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? Well, silence as well… You mean as a sound poet or as a poet? 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’s my favourite composer.
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 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.
Then apparently you agree with Edwin Morgan, who said that a poet can have many voices…
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.
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, Philip Hobsbaum. I spent most of my time drinking and talking with these people. I didn’t go to many lectures 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 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 twenty-six 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 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, Morgan, 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, committed 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 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 (such as the ones edited by Douglas Dunn, Robert Crawford or Roderick Watson) have the agenda of representing the different languages of Scotland. Do you think there’s an opening up in this respect?
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.
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?
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 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 Rollos.
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 will 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 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's 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.
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 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.
In the 1970s Douglas Dunn also had the ambition to reclaim half forgotten Scottish poets, and wrote poems about Tannahill and John Wilson. If your project had gone as far as the present age, would you have included Dunn, or Kathleen Jamie, both of whom come from the same area of Scotland?
Of course. Though 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 language 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 Achlietner, 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
