t. Even in the early twentieth century there was very little good poetry written in Glasgow. I think I felt this challenge when I came on the scene in the second half of the twentieth century. I had very strong feelings about Glasgow: what an industrial city was like, how people lived in it and so on. So when I saw József’s city poems I liked them very much, and I wanted to make good translations of them. I liked to see a very sharp, powerful poetry of life in the industrial city. Later, of course, I got into other aspects of his work, like his love poetry or his poems about his family. But the first thing that struck me about it was the idea of an industrial urban landscape, very often involving completely modern imagery: for instance the trains that are running through his poetry, of course with a final tragic outcome. But it immediately struck me as something that was well worth writing about, and hadn’t been very much done before in English or Scottish poetry. So I thought I’d try and bring it across into our language. These were the ones I probably enjoyed the most. – Well, I would qualify it by saying that although I found these tremendously interesting, the ones that probably moved me most were the ones about his mother. He obviously had a very strong relationship with his mother: some of his poems about her are among his best. The one just called “Mother”, an elegy on his mother, and the washing she had to undertake to make a living, I think it is a very good poem. A wonderful poem! So I tried very hard to make a good translation. What effects has the tension between local urbanism and extrovert cosmopolitanism in the work of such paradigmatic poets as Mayakovsky and József had on your own vision of urban existence? It’s difficult to sort it out. You are attracted by poetry in some other country and the reasons for that may just be that there is something similar either in your character or the environment you belong to. You perhaps don’t want to exploit that too much: it’s just there and it’s

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something you enjoy. But what I like most about Mayakovsky in particular (he was always one of my favourites) is what you get in József too, and I think it is in my own poetry: a strong feeling for what is local, realistic and down-to-earth but at the same time it’s well aware of what’s going on in the world of international politics, and brings political or social ideas and concerns into the poetry. Just because of the time when he was growing up, in Mayakovsky there was a prolific and profitable tension between his desire to write innovative poetry and his conviction that what was happening in the politics of his country had to be supported. He had no hesitation about joining the revolution when it came in 1917, but he had also no hesitation in continuing to write as long as he could poetry of the Avant-garde and Futurist kind. He was very innovative (and I love the way in which he used language in a very surprising way) at the same time as trying to put forward his political ideas in a way that could be enjoyed by other people. I think in the end he was almost broken. He certainly went around Russia reciting his verses in front of big audiences, but he was increasingly criticised, because too much of his poetry seemed difficult, and was asked to accommodate his writing more to the general public. Well, I appreciated that situation and I felt very strongly for him. People sometimes call this a tragic situation (of course, he did die young), but I’m not sure it was tragic. I think he got pleasure – “pleasure” is not the right word – he got a real kind of impetus and drive from bringing the two things together, which I admired a lot. Translation often involves not only thematic and intellectual immersion in the work of other writers but also confrontations with technical considerations when, partly as a consequence of the different rhythmic patterns of languages, a negotiation of formal means must take place. Is it possible at all to bridge the gap between these different types of versification? Yes, it is a difficulty, and I think you’re aware of it and you do what you can. There has to be some accommodation, some kind of compromise. You have to, in the end, deliver what looks like a good poem in English – if you can do this. To get that, you may have to make certain metrical changes, though it can be done in such a way that it may still be not too far from the original. A language which is strongly

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stress-based as English is, or German or Russian (as opposed to, say, French or Hungarian), can do things which are not the same as what you find in the other languages, but can come quite close to it. Your ear tells you that you don’t have to have a luxuriously thumping rhythm as you might have in an English poem when you’re doing some Hungarian poem. You accommodate the rhythm to some extent, and sometimes you have to accommodate it in a way that is metrical, but not English metrical. When Radnóti uses Latin or Greek hexameters I don’t know if it sounds Greek to your ear in Hungary – but he writes good hexameters [laughs] – and in translating them I would try to reproduce that, and it would work in English quite well. Does it work well to your ear in Hungarian? Yes, those are very fine poems… Because Latin must have been a stressed poetic language to some extent but it was a quantitative poetry particularly, and we can’t reproduce quantitative poetry in English. We could try but it just can’t be done. Latin poetry recognises long and short beats and our ear doesn’t get that at all. So in translating Latin poetry you have to do something with that: you cannot reproduce them exactly, so you have to make certain changes. Changes have to be made all the way through translation but you try to keep close to the original. Robert Crawford said: “Some writers view poetry as untranslatable simply because translation changes the original. For Morgan, poetry […] is constantly and energetically translatable because his own attitude to poetry appears to be that it, like life, is bound up with translation, with change.” Do you find this a plausible argument? Yes, I would go along with that. There’s a change that is almost inevitable. There’s even a kind of value in the change, and I think most poetry is, in some sense, translatable. It’s often said the things you can’t translate involve word plays, puns or jokes. People say that in a very free and easy way, but it’s not always quite as impossible as it is said. It’s often quite hard work and you know perhaps you can’t reproduce a pun exactly. But if you think about it, and if you want to do it, you can usually find an equivalent which is pretty near the effect you want to reproduce.

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You published a selection of translations from Weöres in 1970. Why did you keep to his seriously philosophical strain for the most part and why haven’t you translated any of his well-known nursery poems? It’s a good question, and I’ve no answer. [Laughs.] I might do some yet, I know them and I’ve seen them and I’d like to do something. I can’t give you any answer for that, really. I was just so strongly attracted by what you call his “serious poems”, and they made such a big impression on me, that I just went for that. You can do other things, obviously. I do admire the other poems. Are they well-known in Hungary? Yes, they are. I remember singing them in the nursery schools, as we knew many of them by heart… Weöres’s poems for children are not patronising. They tend to have a complex composition that is not always easy for children to understand, and I remember it was the magic of their rhythm that stole these poems into your mind first, and comprehension came second… That’s true for most poems of that type, I think. Children love that: they get into poetry in that way. They love the rhythm and the sound effects, and it’s an elementary part of poetry which can be very important. It is part of the oral element in poetry, I suppose, which goes way back long before there were books of poetry and people would sing, chant or recite it to get it across to any kind of audience. I was very glad that Weöres was able to do that as well as sometimes quite difficult anthropological poems. Do nursery rhymes reflect the ancient origins of our sense of rhythm? I think so, I think they must do. I think it’s just the process of gradually learning something about the arts: both music and poetry, and dance too. They all in a sense come together and children enjoy the clash of these elements, and I think that continues too. Most good poetry does have a strong musical or rhythmical element: it’s very hard to get away from that. It all goes back to something probably very primitive which we may find very hard to pin down exactly. I’m sure Weöres was interested in primitive or early societies and anthropology, and would feel that.

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Do you agree that most nursery rhymes in English stand closer to the Anglo-Saxon than the contemporary metrical patterns of the language? Yes, I think so. And in fact the Anglo-Saxon “heritage” (if you want to use that word) has never quite disappeared. English anthologies – like what we were saying about Scottish poetry – tend to begin with Chaucer. Well, there was great poetry long before Chaucer in what was in fact the English language. Anglo-Saxon poetry is very good: Beowulf is a tremendous poem. The Anglo-Saxon metre, which is quite different from what we get from Chaucer onwards, was very strongly stress-based, and it seems to have persisted after the Norman Conquest. It keeps popping up again and again in English poetry. Yes, you get it in nursery rhymes as well as in other things, popular proverbs for example – anything that people enjoy using and remembering, and it has usually a strong beat without counting the syllables. You also get it coming to the fore now and again in later poets like Coleridge (in “Christabel”), Gerard Manley Hopkins, as well as in W.H. Auden in the twentieth century. There’s almost the feeling as if there was a different kind of music in English poetry which never quite disappears. You often get impatient with our serial metre. One way to do something with this impatience is to acknowledge that the bedrock of the English language never quite got destroyed by the French influence of the Norman Conquest. It’s still there and I think it tells you something important about the rhythm of a line. I’ve written sonnets and I like writing in regular metre myself, but sometimes when you want something very different and you want to break out from that, you often go back to Anglo-Saxon. Do you acknowledge any affinity between your own and Weöres’s linguistic techniques even though your motivations are, of course, different? Yes, I do. I’ve always felt that, and it was confirmed when I actually met him, and had some very interesting conversations with him. We seemed to get on very well and we were to some extent on the same or a similar wave-length. I liked his linguistic virtuosity – because he wrote in many different styles and obviously with a tremendous

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command of language – and I too have used different styles. I got to like the idea that not all poets want to – as people say – “find their voices”. Sometimes in writers workshops teachers will say: “Well, you must find your voice!” I don’t agree with that. I think you can have many voices – well, I have many voices. I think Weöres also had many voices. Yes, I felt a kind of kinship with him. Obviously, our backgrounds were very different in many ways but there was something that drew us together. What impression do you have of him? Well, I didn’t get to know him well: it was only one evening, a dinner in a restaurant with him and his wife. As you know, he didn’t speak very much English, so we had a variety of bits of French, German and Hungarian floating around. It went extremely well and I remember he would use the menu cards to write things on the back: little jokes, little drawings, bits of poetry, and sometimes he was saying: “I mustn’t do this.” He was still aware of the political situation and of the fact that he was still regarded as not entirely a “safe” writer. So it was in the background, but it didn’t stop him from being very extroverted and talking about everything. But he would come to a point and say “Oh, I shouldn’t be saying that, should I?”. He was very interesting and his wife too was an interesting person. Both were extremely cultured, civilised persons. I liked the way the conversation flew very freely back and forward. There were a great variety of subjects: nothing was taboo, or difficult or awkward, it just flew very naturally. What was Weöres’s reaction to being translated into English by yourself? He liked the idea, and would encourage me to go on and do more. Because he didn’t have very much English, he couldn’t really judge what we were doing with his poetry. But he liked the thing to get across into English, and I think he liked the idea of being translated and being better known. Of course, he knew that so many good Hungarian poets were not well-known at that time in the sixties in the rest of Europe or in America. That has changed now, thank goodness, but it took a long time to happen, and Weöres was aware of that. He knew, he surely knew what he was: I think he was a genius. He knew

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he was a great poet and therefore ought to be known in the English language as well as in his own language. [Laughs.] He had, of course, a humorous, impish quality, which was very attractive – almost a kind of child-like quality. He would think of something quite entertaining, quite funny, and just say it even though it had no tremendous depth to it. I liked that about him: there was a kind of innocence perhaps about him, which was very attractive. “In the course of six decades, one’s ideas and ideals concerning translation are bound to fluctuate, and I have sometimes allowed myself more freedom […] but I would still regard the general principle of being a good servant to the foreign poet, rather than thanking him very much and then going on to write a new poem of one’s own, a sound and (with luck) productive approach”, you write in your Collected Translations. Have you perhaps developed a more specific approach to translation? No, I don’t think I have. I still hold to the view that you should be, if you can, faithful to the other poet. There would be moments when it becomes too difficult, or practically impossible, but I think the desire to be faithful is quite important. Sometimes perhaps it’s a matter of mood more than of theory: you come across something in a poem you like and you feel that you’d like to translate it fairly freely. This has happened once or twice, but my general view about it is still that you should be as faithful as you can. In your essay “The Translation of Poetry” you speak about the “deverbalisation and reverbalisation of the poem” and you say “there is some sense […] in which the poem exists independently of the language of its composition”. What does this mean? Yes, this was an idea I found in Walter Benjamin’s writing, which I was always very interested in. I think it’s very hard to be precise about it. I find it an attractive idea that a poem might have a kind of almost metaphysical existence, hovering between the two languages. How you can prove this I’ve no idea, but I have felt that way once or twice: when I was translating Montale especially. His poetry is quite difficult but it has very strong imagery, and often strong sound effects as well. When I was doing his poems I did try to translate it faithfully, but

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there was a point when I could almost see or feel the poem hovering there, like a kind of imagery or a little scene from a film. It’s very hard to be precise about these things, but I almost came to believe that the poem had an existence of its own which could be translated into many different languages. It’s probably just an idea and nothing else, because obviously a poem must be inherent in the language in which it is written: it must have its prime existence, its prime meaningful being there if at all. I’d like to believe in a kind of a Jungian idea, in a universal consciousness, and that the poet can dip into that, because writing poetry is in a sense universal. But it’s not entirely true, because the language a poet is using is not universal in any measurable sense. It’s a very elusive idea, but at that time it did strike me that there might be something about this. So translation would have some moment perhaps – if everything was going well – when you could almost see, feel or sense the poem like a vision in front of you, and then you just find the words from your own language to bring it down to you. But, as I say, I can’t prove that. It may be a fantasy more than an actual reality. [Laughs.] “Morgan is fascinated by how language breaks down and makes itself together again, especially in the case of messages which have been somehow garbled or mutated in the telling”, writes Roderick Watson. He has your classic “computer print-out poems” in mind, but would you agree that a text participates in a similar kind of linguistic game (of coding and decoding, of breaking down and reassembling) in the process of translation? I think so. Yes, and all these things might hang together. In fact, I’ve always been interested in cryptography, actual code-breaking. So I think that interest in codes (properly speaking) links up also with things like concrete poetry, sound poetry, and with the sense that reading a poem often involves “breaking its code”. Even in a simple poem there is a kind of code: it’s not the same as if someone was talking to you. There is something there which is carefully managed to produce a certain effect. You have to make sure you decode it properly. I’m interested in how communication works, and sometimes does not work, and how it can convey certain values.

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You translated the poems of Mayakovsky and Heine into Scots while rendering Attila József, who was affiliated with the communist party for a while like Mayakovsky, and in a sense shares with Heine a technical apparatus inspired by folk songs, into literary English. Could you describe the ways in which a foreign poem embraces another language, accent or dialect? I don’t think I have a general view about that. I tend to do it as it comes up. I thought briefly about using Scots words for Attila József, but finally I decided I could better master what he was doing in English. Scots worked very well in Mayakovsky, because it’s a good language for satire, fantasy, and for various kinds of explosive effects. I don’t think these had the same importance when I was translating József. It’s very hard to argue for or against it afterwards, because I do these things very pragmatically. If it seems right at the time, I just do it and I don’t think too hard if it should be in English or in Scots. In the case of Mayakovsky, Scots just seemed natural and I enjoyed it. It was just the opposite with József: I enjoyed using my best English to get all the effects he was doing. Finally, why is literary translation important? I think translation is important because language is important. Language, despite an enormous amount of theorising, remains one of the great mysteries: how it arose, how it changes, how much is lost if a language disappears, what convergence (if any) is there in the great language groups, how arbitrary is the relation between sound and meaning? A translator, I think, bends his mind to these things in the still watches of the night and hopes that even if he doesn’t crack the mystery, he can learn from the attempt. Glasgow, 13 October 2000

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Bibliography: Edwin Morgan (1920–)

Poetry The Vision of Cathkin Braes, and Other Poems. Glasgow: William MacLellen, 1952. The Cape of Good Hope. Uckfield: Pound Press, 1955. Gnomes. Preston: Akros Publications, 1968. The Second Life. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1968. With Alan Norman Bold and Kamau Brathwaite. Penguin Modern Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. The Horseman’s Word: A Sequence of Concrete Poems. Lancashire: Akros Publications, 1970. Glasgow Sonnets. West Linton: Castlelaw Press, 1972. Instamatic Poems. London: Ian McKelvie, 1972. From Glasgow to Saturn. Cheadle: Carcanet, 1973. The Whittrick: A Poem in Eight Dialogues. Penwortham: Akros Publications, 1973. The New Divan. Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1977. Colour Poems. Glasgow: Third Eye Centre, 1978. Star Gate: Science Fiction Poems. Glasgow: Third Eye Centre, 1979. Poems of Thirty Years. Manchester: Carcanet, 1982. Sonnets from Scotland. Glasgow: Mariscat, 1984. Selected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 1985. From the Video Box. Glasgow: Mariscat, 1986. Themes on a Variation. Manchester: Carcanet, 1988. Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 1990. Hold Hands among the Atoms: 70 Poems. Glasgow: Mariscat, 1991. Three Scottish Poets: Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan, Liz Lochhead (ed. Roderick Watson). Edinburgh: Canongate, 1992. Sweeping Out the Dark. Manchester: Carcanet, 1994. Virtual and Other Realities. Manchester: Carcanet, 1997. Demon. Glasgow: Mariscat, 1999. New Selected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 2000. Cathures: New Poems 1997–2001. Manchester: Carcanet, 2002. Love and a Life: Fifty Poems. Glasgow: Mariscat, 2003. A Book of Lives. Manchester: Carcanet, 2007. Beyond the Sun: Scotland’s Favourite Paintings. Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2008.

Drama A.D.: A Trilogy on the Life of Jesus. Manchester: Carcanet, 2000.

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Translation Selected Poems of Sándor Weöres. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. Wi the Haill Voice: 25 Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky Translated into Scots. Oxford: Carcanet, 1972. Fifty Renascence Love-Poems (selected by Ian Fletcher). Reading: Whiteknights Press, 1975. Rites of Passage: Selected Translations. Manchester: Carcanet, 1976. Platen: Selected Poems. West Linton: Castlelaw Press, 1978. The Apple Tree: A Medieval Dutch Play in a Version by Edwin Morgan. Glasgow: Third Eye Centre, 1982. Master Peter Pathelin. Glasgow: Third Eye Centre, 1983. Attila József: Fragments (ed. Alec Finlay; illustr. John Byrne). Edinburgh: Morning Star Publications, 1992. Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac: A New Verse Translation. Manchester: Carcanet, 1992. Collected Translations. Manchester: Carcanet, 1996. Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus: In a New Version. Edinburgh: Canongate, 1999. Jean Racine’s Phaedra: A Tragedy. A New Verse Translation. Manchester: Carcanet, 2000. Attila József: Sixty Poems. Glasgow: Mariscat, 2001. Beowulf: A Verse Translation into Modern English. Manchester: Carcanet, 2002; originally published Aldington: Hand and Flower, 1952. The Play of Gilgamesh. Manchester: Carcanet, 2005. Tales from Baron Munchausen. Glasgow: Mariscat, 2005.

Non-fiction Essays. Cheadle: Carcanet Press, 1974. Hugh MacDiarmid (ed. Ian Scott-Kilvert). Harlow: Longman for the British Council, 1976. Crossing the Border: Essays on Scottish Literature. Manchester: Carcanet, 1990. Nothing Not Giving Messages: Reflections on Work and Life (ed. Hamish Whyte). Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990.

Editor The Collins Albatross Book of Longer Poems: English and American Poetry from the Fourteenth Century to the Present Day. London: Collins, 1963. Scottish Satirical Verse: An Anthology. Manchester: Carcanet, 1980. With Carl MacDougall (eds). New Writing Scotland 5. Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1987.

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With Carl MacDougall (eds). New Writing Scotland 6. Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1988. With Hamish Whyte (eds). New Writing Scotland 7. Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1989

Douglas Dunn: A Different Drummer Douglas Dunn is a major figure of the generation succeeding the “Renascence” poets such as MacCaig, Garioch, Morgan and others, who followed on from and variously adapted the linguistic or visionary example of Hugh MacDiarmid. His poetry often takes up an oppositional stance in terms of politics, social class and identity, but it can also be intensely lyrical. He has been influential as an editor and teacher. Keywords: Social class; nationality; identity; heritage.

Now a father figure recognised by poets with interests as diverse as those of W.N. Herbert or Don Paterson, Dunn was born in 1942 in Inchinnan, then Glasgow’s rural hinterland. He started his poetic career under the influence of Philip Larkin at the University of Hull, and published his first collection, Terry Street (1969), to great critical acclaim. He gradually disentangled himself from Larkin’s authority and, confirming his leftist politics, laid an increasing emphasis on his Scottish origins in a sequence of volumes including Love or Nothing (1974), Barbarians (1979) and St Kilda’s Parliament (1981). The death of his first wife was commemorated in Elegies (1985), which topped the Times best-seller list for several weeks. It received some of the most prestigious book awards in England but none in Scotland. The translation of his work into several European languages took off following the publication of this book, which might also be regarded as a watershed in his career. Dunn soon relocated to Scotland. He chose North-East Fife for his permanent residence, and took up a professorship at St Andrews University. The turn of the 1980s and 90s saw a redefinition of his relationship with Scotland in two poetry volumes – Northlight (1988) and Dante’s Drum-kit (1993) –, two collections of short stories – Secret Villages (1985) and Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1995) – and various anthologies, including Scotland: An Anthology (1991), The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry (1992) and The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories (1995). The first half of this interview took place in the autumn of 1998, when the campaign for the Scottish parliamentary elections was under way. Among many other things, the conversation explores Scottish and European perspectives on social discrimination based on class, accent and nationality, while trying to chart the main thematic concerns in Dunn’s poetry including his opinion about the political (un)reality of Scotland. He was then writing a poetic version of the letters of Eugene Politovsky, Flag Engineer of the Russian fleet,

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defeated in the 1905 Battle of Tsushima. The long poem appeared as The Donkey’s Ears, almost simultaneously with The Year’s Afternoon, in 2000. In the same year the British Council organised Dunn’s visit to Budapest, with Robert Crawford and the Welsh novelist Patricia Duncker. The second half of the conversation, which we had in his office at St Andrews University, focuses on questions related to translation, poetic vocabulary and aspects of his own rural, west-coast cultural heritage. The first part of this interview was published in Poetry Review 89(3), 1999.

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Your much appraised Faber anthology Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry has been flatteringly said to have one weakness only: that you didn’t include some of your poems in it. Why does that representative collection of Scottish verse not contain some of the editor’s acclaimed poems? Modesty is not necessarily a virtue, but I wouldn’t want to claim it as my vice either. I just happen to believe that if you edit an anthology, then the editor should have the decency to absent his poems from the selection. I mean, how can you “discuss” yourself? A good anthology is an act of criticism, and to have included my own poems would have been unreasonable and unwise. When I made my decision, I thought of Samuel Goldwyn’s deathless remark, “Include me out”, and thought, too, that it means much the same if you say (or if I say), “Exclude me in”. Your poetry is widely read abroad. Your poems have been translated into French, Italian, Hungarian, Polish, German, Czech, Bulgarian, and other languages. How do you feel about being translated? It is heartening, and a real compliment, to find my poems translated into other languages. Or that’s what I feel. Sometimes translation coincides with a visit to another country and an opportunity to meet poets and readers there. Although I’ve become a bad traveller the older I get, I love it once I’ve arrived and acclimatised. That poetry should have an international audience is encouraging. What are the implications of your poems being read by audiences with different social and cultural backgrounds for your own work? Feeling and intelligence associated with love, death, places, and so on, tend to be much the same everywhere. Even if different cultural traditions condition them differently, it has to be said that such feelings are human more than national. To what extent do you believe a European appreciation is important to a Scottish poet?

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My poems are also read in Australia and the United States, and I have recently returned from a literary visit to Venezuela. Perhaps I should widen your question beyond Europe. But I feel myself to be European, and I feel myself committed to an idea of Europe that is cultural before it is economic or political. To know that some of my poems have been read by those familiar, in mother tongues, with the works of Goethe, Heine, Rilke, Ronsard, Racine, Hugo, Baudelaire, József, Pushkin, Pasternak, Mickiewicz, Lorca, Leopardi, Montale, and so on, is truly exhilarating. How do you perceive the role of the poet as a mediator between cultures? My expertise in languages other than English is limited, and I couldn’t claim a role as a mediator between cultures. About the best I can hope for is to represent my own culture as I understand it and try to do so honestly. But part of my mind and temperament – more so, I feel, than my “inheritance” as a Scot – is an interest in any poetry no matter where it comes from. What is the significance of poetic dialogues between languages? When I have attended poetry festivals or other events abroad I usually come away from them with a sense, not so much of difference, but of shared values and shared concerns. Poetic procedures and emphases of style may differ, but it is what is held in common that impresses me. Which poets and prose writers do you regard as your literary models? As for “models”, I’ve tried to be my own man. If you mean “influences”, then there are so many that I wouldn’t know where to begin. Is it possible to suggest Shakespeare as an “influence” or “model” and not be laughed at? I find myself to be eclectic. Of the writing of this century I agree with Brodsky that W. H. Auden was probably the great genius in the English language. It was my privilege to know Philip Larkin on terms of friendship, but I wouldn’t claim him entirely as a “model”. Writers like Jonson, Marvell, Dryden, Pope, Burns, Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Browning, Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Edwin Arling-

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ton Robinson, Robert Lowell, D.J. Enright, Ted Hughes, Peter Porter, and many others, have also been important to me, as have the earlier Scottish writers of the late mediaeval and Renaissance periods, and Scottish poets of the eighteenth century, plus Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. It is against that more indigenous reservoir of “influences” and “models”, that I have introduced writing from other cultures. I see “influence” as a turbulent and unsettled phenomenon. Do you perceive the existence of a broader European context for the “barbarian” poetry written in the British Isles? I think I coined the term “barbarians” in a poetic context in the mid1970s when I wrote the first part of my collection Barbarians. Tony Harrison was in the same district of thought and feeling at the time, and Seamus Heaney also (perhaps even a little earlier). I used the term to mean the oppositional or socially and politically hostile aspect of contemporary poetic sensibility, which was shared chiefly by poets of a working-class and/or non-English origin in the British Isles. A friend of mine calls this the “hairy-arsed school of poetry”, although how he knows is a bit of a mystery to me. In much of Central and Eastern Europe, the same “opposition” was expressed, but by far less direct means, by “Aesopian” or semi-secret routes. In the North-West European Archipelago, poetry was capable of a greater directness although it could be instructive to notice its protective ironies as well. Can we read Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” as a subtext of the work of those poets who employ linguistic or ideological strategies that are subversive of Anglocentric value relations, or is that poem relevant to the present relationship between Scottish and English writing in any sense? Cavafy’s poem wasn’t foregrounded in my mind. My notion of “barbarians” came straight from the Greek, though. “Bar-bar” in Greek was meant to imitate the uncouth sounds of the languages of those who weren’t Greek and were, allegedly, uncultured. The relationship between English and Scottish literature wasn’t a priority. At the time, I was living in Hull, in East Yorkshire, and although the poems are aware of my Scottish background and concerns, I was more conscious of the offence of class-based politics and systems organised around

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the apparent psychological need for demeaning and humiliation on the grounds of birth, nationality, and accent. Is it necessary to define who the “barbarians” are? Isn’t it the dynamic of the relationship that can be artistically more productive? “Barbarians”, in the poems I wrote around that title and concept, are those who have otherwise been excluded from High Culture, but who, by the later part of the twentieth century in the North-West European Archipelago, come to possess it, very much to the embarrassment of those who assume that they have inherited and own the language and its poetic possibilities. Indeed, what you call “the dynamic of the relationship” is where anything artistic might happen – or may have done, as this is an aspect of my work which is now in the past. At the same time it is part of my mind that could be re-activated if circumstances required it, or mind and imagination conspired to bring it back to me. You seem to indicate a tension between “High Culture” and the concerns of “the people”, and I would agree. I want to be a poet of High Culture but at the same time I don’t want to be disloyal to my native parish, my home, my most immediate people, children, friends. Is “Britishness” an appropriate paradigm in reading contemporary Scottish writing, or has it ever been one? “Britishness” is a concept that has perplexed me in my adult years. It didn’t bother me at all when I was younger. For example, when I was a schoolboy, I was in something called the Sea Cadet Corps. Many weekends were spent at a naval anchorage on the Firth of Clyde, while each summer we spent a fortnight on a ship of the Royal Navy. In my case it was HMS Diana, a “D” class destroyer, based in Loch Foyle at Londonderry in Northern Ireland, from where we sailed to Gibraltar and back with units of the Home Fleet, and HMS Starling, a very famous frigate of the Second World War, flagship of Admiral Vian, a great scourge of German U Boats in its time, but by then a navigational training ship, and in which I sailed from Portsmouth to Randers in Denmark and then back to Harwich. I remember feeling very Royal Navy and very British. That I also felt very Scots didn’t come into the equation, even if companions called you “Porridge” or

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“Jock” or commented on your accent. You simply spoke back and held your end up. It strikes me that I’ve been doing the same ever since. I have to consider your question as pragmatically and as experienced as that. Poetry doesn’t arise from a theory but from what the poet knows in life more than in intellect. Yet I have to admit that a “British” national identity may well be in question but due – and this is empirical rather than “historical” in a broad sense – to the puzzlement of English people at the rise of a postimperial multi-racial society, the erosion inflicted by the Provisional I.R.A., Ulster Loyalists, and other terrorist factions in Ireland with their adjunct activities on the mainland, the so-called National Party in England with its fascist and Nazi affiliations, and far less to the convictions of the Scottish National Party. Scottish Nationalism is distinguished in Europe for its democratic principles and procedures. It hasn’t killed anyone, while no one as far as I know has died for its cause in this century unless through stress, overwork, or disappointment. What I’m saying is that the nationalism with which I’m familiar is benign, and not to be confused with nationalisms elsewhere or their lethal activities. It’s not so much a question of “Britishness” or “Britishism” as of the English language. Scotland admits to three languages – English, Scots and Gaelic. The first of these is a lingua franca, but with a Scottish accent (although sometimes with an English accent), and it is the language in which I write and speak (with a Scottish accent), although I have a facility to speak in Scots if I feel like it or the social context invites me to do so. I have never been embarrassed by this fact, which I acknowledge, simply, as a fact. But “Britishness” fails to offer a paradigm to a reading of contemporary Scottish writing. Why? – I believe the reason to be a matter of class politics among Scotland’s writers and readers as much as nationalism. Does European unification coincide with the loss of a (presumed or real) British national identity? Do you perceive it as a “loss” at all? I don’t believe it’s necessary for any national identity to undergo significant erosion as a result of the tendency towards European unity. Nor, for example, do I intend to change publishers or lose my friendships in England. Just how much difference there will be between

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today’s status quo and a post-devolution state of affairs remains to be seen. A considerable portion of recent Scottish writing is dedicated to the re-definition of the meaning of “Scotland”. What is your opinion about this intense debate about Scottishness? A debate about Scottishness has been going on for a very long time – ever since the run-up to the Treaty of Union of 1707. I’d just as soon stop talking and do something, but then I feel I don’t want to try to be in any way politically “influential”. There is something in me that resists “simplifying myself”, as Turgenev put it, in order to be a political activist. It’s a debate in which I have played little part other than through whatever is represented in my writing. Were I to stand on public platforms and say in prose some of the things I have said in verse, then not only would I be paraphrasing my verses, and repeating myself, but I’d be surrendering to a topical force inferior to the art I represent and to which I’ve dedicated my life. I don’t know why – it could be reckless, or feckless – but I feel brave enough to say that. “Scotland is a political fiction,” you wrote in 1988. “It has its varieties of place, people, temperaments, languages, its cities, landscapes, its business, its industry, its employed and unemployed, its rich and poor – it has everything except citizenship.” Would political independence be helpful in bringing Scotland’s perplexing view of itself to a solution? I think Renan defined a nation as “a large-scale solidarity”. Clearly, a country needs a nationality and citizenship to stand behind. Also, a country has to be in a position to take responsibility for itself; it shouldn’t have to endure secondary status. Part of Scotland’s trouble has been the willingness of so many of its people, in all walks of life, to behave as if second rate or inferior. I don’t feel second rate, and I don’t feel inferior. Boasting is not my style, and that’s not my game here. Moaning and whingeing are conditions which I loathe and detest. I take full responsibility for my life and its decisions. Scotland is a country and a nationality into which I feel proud to have been born.

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How do you imagine the cultural role of an independent Scotland in Europe? Scotland’s cultural role in Europe would, I hope, continue as at present and much as it always has. For a country of its size, its influence on Europe, and the world, has been big. We can read a lot about regional identities within Scotland. Some even question that there exists a common Scottish identity at all. Isn’t there a danger that these regional concerns will undermine national interests? Regional identities within Scotland may be overstated by those who identify with these regions, to the detriment of a truly national picture. From the perspective of literature, however, it’s a commonplace view that you have to be local before you can succeed in being universal. Writing that’s local and stays local will probably be of interest only to readers in that locality. Personally, I feel that to be a serious problem only if an attempt is made to claim universality for works that clearly don’t possess it. As a poet who began his career in Hull and lives now in Tayport, Fife (always as far from metropolitan centres as possible), you may feel sensitive to claims of provincialism. In Devolving English Literature Crawford made “provincial” into a “term of praise”, whereas in Identifying Poets he established a paradigm for reading “provincial” poets by devolving literary authority from cultural centres to what was earlier seen as the periphery. However, isn’t it perhaps a restrictive reading that might foreground certain strains of territorial concerns to the detriment of aesthetic considerations? I now live in Dairsie, smaller even than Tayport, and distant from metropolitan centres. It’s a temperamental thing with me – I don’t like living in cities, although I enjoy opportunities to visit them from time to time. Much of my writing refers to places and people, which comes naturally to me. Perhaps it is simply part of the apparatus I need in order to express my formal and aesthetic concerns.

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To try to write poetry at the present time obliges a poet to confront and struggle with a range of technical, formal issues, interwoven through the poet’s thematic, emotional and intellectual obsessions. In the act of writing, the substance which a poet tries to shape – like wayward clay on a potter’s wheel, handled by an apprentice potter – is both what the poet is trying to say and the technical means by which the poet tries to form the poem. It is hard to take one’s mind off either of them, so that criticism which neglects a poet’s artistry for the sake of chasing after an idea (no matter how interesting the idea) always seems to me to be incomplete. Or it could just be that a readable, technical criticism is difficult to achieve. You are alert to geopolitical and cultural tensions in the British Isles and at the same time your work develops a wider frame of literary references. Can we say that the way to the comprehension of the particular and the peripheral leads to the comprehension of the universal in your poetry? I work in a university that was founded in 1411, and which is recognised as one of the major universities of Europe and perhaps of the world. It is a very well known university – so I don’t feel conscious of being on the periphery except perhaps in an imaginative sense. But I discover within myself the same germ of freedom, style, of self-challenge, that I find myself impressed by in a writer like Robert Louis Stevenson. Did Sir Walter Scott feel peripheral? Did Stevenson? Did Robert Burns for that matter? – I suspect Burns’s localism to have been a tactic calculated by a powerful intellect simply to make it known that he existed. But I’m glad you see a wider frame of reference in my work. Throughout my writing life I feel I’ve engaged as much as has been possible for me with European literatures. I have always had to work hard for my living and so I’ve never enjoyed the leisure or the means to cultivate some of my interests as much as I would have liked. It annoys me, but my Samoa will always be one of the mind. Besides, in mid-life, I’ve discovered that I am a practical man as much as a poet. Or practical-poetic. Or poetic-practical. Can a contemporary Scottish poet afford to disregard debates about provincialism and regionalism? Are you irritated by the subject?

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If I don’t disregard them some of the time then I don’t see how I can get anything written, because far from everything I write is addressed to “the matter of Scotland”. But I’m not irritated by the presence of these arguments. Any writer lives and works in a specific intellectual and political climate and it could be damaging were you to take your eye off these contemporary issues for too long. I say “could” because it depends very much on the writer. God forgive that a poet should be obliged to be a politician. In your early collections one may observe an inclination towards what seems to be a politically committed poetry. Your representations of working-class existences in Terry Street and Barbarians, or your allegiance to Clydeside have prompted your description as a leftist poet even in the 1980s. How did you react to such (again, can we say) restrictive readings of your work then? I still find myself on the left side of the political spectrum in that I still hold to a belief in social justice. But to see me as that and only that kind of poet is restrictive or limiting, by which I mean, of course, that it’s not how I see myself entirely. My book Elegies, for example, isn’t about Scotland, although some of the poems are set there (as well as in Hull, and in a rural part of France, and in Dundee). You wrote somewhere that “Community’s a myth”. What is the role of imagination in the re-creation of communal loyalties? Imagination is crucial to poetry and any other form of literature and art. In his masterpiece novel Lanark, Alasdair Gray writes of Glasgow as an “unimagined” city, a city that for many years was somehow (or by and large) avoided by art. Even if there was much interest in art there, Glasgow was rarely its subject. All that has changed and I am convinced it’s true of other parts of Scotland as well as of Glasgow. From my own view of my work (which like any other writer’s is unreliable) I feel that my “re-creation” of communal loyalties occurs in some of my poems but in most of my short stories. The act of imagination seems to be a key principle in your work, and I think it is particularly important in Dante’s Drum-kit. Can we see this

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book as a landmark in the development of increasingly autonomous forms of representation in your poetry? It is not that I have tried deliberately to disengage myself from the political side of my poetry, but after the effort of writing Elegies I found what I had to say politically was wearing a bit thin. There are poems of political consequence in Northlight and Dante’s Drum-kit, but on the whole I’ve been wary of that dimension of my writing, chiefly because I’m conscious of having reached a moment in my socalled career when self-parody or tedious repetition becomes a distinct possibility. I noticed this tendency in two older friends, the late Philip Larkin and the late Norman MacCaig, each of whom found himself becoming a caricature both physically and on the page and neither of whom enjoyed it. At my age it’s a good idea to try to stay new, if it can be managed; and if not, then a better idea is to shut up and get on with something else. I hope that the “act of imagination” is more conspicuous in my recent work. What I find, though, is that having published a book, I somehow, without deliberating it, make sure that the next book is different from its predecessor. I don’t know why this happens. Where does the title of the book come from? Titles are always a problem for me. By Dante’s Drum-kit I think I was drawing attention to the percussive side of poetic rhythm which is a bit loud in that volume. It was certainly an aspect of poetry I found myself fascinated by during the time I was writing the poems collected in that book. I could even have been drawing attention to the fact that I had written a poem (in the book) in terza rima. It seems to me that one of your premises in poetry is a demand for precision, which goes beyond clarity of style and meaning. Is there a categorical imperative that you think a poet should observe? All a poet is obliged to be is a poet. Once that’s been accepted and digested, then the poet can be any sort of poet the poet needs to be – and I emphasise “need” and not “want”. Just so long as the poet doesn’t tell lies to himself or herself and try to use poetry for the purposes of the wide range of forms of special pleading on offer, the most

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common form of which is self-advertising, then the freedom to be a poet should be infinite. Do you have any affinity with moral philosophy? I studied moral philosophy for a year when an undergraduate. I learned how to use expressions such as “that which” and spent a year unlearning them. I also worked as a secretary to my tutor, who was writing a book on the concept of liberty. He would dictate to me, I’d write it down in longhand, and then on a typewriter; and then I’d count the number of words. If there were more than twenty-six words in the sentence then it had to be revised until it was shorter. There could be no more words in a sentence than the letters of the alphabet. I asked him why, in a book on the concept of liberty, he had to set himself this ridiculous unfreedom of sentences. He looked at me as if I were stupid. I looked at him as if he were stupid. We went on like that for weeks. It took him a very long time to pay me, and, in the meantime, I had to read his wife’s poems. When he came round to my little house in Terry Street to give me the money he owed me, I was practising my clarinet – a florid but difficult study from a book of instruction and exercises by Klosé, I recall. He was horrified, and said I was wasting my time with “music” (pronounced like a dirty word) when I should be studying philosophy. Let my answer to your question be implied from the foregoing. To what extent is your ars poetica emotionally motivated? “Emotionally” is not the word I’d choose, although feeling is implicated in the ways in which I write. “Eccentric” could be better in that it includes the sense of emotion as well as individuality. As it happens, I’m fairly expert in my knowledge of written and published ars poetica and art poétique and so on. I am fascinated by these things although I’m the first to admit that they don’t help all that much when you come to put pen to paper. Writings like these are of the past, while one’s own writing is of the present. No matter how much you know, or you think you know, the struggle is always with contemporary issues in aesthetics, and these are discovered in the act of writing, no matter what you’re writing about, whether intimate, or political, or whatever.

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How is it possible to reconcile writing poetry with the duties of professorship? It’s not always possible, as much of my time is taken up with administration and teaching. Having said that, though, I seem to have written a lot during the past three or four years while I’ve been Head of the School of English at St Andrews, and Director of the St Andrews Scottish Studies Institute. This is repeating myself, or, rather, repeating Philip Larkin repeating himself, but you can only write a poem when you have a poem to write. Where life becomes frustrating is when I have a poem to write but at the same time a committee to attend, or a class of students to see, and the poem has to go on hold. What are you working on currently? I have a poem to write, and it’s a long poem, of which I have completed around 115 pages so far. It’s spoken by Eugene Politovsky, the Flag Engineer on the Russian fleet that sailed round the world to meet its destiny at the battle of Tsushima during the Russo-Japanese War. Part I was published in Encounter in 1983 under the title “Politovsky’s Letters Home” – the poem is in the form of Politovsky’s letters to his wife. Since a few weeks ago, it’s now called The Donkey’s Ears, which is what Tsushima means in Japanese. It’s about the beginning of the twentieth century as well as specific to its character. Historically, Politovsky wasn’t a poet. He wasn’t even much of a prose writer if translations of his letters (which were published in English) are anything to go by. I’ve made him a secret poet and overt engineer. Why I’m writing the poem is a mystery to me. What I’m clear about is that it’s not a poem about Scotland, but about the world, and the hellish century which is about to become another century, indeed, a new millennium. And who knows how hellish that’s going to be? I’m not ashamed of the fact that while Scotland is on the run-up to its first parliament since the early eighteenth century I’m writing a poem spoken by a Russian engineer who died at “the Trafalgar of the East” in May 1905. It doesn’t faze me because I’ve written lots of other poems, some of which abut on present Scottish issues, but most of which don’t. I am incorrigible. I hope always to be truculent, obtuse, and incorrigible. My Muse demands of me that I have room for any-

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thing at all, for everything, the erotic and lyrical, the topical and political, the discursive and autobiographical, the main theme and the absolutely digressive, the very significant and the nursery rhyme. If there’s anything I want as a poet, it’s the stamina to maintain diversity and the response to what’s necessary for my circumstances of writing. St Andrews, 28 October 1998

Postscript Recently you visited Budapest, where you gave talks and readings with Robert Crawford and the Welsh novelist Patricia Duncker. As this was your first visit to Hungary, did you have any expectations beforehand? Only those which I would be expected to have from having read a certain amount of European history. I have read several books about the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so I did have a sort of picture in my mind. I knew that Budapest would be a city of impressive architecture in the style of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But, I must admit, I wasn’t quite prepared for what I saw. You can read all sorts of books and then when it comes to the actual experience, there’s of course a difference between reality and one’s “literary” expectations. While discussing one of your poems, you were exposed to a literary debate on an aspect of Hungarian identity… Yes, the “puszta”. Well, I wrote a poem, which is a meditation really on European history [Europa’s Lover], and the word “puszta” is mentioned in it. When I was a boy I was interested in horses and I got a book about all the different kinds of horses of the world as a Christmas present. Of course, Hungarian cavalry (the hussars, and so on) were all very significant in European history. It seems there was quite a culture in the Hungarian Plain to do with horses. And I remember reading about horses in Hungary and the puszta, which I just thought meant the Hungarian Plain. I have since discovered that it is a much more expressive word for Hungarians. We talked about that quite a bit and the problem would be how would a Hungarian translate the word

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“puszta” used by a Scotsman writing in English but in his ignorance using it for what he understood it to mean, whereas for a Hungarian it has all sorts of other meanings apparently. Which I don’t as yet (even yet) fully understand… That issue was discussed quite exhaustively. In fact, I felt relieved when the conversation turned into Hungarian rather than English, because I was a little bit puzzled: not offended in any way, but I felt guilty at having caused such a long discussion. This is a very valid point in translation. There are terms which really represent cultural concepts and large areas of the cultural psychology of a people, and of course that aspect of a language is harder to learn than the language itself. So what was really being discussed was, I suppose, to what extent can somebody really be confident in using a language which is not their mother tongue. What does this tell you about Hungarian identity? Well, it is a bit like anybody else’s identity: it has dark colours and it has bright ones. Well, I still don’t understand fully the resonances that the word “puszta” creates in a Hungarian mind. I have a book about that which I haven’t had the chance to read yet, so perhaps that will illuminate me. I suppose it refers to some rural, perhaps even primitive, part of the Hungarian identity. Wasn’t it too painful to be discussed by scholars at the literary symposium while you were present? Well, I didn’t choose the poem we discussed. It would not have been the poem I myself would have chosen to deal with. “Elegy for a Lost Parish” is a fairly heartfelt poem for me. It was also discussed in the presence of three other Scots, who have quite different psychologies in relations to Scotland than I have. In fact, one of them is not a Scotsman but an Englishman who writes about Scottish literature [Colin Nicholson], and the other is not a poet but a critic and writes mainly about fiction and drama [Randall Stevenson], and Robert Crawford. My poem is about a particular point in the 1970s, when it was the final stage in the transformation of the countryside, and when a way of life died. I was writing a poem about one of the last representatives of a way of life, which is still very dear to me. Since then, Scottish lit-

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erature has become chiefly preoccupied with the urbane, with city life and city issues, and these things have never much appealed to me, because I don’t have any experience of it. I have just received a copy of the television play I wrote in 1979, which is based on the same man that the poem is about. It is called Ploughman’s Share, and it is about that moment when the energy in Scottish life and Scottish economy passed to the cities. I think it’s a very significant moment in twentiethcentury Scottish culture and it hasn’t been adequately explored: it hasn’t been taken seriously. In fact, it’s laughed at. And I’ve got the impression that “puszta” has something like that in Hungarian, and it is a word that represents an anachronism, an archaic way of life. That’s probably nonsense in a way, because cultures are so different from each other. But yes, some poems are hurtful to remember. In Budapest you gave an impressive talk with the title “Literature and the World”. Could you summarise your main points? What I was pointing to was the indestructibility of literature and its permanence, and also the extent of which literature expresses and explains the human verities: values which are either permanent or which change very little. I was illustrating it with reference to various European writers: Italo Calvino, Pasternak, Mandelstam and others. If I had been aware of Miklós Radnóti’s poem “Letter to My Wife”, I think I may well have included that in the lecture too, but I did not encounter it until I was in Hungary. I found it a very affecting poem, even in translation. In fact, I got the impression that the translations were inadequate to the original, and that it was probably a much better poem for a Hungarian reader in Hungarian than for an English reader in English. What conclusions did you draw from this visit? I am not one of nature’s linguists, so I’m always impressed by the standard and confidence of the command of English which I experience especially in Central-Eastern Europe. That visit to Hungary was no exception. There was one person in the translation team who was still at school and her English wasn’t just self-confident, but almost mischievous in its confidence. Some of the translators who were there (and many of them poets as well of course) were obviously very

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skilled. I think the theories of translation are much more highly developed, and are much more a matter of awareness in countries like Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and so on, than they are in Britain – apart from a relatively small number of people here. Erudition in the subject of translation is much more widespread in the European mainland, and I suppose it would have to include Germany, France, and Italy… I have been on quite a number of British Council visits, and it is not often that I come back from these trips feeling refreshed and stimulated. You often come back stimulated but you often come back exhausted. I did not feel exhausted when I got back from Hungary. I felt refreshed. St Andrews, 26 October 2000

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Bibliography: Douglas Dunn (1942–)

Poetry Terry Street. London: Faber and Faber, 1969. The Happier Life. London: Faber and Faber, 1972. Love or Nothing. London: Faber and Faber, 1974. Barbarians. London: Faber and Faber, 1979. St. Kilda’s Parliament. London: Faber and Faber, 1981. Europa’s Lover. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1982. Elegies. London: Faber and Faber, 1985. Selected Poems 1964–1983. London: Faber and Faber, 1986. Northlight. London: Faber and Faber, 1988. The Pictish Coast (etchings by Norman Ackroyd). London: Penny Press, 1988. Australian Dream-essay. Hull: Carnivorous Arpeggio Press, 1993. Dante’s Drum-kit. London: Faber and Faber, 1993. Garden Hints. Hull: Carniverous Arpeggio Press, 1993. Into the Oceanic (illustr. Elizabeth Ogilvie). Lochmaddy: Taigh Chearsabhagh Trust, 1999. The Donkey’s Ears: Politovsky’s Letters Home. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. The Year’s Afternoon. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. New Selected Poems 1964–2000. London: Faber and Faber, 2003.

Fiction Secret Villages. London: Faber and Faber, 1985. Boyfriends and Girlfriends. London: Faber and Faber, 1995.

Non-fiction Under the Influence: Douglas Dunn on Philip Larkin. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Library, 1987. “Importantly live”: Lyricism in Contemporary Poetry: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered by Douglas Dunn on 28 October 1987. Dundee: Dundee University, 1988. Poll Tax: The Fiscal Fake. London: Chatto&Windus, 1990.

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Translation Leopardi: A Scottis Quair, (ed. R.D.S. Jack et al). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for the Edinburgh Italian Institute, 1987. Jean Racine: Andromache. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.

Editor A Choice of Byron’s Verse. London: Faber and Faber, 1974. Two Decades of Irish Writing: A Critical Survey. Cheadle: Carcanet Press, 1975. The Poetry of Scotland. London: Batsford, 1979. To Build a Bridge. Lincoln: Lincolnshire and Humberside Arts, 1982. A Rumoured City: New Poets from Hull. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1982. Scotland: An Anthology. London: HarperCollins, 1991. The Faber Book of Twentieth-century Scottish Poetry. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Norman MacCaig: Selected Poems. London: Chatto&Windus, 1997. Entering the Kingdom: A Selection of Entries from Fife Council Libraries 1997 Poetry Competition. Kirkcaldy: Fife Council Libraries, 1998. Scores: Stories and Poems. St Andrews: Castle House Books, 2001. Robert Browning: Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. With Karsten Piper. Stolen Weather. St Andrews: Castle House Books, 2006. With Hannah Brooks-Motl and Garry MacKenzie. 08\08 Poets. St Andrews: Castle House Books, 2008.

Robert Crawford: The Emphatic Soul Robert Crawford is a poet and an influential critic currently teaching at St Andrews University. The “synthetic” writing style of his early poetry, inherited from English and Scottish versions of Modernism, has given way to a more profoundly lyric tone which remains identifiable, however, by its remarkably wide verbal and conceptual scope. His subject matters include information technology, personal memories and spiritual considerations of living on the northern edge of Europe. Keywords: Modernism; Edwin Morgan; Hugh MacDiarmid; T.S. Eliot; Synthetic Scots; Robert Burns; Presbyterianism.

Robert Crawford was born in Bellshill, Lanarkshire, in Central Scotland in 1959. He graduated from Glasgow University and then gained a doctoral degree from Oxford, where he studied alongside his Scottish contemporaries, the poets David Kinloch and W.N. Herbert. He started writing in “aggrandized” Scots and his vocabulary is still best described as eclectic: it is both “synthetic” (in the sense that it is harvested from dictionaries and other written sources of language) and is assembled, like the pieces of a puzzle game, from personal memories of childhood words and local dialect. Celebrating Scotland’s past and present realities in an intelligent, sharp-witted, thoughtful and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny way is one of the most important strands that run through his work. Most of his anthology pieces (such as “Alba Einstein” or “Scotland”) are related to perceptions of Scotland from unexpected viewpoints. His politics are republican but much less radical than, say, Tom Leonard’s. While in his critical studies he faces up to the challenges posed by Anglocentric cultural forms and attitudes, he describes himself as an “Anglophile Scottish Nationalist” in this interview. Beside various other aspects of Scotland’s realities, he puts an increasing emphasis on his Presbyterian background, which, idiosyncratically, is frequently combined with a tenderly lyrical note in his recent work. Other influences would have to include personal experiences in the family, most important of all the experience of fatherhood, which released new and intense emotions in a poetry that had been, almost habitually, described as “cerebral” and “academic” by reviewers. Crawford’s interest in the vast field of words available for him as a Scoto-English poet has been influenced by his reading of Hugh MacDiarmid and T.S. Eliot. His habit of planting the occasional Scottish turn of phrase into a line of what seems Standard English on the

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page results in a wordscape that will be both familiar and unfamiliar for English-speaking readers. His love of the human voice means, first of all, a general interest in the resonance of a line and in how the poem works in the utterance; it also extends to a passion for performing poetry in front of a live audience. He believes that the immediate effect a poem has on the audience may be central to the justification of its existence, though he does not belong among the celebrity poets of our time. Both verbal and conceptual types of humour feature in his early works but recently he is more and more inclined to take solemn and serious, but still quietly intimate, perspectives on life, religion and relationships. His perception of manmade and spiritual realities is structured around his experience of living and working on what he likes to see as the edge of northern Europe. This is a concern he shares with an emerging movement of poets in and around Fife, including John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson and John Glenday. His contribution to the contemporary poetry scene is vast and various. In 1984 he founded the poetry magazine Verse with David Kinloch, and was appointed Professor of Modern Scottish Poetry at St Andrews in 1989. He was recognised in the 1994 Poetry Society promotion of the “New Generation Poets” along with Don Paterson, Mick Imlah, Kathleen Jamie and others. His poetical works include Sharawaggi (with W.N. Herbert, 1990), A Scottish Assembly (1990), Talkies (1992), Masculinity (1996), Spirit Machines (1999), and The Tip of My Tongue (2003), Selected Poems (2005) and his most recent Full Volume (2008). He co-edited The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 with Simon Armitage in 1998, and The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse with Mick Imlah in 2000. He was also co-editor of a series of monographs on various Scottish authors: About Edwin Morgan (with Hamish White, 1990), The Arts of Alasdair Gray (with Thom Nairn, 1991) Reading Douglas Dunn (with David Kinloch, 1992) and Liz Lochhead’s Voices (with Anne Varty, 1994). His critical prose includes The Savage and the City in the Work of T.S. Eliot (1987), Devolving English Literature (1992, with a second edition in 2000), Identifying Poets: Self and Territory in Twentieth-Century Poetry (1993), and The Modern Poet (2001). Recently, he published a splendid biography on Robert Burns at Princeton University Press.

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This interview was conducted in Robert Crawford’s St Andrews home, in the late summer of 2001. It took place before the death in 2006 of the novelist Muriel Spark, to whose writing he refers. An abbreviated version was first published in The Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 9(2), 2003.

