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poets »
NPD poet blog 2006 › Gerry Cambridge
When I go into primary schools and work with classes I tell them that up till the age of 38 – and I'm ancient now – I'd hardly ever lived in a house. Nor a cottage, bungalow, flat or any other stone building, either. I'd only ever lived in a caravan, mostly in Ayrshire. It was a shabby caravan by the time I left it. I watched the caravan site owner take it to pieces in a couple of hours, so the space I had lived, slept, and wrote poems and articles in for twenty years was suddenly unwalled empty air. Quite a thought. I was very poor in those days, at least in outward things. I had no TV, and I still don't, though I had a radio. I was often dressed in a big green coat with huge pockets (I love pockets) for putting notebooks in, and pens, and scraps of paper with bits of typed up poems on them, and harmonicas, and magnifying glasses for looking at things in close up. But though I was poor, there was a strange happiness to it too, some of the time. I felt a strong need to connect with nature and to know a piece of landscape very well. I think this was because when I was wee I was moved about a lot, every few years. And I had a very inquiring mind. I had a plan, which was to live like a hermit writing fantastic poems and then be 'discovered' at the age of 95. In those days, I was too shy to think I would be able to bear the stress of being well-known any younger than that.
Living close to nature: encounters with swallows and voles I lived very close to nature. One May day I was sitting writing at the kitchen table with the door open, and a swallow flew in – just for a few seconds. It was looking for somewhere to nest. It turned round again in mid-air, and flicked out of the open door again to clouds and sky. One winter, during a spell of extremely cold weather, I discovered a vole – a little creature like a mouse, except with a blunter snout – just sitting on my path. It didn't move. It just sat there. It even let me pick it up. I later learned that sometimes in extremely cold weather small creatures like voles are just stunned by the cold; they go into the trance of hypothermia and can quickly die. I took this one inside, found a little box for it, and put in some cheese. The weather was so freezing that I didn't sleep in the bedroom. Instead, I slept in front of the gas fire in the caravan living room. I remember waking in the middle of the night and opening my eyes to find this tiny vole gazing at me completely unfazed from two inches away, sitting upright on the carpet, eating the cheese or whatever I'd given it in two miniature paws. It took me a while to catch it.
Winter gales and my cat Oonagh In the winter there would often be gales and sometimes they'd keep me awake at night. I would lie and listen to the gusts rushing over miles of field – and then the squall would hit, the caravan walls would shake, the roof would rattle with hailstones as if someone had dropped a giant bucket of gravel over the caravan, suddenly, from a great height. I would lie on my back in the bed with the clothes pulled up to my chin with my cat, Oonagh, who had decided long ago I belonged to her, tucked under the top blanket. I would get frightened that a gust would suddenly unroll the roof of the caravan like the lid of a sardine tin, and there I'd be, face to face with the frights of stars. But it never happened, though it was sometimes a close thing. I think I was lucky.
Walking, not driving, and looking out of windows I used to have to walk everywhere because I wasn't near any bus stops and, besides, I liked walking. I am a great fan of umbrellas because of twenty years of walking through all weathers. I belong to a tradition of Scottish poets who have never learnt to drive a car, though I can ride a motorbike. There are theories for this lack of driving skills among some poets. One is that poets are impractical, otherworldly souls who find driving difficult to learn. I don't have much patience with the idea of the otherworldly poet. Some poets may be like that, but there are lots who aren't. I think one of the most important reasons for non-driving poets is that they like to look out windows on long journeys. They like to think and to read and, if they're lucky, to write.
