
Best Scottish Poems 2004 Introduction \| The Poems \| Acknowledgements

The poems

W. N. Herbert

Source

Author's note

Editor's comment

Biography

Facts about Things

Things are tired.
Things like to lie down.
Things are happiest when,
for no reason, they collapse.

That French plastic bottle, still half-full,
that soft-back book, just leaning on
another book, drowsily:
soon they will want to go outside,

soon you will find them in the grass
with the empty bleaching cans and that part
of an estate agent's sign
that's covered in a fine grime like mascara.

That plastic bag you've folded up
feels constrained by you and wants
to hang from bushes, looking like
a spirit, sprawled and thumbing a lift.

Things are bums, tramps, transitories:
they prefer it when it's raining.
Lightbulbs like to lie in that same
long, uncut, casual grass

and watch the funnel effect: the way
on looking up the rain all seems
to bend towards you,
the way the rain seems to like you.

Things which do not decay
like it best in shrubbery, they like
to be partly buried.
They like the coolness of the grass.

Most of all, they like it
when it rains.

Source

First published in Chapman, 102/3, 2003.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

Author's note

I suppose I wrote ‘Facts about Things’ when I was feeling French, in that it seems to be a poem very happy with absences and abstractions. Mebbe ‘French’ should read ‘a bit like Georges Perec’. I often have intense if strictly Platonic relationships with inanimate objects, because they’re not troubled by their inarticulacy; in fact there is something wonderfully eloquent about their silence.

My silences, on the other hand, are often just badly-camouflaged and deeply misanthropic inner rants. I keep having to remind myself how much I love people when I get to know them, whereas with some objects the bonding occurs instantaneously. They say pets give you unconditional love, but things go one better and are just unconditional. They also don’t back off warily the way people do when they realise how much I love them.

I originally wanted to call the poem ‘Stuff about Things’, which at the time seemed the most perfect title imaginable, but then I realised the poem’s tone was still a little eager to define, so I used the F word. I used to be called an Informationist (by some nasty boys that followed me home), because I was interested in playing with the way the Scottish tradition handles facts and information, and I see this as a derived form of that interest. It’s from my Analytical Informationist period.

I wanted the objects in the poem to be quite ordinary, because I think there’s a played-out excess in some lyric poetry’s celebration of phenomena, a bit like people getting evangelical about Ecstasy in the Nineties. You know what I mean: oysters are gynaecologically wondrous; the skin of octogenarian pianists is particularly fine. Most things aren’t as shrill as people, and so the mystery of the universe can’t be particularly shrill either (except for that bit of it made up of shrill people). Mostly it’s just there. It’s going to be just as present in light bulbs as it is in alligators, and you can contain it quite efficiently in plastic bags.

I’ve always liked plastic. When I was a child, no-one explained it was artificial, and so that divide between organic and synthetic never took hold. I have similar difficulties with authentic and inauthentic language. If people dislike such things, how can they put up with makie-up people in novels, or the arbitrary values imposed on goods by money? Things have none of these problems. They are neither environmentally friendly nor unfriendly. They don’t care what they’re worth. And I admire that.

I’m also a little unnerved by it, which I think is an almost indispensable ingredient in any poem. Often when reading poems I find I’m more scared of the poet than I am of the poem, so I hope this poem has a sufficiently secret life of its own for me to absent myself, and let it get on with its work. In fact it’s a pity they asked me to write this note. You probably agree.

W. N. Herbert

Editor's comment

Interesting and amusing information here about things. Nice repetitions. (Should I be giving points?)

Hamish Whyte

Biography

W. N. Herbert was born in Dundee in 1961, and educated there and at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he published his PhD thesis on the Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid. He has published six volumes of poetry and four pamphlets, and he is widely anthologised.

His last four collections, all with the northern publisher Bloodaxe, have won numerous accolades. Forked Tongue (1994) was selected for the New Generation promotion, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Saltire prizes. Cabaret McGonagall (1996) was shortlisted for the Forward and McVities prizes; and The Laurelude (1998), written whilst he was the Wordsworth Fellow at Grasmere, and was a PBS Recommendation. All three books won Scottish Arts Council book awards. His most recent Bloodaxe collection, The Big Bumper Book of Troy (2002) was longlisted for Scottish Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Saltire Prize.

After holding several Scottish residencies he moved to Newcastle in 1994 to take up the Northern Arts Literary Fellowship and has remained there ever since, holding residencies with Cumbria Arts in Education and the Wordsworth Trust. He taught in the Department of Creative Writing at Lancaster University (1996-2002), and currently teaches Creative Writing and Modern Scottish Poetry in the School of English at the University of Newcastle.

In 2000 he edited the bestselling anthology Strong Words: modern poets on modern poetry with Matthew Hollis. He also edited the interactive CD-ROM Book of the North (2000), featuring prominent writers and artists from the region; and tries to maintain the poetry webzine Franks Casket.

He lives in an old lighthouse in North Shields with his wife Debbie Taylor, the novelist and editor of MsLexia, and his daughter Izzie.