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When did you start writing poetry? I was writing poetry when I went to university, publishing first in school magazines and then a wee bit beyond that. Everything I wrote turned into a sonnet. When I started as an undergraduate at Glasgow University, I can remember taking some of them to Edwin Morgan, whom I knew of as a poet, but whose poetry, to be honest, at that time I didn’t terribly like. I had rather buttoned up ideas about what poetry was. I thought that quite a lot of Morgan’s poetry wasn’t poetry, you know, his concrete poems and sound poems. But Morgan was the only person I knew who was around and who was a real poet. So I knocked on his door and said: could I show you some of these? He was very nice and polite about them. I thought by that stage that I wanted to go on writing poetry. I had started publishing some poems in magazines, especially in the Scottish journal called Akros, whose editor, Duncan Glen, was very encouraging to me. I’d had one or two poems on the radio by that time. I was studying English at university, which meant that in effect I was given a grant by the government to read poetry! This seemed rather a good existence, more or less to be paid to read, and I enjoyed it. There was a scholarship that could get you from Glasgow to Balliol College in Oxford. I had never been out of Scotland (except for a day trip) before I went to Oxford as a graduate student, but I got this Snell Exhibition Scholarship and started writing a PhD on Tennyson, which turned into a PhD on T.S. Eliot. What was Edwin Morgan like as a teacher? I only had him as a tutor in my second year. We were taught as part of a group of maybe twelve or so students, so I didn’t have a lot of close contact with him, but he was a very good and meticulous teacher. He had this great enthusiasm for Milton’s prose, which was not shared by everyone, but I remember the Aeropagitica and Milton’s protestation about not being able to “praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue”. Morgan didn’t do the “I am a poet” routine when he taught. I think we all knew that he was a poet but he didn’t tend to make reference to that. I used to sit in his classroom eyeing up his bookcases. He had a row of books by Hugh MacDiarmid, whose work I had hardly read. There was a separate Scottish Literature Department at Glasgow but, studying English, I didn’t study Scottish literature as an undergradu-

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ate. Morgan asked me if I had read MacDiarmid and I said no, not really, and he gave me what was then the only available collected edition of MacDiarmid: a New York Macmillan Collected Poems, which came out in the early sixties. He had about six copies of these on his bookshelves. I have to say I had noticed this, but you were not expected to leave his class with one of them! He gave this to me and that was a very exciting, almost revelatory, experience, since my taste was already very much geared towards Modernism. I liked Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Picasso, Matisse, Eliot and all the kinds of art from that period, but hadn’t realised that there was this Scottish poet who was working at a comparable pitch and in such a variety of ways. That’s something I came to appreciate also about Morgan’s poetry, which I started reading much more intensively later on in my undergraduate life, and even more when I was a postgraduate. I liked the variety that is there in his poetry both formally and thematically. I thought: yes, that’s there also in MacDiarmid. I loved both the MacDiarmid of these beautiful early synthetic Scots lyrics and the later scientific and off-scientific long poems. As I got slightly more unbuttoned, I also came to enjoy the humour in Morgan’s poetry. MacDiarmid certainly has a sense of humour, but it comes across much more in his prose and very seldom in his poetry, whereas Morgan, like several of the finest Scottish poets – most notably Burns, but also Dunbar – has this terrific sense of humour in some of his poems. Often people assume that the best poetry has to be terribly serious and probably sad, but I don’t think that’s true. The humanity of laughter in a poem is a wonderful thing: the carnivalesque, the frolicsome and the ludic. Sharawaggi, which you co-authored with W.N. Herbert, is written in a kind of synthetic Scots. Where does this interest in the Scots language come from? Sharawaggi came out in 1990, just shortly after my first collection of poems in English, A Scottish Assembly. Bill [Herbert] and I had published a little pamphlet of poems in Scots called Sterts and Stobies. Then Bill and David [Kinloch] and I had typeset in some dark corner of Oxford University Computing Service another Scots poetry pamphlet (Severe Burns), but I was writing poems in English at the same time. I had published a lot of poems in the London Magazine, where

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Alan Ross was a wonderful editor. I had been writing poems in English and I was writing poems in Scots alongside, when eventually I was lucky enough to get picked up for a book called Chatto New Poets II. All the poems published there were in English. Andrew Motion, who was then the editor at Chatto, asked to see some of my Scots poems, but I think he realised that they would be incomprehensible to most non-Scots. So, A Scottish Assembly came out. But, before that, Peter Kravitz, a wonderful Englishman who was the editor of Polygon Books in Edinburgh, had seen the pamphlet that Bill and I produced. It had largely been reviewed in a hostile fashion in Scotland, because it was written in a kind of synthetic Scots that a lot of Scots language activists didn’t like. The kind of Scots we used was messy; it was going into all sorts of odd lexical corners and stirring these up with four-letter words. It was a kind of “sharawaggi”, an absolute mixture. This didn’t go down well. But Peter Kravitz thought there was something in it, so he gave us an opportunity, and we put together Sharawaggi. With the exception of “The Flyting”, we didn’t co-write any of the poems. So the Scots and the English work came out quite separately but both Bill and I were writing poems in Scots at the same time as poems in English. But you don’t come from a Scots-speaking family… My mother would use the occasional Scots word, as would I still, but I certainly speak English with a Scottish accent. I am not a Scots speaker. I grew up in Glasgow, so I was familiar with the rhythms of Glasgow speech, just on the streets of the city, which, again, some Scots purists would say, is not really Scots. I was reading Tom Leonard, but really it was the experience of reading MacDiarmid that made me think that I could do things in this language. A lot of the poems in Sharawaggi involved dictionary trawling. I’d be excited by the sound of these words and the chunky peculiarity of the language. There was a charge about it, and putting these words together would be a way of making sparks. It was both familiar and unfamiliar – rhythmically, consonantally and in terms of the noises. I could hear the words off the page, if you like, even although they were arcane vocabulary. It was at once writing in another language and not in another language. That combination of the familiar and the alien is something that, for whatever reason, has always excited my imagina-

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tion. I like it in The Waste Land: there are parts of the poem that are written in quite plain English, and parts that seem to be not just elasticating, but twanging the English language, and heading out way beyond in other directions. So is it in MacDiarmid, and you can do that, too, if you use a Scots dictionary. I think that impulse was at its height for me in the late 1980s, when the poems in Sharawaggi were being written. It’s something that I have gone back to from time to time, but usually just for one poem. Hardly anybody bought Sharawaggi, you know. [Laughs.] You are addressing a tiny audience, people who can stand this kind of language. The more rewarding route I have found is to try and write a kind of English with a Scots infusion, or texture, or rasp to it, but I’m still fascinated by the riches offered by that great swirl of languages that a Scottish poet comes to inhabit. So, was Sharawaggi a gesture to Scottish Modernism? I’d like to think it was more than a gesture to anything. I believed in those poems. Some of the poems that I feel most attached to now are little short erotic lyrics. Possibly because of my rather repressed upbringing, I found I could talk about sex more easily through Scots than through English. There was probably almost a coded aspect to writing in this semi-foreign language. It was also something that both Bill and I moved away from. The Scots that Bill writes is no longer as clotted as the Scots we wrote at that time, but there was an attraction in making it very densely textured. It was designed to be read aloud – a kind of word-disco! Isn’t there perhaps a sense of artificiality in it when these Scots lyrics are accompanied by glosses and translation in English? To play the Scots soundscape off against a parallel English prose text was on one level a joke, but it was also a way of highlighting technical questions about the status of either language. So, sometimes I quite enjoyed putting in these English texts that read a little bit like translatorese, as if they were translated from another language and sounded still a wee bit “other”. That was part of the pleasure of doing it: it had to do with a way of articulating the complicated nature of Scottish

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identity, which was one of the things I was attempting in A Scottish Assembly, only in a different way. How does your poem “Scotland”, which begins “Semiconductor country…” and has the line “To be miniaturised is not small-minded” (published in A Scottish Assembly [1990]), relate to MacDiarmid’s poem “Scotland Small?”? “Scotland Small?” is certainly a poem that from my first reading I’ve always liked. It seems to me attuned to the nature of Scotland. So, yes, I’d been aware of that poem. I wasn’t wanting to rewrite it but I was wanting to find a different way of talking about one of the things I love about Scotland – its diversity. It is a small country, in global terms, and one should face up to that, but Scotland’s is a kind of smallness that’s very diverse and expands around you. I was going out with someone who was a semiconductor physicist and I would steal vocabulary from her. That fused with the wish to write the “Semiconductor country…” poem. So, as usual with poems, the material comes from various sources, but crystallises and congeals in a particular way. I was using some of this scientific vocabulary, words like “heterojunctive”, which seems to me quite a “sexy” word as well as a scientific term. I like to see my own poem as a love poem in several senses, but as a love poem to Scotland not least. It was a way of bringing together a number of different concerns: writing a little poem about littleness, about being in love with it, and the way this littleness expands. That’s something that in my own consciousness connects with being in St Andrews now, for instance: the notion of St Andrews as a kind of “bull’s-eye centred at the outer reaches”. I suppose I see Scotland like that. What’s your political conviction in relation to Scotland? I grew up in an unreflective, conservative milieu. But, especially since after living outside Scotland, I’ve become much more of a nationalist and a republican. I would like to live in an independent Scotland, but independence in an era of globalisation is not the same as independence in William Wallace’s Scotland. I like to think of myself as a nuanced nationalist. Britishness was very good for Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but I don’t think there is much of

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a thing called British culture or British literature now. All identities (both personal and national) change over time: they are dynamic, and if they cease to be dynamic, they die. So, while I’m fascinated by the idea of tradition, including Scottish literary tradition, I neither wish to nor could conceive of myself as living in the Scotland of Barbour’s The Brus or Blind Harry’s Wallace, in the times of these blood-myths on which Scotland (like many, perhaps all, other nations) is founded. I believe in blood-myths, but probably more in terms of Christianity than in terms of nationalism. Are you happy with the current state of the Scottish Devolution? I would like to see the process of Devolution moving further. It’s a matter of self-respect, I think. I would like Scotland to have more control of its own affairs. Scotland has imagined its own independence, but politics hasn’t caught up. Living in one’s own wee imaginative world, it is easy to pretend that there is more independence in Scotland than there is. I think it would be good for Scotland to have more of its political and cultural institutions, to look after itself perhaps a bit more, and to realise that we have to do things for ourselves and have to get on with other people. I’d like to define myself as an Anglophile Scottish nationalist. That’s a wink to Hugh MacDiarmid, who became celebrated for listing Anglophobia among his recreational activities in the reference book Who’s Who. I think that Anglophobia is MacDiarmid’s most damaging legacy. Information technology is a very important inspiration in your work as well as in Edwin Morgan’s. Is this something specifically Scottish? There is certainly an interest in science and technology that you can see strongly in the work of John Davidson at the end of the nineteenth century. MacDiarmid was well aware of this and picked up on it, developing it in his own writing. Edwin Morgan, often in more ludic, and possibly in more attractive ways, has picked up on MacDiarmid and exploited further possibilities. Probably because I thought I wanted to do this too, I came to conceive of there being a Scottish tradition of poetry that is engaged with science and technology. I don’t see that as my own peculiar invention. I think it is there and that it can be an exciting resource for Scottish poets.

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I don’t just want to write about science and technology: the challenge is to use the scientific and technological imagery that we are all increasingly familiar with (even although we may not understand how a computer works), in ways that are metaphorically resonant, rather than thinking poetry must be confined to certain areas, like the natural environment or falling in love. Nature and love are obviously extremely important to poets, and will be expressed in poetry, but I like the idea that these things might be expressed also through and alongside other aspects of our lives. In our age, surely, scientific discovery and technological processes are part of our existence, and part of the language available to us – just as, if you like, to some degree Scots is part of the language available to most Scottish poets. I want to write a kind of poetry that touches on as many areas of experience as it can. Someone like Douglas Dunn or John Burnside represents, I think, a different movement in Scottish poetry. How would you comment on Dunn’s recent opinion, according to which “poems can often begin in mystery”? I’m happy to agree with that. But I don’t think it in any sense precludes writing about science. The act of discovery, for instance, is something that can be rational but also quite mysterious, if you think of the way a number of scientific discoveries are being made. I like the idea of mystery, not simply being there at the point of the ignition of a poem, but also in the finished product: so that the poem will have some allure, and it will not necessarily immediately reveal all its secrets. So, I see mystery and, perhaps beyond that, spirituality as important to poetry, and don’t see that conflicting with using scientific imagery in poems. I’m happy to defend “difficulty” in poetry, as well as seeing the virtues of accessibility. The interesting thing about John is that he, of course, knows far more about computing than I do. [Laughs.] He worked in the computing industry for a long time, and has poems with titles like “Source Code”. But his work seems in some ways to be a reaction against his experience in that industry.

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Do you share Morgan’s future-oriented vision of Scotland? I think Eddie likes to make out that he has little interest in the past. But there is plenty of evidence in his work that he has a lot of interest in the past (in various pasts) as well as a concern for the future, which is marked, strong and adventurous. I’d like to have both of these. You are undeniably a Scottish poet but you may or may not choose or be chosen to write about Scotland. I don’t think all Scottish poets have to write about Scotland. “Scottish poet” is an accurate definition but needn’t have numerable implications beyond. In many cases it does: the interest in Scots, for instance, is something that I find a lot of the poets of my generation share, even if they don’t write poetry in Scots. You see and hear it in Don Paterson, occasionally in John Burnside, and it’s strongly audible in the work of Kathleen Jamie. Kathleen Jamie and Bill Herbert might be the ones with whom I feel the most affinity among the younger Scottish poets: it is partly the Scots in their work and that both of them tend to write about Scotland but not exclusively about Scotland, and in both of them there is a sense of having been away from Scotland, and having returned. That seems to have been an important experience for most of the poets born in the late fifties and early sixties – almost a clarifying experience. One of the fascinating and heartening things about Edwin Morgan’s example was that (with the important exception of war service) he hadn’t left Scotland. He had done this magnificently, internationally adventurous body of work while living almost all the time in Glasgow. Your 1992 collection Talkies has the epigraph “one’s own language is never a single language” from Bakhtin. Why? That was grafted onto the book at a late stage. I had discovered Bakhtin and this notion was immediately attractive to me, coming from a country which has such distinguished bodies of poetry in Gaelic, Scots and English. Bakhtin wasn’t necessarily talking about what we think of as distinct languages. But his idea of identity as dialogic I found hugely sympathetic. Even when I use the word “sympathetic” it seems to me to fit in very well with the idea of sympathetic understanding that’s there in the Scottish Enlightenment, for instance in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. That

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just struck a chord with me. I had written a prose book called Devolving English Literature, which is partly about Scottish and British and English literary identities, and I discovered Bakhtin only after it came out. I was embarrassed, because I hadn’t known anything about Bakhtin before that. I have another prose book called Identifying Poets, which is looking at poets in Australia, America, Scotland and elsewhere, poets who seem to be interested in evolving a voice that speaks out of and about their particular territory. It was then that I discovered Bakhtin, so the introduction is full of Bakhtin, although the essays are probably less so. It must have been at the same time that I was putting Talkies together. The title of the book refers to the talking cinema, but it’s also meant to signal different kinds of voice. There are one or two poems in it that touch on Gaelic and Highland Scotland, and on other kinds of speaking, and on what translation might mean. So this quotation seemed to fit in with the poems in that book, although it may have had a slightly riskily academic ring to it as an epigraph. It always strikes me that you are a very self-confident performer of your poetry and you have a strong interest in the spoken voice. Your poem “Chaps” in Masculinity even has a kind of “score”. Where does this interest come from? I love the voice. Poetry has to be an oral pleasure, which doesn’t mean that it needs to be delivered with great, bardic afflatus, but that a poem which works only on the page is half a poem. A poem that seems to be silent belongs to an art form that shouldn’t be silenced. There is an attraction in reading aloud to an audience. That’s something I enjoy doing, but it is not so much that I think of poetry as performance: it is the music, the sound. When you’re writing a poem, often you’re listening to it in your head, and there comes a stage when you are voicing it. I don’t tend to use rhyme a great deal, although the poem you mentioned has just one rhyme, “Chaps”, all the way through it. I have this feeling that we’re not living in a rhyming age, and that poetry in our era should not sound neat, or too well-fashioned, which is not to say that it shouldn’t be well-fashioned, but it just shouldn’t wear that on its sleeve. It shouldn’t sound antique. It must be true to the grain of the voice of the age in which we live, and we live in an age full of bytes and bits and broken off voices and telephone jabber

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as well as conversational voices. That slight jaggedness of the acoustic of our age is something that I like to sense in poetry. I’d like to be able to find and make a beauty of that. There needs to be a tension between the jaggedness and the lyrical flow. How do you perceive the role of television and radio in the dissemination of poetry? I think radio is a wonderful medium for poetry. Televised poetry is very difficult, because television is such a fast visual medium. It demands an incessant feed of flipped-over images, whereas radio focuses on the voice. There is almost a voice-in-a-dark-room quality to radio that aligns itself to poetry. I like writing for radio, not a kind of chat radio, but perhaps rather a kind of art radio. I’ve had poems on television but they weren’t written for television. I wrote one script, which had a number of poems in it, for television, but the only poem that really worked wasn’t written with television in mind. There is a danger in writing for television: you think that accessibility is demanded rather anything else, and that might impede some of the subtleties that poems often encourage. I love Burns, much of whose poetry is wonderfully and immediately accessible. When I was writing some of the poems in Masculinity I was trying to write poems that would hit home just like that, clear and simple. They weren’t written for television, they were just written as poems. Often, poems work best on TV when they have just been written as poems, and someone comes and re-imagines them, rather than when poets write them deliberately for television. Masculinity strikes me as a more mature and lyrical book. Do you see it that way, too? It is slightly odd going back and thinking about my own work in that way. I see and hear poems like “Scotland” (“Semiconductor country…”) as lyrical maybe in a way that other readers don’t. I’m uneasy providing critical commentary on poems that I have written. Part of the act of writing and publishing a poem is that it has to go off and live a life of its own. It comes to belong to other people and they see things in it that even the poet doesn’t necessarily see. Lyricism doesn’t entirely come from the conscious mind, whereas at the same time

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there is a lot of critical labour, fashioning and revising that goes into the poem. It’s hard to formulate a neat view of what you’re doing at any particular time. I think there are differences in Masculinity. I wanted to write in a simpler, clearer way, and with a more direct emotional sting into the poems than I had done before. I wanted to write some of them in a way that would appeal to people who weren’t readers of poetry. My father wasn’t a reader of poetry as such, although he read all the books that I wrote (and that meant a great deal to me), but often he would say that he didn’t understand them. I was very pleased to write some of the poems in Masculinity and get response from him, saying that yes, he understood that, and he liked that. And I felt I accomplished something. Whether they are necessarily more lyrical or mature, I don’t know. They were certainly written later but that doesn’t necessarily make a book more mature. [Laughs.] It might be a more unified book, not that I always like unified books. I’m attracted by books of verse that are very diverse, assemblies if you like, and in that way Masculinity was thematically, or perhaps tonally, more unified than some of the others I’ve written. I have noticed that these poems go down very well at poetry readings… Yes, but there are certain dangers in writing poems for poetry readings. I like reading some of those aloud: it’s partly to do with the kind of accessibility that some of them seem to have managed. But accessibility is not the only virtue in a poem. Something that interests me in Scottish poetry is a quality of performativity: it is very strongly there in Dunbar’s, Burns’s and Robert Fergusson’s poems, and also present in Morgan. Until the twentieth century, there has not been a strong Scottish dramatic tradition, but it’s as if that impulse has fed into poetry, most obviously, say, into “Tam O’Shanter”. There is a strength in that performativity. I think all poetry should work both in performance (by which I mean when sounded) and on the page. Some of the poems in Masculinity work when read to an audience, and require no explanation. I like unexplained poems. This is maybe a kind of residual Calvinist thing: the idea of a poetry reading where there is no patter, no explanation, but the poems are just read as well as they can be read, not too fast, and allowed to resonate,

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and that’s it. So you get the experience just of poetry, which surely has to be a special experience, because poetry is its own medium. Sometimes there seems a danger of the medium being diluted by all the patter and all the prose that goes with that, and you can be seduced away from the fidelity to the medium, which is the most important thing for a poet. Does your gentle perception of masculinity in that book carry any strategic relevance in a Scottish literature that is famed for its tough, macho image? Yes, it could be seen that way. I thought I was never going to be a father. I wanted very much to be a father and, had I been braver, I think I would have written about this before I had children. But when our son was born it seems that it released something in me that I hadn’t been able to write about. I wanted to write about the love I felt then. I don’t want the book to suggest that masculinity depends on fatherhood, but at the same time there was this personal impulse or release in me that let some of the poems in it be written at that point. I was also interested in gender. At St. Hugh’s in Oxford I had worked in a women’s college for three years and the experience made me think about sex and gender from a number of aspects. That was one personal element of input. I’d probably better be reticent about this. The poems try to preserve a kind of reticence that’s in me and comes out of my background. In terms of my work, I couldn’t but be aware of feminist criticism and feminism, so that was part of it too. Also, the kind of voice I have is a long way away from Irvine Welsh’s or what sometimes tends to be thought of in a rather lazy way as “Scottish Writing”. Scottish writing is very often defined in terms of its prose rather than its poetry, which can be rather annoying for poets! It’s perhaps inevitable, inasmuch as prose fiction is so much more popular a medium. But the kind of writing that was coming out in a fast and furious way in the early and middle-1990s, the kind of school around Welsh, seems to me in danger of (without necessarily aiming to) creating or building on a stereotypical Scottish masculinity: the kind of hard, angry, violent, damaged, fucked-up Scottish maleness. Finding ways of talking about gentler aspects of what it might mean to be a man, or to try be masculine, or to avoid being trapped by a one-size-fits-all notion of masculinity, seems to be an interesting

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imaginative thing to do, and perhaps a necessary thing to do. At the time that Masculinity came out, in 1996, I think this was not perceived as what Scottish writing either was or ought to be about. But it’s important always to go against the grain of expectations to some degree, and to preserve a sense that any literature and any imaginative act is an act of biological diversification. Imagination needs to be rich and various, rather than just pursuing one kind of definition. Is this book in any sense an answer to, or does it complement, Carol Ann Duffy’s work? I haven’t thought about that. No, I don’t think so. I can understand where your question is coming from. I felt happier thinking of the poems beside some of the poems that Kathleen Jamie was writing about at the same time or slightly later – the experience of her becoming a mother. I like Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry but the poems that Kathleen wrote didn’t seem to be polemically aggressive in any way. They seemed to me to be gentle, subtle and sometimes sly, and I just remember identifying with them when I read them. It was almost as if her writing about being a mother was the same as me writing about being a father. I’m pleased I managed to write some of the little poems at the end of Masculinity, poems like “The Criticism” or “The Handshakes”. It’s just an area of experience that I gained access to and that was so vitally important to me. Spirit Machines continues some of the main themes of Masculinity. Could you explain the title? Spirit machines are computers, but they’re also people. People have bodies but they have souls as well, and these two are fused. While I was writing some of the poems in Spirit Machines I was thinking about blurrings of the human and the mechanical. I was also thinking more prosaically about telephones and word processors, these machines through which human voice or some other human impulse passes. The book also deals with the experience of the death of my father. That was the first time that someone close to me died. It had a strong effect on me.

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But the book also deals with the experiences that both my wife and I shared: in my own case, I had to go to hospital where a lump was chopped out of me, and I got terribly nervous about this. I had just become a father and I thought: is that it? But there was nothing nasty discovered. That was quite close to the time my father died, so it was all pretty upsetting. And the experience of bereavement is there in the book, along with the experience of trying to learn to use a computer. I found a kind of link between the two. I still remember the very naive sensations I had as someone who had had this machine, this Apple Mac, for quite some time and never used it. I had the experience of great plenitude and that all sort of things could be conjured up in an almost magical fashion there on to the screen, and yet if there was something wrong, you couldn’t just reach inside and sort it. You couldn’t really touch the stuff, because it wasn’t there, it was only virtual. It was both present and absent. That seemed to me, metaphorically, to give me a language for talking about kinds of love and bereavement and kinds of religious belief which are often very much about presence and absence, and about one turning into the other or being difficult to disentangle from the other. I’d always wanted to try to write religious poetry but hadn’t felt able to do it. There are occasional poems like “Syrophenician” in A Scottish Assembly, in which I tried to this, in some sense. Perhaps this is some kind of throwback. My grandfather on my father’s side, whom I never met, was a Church of Scotland minister, but I didn’t join the Church until I was about thirty. Now I belong to the Church of Scotland – I’m a dour little Presbyterian or whatever – but I wanted to write about religious belief and I found very difficult to do this. I really love about Eliot’s work that he writes a visionary religious poetry in an age of almost corrosive scepticism. So Spirit Machines was a way of focusing on these ideas. There’s a more regenerative side to it too, in the long poem “Impossibility” which has to do with water, struggle, and imaginative freedom, and was written around the time our daughter was born. You spoke about your wish to be able to write religious poetry in another interview, too. Why is it so important to you? Some people do not like the word “religion” to be used, because they find that too formally organised. I don’t subscribe to Matthew

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Arnold’s Victorian notion that poetry will come to replace religion. That’s wrong. But sometimes I think it is a perceptive notion, because there are strong connections between religion and a sense of poetry operating just in front of beyond, taking you further, letting you discover things by writing or reading it. Imagination is a mode of perception, and is close to faith. For some people this is nonsense, because they might say that faith is just something that’s made up, but I believe in things that are made up. [Laughs.] That’s what poetry is about. To me, imagination and faith are very close to each other, and may cross over at times. We’re not going to really understand anything about God, because we’re humans, but sometimes you feel you come close to it. Sometimes you feel that if you get further you might find a way of achieving a language that speaks for something that is in a literal sense unsayable. There is an element of that in Heaney’s poetry, which comes not least from his Catholic background, even if he is not a believer, and it’s there in Les Murray, who seems to me a wonderful religious poet of our own time. I got involved in co-editing an anthology of Scottish religious poetry. It hadn’t been done before in Scotland, although religion has been historically and continues to be (less so but still perceptibly) vital in Scottish society. I’m not talking here about sectarianism, although that has been certainly important, and remains a wound in Scotland. I’m talking about Christian tradition. Poetry and religion seem to be important in Scottish culture. But, partly because of the iconic status of Robert Burns, who found it almost impossible to write about religion as distinct from its social outcomes, there hasn’t been a historical anthology of Scottish religious poetry. There are ways in which the Presbyterian inheritance in Scotland has been damaging for religious poetry, but there might be other ways in which it has encouraged the finding of certain different poetic languages (not just in religious poetry but in the poetry of science and technology) one can relate to. There’s such a strong impulse in postreformation Scotland to disseminate the Word. This is not just a religious impulse. It’s about education and having access to universities and it’s also about spreading the word in terms of some of the great products of the Scottish Enlightenment (like the Encyclopaedia Britannica) that are making information democratically available throughout the society.

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That focus on the Word and on information can be related to that interest in science and technology, and disseminating those kinds of discoveries that happened in Scotland over several centuries. A peculiar phenomenon! You have a tiny country where not only are there enormous advances in the industrial revolution, but one Scotsman goes to America and invents the telephone, and another invents television. It is amazing that people hadn’t written about that and that it hadn’t become part of our imaginative literature more. I’d almost want to relate that to aspects of Scottish religion. Religious poetry is like tele-vision, in the etymological sense of the word, a far-seeing, a looking beyond, and computers are allowing us to do that too. I feel there is, metaphorically, a lot of potential here. Douglas Dunn told me once that Scottish religious poetry is a contradiction in terms… Well, there are three terms present. Sometimes they have a rather prickly relationship with each other, but they don’t seem to me to be at all contradictory. Douglas has a deep hatred of the word “religion”. I find it strange, because he has a love of the word “spirituality”. He has a deep sense of spirituality in poetry, but for whatever reason he has a strong hostility to religion. There is a sceptical intelligence there in Protestantism that sometimes can be damaging for poetry. The iconoclastic impulse in Protestantism (which was so strong in Scotland, you see it here in St Andrews) can be damaging to rich imagery in poetry. So, in eighteenth-century Scottish religious verse, for instance, you will not find the sort of magnificent, aureate richness that’s there in Dunbar. But, having said that, iconoclasm in the arts is not necessarily a negative quality: the whole Modernist movement is on the one hand in love with tradition, and is on the other hand sometimes jarringly iconoclastic, in a way I found quite exciting. So I differ strongly from Douglas in my attitude to certain aspects of Scottish religion, and certainly in the idea of Scottish religious poetry being a contradiction in terms. I feel that there’s quite a strong religious impulse in Don Paterson’s and Kathleen Jamie’s writing, and in some of the other younger poets of my generation. People tend to think of the end of the title of Don’s book God’s Gift to Women, rather than the beginning, but both seem to me equally

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important. I don’t know a great deal about his background but I think he comes from a much more strictly Protestant fundamentalist background than I come from, and in some ways I can hear that in his poetry. And there’s John Burnside… Yes, John comes from a Scottish Catholic background, and has this powerful sense of spirituality in his work. Again, I don’t know how happy he would be about the word “religion”. The thing that is beautiful in John’s poetry often has to do with evanescence and the fugitive, or the evanescent being mixed with the very precisely concrete. But in terms of religious belief I want to go beyond that. I am, in some sense, a religious believer, and I don’t think that John would think of himself in quite the same way. The Modern Poet was published by Oxford University Press not long ago. What is it about? I found I had to think about the relationship between poetry and academia. This relationship is often thought of as American in origin and as developing in the twentieth century. But I suggest that in the English-speaking world the relationship between the making of poetry and the university education of poets takes off in the eighteenthcentury, when English texts begin to be taught as part of the university curriculum. So I found myself thinking about the links between poetry and academia since the mid-eighteenth century, which is what The Modern Poet is about. It argues that in the mid-eighteenth century a kind of trope emerged which saw the poet as being more primitive but also more sophisticated than other people. The emergence of this trope is clearest in the poems of Ossian. This supposedly prehistoric, Gaelic bard comes from a culture that is seen as primitive and wild. But, from the very beginning, the Ossianic poems come with all kinds of scholarly footnotes, and are promoted by Hugh Blair at Edinburgh University. They are, in some sense, co-manufactured between James Macpherson and Hugh Blair, so they partake of both the wilderness and the lecture room. This is taken up by the Romantic poets, so you get these Cambridge students like Wordsworth and Coleridge, who go to the Lake

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District and roughen up the edges of their work, and who want to link themselves to the wilderness at the same time as carrying a lot of rather sophisticated literary baggage with them. In Victorian times this becomes the notion of the Scholar Gypsy, who is on the one hand an almost supernatural wanderer, on the other hand is a scholar who has studied poetry. The notion of studying poetry becomes more and more important in English-language cultures in the Victorian period. I see this as originating in Scotland, being exported to America and then to England. Eliot said that the artist had to be more primitive and more sophisticated than other people. On the one hand Eliot is urbane and metropolitan, on the other hand he has an interest in anthropology, and wants to tap into some primitive root that he feels is there in poetry – in the auditory imagination, in the beating of a drum. There’s a similar conjunction in MacDiarmid and in the Auden who wants to outsmart the system. This conjunction is there in Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes – these poets who are associated with a bog world, a farm world, a marginal world, a magical world. Hughes studied anthropology and English literature at Cambridge. Heaney is famous also for holding distinguished chairs at Harvard and Oxford. Heaney is very sophisticated at the same time as wanting to remain in touch with a kind of dog-breath-in-the-dark impulse, which I think he talks about when he prefaces Beowulf. Edwin Morgan talks about the poet having to preserve “a modicum of unassimibility” if he (and it usually has been he, although this has been re-gendered to some extent in more recent writing) works in a university. I like that phrase “a modicum of unassimibility” and I felt I had to work out for myself the relationship between poetry and academia if I was going to continue doing the job which I enjoy doing, but I also became interested in it as a larger cultural and poetic phenomenon. Anyhow, I’ve tried to make sense of it… What I’m writing now is A Penguin History of Scottish Literature, which is a grand, five-year plan and I am at the early stages of it. Like The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse that Mick Imlah and I co-edited, and came out last year, this will start at least with St Columba, if not earlier, and will run across a variety of languages, enhancing, I hope, the pleasures of Scottish poetry in Latin and Old French as well as in Gaelic, English and Scots. It will produce maybe a more complicated and nuanced idea of what Scottish

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literature has meant, and means today. A lot of people are moving in this direction, but no one person has done this in a full way before. In terms of anthologies, MacDiarmid’s Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry was the first anthology to bring together, albeit just in translation, Scottish Latin poetry with Gaelic poetry, and poetry in English and Scots. There have been other recent anthologies by Roderick Watson, Thomas Clancy and Douglas Dunn that have had several languages together. I suppose what we did in the Penguin book is that we just went one stage further: starting earlier, stopping later, and including more languages than had been included before. It’s just about the broadening of the spectrum of what Scottish poetry might mean: that it is older than Scotland, and that the territories that became Scotland had already a literary tradition in several languages. I wonder if it contributes to a sense of artificiality again when these foreign-language poems (as well as the ones in Scots and Gaelic) come with English glosses and translation… The older poems in Scots, like Chaucer’s poetry, require glosses on the page for most modern readers. So either you say, as English anthologies have tended to do, Old English poetry is not part of my anthology, we’ll start with Chaucer and maybe we’ll have glosses, maybe we won’t, or you get what seems to me an Alzheimer’s disease notion of what your literary inheritance is and you say: yes, there was poetry in Old English but it is not really part of English poetry. You won’t find any Old English poetry in Christopher Ricks’s Oxford Book of English Verse or in The New Penguin Book of English Verse. This seems to me peculiar and wrong. Old English (like Latin) is a vital part of our poetic inheritance. Similarly, in Scotland, we have to face up to the fact that some of our great poetry was written in Gaelic, a language which now only about sixty thousand people out of five million can read. Either you just deny that, and say: well, leave it for those sixty thousand, we can get no access to it; or you face up to the fact that this is both yours and, in a sense, not yours. But it should be seen as part of Scottish poetry, and so it has to exist in parallel texts for most readers. If you’re doing that for Gaelic poetry, why shouldn’t it be done for Latin poetry and for other poetries that have been written in this territory that we now call Scotland?

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In The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse you included poems by Byron, whose Scottishness some might dispute, or “The Dream of the Rood”, which is usually seen as an old English rather than as an old Scottish poem. What was your policy in this respect? Yes, I’m sure some people would dispute some of these inclusions. We had a porous policy. The earliest text of “The Dream of the Rood” is a fragmentary one, which exists on a carved stone cross in what is modern Dumfriesshire in the South-West of Scotland. So maybe this is a Scottish poem, maybe it’s not. It’s a Northumbrian poem, which is written in Old English, and comes from the Kingdom of Northumbria, which at that time spanned both sides of what is now the EnglishScottish border. So calling it an English poem or a Scottish poem is, to some extent, misleading. It has always been called an English poem, [laughs] so you can’t just really call it a Scottish poem. It’s a magnificent poem and putting it there seemed a good thing to do, because you want to put the best poetry you can get into your anthology. It was also a way of problematising the linguistic identity of Scotland, saying: look, you can see Old English poems and therefore English itself as one of the ancient languages of Scotland, rather than taking a more narrow view, which sees English as this wicked, incoming language that has nothing to do with Scotland until centuries later. There are not many people who would express things as nakedly as that. But sometimes you can get a sense that when people talk about the languages of Scotland, they often mean Scots, Gaelic and the minority languages, but not English – as if English has not been for centuries a crucial language in this land. Putting Lord Byron in there – you know, Byron was not born in Scotland, but his background was Scottish and he spent his childhood in Aberdeen, and writes of himself sometimes as a Scot or, as he puts in Don Juan, “half a Scot”. So it seemed quite legitimate to put him into our anthology. Byron and Burns sit very interestingly together as libertine celebrity poets of the Romantic era. In an essay on Byron, T.S. Eliot suggested that Byron was a Scottish poet in reaction against Calvinism. I think that’s quite a tempting way to read Byron.

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How important is tradition to you as a poet? I’m thinking of “The Flyting of Crawford and Herbert” in Sharawaggi… A “flyting” is a poetic contest associated with medieval Scottish poetry, not least with William Dunbar. Bill Herbert and I wrote this flyting where he would write a poem saying how awful I was, and I would write back saying how awful he was. It was a kind of language frolic. It wasn’t written out of a dutiful sense of Scottish tradition, it was just that literary tradition had made this form available and we found it fun to use. Having said that, yes, tradition is important to me, but so is looking forward, so is dreaming various futures, and so I don’t like the idea of being hide-bound by tradition. This is one of the things I love about Morgan’s work: the sense of adventure and of breaking the rules at the same time as knowing the past, but not being captured by the past, or by the future or by the present. In such a “media” age as ours the danger is always being captured by the present in a journalistic sense, but poetry is news that stays news, as Pound said, and that matters. So the past matters because the poetry of the past has stayed news. How do you see the future of the teaching of Scottish literature? I don’t have a five-year plan for the teachers of Scottish literature! The best answer would be to say I don’t know. I hope it will develop in unexpected directions, but certainly I like the idea that it will be seen as something quite complex, linguistically plural and more varied than some people see it now. I think the greatest living Scottish writer is Muriel Spark, who doesn’t live in Scotland, but lives in Italy. She is a wonderful stylist and her work is very different from some of the great stylists operating here, like Alasdair Gray. Spark is someone who seems almost on a different planet from Irvine Welsh. But these are all Scottish writers of fiction. Edwin Morgan and Douglas Dunn seem very different Scottish writers. I’d like to see a recognition of kinds of difference, kinds of nuance, things that set Scottish writers apart from each other and from other writers, rather than constantly talking about certain rather reductive common features, in the teaching of Scottish literature.

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Recently the British Council invited you and Douglas Dunn to Hungary. Would you talk about your impressions and the people you met there? I had never been further east than East Germany before. I had seen photographs of Budapest, so I had a slight sense of the look of Budapest itself, but not of other parts of Hungary. We weren’t there for long. We saw a number of different Hungaries: we spent some time at Budapest but also some time out in the countryside at Lake Balaton, which was very beautiful. We got to meet people from a range of different walks of life, from the administrator of an orchestra to professional translators, as well as one or two other poets. One of them, Gyz Ferencz, I knew before, because he had been in St Andrews translating some Scottish poetry into Hungarian. I also had the strange experience of meeting a young Hungarian poet, Mónika Mesterházi, who translated a poem of mine into Hungarian. Gyz gave me a prose version of one or two of her poems and I tried to do something with this in English. I also met some Hungarian specialists in poetry and in English at universities: István D. Rácz from Debrecen, and István Géher from Eötvös University. I found the ideas of translation and translation theory, which seemed rather more developed in Hungary than in the Englishspeaking world, also very interesting. I wouldn’t always agree with these purist notions but I was fascinated by them. Also, we had the peculiar experience of having some of our own poems translated into Hungarian, and sitting in a workshop where this was going on. I really enjoyed that… Funny things strike you. I was captivated by all the chestnuts lying beside the tramlines in the streets of Budapest, in some of the streets down near the river. My instinct both from my own boyhood and from having young kids was to pick these up and take them home, because children in Scotland play various games with them. But these conkers just seemed to be a marvellously abandoned natural resource all over the streets of the city. I liked that… Staying in this former party building beside the lake was a rather weird experience and, being driven there, so was the seeing of these huge holdings for Tesco. You can’t get an accurate sense of a country where you go for a few days as an outsider, but I was struck by the way Hungary seems to be rushing to embrace anything that could be

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seen to belong to high capitalism. Sometimes I felt that the people I met were embarrassed by certain representations of the Hungarian past in a way that young Scots might be embarrassed by notions of Scotland as a land of kilted tartan warriors. I don’t know who the Hungarian Braveheart would be, but it seemed to me that Hungary, too, had to confront certain very powerful images of its past – some generated in its past and some much more recently – but those images should not necessarily be jettisoned. Instead, they should be come to terms with, and possibly sometimes enjoyed and relished, rather than just dumped… When I asked about Hungarian poetry, I was given this Corvina anthology of Hungarian verse, which contains some poems that read very well in English. Most of these are translated by George Szirtes and Edwin Morgan, whose translations of Attila József I had read before and really enjoyed; we had published some in the magazine Verse when I was an editor. Because I had just been working on an anthology of Scottish poetry that featured all sorts of different languages, I was curious as to whether there was poetry that would be thought of as Hungarian but wasn’t written in Hungarian. It seemed to me that there must be some inheritance of Latin poetry that had been written either outside or in what is now Hungary. At first this was vehemently denied by several of the people we met, but then one or two of them confessed that it was probably there. I was interested in this question, because I am deeply suspicious of reductive ideas of Scottishness, or of Scottishness in any sense being tied to racial identity. This encourages a fondness for there being all sorts of different Scotlands and Scottish poetry being a mixture rather than any sort of pure line. In the mid-twentieth century there was a lot of pressure put on Scottish poets to write in Scots, because it was felt that you were clearly much more of a Scottish poet if you wrote in Scots than in English. It’s daft to argue that Norman MacCaig is less Scottish, because he wrote in English, than Robert Garioch, whose work was written in Scots. I don’t like these kinds of argument, but they were rather prevalent in Scottish poetry, even when I was growing up, so possibly I was both interested in and slightly suspicious of this notion that all Hungarian poetry was just written in Hungarian. Mine is very much an outsider’s perspective and probably an ignorant perspective.

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What do you think about the reception of Scottish literature abroad? I think the extent of that reception could be exaggerated. It’s been a very healthy thing, though, not least for Scottish poetry, that it’s been translated into a number of languages. There is an anthology of Scottish poetry in Chinese that’s coming out in Beijing soon. Sure, there have been far more visible impacts made by films like Trainspotting. But, for whatever reason, the visibility of Scottish literature has been nothing compared with the visibility of Irish literature. Why? It’s partly that Ireland has had such a stellar clutch of writers in the twentieth century, and partly because of Ireland’s political clout as an independent nation in terms of embassies and cultural outreach, but also because of the Troubles that have made Ireland a politically interesting case. There’s increasing work going on about links between Ireland and Scotland. If you think in terms of our literature, the Scottish writers who made the greatest impact came in earlier centuries, particularly Walter Scott, who is arguably the most influential figure in the evolution of the novel. With Hugh MacDiarmid there are linguistic difficulties for those readers whose native language isn’t English. Even people whose native language is English find him difficult to read. So this linguistic complexity, which is one the most valuable and fascinating things about Scottish literature, also has been undeniably difficult in terms of interesting foreign audiences, from whom some effort is demanded to come to terms with the constellation of Scottish writing. Why is internationalism so important for Scottish culture and how does it relate to British identity? It’s probably because we are a small country, therefore there is always a danger of being parochial. Scottish writers do write an awful lot about Scotland. I am undeniably in love with Scotland, but I am not besotted by it. We have a myth about Scotland somehow being European. There’s some substance to this myth. It goes back to the time when Scotland was still an independent country and there were lots of alliances with France to try and fight off the English. The myth was reinforced after Scotland became politically a part of the British state.

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At the time of the Scottish Enlightenment people like David Hume and Adam Smith were closely in touch with Continental thinking. You see the same certainly in medieval poets: you see a huge awareness not just of Chaucer and the riches of slightly earlier English poetry but also of a Latin tradition in which Scotland was quite distinguished. George Buchanan is perhaps one of the greatest Renaissance Latin poets. All those rather distant aspects of Scotland’s past, not least its literary and poetic past, have been reinforced by what happened with Burns, who was very radically Scottish and local on the one hand but, partly as a result of British imperialism, was exported across the globe and was toasted at Burns Suppers celebrating Scottish poetry taking place on 25 January in all sorts of unlikely corners of the earth. And then in more recent times we have a “media” version of Scotland: both Trainspotting and Braveheart, in a funny way, reinforcing this notion of Scots as wild and barbaric and male and dangerous but also alluring – a kind of Byronic version of Scotland. All these have made for both some international awareness of Scotland and Scotland continuing to be aware that it must interact with all sorts of other countries. American, Australian, English writing is obviously read by all Scottish writers. We are a flavour of the English language. Travelling abroad as a poet, as a cultural ambassador or whatever for Scotland, you normally go through the auspices of the British Council, which has done a lot for sending Scottish writers abroad. But there is no Scottish Council, so you’re always going under the banner of the Union Jack, [laughs] and sometimes that can be a little frustrating. It’s an issue of national self-respect. I’m very interested in a British literary identity but it seems to me that there is virtually no Scottish writer who would subscribe to that now, with the possible exception of the novelist Allan Massie. The one thing that MacDiarmid did in Scottish writing was that he reasserted a strong sense that there was a heritage of Scottish culture, and, as the twentieth century wore on, Scottish identity became less and less British. John Buchan is the last really important articulator of Britishness in the Scottish literary tradition. I’m not sure if the English feel particularly British either. The two world wars maintained a sense of patriotic Britishness, which on the level of cultural production was probably already waning but everyone pulled together as part of the

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resistance to Fascism. In the post-war period, though, that sense of collective Britishness has become weaker and weaker. But it exists strongly at the level of what’s still a relatively centralised government, despite devolution. The danger is that we end up with a toy government in Scotland and the real decisions are taken elsewhere. This has, of course, been complicated by the European Union, and I think there’s a sense of increasing interest in England, even among some writers, in Englishness. That’s coming about as an anxiety vis-à-vis Brussels. The parliament in Westminster, although it is the British parliament, was really conceived by many English people as the parliament of England. But now there is an awareness that for centuries England has not been a nation state, and that in 1707 it wasn’t simply Scotland, but it was also England, that ceased to be a nation state. That didn’t seem for a long time to be very important for English people: they didn’t really notice what had happened, it was a technicality – whereas for Scots it was more than a technicality. The Scots tried harder, in some ways, to be Britons and to articulate a British identity than the English did. But now the English are starting to think about these questions more. How important is European appreciation to a Scottish poet? Can you align yourself with a cultural or spiritual idea of Europe? I can, to some extent, but I’m probably more interested in the idea of the whole world! [Laughs.] Scotland and the world could be more important co-ordinates than Scotland and Europe. There are kinds of technology, not least information technology but also environmental issues, that are pressuring us more and more to think of the world and the people in it as bonded rather than thinking simply we’re a European bloc. What I wouldn’t like to happen is that local national identities are lost and a pugnacious European identity replaces them: the whole of Europe bands together and shakes a fist at the rest of the world. I’m not sure that’s necessarily much of a danger. Europe is undeniably going to be politically important. I’m in favour of more European integration. It seems to me that in the way of the Aesopic style that was evolved in some Communist countries to cope with the difficulties of the system, there need to be kinds of languages evolved to cope with

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the global capitalist situation. I’m not sure we’ve found those yet. The poetry of Zbigniew Herbert, who was able to write about not just Poland but wider issues in a slightly sly and subversive, yet permissible manner, is exemplary. We need to find an equivalent way of writing that deals with our situation within this global economic system: so that our salaries do not earn us, so that a sense of spirituality is maintained. This doesn’t seem to me an issue specific to Europe, but is equally important for other areas of the world. You have written much about regional literature. To what extent has this been motivated by your own situation as a poet living and working St Andrews, a small coastal town by the North Sea? Generally, how important is place to your writing? I’m in love with Scotland, not just with St Andrews. I grew up in the suburbs of a large industrial city, I spent my childhood holidays in the West Highlands, and I have spent quite a lot of time on the Inner and Outer Hebrides. I have very briefly been to Orkney and was wowed by its beauty. Because my father was born there, I have a fondness for Aberdeenshire. As a good Glaswegian I’m meant to hate Edinburgh, but I’ve lived long enough on the east coast of the country that I’ve been a bit corrupted, and enjoy at least going to Edinburgh for short spells. And now I live in this sometimes rather smug, little place, very beautifully situated on the coast of the east of Scotland. St Andrews gets a lot of sunshine by Scottish standards. I love living beside the sea, I’ve got great colleagues, it’s a congenial place, it’s saturated in history but, because it’s such a small place, the history doesn’t quite get on top of you in the way that it might in a larger historic town full of grand museums. So I like living here and I like St Andrews. The aesthetic of the small and the international attracts me. St Andrews, which gets lots of visitors, both tourists and golfers but also people who come to the university, is a cosmopolitan village. It’s full of village gossip but it’s also full of ways of reaching out to the wider world: people coming in from and going out to the wider world. That attracts me. But it’s only one aspect of Scotland. I like the sense of the proliferation of these internal differences and yet some measure of these different landscapes and communities being at ease with each other. This, sometimes, can be spectacularly disrupted: recently we had the

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murder of a refugee in Glasgow, and racism is an issue that Scotland has not entirely confronted. The danger of living out of a place for too long is that you can get dewy-eyed about it, so that was one reason why it was important for me to come back to Scotland. Having said all that, I do love the place and the different aspects to it. But there is more to life than St Andrews. St Andrews, 23 August 2001

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Bibliography: Robert Crawford (1959–)

Poetry With W.N. Herbert. Sterts & Stobies: Poems in Scots. Oxford: Obog Books, 1985. With W.N. Herbert and David Kinloch. Severe Burns. Oxford: Obog Books, 1986. A Scottish Assembly. London: Chatto & Windus, 1990. With W.N. Herbert. Sharawaggi: Poems in Scots. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990. Talkies. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. Masculinity. London: Jonathan Cape, 1996. With John Burnside and Kathleen Jamie. Penguin Modern Poets 9. London: Penguin, 1996. Impossibility (images by Caroline Saltzwedel). Hamburg: Hirundo Press, 1998. Spirit Machines. London: Jonathan Cape, 1999. The Tip of My Tongue. London: Jonathan Cape, 2003. Selected Poems. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005. Full Volume. London: Jonathan Cape, 2008.

Non-fiction The Savage and the City in the Work of T.S. Eliot. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Devolving English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992; 2nd rev. edition Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Identifying Poets: Self and Territory in Twentieth-century Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Literature in Twentieth-century Scotland: A Select BibliographyI. London: The British Council, 1995. The Modern Poet: Poetry, Academia, and Knowledge since the 1750s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Scotland’s Books: The Penguin History of Scottish Literature. London: Penguin, 2007. The Bard: Robert Burns: A Biography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Editor With Hamish Whyte (eds). About Edwin Morgan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990. Other Tongues: Young Scottish Poets in English, Scots and Gaelic. St Andrews: Verse, 1990. With Thom Nairn (eds). The Arts of Alasdair Gray. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991.

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With David Kinloch (eds). Reading Douglas Dunn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992. With Anne Varty (eds). Liz Lochhead’s Voices. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Talking Verse. St. Andrews: Verse, 1995. Launch-site for English Studies: Three Centuries of Literary Studies at the University of St Andrews. St Andrews: University of St Andrews, 1997. Robert Burns and Cultural Authority. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. With Simon Armitage (eds). The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945. London: Viking, 1998. The Scottish Invention of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. With Mick Imlah (eds). The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse. London: Penguin, 2000. With Meg Bateman and James McGonigal (eds). Scottish Religious Poetry from the Sixth Century to the Present: An Anthology. Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 2000. ‘Heaven-taught Fergusson’: Robert Burns’s Favourite Scottish Poet: Poems and Essays. East Linton: Tuckwell, 2003. The Book of St Andrews. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2005. Apollos of the North: Selected Poems of George Buchanan and Arthur Johnston. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2006. Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

John Burnside: Poets and Other Animals John Burnside’s poetry made an immediate impact on readers through its intense focus on mysterious states of landscape and mind. The “spirituality” that lies behind them is not conventionally Christian, but radical and often disturbing. Here he discusses some of the sources of his prolific output, and his concern for a Northern ecology based on a changed relationship between self and world. Keywords: Ecology; religion; Gnosticism; environment; violence.

Burnside is one of those Scottish writers who created a new perspective from the experience of living outside (and then returning to) Scotland. He was born in Dunfermline, Fife, in 1955, but spent his adolescence and young adulthood in England. He gained a college degree in English and European Literature in Cambridge, but began writing poetry after a long spell of working in information technology. His interest is genuinely wide-ranging: he is attracted to philosophy and ecology, he was formerly a software engineer and, due to his Catholic upbringing, he is drawn to the study of spiritual and religious thought as well as the more specifically defined subject of literature. There are many labels that critics like to hang on Burnside – green poet, nature poet, mystical poet, Scottish poet, religious poet – but he refuses to be identified as any of these. Perhaps the only generalisation that is safe to make in terms of describing his complex genius is that environmental awareness has a wide-ranging significance in his work and that it takes account of political and economic problems related to the industrial and agricultural exploitation of the ecosystem, transcendental beliefs and cultural issues, as well as a universal respect for the natural world. Unlike other, mainly American, environmentally responsive poets, he has a specific interest in the northern periphery of Europe. And unlike those Scottish writers who like to defend their European identity (focusing on the cultures and societies of mainland Europe), Burnside takes a fresh view of Scotland’s geographical position, and considers it in relation to other northern territories such as the Scandinavian Peninsula, Iceland, and the Arctic region. He is not really intent on (re)creating a cultural association between these places (as, say, George Mackay Brown, who liked to see the north of Scotland as a hub between northernmost countries to the east and west), but has an interest in the territory itself: in geography, landscape, plants and animals. One of his objectives is learning from indigenous people who

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live in harmony with the land. This is closely related to his idea of “living as a spirit”, which he has also described elsewhere, but the following interview points out new links between Burnside’s environmental awareness and Gnosticism. The different dimensions of life (biological, intellectual, social and spiritual) appear in unity, and communicate his desire to create harmony between the self and the environment. Burnside’s use of the Fife landscape partly stems from Dunn’s groundbreaking work in Northlight but the presence of other formative influences (including Ted Hughes and García Lorca) have been pointed out in his work too. Burnside started publishing at a relatively late age but, since then, his books have followed each other with fierce intensity. He was selected for the New Generation Poets campaign in 1994, and has won or been nominated for so many awards that listing all is not possible here. His poetry includes The Hoop (1988), Common Knowledge (1991), Feast Days (1992), The Myth of the Twin (1995), Swimming in the Flood (1995), A Normal Skin (1997), The Asylum Dance (2000), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and was shortlisted for both the Forward Poetry Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize, The Light Trap (2001), The Good Neighbour (2005) and Gift Songs (2007). His copious work extends to prose fiction, including The Dumb House (1997), The Mercy Boys (1999), Burning Elvis (2000), The Locust Room (2001), Living Nowhere (2003), and The Devil’s Footprints (2007). With A.L. Kennedy, he is author of Dice, a television series produced in Canada. I met him in his office at St Andrews on a Friday morning, exactly a week after the 9/11 attack, which he refers to here. The interview first appeared two years later in Scottish Studies Review 4(1).

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Would you talk about your background and your early influences first? When did you start writing poetry? I was born in Fife, in 1955. I lived in Cowdenbeath till I was ten, almost eleven, years old, then moved with my family to Corby, a steelmill town in the English Midlands. I was educated in Catholic schools, where I was very unhappy, and eventually left aged sixteen. I did my degree at a technical college, studying English and European Thought and Literature. My main interest at that time was in philosophy. I read a great deal of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Gramsci and, of course, for this was the 1970s, Marx. My main literary interests were William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and Walt Whitman, among others. I at one time intended to do a PhD on “Ideas of American Epic” but didn’t carry this forward. My mother became ill the year after I finished my first degree and I stayed at home for a year looking after her until she died in 1977. I drifted around for about eight years, finally becoming a computer programmer in 1985, then a systems designer. I worked in the computer industry, in television and knowledge-based systems, for ten years. During this time I began to write poetry, then short fiction. I quit computing in order to work on my first novel, The Dumb House. I think writing poetry was really a way of staying sane in an ugly world. I enjoyed the logic and mathematics side of computing but hated the office politics and business side of it. Starting to write poetry gave me something else. But I didn’t take the work seriously until my second book. I think I owe this in part to an excellent editor, Robin Robertson. Influences are many. I feel particularly influenced by Spanish language poetry, with Octavio Paz, along with Lorca, Machado and Jorge Guillen as my main reading. I feel influenced by contemporaries such as Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney, and by a number of American poets. Marianne Moore is a kind of spiritual mentor in my mind and Williams is never far away in my imagination. Wallace Stevens also, and some contemporary American poets: Allison Funk, Linda Gregerson, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Eric Pankey, Robert Wrigley, the sublime Mary Oliver (I only discovered her a couple of years ago), and Chase Twichell, to name but a few.

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What brought you back to Scotland after living in England for nearly thirty years and in what ways do your poems “Out of Exile” and “Exile’s Return”, in The Hoop, relate to your residence in England and your return to Scotland? Returning to Scotland was something of a romantic gesture in some ways. I was disgusted by English politics, especially the appalling influence of the Thatcher and post-Thatcher Conservative junta. I felt Scotland was trying to be different, trying to preserve a more humane, enlightened, civic society. This was, as I say, too romantic a view. I did not feel like an “exile” in England, so much as exiled within a capitalist and industrial society which undervalued (if at all) all that mattered to me: the land, the arts, rational thought, civic values, compassion, the imagination. I feel just as much an exile now as I ever did. I will continue to feel this way until I live in a world which respects all living things and their habitats, and would rather raise taxes to fight poverty than to fight wars. You haven’t been to Hungary yet, but recently you wrote a poem about the pollution which occurred last year in the Tisza, a river that runs across part of Romania and Hungary, and flows into the Danube… Robert Crawford had the idea of commissioning a number of contemporary poets to write a poem about, or in response to, the anniversary of Robert Fergusson. The poem I wrote is called “Caller Water”, “caller” meaning pure or clean in Scots. Today, finding clean water for most parts of the world is a serious business. When I was trying out ideas in my mind for the poem, I was reading about the pollution which had been happening in Romania: there had been a serious spill of heavy metals in the River Tisza. Earlier, when I visited the town of Oradea (in the very west of Romania, really almost across the border from eastern Hungary), I was very interested to learn that the Romans had tried to introduce the Egyptian blue lotus there, and now the only occurrence of this plant in Europe is found in that area. I asked someone to show me the way to the spot where you can still find them and I remember being taken by the place. That particular stretch of water might not have been badly affected by the pollution but obviously it felt personal to me.

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Let me bring in a similar example: I have been working on a poem about what happened last week, the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September, and about the situation as it stands now. You have to find some way in to talking about things without being abstract, preachy or polemical. For me, anyway, a poem has to be grounded in some personal experience. So the poem that I have just mentioned started to come together when, on a Sunday morning, I was flying my kite with my son on the West Sands in St Andrews. As we were playing on the sand, the air show at the RAF base in Leuchars was on, and I could smell the gasoline drifting in the air. My son and I were standing there on this beautiful, wide and empty beach, flying kites, and there was this smell of gasoline, insidiously touching us and coming through our lives. For me, that was the beginning of an individual experience. Again, if you want to speak about environmental damage, you have to find a ground for the experience. So I wrote the poem about the River Tisza as a part of that longer sequence, “Caller Water”. It has been said that you started your career as the “token nature poet” of the New Generation. Apparently, you still have a strong interest in nature… Yes, but I have a big argument with the whole idea of nature poetry. First, I have an argument with separating human beings from the natural world, as if we were somehow not natural. Some people say that human beings are not part of nature because they “have” culture. I think it’s fair to call the complicated systems of communication used by certain animals like dolphins and whales “culture”. Second, there is this idea that poems about nature – well, I never write poems about anything, but the context of the poem is metaphorical – that poems about nature are seen as being not very serious. They are seen as pretty, confectionery, whereas the serious poems are written about politics or human relationships. It’s certainly the other way round. The most urgent problem facing us is environmental degradation: lack of good water, air pollution and global climatic changes. Political left and right are irrelevant now for any thinking person. What matters now is the poetry of “we”: preserving the environment and studying how we, human beings, should dwell on the Earth without destroying

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it. My main interest is in poems that relate to ecology or habitat, and this has nothing to do with the old-fashioned idea of a nature poem. The charge against a poet who writes about nature is that he is more interested in animals and trees than in the other people. We know that the Earth has been covered by snow and shrouded in clouds, it has been boiling hot and icy cold, but the Earth and life on Earth has survived that. So a concern for ecological questions and for the natural world is actually a concern with human life on Earth. Where I live, the quality of life has been degraded in a significant way. I lament the fact that there are fewer butterflies or birds of certain types, and I lament the fact that there are fewer green spaces. So it isn’t just a concern about skylarks and autumnal trees. We must remind ourselves that as human beings we are part of nature, and that we cannot survive in any meaningful sense, unless we respect animal life. My mentor, in a remote kind of way, is Paul Shepard, the American ecologist philosopher. He is interested in the way our experience of animals forms us in psychological and social terms, and he says that the socialisation of children is bound up with the stories about and their experience with animals. Most people have almost no experience of animals, and if they have, those are domesticated animals. Most of us don’t see animals in the wild. I often go to places where you can still do that. I like to go to the Arctic Circle, where I can see animals in their own habitat. I have a book coming out next spring in which I use the phrase “homesick for the other animals”. So I have a lot of arguments with the term “nature poetry”, and I think the New Generation has several other poets who are engaged with the natural world in an ecological sense. What’s the title of the book you just mentioned? It is called The Light Trap and it is a book of poems in three sections. The first section is about habitat. The second is called Physis, and it’s about the human investigation of the natural world. The third section is called World and it’s based on ideas from Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura. Lucretius’s ambition was to try and investigate the nature of things, of everything. I find it a nice idea. Heraclitus said that nature loves to hide. My book is about the continuity and the discontinuity between human beings and the natural world.