The importance of words and their meanings Though I don't live in a caravan anymore, I often think that the years I spent there helped make me the sort of poet I am. You often notice that for ordinary people in countries with very oppressive governments and regimes, words are very important, and the books of that country's poets can sell many thousands of copies, I think because when you don't have much, materially, words become very important. And traditionally, poetry has been somewhere that people have gone to looking for 'truth' or, at least, some kind of honesty. Although I didn't live in such a country, sometimes I think I chose to be poor so that I would make words and their meanings one of the most important things in my existence. Then having done that, I was ready to move on and change my life. You've already started sending in questions for me – thank you! I'll answer as many as I can over the next few days. Here we go. Monday's questions › Is there a common strand running
through your poems? Is there a common strand running through your poems? Question sent from Morag, Larbert High School Yes, probably some sort of connection with the natural world, though not always. What fascinates me are connections, transformations, the way everything is constantly being changed into something else: an apple to thoughts in someone's head, air into a jig on a mouth organ, something that happened 30 years ago lighting up my brain cells and being changed into a poem. Recently I was in a workshop and a girl said, irritatedly, "Is this all goin to be about nature? Cos ah hate nature." In a strange way I could understand that, because there is plenty about nature that's pretty horrendous, though, of course, she is a part of nature as we all are – old bits of stars and sunlight and whatever we eat and drink. In the spring I was commissioned to write a poem on the theme of 'Light Up Lanarkshire', to accompany a film about South Lanarkshire's lighting up of various public buildings through the county. One of these was the Miner's monument in Cambuslang. So I made the connection between light, coal, and coal-mining, which is really the history of Lanarkshire, and then realised that my grandfather had been a miner in Bellshill for 40 years in the first half of the twentieth century. The poem came out of all these connections: coal being light trapped in leaves of the ancient forests. My grandfather, digging it up, making my father, and therefore me, possible. If you were going to write a poem about energy how would you go about it? Question sent from a pupil from Langholm Primary I would think firstly of what energy is, probably. What is it? You can't see it or hold it in your hands, but you can hold things that contain it: food, for instance. Or to be more specific, an apple, a cake, a deep fried mars bar. Or a lump of coal. I would try and look at it not in the abstract, but in a very real way. Then I might think all around the subject, and scribble down, say, ten ways of looking at energy. Like this:
And so on. And try and develop a poem out of that. A lot of poems can be made by looking at something from as many angles and in as many ways as you can think of.
Question sent from Fiona, St Mungo's High School I think this question means: isn't poetry for cissies, softies, whimperers, big nancies, people who are useless at sports, folk who can't get on in life and are useless at everything else, wasters, and so on? Someone once asked the American poet Robert Frost this leading question: "Isn't poetry an escape from life?" Frost replied: "No, poetry is a way of taking life by the throat." What poetry does is to try to examine life, whether the life of its writer or of life in general in all its innumerable facets. It tries to use words as accurately as possible. I think poetry likes to be tender-hearted, if it can be, but it can also be as hard as a diamond and about horrific things. For instance, the American poet Anthony Hecht was present at the liberation of an annexe of the concentration camp of Buchenwald in 1945. He said of this, after he'd left the army and was back in America, "For years afterward I would wake up shrieking." Read his poem 'More Light! More Light!' if you think poetry is a bit soft. Or some of the poems of Zbigniew Herbert. Or there's a poem by Robert Frost called 'Out! Out! –'
Does a blank piece of paper frighten you? Question sent from Yvonne, Falkirk
Very often you're just experimenting, and you might not come up with anything that's even halfway good. But the point of it is to have fun in the process.
I like being up early in the morning, but I don't like so much getting up early – the little beeping alarm on my mobile phone in the dark beside my bed, its light pulsing green on the ceiling like something from a spaceship, and then the first bleary stagger to the bathroom. Then I do feel like a virtual poet. That was at 5.55 am. An hour later I was out on the damp pavement, walking to Uddingston train station, to catch an early train to Edinburgh where I was working all day at the University. It is now 11.30pm and I'm sitting, laptop perched on my knee in the late evening silence, very aware that I'm up at the same time tomorrow morning and probably won't be in bed until 2 am.
