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

The poems

Liz Lochhead

Source

Author's note

Editor's comment

Biography

Hell for Poets

It's Hell for the poet arriving for the gig
Off the five thirty three to meet the organiser
Who claps her in a car that reeks enough of dog to make her gag,
Tells her he's looked at her work but he was none the wiser.
Call him old fashioned, but in the 'little mag
He edits for his sins' stuff rhymes – oh, he's no sympathiser
With this modern stuff! Is it prose? What is it?
Perhaps the poet can enlighten him this visit?

– For which his lady-wife's made up a futon hard as boulders
In the boxroom. 'So much friendlier than a hotel!'
Will anyone turn up tonight? Shrug of his shoulders.
'Even for McGough or Carol Ann Duffy tickets have not been going well…'
Meanwhile: here's his stuff, each ode encased in plastic in three folders.

Publication? Perhaps she'll advise him where to sell
Over a bottle of home-made later? Oh shit. She can tell
This is going to be The Gig From Hell…

But it's real hell for real poets when love goes right
When the war is over and the blood, the mud, the Muse depart
Requited love, gratified desire 'write white'
And suffering's the sweetest source for the profoundest art.
Blue skies, eternal bliss, bland putti – Heaven might
Not be the be all and end all…? For a start
Hell itself's pure inspiration to the creatively driven.
Hell was (f'rinstance) Dante's idea of Hog Heaven.
Hell's best! Virgil knew it too before him. Heigh ho!
Man calls himself a poet? St Peter'll bounce him
(Unless he's maybe Milton – it's Who You Know.)
Could I end up in Hell with Burns (his rolling r's announce him)?
End up with Villon, Verlaine, the Rabelaisian Rimbaud,
With Don Juan, Don Whan – however you pronounce Him –
Bunked up with Byron, still so mad, so bad, and so delic-
iously dangerous to know? Not a snowball's chance, but oh, I wish.

Source

From The Colour of Black and White (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2003).
Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Author's note

I am amazed as well as pleased that this poem has been chosen, particularly as I don't think of it as a poem at all, but a piece of light verse. I do think light verse is a perfectly honest and honourable trade and I have derived much pleasure from reading a good deal of light versifying in my time - but when you know where you are going (more or less) before you begin, then it lacks the psychological imperative and mystery of even the simplest or most defiantly private proper poem coming about its own business. The fun for the writer is mostly in managing to say it within the form and rhyme-scheme, and generally one which draws attention to itself too (as in this parody of ottava rima, Byron's form in Don Juan, his apparently endlessly sustainable and wonderfully infinitely flexible one for his characteristic mix of high and low diction, something associated with him as firmly as Standard Habbie is to Burns). The fun for the reader is presumably in sharing the joke?

I often turn to something like this when (as in this case) asked to write something. I was given the title 'Hell for Poets' and the task of making something short and entertaining which I'd perform aloud at the vinous opening party of a poetry festival for which many poets (not me) wrote wonderful Dante versions. I must say it proved a conversation piece as many poets immediately started to share their lurid memories of the ultimate horror-gig...

Liz Lochhead

Editor's comment

Good illustration of Lochhead’s strengths: her marvellous ear, rhythm, wit, verbal dexterity, the blend of colloquial and standard. Writers will recognise the Posy Simmondsish picture of ‘the Gig from Hell’.

Hamish Whyte

Biography

Liz lochhead was born in Motherwell in 1947. Trained at the Glasgow School of Art, she published her first collection, Memo for Spring, in 1971, with immediate success. In the predominantly male domain of Scottish poetry, here was a fresh voice, of women speaking to women, speaking for women.

Her poems, prose and drama escape the boundaries of each genre, using the speech she hears around her, poignant and humorous. Questioning assumptions about female and Scottish identity, Lochhead has forged powerful and personal theatrical pieces. Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off and her translation of Tartuffe are written in Scots, her poems in Scots and English: 'To tell the stories was her work'. These stories, grounded in recognisable lives, are told with tenderness and irony. Lochhead draws on ballad and fairy-tale to give them a deeper life, often a darker one. She has been a liberating, inspiring literary presence.

Her collections of poetry include Dreaming Frankenstein & Collected Poems 1967-1984 (1984, 2003), True Confessions & New Cliches (1985, 2003), and The Colour of Black & White: Poems 1984-2003 (2003), all published by Polygon.