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Your interest in nature seems to me to tie in with your interest in the idea of living in the world as spirits… I used to use the word “soul” a lot, but I felt at the end that there was too much of an association with Christian or Neoplatonic philosophy that separates the body from the soul, and thinks in terms of essence, like the soul, and something more superfluous, like the body. If you think in terms of “spirit”, you might be talking about something that at least wouldn’t be so easy to force into this kind of dualism. I wanted to replace the idea of duality, which suggests two separate things, with an idea of the binary, where the two things complement each other. What is interesting is the play between these imaginary forces that you might think of as spirit and matter. There is no such thing as matter separate from spirit, or spirit separate from matter. The fourth part of the poem sequence called Parousia (which is at the end of my book Swimming in the Flood) reflects how, as a child, I believed that the soul and the body weren’t separate. I believed that the soul couldn’t go to heaven and leave the body behind, because souls and bodies need to exist together. The only way a soul can come to exist is with a body, but also a body can’t have any function if there is no soul in it. That was the starting point for me, but then I began to think in terms of the spirit. The interesting enterprise for any writer, but especially for a poet, is to rescue words from the way they’ve been used before. That is why I was using the word “soul” for so long. But I found that the word was loaded with an extraneous meaning imposed by a monotheistic religion, and I found that “spirit” had some of the same problems with it. Nothing is worse when the word “spiritual” is used as a lazy shorthand when talking about something which is moving or uplifting. To “live as a spirit” means to me to deny the idea which I was brought up with as a Catholic: the idea that we are born with a soul, which gets dirty throughout our lives. I think you can live, or fail to live, as a spirit from moment to moment. The soul is not something given, but has to be created by the way in which one lives in the world. The right dwelling in the world is the key to living as a spirit. For example, if I were to go out with a big gun to shoot animals for fun and leave them rotting in the fields, I wouldn’t be living as a spirit. It’s perfectly all right, however, to go out with a big gun and shoot animals because I am hungry and want to eat, and as long as I behave

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towards the animal with respect. You get aristocratic twits in this country saying that hunting foxes is returning them to their origins. It’s a lie, because if you’re a hunter, you have to live your whole life in relationship with the animals around you, rather than getting a red jacket on every second Saturday and riding around with a bunch of half-drunk idiots and some dogs. That’s not hunting, that’s just a soulless way of living. You can contrast that with someone who still hunts for a living in, say, Africa or Northern Europe or Alaska. They’re living as spirits. I’m not trying to glorify indigenous people, and suggest that they are better than other human beings. But what they do is still better than buying meat in a plastic container in Safeway. That is meaningless. You have no relationship with the animal. You’re trying to deny that the animal ever existed. Living as a spirit depends on the relationship you maintain with the rest of the world, moment by moment and day by day. So there are times when you have no soul, and times when you do. The soul exists as a possibility, as something that you bring into being by the way in which you dwell on Earth. I’m reading a book by Jane Jacobs on the nature of economics. She looks at the etymology of the words “ecology” and “economics”, both of which come from the Greek root oikos, meaning house or dwelling place. She’s saying that economists should study ecology; they should study the natural world. The Greeks saw that the management of a house or a land – economy – is not just a financial thing, but it is related to the way we dwell in the house or on the land, to ecology. We need to realise that an economy that is based on the consumption of a fuel which is so polluting that it damages the air we breathe doesn’t make sense, and that in the longer term an economic model always must be in harmony with the ecological model. Most economists and most people in power have misconceptions about the natural world. In Common Knowledge I felt a slight Gnostic twist to your interest in the supernatural or spiritual, and in Feast Days there is indeed a poem called “Pleroma”. Do you have an interest in Gnosticism? Yes, when I was a student in particular, I was drawn to Gnostic texts. I was interested in the history of Gnosticism and its influence, as it came partly through the western culture. Alchemy was the main

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interest I had for quite a long time and, of course, some of the Gnostic ideas are actually taken up in alchemy. By “alchemy” I mean a magical process and I saw it then as a kind of metaphor: it seemed to me that changing metal into gold was quite straightforwardly a metaphor for taking an incomplete and messed up human mind and spirit and trying to achieve a pleroma or fullness out of that. So the alchemical texts were interesting to me a lot, at the same time as I was also interested in the ideas that came out of Moorish thought. I had been spending time in Spain and I became aware of the impact of Moorish culture on southern Spain in particular. Some of the ideas of alchemy came out of that Moorish tradition, and Gnosticism was a gift to me who, as a poet, was trying to recover from an upbringing in a purely traditional, orthodox Christian context. In a recent essay called “Strong Words” you describe poetry as “provisional” and “philosophical” and you also say that poetry is “a form of alchemy” which articulates the process of living “as spirits”. Could you explain it? If you say that poetry is a kind of alchemical process, a process of revelation, you’re talking about the purification of something which is seen as crude, mixed-up, something almost contaminated, and you’re also talking about methods by which you draw from that the reality or the fundamental, pure essence of something. It seems to me that what the job of poetry might be in the twenty-first century is taking everyday experience, almost the banal, and rediscovering in it a kind of essential life – not necessarily beauty, but an essential authenticity or vitality. All of us have this experience of the world which is mediated by social existence, and we don’t have time to look at or we tend to ignore certain experiences like the natural world. People say, “I don’t like nature poetry. I live in a city and I don’t have an interest in that world.” Well, if you live in the city, you’re also in contact with the natural world: for example, if somebody lives in an apartment, twelve storeys up in a block of flats, there’s still weather and air outside, they have to drink water, there are insects in their apartments, and also these apartments are occupied by animals, that is human beings. I want to refocus on life, and on the “more-than-human”. Poetry is one of the means by which we can purify things by stripping off all these social elements. The kind of poetry I write is a constant search for the

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authentic, but not outside the common, lived experience. It’s the commonplace that is real. The often political Robert Crawford wishes to write religious poetry, whereas once you said it bothered you that you didn’t write political poetry. Is there really such a big gap between these two genres? I said that a while ago. It only dawned on me when I started reading certain American poets, like Mary Oliver, who are considered as nature poets, that it is intensely political poetry! Just as it used to be the case that if you were a member of Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth, you were seen as being environmental or ecological, but not political. The Green Party used to formulate policies entirely around preserving nature, but that’s not true any more. Most Green Parties throughout the world have got very solid and interesting models for the human economics. I used to think in terms of a kind of poetry which relates directly to justice within, or justice between, human communities. But now I feel that there’s a continuity between environmental justice and the lives of human communities – the communities of indigenous peoples in particular. A few days ago, just before the terrorist attack on New York, Britain was involved in the Durban conference on racism. The resolution was to be that indigenous peoples should be considered as having specific rights and a specific identity. But, interestingly enough, Britain blocked that, and you think: why would Britain do that? Britain doesn’t have any indigenous population; we haven’t got any Aborigines or Native Indians here. Then you realise that they probably brokered it as a deal with Canada and Australia, both of which countries currently have problems with exploiting Indian and Aboriginal lands, and so they don’t want the world to recognise that those people have rights. I’ve been interested for a few years now in the situation of the Sami people, who live in the north of Norway, Sweden, Finland and parts of Russia. In Norway the Sami have their own parliament now and they can speak their own language. It’s wonderful! But what happened was that the Norwegians built a dam on the River Alta, a hugely important river for the Sami people and for the local environment. The Sami fought it really hard, of course. After that they gave the Sami a

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parliament which is culturally and to some extent economically effective, but what the Sami still have no rights over is the land itself. What do indigenous people need most of all? They need to maintain their relationship with the land. And it’s not a kind of stewardship, but a relationship of identity. Unless these indigenous people are allowed to live in the relationship of identity with the land, it dies out. That’s a political question. So I wouldn’t say that any more that I regret not having written political poetry. I would say that the poetry that I’ve been writing in the last couple of books (also in the one I’m working on) is political, but it’s political in a new, environmental sense. I’ve never been interested in religious poetry. I was classified as a religious poet but I find religion appalling, and I find it deeply saddening. In a prose piece I tried to describe the Holy Ghost as a small, weasely kind of animal, half man and half creature. I thought it was much more attractive than this nebulous cloud hovering above people’s heads. I used Catholic iconography in my early poems trying to re-make it, but when I’m giving readings I make it very clear that I am not religious. This description that I’m interested in religious things and not involved in politics – I think it’s the other way round. Take the poetry which counts as political in Britain right now: it’s naive, it’s taking the obvious, it’s that old Left and Right paradigm. That’s not very interesting. What’s far more interesting is trying to understand why certain things happen. And you also need to have compassion for everybody, even for George W. Bush. That’s the hard thing to do. [Laughs.] I’m pro-Palestinian but I feel compassion for the Israelis, because the only way Palestinians would be helped is if the Israelis in power learn to be human beings. People who have the power are the ones we should be most compassionate for, because power is a very heavy burden, and completely clouds how you think about the world. Political power is related, among other things, to sexuality, or sensuality, in the broader sense, so you think: wouldn’t it be great if we could sexually liberate George W. Bush, so that he could live a meaningful sensual life? Can you imagine George W. Bush stopping to smell the roses in the garden, or admiring a sunset? [Laughs.] Robert Crawford calls computers “spirit machines”. Is there a link between your own experience with computers and the way you think of spiritualism?

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No, I don’t think so. I think if Robert had worked with computers, he wouldn’t have got the idea. [Laughs.] Honestly, he is using it as an interesting metaphor and I like that book, Spirit Machines, a lot. It was interesting that someone would try to write about computers, because nobody is much interested in commerce and technology in that way. But, no, my experience with computers is much the same as my experience with telephones: it’s a piece of technology that I use. When I started using the Internet it was a much more different creature. It genuinely was an area where information, ideas and opinions were exchanged. It was actually a quite stimulating place to go to (it was much less easy to navigate than it is now, because there were very few service providers), and you thought: what a great tool for education and for improving our lives! But, of course, it became an ugly, commercial thing. I worked in the computer industry for ten years. I was interested in the area of systems design, but I’m not any more. I enjoyed trying to be logical and orderly in my thinking, which I’m not by nature. But after ten years I was glad to give it up, and in fact I wouldn’t go anywhere near a computer now. I only use the Internet, my e-mail, and do word-processing, but no more. I thought at that time that technology was interesting, but now I feel that I’ve had far too much interest in the virtual, and I’m interested in the real. Well, a machine is real, too. What is problematic is the image that it creates and people start to believe in. It’s like television. I hate television: it’s like a slow creeping fungus, which gets through to people’s imaginations and to the way they relate to each other, and rots it all. People’s relationships are modelled on TV relationships written by scriptwriters and acted by actors in a very artificial way. I want D.H. Lawrence to make a comeback, his poetry in particular. In this television age we need someone like D.H. Lawrence to remind us that the one thing that really matters is how we interact. I don’t like where we are right now. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the technology, but it’s the way we’re using it. What’s your political conviction in relation to Scotland? I don’t have one. Well, obviously, I want Scotland to be self-governing but not in the way as it is now. I believe in localisation as opposed to globalisation. I’d like to see Scotland break down into a number of

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autonomous regions: I’d like Shetland to have its own government, and to run Shetlandic affairs entirely within the context of that area; I’d like even Fife to have its own government. I’d like to see things grow more and more local and small-scale, because you can’t look after your environment on a large scale. I’d like terrains in Scotland to be managed by people living there and by people who have a genuine interest in their landscape. I’m not interested in Scottish nationalism. I don’t like nations. I’d like to see no countries but regions, and people who form allegiances together for certain purposes. The more monolithic are the nations the bigger you have the kind of capitalist power structures which are then oppressive to people. I hate the idea of nations. I like the idea of Scotland being more independent from Westminster, and regions within Scotland being more independent from Edinburgh. To Shetlandic people, being governed from Westminster or from Edinburgh is more or less the same. Certainly, if tomorrow there were a march for independence from Westminster, I’d go on and I’d say: yes, I’m here with you. We need land reform. We still live in a feudal society: we still have people who can’t buy land or a house, because some lord owns it. I want radical land reform in which land-owning people who live on subsidies are kicked out. But if there were a more independent Scotland, there would be more chance of that happening. Do you see yourself as a Scottish or as a British poet? I don’t see myself as belonging to a nation at all. I would have said at one time that I was a writer of a Scottish landscape or a Fife landscape. But I have travelled quite a lot and I’ve written a lot of poetry elsewhere: in Spain, Romania and the Arctic tundra. So I think I’m bound to the terrain around me, and since I was brought up in this terrain and in this area, I belong to it. I don’t belong to a community of people who are Scottish as opposed to something else. Is there one Scotland? Compare Glasgow and Shetland, or Edinburgh and Shetland – they don’t belong to the same community. I reflect a relationship with a piece of land and that could be anywhere. If I was to move to northern Norway, I wouldn’t become a Norwegian, but I wouldn’t necessarily be a Scottish poet either, because I’d be responding to a different landscape. Rather than classify myself in terms of a country like Scotland, I like to classify myself in terms of

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some ideas, the habitat and relationships to animals. I’m happy to call myself a green poet or an environmental poet or an ecological poet, but not a nature poet. I’m not a Scottish poet and I’m not a religious poet. These are not useful labels for me. Can you identify with a spiritual or cultural idea of Europe? I grew up in a society which stressed a certain type of mainly male, middle-class and English poetry and I found this unsympathetic. I didn’t really enjoy the contemporary poets except for a few Irish poets. When I was growing up, most of the conservative British poets were not sympathetic to me. Then I started reading other poets, and in particular I found Spanish poets interesting. I started learning Spanish to read them in the original. In these poems the ideas are shining through a muddy pool and you can see a glimmer down there, much of which is being lost in translation. I’d probably never have considered writing poetry without having been exposed to poetry from outside the British context. From a cultural point of view, Europe has been really important to me. The other side of things is more problematic: the question of a united Europe. I’m not really keen on things getting bigger; I’m keen on things getting smaller and more local. Right now the United States is in power, and if the British would sit with the Europeans, then I think Europe could fulfil a useful function. What would be bad, of course, was if Europe tried to act as another United States. And we have all seen that happening: the European Community getting together to mess around with Bosnia, wandering in there, not knowing really much about the situation, and just wanting to sort out the problem by using force. There were things in the past that had to be done, but the arrogance with which they conducted themselves just multiplied the problems. When it comes to military and financial power, I don’t like things coming together. When Tony Blair made his speech the other day about standing shoulder to shoulder with George W. Bush, I was ashamed. Everybody feels sympathy and concern for the people who have suffered in New York, and wants to try and help them in any way they can, but that’s not the same as saying that we’ll stand by the United States no matter what it does. No other country in Europe made that statement. People said, let’s counsel caution. If all the Europeans stood together in the argument about Kyoto before the

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British came in, they might have said something. Wouldn’t it be honourable and something statesmanlike if all the Europeans stood together and said to the United States: if you’re not going to sign the Kyoto agreement, we’re going to do something about it? I’d love to see nations coming together for certain reasons, like stopping racism and environmental destruction, and the kind of arrogant bullying that the United States exercises throughout the world. I’d love to see Europe as a meaningful unit but the last thing I want to see is Europe becoming one of the big empires in an Orwellian scenario. In general, I think, the Europeans could exercise some moral power. A.L. Kennedy described The Dumb House as a “wonderful”, “disturbing” and “lyrically amoral” book. How do you reconcile the record of violence with the lyrical exploration of spirituality? I think there is no need to reconcile one with the other. The world is violent, and I think we must investigate and try to understand that violence, especially in its subtler forms, for example the violence done to laboratory animals in the name of “science”, or the violence of poverty. Violence arises from the tendency to objectify others – humans, animals, terrain and so on – and spiritual enlightenment begins, I feel, in a first recognition that there are no objects in the world, that there is no possibility of being meaningfully “objective”. Thus violence is the symptom of a spiritual failure, a failure to recognise the fundamental imperative to respect and honour “the other”. Weren’t you afraid that some of the scenes of violence described in The Dumb House and in your more recent novels (The Mercy Boys and The Locust Room) would be copied in real life, as was the case with the film version of A Clockwork Orange? What’s the writer’s responsibility in a case like this? One scene in The Mercy Boys was actually based on a real-life incident: it was the one scene that some critics singled out as being unbelievable! I don’t think anybody ever became violent by copying art. I do think that the pornographic element of “Hollywood culture” or TV, where violence is presented as natural, or even attractive, creates a social climate in which violence is sanctioned, especially violence towards the powerless. I do hope that nothing I have ever

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written makes violence seem attractive: indeed, I hope that what I write exposes the ugliness and banality of violence. I don’t think A Clockwork Orange promoted violence, for example. I do think the press and publicity around it may have subverted the film’s original intention, however. Your perception of violence must be different from the definition provided by Ted Hughes, who saw violence, that is “positive violence”, as a form of obedience to the divine law. Or do you agree with Hughes? I see what Hughes means, but I would not use the word “violence” here. “Violence” I always read as the inappropriate or unnatural application of force, for example in the exploitation of other living things, or in the damage done to the terrain, as well as in what we more usually recognise as violence, with the superficial drama it entails. I do think humans are capable of an appropriate aggression in certain circumstances, which could be seen as “obedience” to a divine (or perhaps really natural) law. It may be necessary at times to forcefully clear the ground, to destroy, in order to build. This is recognised in many traditions. But violence seems to me always to be a result of when human beings take it upon themselves to decide what is to happen (sometimes “for the good”), as opposed to striving to become attuned to what is happening. It’s difficult to frame the question in the right way, but, no, I don’t think of the natural world as violent. I think of violence as a kind of inappropriate force, but you can’t talk about “appropriate” or “inappropriate” in the natural world. Violence is something that only appears in the human realm. It doesn’t exist in nature any more than innocence does – the innocence of the lamb, for example – how can anything be innocent in nature? It’s a tricky question and I’m not sure what the actual answer is. One of your latest collections, The Asylum Dance, won the Whitbread Poetry Award. Where does the title come from? I was travelling in America, and met somebody who told me a story about a place where he used to live. In that place the local residents used to go to a sanatorium once a year, and held a picnic and dance with the people who were long-term residents in this place. It wasn’t

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called an asylum, it was called a sanatorium or hospital, but it was very obvious from what he was saying that the people who were in this place were long-term, non-violent mentally disturbed people. He mentioned this in passing but afterwards I started thinking about this again. I was trying to imagine what it would be like to go in and be intrigued by the inside world, and that’s what the poem “The Asylum Dance” is coming from. It seemed to me to be a metaphor, or emblem almost, of the division between the inner and the outer, the public and the private, or the social and the individual. Each of us occupies an external social world but each of us also has a private realm: a personal, individual set of experiences, which could be seen as mad in that conventional way, if you think about your own fantasy life or the way you behave when you’re on your own. If you would take that into the public realm, you would be considered as slightly crazy, and in fact I think that is what the construction of madness is: people who behave in public as they might behave in private, or people who give voice to their private thoughts. It was only after I’ve written that poem that it seemed to be the perfect gift to the narrative. I don’t write narrative type of poems very often and I just constructed this idea of what would happen if an ordinary man who lives outside (and is quite borderline himself, a lonely and isolated person who prefers his own company), if this man goes to this asylum dance one year, and meets a woman who is resident there and falls in love with her. For that one day he’s free to do anything he wants but the next day he comes back again and he is not allowed to go in. It’s a very nice story, but afterwards I thought it was symbolic of the book, which is about the tension between the public and the private, or between the hidden and the visible, and so it seemed to me the key poem in the book. You’ve also tried your hand at writing shorter prose, and I terribly enjoyed your recent book of short stories, Burning Elvis. My favourite has to be the title story, which reminds me of Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Capote, I’m not quite sure why. Could you explain your main concerns in this book? You could say that any work written at more or less the same time would have some common ground. The reason why I write poetry and prose is that it’s like the same road but there are different branching

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paths off that road. Short stories are ways of exploring one part of the path and poems another. Yes, there’s a lot of common ground in the sense that the stories are also about the question of the private and public. There’s one story in that book called “The Invisible Husband” and it is about the opposite of “The Asylum Dance”, because this story is about two sane people but the husband has left and the wife’s madness is probably reflecting her husband’s condition. There are similar concerns between the poem and the story, but prose is a different way of exploring them… I can see now where it’s coming from… It’s a nice thought that you were reminded of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In “Burning Elvis”, which is the title story, there is this not very interesting, self-conscious and slightly silly kind of boy. He’s fascinated by a rather wonderful girl, but he doesn’t understand her, and always thinks about himself. She’s too wonderful to him, and he knows that. In prose I want to write about people who are relatively limited, like the central character or narrator of this story might be. He is nowhere near pleroma. Fullness is a long way away from this person, so far away that he can’t even see the possibility. So at the beginning of the story that character is, actually, a bit of a fool, but at the end you get the glimmer that maybe at some point in the future he will start changing. It’s the moment when he sees the killing, and thinks about doing something, but realises he can’t. I think it’s a wonderful moment, and you have to stop and realise that although he has a place in the narrative as one of the minor characters, part of the story is his own story in which he is a major character, but that is also part of lots of other stories. It’s a very humbling and revealing moment, and I want to write about people who are at the point of discovering that, that the world doesn’t revolve around them, and they have a journey to travel on, and they’re right at the beginning of it. Most of my stories are about young men who are suddenly faced with the fact that they had been standing still and that they haven’t been paying attention to the world around them and it is time to change. In different ways at the end of each of those stories the characters are faced with the possibility of growth, which is a painful thing, but nevertheless an exciting, meaningful and authentic thing. Healing is a form of growth as well. Actually, healing is just another kind of growth. So yes, there are similar concerns between my poetry and my prose. What I’m writing is always about healing: about healing the world or about trying to heal one’s vision of the world.

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Finally, you seem to me to be a very prolific writer. Would you talk about the way you compose a poem or a piece of fiction? I didn’t start writing until I was in my late twenties. I had a very intensive period of writing, especially for poetry, but then I’m not interested in that sense that a poem is very polished and somehow perfect. I’m interested in creating a space, and so a poem of mine would be much more like a sketch than a miniature. Poetry is a very organic process for me. I work in my head and I write it down, and I do polish in the sense of trying to get exactly the right words. Also, the music has to be right, but the music comes out of that process in my head. I’m not really interested in artfulness. Poetry is to me an attempt to stay close to a spontaneous impulse. It seems to me that spontaneity is something expressing its true nature. A spontaneous work of art, whatever its faults might be, will have the virtue of being organic or authentic, because it comes from the direct utterance, and out of the nature of the writer or the nature of the experience. If you prepare yourself long enough in a philosophical and spiritual sense, then the experience can translate into something meaningful to others quite easily and quite quickly. This process, the actual composition of poetry, for me doesn’t involve paper at all. The real thing happens, as Mandelstam said, on the lips. I feel I’m really connected to an oral tradition, in that sense. It may sound pretentious, because I don’t write any kind of traditional oral form, like ballads, but it comes from the same root and from the same way of responding to voice. Obviously, I use dictionaries to check the meaning of words. I’m actually looking at one word in particular in my next book. It is bothering me a lot what the right word is, and the whole book comes down in the end to about five words. I didn’t write anything for such a long time and when I started writing I got this method for words. I felt that these ten years of not writing was expressing itself in the first book. Some of the poems in my first book were very rough, or sketch-like I would say, certainly the poems in Feast Days or Common Knowledge. I almost made it a matter of principle that I wouldn’t stand in the way of the poem too much, in order to try and keep to the spontaneous utterance. More recently, because the poems are slightly longer and more complex, in some cases I haven’t been able to do it in exactly the same way. But still each part of the poem is composed on the lips and then it’s put all

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together, almost like a jigsaw puzzle. That happens over time, because other things are happening as well. I’m quite happy to imagine that you can keep hundreds of lines in your head, but you have to have the peace and quiet to do that. Fiction is more difficult, but again the Burning Elvis stories were written over a period of about five years, and a number of them were written when I was learning my craft. I wrote stories for the radio, most of which didn’t get into the book, because they’re different art forms. You couldn’t work on ten different poems at once. But you can work on a quite complex poem at the same time as on a short story and at the same time as continuing the large-scale work with a novel, because they are different things. You can plug out of one and into another. I think the difficult thing is to work on three or four poems at once. I’m 46 years old and I’ve published twelve books. It doesn’t seem too much for somebody of my age, but it’s making up for lost time in some ways. I don’t like social life that much, especially these days. I spend a lot of time just walking, or playing with my son, or flying a kite, and so there are lots of occasions for thinking and writing, which is where it all comes from: it comes from standing around, and being quiet, and being away. St Andrews, 18 September 2001

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Bibliography: John Burnside (1955–)

Poetry The Hoop. Manchester: Carcanet, 1988. Common Knowledge. London: Secker & Warburg, 1991. Feast Days. London: Secker & Warburg, 1992. The Myth of the Twin. London: Jonathan Cape, 1994. Swimming in the Flood. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995. With Robert Crawford and Kathleen Jamie. Penguin Modern Poets 9. London: Penguin, 1996. A Normal Skin. London: Jonathan Cape, 1997. The Asylum Dance. London: Jonathan Cape, 2000. The Light Trap. London: Jonathan Cape, 2002. Hortus Angelicus (artwork by Jean Johnstone Gilstone). Upper Largo: J. Johnstone, 2003. In Kansas. Nîmes: Grand Phoenix Press, 2003. The Good Neighbour. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005. Selected Poems. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006. Gift Songs. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007.

Fiction The Dumb House: A Chamber Novel. London: Jonathan Cape, 1997. The Mercy Boys. London: Jonathan Cape, 1999. Burning Elvis. London: Jonathan Cape, 2000. The Locust Room. London: Jonathan Cape, 2001. Living Nowhere. London: Jonathan Cape, 2003. The Devil’s Footprints: A Romance. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. Glister. London: Jonathan Cape, 2008.

Non-fiction A Lie about My Father. London: Vintage, 2007.

Editor With Alec Finlay (eds). Love for Love: An Anthology of Love Poems. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2000.

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With Maurice Riordan (eds). Wild Reckoning. London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2004. Wallace Stevens: Poems. London: Faber, 2008.

Kathleen Jamie: More Than Human Kathleen Jamie is one of Scotland’s foremost woman poets, and her work focuses increasingly on ecological issues and the natural world along the East Coast of Scotland. Locality and family are viewed, however, through the perspectives of her earlier travels in Asia, and an education in philosophy has ensured that a cautious approach is taken to her own tendency to be drawn towards the ancient and supernatural Scots ballad tradition, and the poet’s role in mediating between worlds of experience. Keywords: Ecology; politics; shamanism; gender.

Kathleen Jamie is a widely respected member of what is now the middle generation of Scottish poetry. She was born in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, in 1962. After finishing her studies in philosophy at Edinburgh University, she held writers’ fellowships in Britain and travelled in the Near East and Central Asia on an Eric Gregory Award. She made her debut with Black Spiders (1982) and co-wrote A Flame in Your Heart with Andrew Greig (1986). She established her mature voice in poems which appeared in The Way We Live (1987). In 1994 she was selected as one of the New Generation poets by the Poetry Society, and published her extensively praised collection, The Queen of Sheba. In 1999, it was followed by Jizzen, which is about her experience of childbirth and motherhood. Her selected poems appeared as Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead in 2002 and her new selected poems, Waterlight, came out in 2007. So far, she has come forward with relatively few collections but each is regarded as a milestone in modern Scottish poetry and there is not a single one of them that did not win at least one prestigious literary prize. Her recent collection is The Tree House (2004): it earned both the Forward Poetry Prize and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. She has written two travel books: The Golden Peak (1992) which records her trekking in Pakistan (a revised edition was published in 2002 as Among Muslims) and The Autonomous Region (with Sean Mayne Smith, 1993), which contains poems and photos from Tibet. I met Kathleen Jamie in her office at St Andrews University, where she is Lecturer in Creative Writing, a post she has held since 1999. Though she is generally quite reticent about her own art, in what follows she hints at the major turns in her writing career. She began with writing about obvious issues that were open to her as a young

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Scottish female poet in the 1980s and 1990s: gender and politics. Now that the debates about the establishment of a Scottish Assembly are over, she is unwilling even to discuss the question any more, and expresses her wish to move on to explore new fields, and answer new challenges, while remaining realistic about what the Scottish parliament can and cannot do. Similarly, she cannot even be bothered to consider the subject of womanhood with any degree of seriousness any more. She rejects both national identity and gender as valid contexts in which to discuss her work – though what she is saying about nation states might not be fully accurate, at least not in Central and Eastern Europe. Instead, she describes a new interest in “living creatures” and “cultural and ecological areas” but without any guarantee or foreknowledge of where circumstance or lyrical impulse might lead her thought in the future. Readers of the following interview may witness the moment of a major turn in her work, which has become more transparent since the making of this interview, but was in preparation for quite a while. She is settled down in Fife now but has not given up travelling when opportunity arises. As with John Burnside and Don Paterson, living on the northern fringe of Europe and being a part of the landscape with other creatures, plants or just geological formations serves as a new and powerful inspiration for Jamie. But it would be wrong to brand her simply as a nature poet because landscape evokes serious moral, political or spiritual considerations in her poems, depending on the condition of the subject and the situation of the observing self. She makes passing reference to her bilingualism as a Scots and English speaker, and mentions the motivations behind some of her constant anthology pieces, including “Flower-sellers, Budapest”, “The Republic of Fife” and “Mr and Mrs Scotland are Dead”. There is perhaps no other poet in Scotland who has so many different poems that have determined the way of seeing of a whole generation – “The Queen of Sheba”, “Meadowsweet”, “Skeins o Geese”, “Arraheids” or “Wee Wifey” are but a few of them – and she is also one of the few poets in Scotland who does not think too highly of the American appreciation of her work. If it was possible to make a general statement about her at all, then I would say that Kathleen Jamie’s poetry is characterised by freedom of observation as filtered through the integrity of her lyrical intellect.

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Your poem “Flower-sellers, Budapest” is set in Budapest. When did you visit Hungary? I went there six years ago – it was a literary visit. The British Council took Scottish artists of all different sorts, not just writers, to Hungary. There were rock bands and visual artists, and it was really a Scottish festival in Budapest and Pécs. I enjoyed it very much. Don Paterson was also there, and the novelist Alan Warner. It strikes me that the visual impact is so strong in your poem “Flowersellers…” and there is also a strong sense of detail… I think about precision more and more. Recently, I am thinking that precision is acutely important to good writing. You take notes almost like a naturalist who observes something, whether it is a flower or a street scene. It is not out of curiosity, but you almost respect what you are observing. You want to have what you observe accurately in its beauty and detail, and so it is almost like a mark of respect for it. So more and more I am taking notes and acutely observing things. One poet I admire, Elizabeth Bishop, also does that. Really acute observation, especially of living creatures… I am learning to take patient notes… Is there perhaps a note of sympathy in this practice? You mean compassion? I’d hope so. I don’t think it set out to be compassionate – not like a Buddhist, who does it deliberately, but I’d hope so. You’re a better being if you can get compassionate about things. You have travelled far and wide and you have written a travelogue called The Golden Peak, which is set in Pakistan. Would you like to go back there? I used to travel a lot when I was younger, in my twenties, but through my thirties I couldn’t. I deliberately decided to stop, and also I have my family, which makes it difficult to go anywhere. I cannot say I don’t miss it. I would love to go back to Northern Pakistan, especially now that there is this news footage of Afghanistan on television. The

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landscapes – never mind the politics – but the landscapes remind me so much of Northern Pakistan. I stopped travelling almost for moral reasons. I began to think twice about going to wretchedly poor third-world countries just to marvel at people living their lives. I felt I ought to go home and live my own life, look after my own children, have my own garden, so that made me stop doing that. Not that I wouldn’t go again! Overall, it was a very formative experience. I think a lot of what I hold and believe nowadays derives from the times I spent there. Once you described travelling as a kind of holiday from responsibility, and a holiday from “class, identity, mortgages”, as you say. Could you explain that? Yes, I think it is a holiday from identity, of course. You can free yourself from things that oppress you. I think it was a time when I was thinking a deal about identity: national and personal identity. So, to go to a place where you are simply a westerner with all that means – I wouldn’t call it a holiday but it was a different perspective for me. It seems a long time ago now. Have your travels changed or affected your view of Scotland? Yes, sure. You just see Scotland as one very small place in the farthermost reaches of Europe, which of course has its benefits. It is not bad to be stuck in a little place – if that’s possible any longer because of the way globalisation is changing our attitudes of who we are and where we are. But I can’t find talking about Scotland and nation-states and identities important any more. You have lived in Fife for some time now. How do you embrace the landscape when you come back from abroad? I like the Fife landscape. It’s a very pleasant, gentle sort of landscape. Were it anywhere else in Britain, it would be so busy with visitors and tourists. But because people just belt straight through to the Highlands, they miss Fife out and leave us going on with our own lives. I think, however, that it is a mismanaged landscape. There’s far too

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much prairie farming going on; they chopped out far too many trees and hedges. But, on the whole, it’s an alright place to live. You have a poem called “The Republic of Fife”, which seems to suggest that this place is really another country. Is it so? Fife? No. Fifers like to think so, but no. The poem comes from the old idea that Fife was a kingdom, and is still called the Kingdom of Fife. I was just playing with that idea and with a republican attitude to it. As a Scottish poet who also travelled to Asia, can you identify with a European sensibility, in spiritual or cultural terms? No. One feels one ought to, but I don’t really think I care about it. I don’t “get” Europe as a spiritual or cultural entity. Not now. A lot of the writers I respond to are European, but I don’t think of Europe as a spiritual entity. Indeed, it is an entity that’s clearly devoid of any spiritual content, especially now when Europe and North America are dominating the world’s economy and identities. If I had spent more time in mainland Europe, I could have a better idea. Edwin Morgan said that some Scottish writers like to look to America rather than to Europe… Whether we like it or not, yes. Probably because of the language. Not necessarily because we want to embrace it, but it is thrust upon us. We have an unexamined idea that a successful career means being known in the USA – an idea we really ought to start examining! How do you see Scotland and its new parliament? I don’t care anymore. It was important to get a parliament established, and now that it’s done I feel that we seem to have established a parliament which is going to do nothing, except tinker at the edges of the Western social and economic project. It is not going to take a stand and it is not going to be able to make any substantial alterations. All we can do is make minuscule little changes at the edge. I can’t see any substantial change really worth happening and I don’t think it’s possible to make substantial changes. We are so bound up with European

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and North American projects that a little country like Scotland isn’t going to make much difference at all. But you were interested in Scottish politics and in the idea of the Scottish Devolution in the 1990s… It was a job that had to be done and it was a great pain in the arse, you know. There were issues that had to be dealt with. I’m just so glad that they had been dealt with when I’m only half-way through my career as a writer, and therefore I can get on with what I really want to do. I didn’t want to write about being a woman writer or being a Scottish writer all my life. So it’s done and we have got the parliament. Personally, I am not yet forty and I can start and do whatever it was that I wanted to do from the start. Your poem “Mr and Mrs Scotland are Dead” suggests to me, however, a degree of pessimism as far as the devolution is concerned… I am not pessimistic by nature. No, it wasn’t pessimism. It was a sort of ambivalence: it was wishing to assign a lot of things to the dustbin of history, and at the same time you felt a wee bit of the sadness of these changes that were happening. So, “ambivalence” is the word. You said once that “chaos can be glorious” and that you had “a dark longing to bring chaos out of order”. Is that still an ambition? Yes. I think that more and more we have to come to terms with the fact that change and uncertainty is the nature of the universe, and we have to learn to live with that, and even embrace that. It’s just what fundamentalism can’t bear. It can’t bear uncertainty. And if you don’t want to be a fundamentalist, you have to learn to navigate it, and deal with it, even when it’s difficult. You are also a lecturer at the University of St Andrews. When do you find time to write? I teach in the Creative Writing module for the undergraduates, which covers poetry and the short story. They also teach a postgraduate

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diploma for older people and I teach in the poetry side of that. I only teach twelve weeks and in the rest of the year I’m off to do my own thing. How do you see the teaching of Scottish literature? When I was at school, it was at a time famous for pupils not being taught Scottish literature. But I think things have changed in the last twenty years. We do now acknowledge that we have some very fine writers despite – or because of – the political situation. But I simply cannot pretend to be interested in the subject of Scotland’s identity any longer. Does the world need another nationstate? No. What it needs is a sensibility that overcomes nation-states and understands something other than political boundaries – a sensibility that understands cultural or ecological areas. It is time to realise that what is at stake is bigger than ourselves and our own states, and we’ve got to deal with that. If we want to preserve our differences and our diversity, be they language or custom, that calls for different political systems than the old and tired ideas of nation-states. It is ironic (but perhaps not, perhaps it is very typical) that we established a Scottish parliament as the nation-state was just going so firmly out of fashion. Because it didn’t matter any more, that’s why we got it then. A hundred years ago it would have been inconceivable, because nation-states were important. But now, as I say, they really don’t figure for much. We can have one, thank you. I think what we have to do as writers is to think beyond that. There were those of us who were writers in Scotland at the time of the Devolution Referendum, so we had a job which was very simple – “very simple”, well it took three hundred years – but it was very obvious and it seemed that we had to support that plan. Now that it is done we can start – we must start to think beyond that, and to make connections beyond that, be they with England or Europe or North America or Afghanistan, or be they with realms which are non-human. I think these are the tasks that are ahead of us, and not the stuff about identity. As I say, I’m only half-way through my career and I can get on with what is actually important.

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What is important? My recent work has been much more ecologically based. I am interested in the world which is more-than-human, which is beyond the human. I believe that’s where our problems actually lie. I don’t really want to talk about this because I have just started to think about those things. But the role of the poet is not to be political but shamanic (it’s the only word I can think of), mediating between various worlds and bringing messages back and forth between them. I think John Burnside is in a similar realm of thought… Yes, and there’s a number of us. There is a group of us around here who think along similar lines, and act in similar but different ways. I wouldn’t call it a school of poets, but there is a group of us who are thinking along similar lines: myself and John, and Don Paterson is interested as well. Other poets (like John Glenday in Dundee) are working along similar lines, and I think Robert Crawford as well, only he handles it very differently. In the future it may seem that there was a school of poets of similar interest, whose “northernness” or “marginalness” – rather than “Scottishness” – was important. Anyway, we are on the fringes of Europe, next to the Atlantic, and the landscapes that we are familiar with became important to us. Who are those other writers who you would claim kinship with? Living ones or dead ones?… I am reading Rilke, who seems to be right back where he belongs. He seems to be crucial at the moment, a hundred years after he was writing. The twentieth century happened and thank God it’s over, and Rilke is back with us. He has been a crucial figure in our thinking. Elizabeth Bishop has been reassessed as – I hate these words – an environmentalist or ecological poet. Once we get over the fact that she was a woman (thank God that’s been dealt with), we are not any more talking about women writers and men writers, but we are getting over that distinction. As if writing was athletics, and women could only run with women and men could only run with men. But we seem to be forgetting that, thankfully.

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Do you know whom I have been reading lately a lot? – Hölderlin! I have been translating Hölderlin into Scots, you know, for similar reasons. I am not reading much contemporary poetry with any pleasure. I shouldn’t say it, but there is so little that seems relevant or doing anything. I’m also reading D.H. Lawrence, because he is very good at observing other creatures, and Penguin has just reissued his book Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Currently there are three other distinguished writers working in the School of English at St Andrews. What’s the advantage of this unusual situation? It is unusual and deliberate. It is not an accident. There’s a growing sense of our being a – so-called – “centre of excellence for poetry”. Robert Crawford is very keen that this be the case. Robert Crawford, Douglas Dunn, John Burnside and myself are practising poets who also teach here. Personally, I like just hanging out with these people, meet them in the corridors, conversing with them. It can be isolating working alone in your own garret, so I do value that I can come in here in the morning, and I like feeling a part of a wider community of writers. A minute ago, John was just handing in a couple of new poems for me to read. I like that interchange, it’s very casual but very important. Your last book is called Jizzen. What does the title refer to? It is an old Scots word for childbirth, for the act of being in labour with a child. I chose the word because at the time of writing I was having my own two children. So the very physical, organic business of giving birth was in the front of my mind. Also, it was the time of the Devolution Referendum when it seemed to be that Scotland was having a rebirth of its own. So the title functions both ways: personally and politically. Finally, I was wondering about the relevance of tradition to you. I’m thinking of the traces of the Scottish ballads that I feel there in “Mother-May-I” but at the same time there’s also a Gaelic line

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discernible in poems like “Meadowsweet”, and the same problem also seems to tie in with some of your strong female characters (such as the Queen of Sheba) whom you once described as “forms of energy”. Could you say more about that? I am very fond of the Scottish ballads. Sometimes, when I’m working in English – when I’m writing lyric poetry in English – I miss the sense of robust, demotic tradition that comes from the ballads through Fergusson and Burns. But the ballads are good on strong, defiant heroines, and maybe that’s what you can sense in some of my poems. I am acutely aware of having Scots and English available to me, and try to keep both about me. If I work in one, I miss the other. One solution is to combine them, but then you risk damaging your career, which has to unfold beyond Scotland, because this country is so small. I have published poems in Scots in English-language collections but now I think this is hopeless. It slews reaction to the books, and provides critics and lazy reviewers with a handy bin wherein to dump you – see also: “woman”. I feel I am, and guess always will be, in negotiation with the languages and cultures and tradition which surround and pressurise me. Not to mention gender. Not to mention negotiation with the wider world around us – you mentioned Europe. Not to mention the other negotiations one carries out between self and God, self and world, and yes, private self and public self. People sometimes say writing is about “expressing oneself”, which is ridiculous. It is the scene of our constant negotiation. St Andrews, 3 October 2001

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Bibliography: Kathleen Jamie (1962–)

Poetry Black Spiders. Edinburgh: The Salamander Press, 1982. With Andrew Greig. A Flame in Your Heart. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1986. The Way We Live. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1987. With Sean Mayne Smith. The Autonomous Region: Poems and Photographs from Tibet. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1993. The Queen of Sheba. Nexcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1994. Penguin Modern Poets 9, with John Burnside and Robert Crawford. London: Penguin, 1996. The Green Woman, with Caroline Saltzwedel. Hamburg: Hirundo Press, 1999. Jizzen. London: Picador, 1999. Mr and Mrs Scotland are Dead: Poems 1980–1994. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2002. The Tree House. London: Picador, 2004. This Weird Estate. Edinburgh: Scotland & Medicine, 2007. Waterlight: Selected Poems. Saint Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2007.

Non-fiction The Golden Peak: Travels in Northern Pakistan. London: Virago, 1992. Among Muslims: Meetings at the Frontiers of Pakistan [reissued with a new prologue and epilogue; originally published as The Golden Peak: Travels in Northern Pakistan]. London: Sort of Books, 2002. Findings. London: Sort of Books, 2005.

Editor With James McGonigal (eds). Full Strength Angels: New Writing Scotland 14. Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1996. With Donny O’Rourke (eds). Some Sort of Embrace: New Writing Scotland 15. Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1997. With Donny O’Rourke and Rody Gorman (eds). The Glory Signs: New Writing Scotland 16. Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1998.

Don Paterson: The Music of Consciousness Don Paterson is now not only acknowledged as one of the finest lyrical poets of his generation but also as a gifted translator, though he likes to see his translations of Machado and Rilke as “versions” rather than “translations”. When discussing diverse approaches to translating poetry from one language into another, he expresses a belief that poetry is a language-bound medium and that any given poem remains ultimately untranslatable. An accomplished jazz guitarist as well as poet, Paterson makes an extended comparison between the composition of poetry and music, and explains why poems should not be set to music. Keywords: Dundee; Antonio Machado; literary translation; jazz; Fife.

Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963 and after some years spent in the south of England, has settled down in Kirriemuir, J. M. Barrie’s birthplace in Angus. As with Bill Herbert, Dundee exerts a strong pull on Paterson’s imagination but, unlike Herbert, he does write for the Dundee audience – at least on occasion in his plays. His Dundonian accent comes through in conversation but otherwise (apart from local place names in God’s Gift to Women) it is difficult to notice localisms in the poem’s intonation or voice. Polished stanzas, poetic craftsmanship and elaborate diction are Paterson’s creative trademarks. He pays special attention to the musicality of language and, in contrast with Burnside, who is interested in “creating a space” in his poems, Paterson aims for closed compositions in which technique balances inspiration. His first poetry collection was Nil Nil, which won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) and a Scottish Arts Council Book Award in 1993, and in the same year he was elected Creative Writing Fellow at Dundee University. In 1994 he was included in the New Generation promotion. His second collection, God’s Gift to Women (1997), got the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize and a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. In the following interview Paterson speaks about his versions of Machado, which appeared as The Eyes in 1999. At the time when the conversation took place he was working on translations of Rainer Maria Rilke, which were not published until 2006, as Sonnets to Orpheus. Discussing the existence of the poem in different languages and in different realities, Paterson talks about the origination of the poem in a layer below and beyond the consciousness. He gives voice to a conviction that the true lyrical impetus results in poems which are

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independent of the conscious self. He shows humility towards a reality of poetry that is beyond the visible reality of self and intellect, and is not embarrassed to talk about old-fashioned notions like “inspiration”. He aligns himself with John Burnside and Kathleen Jamie, and describes a sort of northern spirituality in their works. While Burnside, for instance, is interested in the form of alchemy as it was imported to Europe from the Middle East, Paterson shows a greater concern for a Western European version of Zen Buddhism. Both endeavours may seem extraordinary in a Presbyterian Scottish context, broadening the modern spiritual and religious sensibility of a country that has been known for its dour Calvinism and as being strongly against any departure from established belief. Perhaps another link between Burnside and Paterson (not forgetting W.N. Herbert!) is that “process” is a keyword in their theories of composition. But Paterson is in a singular position because he is also a jazz guitarist, releasing records with the jazz-folk band Lammas. He is remarkably qualified to comment on the realities of two different art forms (music and poetry) in terms of inspiration, composition, performance, end result and reception, as well as the practice of setting poetry to music, which is a particularly sensitive issue among poets writing in English today. Paterson is Poetry Editor at Picador, and has edited a number of anthologies – including 101 Sonnets (1999), a selection of poems by Robert Burns (2001) and New British Poetry (with Charles Simic, 2004). He published The White Lie: New and Selected Poems in 2001, and Landing Light (which received, again, several important literary awards) in 2003. He has written a number of plays for the Dundee Repertory Theatre – such as The Land of Cakes (with Gordon McPherson) and A’body’s Aberdee, both in 2001 – as well as for the radio – including Kailyard Blues (1999) and The Latecomers (2001). Like Frank Kuppner, he is strongly attracted to how aphoristic wisdom works or does not work, and has published three collections of aphorisms, The Book of Shadows (2004) and The Blind Eye (2007) Best Thought, Worst Thought (2008). He is a part-time Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews, where I met him on a sunny afternoon in February 2003.

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Your recent book, The Eyes, contains “versions” of the great Spanish poet, Antonio Machado. Well, who is speaking these lines in the poem “Profession of Faith”: “I’ll make you, lord, as you made me, restore / the soul you gifted me…”? Paterson or Machado? I think the point about working on a book like The Eyes was that you identify a certain spiritual kinship. I was reading Machado and I said, “Yes, that’s what I think.” And the more I read him, the more I identified with his credo until I came to the point where it seemed exactly my own. Of course my own was just being modified as a result of reading him, because when you’re in the presence of a superior wisdom and if you’re listening properly, you can’t help but be changed by the experience. But you couldn’t say that in this version Machado is speaking, because he isn’t speaking any more. For better or worse, I think it is probably me (or rather, some new version of myself that arose) that’s speaking. I don’t think these questions are important at all, though. It’s a poem that’s speaking, and the question is whether the poem speaks to you. What drew you to Machado? Did you share the credo of Machado, who wanted to write “for the people”? No, not really. But I did want to write a book – I did want to make a book, I didn’t write it – that was more accessible than the books I had done previously. I wanted to write something more open and lyrical. I thought that the best way to start that kind of project was to “steal” the voice of someone else who could do it, and had clearly thought about these things. Reading Machado, I realised that he was the one. He isn’t nearly as well known to English readers as he should have been, and I thought I could try to put some of his ideas into wider circulation. I was trying to honour him and what he said, and disseminate his work a little further. But my Spanish is catastrophic and I always had to read his poems with a parallel crib. I had read a bunch of Spanish poetry for a long time, and was attracted to the line that runs from Juan de la Cruz to Machado: those aspects that have to do with a darker spiritual road or the via negativa. I’m temperamentally very much drawn to the nada as a spiritual thing and it strikes me as one of the very few elegant Western accommodations of Buddhist ideas. Mostly when that stuff hits the European languages it comes out as

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nonsensically paradoxical or boringly self-referential – with the exception of Machado and a few other writers like Cioran. John Burnside said that in Spanish poems the ideas are “shining through a muddy pool and you can see a glimmer down there, much of which is being lost in translation”. Do you agree? I think it is probably true, but it’s true for everything in translation. In any real poem you only have a glimmer of the truth, and that’s the first thing which is likely to go in translation, because (for me at least) much of the truth in poetry resides on the surface of the language and not in the depths. The surface is the one that’s impossible to translate, because those things of which poets are most proud depend wholly on idiomatic circumstances, tiny acoustic resonances and tiny shades of meaning and association that can have no direct equivalent in the host language. Therefore I’m very sceptical about the possibilities of translation. But I think there are various subterfuges, and those subterfuges have to change, depending on the poet you translate. You must be prepared to change them from one poem to the next poem and from one line to the next line. Your strategy has to be absolutely fluid if you are trying to catch the snake of a wholly subjective truth, though the whole process is impossibly subjective. There’s no method, no operation, just a messy procedure, but that’s what writing any kind of poem should feel like. In some poets like Machado or Borges the ideas come through partly because of the absolute clarity of thought and partly because so many of the concerns in their poems are primarily philosophical. There is a clear argumentative structure, so at least these are things for which you can find an analogue. But for particular images and etymological histories you can never find an equivalent. You have to find something else which might have the same effect on the reader in the host tongue, which might be a very different thing. I’m trying to version Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, which is a very different kind of poetry, and I find that so much of what I thought I’d learnt in the process of versioning the Machado poems is absolutely useless when it comes to Rilke. So you learn a lot. Or maybe nothing. Is that why you call poems in The Eyes “versions”?

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Certainly. Some of them are quite close, some of them are pretty far away and some don’t exist in the original text at all. There are a couple of poems in the book that Machado didn’t write, ones that I just threw in because that voice was coming through at the time. I wouldn’t say it was enigmatic dictation or anything like that; they just wouldn’t have belonged in my own book. Apparently, then you don’t agree with Edwin Morgan, who says that everything can be translated… I always agree with Edwin Morgan, because he is so clever, and usually turns out to be right anyway. [Laughs.] Everything is translatable, of course it is, but into what? Everything can find an incarnation in another culture and in another language. I believe that all the old truths are the same as the new truths and they just have to find their incarnation in the culture of the age and they can be useful again. Similarly a truth in a language could conceivably be represented in another. But the whole process is so subjective that you can’t possibly verify it. If it works for the reader – that’s the only test that exists. But Eddie is a perfect translator. He translated Gilgamesh. Everyone else who translates Gilgamesh works from cribs but Eddie sat down with an Accadian grammar [laughs], and learnt the language. Similarly, when he translates from the Hungarian, he uses his own crib. That’s serious translation and you have to respect that. At the same time, I think there might conceivably be only two stages of grace in translation: either you are bilingual and you know both languages or you know next to nothing. And if you know next to nothing, at least you approach the whole project with an utterly resigned humility… [Laughs.] Anything in the middle, such as a little knowledge, is very dangerous. Just a few days ago, in his Edinburgh Lecture Alastair Reid defined translation as “coming up with the same poem in another linguistic form”. Do you agree? No, I don’t agree that it is possible. Alastair Reid is one of my favourite translators in the whole world but I don’t think I can accept that. I have one of Alastair’s exquisite translations of Borges blue-tacked next to my computer. But I think he’s wrong. A word in a poem is a

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unique nexus of different linguistic, acoustic, etymological and semantic strands. It exists as a culture-specific node and not as a set of co-ordinates that can be imported into another tongue. It sits there like a painting in its paint. I know that as a poet, because those things that I’m most proud of in a poem depend on the most vestigial, tiny chimes of music and sense. These are the things that you read as your biggest success: not the great ideas but those tiny, beautiful chimes that make a good line. It’s like trying to translate a piece of music, which is a meaningless thing: it is what it is. If you do something with it, it becomes something else. If we accepted Alastair’s definition, we’d be talking about translation as an operation. And it cannot be. If it’s going to be a poem, it has to be a process, and this has to be completed by a poet. There are some fantastically bad translations of Rilke, but the best ones are in a sense the worst, because they translate him literally. It’s not in English, it’s in some kind of horrific translatorese, yet something sometimes comes through that’s lost in most of the versified versions. But in order for that to become a poem, there has to be a poet. A lot of translators who are not poets try to versify poems. But you can’t write a poem if you’re not a poet. You have no sense of how to balance the demands of form and sense and music or indeed the complexity of the calculations involved. The poem is at the complete mercy of the relative skills of the poet writing in the new language, which means that in a project like the Machado you have to approach the poem with some humility. Occasionally, you see these lovely pairings where you get Philippe Jaccottet translated by Derek Mahon; they are two heavyweights. You can’t judge how close the original and the translation are but at least you know that they are equivalent talents and equivalent literary sensibilities. What’s the difference between the composition of music and the composition of poetry? They are very similar, except in the composition of music what you are composing is a blueprint for a performance and when you are composing a poem it is the performance itself. There is no halfway stage in poetry: your writing is the performance. Despite the fact that in music the blueprint consists of nothing but a code (dots on a piece of paper), you can confirm instantly that Bach, for example, is a vastly superior talent and you can see it by the dots on the page. It’s instantly

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verifiable, whereas poetry is very subjective. People can still indulge the fantasy that they are Shakespeare or Milton, because there is no code. You can’t do that with Bach; you look at the page and it’s absolutely beautiful. Of course, there are grey areas in music as well. But it can be coded because of the stable nature of its material: it works in pure vibrations and their real relationships to one another: relationships they would still have even if we weren’t in the universe. It’s a superior art form, a purer art form, to poetry. Poetry is probably the most interesting thing you can do with your consciousness alone but music goes far deeper into the spirit. When composers take back a line from a dream and write it down and wake up in the morning, the line is still beautiful. But if you take back a poem from your dream and you write it down, when you wake up in the morning it’s always rubbish… Poetry doesn’t pay its line as deep, whereas music goes down right through under the threshold of the unconscious and unites the spirit. But in terms of processes, for me music and poetry are almost identical, which is to do with the relationship between structure and content (they’re the same thing in music and the poem aspires to that), with embellishment and with making sure that every single thing that goes into a poem has some component of forward motion. You can’t put in a line just for the sake of pure decoration: it is always, even if very quietly, advancing the plot. Once you described poetry as “the music of consciousness”. What does it mean? It was not to pay a particularly big compliment; it was really to describe the limitations of poetry. That is not to say it doesn’t affect the unconscious, but it doesn’t resonate directly. It resonates mostly sympathetically, at a symbolic level, rather than on the level of literal vibration, which is how music works. Music can touch the strings of you; poetry has to work to make the air sing around them. Music affects your whole being and it shakes you up physically. It makes you dance. 8 Hz will make your damn eyeballs vibrate. Poetry isn’t quite like that – it’s made of a clever compromise between its semantic and physical properties. It proposes a sort of heretical confusion between sound and sense, it behaves as if they were the same thing; it unites music and language, and we write like that, with the brain leading the ear one minute and the ear leading the brain the next. It is

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trying to do an impossible thing: uniting the beast and the angel by using our unconscious musical intuitions to make up the shortfall between what language can normally articulate, and the real range of our experience and feelings in the world. Metaphor – the dialogue of comparison – gets us so far, attending to the music of words a little further. Maybe that’s the best thing you could say about poetry. Not long ago you gave a talk called “Why shouldn’t poetry be set to music?”. I think it was a fascinating topic to be chosen by someone who is both a poet and a musician. But coming from Hungary, where there is a substantial tradition of setting poems to music, I was wondering if you were talking about English poetry or poetry in general? Setting words you don’t understand to music sounds fine, because it allows you to be much freer. When you set Spanish poetry to music, presumably the result is an abomination in Spanish, but for everyone else it’s just fine, because what you are doing, honestly saying, is a lovely way of shaping the air. It’s very difficult if you know the language, as a sensitive setting, involves a whole bunch of other culturally specific considerations, maybe too many… I love hearing languages sung that I don’t understand, but I’d be just as happy if they’d made the language up. I do regard great poems set to music a complete abomination. I’m trying to soften my position on this but I just find myself going more hard-line about it. Good poems are also meticulous musical compositions and those can only be betrayed by someone coming along and adding more music. Poetry doesn’t need more. It is absolutely self-contained. The basic idea is that when you do that, you make poetry into something else, and I think maybe that’s the kindest thing to say. You are transforming it, and it is no longer the poem it was. The poem doesn’t remain a poem, because you added something to it. From the poet’s point of view, you want to keep the poem open to readers and to many different emotional interpretations. But when you have set it to music, you have interpreted it in a pretty tyrannical fashion that doesn’t allow for another interpretation, because a setting is an emotional interpretation. That’s something we normally leave open to the readers. I think it’s wrong and I think a lot of it comes through a complete misunderstanding of how poetry works. It is ignorance on the part of the composer, really terrible ignorance. Librettists and lyricists

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are very good at leaving room for the music, as they can compose words in terms of space, in terms of using the right kind of lexis (there are a lot of Latinate words that sound very bad when you try to sing them so it’s often better if the language tends to the Anglo-Saxon), and also in terms of what they can allow the composer to express. But what they leave on the page would be a non-starter as a poem, because it’s so flat. There’s no such space in a poem: add something else and you get either a contradiction or a melodramatic effect. Do you have any personal experience? Uh-huh, one or two unfortunate personal experiences. Initially, when you’re younger, you are very flattered when people say: oh, I’d love to set your poem. So you say: yes, of course! It’s like me saying to a composer: I’d like to set your music to something else. But music is more malleable, you know. There are certain kinds of music that can perform different roles: they can be foregrounded, or they can be supportive or they can be used in a cinematic or theatrical context. Poetry is not like that: it can’t operate on the level of being a background to anything without betraying what it is. If you want to shape the air, just shape the air. Leave my wee poem alone… Have you tried writing in other genres apart from poetry? I’ve done radio drama and I have some stage plays written for the local community… I can dump a lot of jokes in them. I have come to think of poetry as a more serious activity, so most of the jokes go in the drama. They have to go somewhere. Make them laugh and make them cry and all that… I like drama but I’m not a proper dramatist like Eddie Morgan; I don’t look beyond a local Dundee audience. Apart from that, well, I write aphorisms. There’s a book of those out soon. Bad habit. Do you write for the theatre in Dundee? That’s right. There’s a very good rep theatre in Dundee. It has a national reputation, but essentially the audience is drawn from the local community. It’s really nice to write for the people I know very well, because it means that I can write in the vernacular. Frankly, any-

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one coming from more than ten miles away would find certain passages very hard to follow, because the speech is so specific to Dundee. The Dundee dialect is quite hard to penetrate if you’re not born there. I like the kind of warmth you get from speaking an exclusive language like that. It’s very intimate. I’ve done a few poems recently in Scots. It is stupid, because you know that people are not going to understand them outside Scotland, but there’s an intimate register in it that you can’t get from a, well, “less exclusive” speech. What’s your relationship with Dundee? Dundee exerts a terrible grip on us. It’s daunting. Imaginatively, it’s a strange place and all the writers living in Dundee pretty much see it that way. I don’t know why. I mean it’s not very special to look at – well, it is actually quite special to look at. I hated it for a long time so much that I had to leave. And then the older I got… I dunno. It has a village mentality and it feels like a walled city: everybody knows everybody else despite the fact that it’s quite a fair size. But I don’t live there now. I live in Kirriemuir, which is J. M. Barrie’s town. As a writer, what does it feel like living in “Peter Pan Country”? I live in the same street where he was born… You are aware of Barrie’s presence because everything has a Peter Pan theme: the barber’s shop, the pubs, you see it everywhere you go, even the kids go to school with a little Peter Pan badge on their school sweatshirts. You would think that was the only thing he ever wrote, Peter Pan. His mark is everywhere, though. He donated this weird camera obscuracum-cricket pavilion, which is right at the top of the town. You edited a selection of poems by Robert Burns not long ago. How important is Scottish tradition to you? I think it has become more so. It was something that was just background noise for a long time. But you are brought up with Burns, and I think it is the same for everyone. It was a long road to come back by, but the tradition has definitely become more important to me. I’m glad, personally, that I took a particular route through other literatures, because I know people who are immersed in Scottish literature to a

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very unhealthy degree. But all wee nations overestimate their importance. Scotland is a small nation, it didn’t produce that many geniuses, you have to put it in some kind of perspective. What you find these days especially, because of the nationalist aspirations of the country, is that we are going down the road of, well, the compulsory celebration of the minor talent. As if we had to pretend we are the size of Germany with the same depth in the squad, or something. I don’t think it’s healthy, especially in poetry. I mean it’s not like art is a democracy. You speak with a Scottish accent, you use the occasional Scots and Gaelic words, and you have written poems in Scots, for example “Homesick Paterson”. Do you see yourself as a Scottish poet? I know there are two problematic terms involved… Well, it comes up, you know. No, I wouldn’t mind if someone called me a poet. It’s absolutely accurate, it’s one of the ways you might fairly be described – male, Dundonian, heterosexual, anarchoBuddhist, whatever. But I don’t feel Scottish. One of the reasons why I wanted to move back to Scotland was that I didn’t want to feel Scottish any more. I came back here because I was sick of the sound of my own accent, and this is the only place where you don’t hear it. Whereas in London, you know, I did feel like a Scottish poet. Here, no, I don’t. It’s a nice thing: you become totally unselfconscious about your Scottishness. So if somebody asks you that kind of question in Scotland, it’s like: how does it feel to have toenails? You know, I don’t think about it very much. [Laughs.] Kathleen Jamie says that there’s a group of poets based in Fife and St Andrews to whom their “northernness” matters more than their nationality. Would you include yourself in this group? Yeah, it’s a spiritual thing, a kind of Magnetic North Trip. A lot of us that share those concerns in their writing, for some reason, came to live in this part of the world. I don’t know why, it’s very odd… I think we are all very different kinds of poets, but it is a strand that runs through our work… Robert [Crawford], Kath, Burnside, John Glenday… Almost a Northern European spiritual thing, Calvin meets the Tao. I don’t know… I’m too close to it to understand it.