Two days a week I work as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow on the science campus at Edinburgh, helping Biology and Physics students improve their essay writing. So this morning began with a meeting with a geneticist, Dr Jeff Bond, to discuss posting my details on the students website to promote my being available for consultation. I came away loaded with course guides and the details of the first big essay the new students have to write by early November. I spent some of this afternoon reading through the 'Origin and Diversity of Life' course guide, impressed by some of the language. Here's a little quote selected at random:
This is very basic biology, for first year students. This type of language has a certain dry beauty to it, I think, though it also explains why I would probably have been no great shakes as a biologist. I think every type of knowledge is like a magical set of glasses or a new lens through which you see the world in a different way. Seeing the world in a different way, or from different angles, can be a very important part of poetry. I remember as a teenager in Ayrshire, on my home patch of landscape, meeting an ecology student from Edinburgh who was wandering up country for a day. He was able to tell me about the big patterns between creatures and plants in that landscape. I was able to show him, among others, a great tit's nest, a tawny owl's nest, and a sparrowhawk's nest. Then, I had a mental map of that wee bit of field and wood and river valley based on where all the birds' nests were. I had a real skill at finding birds' nests as a teenager. Every spring for several years I would fill in little report cards for the British Trust for Ornithology about the nests I'd found. Some years I sent in over a hundred cards. Tonight the Poetry Library had a party to celebrate the launch of The Thing That Mattered Most, its beautiful new book of Scottish poetry for children, edited by Julie Johnstone. I was asked to do a reading to help things along. I try to make my readings interesting. Sometimes I play harmonica amongst the poems. And I remember a bit of advice about writing poems, which also applies to readings: "If you can't make it good, at least make it short." The worst types of readings are those the poet begins with, "I don't usually read in public my long, difficult poems about the fate of modern man, but tonight I'm going to make an exception..." My most popular children's poem Julie had asked me to make my reading 'child friendly' as there would probably be children present. There were two, a boy and a girl. So I read 'The Pluffman' and 'Shore Crab', both of which seem to be innocently liked by children, whatever adults may make of them. Someone has asked me in the questions I've been given did I use a different technique in writing poetry for children than for adults. The honest answer is that I would never say to myself I was writing a children's poem. It would presuppose that I knew what children's taste was, and I don't think I do. I like to think that children's taste would always outmaneouvre my predictions for it. So it would seem to me a little patronising on my part to think: I'm writing this as a children's poem. But I'll come back in a later blog to this question.
Travelling at the speed of light At one point in the reading I was talking about how, as a photographer, I was fascinated by light and how in classrooms, sometimes, if the sun's shining in, I'd put my hand on a table that the sunlight's lighting, and ask: "How long ago did that light that's landing on my hand now begin its long journey from the sun?" "So now I'm asking you," I said to the audience, "how long ago was it? I know the adults will know, but do either of you?" – and I nodded to the two youngsters. "Two million years," said the boy. Everyone laughed, or at least smiled. "Maybe not quite as long as that," I said. "Do any of the adults know?" To my astonishment, not a single person put their hand up. (Please tell me if you're reading this that you were just shy!) "The answer is eight minutes and twenty seconds," I said. "That's how long it takes the light to travel 93 million miles." "But my dad's a scientist," said the wee boy, suddenly, who I now know was called William, "and he says that's not right." Everyone laughed again. I did too. And for a moment I had a pang of dread that maybe I'd been wrong for decades, and that something I'd believed the case since I was ten was now going to be shown to be wrong, in front of an audience, by William, whose father was a scientist, from the wisdom of his eight years. "My dad says it takes millions of years for the light from stars to get here!" Relief! "Ah, that's because those stars are further away," I said. "But our sun is much closer to us, so the light gets here much faster." But good for William for not just sitting in silence when told something
he didn't think was right. I remember as a wee boy arguing with my teacher
about the spelling of 'apple', which I was convinced was spelt 'appel'
– it seemed the most logical spelling. Tuesday's questions › Does poems have to ryme? Question from William, aged 8, Leith Walk Primary Poems no more have to ryme