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Your poem “Profession of Faith” is included in a recent anthology of Scottish religious poetry. How important is your religious background to you? It is important but not in a good way. I’m not religious; I don’t think I have a religious faith. But partly because I was inaugurated in a Calvinist background as a child, I had to reject it by a very circuitous route. I rejected it by initially getting very religious in my teens, and joined the Pentecostal Church, which is fairly extreme. Then I got very anti-Christian for a while. But it’s not like that any more; hopefully I’ve gone beyond that. And Buddhism? Yes, Buddhism and other eastern philosophies… The stuff that has the most resonance and relevance for me has been the Buddhist stuff. I’m convinced by the truth of the dharma as firstly a psychological description of the condition, and as a tool for correcting it, and I tend to gravitate towards those things in Western literature that reflect similar concerns – with the present moment, with the paradox of consciousness. Cioran and Machado and Rilke, and Borges maybe more than anyone, actually. You said once: “The reader may be witness to the miracle, but can never participate in it; poetry must remain a private transaction between the author and God.” Could you explain it? Well, it was an aphorism, which is why it sounds so ridiculous – they have to. But I was referring to the actual moment when you feel – even it’s hard to use the word – but when you feel inspired, about which we can know nothing. For me it’s usually twenty percent of the poem, if you’re lucky, and the rest you have to make it up: it must be composed, and it’s donkey work, and it’s sweat, and it takes a long time, because you are trying to match the quality of the inspired bit. I think I was referring to that. For me it is a miracle and has nothing to do with reason. It happens entirely outside reason or sometimes even any consciousness of there being an inspiration. In that case you might well leave it there, but after that you have a responsibility to make it a piece of public art, you’d better finish it [laughs], but essentially that

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first part – you’re not aware of writing it for any reason other than a kind of spiritual assuagement. You have spoken about the importance of prosody in your writing. To what extent does metre and form help you find the “essence” or the “spirit” in poetry? Oh, completely, especially in terms of the strategy. Because writing poetry is a compositional strategy… That’s where there are very clear parallels between musical composition and poetry. You can’t talk about musical composition as distinct from structure, it’s nonsense, and it is the same in poetry. Some people might completely want to rely on just the argument of the poem, the fact that it exhibits some kind of a line length. For me, though, if I can get the rules and their number right for the material, the more play I’ll have within it, and the more unconscious the process actually becomes. So I am much more likely to say crazy things I didn’t think I knew, working metrically and with rhymes – that way the conscious bit of the brain is just occupied with the syntactic consequences those rules have for the material… But the weirdness of the material you then dig up to naturalise that syntax – that’s the unconscious part. But also in terms of expression and emphasis… To write metrically allows you much more play. Besides, why throw away the metricality that is already naturally present in the language? Why would you want to do that? What possible freedom do you think you’re gaining? I refused to use the words “free verse”, as there’s nothing free in it. You have to define these things in a completely neutral way. “Unmetred verse”, “irregular-lined verse” – great, let’s talk about that. But to set them up in opposition – one free, the other straitjacketed – that way is daft, because for a start they all demonstrate different degrees of formal parallelism, so it’s a continuum. In certain kinds of poems it is more appropriate to be less formal than in another, sure. They’re just appropriate strategies depending on what you are writing, but free verse became a belief system for some folk. Or “organic verse”, which is worse – heavens, in the organic, symmetry is everywhere… In The Eyes your poems are arranged in alphabetical order, whereas in God’s Gift to Women the titles take the names of railway line stations…

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Nobody has noticed that, you’re the first person to mention that. [Laughs.] People say: it’s a very interesting sequence the poems are in. The alphabet is the best way to randomise a sequence. I think the sequence in which the poems occur in God’s Gift to Women is the sequence of the stations as you would find them on the old DundeeNewtyle line. So it’s a geographical sequence, but I don’t know if it works particularly well, to be honest with you. I think the trouble with sequences is that you’ll always find yourself writing two or three poems for no other reason than your contractual obligation to complete the sequence, and they are probably not very good, because you wouldn’t have written them otherwise. So there are two or three poems in the book that I wish I really hadn’t written. Well, I wanted to ask how important is order to you in a metaphysical or social sense? That’s a huge one! [Laughs.] I think it’s absolutely crucial. I think art tends to reveal a secret order: it’s not necessarily a hierarchical order, and it’s not necessarily a progressive sequence. But poetry is very good at revealing the code of an event or a situation. But there are certain kinds of order that are wrongly imposed – I was reading a book of aphorisms by somebody the other day, and they weren’t bad, but he numbered them all – and it’s as if he’d added a certain kind of sense of something cumulative, which was bound just to disappoint. The point with the Machado book was actually to demonstrate that there was no order, so what I wanted to suggest was that where these matters are concerned, the deeper spiritual ones, it’s inappropriate to talk in terms of a progression. Social orders are just problematic. There are certain situations in one’s life where democracy should not be a guiding principle and there are others where it must be. I think people are crazy when they assert that democracy is a template to which all sorts of order should aspire. You have to admit the complexity of a system, and once you’ve done that, certain eventualities are met by this strategy while others are met by that. You should try not to simplify that, you’ve got to be fluid. Are you interested in politics at all?

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Yeah, I’m not apolitical and I’m not a political naïve… I have my convictions, I suppose. What do you think about the current state of Scottish devolution? Well, I’m a republican. An independent Scotland could be a very good idea. I’d like not to be a nationalist, and the only way not to be a nationalist is to have a nation you can relax in. It would mean that different political viewpoints would be able to be expressed far more unselfconsciously, because you would have a structure to do that within. Prior to the creation of those structures the arguments get necessarily simplified. Things could go very bad in May in the elections, because the Scottish Labour Party supports Tony Blair over Iraq… I dunno, an independent Scotland might at least be able to distance itself, if it had the sense, from the hideous death-throes of the US empire, and not cop it when finally it goes down. I mean “some of my best friends are…”, but… Once you said that “word and object are the same thing”. What does it mean? Well, I don’t really believe that, but at some level poets do. I think one of the powerful things about poetry is that it sets itself up as being a kind of invocatory art. Invocation is about bringing things down by calling their names, which is on one level a nonsense, you know, but it’s about acknowledging that language is also a real thing, and words are real objects in time. Does that have anything to do with your idea that poetry is a form of shamanism? I think it is shamanistic, and that is the reason why the gene pool still throws up poets: a few every generation. The problem is that at a conscious level the community has forgotten what poets are for, and poets seem to have forgotten what they are for – but if the two sides could be brought together again, and start speaking – this is called “readership” – well, things might improve. But if we start to think of other poets and the academia as our natural audience for poetry – well, poetry will be dead very soon. You look back at what poets used to do

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and why people used to turn to them instinctively at critical times in their lives (and still do): it had to do with, if not moral instruction, then with spiritual guidance, or at least a sense that their job was to assuage the spirit in its mad love, or bereavement – or give a sense of spiritual purpose, spiritual framing, at moments of commitment or joy or despair. Because poetry is supposed to be something we can all do, it sounds fatally hubristic, you know, setting yourself up as a great spiritual guide. But it’s not the way to do it, you know. I’m no better qualified to talk about anything than the next laddie, except in this regard: I could do this thing with language and I can perhaps put these things – well, not me, but some poet could perhaps put these things better than nearly anyone else – and in doing so reveal a hidden order, how this thing you’re feeling ties in with everything else in the world. It’s not insight – I think mere poetic articulation carries with it an expectation of and potential for some spiritual purpose, which is why so much poetry disappoints folk when they go looking for it, and the triviality or the self-obsession of its subject matter is revealed. And that’s just one possibility. That doesn’t mean that I’m setting myself up as anyone who knows anything, it is just meant to say that I’m a composer of verses, and as such the job is to try and make other people think about what the nature of things is. Poems stop people in their tracks, offer them some brief moment of illumination or wakefulness in their lives: that’s what you want to do. But if you are going to do that – you aren’t going to get far with the wordplay or the anecdotage, the wee ludic games, the post-modern nonsense, or the recognition comedy that’s supposed to be as high as we should aspire as poets these days. Because of that loss of our identity, what happened is that most of the aspiration and most of the ambition has gone out of poetry. Most poetry nowadays is fantastically unambitious: a sad wee poem about the end of your relationship or a funny wee poem about how the fridge wouldn’t fit in that space in the kitchen or a bonkers wee poem about five unrelated things, with a couple of allusions to Baudrillard and Heisenberg or something. But that is what happens when you leave the community – for which we can partly blame Modernism. I’m being inarticulate because this is a real big problem: where is the audience for poetry? Why has poetry lost a general readership? – by

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“general” I mean “non-academic” and “non-practising”… Sorry, I’ll shut up. And often people say that fiction is the genre of the day… Yes, in one of your cynical moments you are almost tempted to say that the spirit moves on, and fiction is where it’s at now, and that it has almost taken over the moral responsibilities of poetry… But of course it’s not true. The project is totally different. Poetry is taught in Creative Writing workshops at many Western universities, including St Andrews. It seems to suggest that poetry is a craft or skill that can be acquired in a specific university course that you pay for… That’s right. It is certainly a craft that could be acquired, but it’s useless unless you have talent as a poet. So if you don’t have a talent, there’s no point in polishing your craft, there’s no point in being a competent versifier. On the other hand, you can have people with talent – there’s nothing more rewarding than seeing them getting the craft right, and the craft is the difference between being able to make a poem or not. But the idea of folk leaving all these courses as formally accredited poets… Ugh! When I was much younger, I remember Douglas [Dunn] always quoting Frost, saying that “poet” is a praise word, it’s for other people to call you a poet. I dunno if I buy that or not, but at least it suggests there should be a bit of humility involved. But if there is a shamanistic side to the calling…well, then there can be too many poets. It would make the office redundant. You can’t have lots of shamans in a community. That’s silly. They could command no attention, no silence. In Canada they started this “Poets Against the War” movement: I think they got up to about thirteen hundred poets against the war… It renders the designation “poet” completely meaningless. A poem against the war, maybe. Just one great poem would have made a lot more difference. But how would we hear it with thirteen hundred poets drowning it out? You work now in the School of English at St Andrews. What courses do you teach?

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I’m part-time so I’m just teaching in the Creative Writing course and I give one or two lectures to undergraduates. The teaching I’ve done so far I just greatly enjoyed. There are some great people here, this is a fantastic department, and I mean not just in the Creative Writing staff. Isn’t there a certain degree of irony in that having left school at the age of sixteen and having acquired your knowledge in public libraries, you teach now at a famous university? Yeah, it’s uncomfortable if I stop and think about it. When I was younger I was quite detained by the fact that I didn’t go to a university. But no, I don’t think it’s a big deal any more. I really wish I’d gone to university, it would have saved me a lot of time: depending on who your teachers are – well, no, I guess, you find your teachers anyway. I regret it, but because I wanted to be a musician and play my guitar, I didn’t have time. And you do feel stupid, having railed against the academy for so long… But it’s taken a while to understand it. St Andrews has historically always been one, but the academy is a real refuge for poets now. It’s the one place these days they can be set something useful to do… It’s a nice thing, though, that you can become an erudite poet without having to go through university education… No, it’s just a two edged thing. The nice thing is that you take your own route through it, and you end up being at home in very diverse disciplines. The great cost is that you read quite haphazardly, but while there are terrible omissions in your reading, you have read a whole bunch of stuff that you wouldn’t have read if you’d gone to university. You know books that other people don’t know because they’re not in the canon. Where you are patchy is the core stuff that you should have read. I still try to catch up. But at least, you think, you have an unusual pattern of ignorance… In one of his essays John Burnside has characterised poetry “as an instrument and a discipline, a means by which I might discover what I knew about myself and the world”, and you have also described music and poetry as “disciplines”. Did you mean it in a similar sense?

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Yeah, in a very similar sense. They are disciplines because they are processes, not operations. Poetry is a discipline: it is a kind of study which you sign up for very early on in life, when you understand that it is going to be an ongoing education. True disciplines can’t be completed. You have to maintain them and you have to continue to study them, because they are open-ended. It is important to stress that, and if you don’t, a lot of people sign up not realising there is a discipline. They would hate the connotations of the word. I remember sitting with Sean O’Brien in a pub once. We were both knackered from a day’s writing, in which all either of us had accomplished was scrubbing out one line we’d written the day before. He said, “Poetry, Don, is dead hard, you know.” It wasn’t much of an aphorism but I thought, aye, you’re damn right. But there has to be that disciplined structure if you’re going to bring anything home worth the winning. The trick is to be in love with poetry, to stay in love with it, and then it doesn’t feel like work. St Andrews, 28 February 2003

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Bibliography: Don Paterson (1963–)

Poetry Nil Nil. London: Faber and Faber, 1993. God’s Gift to Women. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. The Eyes: A Version of Antonio Machado. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. The White Lie: New and Selected Poems. Saint Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2001. Landing Light. London: Faber and Faber, 2003.

Non-fiction The Book of Shadows. London: Picador, 2004. The Blind Eye: A Book of Late Advice. London: Faber, 2007. Best Thought, Worst Thought: On Art, Sex, Work, and Death: Aphorisms. Saint Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2008.

Translation Sonnets to Orpheus: A Version of Rilke’s Die Sonette an Orpheus. London: Faber and Faber, 2006.

Editor 101 Sonnets: From Shakespeare to Heaney. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. With Jo Shapcott (eds). Last Words: New Poetry for the New Century. London: Picador, 1999. Robert Burns: Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 2001. With Clare Brown (eds). Don’t ask me what I mean: Poets in Their Own Words. London: Picador, 2003. All the Poems You Need to Say Goodbye. London: Picador, 2004. With Charles Simic (eds). New British Poetry. London: Picador, 2004.

Tom Leonard: The Sound of Poetry Tom Leonard’s poetry has been identified as one that has been nourished by Glasgow working class speech forms but in the present interview he outlines other contexts that have contributed to the creation of his unique urban voice – including a literary version of European avant-garde and American beat poetry. His work has been defined by an active interest in how linguistic markers of social difference break down readerly expectations and part of its significance lies in Leonard’s constant search for ways to contribute to the initiation of democratic dialogues with the past. Keywords: Avant-garde; Glasgow; dialect poetry; sound poetry; James “B.V.” Thomson; Paisley

Tom Leonard was born in 1944 in Glasgow. Although he denies any special affinity with the place, it is a fact that he has never left the west-coast capital of Scotland, and indeed he has dedicated the greater part of his work to the representation of Glasgow working-class life. He was a dropout from the university but finally graduated there, after re-entering in 1971. He keeps fond memories of Edwin Morgan, his then tutor at the English Department. During the university years he became a member of Philip Hobsbaum’s Glasgow Group, whose other members at that time included Alasdair Gray, Tom McGrath, James Kelman and Aonghas Macneacail. Leonard started as a sound poet in the Avant-garde movement of the 1960s Glasgow Renaissance but in the following interview he lays down a wider European framework for this aspect of his poetry. Influences on his work are principally from America: the speech rhythm of William Carlos Williams was a formative stimulus, but perhaps equally important is the radical, Whitmanesque energy of the Beat Poets, most notably of Allan Ginsberg. However, his more wellknown works are the poems he composed in the Glasgow dialect. Leonard is not only proud of his working-class origin, but makes use of class antagonism as a constant source of emotional impetus. The phonetic transcription of Glasgow pronunciation looks strange in print not only for foreign readers but also for native speakers of English. One strategy to gain a better access to what, essentially, seems an alien language on the page, is reading the lines out loud. Leonard’s much-discussed translocation of Glasgow idioms and urban speech into dramatic monologues also implies a return to the spoken word, to the voice, in poetry. So when we read out the lines, Leonard gives

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voice to the culturally dispossessed, using our voices to represent their voices. He embraces elements of urban popular culture (football, gossip, news, television) and uses them to illustrate abstract conflicts regarding the possession of basic human rights. Like many other poets of west-coast origin, including Dunn and Morgan, Leonard’s politics are leftist but, admittedly, more radical than either of those other poets. Often he can be sly and ironic, and sometimes even humorous, but is always deadly serious about the role of literature. On the profoundest level, Leonard’s work points to questions of social and linguistic discrimination, and challenges established views about the rights of access to culture and education. In a word, he probes the fundamental questions of democracy. His works include: Six Glasgow Poems (1969), Poems (1973), Intimate Voices: Selected Work 1965–1983 (1984), Situations Theoretical and Contemporary (1988) and Nora’s Place (1990). Reports from the Present: Selected Work 1982–1994 was published by Jonathan Cape in 1995 and another recent collection of his work was published as access to the silence (2004). Since then he came out with two new collections: inside looking in: 12 Poems (also in 2004) and Being a Human Being (2006). He edited Radical Renfrew (1990), an anthology of radical poetry from the west of Scotland written between 1789–1914. His prose includes the political essay On the Mass Bombing of Iraq and Kuwait (1991) and Places of the Mind: The Life and Work of James Thomson (“B.V.”) (1993). I visited Tom Leonard in his home in Glasgow in the spring of 2003. The interview was first published in Scottish Studies Review 5(2), Autumn 2004.

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Edwin Morgan has a terrific poem called “Interview”, which is really an interview with a sound poet. When the sound poet is asked about his favourite sound, there is silence. What is your favourite sound? I think Edwin is really having a sly dig at sound poets here. What’s my favourite sound? I don’t know… Maybe my wife’s breathing on my arm when she’s asleep…the blackbirds in the morning at this time of the year…it means that they’ve arrived. These are the only two I can think of just right away… I mean there are a lot of other sounds I like: it’s a difficult question, even more difficult than being asked who my favourite composer is. Do you still create sound poetry? No, I haven’t really done that for about fifteen years now. I feel that I pushed in a particular direction and I had gone as far as I could go in that direction, and then I just left that. There was a particular phase in the seventies, a generation of sound poets who were in fact a generation older than me. My own work in sound poetry only amounted to an hour’s work altogether on tape recorders, also using placards. But as I said I had gone as far as I could with it and then I just wanted to do something else… I think what I got involved in was pursuing a particular type of personality. Although I was exploring different emotional registers, I got drawn into what was almost like a demonic personality that was taking over in a way that I found useful in making certain work based on texts from Kierkegaard and the Book of Job. At the time I was working in the house. I didn’t have a sound studio; I covered a wee cupboard with egg boxes to sound proof it and I was driving my children nuts, trying to make these things. They still talk about the terrible sounds I was making in the room making these things. [Laughs.] But, yes, I might go back to some of it, because I’ve still got my tape recorder I used then, although things have moved on in electronics since I was really involved. What drew you to the awareness of language, voice and authority in poetry? I suppose one of the reasons I’m interested in particular types of voices is because I have different types of voices myself. People living

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in a city can have different voices, particularly. Everybody has got different registers on different social occasions but I think cities can throw up people who are on the crossroads of different languages. From an early age I was aware that I would have to change my voice and I was aware of being corrected (in inverted commas) for using the wrong words. I was aware that, for instance, my mother spoke using a lot of words that were Scottish, but then she would tell me to speak “properly”, as she called it. But I think it’s a very common phenomenon, and not just in Scotland: you get it in different cities where the urban accent is looked down on, and there are parents who worry about their children not getting on in jobs or to university if they speak like that. So although they speak with a vernacular accent themselves, they tell their children to speak differently, and sometimes they might even punish their children for speaking the same way as they do themselves. I know that I was aware of that variety of voices. When I was about twelve and I was at a school holiday camp, I remember I went on the stage as a kind of mimic comedian, and did a whole load of voices from different parts of Britain as my act. From my childhood that variety must have interested me, but I was also aware that it was something to do with identity. When I was at school and in the English class, I really enjoyed writing the fortnightly essay we were asked to write. I was about thirteen or fourteen, I would love Dickens at that time, and I would write, I suppose, in a fairly high register in my essays. I didn’t write in the vernacular, but then there was no orthography for that: there was no written variety of the spoken language, which again is a common phenomenon with dialects. One of the books I found really interesting when I was on holiday in Malta about five years ago was a book by Geoffrey Hull called The Malta Language Question: A Case Study in Cultural Imperialism, and it talked about how the Maltese language had no written form until the nineteenth century, when the different factions – Italian, English – set about trying to compose forms of written Maltese for the population. These things that can seem so particular, local, specific or provincial are very common, and are found in different parts of the world. So apparently you agree with Edwin Morgan, who said that a poet can have many voices…

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Well, I think my work shows that. I don’t have a single voice that permeates my work. My work is made up of different voices: some high register English, some very low register, some written in phonetic dialect, some very formal, and some very informal. So I’ve had to have different voices in my work, because I have different voices in my life. I didn’t have an abiding or what I would call a “colonising narrative”. My cultural experience is made up of different voices: the voice I would have when I was (as I said) writing my English essays, or the voice that I would have when I was speaking in the house. These are two completely different voices. If, as an artist, I wanted to represent these voices, if I was to use my own culture, or if I was to try and make art of my cultural experience, I had to use different voices. I’m not a poet who’s got a single voice at all. But I would say it depends on what the question means: whether it’s a case that someone has a style that represents a voice, and within that “voice”, as it were, all the experiences are gathered; or whether a person uses a range of voices which represent those different experiences. That’s a choice one has to make, and I think a poet tends to be one or the other. Douglas Dunn, for instance, I would say is one of the former. Douglas has a recognisable style and a recognisable voice, or Norman MacCaig has a recognisable style and a recognisable voice, which is consistent throughout the main body of their work. And then you’ll get others in whose work it’s almost like collocation, or laying side by side the different voices which cumulate towards a whole, whether it’s a wholeness of personality or a wholeness of culture. I’m very suspicious about saying that a poet must have anything. You know, a poet is somebody that writes poetry, and that’s my definition. How they do it is up to them; they make the rules, the rules don’t make the poet. Partly because of the voice you have, you have been described as a working-class poet. Do you think it is a plausible description? To the extent that I have not betrayed my working class origins, I am a republican socialist (roughly) and I sometimes write in what can be called a working class accent. But it is not a total description, just another fence thrown round the field.

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You seem to take literature very seriously, for instance you spell “literature” with an upper-case L throughout your introduction to Radical Renfrew. But how important is its playful or ludic side to you? I take Art and Literature, the latter which is part of Art, seriously in that it represents a crucial part of universal democracy, a democracy of the universal human spirit cutting across space and time. That’s partly what that introduction is about. But I like a good laugh, if that’s what you mean by ludic. One of the best “reviews” I’ve had was when I was working in a bookshop in the sixties and a woman came into the shop who had given her husband a copy of my recently-written Six Glasgow Poems. She told me her husband had influenza, but he had nearly fallen out of bed laughing when he read them. To make somebody laugh when they have the flu – that’s an achievement to be proud of! Talking of your Glasgow poems, what’s your relationship with the city? Have you ever lived elsewhere? I lived in Edinburgh for six months before getting married in 1971, and in London for a year after the marriage. Apart from that it’s been Glasgow. I have no great love affair with the place, it’s just where I live. I hate the winters, which seem to get darker, damper and longer every year. Like most cities Glasgow is an anthology of different places and contexts. I happen to like the area where I live, it’s not too posh and it’s not rundown. The flat faces a park and is near the university which means there’s a constant turnover of population, and there’s a lot of life round about in the streets. Probably that’s why we’ve lived in the same flat thirty years. Would you speak about your studies at Glasgow University? Well, the first time I went I studied English, Latin (which I hated), Moral Philosophy, History of Art, but at that time I couldn’t be bothered with the university itself. I liked meeting people who were there, and I met a number of poets: Tom McGrath, Alan Spence, Aonghas Macneacail, and Philip Hobsbaum. I spent most of my time drinking and talking with these people. I didn’t go to many lectures

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and I drank most of my money, but I wrote quite a lot and I got to know people whose company I found exciting. Then I edited the university magazine for a year, I spent most of my time doing that, then I got thrown out because I only passed one exam in the whole two years. That first time I went to university was between 1967 and 1969. By the end of 1971 I was married in London and I had to decide what to do. I decided to try and get back to university and I managed to get back in. I worked quite hard, doing Scottish Literature and English Literature. There were aspects I enjoyed and aspects I didn’t enjoy: I enjoyed being asked to read books, basically, and those days students got a grant. If the conditions were as they are now, I probably wouldn’t have gone to university. I went to university to solve a problem: how do I get money and what do I do for the next three or four years? All I wanted to do was read, talk and write, so going to university was an option, and I saw it as a place where I could meet people, and where I could talk, read and write. I couldn’t be bothered with the lectures very much, though. I was lazy, I suppose. But when I went the second time, I worked very hard, and enjoyed quite a lot of it. I found that I enjoyed working out my responses to a number of different authors, though oddly enough I enjoyed the English Literature side more than the Scottish Literature. Which Scottish writers would you read at university at that time? Well, it was the whole history of Scottish Literature that we were reading. The most important Scottish writers for me would be Dunbar and James Thomson, whom I went on to write about. These were the Scottish writers that I was most involved with. But it was an honours degree, so I had to do Scottish Literature at some depth. I had difficulty with the language side, there was a Scottish Language component of the Scottish Literature degree, and I was at odds with some of the attitudes in it. So that proved a wee bit difficult. But put it this way: it was a lot better than, say, working in the civil service in a nine-to-five job. Before I went to university, I had been working in a bookshop, and I hated it. I hated most jobs that I worked in, so it was the very least hateful thing I’d been involved in, you know. But mostly the two things I like to remember were being forced to express my opinions about certain authors and being forced to read certain

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authors I probably wouldn’t have read otherwise, or hadn’t read until that time. Edwin Morgan was also at the university at time, wasn’t he? Did you meet him then? Yes, he was. But I met him socially as well. For a wee while he was my tutor in the Thomson thing. He was in the English Literature Department, and he taught some of the English Literature side. What was he like as a teacher? Very good…very informative…very full of detail, and particular to detail…and very open. I don’t remember many of his lectures at all. Actually, I think I can only remember one. But I remember being in a tutorial with him and, as I said, for a while he was my tutor in Thomson – for about six months or so. He was very specific and very assiduous. I took a special paper on Carlos Williams in my honours degree, and Edwin Morgan was my tutor for that. Where there was Edwin, there was never any sloppiness and there was never any bluff. He would have read thoroughly everything he was talking about, and in drawing your attention to something and asking about it he would have quite detailed and specific points he wanted to raise. He was a very careful teacher. Well, thankfully, he left it to me to make my own direction on Williams, because at this time I would be about twentysix or twenty-seven, and I had my own ideas, you know. I wasn’t somebody just out of school looking for guidance in that way, and I wanted to explore and explain my own ideas on Williams and Thomson. Has Edwin Morgan been an influence on you? Or Ian Hamilton Finlay? How do you see Morgan’s Glasgow poems? Edwin hasn’t, Finlay has. Edwin Morgan to me is centrally a narrative poet with Cinquevalli as the changing narrator at the heart of a huge range of changing contexts and locations. It’s his technical ease and surety – which no-one else in Scotland can touch – linked to his great invention that lets him roam so far and wide. In Edwin’s concrete work it’s significant that the “Emergent Poems” emerge towards a

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sentence, not away from one, and it’s not for nothing that he congratulated MacDiarmid in the words “You took that hazard of naming”. It’s typical again of the Cinquevalli self-challenge that Edwin Morgan chose to address the grimy, low side of Glasgow in the most traditionally “high” of poetic forms, the sonnet. Yet for all that he is indisputably a major poet, his is not work that has ever had any influence on my own output, for what it’s worth, as he and I simply approach language from totally different angles. In Scotland the only poet who has had any bearing on my work has been Ian Hamilton Finlay, obviously in his Glasgow Beasts an a Burd but also as someone to whose work over the years I have returned, with or without direct result, simply to think about fundamentals of form. Hamilton Finlay is therefore the poet among the modern Scottish poets who has meant most intellectually to me. The one who has touched my heart most has been W.S. Graham. Do you follow the work of other Glaswegian writers: Lochhead, Kelman, Gray, Kuppner and others? Which of these writers are you particularly interested in? I’m not going to give marks out of ten to a range of friends and colleagues. If I didn’t follow the work of these writers I’d be pretty blinkered, as well as missing out on a good deal. In practical terms there’s the fact that I often read with these writers publicly and get to know some of the latest that they’re up to that way. But besides buying work there is the odd interchange of manuscripts before publication with a couple of them. Again, though, it’s not some kind of closed circle or “school”. Would you say something about the other influences you mentioned: Carlos Williams and Thomson? Why did you find Thomson particularly important? Talking about these things can get too theoretical. Any theoretical recognition is retrospective. Williams I just loved right away as someone who was on my side of the fence, and there is a fence. On the other side of that fence was Eliot, and all the other elitists hiding behind notions of decaying European culture to body forth their own personal problems and prejudices. Williams is a beautiful poet, com-

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mitted to the sacredness of the voice. Leave it at that. Thomson moved me profoundly when I first read him, that was what mattered, not a perceived “importance”. I felt there was something I had to reach in him, something that I spent eighteen years in pursuit of, writing Places of the Mind. “The City of Dreadful Night” is the great existential poem of the nineteenth century: in the tradition of Kierkegaard before – and R.D. Laing after. The Mitchell Library was very important to your education, and you worked as Writer in Residence at the Paisley Central Library. Would you tell me more about these great public libraries? For myself the library was a central part of education. In some ways it was more crucial than the school or the university was – apart from, at school, being taught to read and write, of course. The library was the crucial factor in my life as a writer from childhood. My father was a railwayman who didn’t read books. There were no books in the house. But when the library opened at the foot of the road, from the age of five I was down there regularly, devouring books. I spent a lot of my childhood with my face in a book – not to the exclusion of playing, I was quite sociable. The public library to me – to my generation, I would say – was crucial because of the freedom it gave to choose what you wanted to read, and the freedom it gave you to make up your own mind what you thought about what you had read. I think a lot of ways that poetry is taught at schools is dreadful: people are channelled in directions to look upon a poem as a kind of moral crossword puzzle with certain answers that the poet – and teacher – has up his or her sleeve, whereas I could read poetry in the library and not say anything about it and that would be fine. I could read whom I wanted and that would be fine. Public libraries are crucial to democracy, as I say in the introduction to Radical Renfrew, they are like the Athenian agora in that respect. Talking of language and democracy, I remember you said once about the Lallans movement that it is “extremely conservative as far as poetic form and philosophy is concerned”. Would you explain that? The body of language was in the dictionary and not in the mouth. And it was poetry connected with specific speech acts in America in the

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fifties and sixties that was of particular interest to me. Nor were there any Lallans poets concerned with anything like concrete poetry. The basic difference between language as the speech of a specific person and language as something that has nothing to do with speech, that is literary, I would say it’s like the difference between Robert Lowell and Frank O’Hara, or the difference between Robert Lowell and Ginsberg, or the difference between Robert Frost and Carlos Williams. Robert Frost is a great poet, a very traditional poet, but it’s a very different tradition from the poetic tradition Carlos Williams is working in. I didn’t find any of the traditions that Lallans writers were working in meant anything to me. It’s maybe to do with the fact that they were trying to present a body of language in their work as representative of a nation in a certain way, and I’m not really a nationalist. I see the history of nations as basically the story of a debate between trade and the arms industry. I tend to see myself – I suppose I have to use “-isms” – as a localist and an internationalist. Did you enjoy reading Hugh MacDiarmid’s early poems, which he wrote in a form of Scots? I enjoy him now, but I didn’t enjoy him then, because they were part of an agenda, and the agenda was literary Scots. The culture was steeped in an amount of snobbishness, and the snobbishness around Lallans was palpable. I think they always felt under attack from the English lobby and from someone like me who wanted to put forward a language specific to the West Coast of Scotland. I knew some Lallans people who would deride my language as “slang” and “patter”, so I didn’t feel very sympathetic to them in return. I could see those MacDiarmid poems now in an international context, but at the time I just wasn’t interested in Lallans poetry, because it represented a stance. MacDiarmid was extremely elitist, so I didn’t really see why I should be gracious towards him, because I’m sure he would be totally ungracious towards me. Today, I think, a greater variety of Scottish voices can be heard on television or in the radio, and recent Scottish anthologies do represent the different languages of Scotland. Do you think there’s an opening up in this respect?

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I think it’s the writers themselves who have opened up. It’s not that we should be grateful to certain individuals for now including what has been done, it’s the writers themselves who have been doing it. It existed whether or not anthologies included it. Yes, I mean, I see things are much more loose and open than they were thirty years ago. That’s a good thing, and it’s in prose as well as poetry. Different voices are being heard, and it’s necessary, and that’s happening, yes. But I think it’s the artists who make the running all the time. What’s being written at this moment I have no idea, even as we speak there will be artists making the running somewhere. That’s the way it should be, and of course the way it always will be. What about the possible downside of having a Babel of various voices and languages? After all, the main purpose of language is communication, and communication is only possible if we speak more or less the same language… People make the mistake of saying that art should be in the language of communication, but the language of communication is not the language of Art. The language of Art is a language in itself, that’s what I believe. So if someone writes in the language of Art, it might be in a language that only two thousand people speak, but it’s still universal. The language of Art is universal, but it doesn’t have to be a universal language of information: it is universal because it’s about the universal person. One has to know something at least about the various Scottish accents and speech forms to be able to enjoy the part of your work which is in Scots. Who do you write for when you write in Scots? I write for the man inside my head. It doesn’t go any further than that. To put it pompously, if you are writing as an artist, you have to see yourself as a universal person, so even if the language you are writing in could be only understood by two people, it’s still universal in that sense. Whenever I’m writing a poem, I’m trying to work out about language: it’s something between me and the language, and it has nothing to do with anybody else. So I don’t write for anybody in that sense. But, obviously, having written stuff and trying to publish it, I suppose it’s for people who are of roughly the same interest as myself.

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Robert Crawford said somewhere that you write not only in your language (Scots as spoken in Glasgow) but also about it. Would you underwrite this opinion? Yes… In some of the poems that I wrote I was aware of, and annoyed by, criticism levelled at anyone, including myself, using this language as a means of art. Some of the poems I then wrote were directed at people making this criticism, and contained within the poems themselves are a rebuttal of the criticism that had been intended against me. So in that sense the language is conscious of itself. You said once that you are interested in political analysis, and most of your work is profoundly polemical. Aren’t you afraid of simplifying yourself when you write political essays? Well, to take for instance the polemical essay about the so-called Gulf War: it wasn’t a case of simplifying, it was a case of making things clear to my own anger. I think another misconception in people who don’t usually write or read things with an overt political content can be that there’s a political art that goes on when you write something political, and there’s a poetry art that goes on when you write something poetic. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all language. I’ve written polemical stuff about the bombing of Iraq and Kuwait, for instance. Following this issue closely, I was trying to deal with my own anger, and with the information that involved so much lies in the language that was bombing me. So it was a protest against being bombed by bad language, and that’s how committed I feel about it. It has nothing to do with simplifying. Simplification came from the other side, the detail would have to come from my side. This wasn’t that “if you are writing about politics, are you not afraid that you do this or that or the next thing?” It’s not a question of feeling, it’s a question of belief, and it’s a question of emotional conviction. And that emotional conviction was as total when I would be writing that as when I would be writing anything else. I simplified it to the extent of representing what I was trying to say of the bad writing. As in all cases, you try to avoid bad writing – that’s the only thing a writer wants to avoid. How much public influence do poets have in this country?

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It’s difficult to say. Most children encounter poets at schools, but they encounter them related to exams, which I think is a terrible, terrible thing. To what extent the diversity of voices in poetry has influenced the political movement, I don’t know. I just see it as part of the whole movement. MacDiarmid, for instance, would be for many people a kind of promotional gathering point or focal point for nationalist feelings. The diversity of voices in poetry and prose just now, you could say, makes people aware that they have a right to accept their own voice and their own culture as not being a subdominant, but an authentic culture, which is as authentic as any other culture. In that sense there’s an influence. But what is influence and what is part of a wider movement is always difficult to say. When I think of my beginning to write in my own form of Scots, I had read not long before R.D. Laing, the existential psychiatrist. When he talked about the language of the schizophrenics, people regarded as self-proving their madness because of the way they spoke; they were thus created as “other” – whereas in fact their language had meaning and was coming from a person as fully human as the people who were classifying them – I reacted very favourably to that. I enjoyed reading The Divided Self around 1965. Again, you see, R.D. Laing is part of a whole movement towards the claiming of a person as being authentic. R.D. Laing and his existential psychology is now discredited in Scotland and elsewhere. Doesn’t it worry you that you will discredit yourself by making references to him? No, that doesn’t worry me at all. When you say he’s discredited, there’s more than one R.D. Laing often being referred to. There’s the early analyst of ontological security in The Divided Self, and there’s the later Laing often dismissed as an alcoholic hippie caught up in flower power. The latter is unfair but it’s the early Laing in any case I mean. The Divided Self is an important book that will remain important – like The Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Did you vote in the last Scottish parliamentary elections? I can’t remember if I voted the last time… I might have voted Scottish Socialist and I think I voted Scottish Nationalist ten years ago. I’ve also voted Communist. The devolved parliament doesn’t really excite

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me, the parliament in command of the missiles is down the road in England – it’s not the Scottish Parliament. I like some of the things the Scottish parliament’s been doing, for instance making fares free to people of sixty and over, I think that’s been good. But I just feel that it is a sop, it isn’t a real parliament. I called it once a “sweetie shop” where people could argue over the Mars bars and the Rolos. Do you think devolution in Scotland might develop further? I’m not sure. I’ve said before I would like an independent Scottish Socialist Republic. How likely it is to come in the near future I don’t really know. At the moment, once again, the way things are we are just completely at the mercy of not even the British Parliament, but the British Prime Minister, who decides for instance who the country can go and fight. These are the things that aren’t decided at elections. Nobody voted for Blair to go to war with Iraq, but once he was in power, he decided it on his own. Have you been to Hungary or other East European countries? My one journey east was to the then Soviet Union in 1989 with my family: three days in Moscow, nine in Yalta, two in the then Leningrad. It was good to visit Chekhov’s house. My country is just about to join the European Union and we are told that we’ll join not just an economic entity but also a common value system. As a poet living in a European member state, can you identify yourself with a European sensibility, in spiritual, moral or cultural terms? No. That’s just not the way I think. I have enjoyed reading a number of European writers, mainly of prose, not poetry, because poetry in translation often didn’t interest me: mainly because I couldn’t hear the voice. I’d rather hear it in the original even if I couldn’t understand it. So in terms of poetry I don’t have any real European sense. But in terms of prose I have read a number of European writers who have meant a great deal to me. When you talk about a common value system, I tend to get a wee bit worried there. Novalis talks about the basic Christian empire of Europe, and I think that’s dangerous. Not

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that I’m anti-Christian but I’m for heterogeneity, not homogeneity. So it doesn’t figure in my way of thinking at all that I’m a European. No. Too much of my poetic influences have been from America: the particular democracy of voices coming from there, that is. But there is the culture of European classical music which has probably meant more to me in my life than the culture of literature: the culture of Bach, Mozart – not forgetting in Hungary Bartók, whose fifth and sixth string quartets I love. Speaking of prosody, do you enjoy reading the work of younger poets who often write in various versions of Scots, such as the Dundonian W.N. Herbert, or Kathleen Jamie, who comes from Paisley and lives now in Fife, or Robert Crawford? Yes, I’m interested in what they do. Kathleen Jamie’s The Queen of Sheba is a great book, a wonderful book, I enjoyed reading that. Though there are younger poets like Sandie Craigie from Edinburgh; Robert and Bill Herbert and Kathleen are middle-aged, basically. I’m quite old myself now, fifty-eight. But, yes, I like the diversity. For instance, I’m doing a lot of readings across Britain just now, one of my poems is in the English GCSE exams, and we go to different places, and the schools are bussed in to hear eight poets who have poems in the GCSE, and who talk about their poems. And as I say to the children from the platform, I like the fact that when I step on a train in Glasgow and I step off the train somewhere else, I hear a different language, a different sound system, and I find that interesting. I think it’s one of the interesting things about Britain and it’s one of the things I like in Britain. I like it in the actual fact of the place itself as much as in the art that has been made from it. I like getting off the train in Yorkshire and hearing Yorkshire voices round about me, I like getting off the train in Llandudno and hearing Welsh voices round about me, and that I can find in Scotland as well. I like hearing different voices. Which is the poem you mentioned? It’s “The six o’clock news” from Unrelated Incidents.

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I’ve experimented with that poem, introducing it to students in Hungary, who I think even at university level sometimes have the idea that English is a homogeneous language, which it is not, of course, and also there is this widespread misconception among Hungarian learners of English that they speak the English language without an accent. So I was trying to introduce some of your poems, including “The six o’clock news”, and once the students realised they have to utter the words rather than read them silently, they enjoyed the poems, even though I had to explain some of the specific idioms, such as “Belt up!”… I had to explain “belt up” to an English girl once. She asked from the audience what does “belt up” mean? Now every time I make a point that “belt up” means shut up. Is it an expression that’s specific to Glasgow or to a certain district in Glasgow? I don’t know, I just assumed it was widespread, you know. [Laughs.] Would you talk about your book Radical Renfrew? I noticed that various British libraries have a copy of it… It’s one of my few books in print… Was it a commissioned work? What happened was that while I was working in Paisley Central Library I saw behind the counter the local nineteenth-century collection which no one ever read and I wanted to read it. I thought that if there wasn’t an anthology, I would make one, so I just read the collection and made an anthology from it. It wasn’t commissioned but when I asked to be given time to do it, the library was very interested, and said they would give me time and they might make an anthology from it. I wasn’t sure if I’d have a publisher but I was reasonably confident. When I was making it, I had a distinct sense of audience: the audience would be the people who used the library. I was interested in the fact that here was a whole collection of mainly nineteenth century poetry and I didn’t know any of it. As I say in the introduction, my

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own idea of nineteenth-century West of Scotland poetry was zero …maybe a minor figure like Tannahill, Thomson certainly, John Davidson, and that was it. I wanted to read this quite big collection, I asked myself: what is in this? where has all this stuff gone? why are they all out of print? I was curious and I saw it as my job, since I was behind the counter in the library as writer-in-residence, that this might be the only time in the library’s history that a poet was there who could go through this and make it available again to the public. It became a reclamation exercise: an exercise of reclaiming my own roots basically; a sense of discovering my own culture and my own cultural identity as a poet as well as a person. Have you thought about bringing it up to date? If you are making an anthology and bringing it up to date, then you get into personal politics. It’s very hard to avoid that, somebody is sure to get offended that they are not in, and you have to be very brave. But I wasn’t interested in bringing it up to the present day. I was interested in making an anthology from this body of work which was forgotten, from the French Revolution to the First World War. It was actually a quite convenient cut-off point, but in any case the library did not have much of the poetry published after the First World War. Among the interesting things I learned making the anthology was that Paisley Central Library became a public library in 1870, previously it was private, and most of the really radical stuff came from before 1870. When it became a public library, there was censorship. So, in an odd way, when people won a right to a library, they were actually prevented from having access to all that was going on at the time, because the guardians at the door of the library stopped any radical things coming in. Whereas the body of work which was already there in the library from the time it was private contained a whole lot of radical material. You come into these paradoxes or apparent contradictions all the time when you get into a culture. A right is won but a culture is lost. People have won the right of access to the library, but then somebody says: no, this is too dangerous, you can’t have that culture. In the 1970s, did you feel kinship with the “barbarian” poets (Harrison, Dunn and Heaney), who recognised education and lan-

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guage as class property, and who had a “grudge” against those on the other end of social hierarchy? I never really thought of them as “barbarians”. I mean Tony Harrison never struck me as a barbarian – he is far too civilised for my taste. [Laughs.] I don’t see them as barbaric in any sense. Harrison has this peculiar attitude to his father, as if he was baffled by his father’s working-class culture, and as if because he’s been to university, he was no longer working-class. I regard that as bad faith and I don’t have any patience for that. Well, maybe it is barbarian but not in the sense that he thinks it is. I don’t regard that as very authentic. I do have a lot of time for Seamus Heaney but I don’t know if I see him as barbarian, either. I think it is a misuse of the term. “Barbarian” I tend to regard as somebody who is really rocking the boat, as a bull in the china shop. I don’t think any of these three writers are bulls in the china shop; I think they worked in china shops for quite a long while. In fairness, these words like “barbarian” come up, and then people have to defend the position somebody else has ascribed to them. These poets are well-known abroad. To what extent do you think European appreciation is important to a Scottish poet? Are you interested in the reception of your own work outside Britain or on the Continent? I can’t speak for any other Scottish poet, or poets in general. The fact is that there are so many different prosodies, different approaches to poetry, different politics of language and of poetry. To be “appreciated” by some people either at home or abroad can be for an aspect that others, at home and abroad, would not be interested in. As a “sound poet” I’ve performed in Vienna, been written up in Henri Chopin’s Poesie Sonore in Paris, my work there known to people like Chopin himself, Ernst Jandl, Gerhard Rühm in Austria, Katalin Ladik in Hungary, Bernard Hiedsieck and sundry others whom I have also in the past invited to Scotland to perform. But this is an aspect of my work that I would guess would be of little interest to the so-called “barbarian” poets you mention, or other mainstream writers. Again, the “dialect” aspect of my work, Gerhard Rühm pointed out to me when he was in Scotland, is an echo of the Wiener Gruppe work of the late fifties – writers like Rühm himself, Friedrich Achliet-

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ner, Konrad Bayer, H.C. Artmann – people using a phonetic city dialect in non-traditional, “modernist” for want of a better word, verse forms. The fact is that the same linguistic politics of colonisation and counter-colonisation occurs in different and many parts of the world, throwing up the same stratagems that the locally mainstream will put into some little locally marginalised classification-box. My phonetic dialect work nowadays is sometimes bracketed – outside Scotland that is – with counter-colonial Black writers like John Agard, Jean Binta Breeze, Linton Kwesi Johnson. I’m happy enough with that. It’s a matter of feeling solidarity with certain other writers then, whether in Vienna or the Caribbean. But “being appreciated” too often means having your work used in some university literary department, which is of no interest to me whatever. What are you working on nowadays? I’m preparing a radio version of the translation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya I had on the boards last year. Also a collection Access to the Silence is planned for early next year, I hope to add a few to that. I’m not working on any long-term project like Places of the Mind or Radical Renfrew. I wish I was. Glasgow, 7 March 2003

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Bibliography: Tom Leonard (1944–)

Poetry Six Glasgow Poems. Glasgow: Midnight Publications, 1969. A Priest Came on at Merkland Street. Glasgow: Midnight Publications, 1970. Poems (Dublin: E. and T. O’Brien Ltd., 1973. With Alex Hamilton and James Kelman. Three Glasgow Writers. Glasgow: Molendinar Press, 1976. Ghostie Men. Newcastle upon Tyne: Galloping Dog Press, 1980. Intimate Voices: Selected Work, 1965–83. Newcastle upon Tyne: Galloping Dog Press, 1984; reissued London: Vintage, 1995 and Buckfastleigh: Etruscan Books, 2003. Satires & Profanities: Political Pieces. Glasgow: STUC, 1984. Situations Theoretical and Contemporary. Newcastle upon Tyne: Galloping Dog Press, 1986. Nora’s Place. Newcastle upon Tyne: Galloping Dog Press, 1990. Reports from the Present: Selected Work 1982–94. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995. Tom Raworth, Bill Griffiths, Tom Leonard. Buckfastleigh: Etruscan Books, 1997. access to the silence: Poems and Posters, 1984–2004. Buckfastleigh: Etruscan Books, 2004. inside looking in: 12 Poems. Glasgow: Survivors’ Press, 2004. Being a Human Being. Glasgow: Object Permanence, 2006

Drama If Only Bunty Was Here: A Drama Sequence of Totally Undramatic Non-sequiturs. Glasgow: Glasgow Print Studio Press, 1979.

Non-fiction On the Mass Bombing of Iraq and Kuwait, Commonly Known as “The Gulf War”, with Leonard’s Shorter Catechism. Stirling: AK Press, 1991. Places of the Mind: The Life and Work of James Thomson (“B.V.”). London: Jonathan Cape, 1993.

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Editor Radical Renfrew: Poetry from the French Revolution to the First World War by Poets Born, or Sometime Resident in the County of Renfrewshire. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990.

Frank Kuppner: The Pragmatism of Profundity Frank Kuppner is a reclusive character in the contemporary Glasgow writing scene, though in significance he stands alongside Lochhead and Leonard. He first came to be known for his quatrains written in the manner of ancient Chinese poetry but in the present interview he describes a wide range of other considerations that have contributed to the making of his rather eccentric and singularly unconventional writing style. These considerations and circumstances include his experience of being a self-taught poet who did not undergo any formal training in literature at university level; the teaching of creative writing to university students; and his understanding of English and Scottish versions of Modernism. Keywords: Modernism; science; autodidactism; creative writing; Avant-garde; quatrains

To my best knowledge this is the first conventional interview with Frank Kuppner – “conventional” here meaning an interview based on a form of dialogue in which the person interviewed is not identical with the person who conducts it, as is the case in his other interview, published in Talking Verse (1995). Kuppner was born in 1951 and he established his detached, perplexing, sometimes very unsettling but on the whole admirably independent and highly idiosyncratic voice with A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty in 1984. However, it was also then that the vast talents of Edwin Morgan and Liz Lochhead hit the peak of their reputation, and hid from view the initial phase of Kuppner’s career as a Glasgow poet. Until quite recently, the relevance of his writing to Scottish versions of postmodernism has not been given full critical attention except on the odd occasion (most notably Robert Crawford dedicated a chapter to Kuppner in Identifying Poets, in 1993), and so the unfailing commitment Carcanet Press has shown to publishing Kuppner’s poetry and prose for about two decades now is all the more praiseworthy. Kuppner’s poetic nonconformity escapes all attempts at classification, so much so that he is described as a “West Coast individualist” swimming in the “crowded pool” of millennial poetry in Douglas Gifford’s edited volume, Scottish Literature (2002). Gifford suggests that the closest analogy is probably Alasdair Gray’s fiction, inasmuch as both Gray and Kuppner like to knock the reader’s expectations off balance when approaching well-established concepts such as reality, authority, quantity, extension, perception or identity. While he remains a remarkably unique talent, I think it is possible to

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discover some further, and equally subtle, ties between Kuppner and Glasgow’s Laureate, Edwin Morgan. The works of both writers exhibit an exploratory imagination and an eager, sometimes even grotesquely scientific, intellect that tends to reach out to uncharted places wherever they be: round the corner in Glasgow or in ancient China, in outer space or in your mind, in history or in one’s own personal memory. Kuppner’s poetry collections include The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women (1987), Everything is Strange (1994) Second Best Moments in Chinese History (1997) and What? Again?: Selected Poems (2000). Two more recent collections were published by Carcanet Press: A God’s Breakfast in 2004 and Arioflotga in 2008. Among his prose books one may find A Very Quiet Street (1989), A Concussed History of Scotland (1991), Life on a Dead Planet (1996) and In the Beginning there was Physics (1999). I met him in one of those grand, European-looking cafés of Glasgow’s main street, which he must have carefully selected as the setting of the long conversation we had there, and then he gave me a personal guided tour around central Glasgow. Extracts from this interview were first published in Scottish Studies Review 6(1), Spring 2005.

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Would you talk about your background first? My father came from a village called Henningsdorf, near a town called Konitz (nowadays Chojnice), in what was then still a part of Germany. When he was born there, in 1912, Poland was still parcelled out among its neighbours. He didn’t talk about it all that much, whether for reasons of personal tact or general prudence I was never quite sure. Maybe we didn’t encourage him enough. To be brief about it, he arrived over in Scotland with the yet again reconstituted Polish army after the Second World War. He himself was ethnically German, although he learnt Polish as a boy out of sheer social necessity. Mind you, his father could speak both German and Polish too. It is a rather complicated story but it does give you a sort of European dimension, I suppose. You become very aware that, because of its geographical position, in Scotland it is particularly easy to know nothing much about other places, whereas in Europe (I would imagine) you are in the middle of the events, and people are passing through all the time – whether you want them to or not. Maybe I’m being naïve. But that’s the more exotic part. My father virtually never talked to us in German or Polish. I genuinely think he assumed that because we were his children, we should know his languages naturally. Just wait and see. It would come automatically. We were nine or ten and he must have realised with a shock that we were never going to speak German off our own bat. So he paid out his hard-earned cash for the two oldest of us to go and study German in a city college once a week after school hours. It was a start. (Polish was never really an option.) On the other hand, I do feel a little strange or confused when I go to Germany. I feel almost as if I have some sort of shares, even if only faded, psychic shares, in this outfit, bequeathed to me by somebody else. Suddenly I am surrounded by people who talk my father’s language and who tend to talk English the way my father did. We had thought every bit of it was personal to him – but it turns out that quite a lot of his detail is cultural. All my father’s relatives stayed on in Germany, one or other of them, so I suppose I do feel very tenuously German – though, very obviously, I am not actually German. Not quite a hundred percent un-German might catch it. And then you went to study at Glasgow University…

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If you want to talk about this… [Laughs.] Yes, I did go to Glasgow University but I didn’t get on very well there. It was hardly Glasgow’s fault, though I can’t think of it as a great educational opportunity sadly missed. I think I was soon seduced by a rather unrealistic notion of life as writer – of the possibilities for that sort of thing which the culture I was in realistically offered as a routine choice. For one thing, it was the late 1970s and there were still lots of people dropping out: it seemed a not unreasonable thing to do. Almost brave, a little badge of honour; and certainly something you could quickly recover from. It was much more an option than it is now. The wind seemed to change pretty drastically very soon after that. But I don’t think of my time at university as being formative in any very important way. I am not trying to be mean here. That’s just how it was. Like Tom Leonard, you are said to have received your education in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. It was a formative experience, wasn’t it? Who says these things? It’s amazing that people know these things! I think of myself as a private person, and as being very reserved about my life, not to mention life in general, [laughs] and so I tend to be taken aback and wonder: how on earth do people know this? Then the horrible truth dawns on you. Wait a minute here. Did I put it in a book and publish it? My God, how reckless. What a stupid thing to do. Thank God people are so suspicious. Yes, I did spend a lot of time there for a while (for the best part of a decade, in fact, off and on) because I found actually at a certain point of my literary non-career, or career of literary non-success, that it was impossible to keep on writing unless I moved myself into a formal “writing” environment. I needed what might be called a formal stimulus to keep going. Or maybe it was the only way I could kid myself on that I was part of society. I had this very unrealistic idea of what I would manage to do, and what the social results would be. I must have kept thinking that a staggering breakthrough of careerestablishing proportions was just up ahead. I don’t know why, but I was fairly confident about this for a while. And I dare say that sort of thing does occasionally happen, even in real life. You know, I find that a lot of students are interested in knowing what they should be doing, and I tell them: as far as I can see, you

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should be doing what you do out of yourself. It’s not an infallible guide, but other guides are even less reliable. It’s not like medicine or engineering where you enter a discipline with a clear structure and you move up systematically – and it’s not like throwing darts to a board either. It is more like these picture games where lines start off from four or five or a hundred points then jumble together in a series of tangles. You have to find out which one starting-point leads you through to the goal. You come in here and you have to end up there. And there seem to be hundreds and hundreds of ways leading into the thicket and there may be one way out, and you don’t know which it is. You don’t know if you’ll ever know that. All you know is that if you are not going in the thicket, you are certainly never going to end up at the goal. There is no quick way round the side. Do you enjoy working with students? Yes, I like talking to them. It’s good for the humility, for one thing. Obviously, I don’t have a rapport with all of them but I have more rapport with them than I had expected. Usually they are better writers than I was when I was at their age. The main problem, of course, is that at the age of twenty you cannot be quite honest with them. Perhaps you simply don’t have a big enough sample to know quite what it is you are actually dealing with here. Or it is just too early. But presumably one would always be able to help if one had enough tact and insight. If all else fails, at least try to avoid being harmful. But who can guarantee even that? “Keep going and see what happens, for as yet you know virtually nothing of what you’re going to find out”, is obviously not very helpful advice, however true; so instead one tends to concentrate on the minutiae – since, for all you know, they might turn out to be the vital details. In the end, you can criticise only what’s in front of you, however much you might suspect that the work, for one reason or another, might well be passing out of the student’s life very soon. Are they Creative Writing students? No, it’s not formally part of that aspect of things: I am a Writer-inResidence, who is just there for any student, or member of staff for that matter, or for anyone who makes his way through. There has been

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something of an explosion in the area of Creative Writing teaching and many people tend to be confused about what role one has. They think you are a quick way in, or a shortcut to the main action. In fact, the Writer-in-Residence seems to be something like a relic of a more innocent, almost more amateur age. You started writing in the seventies, as you said… I can’t remember what were really the first things I wrote. I had this idea of being a writer years and years before I’d had any capacity. I really don’t know why, it must have been a delusion, whether benign or otherwise. [Laughs.] I remember telling people when I was fourteen or fifteen that I was going to be a writer, and being met with quite natural scepticism and almost anger at my stupidity. The reservations people had on the subject turned out to be justified to an almost uncanny degree – but what can you do? That’s another problem: the necessity in many areas of finding things out for yourself. I remember I wrote a poem called “After Passau” when I was twenty. This was the first poem I ever wrote where I didn’t get the normal response one always had: of thinking on the day when you wrote it that it was wonderful, colossal, earth-shattering – then getting up the next morning, reading it again, and finding that it had yet again mysteriously evaporated or deflated overnight. From now on there was a fair chance they would at least still be alive the next day. So, it was about from the age of twenty when I’d assess myself as at least beginning to be a writer. And I was almost successful quite early on: I wrote a play about David Hume the philosopher – of whom I knew little enough, God knows. It was a collection of scenes, and was very nearly accepted. In fact the dramatist called C.P. Taylor, who accepted works for the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, formally accepted it. But I was so naïve and so very polite. I didn’t push myself or ask questions. I assumed that it was accepted and that therefore, several months later, during the Festival, they would no doubt perform some scenes of my play. Why make waves? Anyway, it wasn’t until the Festival had started and they weren’t doing it, and their programme remained resolutely tight-lipped as to my very existence, that I realised it wasn’t going to happen. Of course, if it had gone forward, it might have been pretty useful for me.

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As it was, for reasons that tend to elude me these days – perhaps it was merely lack of anything like appropriate guidance – I then seem to have spent year after year doing little more than compulsively write what I thought were plays and voice-works, which I sent to the BBC, who just about never accepted them. I don’t know quite why – perhaps they returned them to me terribly politely – but I went on assuming that they were very shortly going to get onto my wavelength, or vice versa. I just kept thinking: “Maybe the next one”, and I kept on adapting or trying to be more accessible and more popular, never really getting anywhere. I suspect they were patiently waiting for me to get the message, give up and stop bothering them. It wasn’t until I was about thirty that I started writing poetry again. I think I had stopped for a long while because I wanted to work out what poetry was first. I thought the important thing was to work out what it is, and once you had worked that out, then that would be that. All you need to do next was apply your knowledge. This went on for a lot of time. Throughout my twenties I wasn’t writing poetry, because I was trying to work it out what it was – with, of course, total lack of success. It’s not that sort of beast. It’s so much more ad hoc. What works works and what doesn’t doesn’t, and you can’t really tell which is which until you see it. If even then. I mean, I wasn’t thinking about this all the time, because I was doing other things as well. But how do you write poetry if you don’t know what it is? However, time was passing, I had less free time for longer projects (which were all unsuccessful anyway), and I was still no nearer working out what poetry was. Of course, one hardly knows what anything is. Why pick on poetry? I felt I had waited long enough and would quite like to get back to it, but how? And I worked out that one possible way would be to try and find the best poems that I knew, and imitate them. Get back into the maze that way. Pure pragmatism. After all, I knew these ones worked, if anything did – whatever it was they might be doing. And the best poems I knew then was actually a book of translations of Chinese poetry called The Jade Mountain – translated by a chap called Witter Bynner, with the help of a Chinese scholar who went back to China at just the wrong moment and disappeared. I thought they were absolutely wonderful poems, and so alive, particularly given that they were written well over a millennium ago. So – it could be done. If I could do anything like this sort of thing, I

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would have something that works, however it might be doing it. I started that way. I was writing my own poems in four lines and eight lines, because, by and large, that’s what that poetry is like – and in fairly free form, because that’s what the translations were like – and all those little Chinese poems I began to write soon afterwards emerged almost by accident from the heart of what was my poetical style anyway. And once you’re on, you can adapt and strengthen them and change anything, but that really was the way I got back onto the high wire. So that was your way into the maze… That was the way back in. I’d been in and then gone out, and couldn’t find the doors. As I say, I could now adapt and go on from there – but even Shakespeare would be hard pushed to adapt without something specific to take off from. MacDiarmid, Ashbery and Ian Hamilton Finlay have been mentioned as influences on your work. In what ways have they affected you, at all? Are you drawn to the avant-garde movement? At one point I did read a lot of MacDiarmid, and he is a figure we cannot but be aware of here, if not elsewhere – but I must admit that after a while a very strong revulsion of feeling set in, and with the passage of time that has intensified. Wonderful company in real life, apparently – but nowadays I would sooner not waste my precious time by devoting it to re-reading a quasi-scientific Stalinist with aspirations to mysticism. My priorities nowadays lie rather elsewhere. Still, I’m sure he has left much for scholarship to do – and not only in identifying the source of his plagiarisms. Ashbery moves around the runway pleasingly enough, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him in flight. Maybe I’m never looking in the right direction at the right moment. The binoculars never quite focus – and these days it is usually focus I want. Finlay I confess I have never persevered with enough to get the hang of. I don’t really understand where he’s coming from – to use a classic locution of the sixties. I have little or no grasp of the necessary presuppositions.

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As for avant-garde as such, I suppose I feel that, here as everywhere else, if you are letting yourself be choreographed by any critical term then, to continue the rather confused metaphor, the dance is not going to amount to anything very overwhelmingly much. You mentioned once the French writer Lautréamont as another major influence on your writing… Oh, think twice before mentioning anything in print. Well, the people one is enthused by just at the time one happens to be granting a rare interview tend to loom disproportionately over the others, but, yes he was certainly a very great enthusiasm of mine for a long while. He was born in Uruguay in 1846 and he died in Paris at the age of twentyfour and a half – he died several years younger than Rimbaud. It is something you get very enthusiastic about for two or three years and you’ll absorb, and then you almost forget about. What you got from him is more or less taken entirely for granted, like breathing. People often ask who your main influences are. Well, yes, fair enough. But some of your main influences you have often just about forgotten about, because they are so internalised. They are no longer a memorable, isolated episode. Lautréamont, particularly in his later work – really, he only had time to do two works – used to do something involving quotations from great minds like Pascal. He changed them, twisting them in the direction of optimism, as he put it. Great minds latched to a positive project – that must be a way of manufacturing useful stuff. A brilliant idea, and so delightfully intertextual to boot! I was fascinated by this notion that you can just change these things, these real or alleged pearls of ultimate verbal wisdom which are lying there on the page in front of you. I then started trying to produce would-be epigrams myself. Frequently the results were pretty absurd remarks, but in another sense they can also be very interesting even when they sound somewhat crazed. There is something so authoritative-sounding about the genre – a sort of crystallisation of the authority which inheres in writing in general, provided it has the least degree of self-confidence about it. From a literary point of view, there is not too much interest in remarks which are absolutely dead straight – even absolutely dead straight wise, though they can be rather a help if you can isolate them.

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But, really, the whole enterprise has a sort of watermark saying “Beware of Such Authorities” running through it. You are forever getting people who are saying that “Dante said this” or “Chesterton said that” and so on – as if nothing more was left to be said. As if you could derive the truth of their remarks directly from their ability as verbal or literary artists. Well, of course, even verbal artists can be right sometimes – but in fact there is a great deal of nonsense to be had from people who are brilliant literary technicians. And some of it can be nonsense of a massively dangerous kind. One of the points I was putting forward (in prose, particularly) was making my readers reflect on how much authority the authorial voice thinks he has. There are times when you want to say exactly in your own voice what you think, and there are times when you just practise something more like free association. But perhaps fiction is a better name for it, short and sweet. I think there is something healthy about creating a register which your readers have to think about. Of course, ideally one would be readable too. (Rather a counsel of perfection here!) But I mean, so that if you quote anything I have written, it’s quite possible that it is exactly what I mean, but equally it is quite possible that what I’m saying is not what I mean. Rather like the drama. Of course, there are limits to what a moral being should be happy to be mistaken to be saying, if you follow the grammar. I don’t quite know how I got there, but there you are. It’s a literary technique: fairly free association. In writing you can go back, whereas in talking you get to a point where you have no idea how you got there, so I’m just stopping here. Indeed, much of your writing does seem to me to consist of a random association of ideas, memories, impressions or perceptions… How dare you? Well, yes, there’s a book I wrote, called A Concussed History of Scotland, which started off almost as free association, experiments in automatic writing. But it turned out that almost the whole process of subsequent work on that book was the attempt to try and get some unrandom point into it – because one thing you learn rather quickly is that, if you are in the right mood, you could just go on free associating forever. So what? There is no value in it as such; it is a technique you can learn. Obviously, it is not a crime; but if you are at all interested in the predicament of the reader, you cannot just

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go on producing surface effects for page after page, however scintillating. One tires very easily. God, how one tires. So, actually, not very much of my writing is free association, because I learnt from that book that it doesn’t work. Or there’s not too much you can get it to do. I tried to put various epigrams into it subsequently, like so many raisins in the cake, as aids or props or consolations to the reader; as something that actually means something very specific – you can take a pause here, have a breather, and go on – or as some sort of basic architecture. Since then free association is not something that I do, unless perhaps I am trying to induce or fake a spontaneous turn in the voice. Or I might expand what a voice is saying by throwing in a remark which cannot actually be explained fully in terms of what is said around it. It is just a suggestion that an interior life is going on while he is talking, but free association to me clearly doesn’t, in any deep and extended sense, work. I do read writers who free associate all the time (or who seem to), but I find it rather irritating, to be honest, after a certain point. As far as I’m concerned, the final results on that one are definitely in. In little doses you can add it to your armoury, I suppose, or you can use it as one more tool, a useful side door key, but by and large it is not something I recommend. Certainly, A Concussed History of Scotland was based on free association (and one other method which I think I’d rather maintain a maddening reticence about here), but I don’t think I’m aware of any other work that started off the same way. Sometimes I do wonder: who is this person speaking? Surely to God it can’t, in the legal sense, be me? However, sometimes this slightly crazed voice talking away isn’t mine, at other times it is. Of course, one always has hopes to be a purveyor of wisdom; but I find it, to say the least, entertaining, and I hope maybe other people find it entertaining too. Also, this crazed voice does tend to cut against authority figures. One has noticed. The authority voice is very limiting: you have to be in the role all the time. One well-aimed torpedo can finish you off. It’s much more interesting throwing off all sorts of things, some of which could be very interesting or true remarks. If you are committing yourself just to making guaranteed true remarks – well, it can’t ever be done in the real world, can it; so all you are left with is various more or less brilliant or convincing pretences or imitations of it. La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims is the nearest thing I know to the real thing in this particular department, if memory serves – and yet, how much more interesting even this

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would be if only some of them were obviously, not to say flamboyantly, wrong. There’s something boring at the heart of the common posture of being right all the time. Not that anyone ever is in fact. Of course, in real life you do want to be right all the time. And, as I say, one has one’s aspirations for wisdom. (I have missed out something pretty important here, but I’m not quite sure what it is. How deep can a subject be, or how deeply can you know it, if such a limited being as oneself can’t put a foot wrong in his discussions of it? (But there is no rubbish quite like the rubbish you can find within brackets.)) In your poems there is an apparent randomness, obscurity, elusiveness, flux, change and uncertainty, for instance in “An Old GuideBook to Prague”, and perhaps even more acutely in your prose book A Concussed History of Scotland. At the same time, there is an obsession with the exact description of streets and other places, and there is a strong concern to achieve accuracy. What makes you try to be so punctilious? Are you frightened by the feeling of uncertainty? Well, I very much hope not. Rare is the culture which applauds cowardice. I think that would be rather like being frightened by existence as such. One is trying to get it exactly, precisely because it is so wonderful and yet so precarious. I mean to say, you have to remember to interview the survivors before they die, don’t you? Yes, but what I mean is that you have been described as an existentialist, and as a “Glaswegian Kierkegaard”, for example… Ah, no, I think that was a friend of mine giving me a friendly mention in a high-circulation newspaper. I am not sure how much Kierkegaard he had read. More than me, I dare say – but, as it happens, I’ve read a bit of him recently (some book with a wonderful title about Advice for Young Actresses or some such) and, for all the manifest intelligence and élan, I find he takes very seriously things that I can hardly even begin to take seriously. At the same time, among the welter of misplaced ingenuity, some of his remarks struck me as being noticeably astute. He does talk about the mistrust of authority, but he cites it specifically in a Christian viewpoint. Like Dante, he is a brilliant writer but some of the content of his writing strikes me as only dubiously sane if by insanity you mean not being in touch with reality. (It

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seems to me, for instance, that in a lot of passages Mr Dante is clearly not in touch with reality. Not by a million miles. Which is well over a million and a half kilometres.) However, it is brilliantly done and it is a fine example of how literary ability cannot be automatically translated into trustworthiness. But uncertainty… Since you asked me, I cannot see the fear of uncertainty driving through my work. I should prefer to think of it as a keen awareness that transience, if left to itself, will describe nothing, no matter how precious it was to anyone. The universe as such is not in the biography business. Nor, indeed, in the autobiography business. In fact, it’s worse – because I certainly do have this notion of myself as being one of the people who are the least afraid of uncertainty. Is that one of my self-delusions? Obviously, like the face, one cannot see one’s own. Uncertainty is the norm, it’s what we’ve got, and we just have to accept that. There are times when I am trying to be very specific about things that are not going to be recorded somewhere else. No point waiting for the rehearsal to stop and for real life to begin at last. They’ve been running the camera all along, even if no one thought to put any film in it. What draws you to those unlikely large numbers, for instance in “The Autobiography of a Non-existent Person”? On the one hand, it’s funny but… Well, that’s part of it; it’s funny. But there is also the undeniable specificity of 139,221. You may argue about truth and justice and value and life and history, but that number (which I have already forgotten) is what it is: it’s a sort of bracing moment of peace and security, if that’s what you want. We could all do with them, I suppose. But there are also some other factors involved. It is so easy to say things which we cannot visualise – or even conceptualise – then use the neat words of the number as if it were the thing. And something like the opposite too. How something like 1,157 bees can unaccountably bring the bee-ness of the individual bee closer. It’s hopeless. But one thing I have noticed is that I like the number seventeen. I am not quite sure why, but whenever I say my random number, I tend to say seventeen. It’s an intuitive, or perhaps merely lazy, response. I might change it to nineteen if I want to cover my tracks just a little. Prevent one from being too predictable. Give a hint of one’s uncanny range.

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The long numbers tend to be vanishing, but nonetheless I think funniness is part of the business. It’s so easy for numbers to get up to a non-human scale. You don’t have to work hard at conjuring up things that are mildly challenging to normal human perceptions if you say you are doing them 53 million 219 thousand whatever times. Immediately, you feel that there is something odd with the whole notion of it. And then you think: no one has counted how often in life one does something. That’s the phrase I find myself using quite often: “No one has been keeping a record.” I’m trying to be very specific about things because no one else is keeping a record. We forget things. That’s why I put somewhere: “the opposite of life is more life”, meaning much what I meant when I said that the best way to deal with an emotional disaster is to get involved in another. I don’t actually believe that, I suppose, but it is possible that when you are in another emotional disaster, at least you forget about the first one. [Laughs.] No idea how I got there, and I also don’t want to keep quoting myself. Mind you, there’s not much point hanging about waiting for somebody else to do it. That is one thing which life has taught me. Douglas Dunn once said about “experimental writing” that experiments have to amount to something after a certain time. What’s the result of your experiments? Do you see your own writing as “experimental” at all? I suppose, thinking about it – and it is not something I would greatly recommend (thinking about one’s “writing” in general, rather than about specific projects) – it’s a question of trying to keep things as open and responsive as possible. Even one’s own unique and glorious personality is in many respects itself a complexity of limitations, and you don’t want to be cultivating a writing style which even further delimits you, and disables you in principle, as a matter of mere literary technique, from catching certain elements of whatever lies within your view. You want any additional tool that is not going to be more trouble than it’s worth. And I suppose you have to find out for yourself whether it’s that or not. Why do you keep numbering your stanzas?

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Well, I don’t do quite so much of that now. Maybe there was something slightly neurotic about one–two–three–four… I am working on a novel which is resisting the sequence of one–two–three–four–five, because there is something about that sequencing which irritates me now. I mean to say: am I a free agent here or not? At the same time, disrupting the sequence offers a slight suggestion that you are not being told everything. Very easy to do! Instead of Chapter 10 followed by Chapter 11, just jump from Chapter 10 to Chapter 13 and suddenly there are two possible missing chapters in between. An instant living gap all of your own! (Should I be saying this? Make all your friends envious.) As I say, it’s a fight against being tied up by formal restrictions, because you want to have as few restrictions as possible once you start writing. In writing, people are forever closing off larger or smaller sections of themselves in what are merely formal ways. Why add to your limitations? You really need a writing style that allows as much as possible in, and you definitely don’t want to be adding further restraints – such as excessive formality of language (or, I suppose, an excessive informality) – to those other restraints that are unavoidably there anyway. You have written a lot of poems in quatrains and you know much about the theory of this stanza form, as the introduction to A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty also suggests. Do you still like writing in that form? Well, I still keep writing the Chinese poems. There is something about the balance of a four liner… just as there is something about the nonbalance of a three liner. The quatrain form started off from that specific Chinese poetry and just sheer habit kept me doing it. I think I numbered them for easier reference; it might not be anything more than that. I tended not to give individual titles, and one has to have some way of identifying them. I am not aware of any deeper number mysticism. And I suspect there is very little theory to the form – at least as I employ it. Your poem “A Couple of Measured Paces”, which you dedicated to Edwin Morgan, looks like a twin sonnet, but in the end I felt that you were writing it in your habitual four liners…

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Well, sonnets of course can tend to break down into four liners, I was aware of that; but it wasn’t something deliberate, though I might have been trying to follow the older form as well as I easily could. I would say my habitual four liners have been in steep recession for well over a decade. However, not too long ago, I noticed that a lot of my poems tended to be about fourteen lines long. I had used four lines and at one point I used eight lines, because there is a very minimal formal restraint in it (an eight line poem puts a tiny restraint on you, just to make it interesting without you becoming the victim of it), and I have noticed that there are thirteen, fourteen, fifteen line poems that I have written and I thought: well, why not go for the reassuringly rich scent of tradition here? Of course, there is no point in maiming a poem for an arithmetical fetish – but it was rather chastening to discover how easily one could find something worth adding to a twelve liner or, even more chastening, taking away from a fifteen liner. Though even more common, perhaps, was the experience of starting off with the expectation of writing another fourteen liner, finding it ran to fifteen or sixteen, revising it without further formal preoccupation, and finding it ending up with about thirty lines to it. I once published a little cycle of fourteen liners, which was called Four Mistranslated Sonnets – although there were five of them, just to suggest the actual extent of mistranslation going on – and the element of translation also explained why they didn’t rhyme. Occasionally I will put in a rhyme, if a gift offers itself. (Sometimes language makes such offers to the non-rhymer – which at times, by the way, it would be disastrous to accept.) I find that because of the influence of Edwin Morgan’s Sonnets from Scotland, the sonnet is just about the most popular form of them all among my students. Of course, the sonnet is very likely the form of forms – but as far as I’m concerned the writing of a formal, rhyming sonnet is pretty much a dead end. The formalism almost invariably makes you write against the instinct of your writing (if your writing actually has instincts) and it is not something I would go out of my way to encourage people to use – though, obviously, in the end they have to make their own decisions about these things and, needless to say, you have to prune and prop to encourage some varieties to grow. Aren’t you comfortable with the metrical restrictions of traditional verse forms then?

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Well, I suppose not – though it is where I started as an idiot youth, and every so often, on an ad hoc basis, I briefly come back to it. Of course, one should do whatever one find works – but in general it seems to me that, unless you are having the poem somehow brought into existence by the form itself, what you are doing is just making it more difficult to say things which are not predetermined by your verse form. Of course, some forms strike a balance between fruitful provocation and rank petrification better than others do – and people can feel an immense sense of rightness about some of them too. Blank verse, ballad metre, Omar Khayyam, and certainly terza rima as Dante uses it. But, by and large, the more complex and demanding the form, the greater the demands it makes on your necessarily limited resources of energy and attention. Leaving less over, if this rather mechanical image has any justice in it, for giving to the content side of things. And with what might be called “Very Important Matters”, there can be a sort of indecency in the very process of having to split your attention between the subject matter and something so much less worth bothering about as formal points. In short, it can be unhelpfully distracting if your mind is forever having to be on the form as opposed to the content. And unless you are preternaturally gifted, it will be forcing you to make the marches you don’t want to make, or to move the words you don’t want to move, or say things that you don’t quite want to say. You want to say something different but the form won’t let you! For a serious writer, what greater indictment could there be? When you are writing in prose, to give a nursery example, and you move one word from here to there, then it’s nearly always the same word – there are rarely quite such lethal formal knock-on effects – but somehow it’s now doing things much better here than it did there, in a way you can’t necessarily verbalise. But if formally you have to have it there, then you have just shot yourself in the foot. It’s not accidental that Shakespeare’s greatest stuff is in blank verse, because it is one of the most elastic forms. Maybe some of the prose is even better. Of course, as I said, there are particular stricter forms that just seem to work, or to work for certain people, or without whose inspiring restrictions some people would not be able to write anything whatsoever – which would not always be a bad thing, I must say – but, by and large, it seems to me that the more important the formal aspect gets, the less important all sorts of other things are, like engaging with

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reality. I think making nice, not to say superb, formal patterns with linguistic expressions should not be confused with saying what it would be a great relief not to have to refer to as wonderful and perhaps even necessary things which contain or connect up with truth. Are you interested in reality and truth? I think one would probably be well advised to say “Yes” here. In fact, since you ask, I find these are just about the only things I am interested in. (I suppose I could claim to prefer unreality and lies.) Yes, I believe reality is out there. I believe there is an objective reality and there is an objective truth. It’s so unfashionable and lowering to make these remarks, believe me. Perhaps a certain naïve pride also comes through. The problem is that with so many of these questions you start off at a very naïve level, then work your way up into a more suave and sophisticated viewpoint. Then, very often, you work your way further up, as you think – only to end up with something that sounds very suspiciously like what you believed when you started out. So you are always defensively aware of the advantage of showing that, if you like, this is not just an unreflecting naivety that you are now giving voice to. Only now do I dare to come out and admit that I believe the meaning of a text, if any, derives from authorial intention, if any. However, language is far more clever than its users – I mean, it has more resources than its users can access or probably even be aware of. And one of the innumerable things it can do is to suggest that it is creating meaning all on its own. It is always far more complex than we think; and a lot of literature consists of works that are deliberately polysemic, where there are many strands that don’t actually mean anything less diffuse because all (or most, or part) of what the author is doing really is providing material to be interpreted, and it could be interpreted and discussed forever without getting a single conclusive answer. Because there isn’t one. Of course, there are positive aspects to this. Some very great writing to some extent deliberately provides just such inexhaustible material. Wonderful concepts swinging about all over the place, with the eager questant after wisdom in hot pursuit. Inexhaustible, though, more for a technical reason than because uninterpretably deep wisdom is genuinely provided. Actually, I don’t even

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see how there could be uninterpretably deep wisdom. And certainly not from human beings in a human language. The Waste Land seems to be a good example hereabouts. T.S. Eliot, in general, is, among much else, a brilliant manipulator of the aura of language. Very often the reason why you can never quite work out what he means is because he doesn’t mean it. Which is to say: it’s not that he means something very specific that you are not getting, perhaps because you’re not intelligent enough, though quite possibly one isn’t, but rather he is taking fairly magnificent advantage of the capacity of language to suggest great oceans and umbras of meaning, which he can achieve by using all sorts of rhythms, languages, and bits of wondrous polyglot semantic seasonings. Ultimately, it’s a technique. There is a technique of literary profundity, which is quite distinct from actual profundity, for making remarks which are true or which have truth in them but which are comparatively difficult to assimilate. It’s an appearance of profundity – mimicry, more or less, depending on the individual case. Of course, you have to be quite astute to be able to get even there. And mimicry can be very entertaining. But often it cannot simply be turned into genuine coin of the realm in any real life situation. Decade after decade, students write essays on The Waste Land and nobody is any further forward at the end of it. They are not going to get there, because there isn’t enough material to complete the circuit. Or it’s like a puzzle where they haven’t given you enough pieces. You can get little local and personal triumphs here and there, but you can’t build it up into a whole. I don’t know. Maybe it all adds to the fun. Religious poetry also aims to find or reflect the truth you are talking about. Are you interested in perhaps writing religious poems? Not really. But religion is the classical locus of claims of ultimate truth about reality, so you are bound to have a certain interest in the subject, are you not? Maybe that’s one of the reasons why one is aware of the literary technique of profundity as such. And there’s also a technique of silence. The two are very much related. The apparent profundity of silence. The “too profoundly true for mere words to have a chance of catching it” notion. Whereas everything that can be verbalised can be criticised – and we don’t really want criticism, do we? All just too negative.

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Religious poetry and religious discussion is forever coming up against the basic problem (only one of many, granted) that if something is superhuman or beyond the human, then you can’t get at it. Not even silently. The notion that somehow you are in contact with something you cannot be in contact with, that you are touching something which is in principle beyond human capacity to get at – this is merely a piece of particularly privileged rhetorical abuse, part of the verbal technique of profundity. Wittgenstein, I suspect, is particularly good at this sort of caper when he goes into religion. But then, so many special rules suddenly apply once you get into the discussion of religion. People in one religion usually can see quite clearly the absurdity of another religion, however special their own might be. For instance, I remember reading about the Aborigines who have this notion: why do animals run around? Well, they run around because there are further little animals inside the bigger, obvious ones – and that these are making the big ones move. Immediately you can see this is (excuse me) rubbish, but of course if you just say that those little animals are invisible, you’ve already got the soul – something so venerable and revered that for a large part of our history to voice doubts about it was liable to have serious consequences for your health and freedom. The question just has been moved one step back and then covered by a drape. Then the drape is embroidered ever more wonderfully and people revere the embroidery as some sort of ultimate truth. Truth is a distinctive quality possessed by verbal or conceptual expressions when they correspond to reality. There can’t possibly be a truth so deep you can’t express it; it’s a contradiction in terms. Mind you, I do like the idea of a lie so deep that it defies expression. But not one person has ever talked of that for a thousand who talked of the other fantasy – for all the very obvious formal identity between them. You are a qualified electronics engineer and as you once said you are drawn to science books because you want to “get an idea of what is actually known”. How does scientific thinking affect your poetry? I remember it was in my early twenties that I got hold of one of these encyclopaedias which seemed to be offering the whole of science in about sixty pages of tiny print. I thought: this is useful and I could do with it. So much objective or would-be objective knowledge in one place. Anyway, I did read it through and I just found that there was

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something profoundly satisfying and sympathetic to me in the whole set-up. Hitherto, I suppose I had looked on from rather a distance, artistic and resentful and fearful that one had maybe missed the bus. I’m not talking about the actual practice of science, bogged down, as it no doubt often is, with compromises of everyday living and the need to earn a crust and so forth. No, I’m talking about the overall project of science. One would have to call it something like the systematic attempt to get at the truth of what actually is. My God, but language like that has taken such a persistent battering in the years since. But often, when I read about science these days, I am still struck by what might be called almost the mental health aspect of this area of human discipline: a sort of clean air blows through the pages. Rather more so than in some other areas of endeavour, I should say. The basic sense of the scientific project is the attempt to find out how things actually are. This doesn’t sound much – but it turns out it’s a lot more than very many people and disciplines are willing to get too demeaningly involved in. The rest may well be fiction – but I wonder if the division between fiction that thinks it’s fiction and fiction that truly thinks it’s fact isn’t at least as significant as the traditional one between fiction and fact. Isn’t there something strangely factual, whether for good or bad, about fiction that isn’t trying to pass itself off as fact? Maybe not. Anyway, I seem to remember meaning to add earlier that for anything that’s invented to be best right at the start is quite unusual – things are rarely born unimprovable. You can always make them better. Once the Wright brothers get that ridiculous plane in the air, then more or less everyone can join in, and within fifty years we have jets. So after Pascal or your favourite schoolteacher or some other infallible authority has made his initial profundities you can just correct them. Of course, one can also ruin them, whether deliberately or not. With a bit of luck, both versions will survive. Or the better one will? A touch of idealism creeping in there perhaps. It’s a question of what you are left with once the author is dead. Or, for that matter, alive. Several other Scottish writers, for instance Edwin Morgan or John Burnside, are also comfortable with the combination of science and poetry. Do you think it could be something specifically Scottish?

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How would I know? Culturally, Scotland has in recent times rather been a country of technicians, engineers and scientists, so there might be something in it. What a magnificent culture it would be which embraced equally everything that was worthwhile. Of course, you have to be aware of the dangers of oversimplifying but certainly I was aware in my teens of a vague notion that nearly all the famous Scots I read about were technicians and artisans and, as it seemed then, saddeningly unspiritual. On the other hand, you would be wrong to think in suggesting the idea that when working in an artistic environment in Scotland you are necessarily among people who are deeply sympathetic to science. It might be a more common attitude than in some other places, I suppose. You have mentioned those two writers and you could mention figures like MacDiarmid, who made a point of calling himself a scientific socialist, so I suppose it’s part of the culture. You could say that Protestantism produced that interest in the sciences, but what produced Protestantism? It’s a many-body problem. However, in terms of making cultural, political or social remarks the only thing you can honestly do, as a methodological point of general applicability, is to be as aware as you can of how complex all these things are and try to proceed with appropriate caution rather than be incapacitated by indecision. You can go around picking up positive instances about poets in Scotland who are interested in the sciences if you like, but you can easily go around picking up counter-examples. George Mackay Brown, for instance, who in his entire career was more or less dead set against technology as such. Not a unique case, I would hardly think. But, certainly, in Dictionary of National Biography terms, Scots may well tend to lean more to the engineering and technology side than to the artistic side. In The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women you write about galaxies, stars, evolution, the cosmos and so on. Did any of Edwin Morgan’s science fiction poems have an influence on you? I like Morgan’s openness of approach very much, and clearly you can get a science fiction element in MacDiarmid – not least in his politics. But what I write is not science fiction, unless you break it down into science and fiction. Some of Edwin Morgan’s poems belong very specifically to the science fiction genre but I don’t think any of mine

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do. Actually, what makes it seem science fiction is the interest in astronomy, which is a very quick way into so many things that can be called “science”. An interest in botany or in the behaviour of butterflies is not really altering your perception of our human place in the universe quite so dramatically, I don’t think. Is it? Whereas astronomy – especially when you see these maps of the galaxy – takes you straight in there. Astronomy isn’t kidding. You receive less critical attention compared to some other Scottish writers. So I think it was quite unexpected that Robert Crawford wrote a long chapter on your work in his Identifying Poets. Have you read Crawford’s book and are you comfortable with his criticism? Yes, of course I’ve read it. I read it more than once, with a quiet inner glow of pride. I think it started out as an essay for what is just about the only specific academic Scottish literature magazine known to me – a periodical called the Scottish Literary Journal. He was editing Verse around that time, which published quite a few of my poems, and he knew my work very well. Robert’s book appeared at Edinburgh University Press, which, under another imprint, used to publish my prose. It’s a much more home-grown thing than you might think. Maybe it’s the same in most places. Someone at Polygon was suggesting to Robert Crawford that he might write about various poets, and collect these essays in a book. I did read it, and thought it was very intelligent. It was quite a few years ago and now I’m quite used to seeing this list of Scottish writers that I’m not on. There are, after all, much larger blips on the radar. But I think people do tend to see me as slightly foreign and as not really “Scottish”. I understand it and it’s true that I’m not quite wearing the same team strip, you know. Maybe I’m in the away strip. And, indeed, it may even be they don’t think I’m worth the trouble. It’s true I don’t think that being Scottish is something one should feel one has to work at. When I go elsewhere and do readings, people sometimes say they don’t hear anything Scottish in my work, as if somehow there are set rules about it that it is a bad show not to conform to. Well, I lived there all my life, what else do you have to do? You have to mention this and that to be seen as Scottish? I seem to be somewhat in the position of a native foreigner. But surely the categories are there to fit the people, not the other way

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about? I don’t know. Maybe this is how traditions change. Or develop. Or die out. Do you perhaps see yourself as a British writer? Ah, well, since you mention it, I’m afraid that’s the one thing I wouldn’t describe myself as being. But actually this is a question that does come to my mind. For example, I remember that at an earlier part of my life, for quite a few years, I was on the unemployment benefit and every time I went into the Post Office to cash the giro I would feel a sort of distant warmth toward the British state. On the other hand, culturally Britain is so weighted in all sorts of ways towards one member of the grouping that it can hardly be said to function at all. It has a vast formal or ceremonial existence, true – but what else does it have? What else can it have, in fact? It’s not easy. At times it seems to be not much more than a flag of convenience. Though such things no doubt can be real conveniences. Suppose a few small churches were to unite with a much larger one. Even if the name were to be changed, the general perception would be that the larger church has simply undergone a certain restructuring and was continuing under the new name. Any alterations or characteristics stemming in the main from one of the lesser ones would be perceived as a characteristic of the large new (that is, old) church. Does this matter? Well, it almost certainly will seem to matter to quite a few of the former minor dispensations. Nevertheless it would probably be better off for all concerned that this ecumenical triumph occurred than that it didn’t. Does the same thing work politically? Would the losses be outweighed by the gains? I don’t know. How can anybody be sure? Maybe the losses are just more obvious. Much the same problem holds good for the UK–EC relationship too, of course. And, as usual, exactly the same people can be very sensitive to such problems in one direction and blissfully unaware of nearly identical problems in another. But it is absolutely normal for people not to have any conception of any difference between “Britain” and “England”. Tedious but true, for what it’s worth. Even people in the Times Literary Supplement will talk of the British Navy engaging the Armada in 1588 and so forth. I mean, who cares, you might not unreasonably ask, out there in the broader world, but it can be a bit

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disconcerting to see what things apparently don’t even deserve to be got right. It might be different for you in Hungary, given that you are linguistically so distinct – but I rather suspect that if you were to present many a fine mind with a map of Eastern Europe with all the names removed, it would be a melancholy experience indeed to see which national outlines they could identify. Look how people are forever calling Rilke or Hofmannsthal German writers. Britain is not much of a cultural term; it’s more like an inexact way of saying “English” with additional things round the frill. But whose fault is that? I’m sure that if Scotland wanted to have political independence, it could do it like that! [Snaps fingers.] A friend of mine said he wished Scotland would get its independence so he could leave the place with a clear conscience. But people keep complaining, it seems to me, almost as an emotionally satisfying substitute for action – which is difficult and uncertain. It’s almost as if a child has a license to complain and not do anything – but once the child has got to, say, thirty or forty, he should either be doing something about it or should no longer be complaining. However, the image is beginning to run all over the place, I’m afraid. But one thing I do not very much like at all is a fairly widespread habit of what I can only call taking advantage of the good will of the people in charge to snap at their heels and make wonderfully biting remarks just within earshot – and then going on to mistake such inexpensive displays of audacity for anything remotely like genuine bravery and independence of mind. Did you vote in the 1997 referendum for a Scottish parliament? Oh yes. I voted “Yes” to all these things. There’s still a car parked quite near where I live with a sticker saying “NO-NO” in the back window. Whenever I see it I am always struck by the owner’s thoughtfulness in continuing to let us know his own opinion on this rather historical matter. Mind you, I’m also struck, rather more favourably, by the maturity or the weariness or the poor powers of observation which has left the car completely unmolested for years. But “us” and “them” is something you want to avoid whenever you can.

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How much does Glasgow matter to you? Have you lived elsewhere? No, I have lived nowhere else. Perhaps I never had the sort of ambition that required a relocation. The place of one’s childhood and youth is always special – and as one spends more and more time here the city becomes a sort of convenient one-volume encyclopaedia of the details and reference points of one’s life. So, in a sense, the more time passes the more it matters. It’s also the site of the most of the more visible half of my family history. So it would be a very strange thing if it didn’t matter to me rather a lot. On the other hand, the world is full of cities which would be perfectly worth staying in if that was where you happened to find yourself. There are probably thousands of them. Edwin Morgan said that people in Glasgow like to look to America but I really feel that Glasgow is such a European-looking city… Well, again, I don’t feel as if I’m surrounded by people who are interested in European culture as such. That Glasgow looks to America is inevitable given the geographical position and of course there is also the near-identity of language. But, again, it depends on picking up positive instances while ignoring the negative ones, and, of course, nearly everybody in Europe looks to America to some extent. My country is about to join the European Union, and we are told that we are joining not only an economic unit but also a special set of values and principles. So this is my standard question in this series of interviews with Scottish poets: as a poet working and living in an EU member state, can you identify with a European sensibility in spiritual, cultural or moral terms? Well, some people question if there’s a thing as Europe at all. It’s odd, given the linguistic diversity, but it is also very clear, particularly from outside Europe, that there is such a thing as a European culture and, obviously, in historic terms there is something called Europe. Maybe a more interesting question is: where does Europe actually begin and end, and are some countries more European than others? Obviously, Italy and Greece are sort of “it”, and France too, and Germany of course (and not merely as the most powerful nation that ruined Europe

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several times), and the Netherlands, where we have this fantastic outburst of painting and scientific exploration that we tend to forget. But as you go further east – well, you see, we associate Hungary more than anything else with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Or perhaps with the football side of the 1950s. But we are also aware that a long time ago people came into what is now Hungary from Asia, and speak this deeply exotic language that no one else speaks. It’s practically a family code. But to answer your question: I very much identify with European norms in all sorts of ways. To take your cultural points of reference from your own country does not seem very admirable to me – though no doubt the more globally-sized your country is, the less is the deprivation this leads to. Or the less noticeable it is, perhaps. I think your poems reveal a wonderful talent of catching the essence of a foreign atmosphere. You have devoted two books to China, and you have written poems about Persia and Prague, and there are several references to Hungary in The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women. What draws you to these foreign places? I have always liked the look of these places, the baroque architecture and so on. It all seems terribly right to me. But the same goes for innumerable somewhat more mundane details of daily life. As for China, well, you could say it combines in almost ideal form the notion of an alternative universe, something completely alien, and an alternative homecoming, something completely but almost bafflingly familiar. I think there is such a thing as Middle Europe and it takes in quite a few countries and I have always felt rather deeply attracted to it. I don’t know why, because that’s not the part where my father came from. I have always liked the look of it. You look at those baroque churches and palaces in Prague or Bavaria and you think: yes, that’s what a building should look like. There is a whole clutch of similar cities with a very strong cultural sense there. I don’t know if it still exists because of the political and linguistic diversity, but seen from outside there’s clearly a distinct Middle Europe and I’m reacting directly to that as a place that appeals to me. I know I’ve said that I feel North European, but it’s not a massively exclusive feeling.

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Your books are often inspired by other books, for example A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty is based on paintings from Oswald Siren’s Chinese Painting and “An Old Guide-Book to Prague” actually takes its inspiration from a 1937 guide-book to the city. Where does this sense of bookishness or antiquarianism come from? Do you find that it doesn’t interest you enough what is going on around you? It must be a reflection on my lifestyle, but as my lifestyle changes what I write about also changes, and I certainly do that sort of thing far less now. That was “Kuppner: The Late Early Phase”. The Chinese book came from a growing interest in Chinese culture generally, and I happened to find that book on Prague at much the same time and I wondered: can you do the same thing with photographs as you did with pictures? That’s where I started from; but it has branched out. I think at the time that was my habit: I spent a fair amount of time sitting in libraries and looking at books while I waited for artistic movers and shakers to become aware of my existence. That was one type of subject matter but it limited what I wrote about. I haven’t done it much lately, except that I keep having bursts of writing more of the little Chinese poems. Though even these tend not to derive from pictures any longer; they just arrive from anywhere. It has got through very deeply, wherever it came from. There was a long time when I thought I couldn’t write a book about Glasgow because I didn’t much like the city. But this is fairly normal – people often leave their place of birth for a time and they come back to it later. I just didn’t have either the money or the initiative to leave it in the first place, I suppose. And one tended, as I said, to have this fairly irrational belief that wild success was just round the corner. These days I tend to write about it all the time. I have even had a couple of books on Glasgow subjects published. After all, life is life, and it is where one has actually lived. Mind you, the books were also principally about local murder stories. I don’t know where that leaves us. Once you said you are “nursing the impossible dream of emigrating to Edinburgh”. Is it really like another country compared to where you live now?

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Oh, very much so! I mean people from Edinburgh… Well: it’s not exactly like going to Bolivia, is it? But they are such wonderfully different cities given that they are so near. Scotland is actually rather lucky in not being in a sort of permanent centrifugal whirl around a single major city. God knows what other places I’m referring to here. Actually it is still such a surprise to go over to Edinburgh and find it it’s still there. Here it is. Still in place. You didn’t just dream it. Well, I assume it’s still there. To a quite incredible extent, Edinburgh people tend to stay in Edinburgh and Glasgow people in Glasgow. I myself hardly knew a thing about the place until my sister went to stay there for a while when I was already into my thirties. I then walked all over the place, with the Penguin Architectural Guide to it that had just come out, and it was really a shock to me to find that this astonishing historical entity had definitely survived to the extent that it has. I kept thinking: “Wait a minute. There’s some mistake here. Why wasn’t I informed of this before?” It was probably in the high tide of that enthusiasm that I made that remark about emigrating in a letter to my publisher – and it got into a catalogue – and once something is in a catalogue then that’s that. It is frightening how easily and ineradicably such trivial remarks can proliferate. Yet again: the authority of the written word. Actually, I worked in Edinburgh for three years recently at the University as Writer-in-Residence there. I felt very privileged. The illustration on the front cover of your book A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty was done by Alasdair Gray. Was it on your request? Yes. I asked him if he would. It was to be a Chinese version of a Western picture, as a marvellously witty counterpoint to all these Western poetic derivations from Chinese art. He ran up a sketch I very much liked, in free hand, very quickly, just to show to the publisher, to see if the publisher would accept it. Which, of course, he did. The final version is rather more formal. Mind you, when I saw it, I said to him: “Alasdair, this woman is Japanese. The book is based on Chinese art and this charming female is clearly from Japan.” I have to say, he didn’t seem to be particularly bothered by that. In fact, no one seems to have been particularly bothered by that. But I still think she looks

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Japanese to me. You know, if I were writing a story I think I would stop at any line which was even half as wistful and lyrical as that. Glasgow, 7 March 2003

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Bibliography: Frank Kuppner (1951–)

Poetry A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty. Manchester: Carcanet, 1984. The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women. Manchester: Carcanet, 1987. Ridiculous! Absurd! Disgusting! Manchester: Carcanet, 1989. Everything is Strange. Manchester: Carcanet, 1994. Second Best Moments in Chinese History. Manchester: Carcanet, 1997. What? Again?: Selected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 2000. A God’s Breakfast. Manchester: Carcanet, 2004. Arioflotga. Manchester: Carcanet, 2008.

Fiction A Very Quiet Street. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1989. A Concussed History of Scotland. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990. Something Very Like Murder. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1994. Life on a Dead Planet. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996. In the Beginning There Was Physics. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1999.

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W.N. Herbert: The Poetry Game W.N. Herbert is a many-voiced avant-garde eccentric whose poetic aims and strategies are hard, if not impossible, to pin down. Though he likes to identify Hugh MacDiarmid’s version of Scottish modernism and the tradition of Scottish comic verse as represented (knowingly or not) by William McGonagall as his main sources of inspiration, his work shows at least as much similarity with the poetry of Edwin Morgan when either invention or playfulness is concerned. This interview is one of the rare instances when Herbert describes his intimate bond with estuarial landscapes, and alludes to a surprising kinship with Douglas Dunn’s lyricism. Keywords: Dundee; Avant-garde; Scots; Hugh MacDiarmid; William McGonagall; place in poetry.

Bill Herbert, “poet and pseudo-scholar” (his own designation), was born in 1961 in Dundee, and graduated from Oxford University. Gags aside, he is a typical academic poet of the middle generation. At the same time, his playful (and sometimes seemingly cynical) wit combined with an unorthodox association of ideas has not always found general approval with dignitaries and decision makers in the academic establishment. He has been regarded as a cerebral poet with a sharp, but provocative and sceptical intellect. So I was rather taken by the public applause that I witnessed after his live reading at the 2003 Edinburgh Book Festival, which I had visited to interview him for this book. Critical perspectives on his work tend not to consider that, but it is obvious that the public context of poetry is very important for Herbert: among other things, he has initiated and participated in a series of collaborative art projects in Scotland and the North-East of England, such as designing and placing art works in public spaces or heading the multimedia project “Book of the North”. Herbert is a prolific writer. His poetical work includes Sterts and Stobies (1985) and Sharawaggi (1990), both written in collaboration with Robert Crawford. Anither Music (1991), Dundee Doldrums (1991) and The Testament of the Reverend Thomas Dick (1994) partly sprang from experience and material related to his native Dundee. Forked Tongue received the Scottish Arts Council Book Award in 1994, and Cabaret McGonagall (1996) won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize. The Laurelude (1998), which is discussed in detail here, won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The Big Bumper Book of Troy (2002) revives memories of

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Dundee again. His most recent Bad Shaman Blues (2006), a fantastic journey of the mind, was selected as Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for both the Saltire Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. With Richard Price, he launched the poetry magazine Gairfish in 1989, and co-edited Contraflow on the Super Highway: A Primer of Informationist Poetry (1994). He possesses outstanding critical faculties as an academic: both his To Circumjack MacDiarmid (1992) and Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (co-edited with Matthew Hollis in 2000) are required reading for poetry enthusiasts. Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Morgan, two father figures in twentieth-century Scottish poetry, have been pointed out as major inspirations for W.N. Herbert. This interview adds William Topaz McGonagall, a nineteenth-century public orator and clown figure from Dundee, to Herbert’s influences, which he discusses in depth here. While Morgan’s linguistic virtuosity and ardently universal curiosity has offered itself for critics as an obvious link with Herbert’s work, in the following conversation he makes mention of American Beat poetry as a major impetus on his diction, for example, in Dundee Doldrums. In general, cultural memories of all sorts from his native Dundee keep coming to surface in his books, while distant views of the Tay Estuary with Dundee and Broughty Ferry in the background add Douglas Dunn, another father figure, as an (as yet unacknowledged) influence on Herbert’s formal concerns. His post-modern selfreflexivity encompasses obvious allusions to serious literature from Wordsworth to Wallace Stevens, and references to popular culture from The Simpsons to Star Trek and Dundee urban legends. While in Herbert everything is taken with a pinch of irony, he has a keen spiritual interest and, like John Burnside, he regards poetry as a philosophical process. Herbert was ready to speak about language in more detail than any other poet in the present collection. His bilingualism of Dundonian Scots (also spoken by Don Paterson but with a different lyrical cadence) and Standard English (on the page) with a Scottish accent (in pronunciation) is a hallmark that is sometimes kept in separate books, but sometimes changes from poem to poem within a single volume. But this simple, binary division does not reflect Herbert’s linguistic genius aptly enough. He uses the sort of Synthetic Scots which was invented by MacDiarmid and which also finds a fond

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resonance in Crawford’s early work – but Herbert adds to it vernacular turns of phrase from Dundee as sieved through his familiarity with various levels and layers of culture, and augments it with his own linguistic idiosyncrasies, innovations and inventions. He takes a nuanced and historically considered opinion about the status and present uses of Scots in both literary and social contexts, and does not share romantic notions that a language has to be, by definition, organic. He can be wittily ironic about everything – including politics and nationality – and yet he holds old-fashioned categories such as “Scottish” or “British” relevant for his work. But he admits that the experience of living on the border between communities (both in realistic and imaginative terms) remains his most important motivation: he maintains a love and hate relationship with his native Dundee while unfailingly abiding by the outsider’s perspective on Scottish writing and culture. Herbert is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and lives in an old lighthouse by the Tyne Estuary, which features in some of his poems. The following conversation was recorded in the Writers’ Tent in Charlotte Square at the Edinburgh Book Festival, 2003.

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When did you become interested in poetry and how did you start writing poems? How do you catch a disease? It was the right germs in the right conditions: Auden, Brecht, Donne, Hopkins, Keats and Shakespeare make a pretty contagious combo. Then I was a stroppy adolescent who was good with words and whose English teachers didn’t entirely distrust language either. Quite the contrary, they managed the miracle in midseventies Broughty Ferry of suggesting it wasn’t entirely freakish to be interested in how words went together. One teacher wrote sarcastic replies to my sarcastic comments on her marks, another helped us set up an “alternative” school magazine. Almost all of them taught openly and with some passion, regardless of those students who adhered to the old Dundonian principle of assuming that everything intellectual was firstly beyond them and secondly contemptible. Some of us responded. We acted in plays, some written by ourselves, and we wrote, however badly. The response to language is bodily: after a while writing changes the way you perceive things. So by the time we went on to university or drama college or wherever, we were infected. I am always troubled when people talk about our reaction to poetry as being “cerebral”, as though the cerebellum somehow wasn’t in their body, or their notions of what was or wasn’t witty or sensuous weren’t produced by that very organ. But that’s because I’m still ill. Somewhere you described yourself as an anarchist and you said that poetry is fundamentally anarchic – what does it mean? Well, I’m an anarchist in the political sense in that I don’t value the state or the various modes of control it generates. I don’t understand what money is for, outside those parameters. I fear religions as much as I respect spirituality. I don’t experience patriotism on anything other than an irrational tribal level, so I don’t trust that much either. In literary terms, this means that for me exercising the freedom of the imagination is the first goal. So I don’t usually fit in with particular ideological lines, or come up with neat statements on public issues. However, I can produce poems which represent opinions I don’t agree with – for instance, poems which could be seen as having a nationalist agenda as well as poems which contradict that. I don’t regard the role of the poet in relation to the poem as one that is politically responsible

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– I regard it as politically irresponsible. I think that’s part of the freedom which I was arguing about. I don’t think that a poem is on message (I don’t think it can be on message) but sometimes it can be interpreted as such. When you come to Scotland for poetry readings, is it possible at all to separate poetry and politics, or poetry and nationalism? I’m thinking of the lady in the audience at today’s reading who praised you and Robert Crawford for using “our” language, as she said, in a beautiful way to address international issues. Well, isn’t it natural for the language of any community to use it to address the matters of the community as well as international issues? Sure. I think the issue there is an issue of interpretation rather than an issue that I have to address in my writing. The audience is free to interpret my work as expressing “our” language in that sense. I noticed when I was answering a point Gavin Wallace made about the Scottish parliament, I actually said “your parliament”, which I was surprised to hear. Theoretically it is my parliament too, but I feel disaffected from that notion. I feel that my task is very straightforward: there are certain linguistic possibilities which I am exploring and there are certain literary heritages which I am engaged by, most of which are Scottish, and those bring cultural and political subjects with them, but that’s not why I am pursuing them. I’m pursuing creative possibilities: there are certain poems which must be written, from my point of view. Maybe not from anyone else’s. [Laughs.] You live in England and most of your books have been published outside Scotland. Do you still see yourself as a Scottish writer, or is a description like Scottish, British or European writer relevant to you at all? All of these descriptions are relevant. I am a very primitive, conservative thinker to the extent that I could not describe myself as not being Scottish, no matter how disengaged I felt by Scottish issues. My publisher is based in the (far) North of England, and that feels right – I would rather not have a London-based publisher. A lot of my creativity is about the process of making irrational choices. Electing to have a non-Scottish but non-London publisher is an irrational choice

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career-wise, but makes sense to me creatively. I regard myself as a Scottish writer who works primarily in a Northern European context. Being on the border between England and Scotland means to me that I work in a Northern European rather than a Northern English or British framework. It is a space which allows me to see the things which are happening in European history: the redrawing of countries, the re-categorisation of cultures, and the establishing of hierarchies of languages. Being on the side of the border that is not in my own country gives me a lens through which I look at it all. How much of this is rationalising after the fact, I’ll leave up to you. Do you believe in a European spirit in literature? I’m inclined to say no because I fear such large abstractions. To my mind, such grand statements are counter-creative; they accrete cant. The encounter that you make with your own or another culture could take you a lifetime to interpret, whether it’s an encounter with literature, or with people, or with the intimate, day-to-day business of living somewhere. These are lifetime processes. I see my creativity as a process and every now and then an opinion may come out of that, but I am not interested in the opinion – I am interested in the process. The process of engaging creatively with your sense of Northern European culture has the potential to produce art – but the quest to deliver a definition of a Northern European culture or the entire European Union as a single cultural unit only produces nice little slogans. The back cover of your book Anither Music says, “here comes Dundonian W.N. Herbert with the latest alternative to English”. Is that what you really wanted to do, and is it really an alternative to English? No. I wrote that, so I’m responsible for it. I think what I should have said was an “augmentation” in the same sense as “augmented chords” – a perhaps obscure thing that can really change the texture of a piece of music. So, too, Scots is a particular way of looking at Englishes – and I prefer to think of English in the plural, because when we think of the English language we do seem to mean a very precise, politically defined unit which I am less comfortable with. So, no, I got that wrong. [Laughs.]

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But reading that book I noticed that some of the Scots poems are accompanied by footnotes in English. Isn’t it artificial that you have to explain those Scots words and expressions to your readers? Yes, it is. I would argue that a great deal of the creative process is, or can be seen as, highly artificial, and one of the things which was going on with the footnotes, the glossaries, and so forth, was an attempt to add another layer of artifice to the interpretative mix. Part of it you could interpret as insecurity (that the poems might not stand by themselves), but part of it was a genuine playfulness to go into this other area, and see if what that produced was aesthetically viable. At the reading I noticed that your Scots poems work very well in performance for the majority of the Scottish audience. But there were a few people including myself who couldn’t make out anything of the long poem “The Great Camperdown Breakout” you read from your latest book. What about this part of the audience: should they learn Scots or should they just leave it? I don’t prescribe what the audience should do. The audience can or cannot engage with the work and it is not my job to make people learn or feel that they ought to learn Scots. It’s my job in performing those poems to make people experience Scots and the experience can be positive or negative for them: it could lead them on to examine my poem on the page, or not. Performance isn’t a prescriptive zone, it doesn’t tell the audience how to behave during it, and it doesn’t oblige them to do anything as a result of it. Nor is performance more important than the zone we enter into when we pick up a book; it may be that when people read those poems there’s a totally different effect. That could be seen to close down Scots to an international audience – people who pick up English as a second language aren’t necessarily going to want to pick up a variation on it. But they can pick up on the music and rhythm, and they can often appreciate the, shall we say, piquant relationship between a politically less powerful speech and its more dominating neighbour. I found that was particularly the case in India where English has this interesting role as a frequently unwanted lingua franca.