Question from Stephanie, Edinburgh Heaven forbid! 'Confronted' by a poem every day? One of the nice things about poetry is that you can take it or leave it. It doesn't force itself on you; it's like a wild bird, say, a sandpiper or a sanderling or a greenshank, that exists anyway, and doesn't need you to pay it any attention at all, and doesn't care a scrap whether you do and would probably rather you didn't. (There the similarity with poetry ends. Maybe a poem is more like a cat, in that way.) But it might be fun to help people who wanted to see like poets, so they could glimpse the hardly-visible poems around them in 'ordinary' existence every day. Does poetry always have to be about sad things, or can it also be about looking up? Question from Ennia I wonder where you got the idea that poetry always had to be about sad things? Maybe poetry is like a man or a woman who always wants to find or see the best in everything. Even if he or she doesn't always manage it, and is sad, sadness is based on the knowledge that happiness exists. Maybe though it's easier to write a sad poem than a happy poem. And maybe people take a sad poem more seriously than they do a happy one. Perhaps because a sad poem, like a sad person, may seem to need more looking after and looking out for. But of course you can also get sad poems, like sad people, who 'put it on' to some extent and then you get overblown sentimentality. Why is poetry important to you? Question from Esther, Falkirk High School I suppose because it helps me make sense of and find a pattern in my life. It's wrong to think of poetry as being always about 'higher things'. Poetry can be about everything that human beings suffer and enjoy and love and are fascinated by, as you see if you begin reading what poets have written down the ages. It's also important to me because I like making things… it satisfies my need to be creative. (A poem is made just as much as a table is, or a musical instrument.) Also, especially when I first began, that it was something I could do without any money made it important to me. I had been a nature photographer and was frustrated that what I could achieve as a nature photographer to some extent was based on whether I could afford the specialist equipment. Poetry seemed much 'purer' in that way. All you needed were a pencil and a notebook and an interest in the art. Finally, that is still all you do need.
What is your favourite biscuit? Question from Daniel, Liberton High School As probably its most unlikely buyer, at least if its name means anything, I am a great fan of 'millionaire shortbread' and if it has green mint filling instead of toffee just under the chocolate top I like it all the better.
What do poets keep under their pillows at night? Question from Julie, Forrester High School I suppose, everything that everyone else does:
Out late to take a bin out – the cool air outside swabbing my bare arms, and the stars above this small town's rooftops all with that fresh-rinsed brilliance they have in the clear spaces between showers, as if the atmosphere has been washed as brightly-clear as a window. Definitely a feel of autumn in the air. A cruising slug about its non-human business on the wet-leafed pavement. And way above it, me, and way above me, just before I came back in, I noticed the great square of Pegasus and remembered that, off to one side of it, if there wasn't a moon above the rooftops, I'd be able to see the spiral galaxy in Andromeda, the furthest object visible to the naked eye. Its light takes around 2 million years to reach us. You have to look past where it is, because the edge of the retina is more sensitive to light than the centre, and then you 'see it'. You see it best indirectly. With the naked eye it looks like a faint milky smudge, not like the brilliant purple and amber structure you see in photographs taken with massive telescopes. But somehow all the better for being seen in person. Sometimes I think writing a poem is like that: you need to glimpse it out of the corner of your eye.
This bit of amateur astronomy is right to the point because today I helped judge a competition of posters by second year PhD Physics candidates, some of them working in astronomy, in the School of Physics at the university. The secretary for the graduate School, Jane Patterson, thought it would be a good way to introduce me to the candidates. It quickly became apparent that most of these posters were written in another, highly abstruse language, called Physics English. I and my co-judge, the mathematician John Martin, went down the corridor scrutinising the large poster designs, with Jane taking notes. I was relieved that John said he found the science difficult, though his maths background gave him a much quicker grasp of everything than I had. Actually, in my case 'grasp' might be an exaggeration. But at one point Jane had to ask a passing lecturer to explain a particularly complicated poster, from a specialist in Particle Physics, impressively titled 'The Kaon-B parameter from lattice QCD'. The physicist launched into an explanation which was practically as abstruse as the poster itself. My main role, thank goodness, was mainly to judge on design and layout. At the crowded presentation later, before the two prizewinners were announced, I quoted W. H. Auden's quip that in the company of scientists he felt like a shabby country curate at a convention of arch dukes, while the assembled students, all of them plainly brilliant, scrutinised me as if I were a strange creature just fished up out of the sea. A number of them talked to me afterwards, curious to find out what my role in the University was. Poring over the astonishing terms and the equations and diagrams on the posters was for me a glimpse into another much more rarefied world. I felt amazed by human intelligence, but also newly aware of the gulf between science and art, and the incredible specialisations going on. All these scientists said one thing: that each field was so specialised that it couldn't be understood unless it happened to be within your own area of knowledge. It was good afterwards to walk out into the damp refreshing Edinburgh autumn night that didn't ask for intelligence, analysis, or any response at all, and take a bus.