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Why is it that even today poetry in Scots seems to have a very strong link with performance and oral tradition? It is a very performative medium and this is one of the paradoxes that interest me. Literary Scots can be defined as very remote from demotic or spoken Scots, nonetheless it can perform well. This seems to be a point where the expectation that this is purely a High Culture medium breaks down and something else comes through. The thing that comes through is very intriguing to me, because you could argue that it was an artificial linguistic event but you could also argue that it is an atavistic linguistic event, and the switch between the two appears to be contradictory. Why Scots is able to do this is probably very much caught up with the history of the language and how it moved from being a general speech into becoming a supposedly workingclass speech – which is a very shortened and inaccurate history of the Scots language, because right into the nineteenth century you have quite a lot of prominent literary, political and social figures who are able to articulate in Scots. At the top end, the intellectual and official role is supposed to be taken over by English, but instead of that happening we have an incomplete process of absorption into the English language, and you have a continued energy of Scots which comes through. It is a social construct that the language is simply artificial in its present surviving forms, and it is another construct that artificiality is necessarily a bad thing. There’s an evolutionary argument that Burns was able to write Scots naturally but Stevenson was no longer able to do that and soon it will be entirely extinct in literary terms. It extends right back to the Middle Ages: in some magical golden era people were able to write naturally in Scots, but they can’t ever do that in whichever period is currently under discussion, and especially not now. In fact, the processes of attrition, survival and revival are more complex at any given moment in history, and ours is no exception. The expectation that language is dead or its use is hierarchic can be overturned in a moment (a moment’s reading or a moment’s performance) and that interests me enormously. Apparently, you don’t agree with Edwin Muir, who said that Scots was a dead language…

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Muir had a very particular agenda, coming from outside a Scotsspeaking context in his own linguistic heritage. He came from Orkney, and was not thinking of Lowlands Scots as being his speech at all. He was also trying to align himself with Eliot’s argument about the dissociation of sensibility: the whole division between the dead head and dying heart of Scots is arguably derived from Eliot. It is an interesting idea but it has got a very specific cultural background. The note in your book Dundee Doldrums: An Exorcism says that your work relates to “the buried life of that unfortunate tongue, and how, in one given instance, it was exhumed”. It’s very similar to what Muir says, that Scots was a dead body, and was galvanised into existence like Frankenstein’s monster… Yes, I very much like this Frankenstein image: the dead bits are stitched together, and are galvanised, and something live comes out of them. It is a nice metaphor and I was being ironic in that particular instance. I like the idea that organic models might not fully describe language, so that the artificial, the resurrected and the galvanised – even the robotic or the computer-generated – all have a role to play in the specific construct of a poem. That was probably what I was alluding to. What or who is “exorcised” in that book? The love of my life, as I saw it, which turned out to be not so much the particular girl but the particularities of the place. Dundee in the seventies was an intellectually and emotionally grim place to grow up in, a Wasteland for northern proles without angsty literary associations, just the full-on threat of violence for revealing any kind of spark. Those who emerged from it, like the great singer Billy MacKenzie, tended to be weird and wonderful individuals. I think the best Dundonian writing in my generation has a rather warped beauty. And none of us, of course, knew about each other – one of my problems has always been the assumption that there can only be one of me when in fact there was a belated renaissance going on: James Meek, Don Paterson, Alison Kennedy, Tracy Herd, Matthew Fitt, Bill Duncan, John Glenday, Andrew Murray Scott. It’s not bad for a wee

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hell-hole. Naturally the exorcism didn’t take: cast out one devil, as the Bible points out, and there’s plenty to take his place. You mentioned energy before, and you also said elsewhere that paradox is a source of energy. What do you use that energy for in poetry? I’m thinking of the keywords from the book’s praise on the blurb: “energetic”, “crazy”, “various”, and so on. Does that mean that you are more interested in energy, games, experiments and variousness than feeling, lyricism and poetic truth? No, it doesn’t mean that. It means that one of the things I look for in a poem is a pulse, and we come back to the Frankenstein motif here. The pulse can be small and intimate or it can be a great, galvanic tour de force, and I don’t mind which. The crucial point here is that for me poetry is a way of existing, of just being alive. To my mind, poetry is a very natural expression, it is the way the brain responds to experience and language, so the idea of a poetry which doesn’t have a pulse or energy is not possible for me. To divide poetry into a poetry of energy versus a poetry of intimacy is a false dichotomy. The paradox of Frankenstein’s monster, the dead thing that somehow lives, is close to the heart of the issue: we can find poignancy in the synthetic and monstrosity in the organic, we can be both complex and direct, it is a vital part of our humanity that we are prepared to contradict ourselves in our efforts to define ourselves. In a poem you can have all these ways of being as a person and that is what I’m trying to express; it so happens that one of the ways that I am in poems – that I exist in poems – is very energetic. I don’t know that it has much relation to how I behave as a person because that’s not my focus. My goal has always been to try and find as many things that can be poems as possible, and as many ways of being in a poem as possible. So that means that there can be a great diversity of emotional content and intellectual content in any given poem, and I am trying to find the specific textual centre of that content. There is a very strong presence of Hugh MacDiarmid’s spirit throughout your poetry and I think once you described him as a “prophet figure” and a “heavy paternal presence” who “lays down the law”. Is he still so important for you?

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Not to the same extent as he was before; now he should be one figure amongst many. At a certain point when I was principally publishing poems in Scots, he would seem to have been the strongest influence on me. That’s fair enough because then the first energy I used was lexical and in that sense I was using the language in a very MacDiarmidian way. However, as I have developed as a writer I have become more balanced in terms of the different energies I am trying to access, and one of the energies which I realise is, and always has been, primary in my work is formal. It’s the energy released by the choice of form – be it a particular stanza or a notion of form that a particular bit of writing has. I realise now that it goes right back to Dundee Doldrums, where the form is derived from a notion of beat poetry (a mixture of Kerouac and Ginsberg), but that is still a formal decision. One of the things which almost displaces MacDiarmid as the main prophet is that it was a particular stage in my poetic work when I was primarily engaged by the alien qualities of language, or rather engaged by the way that an alien language (the language of the dictionary) can seem so intimate. The formal engagement is just as important and possibly more thoroughgoing. I see my tradition as going back through Edwin Morgan and W.S. Graham to Hugh MacDiarmid, and beyond him to John Davidson, and it carries on going back through Hogg and Burns and Fergusson to the medieval Makars, and beyond. One figure along that route may seem to sum up an aspect of a writer’s work but that doesn’t mean that they are the only significant figure. MacDiarmid exerts a great influence on a number of Scottish poets, but what made you call him a paternal figure in particular? It comes up several times I think… Yes. In an interview when MacDiarmid’s name was given, I said “Papa!” I was joking in a Freudian vein but then I also said “Il Papa” as in “The Pope”, which the interviewer perhaps didn’t catch – a tease based on the non-Catholic background of MacDiarmid and his penchant for ex cathedra pronouncements. These were responses to Harold Bloom’s theories as to how a writer engages with other writers. MacDiarmid was a paternal figure in that he behaved in a very aggressively masculine manner. He was a very macho figure and

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that’s a particular hang-up of the Scottish tradition which we have to deal with. I deal with it by rejection, since I’m not that kind of male and I don’t believe male writers have to be laddish to thrive creatively. (I’m prepared to accept the fact this means I hardly thrive socially.) The two principal modes that MacDiarmid opened up for me were the use of dictionary Scots, and the introduction of prose registers and found material in English poetry. These are two primary techniques that I have used in my work along with others. I see those very much as inherited things in the way that you inherit property from your father, only this is intellectual property…The father gives you things and the father takes things away… In Dundee Doldrums there are two important MacPresences: MacDiarmid and the Dundee poet William McGonagall, and of course you also have a book called Cabaret McGonagall. Are they sort of jokers in a pack of cards? [Laughs.] Well, that’s a good way of describing them. MacDiarmid is in the unfortunate role of the king and the joker I suppose, whereas McGonagall is seen purely as the joker that you do not even use in most games. To my mind it is very important that he should be included in the game, because he represents a moment in cultural history when there was a general reaction to poetry which was philistine. McGonagall was a touchpaper, he gave people a point of focus at which they could articulate their resentment, their distrust and even their fear of poetry through the medium of ridicule. He was partly a martyr and partly a scapegoat, and it intrigues me that this happens in my hometown of Dundee. It makes that seem a culturally significant moment from my town and from my own background. It is also important that this has to do with performance: McGonagall performed his work, and was ridiculed for doing so; he attempted to engage with the public and he got a very direct response from it. There aren’t many poets of whom you can say that the public loved them or the public hated them. Usually the public is indifferent to them – if not ignorant of them. It was a point when something bad and destructive appeared to happen but I think it was also a moment when everything became clear: we understood that Scotland was a philistine country and hated poetry.

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Then you don’t laugh at McGonagall? I do, I think he is a very funny poet. I sometimes wonder whether these are deliberately secured effects and if he was a great comic poet in a performance mode. When you read him there is a glimmering sense every now and then that he knows exactly what he’s doing with this particularly pathetic rhyme or that particularly stupid observation. But that’s very rare, because so much has obviously been churned out that it is the same effect that’s being struck again and again. But now and then you think: yes, this is a very particular definition of talent, perhaps a unique definition of talent, and that’s very entertaining. Do you sympathise with him? I have great compassion for him. I think he was a martyr in that sense, so we have got a prophet and a martyr. Which card would you identify with in a pack of cards? I like access to the destructive power of satire and to absurdity. I see McGonagall as being quite close to the Dadaists in the effect he had on the general public that I mentioned and I like that space, but I don’t see myself as having to fix a role. There might be a poem in which that is the role I play and there might be another poem in which it decidedly isn’t. My pack of cards is a bit more mutable, I suppose: you look at them too long and the faces and the numbers swim and start to switch. You have a book called The Testament of Reverend Thomas Dick. Who is he? Is he perhaps another joker? He was a nineteenth-century astronomer and author who was also a minister. He was a religious figure and he tried to put together one of those false sciences. He tried to align what he believed with what he knew, so he conjectured about the role of the planets in the afterlife, whether alien populations are Christian, and whether angels take part in astronomical observations. He tried to put together two modes of thought which fundamentally do not link in modern terms, so he is one of those fascinating figures for me. He is trying to come up with a

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holistic position which leads him into absurdity, and that is my territory: the moment when one thing can turn into its opposite, the point at which contradictions can be briefly held in balance. There is great poignancy in his attempt and there are genuine moments of very strange and exotic invention when he is trying to put his worldview (his view of the universe, rather) together. Again, he is a Dundonian. Every now and then a Dundonian tries to make sense of the universe and fails miserably, and that interests me – I have always loved that moment. The book is written in English (at least what seems to be English on the page) and it also seems to be a lyrical book compared to some of your earlier collections. Am I right to trace an echo of Douglas Dunn in the Fife and Angus settings of the poems, or in phrases like “Pictish whispers”? No, it was really a parallel endeavour. I became aware of Northlight and the angled view of Tayside that Douglas was taking in his book, but effectively a lot of my poems had been written before Northlight appeared. Essentially, what happened with my early publications was that all the Scots work was gathered into little collections like Dundee Doldrums and Anither Music, and all the English work was gathered into The Testament of Reverend Thomas Dick. So apart from the Dick poems themselves it is largely eighties work being published in the early nineties, and then the more recent stuff went into Forked Tongue. The Testament was my first collection in English, so although I was aware of Dunn’s work (Barbarians and St Kilda’s Parliament, which did influence me), the stuff with the Pictish theme was entirely independent – it was just a publishing thing that made it seem that way round. Why did you keep the two languages apart in separate books? I can’t remember that there was a conscious decision to do so, because as soon as I was making conscious decisions about it, I was trying to combine them, as in Forked Tongue. My idea was that there was a dialectic between the two languages, so they had to be presented together, as I think it was in MacDiarmid’s volume from the Thirties, Stony Limits (at least as he originally intended it to appear). Before

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that I was being offered small press publication and there was a unity of work that held together along linguistic lines. Probably the case was that at that stage my books would not fit together as bilingual, so that became part of the endeavour in Forked Tongue and Cabaret McGonagall. By Cabaret McGonagall I was starting to think that the union had to take place from poem to poem rather than collection to collection or section to section, so you had the transition between two poems being the space in which these processes were brought out and thought out, and that’s the principle my most recent books have explored. In Forked Tongue there is a poem called “The Landfish”, which takes its epigraph from The Complaynt of Scotlande, and is in a variety of Scots that seems very different from the Scots of the medieval poem. Is it the same language at all and how are these language varieties related? One is the ancestor of the other: the medieval prose work The Complaynt of Scotlande was probably written by a Dundonian, Robert Wedderburn, who was one of three brothers who produced plays, prose and poetry in the sixteenth century, practically whilst Scotland was becoming a Protestant nation. They were all caught up on both sides of that great debate. Again, it is a moment of intellectual and spiritual change which these Dundonian writers are trying to encompass in their work: I admire the Complaynt particularly for its effort to preserve a continuity which failed. It’s the only significant extant work of Scots prose from the period. Because the effort failed and the Reformation frowned on artistic endeavours of all sorts, there was a century before another significant prose work appeared from a Dundonian, Aretina, the first Scottish novel. But this was in English, as was the next significant prose work, again more than a century later, A Few Days in Athens by Frances Wright. It is this continuous discontinuity which makes the relation between the language of my poem and Wedderburn’s Complaynt seem so distant. Perhaps the contents or the modes of thought are not quite so far apart, or perhaps the shifts in language maps the differences out precisely. The point for me is that the territory can be mapped through language and form, even when it can’t always be easily explored.

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One of your latest books is called The Laurelude. Coming back to the joker or clown figure, the title seems to allude to Stan Laurel as in Laurel and Hardy, and perhaps carries a connotation of the word “ludic”, as well as a reference to Wordsworth’s The Prelude. How do all these things come together in your mind? Well, that’s a biographical question, really. I went to the Lake District to do some work in Ulverston where Stan Laurel was born. There’s a Laurel and Hardy museum there, and I went to the museum and watched a couple of hours of short films, all of which I remembered from my childhood. When I came out, I was convinced that Stan Laurel was the idiot boy from Wordsworth and this was a way of looking at the development of the imagination in the Wordsworthian sense. It gave me the means of approaching my own childhood and the romantic and sublime landscape in a way that made sense biographically as well as imaginatively. It is just one of those instances when you need some things to meet in order to produce the subsequent art work. For me it was the works of Wordsworth meeting the works of Laurel and Hardy which enabled me then to take on a whole area of writing which I hadn’t been able to get out before. I think I’m probably more Coleridgean than Wordsworthian, and that probably also comes out in the poem. The cover of the same book says that you are “exiled” to Newcastle. Are you a political exile? No, I’m not. It is a slightly fanciful description. I think that I am temperamentally on the edges of most communities that I’m part of. [Laughs.] I think Edward Said said that the artist should be slightly out on the fringes and I am very happy to be there. It is certainly the space where I work most and where I work best in creative terms. Also, there is an element of being passive and of allowing events to take me to places where I wouldn’t necessarily volunteer to go, and then of making the best of it imaginatively. Finally, I seem to need to be a certain distance away from what I interpret as a cultural mainstream. I need to be able to know about it and access it, but I need to be remote from it and alienated from it to some extent, so it is an exile position, but it is a self-imposed exile.

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The word “exile” seems a commonplace in contemporary Scottish writing… Yes, and that appeals to me enormously: that MacDiarmid could be regarded as exiled to Whalsay in the Shetlands; that W.S. Graham was exiled to Cornwall; that John Davidson was London-based and again he ended up in Cornwall. There is something about the intimacy of the Scottish cultural scene, which is better viewed from far away [laughs], so in that sense there is a political as well as a personal and cultural aspect. I think it is a proper traditional posture for a Scottish poet – not being in Scotland. You live in a lighthouse in the Tyne Estuary, which seems to me another romantic gesture beside the idea of the exile… Yes, it is one of the lovely symbolic things which I could be romantic about, except that again I was completely passive: it happened because my wife wanted to move to the Tyne Estuary. What I then did and what poets always do, I suppose, is that I exploited what happened to me: I looked at it to see whether it had symbolic resonance and to see how I felt about it having symbolic resonance. So it’s not just a Yeatsian symbol of the tower and a way of addressing certain issues: it’s also how I feel about such things happening to me, and how I feel about the possibility that I can be interpreted as a Romantic poet. I think it is a very happy accident but it also means that I can also use the form of The Tower to write different poems. There is a formal reaction to being in that situation, which means that I looked at the structure of The Tower again in the same way as I looked at the structure of The Prelude when I was writing The Laurelude. Circumstance gave me a formal choice and that has been the case throughout my career from Dundee Doldrums on: it is always an aesthetic reaction, there is always a formal engagement, and that’s the bit that interests me. In The Big Bumper Book of Troy there is a poem called “Firth of Tyne” which seems to have echoes of Dunn, for instance in the lines “Because I’m not at home here yet I walk/ out to the rocks that jaw the estuary;/ because I can’t yet find that comfort of a curve,/ the harbour shelf at Broughty Ferry…”

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Yes, well, I don’t think it’s deniable by that point… [Laughs.] Dunn has written Northlight and I was influenced by it. I’m a very accumulative personality, if that is the right word, although I would say that the principal influence I am working with in that section of the book, in the Bloomian sense again, is Yeats. The book probably works through a series of potential father and fraternal figures and Dunn plays a part in that, yes. I think the question that Northlight posed to me was: how can you be at home if you’re not from here? Can you construct an identity? Can you construct a location, a creatively satisfying landscape that you can operate within? That was certainly what I took from Northlight and that was in some ways the challenge which The Big Bumper Book is about: what is that you need to survive creatively? What does the book’s title mean? There are two references. The first is to the Troy Book, the medieval form of recounting the story of Troy, which is always seen through the lens of the particular society that the writer is working within. One example from my tradition would be Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid. The Troy Book is more often our way into looking at that social setting rather than the events of Troy, because we all know what’s going to happen in the story. So it’s really about how we look at the story and that’s the interesting element. The other allusion is The Big Bumper Book, which sounds like a children’s book, the comic annuals which were part of my childhood, because Dundee is the centre of D.C. Thompson’s “publishing empire”. Again, I was trying to bring two elements together: the search for home (obviously engaged with definitions of the childhood home) and how I have come as an adult to form a cultural landscape for myself. The two elements are brought together in the title, and it has a slightly oxymoronic feel. It sounds there cannot really be a book of poems called The Big Bumper Book of Troy because the two elements don’t exactly match, and I liked that. One of the ideas in the book is that the original site of Troy is discovered in Dundee, but it’s a joke again, isn’t it?

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Yes, except that one of the simple mistakes we make all the time is trying to interpret things literally which are only symbolically true – and vice versa. For example, I was watching a programme about a cult in Bedford, in the South of England, who believe that they are at the site of the original Garden of Eden and this is where Christ will return to. Now, on an imaginative, symbolic level they are absolutely right: Eden is where we are, the only space we can acknowledge, the sacred space, is the one that we occupy. But the problem is that they are taking it literally, so Eden becomes a very particular geographic place. So can Dundee be Troy? What I’m saying is the idea of Troy is something that we have to realise in our own lives. In the book I’m trying to analyse that idea in relation to the traces of my own life and so, of course, for me logically Dundee must be Troy. Therefore, I must be able to look at the history and culture of Dundee and find in it traces of the Troy legend and I make use of the idea that the Troy Book reveals the culture of the writer of the Troy Book rather than telling us something about the original story of Troy. So when you say in the book that “Dundee is Troy”, it is then in a different sense than Tony Harrison says “Newcastle is Peru”? [Laughs.] Well, it alludes to him, but again I cannot really claim Harrison as being a great influence. The three Hs, that Heaney– Harrison–Hughes axis that sometimes seems to prescribe the English imagination, doesn’t really have that much of an impact on me. There seem to be lots of little jokes in the book, for example in the poem “At MacDiarmid’s Tomb”: it is an elegy on MacDiarmid on one level, but if you look at the excessive use of geological vocabulary, on another level it is a funny paraphrase of “On a Raised Beach”… Absolutely, and it should be both things at once. It is basically using the technique of the found poem and the extraordinarily outlandish vocabulary which MacDiarmid enjoyed. The source text is “At Lenin’s Tomb”, in which MacDiarmid describes the tomb in terms of the stone that it is made from. I had been to Lenin’s tomb during a reading trip to Moscow and I started thinking about MacDiarmid’s grave, which is a very simple affair and nothing at all like the things

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described in my poem. But then I started using geological texts to assemble the actual stones of the areas where he lived in his life and when I was doing that, I found little accidental jokes cropping up, and realised that the language was highly appropriate to MacDiarmid. Something which interests me very much is the space around the parody and the pastiche, which are usually regarded slightly dismissively as satiric forms. To me there’s a homage element in using another person’s form and using it in a new and imaginative way. To my mind, there is always another, potentially creative dimension to pastiche and in this case it was elegiac. The book features another clown figure, Homer Simpson, who supplies the epigraph, “D’oh!”, to one of the poems in the section called “Troytoon”. How does that relate to this stuff? Well, he relates to it in a very primary fashion in that Homer is an example of it being all right not to know anything. No, it is not all right not to know anything, which is part of the point of The Simpsons at one level, but you’ve got this wonderful double edge going on there, which is that the thing being satirised is also being valued. It’s viewed critically but with compassion, which is how I view a figure like McGonagall. The family life of the Simpsons is a great and commendable thing, which is why the elder Bush went so wrong when he said that Americans should not be like the Simpsons. Homer Simpson fits for me because he is a cartoon figure in a book that’s partly about the resonance of cartoons. He is someone who appears to have no understanding of any classical heritage and yet his name carries a resonance of that heritage. And he is somebody that it is very easy to identify with: a lot of my male friends say “I am Homer Simpson!” in that “I am Spartacus!” sort of way, so he was a really good character to refer to. He presents a lot of the problems in the book in a nutshell, in one word: “D’oh!” One of the things that engage me a great deal is: how do we respond to high culture; how do we respond to Wordsworth; how do we respond to Troy? A simplistic argument is either we put them to one side or we teach them very rigorously. It seems to me that there is a great deal of middle ground between the two and that tends to be the space I am operating in – again a border territory.

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Finally, would you talk about your project Book of the North? Is it finished now or is it an ongoing project? Well, there is a sense in which it is still ongoing. First of all it wasn’t literally a book, it was a CD-ROM which gathered together five poets, five novelists and five artists, in order to produce work specifically in that particular format, so it’s going beyond the page. Another title at one time was “North of the Book”. It was really an imaginative idea which kept a group of people together for a certain period of time, and made them interact and work together. I always seem to be trying to write the “Book of the North”; trying to get writers to interact with each other in the way that takes them beyond the specific text or book they are working on in any given time. Several of those writers and I have worked together subsequently on performances or collaborations with musicians and composers, and that will continue. The main way this impulse expresses itself at the moment is a series of public art projects in the North East where I am presenting text in a sculptural context in the landscape, working with artists, architects, builders, schools – even a rugby club. One project, based in Darlington, features a sculpture park organised by texts which represent the natural and economic life of that part of the city. I have been naming streets, putting therapeutic texts into a hospital, and making up monsters for a children’s play area… It has been a fascinating new way to re-engage with my obsessions about place and history. Edinburgh, 21 August 2003

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Bibliography: W.N. Herbert (1961–)

Poetry With Robert Crawford. Sterts & Stobies: Poems in Scots. Oxford: Obog Books, 1985. With Robert Crawford and David Kinloch. Severe Burns. Oxford: Obog Books, 1986. With Robert Crawford. Sharawaggi: Poems in Scots. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990. Anither Music. London: Vennel Press, 1991. Dundee Doldrums: An Exorcism. Edinburgh: Galliard, 1991. Forked Tongue. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1994. The Testament of the Reverend Thomas Dick. Todmorden: Arc, 1994. Cabaret McGonagall. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1996. The Laurelude. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998. The Big Bumper Book of Troy. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2002. Bad Shaman Blues. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2006.

Non-fiction To Circumjack MacDiarmid: The Poetry and Prose of Hugh MacDiarmid. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

Editor With Richard Price (eds). Gairfish. Bridge of Weir: Gairfish, 1990. With Richard Price (eds). Discovery. Bridge of Weir: Gairfish, 1991. Duende: A Dundee Anthology. Dundee: Gairfish, 1991. The McAvantgarde: Edwin Morgan, Frank Kuppner, Tom Leonard, Kathleen Jamie: The unpublished MacDiarmid. Dundee: Gairfish, 1992. With Richard Price (eds). The Liberty Tree. Dundee: Gairfish, 1993. With Richard Price (eds). Contraflow on the Super Highway. London: Southfields Press and Gairfish, 1994. Book of the North (interactive CD-ROM anthology). New Writing North, 2000. With Matthew Hollis (eds). Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2000. A Balkan Exchange: Eight Poets from Bulgaria & Britain. Todmorden: Arc Publications, in association with New Writing North, 2007.

Kate Clanchy: The Sister Art Kate Clanchy speaks about her fears and anxieties about being appropriated by the Scottish literary establishment to be made into a token representative of national literature. She reveals whether and to what extent a place of residence might or might not affect the poet’s choice of subject matter. She describes her own background as a schoolteacher and how it has shaped her ways of reading and seeing. Defending her ambition to become a popular poet, she also explains Carol Ann Duffy’s importance for her generation of women poets. Keywords: Motherhood; confessional poetry; Carol Ann Duffy; popular poetry.

Clanchy occupies a contradictory position in modern Scottish writing. She was born in Glasgow (in 1965) and went to school in Edinburgh, but her father’s family comes from England, she has an English voice, and has her teacher’s certificate from Oxford. She comes from near where Kathleen Jamie was born and raised, but hers is a different social and linguistic reality and she has developed different interests and preoccupations. Jamie lives now in the north and teaches at St Andrews University, while Clanchy lives now in the south, and teaches at Oxford University. After the success of her first book, Clanchy was appropriated by Scottish critics as a token woman poet from the younger generation. In this interview she reveals her old grudge of being rejected for a position at Scottish schools as a young teacher with a degree from England, and tells about the sharp contrast between that experience and the experience of being greeted as a Scottish poet after making a successful literary debut. Though she visits Scotland on a regular basis (I met her during the Edinburgh Book Festival), she is clearly unhappy with being categorised as a “Scottish poet”. In fact, like most other poets in this collection, she turns down wearing any critical tags – “woman writer”, “popular writer”, “feminist writer”, or “New Generation poet”. Her favourite subject matters include the relationship between men and women, her family, and the experience of being a teacher, a daughter and a mother. If she writes about place, the location tends to be in the south of England, as is revealed by the intonation of her lines. Intonation, of course, is not the whole thing: there are many other “Scottish” writers in whose speech one can hear little more than traces of Scottishness, like John Burnside or Richard Price; or like Kenneth White, who speaks Scottish English with a

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French accent, and writes in British English with a Continental “accent of the mind”. Reviewers have noticed Carol Ann Duffy’s influence on Kate Clanchy but in the following interview she also talks about their friendship and Duffy’s role as a mentor in more detail. Their work marks a fresh approach to poetry. They do not see poetry as an elitist diversion for educated, white middle-class men. In their hands the poem virtually becomes a consumer item in a world of consumerism. Producing poetry is geared towards financial profit: Duffy proved the impossible when her sales soared and The World’s Wife topped the bestseller lists of bookstores. Poetry is adjusted to customer demands: it is popular and entertaining, it targets the different age groups of both genders, and is prepared for mass consumption by experts in marketing and advertising. Clanchy has not, of course, reached Duffy’s fame yet, but she does defend the position of the popular writer in general and mentions, in particular, the marketing strategy of her recent book on maternity. Her first collection, Slattern (1995), was winner of the Forward Poetry Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. Rich in details of ordinary life, Samarkand (1999) is about journeys (both actual and fictitious), friends, family, and domesticity, while Newborn (2004, shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize) tells about her experience of motherhood. She has written for children (Our Cat Henry Comes to the Swings, with Jemima Bird, 2005), regularly contributes to the Guardian, and also writes for BBC Radio. I met her at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2003.

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Once you said you were surprised to be “embraced” as a Scottish poet by the Scottish literary establishment. Why? Well, I was born in Glasgow and I lived there until I was ten, and went to school here in Edinburgh. After that I went to Oxford, and was qualified as a teacher, and then worked for a year in London. But then I decided to come back to Edinburgh to work as a teacher and I found I was actually blocked. The Scottish Teachers Organisation wouldn’t accept me, because I didn’t have a Scottish qualification. I was trying to get a job for two years, but couldn’t get a job here and that is why I returned south. I grew up in Scotland but I have an English father and I don’t have a Scottish enough voice. When I was a schoolgirl they saw me as English because I was taller and louder than the other girls. So, I suppose I couldn’t get a job as a teacher officially here in Scotland because I am too English to teach Scottish children. When I speak, everyone thinks I’m English and I thought I might as well go down to England. England is a very multiracial country: I have taught in multiracial schools and colleges, all my neighbours are very multiracial, and I have married an English person. My son goes to a multiracial school and nobody asks him how English he is. I don’t miss these aspects of Scottishness at all. Having been through the experience of being not good enough to teach Scottish children, it was a big surprise to me to suddenly find people saying I am a Scottish writer. I felt angry because actually all my writing has been supported by English organisations and I am much freer in England. If I’m not good enough to teach your children, why am I good enough to be your writer now? I felt irritated by it. There are certain things that are expected in Scotland: you are expected to write about the landscape in a certain way, you are expected to write in Scots, which, you know, I don’t speak, and there are other constraints on things which are expected of you as a writer. And there are lots of Scots like me in fact. You have been also called an Anglo-Scottish writer. Is it perhaps a better way of describing your perspective? Probably. But why not just call me a European writer? I am quite troubled by the ideas of Scottishness and the panic about being

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Scottish enough. There was an article in the Scottish journal The Dark Horse about Dream State, which is a new anthology of Scottish poetry with some of my poems in it. In the article I was picked out as somebody not being quite Scottish enough to be in it. You know, I’m not Scottish enough because I live in England and my father is English. I think if we were doing this with colour and said this person is not British because they’ve got a black father, then we would say it is straightforward racism. If we do it because somebody is not quite Scottish enough, it is acceptable. But I don’t find it acceptable; I find it as unacceptable as Norman Tebbit saying you are not English enough to support the English rugby team. Actually, in England these questions whether you are English or not don’t come up, because there is such a multiracial mix. I spent some time in Finland and I think if I were a Finn, I would have no problem in saying I’m Finnish and my nationhood is important to me, because it is such a small and cohesive people with a very distinguished, extraordinary language. The Scots aren’t necessarily like them. The Scots are very diverse: somebody from Edinburgh speaks a language that is very difficult to understand for someone from the Isle of Lewis. We don’t necessarily have all that much in common. Scotland is a country people are draining out of, despite everything it has and despite the massive subsidies that are sent up to Scotland. I don’t receive the big grants that Scottish writers do. I think this “Are you Scottish enough?” thing is a paranoia and I don’t miss that about Scotland. It seems to be the paranoia of a nation on the edge. Most people say that the best Scottish book of the last ten years is Trainspotting because it shows Scotland as it actually is. It is not the land of lochs and glens where people speak Scots, but the book is written in the actual urban vernacular and shows the actual life people live, and there are few Scottish poets who do that. How do you feel about Edinburgh on a visit like this? Oh, it is beautiful! I like to see my home where I grew up. There’s something about the air and the freshness, and I think about the perspectives which are all very familiar to me. I try to come back every year. I would love to live in Edinburgh but there’s no hope, as my husband is an academic, of ever getting a job here. Even if he did get a

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job here, he wouldn’t be accepted. I come here as a tourist and I think the properties are fine – look at this high ceiling, look at these views – but I don’t think I want to live here again. That’s not because I don’t like it – it’s beautiful! – but because I feel the doors are actually closed to me or to my family. I don’t want my son to go to a school here where everybody’s white and people say your voice is wrong. I’d rather send him to the school up the road where diversity counts. People come from Pakistan and Bangladesh and the Caribbean, and also from a lot of European countries, and I’d love him to go to that school, that diverse environment where nobody is going to say: “Are you English?” I think it’s a much freer environment. Do you think it’s a problem in Scotland? Yes, I do. There is a sort of closeness or smugness which turns into, or is disguised as, paranoia. There was a large-minded Edinburgh once and there are some large-minded European-looking Scots now. But when I was trying to get a job as a teacher in Edinburgh, and I wrote an article in the Scotsman just saying these are my qualifications and I wanted a job as a teacher in Edinburgh, I was actually phoned up by the Head of the General Teaching Council saying that they will make sure I will never get a job in a Scottish school. That’s the Scottish establishment! One teeny article by an aspiring teacher and a phone call from the establishment saying they will make sure I will never get a job, my name is marked. I tried to respond in the Scotsman and the newspaper was phoned up as well, and they were told not to publish my article. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? If I had the guts to take them to the European Court of Human Rights… But I couldn’t be bothered. So I got a job in England, that’s easier. So that’s why when they gave me the Saltire Prize, I wasn’t all that grateful. I didn’t want the Saltire Prize – I wanted a job. In your latest book Samarkand there is a poem called “The Bridge Over the Border” in which you pose the question: “Where do you belong?” Is there really an answer to that question? I don’t know. The poem shifts in the end. I think when you get older the more you would like to come back to where you were born. I haven’t quite got there yet but I will probably feel that way too –

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establishing myself as a resident in Edinburgh…There is of course a kind of belonging to the first landscape feelings I have of Edinburgh. But when it comes to questions like “Where did I find my voice?” and “Where am I easy with myself?” then I like the south of England. Have you ever visited Samarkand? No. The title poem is actually a translation of a Finnish poem called “The Traveller from Samarkand”. The Finns have got a special feeling for Samarkand and they are aware of their strange position between the east and west. But speaking an extraordinary language like Hungarian, you probably have a better understanding of this situation. Have you read Kathleen Jamie’s books about the same region? Oh, yes. I love Kathleen Jamie’s work. She is fabulous. She grew up in a very different culture and with a very different language. I grew up in the middle of Edinburgh and Kathleen comes from a very different background. It’s always very interesting when we meet. In a way we grew up in the same place but practically it’s a different country. I think migration is a central theme in your book. It is often said that Scottish literature has been tied up with the idea of exile and emigration, and although you don’t entirely see yourself as a Scottish poet, have you ever felt like an exile? No, I’m not in that full sense an exiled person, because everyone has another country that’s important to them. I suppose my other country was England when I grew up. My grandmother comes from Winchester in the South of England and it did seem very different from Glasgow, like another country. It was also another country where I always thought I belonged. So I suppose I live in my other country and it doesn’t feel like exile. The Scottish writer I like the most is Robert Louis Stevenson. I like his work very much and I have a kind of identification with him because he grew up in Heriot Row and I grew up in Heriot Place. On the way back from school I always looked at his window and of course I read his books. I think he had a great ambivalence about Edinburgh. Alasdair Gray, the Glasgow novelist, has a book called

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The Fall of Kelvin Walker, which is about being English and being Scottish. The book ends with Kelvin Walker being reclaimed by Scotland in the same way as, for example, Boswell was reclaimed. His lawyer father recast Boswell in Edinburgh and the same thing kept happening to Stevenson. I’m sure if he hadn’t had TB, he would have finally been reclaimed and replanted in Heriot Row. There is a pull back to sitting there and being good and not playing. I suppose I’ll be reclaimed or replanted too one day. [Laughs.] Is England really another country? Because, anyway, you don’t need a passport to go there from Scotland…Or perhaps do you have a British identity? Not at all, it’s not a different country. But there’s enough difference between England and Scotland. In the last thirty years the world has become enormously more homogenised, but when I was ten I saw a big difference between Hampshire and Glasgow: difference in the climate and in the landscape. I always put down that I’m British, but people always say you are not British. You’re Scottish. Are you comfortable with the idea of a European culture or European sensibility? Is it important for you as a writer working in the British Isles to consider such questions at all? Living in England I can say that this country is always in a funny position where it is very close to Europe and at the same time looks to America. Politically, I think the European Union is a good thing and I am very suspicious of nationalism. What do you think about the devolution in Scotland? Are you happy with it, or are you interested at all in the subject? I am not enormously interested in the subject. They don’t seem to have done a vast amount with it. The interesting aspect with it is that when they voted for levying taxes, they haven’t levied any. I don’t think they have actually changed anything on economic grounds. The economic basis is still the same. If they were going to genuinely change Scotland and make it more socialist and raise their own taxes, and have a much more egalitarian system, that would be great. They

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do seem to do an awful lot of talking – it seems a bit of a half-way house, a bit of an unromantic compromise. Kathleen Jamie wrote that beautiful poem about it. You feel as a writer that actually you get enormous grants up here, much more than writers do down south. For every twenty thousand pounds the Scottish Arts Council has at its disposal the Arts Council of England has fifty thousand pounds in subsidies for the whole of England – and it’s not very much at all, considering that many more writers are gathered in England. In Scotland there is much more money and I don’t see why, really. It would be nice if English writers were treated as equal. In your book Samarkand gender is another important theme. How important is for you to be a female poet as opposed to simply being called a poet? I am always interested in gender. It is one of the things I have always been interested in but it’s a very wide question. I grew up and went to school without ever studying female writers. Even when I went to the University of Oxford I didn’t think I could be a poet. I thought perhaps I could be a novelist but I didn’t think I could be a poet, and I’m sure it was about gender. I started writing poems when I read Kathleen Jamie, which helped me a lot. The bias of history is so much against you if you are writing a poem as a female poet. The opening poem in Slattern is called “Men”. Men listen to that poem and they feel uncomfortable. They feel challenged and often they say they don’t like that, because it does something very unusual: it objectifies men and talks about men. In a lot of poems I have read male writers objectify women – that’s the norm. And at the same time for a male poet it would be difficult to describe women because that would be technically misogynist. So it’s a strange moment. The poem seems to startle many people, mostly critics, who have their own ideas about talking about men, because it shows the impact of writing about men. My new book, Newborn, is all about my child. I think there are lots and lots of secrets in the world about men and women and motherhood. I don’t see why the subject of motherhood is an any less good subject. I think it should be a mainstream subject and it should be criticised by the way the poems are written about the subject matter. At the same time, I know that either I’ll get mindless praise or mindless dismissals – mostly I think mindless dismissals – in writing

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about motherhood. It might be the end of me as a serious poet. So it’s kind of a risk to write about popular subjects. It is a double-edged thing because it is a new area that’s not much explored, although there are poems about motherhood. It’s a very exciting and great place to go, and at the same time you feel doomed. Kathleen Jamie has also published a book about motherhood, called Jizzen… Yes. That was a wonderful book: it is half about landscape and half about motherhood, and with wonderful poems about The Black and White Minstrel Show. That was a fantastic third book by such an important writer. If you want to think about the way women writers are treated, it’s a very good example of it. It got to the T.S. Eliot Prize, which surely, surely it should have won, and the judges stood up and gave a shortlist of four. I was so angry about that, because it is such a fantastic book: it is so formed and so perfect and so serious and funny and varied. I’m sure it is “womanishness” that stopped it from winning a big prize. At the reading yesterday I found that the poems you read from Newborn were very heartfelt. Where is the line between privacy and public art in poetry? They are very confessional poems, aren’t they? I think it depends on what line you draw; you can be as confessional as you like. It’s not that I don’t like stories in poems, or public poems, but I think the confessional line is a very difficult one to draw, because you want to be true to yourself and yet more interesting for others. And not to sentimentalise oneself is very difficult. I find that the truer you get to yourself, very often the truer you get to other people’s experiences. I don’t think that all books have to be confessional and I didn’t intend this book to be confessional: it’s just the way it is. Maybe my next book will not be confessional. Newborn is more directly confessional, and less story-telling and less puzzling than my first book, Slattern. It has a story and moves through time. It’s just the way it is. This particular course reflects my particular reading of American confessional poetry: I have been rereading Robert Lowell and all these poets. I have read them before but they have had a particular resonance with me in the

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last year or two. I have been reading a lot of them, so I suppose the book reflects that. It is just a project I found myself in. I find motherhood very demanding. Motherhood, I think, pulls you in and I feel very close to the project, working very hard, and it filled up my whole life, and this is what has come out of it. It doesn’t mean that my next book will be purely confessional. It reminds me that when I was writing Slattern, my first book, I didn’t have any thoughts about who would read my poems. I was simply just stuck in a classroom, and I felt the deep divine boredom of being stuck in a classroom in those early poems. That’s the same deep happiness and deep boredom of being with a small child: deep boredom and deep frustration, and the isolation and yet the togetherness. It is exactly the same screws that keep pushing on me and I have got faith in them in the same way. The poems in Newborn are truthful to what I felt, and at the same time they represent a critical selfslaughtering. And at the same time I don’t care, which is a very interesting by-product of parenthood. Nevertheless, I am very excited about the book. Where does the title of Slattern come from? It is what my mother used to call me when I didn’t peel the potato very well. It is a Scottish and North of England word. All these Nordic or Scandinavian words in the speech of the East of Scotland and the North of England acknowledge a Scandinavian identity. I think “slattern” comes from there. It’s about ambiguity and messiness, and it is a good striking word. I didn’t realise how many people didn’t know what it meant – I thought everyone knew what it meant – but in fact lots of the people I meet don’t know its meaning and I have to explain. Your poems were first published in Anvil New Poets 2, edited by Carol Ann Duffy. Did her confidence in you help at the beginning of your career, and has her poetry influenced your own ways of writing? Oh, yes. I think the way she uses sound and the way she uses form in poetry is very influential. The way she half rhymes or rhymes in the middle of a line is very engaging. I found a lot of sounds and broken forms in her poetry. She is a diverse writer and she is very alertly

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feminist. I think just her example as a writer is important for me. She is a very strong figure and she is my friend, and I think it is imperative that you make association with other women writers. Carol Ann Duffy is a great example for me as a person and also I admire her as a writer on the path that she has taken and that she has gone down that path. Her poems are popular, selling a lot of copies to a novel reading audience and that’s where I would like to go. What other poets do you enjoy reading? There are so many, the more proper question would be – what are you reading at the moment? I read a lot of women poets: I like Carol Ann Duffy, Kathleen Jamie, Selima Hill, Sharon Oates and Lewis Glock. I also read Paul Farley, Don Paterson, Robert Crawford, Simon Armitage, and then poets further back – I like Philip Larkin and I like reading the Metaphysical Poets but, you know, poetry is my main reading. What I’m reading right now this week is C.K. Williams and I think he is fabulous. I’m a bit of an eclectic reader and as my husband is a scholar he says that’s what kind of a random, messy, odd reader I am. I read a bit of this and I read a bit of that. As I said, in the last couple of years I have been reading much more American poets than I had been reading before and I can see that in my own work. Carol Ann Duffy is often seen as a popular poet, and I think Helen Dunmore talks somewhere about you becoming a popular poet too. Is that an ambition? Do you want to be a popular poet? Yes. I want to be read widely and I think the narrowing down of the poetry audience seems to be a great shame for poetry. I think poetry has never been read by everybody and I can’t imagine that poetry can be read by the same audience as, say, newspapers. I don’t think it is a realistic ambition, but I think it is a realistic ambition to have poetry read by the same, quite large, number of people who read literary novels and biographies. An amazing number of people read heavy literary biographies in this country and it has astonishing sales. But, as I say, what is amazing is that these aren’t stupid books about stupid people: they are clever, heavy, weighty books by clever people. So I don’t see why poetry is no longer read by these people. It used to be, and I think to be read by many is a good thing. I don’t see why Poetry

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Review seems to be on a manic quest to hate anything that seems to be popular and accessible. That seems to be ridiculous. If half the poems are failing to reach them they find it unacceptable and they can’t understand them. And it is more likely to be a popular poem. If there is a wide, intelligent public that is highly interested in literary biographies, then this same audience should be able to read some of our poets – not every single one and every single collection, but should be open to that. I think there’s a terrible backlash against some of the moves to make poetry more popular in the critical establishment. That’s not what I feel at all. I would like my poems to be widely read. I don’t mean read by everybody but I think they could jolly well reach the same people who read literary biographies. With Newborn I’m quite keen to try and do that in the same way as Carol Ann Duffy. She sells forty thousand copies while most poetry books sell three thousand, and I think that’s good. I was a schoolteacher and I don’t disrespect the common taste. Very often the common taste is onto something alive and fresh that more literary people cannot imitate. I am thinking of the novels of Douglas Coupland, for example Generation X. It’s very easy to look down on it and say it’s all about teenagers, it’s cheaply written, and so on. Yet it has a freshness and a feeling for the way we live now that many literary people can’t match. Novels that are discovered by the popular taste usually have something that makes them special or particular about them. So I’m more proud to have many readers than I am to have a particular criticism. Criticism is always so much about critics and I think readers can be more open to perceptions. It is actually a choice I’m coming up against, because Newborn is going to be marketed: it’s going to be published on Mothers’ Day, and going to have a very pretty cover, and sent to all the parenting magazines. It had to come like a choice, really. One of your poems has been included in the national curriculum. How do you feel about it? Yes [laughs], it was set as an exam. One of my poems – or rather a couple of my poems are in the curriculum but the funny thing is that it was set for the Higher Exam, which is the big exam that they take when leaving school. It is a set text, which is very funny for me,

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having been a pupil and having been a teacher. I am very pleased, although they didn’t pay me the money. [Laughs.] But I’m not against that. A lot of people say: “Oh isn’t that terrible, being discussed?” I don’t feel that at all. I was a teacher and my most important work was bringing young people into contact with poems. Do you still teach? I’m freelance at the moment. I teach a tiny bit at Oxford University. But at the moment I’m on maternity leave, so I have more time to write. I imagine that once my children are back at school, I will go back to teaching – not full time but part time. I don’t want to work full time; I don’t find it helps me and I have other pressures in my life obviously. At the moment I’ve got the pressure of bringing up my child and it’s plenty of work in the short term. That’s a very wonderful and full life. But I still think of myself as a teacher and I like teaching very much, and I imagine I will go back. How do the academia and poetry, or the theory and the actual business of writing poetry mix? I think you can get taken away from ideas about creative writing while learning to be a critic. I feel that at that stage it is a time for taking things in and learning to read, and the writing time can or will come later. That’s what I tell them. Of course, anything they turn in is going to be evaluated, that’s just the process. I enjoy teaching people to read. I like working in a community and I like working with people. Do you think the art of writing can be taught? You can help people be better and you can give people space and sometimes that’s incredibly important. If you are taking somebody out in life who has no aspiration to write, a creative writing course can be a wonderful thing. It gives people a chance. But I don’t think you can teach somebody to be good. It has to be their own progress. I love to work with people and their writing: I get worried, or I get upset. To what extent has teaching students to read influenced your own ways of reading?

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Well, I think so much that I can’t even tell, because I started teaching when I was twenty-one, which is quite young. I worked in a classroom for ten years. I was thinking about that the other day when I saw some children misbehaving and I suddenly turned into a schoolteacher and told them all off, and suddenly they changed and they believed me. I have that teaching persona, that habit of reading a text, and how to explain to somebody – it’s quite deep. I can’t distinguish it from my own writing and I find it a nourishing process. I think I got into the habit of uncomplicated reading when I was teaching in the classroom. At university they teach complicated reading: how to make it big and not make it very microscopic. But when you are reading as a teacher, very often you have to pay attention to the microscopic details. So I was endlessly going over Shakespeare’s plays and for ten years I was reading Shakespeare’s plays all the time. It is an amazing experience really, and loads and loads of Shakespeare plays I know nearly by heart, having gone over them so many times. I think it made my practice much more microscopic and also made me not look for a complicated reading but a simple reading. It’s like crawling over the earth and looking at individual flowers rather than trying to get up in a helicopter, which is what you are doing at university. You said somewhere: “Poetry is taught as if it were magic; but years in the classroom have shown me that it is a process of seeing and breaking things down. In my poems…I’m trying to explain something as clearly as I can – almost like an apology or a request. I consciously aim to be accessible.” It seems to me that precision is something that is very important in your work… Yes, I suppose it is – precision and observation and closeness to details, with your nose to the ground. I think that people do teach poetry and very often the pupils are alienated from poetry because they think it is a magic process. And you can actually go over words with children and you can help them towards their own meaning. It’s quite a nourishing process: crawling over the ground and finding the small details that matter to you. Finally, would you talk about your work for the radio?

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Yes, I quite often work for the radio. I have done work for the BBC World Service: two series of poetry programmes and educational programmes, and I have done more other little bits. I have done three plays and I am just doing my fourth. This fourth is very fantastic and it is very much plot driven, it will be called All the Birds of the Air. It is from a dreadful song we have called “Who Killed Cock Robin”, which I remember from my childhood. It’s about an anorexic girl who doesn’t actually speak at all but she is the complete centre of her family and everyone’s got their theory, their own agenda, and their own little quest – her best friend and her mother and her sister. It’s quite farcical and I’m very happy with that one. I think that finally, four plays in, I got hold of form. I finished Newborn and I found that there is a silence after I have written a book, and this was a way of breaking the silence. Edinburgh, 20 August 2003

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Bibliography: Kate Clanchy (1965–)

Poetry Slattern. London: Chatto & Windus, 1995. Samarkand. London: Picador, 1999. Newborn. London: Picador, 2004.

Fiction With Jemima Bird. Our Cat Henry Comes to the Swings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Non-fiction What is She Doing here?: A Refugee’s Story. London: Picador, 2008.

Editor All the Poems You Need to Say Hello. London: Picador, 2004.

Kenneth White: A Strategist of Mutation Kenneth White is founder and main proponent of a literary discourse that came to be known as “geopoetics”. Here he discusses the Scoto-French context of his poetic and narrative works in which he aims to probe the relationships between environment and poetics. He talks about a specifically European, Celtic, tradition of the travelling intellectual (or “intellectual nomadism”), while his own influences include half of geography, from North America to the Far East. He describes the making of his spiritual and geographical itineraries or “waybooks”, which record his break away from a poetic tradition of social commentary so as to focus on large-scale issues that shape our relationship with the spaces we occupy. Keywords: Environment; intellectual nomadism; Brittany; geopoetics.

Kenneth White writes: “Born in Glasgow and raised on the west coast of Scotland, Kenneth White studied French, German and philosophy at the universities of Glasgow, Munich and Paris. He was first published from London in the mid-sixties (The Cold Wind of Dawn, Letters from Gourgounel, The Most Difficult Area – all at Jonathan Cape), but broke with the British scene in 1967, settling in the Pyrenees, where he lived in concentrated silence for a while before beginning to publish again, this time from Paris. A whole series of books – narrative, poetry, essays – won not only widespread recognition in France, but also some of its most prestigious literary prizes: the Prix Médicis Étranger for La Route bleue, the Prix Alfred de Vigny for his poetry, the French Academy’s Grand Prix du Rayonnement français, the Prix Roger Caillois and the Grand Prix Edouard Glissant for his work as a whole. These books have been translated into several languages. Since his return, via Scotland, to the English-language context in 1989, White’s work has been published by Mainstream (Edinburgh): The Bird Path, Handbook for the Diamond Country, Travels in the Drifting Dawn, The Blue Road, Pilgrim of the Void, and by Polygon (Edinburgh): On Scottish Ground, House of Tides. It has been said of Kenneth White that he belongs to a silent Avant-garde, moving out beyond all the orthodoxies and all the confusion, opening up new space. From 1983 to 1996, White held the Chair of TwentiethCentury Poetics at Paris-Sorbonne. In 1989, he founded the International Institute of Geopoetics, which now has centres in various countries, including Scotland, and he directs its transdisciplinary review, Cahiers de Géopoétique. Kenneth White lives at present with his wife Marie-Claude, translator and photographer, on the north coast of Brittany.”

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After a first meeting with Kenneth White at the 2003 Edinburgh Book Festival, this interview was conducted in correspondence, and was concluded in the spring of 2004.

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Could I ask you to speak about your beginnings, your early influences? Everything began for me in about ten square miles of territory on the west coast of Scotland: the shore and the back-country of a typical Scottish village. I’d be about twelve years old. I’d had enough of belonging to gangs, which was my introduction to politics. From then on, I’d move along the shore, or walk through the woods up into the moors and hills, on my own. I invented practices for myself, which I later identified as a kind of home-made shamanism, such as can be found all over the world in primal times. First of all, before actually entering into the territory, I had to concentrate for a while, get rid of a lot of confusion. This I’d do by holding a piece of quartz in my hands and counting according to a pretty complex system of numbering. Once my mind was “cleared”, I could move into the territory. I’d follow animals. Ever spent two hours travelling with a hedgehog? I did, often. At a faster pace, I’d run with hares, grey hares that were white in winter. I had my favourite trees too: birches, beeches. I not only climbed into them, I made love to them. If he’d known about it, Freud might have called it arboreal masturbation and turned me into a case. I’d stand for longish stretches of time under waterfalls, letting the water splash over my head – a practise which I later came across in Japanese Shinto. Then there were the moors, those long stretches of heathery void combed by the wind. There was a tremendous exhilaration up there, an exaltation. A great silence, only now and then the cry of a bird: a kestrel, or a vagrant gull from the shore. I’d let out the occasional cry myself. I’d talk with owls in the forest at night, having worked out a good way of making sounds by blowing through my clasped hands. The owls would answer. That set a shiver running up my back. I had the feeling of being in touch with a large, more-thanhuman context. Language is so often considered only in terms of inter-human communication. But you’re not only in the human context; you’re in the universe. You have to have some awareness of non-human and cosmic language too. I keep logos in touch with eros and cosmos, and it all started back then. If one beginning of speech was something like: “Pass me the bone”, another, and I think more original, more

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primordial, was “Ah!”, in front of some astounding scene. Exclamation comes before communication. I’m talking about biocosmic influences here. They’re the basis. I can talk about literary influences too, of course. But they came a bit later. In literature, from the start, I was looking for a language adequate to that basic experience, capable of extending it, developing it. A lot of people, hearing you speak in those terms, would say you were a Romantic. Would you accept that definition? For a lot of people, if you’re not a logical positivist, if you’re not a myopic realist, if you think in terms other than those of the market, you’re a Romantic. The prevalent cultural discourse is povertystricken. I’m not a Romantic, I go further back and further out of Romanticism. But I don’t use it as a term of sneering rejection. I recognise the importance of the Romantics in the movement of culture. So, who were they? They were the first to react against the modernist system set up by René Descartes in the seventeenth century, which has been the basis of our civilisation and culture, our science and technology ever since. This was the division of subject (res cogitans – the “thinking thing”) and object (res extensa – the “thing out there”), and it was a project: technical mastery over Nature. As Modernity progressed, the subject was going to become more and more subjective, while the object was going to become more and more objectified. Result: a technological system which treats the world purely as exploitable material, to the point of ecological disaster, and in which the citizen, if not totally absorbed in techno-economic function, has only personal fantasy, mind-cinema to fall back on. How much of our literature, how much of our culture stems from this context? The Romantics were out to heal the split between subject and object, and they wanted a new project. A tremendous amount of work was done, which most people never think of when they use the word “Romantic”. Mostly in German, it was translated at least in part by Carlyle and Coleridge, and it was via Carlyle, his correspondence with Emerson, that it got into America, to spark off the first American literature. The whole field is still seminal, at least in its cooler and more open areas.

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What about people who live in cities? Well, I was born myself in a city, Glasgow, that Celtic Chicago. Though I left it at the age of three, my father having decided that he wanted to raise his children in another context, for which I thank him. I only came back into the city as a student. So, we got out. By the way, we weren’t a family of jet-set millionaires. Which would seem to indicate that there’s no absolute fatality, if you know what you want, what your basic needs are, and are ready to go for them. If civilisation has largely meant citification, that goes way back to the victory of sedentarisation over nomadism. But no thinking person can claim civilisation is an unmixed blessing. Think of Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents. And cities have become more and more difficult to see as the acme of civilisation. So that, “according to the city” is no longer the supreme criterion of value. We need to think in terms of a larger space. That said, even in the worst hell-holes, it’s possible to keep in touch with the larger context I’ve been getting at. If there’s a river, great. If not, there are the clouds in the sky, lichen on a wall, passing birds, and so on. You can also get out of them now and then. And then the cities still have the most extensive intellectual resources: libraries, universities, museums. They can be made good use of. I’ve lived for long periods in several cities (Glasgow, Munich, Paris), sojourned for shorter periods in many more, and passed through a whole lot more. In fact, there’s a kind of dialectic in my work between the city and the desert (in the old, large sense of the word). What were your early literary influences? The first real influences were American: Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman. Before them, all I had was Burns and Wordsworth. Burns I had sympathy with, if only for the fact that he was an Ayrshire lad like me, and there’s a rumbustious humour in him I love, as well as little flashes of a rarer thing: snow on the river, a moment white, then gone forever. But as Whitman says, and I saw it even at that early age, Burns is no good for “new world” study. As for Wordsworth, he is, as Thoreau says, “too tame for the Chippewa”. No, it was those three Americans who first really influenced me, with Melville, the Melville

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of the “white whale”, and of The Encantadas, on the side. Why? Because they carried more space and energy with them, because they were breathing deeper. Also, because they were come-outers, breaking out of a restricted context into a space still to be defined, for which they didn’t have all the co-ordinates. My principal readings, my really substantial and nourishing readings, around the age of fifteen, were Emerson’s essays “Society and Solitude”, “The American Scholar”, “The Method of Nature”, Thoreau’s Walden and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”. These were great times. They lasted up to the Civil War. Since the Gilded Age, anything like real live culture in America has been carried by isolated figures trying to maintain or retrieve, sometimes desperately, that kind of basis here and there and work from it again. But it’s after all in Europe that the radical work has been done. If my first source of influence was American, the second was the work of certain European erratics, in the forefront of them, Nietzsche and Rimbaud. During my student days, they constituted my main reading and study. I was attracted to the distance in which they lived, and was intensely interested by the radical culture-analysis undertaken by Nietzsche, the radical refusal of Rimbaud. Then their trajectories. Nietzsche begins in Germany, but always called himself an “outside German” (ausserdeutsch). Looking for places in which he can “cure himself of the historical sickness”, he lives along the Mediterranean coast, or among the Italian lakes, or up on the Engadine plateau in Switzerland. It’s a long errancy full of research and experience. Something similar goes on with Rimbaud. From Northern France, he moves across the Ardennes into Belgium, from there to Germany and Scandinavia, thereafter he jumps to Java (from which he returns on a Scotch boat bound for Leith, The Wandering Chief), finally ending up, via the Red Sea and Aden, on the plateau of Abyssinia. And then it’s what they get at in their writings. With Nietzsche, in addition to his incisive analyses which cut away so much palaver, moments of superhuman well-being, salubrious inspiration, and the best writing in German ever. As for Rimbaud, he’s all incandescence. “One stroke of white lightning annihilates the culture-comedy”, he says. His “Illuminations” rush across civilisation shedding black, red, and sheer white light. Nietzsche and Rimbaud were for me the first interesting intellectual nomads. That’s where I really began… Never forgetting my original experience on Scotland’s west coast…

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Before we leave this early stage and follow up the rest of your itinerary, what do you mean by the term “white world”? That was the first synthetic term I used, to indicate the context I felt myself to be working in. It brought together the phenomena I was moving among (breaking waves, quartz pebbles, wings of gulls, birchbark), the country I was living in (its ancient name: Alba), and, as a bonus, my person, but in an almost anonymous way. To that original cluster, I later added the whole hyperborean, circumpolar complex, which brings together Celtic culture, Indian-Inuit culture, and Siberian shamanism. And then again, the white background of Zen Buddhism, where supreme identity is described as “a white heron in the mist”. I gave up using that term for a while, because I saw people understanding it in an otherworldly, idealistic, spiritual way. But I think I’ve explained it enough by this time for it to be understood rightly, in the developing process of my semantics. To sum up, it’s a space outside the codes. You have spoken of “a fresh sense of geography” in your work. What does this freshness consist of? The physical experience of space, earth-space, and phenomenology. We’ve been living in a historical context for a long, long time. Christianity is a historical religion: after the death of Christ, it looks to his return. Western civilisation has always been waiting and hoping. When there’s pretty obviously nothing much left to hope for, it keeps on waiting – for Godot. That’s Beckett. I like his humour, but it’s definitely dead-end. History is also the city. It begins, classically, with the warring of city-states: Athens against Sparta, Rome against Carthage. This historical process went on and on, goes on and on. Shakespeare said it was full of sound and fury and signified nothing. Hegel, a while later, said he saw sense in it. History was leading to something great. To the mightiest State on earth (Bismarck’s Prussia, Hitler’s Third Reich). To the power-state that would put an end to all States (Marxist-Leninist Russia). To a huge Supermarket of Happiness for All (the liberal West). Most of these History-propelled trajectories have, fortunately, ended in disaster. Only the Supermarket remains on the horizon. But

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who believes it’s a peak of civilisation, or the basis of anything like a real culture? I’m not talking about the end of history. I’m talking about the end of the belief in history, the confidence in history. Hence the return of the nomad, the interest in nomadism. The nomad doesn’t make history. He follows his paths from well to well. He’s concerned with well-being. So doing, he works in close to geography, and with the parameters of sensitive space. One of the things I put across in my essay-books is a move from historical consciousness to a new geographical awareness, which means a re-connection of the human mind, the body-mind, with place and space, and the re-raising of primal questions as to how we live on the earth, research as to what fine, subtle earth-living can be. All this post-historical thing has, obviously enough, an influence on literature. History is story, that is plot, intrigue. The geographical tendency implies a different type of writing: beyond both story literature and the poem as the attempt to elaborate a chiselled moment of eternity, when it isn’t just metrical commentary on this and that. You speak of “intellectual nomadism”. What exactly is that? I first came across the figure of the intellectual nomad in Spengler’s Decline of the West, read in Glasgow when I was a desperado kind of student there – a student of modern languages (French, German), ancient languages (Latin) and philosophy, along with a whole lot of other things I picked up in the university library (I ransacked the shelves, from geology to theology via biology). In Spengler, the intellectual nomad is a furtive kind of character, roaming about the city streets, on the edge of society. He’s an outsider, a “Steppenwolf” – but with not much open space at his disposal. That’s pretty much how I lived myself in Glasgow, dressed in a black, anarchistic anorak. The figure fascinated me. Seemed a lot more interesting than the “writers” and “poets” I saw around, most of them with no great awareness, minimal knowledge, and no aura at all, scribbling out their nonentity, paraphrasing their existential paralysis, telling sad-sack stories. I know I was going to be doing a lot of intellectual nomadising, doing my damnedest to give the intellectual nomad more space, both mental and physical, than Spengler allowed him. I still had a sensation of space from my ten square miles on the West Coast, and I was going to

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extend it – the world is still a lot more open than we think, despite all the enclosures, despite all the enclosing forces, of which I’m well aware, but it’s too easy to get precociously resigned. So, I was out to give the intellectual nomad more scope. A mass of studies and notes led finally to a massive State-thesis on intellectual nomadism I defended in Paris, which was seen as opening up a whole new field of study. And I’ve worked more on those lines since. Two short definitions of the intellectual nomad as I see him. One, he’s neither the intellectual totally divorced from reality, handling the latest intellectualistic half-language, nor is he the socio-political intellectual, engaged, pathetically, often so wrongly in direct political action, or in endless social commentary. The intellectual nomad works in a larger space, and is engaged in larger questions (though he’ll also pitch in directly now and then if he sees it as useful). Two, the intellectual nomad knows that all cultures are partial. So he will nomadise from culture to culture, gathering in elements that can contribute to something like a complete world culture. For years, you were away from Scotland yourself. Why did you leave the country? I left it as a Celtic intellectual nomad, as a Scot out for more scope. I left it in much the same way as Joyce left Ireland, taking a lot of Scotland with me – more of Scotland than was actually left in the country. In the first instance, it was that intellectually sluggish, politically narrow, ideologically opaque entity, Anglo-dictated Great Britain that I was leaving. I published my first books from London, simply because there were hardly any publishers in Scotland except of a strictly patrimonial kind. I did three books there with Jonathan Cape that were received by a sharp critic (as Melville says somewhere, there are never more than five real critics in any country, and four of them are usually asleep) as being “outside the mainstream, or rather muddy eddy, of contemporary British literature”. What was contemporary British literature? There was no intellectual energy in the air. The little thought extant was going to get wrapped up in very dull packages of sociology. Prose was represented by a novel that, when it wasn’t beerily naturalistic, consisted of intrigues in university staffrooms, hospital wards, and so on. As for poetry, it was what I thought of as lawnmower poetry – it went on,

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correctly humming, within a very restricted context. Add to that, the fact that fast-food literature, gilt-edged trash, was beginning to pour in from the U.S., with marketing force behind it. When I presented my fourth manuscript, my publisher said he could see where I was going. But I was really more Continental than British. Britain, he said, was no longer really a literary country at all. What I should do was put my “incandescent” manuscript in the fridge for a while, and in the meantime write a fat naturalistic novel about Glasgow: births and deaths, blood and vomit, mud and manure – you know the kind of thing. That would go down well, both in G.B. and the U.S. I said I wasn’t interested. So I left for France. So doing, I realised more and more that I was following a strong Scottish tradition. Rebellious and researching Scots have frequently, almost regularly, left Scotland for France, “always a favourite place for Scottish wanderers”, as Irving says in his Lives of the Scottish Poets (1810). In my own intellectual genealogy, I like to go back to the travelling monks of the sixth and seventh centuries who left the Western Isles to travel all over the Continent, founding monasteries, libraries, schools. “Teachers of language and literature to all the West”, says Ernest Renan in retrospect. At the time, seeing them swarm all over the place, the Bishop of Auxerre in Burgundy cried out: “Who are these people from the ends of the earth?! Wild barbarians, but at the same time scholarly in the extreme. The more intellectual they are, the more they seem to want to travel!” After that first big surge, there were individual figures. I salute Duns Scot, brilliant mind, of quick Scoto-Celtic perception, who worked in France before leaving for Germany. George Buchanan, poet, historian, political thinker, who worked in Paris and in Bordeaux, where he taught Montaigne. On to David Hume, one of the sharpest philosophers in the English language, just as much at home in Paris as in Edinburgh, but not in London. Up to Robert Louis Stevenson, who reached the full expansion of his being in Fontainebleau and the Cévennes. And to Patrick Geddes, biologist, sociologist, working in Brittany, Paris and Montpellier. That’s the line I’ve followed and extended, in my own way. You have said: “We can’t conceive of literature in national terms any longer.” What does that mean? Isn’t it the privilege of English

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language writers only? What about small languages whose survival depends on maintaining a strong national identity? Our present world-context is caught between two forces. On the one hand, a massive cosmopolitanism seen basically in strictly economic terms, but carrying a platitudinous, steamrolling ideology, and a culture only of the most primary and most vapid sort. On the other hand, in reaction to that, you have a clinging to nationalism, localism, identity, ideology. My sympathy goes to the latter movement, but I don’t think it’s the solution. It carries its own blockages and constrictions. I side in fact with neither camp. What I go for is “open world”. And every locality is open, if you can read it right. Most nationalisms know very little about the country they arise in. They work according to an image, an ideological image. To read a country means to follow river-systems ultimately opening on to ocean, it’s to read geology, it’s to be able to follow mountain systems, it’s to know about the movements of peoples and languages. I’m for this complete, open knowledge of locality, as against limited localism and narrow nationalism. And it’s from this that the greatest work stems. Creativity, the deepest creativity, arises not from identity, but from a field of energy. What I look for, all over the world, beyond the nations, are islands of energy. Whether they be expressed in majority languages or minority languages. A real writer always writes a minority language anyway. This is where translation comes in. What I call “open world culture” depends on translation. And it’s the greatest works, the most open works, that translate the best. I said I look all over the world. That’s also part of intellectual nomadism. Take the case of Hungary. I have great respect for the freedom fighters during the Ottoman times, the Austrian times, the Stalinist times. But we’re talking about literature. Political rodomontade doesn’t make for great poetry, for the greatest work. I know the dialogue, or rather trialogue, among János Arany, Sándor Petfi and Gyula Reviczky concerning nationalism and cosmopolitanism. But, as I’ve indicated, I think the real question – the real ground – is elsewhere. I can understand Petfi’s “Arise, Magyar, your country calls”, but I appreciate more his “Song of the Wolves”, and I listen close when he says: “Destiny, give me space”. I do the same kind of reading of Erdélyi’s Crying on the Danube or Faludy’s Album of the Red Byzantium.

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In general terms, Central and Eastern Europe has lain under two great weights: history and religion. At the moment, it’s exposed to a ruthless, perspectiveless market economy. Before the questions were: “What are your beliefs?” or “How is your patriotism?” Now, it’s: “How much are you worth?” We’re badly in need, all over the place, of a different space. That’s what I’m talking about, that’s what I try to get at, in my essays, my narrative books and my poetry. Although your nomadism is principally intellectual, you also travel a good deal. What are your favourite destinations? Where did you go last? I started off by moving over Europe. That comes over in the book called Travels in the Drifting Dawn. After that, I felt the need to go from West to East. Back-tracking, as a Celtic intellectual nomad, into Asia. That gave rise first to The Face of the East Wind, which takes place in Hong Kong, islands in the South China Sea, Taiwan and Thailand from Bangkok up to the Mekong River and into the forests of nomad tribes such as the Hmong and the Karen. After The Face of the East Wind, it was The Wild Swans, which recounts a Japan trip, from Tokyo up on to the Hokkaido (the “North Sea Road”). After that, it was America, the North of North America. As a boy, I’d been attracted to Labrador. That’s where I went, from Montreal along the North bank of the St Lawrence. In the book of that journey, The Blue Road, I was following out my own existential and intellectual path from boyhood on, bringing in my elective affinities, letting their voices come in here and there. I was also tracing out, via discreet little references, the whole Western path from Romanticism on. And I was exploring a certain Americanism, which for me starts with those Asians who became Amerindians, takes in the French-Canadian voyageurs (there were often Scots among them), before moving up to certain writers. The “blue road” is the “good red road” of the Indians, but in a more obscure way. It’s also of course the river, the great St Lawrence. I like any country that can give me new sounds, new colours, increase my sensation of the world’s diversity. But maybe I have a particular liking for islands. I started off with the islands and archipelagos of Scotland: Hebrides, Orkneys. But I know quite a few islands too in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.

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Among the “work in progress” sheaves laid out on the floor of my Atlantic studio in Brittany, I’ve got an immense, sprawling, archipelagic manuscript which tries to gather in all the experiences, observations, cogitations and meditations gathered on these islands. I may or may not get round to composing it…I think I probably will. It’s a significant part of my cartography… What’s a waybook? When my prose books started to come out, first in France, critics were saying I was inventing a new type of literature. I began to see I maybe was. It was outside the novel, in that it had no characters, no plot. And it was outside travel-writing too, because it carried more intellectual energy with it and went through more dimensions. I decided to give it a name: waybook. The waybook is the literature of the intellectual nomad. Its space-time is that of the collapse of all models, and the end of all beliefs. The intellectual nomad is a supernihilist, who has integrated nihilism into his mind-process, but doesn’t stop there. He learns a way, step by step. I’ve learned a lot from other ways: the way of extreme Buddhism, for example, the way of the Chinese Tao-man, or the way of the Sufi pilgrim, who goes “East” by travelling “North”. The waybook will usually start in a big city. In other words, it will start where most of us are settled, more or less comfortably, more or less frustratedly. It’ll move around there for a while, exploring the labyrinth. Then it will start to move out along a road or a trail. Along that trail, there will be encounters, physical sensations, meditations, attempts to recover lost culture: a multi-dimensional journeying… Till the road reaches an area full of emptiness-plenitude… These are books about moving through large spaces. Do you also have feeling for particular places, smaller places? Very definitely. You move, you travel, so as not to get mentally obese, to keep streamlined. You travel also in order to improve, densify, intensify your residence. You stay put, study, think, so that your travelling isn’t just an aimless wandering about, but that there’s a logic in it. I like the Zen phrase that says: “He’s in the house without having left the road; he’s on the road without ever having left the house.” Which is close to what Whitehead said about there being no simple

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location, every place being a focal-point in a spatial stream of process. In addition to waybooks, I write also what you might call stay-books. My very first prose-book was a book of place: Letters from Gourgounel. Gourgounel (“gurgling source”) was the name of a farmhouse I had in South-East France, in the Ardèche. A beautiful old place, half way up a high hillside, surrounded by meadows, moor and forest, a thick forest of chestnut. On the other side of the valley, the jagged ridges of the Tanargue range. It was partly in ruin, and there wasn’t much money around to do a renovation job. But I loved that place. I did a lot of writing there, but I also spent hours and days just looking around, absorbed in the sheer enjoyment of simply being there. Then there’s House of Tides, which in its very title carries a double sense of stability and movement. It tells about living and working in my present place on the north coast of Brittany. Another marvellous site. An old Breton farmer-and-fisher house of granite and schist, about four hundred yards from the sea down a valley path. In fact, three separate buildings forming a little hamlet. In the book, I talk about day-to-day life, about neighbours, about nearby towns, islands off the coast, walks along the coast. I talk about rain, changing skies, winds veering and backing. I wanted to give a sense of this sea-province of France, this promontory of Europe, which is itself a province of Asia. It’s an intimate place for me; it’s also a strategic place: on the edge, Europe and Asia behind me, facing the open sea. An isolated place, in touch with the whole world, with the wholeness of a world, which doesn’t exclude gaps, fragments, abruptitudes. What is the relationship between geography and poetry? Lines. I learned more about rhythm and structure from the morphology of shore and mountain than from anything else, and they’re a perpetual source of renewal. Many an old Chinese poet will say the same (I found that out later), pointing out their development from early poems that were just “elegant” to later poems that were like clouds moving across a mountain, or the rushing of a torrent. When they moved from “silky” literature to something rougher and rarer. (Whitman broke into that, saying, in front of a breaking wave on the shore of Long Island, or a chaos of rocks in Platte Cañon, Colorado, that he was willing to

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throw out everything most people associated with poetry: correct prosody, a metaphor or two, a sentimental remark, or whatever, if only he could express that undulation, that chaotic mass.) The Chinese painters talk of “flying white” style which, via its breaks and gaps, its “unfinishedness”, opens out on to a sense of vastitude greater than could be attained by a would-be perfection. This “no-art” is the summit of art. It implies a transformation of the self, this “self” being experienced more and more as an open system. Which is why, in the really tough schools of art and poetry, it will be said that the basic work for the highest art and poetry is done “outside art”, “outside poetry”. This brings us back to what I said at the very beginning of our conversation, concerning maximal, optimal basis. To come back to lines…I lived for years with the jagged lines of the Pyrenees before my eyes every day. I can’t dissociate “line” in poetry from that kind of line. It’s as if I was trying from the start to get at a writing adequate to the writing of the earth done by geomorphic forces such as ice, rain and wind. Then there are the sea-lines. The fifty-two sections of a long poem of mine like Walking the Coast are like waves breaking on a shore. I can use all kinds of rhetoric. I’ve studied the books too. Throughout my work, you’ll find examples of practically everything. I’ve learned a lot from prosody, and I’ve learned a lot from prose – that prose which Baudelaire and Rimbaud started to use, and which Cendrars put forward in what is perhaps the inaugural poem of the twentieth century: The Prose of the Transsiberian. I’ve learned a lot from a lot of places and a lot of sources and tried to concentrate them in a new synthesis. But when I’m really on the edge, or on the heights, it’s those mountain-lines, those coast-lines that come breaking in. One of the theoretical words you’ve come up with in your researches, maybe the main one, is “geopoetics”. What is geopoetics? Geopoetics is a field that opened up in my itinerary after long years of intellectual nomadism. In other words, it’s based on a thorough, indepth analysis of the situation, the context in which we find (or don’t find) ourselves, on an exploration of the cultures of the world, as well as of its physical spaces, and on unceasing work in poetics as optimally synthesising language and maximal method of composition.

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We’re badly in need of a new general discourse. What we have, most obviously most prevalently, is a hotchpotch, with “contributions” coming from all kinds of particular (socio-political, psycho-personal) areas. Media and culture-biz people stir this hotchpotch around, and it gets nobody anywhere. There are good bits in it, but they get lost in the mess. Geopoetics can be approached from scientific, philosophical and poetic angles. It tries to work out and work at a general field such as existed before the separation of knowledge and intelligence into those separate domains. Heraclitus, for example, is “scientist”, “philosopher” and “poet” all at once. He evolves in a highly charged and yet open field. In addition to propagating a new language, which can incorporate elements of other interesting languages, geopoetics is out to open up a new cultural space by going back to the origin of every culture: the relationship between the human being and the universe. When that relationship is intelligent, sensitive, subtle, you have “a world” in the full sense of the word (in old Chinese, they speak of writing that “has a world”). When the relationship is brutal, and stupid, you do not have a world in that basic sense I’ve just evoked – you have a series of wastelands, fairgrounds, precincts of horror. Just look around… Why call this new field “geopoetics”? If you look at the history of the live cultures of the world, you come to see they evolve around a central focal point, which is the agreed centre of interest for the group. For example in Christianity: the Virgin and the Child. In Greek culture, the agora. In Stone Age culture, the relationship to animals, or to ancestors. I asked myself what could be the focal centre for culture, acceptable, beyond all the religions and ideologies, all over the world, north, south, east and west. I came to the view it could only be the Earth, which we all share, and on which we try to live. Hence the “geo”. (Gaia mythologists, please abstain.) As to poetics, there’s a word, a concept, hardly prevalent in our culture. We still have “poetry”, but no sense of the radical scope of poetics. But again, if you look at the cultures of the world, you have a poetics at the centre. In Greek culture, the oceanic poetics of Homer, especially in the Odyssey. In Chinese culture, the Book of Odes, that carries “the wind of the territories”. In a Palaeolithic or Neolithic group, you have the shaman, there to maintain a contact between humanity and the universe.

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To sum up, again using the vocabulary I’ve worked out, geopoetics is a combination of landscape (the physical nature of the planet), mindscape (the configuration and dynamics of thought) and wordscape (a sense of language that goes away out beyond standardised communication). What is the mission of the International Institute of Geopoetics that you founded and how does it work? Although I’m an out-and-out individualist, convinced that it’s the single intelligence that can go furthest, and open up the largest space, I’ve always been a creator of groups. In Glasgow, in the mid-sixties, it was the Jargon Group, devoted to “cultural revolution” (no reference to Mao). In France, in the times of the ’68 May revolt (during which my slogan was: “Not Mao, the Tao!”), using a French word dear to Whitman, Francophile like all intelligent Americans from Jefferson on, feuillage, I set up the group Feuillage, devoted to an enlivening of culture and the principles of a creative university. Later on in Paris, it was the Zen-sounding group of The Feathered Egg, out to give the mind wings. I’ve always liked what Mandelstam says of Dante: that he was more than a poet in the banal sense of the word – he was a strategian of mutation. The International Institute of Geopoetics is the most ambitious enterprise in this line. It’s an anarcho-geographical kind of organisation, an association of free individuals, which I set up in 1989. We started up a multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary magazine, the Cahiers de géopoétique, with contributions coming in from biologists, psychologists, geographers, writers, poets and artists. Then in 1993, I proceeded to what I called, as founder-president, the “archipelisation” of the Institute, that is the creation, habilitated by the Institute, and working in close association with it, of centres and workshops in various countries. At this point, there are centres in about ten countries, including Scotland. The publication of your Collected Poems 1960–2000: Open World, looks like a long deserved official recognition from Scotland. How do you feel about all this and how does it feel that until very recently your work has received more attention on the Continent than in Scotland?

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I don’t really think in terms of merit or recognition. Things go on at a deeper level. My relationship to my native country is kind of tectonic. I see any real work, in the sense of opus, as a mountain range or an archipelago in its topography. That’s how what I’ve done, and still will do, will be seen more and more. As part of the fundamental landscape… Forgive my immodesty! Every real writer, every fundamental poet-thinker, makes do with the contemporary context, while knowing very well that his real space is elsewhere. With regard to Scotland, it’s true I’ve lived and worked as much outside the country as in it. But that’s nothing unusual. Joyce worked most of his life outside Ireland. The same for Gogol and Russia. Exile of one type or another has always marked the highest work. Let me say too, in passing, that even when I was “away”, I was often in Scotland, “incognito” as it were, travelling over the country, moving along the fragmented west coast mainly and among the islands. It was a contemporary socio-politico-cultural context I’d distanced myself from, not the country itself… In general terms, considering things from the long view, if you travel a wide circuit as I’ve done (and every writer or artist I admire), it takes more time than if you travel a short one. And if you fly high, for a while you’re going to be invisible. So I have no complaints, no beefs. Given the kind of writers and artists I admire and feel affinity with (the Nietzsches, the Rimbauds, the Van Goghs), I think in fact I’ve been, all in all, pretty lucky. Not “privileged”, as some would have it, because the road has never been a primrose path, but lucky. Once you described yourself as a patriot “in an outlandish way”: do you still feel that? When I came back into English-language publishing around 1990, with a lot of manuscripts written originally in English, but which had appeared first in French, translated from there into other languages, I decided to do so from Scotland. In France and elsewhere I’ve always been known as a Scottish writer. I’ve always thought of myself as a Scottish writer – in the line of Duns Scot, Buchanan, Michael Scot, Hume, Stevenson…I evoked a socio-political cultural situation. This is changing. Scotland at the present moment is in a state of transition. But the transit area is encumbered with a lot of paraphernalia and secondary stuff. The Scottish sections of some universities spend their

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time grubbing up for “re-evaluation” barrels of sub-Burns, sub-Scotts, sub-everything, to prove to themselves and maybe the world that “Scottish literature” exists. A literary magazine will present John Buchan as “one of Scotland’s greatest twentieth century writers”. Now, if anybody wants to read John Buchan, during a bout of flu, for example, or when tired after a round of golf, fine – but to present him as a “great writer”…no, definitely no. As to more contemporary productions, there’s a Burger King shop on Princes Street, Edinburgh, and next to it a bookshop. When you see what’s presented in the bookshop window as “the best of Scottish literature”, you think of the hamburgers… With regard to the attitude towards myself, the public reception has been tremendous, the institutional response too. Of course there are pockets of reaction. There are local writers and groups of writers who are annoyed by my presence. They feel I’m upsetting the apple cart, threatening their niches. Some will emerge now and then, spit or hiss in my direction, then go back into their holes. Others will try to pretend I’m just not there. How many anthologies of “Scottish literature” are produced in which I simply don’t figure. All of this kind of reaction is boringly predictable and ultimately insignificant. It’s not anthologies that matter, or compendia of “Scottish literature” – it’s a work. There are never many complete works around. When I say “complete” works, I don’t just mean a collection, I mean a work that tries to get at a completeness. Trébeurden, 2 April 2004

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Bibliography: Kenneth White (1936–)

Poetry Wild Coal. Paris: Club des Étudiants d’Anglais de la Sorbonne, 1963. En toute candeur. Paris: Mercure de France, 1964. The Cold Wind of Dawn. London: Jonathan Cape, 1966. The Most Difficult Area. London: Cape Goliard, 1968. Mahamudra, le grand geste. Paris: Mercure de France, 1979. Le Grand Rivage. Paris: Le Nouveau Commerce, 1980. Scènes d’un monde flottant. Paris: Grasset, 1983. Terre de diamant. Paris: Grasset, 1983. Atlantica. Paris: Grasset, 1986. The Bird Path: Collected Longer Poems. Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1989. Handbook for the Diamond Country: Collected Shorter Poems. Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1990. Les Rives du silence. Paris: Mercure de France, 1997. Limites et Marges. Paris: Mercure de France, 2000. Open World: The Collected Poems 1960–2000. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2003. Le Passage extérieur. Paris, Mercure de France, 2005.

Translation André Breton: Ode to Charles Fourier. London: Cape Goliard Press, 1969. André Breton: Selected Poems. London: Jonathan Cape, 1969. Showing the Way: A Hmong Initiation of the Dead. Bangkok: Pandora, 1983.

Narrative Letters from Gourgounel. London: Jonathan Cape, 1966. Les Limbes incandescents. Paris: Denoël, 1976. Dérives, plusieurs traducteurs. Paris: Laffont, 1978. Lettres de Gourgounel. Paris: Presses d’aujourd’hui, 1979. L’Écosse avec Kenneth White. Paris: Flammarion, 1980. Le Visage du vent d’Est. Paris: Les Presses d’aujourd’hui, 1980. La Route bleue. Paris: Grasset, 1983. Blue North. New York: Braziller, 1984. Travels in the Drifting Dawn. Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1989. The Blue Road. Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1990. Les Cygnes sauvages. Paris: Grasset, 1990. Pilgrim of the Void. Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1992. Corsica, l’itinéraire des rives et des monts. Ajaccio: La Marge, 1999.

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House of Tides: Letters from Brittany and Other Lands of the West. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2000. Across the Territories: Travels from Orkney to Rangiroa. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2004. La Maison des marées. Paris: Albin Michel, 2005. Le Rôdeur des confins. Paris: Albin Michel, 2006.

Non-fiction The Coast Opposite Humanity: An Essay on the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Carmarthen: Unicorn Bookshop, 1975. The Tribal Dharma: An Essay on the Work of Gary Snyder. Carmarthen: Unicorn Bookshop, 1975. The Life-technique of John Cowper Powys. Swansea: Galloping Dog Press, 1978. La Figure du dehors. Paris: Grasset, 1982. Une apocalypse tranquille. Paris: Grasset, 1985. L’Esprit nomade. Paris: Grasset, 1987. Le Monde d’Antonin Artaud. Bruxelles: Éditions Complexe, 1989. Hokusaï ou l’horizon sensible. Paris: Terrain Vague, 1990. Le Plateau de l’Albatros. Paris: Grasset, 1994. Van Gogh and Kenneth White: An Encounter. Paris: Flohic Éditions, 1994. Les Finisterres de l’esprit. Cléguer: Éditions du Scorff, 1998. On Scottish Ground: Selected Essays. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998. Une stratégie paradoxale: Essais de résistance culturelle. Bordeaux: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 1998. Geopoetics: Place, Culture, World. Glasgow: Alba Editions, 2003. The Wanderer and his Charts: Exploring the Fields of Vagrant Thought and Vagabond Beauty. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2004. Adventures of a Bibliomaniac. Blair Atholl: Fras, 2005. On the Atlantic Edge: A Geopoetics Project. Dingwall: Sandstone Press, 2006.

Aonghas Macneacail: Land, Language, Memory Aonghas Macneacail is regarded as the most eminent Gaelic-language poet in the generation following that of Derick Thomson and Sorley MacLean. Here he talks about the place of Gaelic poetry in modern Scottish writing, but extends the horizon of sources and influences into a European perspective with Gaelic as one of the many minority languages currently spoken in the EU. Following the aims and procedures of the Glasgow Group as established by Philip Hobsbaum, he identifies his main objective as lucidity in poetry, while defending poetry’s right of free crossing between all languages – not only between English and Gaelic. Keywords: Gaelic poetry; poetry in translation; minority languages; the Glasgow Group.

Macneacail has been nicknamed Aonghas Dubh, which means “Black Angus”, probably because he has the commanding look of a Celtic bard – whatever Celtic bards might have looked like. He was born as Angus Nicholson in 1942 on the Isle of Skye, but uses the Gaelic equivalent of his name to reflect his Celtic origins. As Gaelic culture is becoming a curiosity in its own country and its survival gives rise to anxiety across Europe, it is no wonder that Trevor Royle’s Mainstream Companion to Scottish Literature dubs him as “a tireless worker in the cause of promoting Gaelic”. Macneacail’s career as a poet, editor, dramatist, script writer, researcher, lecturer and journalist is a prime example that, by definition, a modern Gaelic poet has to invest at least as much energy in documenting, preserving and campaigning for Gaelic culture as in creative writing. He has toured Europe and North America, giving lectures and poetry readings, and has been associated with The Gaelic College on Skye since 1995. He was educated at Glasgow University between 1968 and 1971, where he attended the meetings of Philip Hobsbaum’s Glasgow Group. Beside the influence from his younger contemporaries, his poetic development has been shaped by the legacy of the great generation of Gaelic-language poets: Sorley MacLean, Derick Thomson (whose Introduction to Gaelic Poetry remains the best review of the subject to date), George Campbell Hay and Iain Crichton Smith. The following interview was conducted during the early spring of 2005 by correspondence. Responding to my provocative questions about the habit of printing parallel English and Gaelic texts, Macneacail speaks about the free choice between the languages available for him as a bilingual writer, and defends the right of selftranslation when the need arises. But when I invite him to speak about

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his links and relationships within Gaelic writing in more detail (because in my experience modern Gaelic poetry remains a novelty even among readers of verse), he gives what might seem surprising choices for a Celtic poet – William Carlos Williams, Thomas Hardy and Pablo Neruda – and goes on describing an international treasurehouse of mutual impact and stimulus with contemporary Irish Gaelic and Continental writers. Does it suggest a future strategy for Gaels? Is it possible that the key to survival might not be via English, as is generally supposed? The EU has launched a new policy on lesser used languages, including Scottish Gaelic, which is a necessary step in preserving a culture and a speech form which is about to disappear from everyday reality. But it is more important that general interest in Celtic languages should be made more informed. Macneacail draws attention to the importance of communication – not as a mere slogan but as real and imminent exchange of ideas between writers who work in different fields and in different countries and yet have something in common. Poets and translators must work together on giving access to Gaelic poetry not only through the English language but in a variety of other languages also. Macneacail’s own career illustrates the ways in which the Gaelic tradition can be given a new life in contemporary dialogues with readers from Belgium, Switzerland, Poland or Liechtenstein. His poetic work includes: Poetry Quintet (1976); Imaginary Wounds (1980); Sireadh Bradain Sicir/Seeking Wise Salmon (1983); Cathadh Mor/The Great Snowbattle (1984); An Seachnadh/The Avoiding (1986); Rock and Water (1990); Dol Dhachaidh/Going Home (1990), illustrated by Simon Fraser; and Oideachadh Ceart/A Proper Schooling (1996); and Laoidh an Donais Òig/Hymn to a Young Demon (2007). Some of his Gaelic collections contain parallel English translation. He is editor of A Writers’ Ceilidh: An Anthology of Highland Writing (1991), and co-authored, with Iseabail MacLeod, Scotland: A Linguistic Double Helix (1995) for the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages. He has written plays for the 7:84 Theatre Company and the Eden Court Theatre, and television scripts for BBC Scotland.

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When did you start writing poetry? Curiously, I didn’t attempt to write poetry till I was about nineteen. I’d been a reading school-child (though more prose than poetry) but having become alienated by the choices school had forced upon me, I read virtually nothing for about three years from the time I left school, at sixteen. I think I always read newspapers, but became more interested in art, so began to read books about contemporary artists. Eventually, having decided I wasn’t going to be good enough to be a professional artist, I turned to words as words. The books that renewed my interest in literature were Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies and later a selection of Dylan Thomas’s poems. Thomas may have provided the welcome mat, but I found my doorway into poetry in general by scouring every anthology, particularly of contemporary Scottish poetry, that I could find. But also, discovering the poetry of Yeats and Hardy, then being introduced by an evening class tutor to Wilfred Owen, gave me a sense of what I can only call some kind of literary “kinships”. I think there’s something of the Celt in Hardy, and in Owen, even beyond his Brythonic name, and Yeats, of course, was full of it – despite his Anglo roots. Thomas was the son of a Welsh-speaker who wrote poems in his own language but did not pass it on to his offspring; the fact that Dylan must have heard his father’s verse seems obvious from the way he uses language, both tonally and rhythmically. Could you talk about your influences? How much have these influences changed over the years? There’s a sense in which we are influenced by everything we read, so that the process of change is continuing and ultimately unquantifiable. The way Thomas, Hardy, Yeats and Owen use their linguistic and prosodic skills has always remained significant to me. Then, in the English tradition, people like Basil Bunting and W.S. Graham (an exiled Scot); in Scotland itself, Norman MacCaig, Iain Crichton Smith and George Mackay Brown spoke a language I felt at home with, partly because they inhabited a landscape I recognised. I was in my mid-twenties before the Gaelic poets came to my attention, while attending evening classes in Glasgow. My education until then had left me with the impression that no serious Gaelic poetry had been

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written since the early nineteenth century. Discovering MacLean, Thomson, Hay and MacAulay, and learning that Crichton Smith was also a Gaelic poet hugely excited me, and provided the impetus for me to start writing in Gaelic – all my efforts at poetry till that time had been in English. At Glasgow University, poet and English lecturer Philip Hobsbaum’s reaction to a batch of poems I’d given him to comment on alerted me to the value of personal experience and close observation as sources for creative material – that something so “everyday” as one’s own experience and environment can be drawn on for poetry is not necessarily obvious to the inexperienced writer. Through Hobsbaum I would also become aware of my contemporaries, particularly Tom Leonard, whose poems in Glasgow dialect were causing quite a stir. Through Tom I got to know Tom McGrath, an enthusiast for the Black Mountain school of poetry, which led me to Gary Snyder and William Carlos Williams, among others. At McGrath’s house I also met Alan Spence, whose enthusiasms led me (as Snyder might) to Japanese poetry. Would you talk about working with Philip Hobsbaum in Glasgow? When I first met Philip Hobsbaum, I was very much adrift in a sea of prosodic possibilities, with neither compass nor anchor. Philip’s advice to “Write about what you know. Go back to your roots” enabled me to open (though not without difficulty) the door to a personal voice through which I could begin to express my relationship with the world. Although Philip’s group did not encompass Gaelic poetry, he did accommodate and encourage other Gaelic poets, as well as those writing in Scots. At that time I was writing mostly in English, so there was no sense of creative conflict, although Hobsbaum did express, on more than one occasion, the belief that I’d “have to choose”. The Glasgow Group was run on the same basis as its predecessors in Cambridge, London and Belfast (more detailed accounts of which can be read on the net). Pre-circulated texts were read by the author in the “hot seat” then analysed in considerable detail. Perhaps most of all, it taught us the importance of being able to justify the use of every word in a piece of writing, and to be able, in due course, to make such judgements with confidence for ourselves. There were

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those whose critical faculties were fully tuned already, but I’d count myself as one who, initially, had much to learn (being any kind of creative artist is, of course, a learning process until death). Being in the Group, at that particular time meant one was privileged to hear and comment on sections from Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, and Jim Kelman’s Bus Conductor Hines before these books had found a publisher! Do you ever feel overpowered by your great twentieth-century predecessors like MacLean or Thomson? Derick Thomson was my professor in Celtic Studies at Glasgow University. At the personal level he came across as extremely reserved, but his poetry, like that of Crichton Smith, has a contemporary informality when compared with the lyric intensities of MacLean’s work. I’d say that, for younger Gaelic poets, these poets provided a firm ground on which to build, and from which to seek out new directions, rather than as any kind of barrier. Are there any non-Gaelic influences that you hold important for your own work? Apart from those already mentioned, I’d count the great Haiku masters, Basho, Issa, and so on, but, as key influences on the way I see poetry, I have to nominate, particulary, two very different poets; the Chilean Pablo Neruda and Czech Miroslav Holub. I love Neruda’s bright opulence and Holub’s vivid economy with an equal passion. Hugh MacDiarmid’s early lyrics are wonderful examples of an apparently contradictory, but highly characteristic, ability to accommodate a “quart in a pint pot”: these are exquisite gems, explosive with creative energy. I think your work has been compared with the poetry of Norman MacCaig… MacCaig used to say that he derived his use of imagery from the way his mother, a native Gaelic speaker from the Isle of Harris, spoke: having only learned to speak English comfortably as an adult, according to the poet she translated her own idiomatic Gaelic directly

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into English, leaving him with echoes he could draw on for the rest of his life. I certainly derive much pleasure from the way his images spill so naturally out of the poems. Are there any contemporary – Scottish or foreign – writers that you feel a special kinship with? All the younger Gaelic poets are to be commended for engaging with the world we live in with tremendous commitment and imagination. Against all the realistic odds, new poets keep emerging, to do new and exciting things. People I would see as being my own generation of Irish Gaelic poets, particularly Michael Davitt, Cathal Ó Searcaidh and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, I admire and respect hugely and regard as key figures in a community of poets in that language who have done much to build bridges between the Scots and Irish Gaeldoms and between Gaeldom and the wider world. I am as likely to meet such poets at poetry events in New York or Berlin as in Edinburgh or Dublin. Among younger Irish language poets, Gearóid MacLochlainn’s Belfast vernacular and association with the edgier realms of popular music give his poetry a particularly attractive energy. All the living Scots previously mentioned would have to be acknowledged, plus prose writers like James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, whom I got to know as fellow members of Philip Hobsbaum’s Glasgow Group, and a slightly younger generation of poets like Brian McCabe and John Burnside. There are, inevitably, others whom we have to search the archives for but who are very much alive, and responsible for some of the best writing of the past half-century, Donald Campbell being a particular example. I don’t think we do nearly enough to access contemporary work from other languages. Last summer, I was privileged to work with Lichtensteiner Michael Donnhauser in a mutual translation exercise organised by the Berlin Poetry Festival: although I hadn’t seen his work previously, engaging with it at close quarters was an immensely stimulating experience. More should be done to bring us into contact with the poetries of other languages, particularly where there are notable levels of shared experience, historical or on-going. But why shouldn’t poets in “marginalised” Gaelic not be able to engage directly with “innumerable” Chinese, for example? We have much to

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learn from each other. I don’t think we should be measuring languages in terms of numbers of speakers, but of creative energy. If poets can come up with the goods, they are the equal of any: it’s not a competition, though, but a communication that ought to be happening. Gaelic is a minority language in Scotland and writing in Gaelic is a choice that obviously restricts the number of one’s readers. Wouldn’t it be a more obvious choice to write in English? What is it that one can’t express in English as successfully as in Gaelic? I don’t have much to say in this mattter. If the thought comes first in Gaelic, the poem that follows will be in Gaelic; if it’s triggered through English, the same applies. I probably bring less of my Gaelic world into the English poetry than vice versa, but once the poem is begun, it becomes a journey and search toward completion, with lucidity a prime objective. The Avoiding and Other Poems is a bilingual book. Doesn’t it seem slightly contrived to include facing English translations of your original Gaelic poems? My life as a poet began (as I believe did Sorley MacLean’s) through the medium of English. Given that English was the only language given any authority, at school, in the newspapers, the books we had to read, the radio. Even church leaned toward English, if occasionally negatively. Sunday school was in English and the snappier sermons were in English – those in Gaelic were longer, for a child interminably so. The Gaelic poetry we were exposed to at secondary school was of the weightier eighteenth-century sort – no poetry of the nineteenthcentury Highland Clearances, and none of the marvellous folk songs. So I have seen myself as an English language poet, chronologically before becoming a Gaelic poet as well, and as one who valued the opportunity to reach the non-Gaelic audience among whom most of my life is spent, in translations that aspire to be as close in creative quality as the originals. If I don’t translate poems originally written in English into Gaelic it is because there’s no need: Gaels all read English, including many who cannot comfortably, if at all, read their native language. Some critics have questioned the appropriateness of people like me translating our own work, but quite what the objection

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is I fail to understand. My perception is that, as the originator of the poem, who either crafted it to make striking something I wanted to say, or went with it to find out what I had to say, I might reasonably be assumed to be suitably qualified to bring out the closest approximation to the qualities of the original. Having said that, I will happily encourage anyone to have a go at translating my poems who is so motivated. Every reader’s interpretation is going to be leavened by that reader’s own experiences. What kind of readership did you have in mind when writing that book? I don’t think I ever write a poem with a specific readership in mind. Even when commissioned to write to a particular theme or brief, I find the process of exploring the direction into which I have been prompted tends to take over. I suppose that if An Seachnadh has any unifying drive it arises from a sustained preoccupation with working out my relationship with the conservative presbyterian Christianity of my upbringing. If every aspect of secular pleasure is viewed with suspicion by the centres of influence in your community, it tends to leave a lot to be worked out. Given that our school head teacher was also an elder in the church I was obliged to attend, I had a surfeit of such questions to resolve. What do we gain or lose when we read the English text without understanding the Gaelic original? The rhythms of any language are likely to be peculiar to that language. Gaelic is particularly well endowed with long vowels and dipthongs which makes it a particularly easy language in which to attain a kind of musicality, though that can, if necessary, be worked against. Ambiguities don’t always translate, and sometimes less than desirable ambiguities may arise in the translation. A good translation will not necessarily replicate the assonances or metric patterns of the original, but if it creates its own distinctive atmosphere while carrying the poet’s original intention, in terms of mood or meaning, it may be said to have worked. How big is the literary prestige of Gaelic in Scotland or in the UK these days?

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It’s harder for the literary establishment in Scotland, to present itself without a demonstrable reference to Gaelic. Sorley MacLean’s achievement and his subsequent international reputation means that the poetry of his successors has to be measured with due seriousness. Scottish literature cannot be written about anymore without reference to Gaelic poetry and its practitioners. Nor do magazine editors tend to the view that Gaelic can be ignored. Along with Britain’s other marginalised languages, including Lowland Scots, Welsh and Irish, Gaelic per se is less likely to have a presence in publications that have a more “national” (i.e. London and Oxbridge) perspective. In more general terms, recognition continues to present difficulties. Don’t ask a daily newspaper to publish a Gaelic poem – a translation, perhaps, on very rare occasions but never the original. How relevant is Gaelic tradition to you and how can one renew the Gaelic traditions in poetry? The fact that Gaelic poetry was essentially oral, usually sung, until the early twentieth century means that virtually every Gaelic poet is going to acknowledge its influence on how we use our language. I don’t take the view that any interpretation of, or reaction to, the tradition, no matter how “outrageous”, is sacriligious. I believe in the intrinsic value of all traditions, but believe also that no matter how vigorously an “avant-gardist” may confront, stretch, distort, disown it, a tradition will survive. The themes and motifs are there to be rediscovered and reworked according to the needs of the time. We have our songs sung by interpretors who belong to continuums that go back hundreds, possibly thousands of years, and that’s how it should be. We also have our interpretors whose concern is to subject the same material to the most radical treatmemt possible, and that’s how it should be. The healthiest tradition will have the confidence of self-belief coupled with an ear open to all that is fruitful from elsewhere. I believe early twenty-first century Gaelic culture is in a singularly dynamic state, numerically fragile yet creatively strong, rich in traditional voices and innovation. Would you talk about your book A Proper Schooling? What does the title mean?

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The title poem draws on the dichotomy between what we were taught at school, which had the imprimatur of authority, and the anecdotal history we learned at the fireside, but which had no perceived validity until James Hunter’s book, The Making of the Crofting Community, gave a formal context to events I’d heard since infancy as the fireside reminiscences of my great aunt (“not history but memory”). If The Avoiding explored the effects of an outwardly puritanical theology on the individual and community, and the ways of coming to terms with or accomodating it, A Proper Schooling is more to do with articulating a place in history and the wider world for the Gaelic experience. In Meg Bateman’s poem “The Decline of Gaelic” the lines “humanity being robbed/ without hope of reparation” sound like an elegy for a lost Gaelic world. Do you ever experience a similar sense of loss? Do you take this loss personally? Or do you perceive a loss that affects universal human values? Sorley MacLean, in the 1930s, wrote about the agony of “putting his thoughts in a dying tongue”, while acknowledging he could do no other… The poems in Rock and Water were written (in English) as a kind of record of a way of life I saw as disappearing: the sequence was already well advanced before I had started writing seriously in Gaelic. Logic tells me Gaelic cannot survive: instinct persuades me that it will refuse to die. The more poets, novelists, songwriters, and film-makers, whatever, insist on taking the language to its creative and imaginative limits, the more likelihood there is that society will insist on its survival. Every language has something unique to give to the world: the more essential and energised that “something” is, the more – I believe – is its continuing viability going to be insisted on, and provided for. Gaelic poetry has long been associated with orality and performance. To what extent have the oral traditions affected your own considerations in technique and subject matter? From an early age, you hear song, which by its nature is an oralising of the word. Gaelic song was woven into our lives, along with another sung thread which no Presbyterian child could avoid – the Gaelic psalms, both as an aspect of formal worship and as an unavoidable element in education – particularly if your primary school master was

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an elder in the local church! I think that hearing the sung work as much as I did left an ingrained sense of the sound of words, and the effect that could be created by those sounds. I imagine that the formal patterning of song must have had its influence on how I sense and use the rhythms of language, even when composing in “free verse”: I feel very uncomfortable with a piece of writing that doesn’t have a distinct sense of rhythm, no matter how irregular the scansion. Another thing that has been associated with Gaelic culture is exile and emigration. Have you ever felt like an exile? Is it a relevant experience for you personally? In my time, every educable Gael was born with the shell of exile on his (occasionally hers, but usually his) back. Actually, the great majority of young islanders, who wanted any kind of training, were likely to have to leave home to achieve their ends. Many nurses and city policemen were likely to be Gaels. There were ships where the entire crew, from skipper to cabin boy, were Gaels. And, of course, there were generations of emigrants, some forced, some “voluntary” to North America and Australia, and elsewhere. We all had cousins in the city, and more distant cousins overseas. I knew at quite an early stage in life that I would be expected to go off to “university”, whatever that was. As I recall, I wanted to go to sea, as my father, uncles and grandfathers (at least I supposed they also) had done. In the early days, I was just a country boy in the big city – excited and scared in just about equal measure. By the time I got to university, in my midtwenties, I was more concerned to work out my identity as a poet, than with questions of origin, or relationship with place. It took that key remark from Philip Hobsbaum, “Go back to your roots” to send me on the first uncertain steps toward working out a relationship with where I was from. And by the time I was old enough to even contemplate the possibility that return could ever be an option, it was too late. Too many of the old ones had gone, whose lives and personalities gave the place those particular characteristics that allowed me to call it home. More and more, each time I returned, with fewer familiar faces to greet me, what remains my birthplace became less and less a place I could easily call home. Where I live is home, but it’s the adopted home: the place where I grew up is home, even though it no longer exists. Because a place is never just its topography: the smoke rising

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from a particular chimney must indicate a particular, familiar figure stooped over the fireplace, stoking coals in. So I guess, yes, the question has some relevance to me. It therefore seems natural that I should empathise with the displaced peoples of the world, whether, historically, the First Nations of North America, or currently, the Kurdish communities alienated by the various states that occupy their land, and the Palestinians, for whose plight no Western government, or national media, seems capable of demonstrating any understanding, or expressing any sympathy. I have visited Israel, and have friends there, so I am not advocating abolition of that state, though it seems obvious there are contradictions it has yet to resolve. The way enemies are demonised, so that we do not need to think of how, or why, they come to be “enemies”: that paradox that arises from not going among those we do not understand, which enables our politicians to manipulate our feelings, and therefore our attitudes, should be harder to achieve when the other is viewed from somewhere else, when you have had experience of being the “other”. Putting such charged thoughts into effective poetry isn’t so easy, though. My primary school was on the other side of the bay, so, from the age of five, I viewed the house where we lived, “home”, from a distance (perhaps half a mile in crow’s flight). In the poem “dol dhachaigh – 2” [going home – 2] you write about travelling birds, travelling salmon, and travelling seasons even, which may be seen in terms of an opposition with the quiet and stationary world as described in “gleann fadamach” (glen remote). What is your view on the double pull of migratory spirit and loyalty to the landscape? The poem “dol dhachaidh” arose out of recalling conversations with city Gaels, in their middle age, returning to their home village for the summer holidays and discussing their plans to retire there. By the time they came to retire, their reasons for returning, as I cite myself in answering the previous question, had diminished, although the dream never altogether faded from their converstions, as I recall. And “gleann fadamach” relates to one of many deserted villages found in Highland and Island glens, to which no such return is possible, because the landscape is one of ruins and absence of people. Sorley MacLean’s “Hallaig”, which I was privileged to visit for the first time

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last year, is a particularly potent example, and one I could identify with as part of the wider Gaelic landscape to which I have a sense of belonging although my actual home now is in the Scottish Borders. Have you ever felt marginalised as a writer? Liz Lochhead used to comment on her role as the “token woman writer”. Gaels, in UK terms, live with either being featured as a “Gaelic poet” or, more commonly, as far as mainstream events and magazines are concerned, not being acknowledged at all. It may be that we are to blame in not submitting material, but when you have read, for example, a magazine like the “national” Poetry Society’s house magazine, The Poetry Review, for decades and never seen a poem in Gaelic, Irish or Welsh included, you are entitled to assume that there is a perception that such languages don’t belong in the family of British languages. We can travel anywhere else in the world and be welcome as bona fide poets, and there are some signs of improvement in Scotland itself, but there are still entrenched prejudices to be overcome. My own perception is that I am a poet who happens to write in Gaelic – which happens to be my native language. I am happy also to be a poet who writes in English. There is, however, a further marginalisation to live with – if published by a Scottish imprint, your work is unlikely to be widely reviewed – not at all at the UK national level, and erratically at the Scottish national level. (It has been suggested that a publisher’s ability to advertise in a given journal can enhance attention to the material published.) My country has just joined the EU and we are told that apart from having access to the common market we have also joined a set of European values and principles, so this my standard question in this book: as a poet living in an EU state, can you identify with a spiritual or cultural idea of Europe and do you ever feel European values and traditions are relevant to your own work? I do think we have much more in common than could ever divide us. The democratic impulse is rooted in our communal histories. You see it in the Nordic “Tings” (including the present Isle of Man parliament, a Nordic institution in a Celtic culture) and in the Celtic principle of leadership by consent – not necessarily of the whole tribe, but of a

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sufficient cross-section to make it at least as democratic as the Greeks. I think the collective imperative that shapes so many of our societies (when freely opted for, rather than coerced or manipulated into) arises from those societal structures that had a core base in mutual obligation. Apart from the intrusive Judeo-Christian mythology (itself leavened with Greek mythic elements, among others) I think our Celtic mythology, as much as can be pieced together of it, shares many characteristics with those of both Northern and Southern Europe. Polytheism on an animistic base would appear to have given definition to the lives of all our ancestors. Traces of those old beliefs still surface among the personal beliefs of the most “rational” of our citizens: were we to inquire, we may find that they are not only more widespread but more comprehensive, that a systematic study of beliefs normally dismissed as “superstitions” might reveal a more nearly intact body of indigenous (pre-Christian) beliefs than we imagine possible. A knowledge of what the Celtic ancestors of the Halstadt and La Tene cultures thought about their world, and how those thoughts related to those of other contemporary cultures, would be useful to us today, in enabling us to identify more clearly the continuums that exist across both history and societies. While different societies may have, superficially, developed radically different social structures, when we engage with each other, what strikes us is the kinships. Tolstoy may have been a Russian aristocrat in the time of serfdom, but his humanity is apparent to the poorest crofter or mariner on the Western extremities of Europe. In Beethoven’s Pastoral I hear the sounds of summers I have also known in Gulf Stream damp North-West Scotland. The marble statue depicting the Dying Gaul found in Sallust’s garden, and now on display at the Capitoline Museum in Rome, may symbolise the extinction of a culture (though we are still here), but it still speaks to us across more than two millennia, as a wonderful piece of art. Why is Gaelic special and why do we need to know more about Gaelic culture? Gaelic, along with the other Celtic languages, Irish and Manx in the Q-group, and Welsh, Cornish and Breton, in the P-group, forms part of the Indo-European family of languages. Historically, it can be claimed, through the imaginative “translations” in James Macpher-

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son’s Ossianic collections, to have launched the European Romantic movement: poets, artists and musicians, as well as politicians were influenced by Macpherson’s writings. Every language imparts its own particular portion of knowledge. I remember reading the account of a last surviving member of an American tribe, whose death would take a body of lore that included significant cures obtained from plants which he knew only by their native names. Gaelic has traditions, in song, poetry and story-telling, which are distinctive, rich and ancient, for which alone it would remain important, but its continuing role as a source of powerful new works to be read, heard and sung, makes it crucial that Gaelic be accepted within the community of modern languages. The songs of Runrig and the works of all the poets are currently being complemented by a body of prose, novels and short stories, of major significance. Do you see yourself as a Scottish poet? Or a British poet? Or a European poet? Most of my subject matter is Scottish, by virtue of my familiarity with its geography, sociology, lore and history, as well as my extensive reading of Scottish literature and reference material: it is, after all, the culture into which I was born and with which I am happy to identify. The poets writing in English that appeal to me, other than the Scotttish poets who do so, would include Thomas Hardy (whose imagined Wessex contains, in Cornwall, much territory that is Celtic), Wilfred Owen, whose surname indicates Welsh ancestrym and more obviously Celtic poets like Dylan Thomas, W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney and of the Thirties Poets, Louis MacNeice, an Ulsterman. If “British” means the mainstream English tradition, as represented by W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin or Ted Hughes (whose surname is, I know, Welsh) and their contemporary heirs, it doesn’t engage me in any meaningful way. It’s not that I’m critical of the poetry, it just doesn’t excite me. Having had poems translated into several languages European, I am more than happy to be accepted into the community of European poets. I do have a sense of, particularly, East European poets having had to engage in unavoidable, direct and personal ways with the world they lived in. Even the most private poems have a distinctly public resonance. They are poems that had to be written, and I like that.

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Kathleen Jamie and John Burnside and others have suggested that they have come to be interested in a general “northern” or “marginal” identity as opposed to a Scottish national or a European supranational identity. Would you include yourself in this group of writers? My starting point is where I come from, which happens to be the township of Idrigil, on the north side of Uig Bay, in the Trotternish peninsula, most northerly in the Isle of Skye. The three names are all of Norse origin as is my surname, so that element must resonate with me. But the music and lore which pervaded my childhood and triggers, still, the most immediate response, was entirely Scottish Gaelic. I think it is possible to remain utterly Scottish while being at ease with both the European and international dimensions. I can understand why Japanese scholars connected with early Gaelic texts written by clerical scribes on the margins of illuminated manuscripts. Their evocations of nature seemed very Japanese, while the Gaelic concept of “listening to the music of what happens” must have seemed like pure Zen. In that, I also feel at home. How important is landscape and nature for yourself? Do you see yourself as a nature poet? I grew up in a landscape and I think that, even when your human ties have been severed, a childhood landscape stays within you. It remains specific, and special. When visiting Japan, in 1990, the landscape of Hokkaido, where we spent ten days, became woven into those other lanscape of memory, not only of my native village but of various parts of Europe previously experienced – Switzerland, Poland, Brittany, for example. A rock formation or a meadow can affect my imagination in ways that no street or architectural construct ever could – although striking, usually eccentric, details in buildings can initiate their own dialogues. How closely is Gaelic poetry tied up with nature as opposed to the urban environment? I think Gaelic poets whose formative experience is urban will have no difficulty creating a thoroughly urban Gaelic poetics.

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One of your recent books was called Rock and Water – what was the idea behind it? My own interpretation of the title Rock and Water is that it is a metaphor for religion and humanity, more specifically the rock-hard puritanism in which I was brought up and the earthy fluidity with which members of the community could burst into song or deliver a bawdy anecdote – the resilience of the human spirit, which confronted by any great obstacle, will find a way to flow round it… Others are welcome to make their own analyses. What’s the significance of sea, wind and weather in your poems? Growing up beside the sea, on the side of a generally well sheltered bay, I have memories of waiting for the next big wave to break over the wall of the long stone pier which reached out into the bay. A Westerly or Sou’Westerly wind was likely to have that effect. Harvests, of course, were dependent on the weather. Bad autumn weather always presented a threat to haymaking. The sea remained an issue because father was a mariner. On summer evenings, were he home between voyages, he might take me out fishing in a neighbour’s small open dinghy: but that depended on the weather. In this respect, to what extent does your poetry conform with or undermine Gaelic traditions? I don’t know if you can truly undermine a tradition. Iconoclasm tends to have an invigorating effect on a healthy tradition. Finding new ways of expression doesn’t invalidate the old. In-as-much as I can objectively judge, my poetry both draws, extensively, on Gaelic traditions, while at the same time weaving elements from a diversity of sources into those traditions. I do also write formal song lyrics which others set to music: these make no pretence to being anything other than traditional in construction, while they may draw thematically on incidents or events from my own experience, and in that sense may be less than strictly conformist. How important is spirituality and religion to you? Is there a special link between Gaelic poetry and spirituality?

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My interest in aspects of the “Old Religion” of the Celts might lead some to assume that I am sympathetic to “New Age” disciples of “Celtic Spirituality”: they would be mistaken. My interest in how, and what, our ancestors believed should be measured on the same basis as my interest in how they played, or sang, or told their tales, and how they related to each other, formally and informally. Each of these elements may be seen to have survived, in however attenuated a state, forming threads in the continuum that acts as determinant in shaping how we view the world. All the old gods and heroes, and the stories that have grown around them, are, or ought to be, natural strands in our heritage, a legitimate source for the imagination to draw on. The imposed religion is there to react against. In that it shaped my education from infancy, it must inevitably be acknowledged that I am affected, and that the values of such a puritanical theology are ingrained in my psyche. A Gaelic poet, seeing a horse on the side of a hill, will tend to describe a horse on the side of a hill. Modern Gaelic poets may engage with symbolism, psychology or whatever other intellectual tool lies to hand, but only to more effectively reveal what’s there. Carlops, 19 April 2005

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Bibliography: Aonghas Macneacail (1942–)

Poetry Imaginary Wounds. Glasgow: Print Studio Press, 1980). Seeking Wise Salmon/Sireadh Bradain Sicir (illustr. Simon Fraser). Nairn: Balnain Books, 1983. An Cathadh Mor/The Great Snowbattle (illustr. Simon Fraser) Nairn: Balnain Books, 1984. An Seachnadh, agus Dàin Eile / The Avoiding and Other Poems. Edinburgh: Macdonald Publishers, 1986. Rock and Water: Poems in English. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990. Sgàthach the Warrior Queen (illustr. Simon Fraser). Nairn: Balnain Books, 1993. Oideachadh Ceart agus Dàin Eile/A Proper Schooling and Other Poems. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996. Amra Choluim Chille/Dallàn’s Elegy for Columba (ed. and tr. P.L. Henry). Belfast: Colmcille and Iontaobhas ULTACH, in association with Proiseact nan Ealan, 2006. Laoidh an donais òig/Hymn to a Young Demon. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2007.

Non-fiction With Iseabail Macleod, Scotland: A Linguistic Double Helix. Brussels: European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages, 1995.

Editor A Writers Ceilidh for Neil Gunn (illustr. Simon Fraser). Nairn: Balnain Books, 1991.

Richard Price: Signage on the Super Highway Richard Price is a librarian and avant-garde poet, as well as an editor and critic with a deep knowledge of small press publication and a particular insight into the Scottish literary scene. A key figure in the Informationist group of the 1990s, he continues to explore new forms of creative working across the verbal, visual and musical arts. Keywords: Informationist; avant-garde; translation; Migrant Press; Gael Turnbull; Edwin Morgan; Renfrewshire; conceptual art; Attila József.

Richard Price has worked with several other poets featured in this book as editor, translator and writer of poetry and fiction. He is author of the collections Lucky Day (2005), Greenfields (2007) and Folded (2008). As Head of Modern British Collections at the British Library and former chair of the Poetry Society, he has a specialist’s knowledge of the current Scottish poetic scene. Price was born in 1966, and grew up in Renfrewshire. He gained a doctoral degree at the University of Strathclyde, where he wrote his thesis on Neil M. Gunn, later published by Edinburgh University Press (1991). His professional interests include small press publications, and with David Miller, he co-authored British Poetry Magazines 1914– 2000 (2006). In 1989 he founded Gairfish with W.N. Herbert and in 1991 he established Vennel Press with Leona Medlin. With Raymond Friel he was founding editor of the poetry magazine Southfields and in 2001 he started Painted, spoken. He is associated with a 1990s group of Scottish poets, the “Informationists”, which includes Robert Crawford, W.N. Herbert, David Kinloch, Peter McCarey and Alan Riach. Their work was collected in Contraflow on the Super Highway (1994). While it might be wrong to call it a proper school, it is a fact that these six poets have worked in association with each other, on and off, for the last two decades, and they do share some basic concerns. It was first defined as a separate movement by Price himself, who pointed out in it a “profound interest in the nature of information itself”. On the one hand, it is an interest in how information travels and how communication works or breaks down, and how knowledge and information is manipulated. On the other hand, it is an interest in the inventions of modern technology (telephone, radio, television, microelectronics) and how they contribute to the distribution, control and interpretation of information. It is all permeated by an awareness of the paradox of large and small, virtual and palpable realities. Informationists write

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about knowledge but they also wish to stretch or change our understanding of historical and contemporary realities through presenting alternative narratives (sometimes made up or sometimes sweeping out the forgotten corners of the past) or unorthodox modes of observation (at times evocative of the “Martian” style of the 1970s). While their poems speak of an allegiance to where they come from (as in Crawford and Herbert), they take pride in their cosmopolitan education, putting elocution to an active use and revelling in obscure references. In general, members of the group share an interest in small magazines and publications, although many have gone on, by now, to publish their work with big presses mostly, such as Cape, Carcanet or OUP. Price’s poetical works include Sense and a Minor Fever (with illustrations by Peter Robinson, 1993), Perfume & Petrol Fumes (1999), Frosted, Melted (2002) and translations of Louise Labé in Lute Variations (2006). His interest in avant-garde and experimental poetry comes to surface in various art projects in which he collaborates with visual artists: Gift Horse: text by Richard Price and drawings by Ronald King (1999); Renfrewshire in Old Photographs (with Raymond Friel, in 2000); A Twenty-Piece Puzzle: with visual art by Chan Ky-Yut (2004), and The Mechanical Word, published in a “limited edition of twenty copies” in 2005.

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As someone who was born in England, grew up in Renfrewshire, Scotland, and currently works in the British Library, do you see yourself as a Scottish poet, a British poet, or a Scoto-English poet or perhaps a European poet? On the one hand I feel I should rush to say Scottish! And then I think of my parents – English! And then I think of my largely enjoyable holidays and visits to various places on the continent: European! Funny you didn’t ask if I felt American, but perhaps that might be a question. That’d be far too many hands. But, in truth I am not sure what you do with these very broad categories, though I register their appeal as much as their discomfort. It feels as if more work would be needed to be done with defining all the ishnesses of these terms before I could say, “Oh yes, I’m definitely that ish, but I’m definitely not that ish”. Aesthetics, politics, sense of belonging? But those terms are pretty vague, too! I certainly grew up in Scotland, and I certainly continue to spend time there willingly (“oh that’s rich of you, Richard!”) – but an appearance crossing from one CCTV camera in Scotland to another, a flicker from one grid on the GPS to another, doesn’t get you much closer to the micro-decisions (and micro-effects, decided or not decided) of a particular poem; that kind of nuance barely gets into aggregatable display behaviour, and of course you can’t get far into the thought processes on a national identity ticket without getting bogged down in material particularity and chance. In that way state identity is supplied from outwith the individual, and is to do with marketing and state identification cross-overs that I don’t feel the need to be consistent about. In that sense, I vote for the Republic of Renfrewshire! Glasgow for European City of Glasgows! Seriously, what does it mean in the poetry to be “Scottish”? Well, yes, the influence of some Scottish poets is important and I think demonstrable – MacDiarmid, Graham, Leonard – and are all there in my poems to see (a question of material stylistics, but that’s for a critic to drill deeper). By the same token, though, that might make me Greek-in-translation and Latin-in-translation, too, with a bit of American rock and roll, blues and country ‘n’ western thrown in because I’m fond of all these. But belonging? – yes it is important to me to feel others think I belong in Scotland in some way after quite a

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long time working out of the country but I hope others think I belong in the lyric world, too. Why is America seen as vital to Scottish writing? I’m surprised that in Scotland concepts of Scottishness are sometimes figured as a function of European-ness, whatever that is, and as a function of not being in any way doing anything that England did, does, or ever will do. That’s quite a binary attitude. Must be nice living in such a well-defined place. Well, it’s my impression, so I might be quite wrong about it. Maybe America should be thrown in to the mix a bit more when folk are talking about Scotland? Not to welcome it and not to reject it, but to probe it, see what it means: does it mean anything to say there is an American aesthetic, or group of aesthetics? What effects have particular poets or poems had on Scottish writing, you know, with actual examples talked through. So I was more talking about being conscious of influence or just engagement rather than as a market for anyone’s wares. I like some American poetry – Emily Dickinson, Robert Creeley, Lyn Hejinian – but I find a lot of American poetry either raucous, simple-in-a-bad way, cat-that-got-the-creamish smug (all those assumptions of the reader, all that sentimentality), professor-fussy and tweedy, or obsessed with the name America itself (which seems to stand for anything the poet likes or really doesn’t like). That said, I like the way that Scottish poets like Peter Manson and Fiona Templeton have kept the door open to the American avant-garde, that they have made real connection to contemporary experimental writers there. I recently heard Leslie Scalapino and Catherine Wagner read and you’d be very hard put to find Scottish writers so accomplished in their impact and complexity (I almost say this grudgingly!), with such a different approach to poetry, I mean completely Other – I can only really think of Peter Manson, Fiona Templeton, and Drew Milne, off the cuff, working in that layered, complexly performative way. As for me, in a way I just write the things I enjoy writing, and then I see if others like them on the page or being read to; it’s at that point that you’d be foolish to ignore an English-speaking market the size of America but I leave that kind of thing to my publisher, it’s a very secondary thing.

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Dunn has also spent some time in America and his early work is strongly associated with Renfrewshire, the place of your childhood. Do you regard him as a “predecessor” – in any sense? No, although I like some of the things he has done. When I was very young, late teens, his poem on Billie Holiday was a trigger for me writing “My father’s record collection”, and I like the quiet conservative anarchism of his vision of Secret Villages where many kinds of life can be lived in resolutely undeclared privacy – until it is imagined into revelation. I like the idea of there being other writers who have strong associations with Renfrewshire at the same time as recognising this as a kind of Me-and-My-Army behaviour. Is a House full of Poets a citadel or a prison? If it’s a citadel, what’s it trying to defend? If it’s a prison, shouldn’t we be throwing away the key? So, yes, I’d be very happy to be seen in W.S. Graham’s company and Douglas Dunn’s, and Daniel O’Rourke’s and Raymond Friel’s – all Renfrewshire poets – but I hope that it isn’t about mobilising a brand, though I fear it is! Buy those books, see those poets! I don’t agree with the idea of a poetry family tree, of succession and successors, even of progress in poetry: I think those ideas are as much about the obliteration of history as connection to it, so I’d be very careful talking about “predecessors” and so on. The reworking of your memories of the Kilmacolm Hydro Hotel seems to me to be going along lines that might be associated, even if marginally, with some of the concerns exhibited in Kuppner’s work. Has he been, perhaps, another presence in your work beside the ones you mentioned? Oh yes, Kuppner is very much a favourite. He is sly and he is funny and then his poem sequences creep up on you and suddenly are also terribly touching. Sad, funny, sly: Muriel Spark, Bernard Malamud (in A New Life) and Frank Kuppner, eh? You know, writing something that is just slowly sinking in, sinking in as you’re reading the next thing and then suddenly it has a purchase on you, that’s quite some ability and it’s something I strive for. And with Kuppner (not so much with Spark?) you have this sense of taking a single situation and seeing it in all kinds of different ways, going through perspective after perspective, almost like an and/or/not machine, if there is such a thing.

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Would you talk about your recent work, Renfrewshire in Old Photographs, a joint project with Raymond Friel? Yes, as you know Raymond and I go back quite a long way – he contributed to Gairfish when I was co-editing it with Bill Herbert in the early 1990s and from that time on we became friends. He moved to London, to Southfields in fact (where Wimbledon tennis is played), and our magazine Southfields grew from frequent meetings in the centre of town – we’d serve ideas up to each other and see if they could be volleyed back. We discovered we came from the same county, Renfrewshire, but quite different parts of it. He’s from the urban coast that W.S. Graham knew, and I’m from the sleepier saints’ villages a few miles inland. (Of course, the saints are long gone, and there have been one or two industrial interventions on the way.) We started talking about this genre of publishing, “Anyvillage in Old Photographs” and how we might write something that took the concept for a walk. It would deliberately be without visuals – it would be up to our texts to provide sensation, visual or otherwise – more what a variety of people might write on the other side of the postcard rather than the photo. Looking back, it was essentially an artists’ book, in the conceptual artist tradition rather than the pictorial artist one. Raymond collaged and reshaped first-hand testimony of the blitz in the lower Clyde, brought together other historical poems (I mean historical poem as an analogue to historical fiction) and I conjured some voices or even remnants of voices that seemed to me to be more part of my Renfrewshire. “Renfrewshwhere” is still a psychological landscape for me, a Wessex if you like, real and not real, and my short stories in A Boy in Summer are in a way a continuation of my part in Renfrewshire in Old Photographs (as Raymond’s recent collection A World Fit to Live In is a continuation of his). Where does the ambition of the art projects come from? I think it comes from a braiding of an awful lot of strands. I think my mother trained at an art school in the Southeast of England when she was a teenager, but more than that I’m afraid I don’t know (my mother died in 1990 and it is one of the many questions I cannot now ask her). In any case, she painted in a style rather like the Scottish colourists (in fact, the west coast was also her subject, though a little further north

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than Iona) – though she probably wouldn’t have known about them and would not have seen herself as a Scottish painter at all. She was also a dressmaker, shirtmaker and general adjuster of hems – the idea of making things was strong, and my father also had a workshop and could (and still can) make all manner of practical things out of wood, as well as large models of ships – made from the actual blueprints of the boats themselves! We had a number of these about the house, not excessively but there they were and that’s what you did with your creativity: you made things you liked and you just put them somewhere quietly on show. I think the setting out of a poem, the act of writing a poem, almost always for me with a pen on paper, is something like an inscribing or even painting, sometimes with a fast rhythm like a sketch, sometimes slowed way down like a Japanese print. In that, I register that I am working within a Romantic construction of the writer but if so, so be it. Why do you enjoy working with visual artists? In my work at the Library I’ve come to know quite a few artists, especially those involved with the artist’s book, including Ronald King who, as you probably know, is one of the great British book artists (“British” in this case meaning Brazilian English) and if we have clicked talking things over then sometimes we’ve gone on and made a book. With gift horse I encouraged Ron to work with a text I had already written (in fact two texts – he couldn’t find a way into the first one, so I went back and rethought it completely) and then he came back with a remarkable book in which the horse of the title actually moves through the codex in blind embossing; extraordinary and probably the most minimalist he has ever been, totally responding to my concision (and he is normally very exuberant in his production: he’s someone who can do almost anything). The enjoyment is partly personal – the artists I’ve worked with are good to know, fun to know – but artistically there’s a sense of producing something that neither of us could produce without the other, of the artist’s book becoming extra dimensional, super-articulate. In what sense do these projects approach conceptual art?

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They are conceptual in the sense that a premise starts them: as with the book series that Karen Bleitz and I worked on together in which the idea was to dramatise English language verbs using mechanical cogs and dramatic texts; in Renfrewshire In Old Photographs there is a broader limitation where improvisation can be freer but not wholly free. As with most conceptual art they also problematise the means by which they are delivered, the medium of art itself: gift horse uses white on white (the blind embossing) which should be invisible and so a non-element of the book, but which is in fact made by the shadow of the indent; the book I collaborated on with Karen is a laser-cut light aluminium – with the page-width a centimetre! – and so on. And what about the auditory imagination? I can remember the Beatles’ records in the early 70s, an absolute staple in our household well after they had split up, and writing stories in a notebook over the rainy holidays and later, early teens, getting interested in song lyrics in the whole North American singer and songwriter tradition, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, especially the amplified electric sounds and the various luxuriant backings. The Clash and the Sex Pistols were a continuation of aspects of that and were very much celebrated as such in our house. To hear a lyric that was already stimulating set within extremely exciting urgent soundscapes – that was, and is, one of the great pleasures for me, and one of the great sadnesses that I have not been able to learn to play music and so songwrite in the way I’d like (as yet – I must make time – it’s not enough punishing folk with the poems, they should have to listen to my guitar technique). The aural quality of my poems is something I take very seriously, phoneme by phoneme, and the sense of lyric push, the dynamic of the poem – perhaps to add micro sound effects that songs may not have but which reach into the phonic realm in compensation. I was pleasantly surprised to find your poem “The world is busy, Katie” (which I found amusing and deeply lyrical at the same time) in a recently published Scottish–Hungarian bilingual anthology, because it reminded me of a popular cradle song written by the Hungarian poet Attila József. In what ways has the experience of having a young

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family changed your way of thinking or your world view or your inspiration in poetry? Thanks – yes, I still like that poem. And, like many Scots, I know and love Attila József’s work through Edwin Morgan’s translations. Having Katie, my eldest daughter, completely changed my life. She suffers from Angelman’s Syndrome, a catastrophic deletion in one of the chromosomes, so is severely disabled, physically and mentally; she is also unable to speak though she can laugh and cry and signal a few fundamental emotions. I hope I will never underestimate the value of language again – I mean the articulacy of the hundred or so words that from six years up we tend to have command of. In my poems it had already been a theme before Katie, how language under pressure has a kind of super-expressiveness, that bits of language and their silences can have more to them than can be achieved with a “fuller” vocabulary (I think of Chekhov here, of Beckett), but with Katie that became personal, earnest, something we’ve all struggled with and tried to turn around. (Thankfully, most of the time it’s we who struggle – Katie’s fine-in-her-world and I think happy, long may it stay that way.) And also to value those who can’t speak – politically, actually, who can’t speak. With Ellen, Katie’s younger sister, it’s been all about the extraordinary world that children see and say and sing. I think not to forget that. If somehow Attila József could have pulled himself up or been pulled up to see that again, if he could have been dragged out of that whirlpool of depression, with something like that sense of wonder, and wonder-in-form (and there is a world-weary child in his poems)… Well. Big ifs. You’re also a translator of Apollinaire, Labé and Vallejo… What draws you to translation? I’m not completely sure what has drawn me into translation in general – I guess it’s part of a general thirst for knowledge and, especially, for pleasure. I like Catullus and Sappho in translation for the pleasure they take and the pleasure they give by having that pleasure; part of that pleasure is to do with excelling in form. I can see that translation is also what a lot of poets do and have done, goes with the silk neck scarf; if poets are anything like me they are self-centred hedonists who

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also seek sensation in all manner of forms, and translation is one of them. One pleasure for me is to use English (generally, sometimes Scots) in an outré way, to make it perform in a way that maybe it isn’t used to performing (though you say something like that and then years later find that, yes, there was X all along stretching the language in this way, or – conversely – quite happy to use traditional forms and still sound right for the nowness of now). I guess there’s that dreadful didactic thing going on, too – you can just about grasp a language (of course, I am really very bad at languages, and though I have called my work translations in the past it’s probably better to call them variations or improvisations on something I only glimpse at) and you can pass on your excitement about a poet to someone else, give a bit of historical detail as well, and then they can get into that poet, that world. I’m sure there is some kudos in being a Translator, which now appears to be so sacred it’s a new rank of clergy (and a lot of the clergy look awful like Holy Willies to me), so maybe I’m a bit guilty of adopting the Borrowed Authority. I hope not. You have to remember, too, that a lot of what is translated may well have been quite bad poetry to begin with: translation can confer value on some pretty mediocre stuff and so I don’t think that translation as such is a good thing, it is more of a kind of minimum necessary thing, but that doesn’t mean we have to fill our magazines and books with it all. By the same token I like the fact that some authors will never be understood except within their language communities (if then!) – I like the very fine-tuned as well as the transferable. Where does the interest in these poets come from? Apollinaire was an accidental choice. I came across Steegmuller’s biography in a second-hand bookshop in Brighton and devoured the book. I then began looking for more translations (I studied French at school but it is shaky) and began to make versions of the poems that were especially easy (I thought) or especially interesting. Eventually I did some versions that didn’t rely on me seeing a translation first, and finally I asked a French academic and poet to make sure I wasn’t committing awful crimes. He said I wasn’t but I think the appeal process is still under way. This was much the same for Labé, who a friend suggested I read before I went on holiday to Lyon (where Labé thrived). I am cheeky in this – even cheekier with Vallejo because

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neologistic Peruvian Spanish in a compacted modernist style isn’t my first language – but I hope the versions themselves are telling the reader I’m being cheeky. I have no wish to pass them off as “authentic” but I would be happy for readers to search out the originals and serious translations, and even happier if they liked what I was doing formally and with the English in my versions. Other draws for me in these poets… Apollinaire and Labé are both love poets at the cutting edge of their time’s modernity; Vallejo’s exclamatory melancholy, as if sorrow can be made energetic – not turned around, not manipulated, but somehow become moving in the sense of touching the reader but also encouraging, pushing them even, into a better state of being. Possibly! Seen from the other end – what aspects of modern Scottish writing would you bring to the attention of foreign writers and translators? I think the work that the Scottish Poetry Library has been doing with various countries to translate Scottish poetry would be one of the first places I’d start: perhaps looking at single author collections that take their cue from some of the authors included in the Intimate Expanses anthology (start with me, please – of course!). But I stress the chance elements of all this, my experience of an unstructured introduction to foreign literature: to some degree you have to accept the chaos of survival and transmission, and the excitement of personal connection. So if you were to take anthologies as a starting point as in fact I’ve just suggested…probably you should just forget that suggestion! I like anthologies, but I don’t believe in them: they are not sacred texts and they are not scientific data sets; they are personal choices mediated by the material infrastructure of poetry. And like other cultural infrastructures, these, too, are chancy fields of play between personality and power, even if, with poetry, it is symbolic power. (But don’t underestimate symbolic power – the Stock Exchange doesn’t.) And from not, after all, using anthologies so to choosing poets I would like to be translated. Maybe the right thing is to stress the setting up of frameworks to translate – the work Iain Galbraith has been doing in Germany and Austria, and again the Scottish Poetry Library with Hungary and other countries – it’s happening alright, but to have more of these, perhaps on the lines of the CCCP (Cambridge Conference of Contemporary

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Poetry) events at Cambridge – how about new initiatives at Strathclyde or Paisley University? how about a George Campbell Hay Translation Fair (translating other poets) based in the public libraries or George Square in Glasgow or as a marquee in an annual open air festival? translation poetry clubs that meet monthly like book groups? – that sort of thing – but always with that slight warning about translation itself: the translation of a poem may be predicated on how easy it is to translate, how close it is to a particular strand in the receiving country’s literary or wider cultural codes. You look at how often particular novelists have been translated and that does not always mean the books are good. I’m sure a lot of poets would like to be understood in their own language before they try to be understood in someone else’s, and that happens less often that you might think. Which favourite Scottish poetical works would you recommend to be translated into foreign languages? Oh, actual poets. I have no brief to say this or that is better – I share Donny O’Rourke’s feeling that “I’m more an innkeeper than a gatekeeper” – and I don’t really read poetry that way. Can you imagine dismissing one painting for another, keeping the “top ten” policed and the “bottom” infinity out? I’d have to know more about the receiving country, too – maybe it’s polite to ask! And after all those cavils, I would just sink down and reel off the poets whose work I enjoy, whether I am very familiar with their work (and the poets themselves – poets are personal, too!) or just starting to get curious, and I would also play against the biases of how Scotland chooses to represent itself, list the Scottish poets I like and can engage with critically who aren’t exactly welcomed by Scotland itself – some avantgarde, some traditional – and get them into print (the others can look after themselves). Speaking of personal choice: it’s very interesting how Edwin Morgan has mediated and introduced the work of Attila József in Englishlanguage poetry… What has this personal choice added to modern Scottish poetry – or perhaps to poetry in the British Isles – and, in your opinion, to what extent has József’s pre-war urban modernist sensibility opened up, if at all, new vistas in English translation?

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When I think of this question various large, probably too-large, ideas come together. I think of József’s contribution to an urban poetry, especially an urban poetry of working class life; I think of his way of finding a formal control for what could easily have been gushy, confessional writing; I think of his love of rhyme, song-like lyric, and technical sophistication; the way that he is both modernist and traditionalist. It remains to be seen how many have read him, either in Eddie’s translations or others that have appeared, so I don’t know how to answer your question about opening up. I guess József attracts me in the way that Apollinaire attracts me, that sense of being both oldfashioned and absolutely attuned to the contemporary (perhaps Catullus, who you would hardly put in the same sentence because of his largely different subject matter, also has that knack of being absolutely steeped in tradition but being able to express himself fluently in his own nowness and to shape what that nowness is; maybe Aygi does that, too, in a different way yet again). Hmm, but these are such large concepts: I guess I trust, first of all, detailed textual criticism, actually looking at a specific poem. In some places, like the modern volume of the recent Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, all you get is these enormous concepts trundled out, one concept-dollop per poet, each looking like a tick box rather than a consideration of poetry itself. You might think that the poetry itself remained unread, while blurbs and autobiographical notes were the meat and drink of it all. If József teaches us anything maybe it should be: please, read the poetry. Critics spoke about a “unilateral declaration of independence” in the 1970s and 80s. But since the setting up of the Edinburgh parliament, what’s the relationship between poetry and politics been like in Scotland? I think you need to go back to that notion of “independence”, because, although I believe in Scots’ right to democratically constitute themselves as Scots and decide on political models on those terms (and, by the same token, for those within the current Scotland to constitute themselves differently and depart from a simple Scottish political model altogether), I feel it is not correct to say that artists and writers as a whole or as an aggregated whole made a declaration of

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independence in the 70s and 80s. This is historically incorrect, a misplaced romanticism. That’s because there was a range of political opinion – unionists on the left as well as the right, some of those believed in devolution (which is not necessarily an independence stepping stone), perhaps some who did not; many who simply didn’t declare their political opinion or who did not see politics in those terms at all, who had more complicated responses or “simpler”, “non-political” ones. That doesn’t mean that poetry collections like Eddie [Morgan]’s Sonnets from Scotland or Robert [Crawford]’s A Scottish Assembly (an Assembly – not a Parliament – think of the political and poetic resonances Robert is making out of that – rich ones, but not independence, and his poetry also problematises Scottish self-image) – weren’t broadly speaking moving towards decentralising control (though, of course, then Scotland has centralised it in Edinburgh), but there is ambiguity there, complexity. Remember that and you can see that Scotland’s Parliament is to some extent reflecting it – it’s far more various in represented voice than the UK Parliament, it works through risking coalitions, it symbolically and practically instates the including circle rather than the adversarial oblong as a means through which to discuss things, and so on. Well, there you go, I’ve started romanticising myself, now. Perhaps Scottish poetry also survives by those differences in changing coalition. To be frank, like the Scottish Parliament, Scottish poetry also requires UK money to float it – almost all the properly distributing and marketing commercial poetry presses (if a poetry press is ever commercial) that publish Scottish poetry are UK presses based in England. Are the poets published by these presses writing work that crosses the borders for poetry-consumers? (Does this valorise them as the “best” for some, and of dubious quality to others?) Why can’t Scotland produce two or three medium size poetry publishers that can match the Carcanets, Fabers and Salts? It’s incredible. Luckily, that’s not the only model for poetry – small presses build their own networks and don’t need that kind of capitalisation – and so does politics. I’m not close enough to Scotland now (or activist politics in general) to say if the constructive anarchy of small press poetry is matched by political groups, but that’s something to think about if these comparisons are really going to be worked through.

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Well, in the poetry itself? One of the things the Informationists were talking about was both using and problematising the new technologies in a political way. Tom Leonard and Edwin Morgan were already doing this with their poems that are about, and work through, the conventions of the broadcast media. (And in fact, John Galt’s Annals of the Parish is the classic ur-Informationist text; a completely different way of understanding the novel and of politicising it, as his later novels would develop.) Since devolution – though I resist the causal link – Drew Milne’s poems, which re-treat and mimic advertising and managerial language to produce shrill but strangely beautiful works are doing this, as is Peter Manson’s remarkable prose-work Adjunct. Another link here – Gael Turnbull’s collaging “texturalist” poems – I need hardly say that Migrant magazine and press was one of the most important “Scottish” little presses of the last century, but, no, I have to: it is striking that very little mention is made of it in the conventional histories, probably because of territory. (Yes, it provided a context for Finlay and Morgan to have their early Scots poems published, and was part of the Ugly Birds controversy with MacDiarmid, but it was based in England and America, so we need not mention it!) I don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of contemporary Scottish poetry so I’m not able to match poet or poem to politics. My response is therefore a kind of plea that readers – let’s forget the managers of cultural capital for the moment – that readers allow different poets to develop differently; that poets who make aesthetic explorations, sometimes difficult, sometimes crystal clear, may well be displaying a cluster of political acts that folk can talk about as political; and poets who are writing committed poetry in anger or within what they see as political or even religious compulsion, they have their political space, too, but they have their aesthetics to be discussed in relation to their engagement. Top tenism, finger-pointing, all that stuff – well that’s a kind of politics I suppose, too, so what am I saying! – but let’s not use it to close down poems and poetry. Poems are always related to other poems and to all kinds of things not normally seen as poems. The contemporary scene really is full of potential – let’s not get ahead of ourselves by calling it a golden age or anything like that – let’s just say, YES, more please, and have you seen this, have you thought of that, did you know X was up to a similar thing in the 1780s but you’re doing it in that way in these different times, and so on.

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Several poets I interviewed said that once the new Scottish assembly had been opened, they wanted to think about other important issues, and wanted to pursue different projects. In your opinion, why has nationalism become a less important ingredient of recent Scottish poetry? I think the measure here is not nationalism as an ingredient in the poetry, but nationalism as an ingredient in how the poets are talking about their poetry. I would be very surprised if there really was so much poetry of specifically and overwhelmingly nationalist content before the Parliament compared to all the other subjects the poems dealt with in the same period. This is therefore a question of how poets are perceiving and placing themselves, and claiming their work as directly political, presumably even as having affected political outcomes; it’s not I think a question of the poetry itself. It reminds me of Duncan Thaw’s claim in Lanark in which he implies that Glasgow had never been imagined before (with the implication that Lanark is now doing it). Quite a claim for a city that, on the contrary, had been imagined many, many times before in art and literature: but this is not a criticism of Alasdair Gray, I hope; rather it’s an appeal to contextualise what Thaw is saying: Thaw is quite wrong and perhaps we should know he’s quite wrong – it’s because he’s disconnected from the literature and art of Glasgow that this is an interesting comment, not because he is right. (Because he’s actually wrong.) There is also the ghost of academe here, because what I am surprised at is how much Scottish literary criticism is devoted to notions of state (not, of course, the same as nationalism) and perhaps this has affected poets themselves: they are tempted or compelled to reduce the interpretations of their older work to fairly basic limitations, perhaps because the market channels (of which academic interest is a serious one – and the academic world is by its nature more interested in older work than new) respond so well to debate about nationhood and fitting the canon around that; Scotlit academics are dab hands at it, and perhaps (speaking as someone who would welcome Scotland’s independence) that remains necessary to some degree. Perhaps if the poets would continue going their own ways and literary criticism would try to engage more sophisticatedly with their work, though, that’d be a step forward. (Though of course, I

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exaggerate, and hurt omelettes to grow some eggs.) Actually the earlier Scotlit criticism – on the fifteenth to the seventeenth century that I’ve seen – seems better at this (“seems”, because, as I said earlier, I don’t pretend to have an encyclopaedic knowledge), at attuning itself to textual criticism as well as more philosophical concerns (without eschewing the political); perhaps it’s just a matter of catching up? Why do Scottish poets seem to share a distrust of any form of centralised government even when it is formed locally? Scottish poets distrust centralised government? I thought everyone did?! And Edinburgh is centralised government now, not local. Donny O’Rourke described Scotland as a “dream state”. Has Scotland remained one or, in your opinion, to what extent has it been a dream fulfilled? Yes, but what is a dream state? Again, it’s a classic complex phrase. When Donny quotes from the Stuart Paterson poem in the context of 1994, before the Parliament, he’s meaning it, as I see it, as a comment on utopia and desire (the state that would be wished into existence) but also as a comment on trance, on stalled politics, on inaction. As Bob Dylan says in “When You Gonna Wake Up” – “in order to dream you gotta be asleep.” In that sense, Donny was matching the aspiration with a criticism of the poor political representation and political action in the country: it’s a phrase talking about political ideals and practical stasis; a fantasy in both the positive and negative connotations of the word. He was criticised for his choice because it seemed to be a political intervention of that kind. (Note: it’s an anthology, a selection – it’s not a cross-section of the available subjects being written about; that would be quite something else.) When Polygon reprinted the book in 1998, the meaning had perhaps shifted with the new political dispensation; by the time of the new edition a little later still, as Donny says in the new Introduction, there was a sense that, for him, that criticism had merely identified the intended political dimension to his selection, and by now the anthology hardly needed to do political work of that kind; new subjects and new poets came in (though it would be a travesty to regard the original book as narrowly nationalist; or to say that

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now there’s a Parliament in Edinburgh the political work is over – good things are coming out of that Parliament, I believe, but perhaps we’re not quite there with all the political infrastructure countrywide, societydeep). But charting the trajectory of the Dream State anthology – that’s not the same as a general shift in poetry; to say that would be to confuse an intervention with a much bigger, almost scientific, survey enterprise, which Dream State never was intended to be. (Footnote on dreams: maybe dreams are fulfilled in oblivion not in reality: dreams aren’t about fulfilment, dreams are about the longing for longing.) What has changed or improved in the teaching and dissemination of modern Scottish literature in the recent years? I’m probably too distant from it to comment as someone involved in the education process. (My involvement from a family point of view is necessarily with the English education system.) From a poet’s point of view, it has been wonderful to be included in Scottish Poetry Library and other anthologies that have had state funding to some degree, and I think these are available in schools. That said, I don’t think I’ve ever been asked to read at a Scottish school and only once or twice at a Scottish university – but then, I’m not that bothered; I’m not sure poetry should be assumed to go directly to education – can’t it have some life out there in the bigger world first! It isn’t all about education. I’d like poetry to go over the heads of education first. You mention the Scottish Poetry Library and the universities… What do you think about the activity of Scottish organisations, such as the Scottish Arts Council, the Association for Scottish Literary Studies (ASLS), the Scottish Poetry Library, university departments and so on, in bringing Scottish writers to the attention of the public? For me, the Scottish Poetry Library has been the most important organisation. It’s telling that they have worked outside of the historic institutions; it is a genuinely new institution for this new Scotland of ours. I have had very little contact with the Arts Council since I felt compelled to pull the plug on Southfields (and have been relieved of all that overdetermined bureaucracy); they’re not central to me, but perhaps its successor has upped its involvement with one or two

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authors direct. There is still a need for a seriously funded literary imprint in Scotland that would have poetry as an important part of its work, but that involves entrepreneurial gifts, editorial talent and not just state subsidy. I don’t think it’s the ASLS’s role to engage first and foremost in getting contemporary poets known, but I feel a debt to New Writing Scotland – it was wonderful to be welcomed into that continuity, if you like; I’m glad of StAnza too, and I think more could be done by unis (and other town or area-based organisations) organising events, but again I think that we can do two things at once: build links with academe if the poets and the academics want that (I’m not so bothered personally, the results don’t look so good to me as yet, and I feel to do so would be to short-circuit a bigger audience!) and, in the opposite direction, de-link poetry from the didactic altogether – get closer to TV, digital, audio, music and other media, theatre, visual and performance art (that is the main channels to the public!) and forget about what in certain lights look rather like education special interest groups – they can come along and do their analytics if they want, of course, and mould the work back for their charges, they’d almost be welcome, but it’s not something I, personally, want to be too interested in, or too close to; they’re after the event. I was surprised to find that virtually all poets I interviewed for this book have more or less gone “digital”: they are confident users of the World Wide Web, e-mail, and the other opportunities that computers offer. In your view, how much has computing technology altered the process of writing, the image and self-image of the writer, and the relationship between writers and readers? Yes, it really is here, with writers, part of writing. In terms of the initial work, even for my fiction, I still write on paper first. For fiction I very quickly transfer an idea to a word processing file and most of the book will be written directly to screen after the first notebook burst. Poetry is different for me – I write within a notebook and rewrite within a notebook. By the time it gets into a computer it’s a case of “post-production” editing. I do have a website, hydrohotel.net, but I’m not yet ready for direct interaction with readers. I’m not expecting a deluge, but I wouldn’t be able to handle correspondence like that, practically and also in terms of keeping a bit of respectful distance from the reader as

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I hope they would be respectful of me (we’ve barely been introduced), so there’s no e-mail offered. The web thing’s greatest importance for me is in terms of fast e-mail communication and getting background info and news up about the work; and obviously getting information myself from others because they do that too. A countertrend to this is my interest in physical art objects that cannot be translated to digital, they have to be touch-seen not touchscreened, and I think this is a zeitgeisty thing, maybe in quantity a byproduct of digital, paradoxically. Quite a few Scottish poets have produced very beautiful editions of their work – Drew Milne’s booklets, Fiona Templeton’s Oops the Join – and others have collaborated with artists to make text-based visual objects that just can’t be got across online. These things go together. How do you hand on the love of reading to the younger generation and how do you teach them the importance of words using mainly the visual and digital means? Sadly I recognise the phrase “younger generation” as something I’m no longer in! Perhaps there is a generation-to-generation handing down, but I’m hoping things are more mixed up than that. In a way, you could say that younger folk have a lot to teach the older people like me: I’m very struck by the confidence in reading their own work that some of the twenty and thirty something poets I’ve seen have, folk like Jim Carruth, Hazel Frew, Chloe Morrish (though they’d probably be aghast I said they were confident). It’s younger and older folk who are involved in reading series like Shore Poets in Edinburgh and Mirrorball in Glasgow – these are anchor elements to any poetry infrastructure and they operate outside an official teacherly environment. The potential of the web is a cliché but it’s a true one and it’s likely that folk who have grown up in a digital age in a way that even my immediate contemporaries haven’t will have a firmer grip on webdelivered poetry – though Informationists were always of course theoretically plugged in! If you could have betters and bests (I don’t think art’s like that, myself) a Glasgow-based band like Belle & Sebastian would basically be Better Than Poetry – they contain poetry of a very high standard in their words and that’s only part of the amazing material they deliver.

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Can you give more examples? Younger folk are doing it already, no doubt through direct encouragement of teachers (official and unofficial) sometimes, but also through just getting out and seeing and hearing with not that much direction; availability first (“have strength in the libraries that remain” – real books, virtual books, real live, virtual live; grown-up imprints). Communicated enthusiasm – then let’s leave the teaching thing down quite some way, let’s not solidify and codify and selectify things too quickly yet, the soup’s still cooking, we’re going to readings, reading texts, for pleasure, not even for history or philosophy. (I don’t mind those things, I’ve even heard they’re quite important, but, for me, let’s keep them implicit, please! Let’s keep the didactic out of contemporary poetry for the minute – we already know there’s global warming, do all the poems have to shake their heads in the same wise way; it’s not wise to be wise!) They don’t teach Lucinda Williams or Joan As Policewoman at school. You go up to Peter Manson’s site, say, and you’re directly connected to one of Scotland’s avant-garde poets – a bit of a rare breed that, but good to have in the viewing centre! How do you find out about it? – Wee communities of information grow, friends and friends of friends, discussion lists you can dip into and out of, positive anarchy sometimes aggregating up, intersecting with the corporate ones now and again, no problem. Finally, it would be a one-sided representation of what contemporary Scottish verse is without mentioning at least some more “peripheral” trends and tendencies, or experimental and avant-garde publications, and new voices. Based on your book British Poetry Magazines 1914– 2000, would you talk about the role small presses and little magazines have played in the last two or three decades? I think it’s a misidentification to see the experimental and the avantgarde as peripheral. Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Conceptual Art are about as un-peripheral to art as you can imagine, though the function of time and articulate advocacy, and the enabling of the public to see these works, admittedly, are part of the “deperipheralising” process. For me the key Scottish presses of the last two or three decades have been Polygon and Edinburgh University Press, which (when the two were sister imprints or ran the Review)

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published early books by Gerrie Fellows, Raymond Friel, Robert Alan Jamieson, Robert Crawford, W.N. Herbert and others. The Review was a key journal for the Glasgow-based writing of Kelman, Gray, Owens and Galloway. But a long time before that, there was Gael Turnbull and Michael Shayer’s Migrant, an early publisher of Edwin Morgan and, especially, Ian Hamilton Finlay: Finlay was put in touch with the Black Mountain poets and the Objectivists through Migrant and he quickly launched his own wonderful magazine, Poor. Old. Tired. Horse., which published sound and concrete poetry and generally was extraordinarily internationalist (and fun). Chapman has been a vital magazine for setting key arts debates before its readers. Others in my memory have fallen away, Cencrastus, West Coast Magazine, and Radical Scotland, but I remember them fondly as political magazines that saw poetry as part of political expression. I was involved in several magazines, too, which I think attempted to offer a spectrum of work rather than advocate the mainstream or the avant-garde. Object Permanence, from the early nineties, was a significant publisher of American and English avant-garde material and Peter Manson and Robin Purves who still run the press offshoot continue to import, as it were, poetry that Scottish readers may well find eye-opening. I suppose, though, I’ve done an air brushing of magazines and presses – it could be argued that big English presses, Random House and Faber, say, or smaller ones, like Carcanet and Bloodaxe, have been as important to Scotland. “Discuss!” London, 5 February 2007

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Bibliography: Richard Price (1966–)

Poetry Sense and a Minor Fever (illustr. Peter Robinson). London: Vennel Press, 1993. Tube Shelter Perspective (illustr. John Dory). London: Southfields Press, 1993. Marks & Sparks. Edinburgh: Akros, 1995. Hand Held. Kirkcaldy: Akros, 1997. Gift Horse (drawn in wire by Ronald King). London: Circle Press, 1999. Perfume & Petrol Fumes. Edinburgh: Diehard, 1999. With Raymond Friel. Renfrewshire in Old Photographs. Glasgow: Mariscat, 2000. Frosted, Melted. Callander: Diehard at the Callander Press, 2002. Scape: Nine Poems. London: Oasis Books, 2002. A Twenty-Piece Puzzle (visual art by Chan Ky-Yut). Ottawa: Lyric Press, 2004. Lucky Day. Manchester: Carcanet, 2005. Earliest Spring Yet. Norwich: Landfill, 2006. Greenfields. Manchester: Carcanet, 2007. Folded. Edinburgh: Essence Press, 2008. little but often (design by Ronald King). London: Circle Press, 2008.

Fiction A Boy in Summer: Short Stories. Glasgow: 11/9, 2002.

Non-fiction The Fabulous Matter of Fact: The Poetics of Neil M. Gunn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991.

Translation With Donny O’Rourke. Eftirs/Afters: In Scots and English [versions of the French poetry of Blaise Cendrars, Robert Desnos, Valery Larbraud, Philippe Soupault and Guillaume Apollinaire]. Glasgow: Au Quai, 1996. With Stephen Watts. César Vallejo: Translations, Transformations, Tributes. Staines: Southfields in association with Au Quai, 1998. Lute Variations by Louise Labé, with improvisations by Richard Price. Powys: Rack Press, 2006.

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Editor With W.N. Herbert (eds). Gairfish. Bridge of Weir: Gairfish, 1990. With W.N. Herbert (eds). Discovery. Bridge of Weir: Gairfish, 1991. With Leona Medlin (eds). David Kinloch: Dustie-fute (illustr. W.N. Herbert). London: Vennel Press, 1992 The McAvantgarde: Edwin Morgan, Frank Kuppner, Tom Leonard, Kathleen Jamie: The Unpublished MacDiarmid. Dundee: Gairfish, 1992. With W.N. Herbert (eds). Shibbo-lithos: Essays and Poems by and about Hugh MacDiarmid. Dundee: Gairfish, 1992. With W.N. Herbert (eds). The Liberty Tree. Dundee: Gairfish, 1993. With W.N. Herbert (eds). Contraflow on the Super Highway. London: Southfields Press and Gairfish, 1994. With James McGonigal (eds). The Star You Steer By: Basil Bunting and British Modernism. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. With David Miller (eds). British Poetry Magazines, 1914–2000: A History and Bibliography of ‘Little Magazines’. London, British Library: Oak Knoll Press, 2006.

Index Achlietner, Friedrich, 186 Agard, John, 186 Anderson, Benedict, 22 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 309–11, 313 Arany, János, 269 Armitage, Simon, 80, 253 Arnold, Matthew, 15, 96 Artmann, H.C., 186 Ashbery, John, 196 Auden, W.H., 50, 62, 99, 224, 295 Aygi, Gennadiy, 313 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 153, 182 Bachelard, Gaston, 25–26 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 89–90 Barbour, John, 23, 38, 87 Barrie, J.M., 16, 147, 156 Bartók, Béla, 182 Bateman, Meg, 290 Baudelaire, Charles, 62, 273 Baudrillard, Jean, 162 Bayer, Konrad, 186 Beckett, Samuel, 265, 283, 309 Benjamin, Walter, 53 Bird, Jemima, 244 Bishop, Elizabeth, 137, 142 Bismarck, Otto von, 265 Blair, Hugh, 19, 98 Blair, Tony, 126, 161, 181 Bleitz, Karen, 308 Blind Harry, 87 Bloom, Harold, 232 Borges, Jorge Luis, 150, 152, 158 Boswell, James, 249 Brecht, Bertolt, 37, 224 Breeze, Jean Binta, 186 Brontë, Charlotte, 11 Browning, Robert, 63 Buchan, John, 16, 106, 277 Buchanan, George, 106, 268, 276 Bunting, Basil, 283 Burns, Robert, 15, 17, 63, 68, 79–80, 83, 91–92, 96, 101, 106, 144, 148, 156, 228, 231, 263, 277

Burnside, John, 24, 29, 30, 80, 88, 89, 98, 113–34 passim, 136, 142–43, 147–48, 150, 157, 164, 210, 222, 243, 286, 296 Bush, George W., 123, 126 Bynner, Witter, 195 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 18, 63, 101 Calvino, Italo, 75 Campbell, Donald, 286 Capote, Truman, 129 Carlyle, Thomas, 18, 262 Carruth, Jim, 320 Catullus, Gaius Valerius, 309, 313 Cavafy, Constantine P., 63 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 50, 100, 106 Chekhov, Anton, 181, 186, 309 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 198 Chopin, Henri, 185 Cioran, Emil, 150, 158 Clanchy, Kate, 20, 29–30, 243–59 passim Clancy, Thomas, 100 Cohen, Leonard, 308 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 50, 98, 262 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 16 Coupland, Douglas, 254 Craig, Cairns, 12, 15 Craigie, Sandie, 182 Crawford, Robert, 19, 29–30, 39, 49, 60, 67, 73–74, 79–111 passim, 116, 122–23, 142–43, 157, 179, 182, 189, 211, 221, 223, 225, 253, 301–2, 314, 322 Creeley, Robert, 304 Cruz, Juan de la, 149 D. Rácz, István, 103 Dante, 59, 70, 77, 198, 201, 205, 275 Davidson, John, 87, 184, 231, 237 Davitt, Michael, 286 Descartes, René, 262 Dhomhnaill, Nuala Ní, 286 Dick, Thomas (Rev), 221, 233–34

326 Dickens, Charles, 170 Dickinson, Emily, 304 Donne, John, 224 Donnhauser, Michael, 286 Douglas, Gavin, 18, 40 Dryden, John, 63 Duffy, Carol Ann, 27, 94, 243–44, 252–54 Dunbar, William, 17, 83, 92, 97, 102, 173 Duncan, Bill, 82, 230, 316 Duncker, Patricia, 60, 73 Dunmore, Helen, 253 Dunn, Douglas, 16–18, 20, 25–27, 29–30, 59–78 passim, 80, 88, 97, 100, 102–3, 114, 143, 163, 168, 171, 185, 202, 221–22, 234, 237– 38, 305 Duns Scotus, John, 268, 276 Dylan, Bob, 308, 317 Eliot, T.S., 15–16, 18, 79–80, 82–83, 95, 99, 101, 114, 135, 147, 175, 207, 222, 229, 251 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 262–64 Enright, D.J., 63 Farley, Paul, 253 Ferencz, Gyz, 103 Fergusson, Robert, 92, 116, 144, 231 Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 174–75, 196– 97, 315, 322 Fitt, Matthew, 230 Freud, Sigmund, 261, 263 Frew, Hazel, 320 Friel, Raymond, 301–2, 305–6, 322 Frost, Robert, 63, 163, 177 Funk, Allison, 115 Galbraith, Iain, 311 Galloway, Janice, 322 Galt, John, 315 Garioch, Robert, 59, 104 Geddes, Patrick, 268 Géher, István, 103 Gifford, Douglas, 12, 35, 189 Ginsberg, Allan, 167, 177, 231 Glen, Duncan, 82 Glenday, John, 80, 142, 158, 230 Glock, Lewis, 253 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 62

Index Gogol, Nikolai, 276 Goldwyn, Samuel, 61 Graham, W.S., 175, 231, 237, 283, 305–6 Gramsci, Antonio, 115 Gray, Alasdair, 69, 80, 102, 167, 175, 189, 217, 248, 285–86, 316, 322 Gregerson, Linda, 115 Greig, Andrew, 135 Guillen, Jorge, 115 Gunn, Neil M., 301 Hardy, Oliver, 236 Hardy, Thomas, 63, 282–83, 295 Harrison, Tony, 63, 185, 239 Hay, George Campbell, 281, 312 Heaney, Seamus, 63, 96, 99, 115, 185, 239, 295 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 265 Heidegger, Martin, 115 Heine, Heinrich, 54, 62 Heisenberg, Werner, 162 Hejinian, Lyn, 304 Henryson, Robert, 238 Heraclitus, 118, 274 Herbert, W.N., 17, 19, 29–30, 59, 79– 80, 83, 89, 102, 147–48, 182, 221– 42 passim, 301–2, 306, 322 Herbert, Zbigniew, 108 Herd, Tracy, 230 Hiedsieck, Bernard, 185 Hill, Selima, 253 Hitler, Adolf, 265 Hobsbaum, Philip, 167, 173, 281, 284, 286, 291 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 213 Hogg, James, 231 Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich, 143 Holiday, Billie, 305 Holub, Miroslav, 285 Homer, 274 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 50, 224 Hughes, Ted, 44–45, 63, 99, 114, 128, 239, 295 Hugo, Victor, 62 Hull, Geoffrey, 170 Hume, David, 106, 194, 268, 276 Hunter, James, 290

Index Imlah, Mick, 39, 80, 99 Jaccottet, Philippe, 152 Jacobs, Jane, 120 Jamie, Kathleen, 25, 29–30, 80, 89, 94, 97, 135–45 passim, 148, 157, 182, 243, 248, 250–51, 253, 296 Jamieson, John, 17 Jamieson, Robert Alan, 322 Jandl, Ernst, 185 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 186 Jonson, Ben, 63 Joyce, James, 267, 276 József, Attila, 18, 31, 35–37, 43, 45– 47, 54, 62, 104, 301, 308–9, 312– 13 Kassák, Lajos, 44 Keats, John, 63, 224 Kelly, Brigit Pegeen, 115 Kelman, James, 167, 175, 285–86, 322 Kennedy, A.L., 114, 127, 230 Kerouac, Jack, 231 Khayyam, Omar, 205 Kierkegaard, Søren, 169, 176, 200 King, Ronald, 302, 307 Kinloch, David, 79–80, 83, 301 Klosé, Hyacinthe, 71 Kravitz, Peter, 84 Kuppner, Frank, 29–30, 148, 175, 189–219 passim, 305 Ky-Yut, Chan, 302 Labé, Louis, 302, 309–11 Ladik, Katalin, 185 Laing, R.D., 176, 180 Larkin, Philip, 59, 62, 70, 72, 253, 295 Laurel, Stan, 236 Lautréamont, Comte de, 197 Lawrence, D.H., 124, 143 Leavis, F.R., 15 Lenin, V.I., 239–40 Leonard, Tom, 20, 29–30, 79, 84, 167–88 passim, 189, 192, 284, 303, 315 Leopardi, Giacomo, 62 Lochhead, Liz, 18, 27, 80, 175, 189, 293 Longley, Michael, 115

327 Lorca, Federico García, 62, 114–15 Lowell, Robert, 45, 63, 177, 251 Lucretius, Titus, 118 MacAulay, Dondald, 284 MacCaig, Norman, 59, 70, 104, 171, 283, 285 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 17, 42, 59, 79, 82–87, 99–100, 105–6, 175, 177, 180, 196, 210–11, 22–22, 230–32, 235, 237, 239–40, 285, 303, 315 MacGillivray, Allan, 35 Machado, Antonio, 18, 115, 147, 149–52, 158, 160 Mackay Brown, George, 113, 210, 283 MacKenzie, Billy, 229 MacLean, Sorley, 14, 281, 284–85, 287, 289–90, 293 MacLeod, Iseabail, 282 MacLochlainn, Gearoid, 286 Macneacail, Aonghas, 19, 28–30, 167, 173, 281–99 passim MacNeice, Louis, 295 Macpherson, James, 98, 295 Mahon, Derek, 152 Malamud, Bernard, 305 Mandelstam, Osip, 75, 131, 275 Manson, Peter, 304, 315, 321–22 Marvell, Andrew, 63 Marx, Karl, 115 Massie, Allan, 106 Matisse, Henri, 83 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 18, 36, 45, 47, 54 Mayne Smith, Sean, 135 McCabe, Brian, 286 McCarey, Peter, 301 McClure, J. Derrick, 12, 28 McCrone, David, 22 McGonagall, William, 221–22, 232– 33, 240 McGrath, Tom, 167, 173, 284 McPherson, Gordon, 148 Medlin, Leona, 301 Meek, James, 229 Melville, Herman, 267 Mesterházi, Mónika, 103 Mickiewicz, Adam, 62

328 Miller, David, 301 Milne, Drew, 304, 315, 320 Milton, John, 82, 153 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 18 Montaigne, Michel de, 268 Montale, Eugenio, 18, 36, 45, 53, 62 Moore, Marianne, 115 Morgan, Edwin, 13, 17–18, 21–23, 26, 28–31, 35–58 passim, 59, 79– 80, 82–83, 87, 89, 92, 99, 102, 104, 139, 151, 155, 167–69, 171, 174–75, 189–90, 204, 210–11, 214, 221–22, 231, 301, 309, 312, 314–15, 322 Morrish, Chloe, 320 Motion, Andrew, 84 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 182 Muir, Edwin, 14, 35, 229 Muldoon, Paul, 99 Murray, Les, 96 Neruda, Pablo, 37, 282, 285 Nicholson, Colin, 26–27, 30, 74, 281 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 264, 276 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg), 182 Ó Searcaidh, Cathal, 286 O’Brien, Sean, 165 O’Hara, Frank, 177 O’Rourke, Donny, 24, 27, 305, 312, 317 Oates, Sharon, 253 Oliver, Mary, 115, 122 Orbán, Ottó, 44 Ossian, 98 Owen, Wilfred, 283, 295 Pankey, Eric, 115 Pannonius, Janus, 44 Pascal, Blaise, 197 Pasternak, Boris, 37, 62, 75 Paterson, Don, 18, 19, 29, 59, 80, 89, 97, 136–37, 142, 147–66 passim, 222, 230, 253 Paterson, Stuart, 317 Paterson, Stuart A., 24 Paz, Octavio, 115 Petfi, Sándor, 44, 269 Picasso, Pablo, 83 Pilinszky, János, 44

Index Politovsky, Eugene, 59, 72 Pope, Alexander, 63 Porter, Peter, 63 Pound, Ezra, 45, 102 Price, Richard, 29–30, 222, 243, 301– 24 passim Purves, Robin, 322 Pushkin, Alexander, 62 Racine, Jean, 36, 62 Radnóti, Miklós, 48, 75 Reid, Alastair, 151 Renan, Ernest, 66, 268 Reviczky, Gyula, 269 Riach, Alan, 301 Ricks, Christopher, 100 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 62, 142, 147, 150, 152, 158, 213 Rimbaud, Arthur, 197, 264, 273, 276 Robinson, Edwin Arlington, 63 Robinson, Peter, 302 Rochefoucauld, François de La, 200 Ronsard, Pierre de, 62 Ross, Alan, 84 Rostand, Edmond, 36 Royle, Trevor, 281 Rühm, Gerhard, 185–86 Rymer, Henry, 19 Said, Edward, 236 Sappho, 309 Scalapino, Leslie, 304 Scève, Maurice, 45 Schoenberg, Arnold, 83 Scot, Michael, 276 Scott, Andrew Murray, 230 Scott, Walter, Sir, 15, 63, 68, 105 Shakespeare, William, 40, 62, 153, 196, 205, 224, 256, 265 Shayer, Michael, 322 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 11 Shepard, Paul Howe, Jr., 118 Sidney, Philip, Sir, 26 Simic, Charles, 148 Simon Fraser, Simon, 282 Simon, Paul, 308 Siren, Oswald, 216 Smith, Adam, 19, 89, 106 Smith, Iain Crichton, 281, 283–85 Snyder, Gary, 284

Index Spark, Muriel, 16, 81, 102, 305 Spence, Alan, 173, 284 Spengler, Oswald, 266 Stalin, Joseph, 42 Steegmuller, Francis, 310 Stevens, Wallace, 115, 222 Stevenson, Randall, 74 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 16, 23–24, 63, 68, 228, 248–49, 268, 276 Stravinsky, Igor, 83 Szirtes, George, 44–45, 104 Tannahill, Robert, 184 Taylor, C.P., 194 Tebbit, Norman, 246 Templeton, Fiona, 304, 320 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 82 Thatcher, Margaret, 116 Thomas, Dylan, 283, 295 Thompson, D.C., 238 Thomson, Derick, 14, 281, 285 Thomson, James ('B.V.'), 16, 167–68, 173–76, 184, 284–85 Thoreau, Henry David, 263–64 Tolstoy, Leo, 294 Turnbull, Gael, 301, 315, 322 Twichell, Chase, 115 Vajda, Miklós, 44 Vallejo, César, 309–11

329 Van Gogh, Vincent, 276 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 18, 40 Wagner, Catherine, 304 Wallace, Gavin, 225 Wallace, William, 86 Warner, Alan, 137 Watson, Roderick, 12, 54, 100 Wedderburn, Robert, 235 Welsh, Irvine, 93, 102 Weöres, Sándor, 31, 35–36, 44–45, 49–52 White, Hamish, 80 White, Kenneth, 18, 29–30, 36, 243, 259–79 passim Whitman, Walt, 115, 263–64, 272, 275 Williams, C.K., 253 Williams, Lucinda, 321 Williams, William Carlos, 115, 167, 174–75, 177, 282, 284 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 115, 208 Woolf, Virginia, 283 Wordsworth, William, 63, 98, 222, 236, 240, 263 Wright, Frances, 235 Wrigley, Robert, 115 Yeats, William Butler, 238, 283, 295