Back late after a long train journey through industrial Lanarkshire to a scatter of mail on the doormat, but nothing very exciting. A couple of submissions for The Dark Horse, my poetry magazine, to add to those building up into an impressive pile on my table like an increasingly guilty conscience.
But what wasn't waiting on my mat was a book I've just ordered, Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. It was sent out to me a few days ago. I hope it's not gone missing.
These last few days have been so hectic that sometimes I've thought this blog might become a blo, or perhaps even a bl, an og, or maybe even a b or a g. Phoned by Talk 107, an Edinburgh radio station wanting to interview me at 7.30 am tomorrow, which is National Poetry Day, for a little soundbite of poetry as folk all over the country rush off to their jobs, or sit in traffic jams on city outskirts. They're going to phone me up at home so I'd better make sure I'm
› How many poets does it take
to change a light bulb?
How many poets does it take to change a light bulb? Question from Karen With a certain type of poet, you wouldn't get the light bulb changed at all, no matter how many of them there were. You'd be sitting with candles. On the other hand, I don't know of many physicists who write poems, but I do know lots of poets who love gadgets, build their own websites, and embrace technology.
Do you write a poem on whatever you see or does it take time for you to write a poem? Question from Darren, Liberton High School Sometimes you can write a poem very quickly, in ten or fifteen minutes, and you don't change it too much after that. You always change it a bit. But sometimes a poem can take you years. There's a poem in my last book, Madame Fi Fi's Farewell, called 'Tale of a Cat' that I began to write in 1993 and I couldn't finish it. In 2000, someone asked me for some poems for a pamphlet and I looked at the poem again, saw immediately what had been wrong with it, and wrote the rest of over a couple of days. I couldn't finish it in 1993 because my life had to catch up with what the poem wanted to say, I think. But because I hadn't reached there yet, I didn't know what to write, though I did know the poem wasn't properly finished.
Have you ever written a poem that you did not alter after the moment of writing it? Question from Anon Yes, when I was about twenty, and it began like this:
I think we can take it from this that not altering a poem from when you first write it isn't such a good idea! For how can 'fiery flames' shoot 'an arrow', whether of passion, wood, or anything else? Poets should always be aware – it's something you learn very quickly – of the possible inconsistencies or ambiguities in what they write. In fact that's one reason why I think that even if you're not especially ambitious to write poetry seriously, trying to write it can improve your written expression whatever else you write, whether it's letters, essays, scientific papers, articles, blogs. Poetry is language used under high pressure. It forces you to be accurate and to be sensitive to all the shades of meaning in your words, all the possible ways they could be taken.
Why do poets and cats go together? Question from Robyn, Edinburgh Possibly because a cat is like poetry, and doesn't come to you just because you want it to.
This brings me to what I said yesterday about never being able to tell myself I was writing a children's poem. The critic and literary magazine editor Michael Schmidt said recently that he didn't like poems that 'had designs' on him. I think I know what he means by that. If a poem tries too hard to be liked it can have the opposite effect on a reader. We don't really take to poems that are seeking our approval, which cats never do. That might be one reason why some people like cats and genuine poems.
Do you ever get bored of writing poetry? Question from Caitlin & Launen, Liberton High School No, because poetry never sticks around for long enough to make itself boring, and it's not boring in nature anyway. Poetry is like a fantastic friend that you only see now and again, and never for long, who somehow, just by existing, fills you with hope and energy and the idea that all sorts of things are possible. On the other hand, I do get bored sometimes with trying to write poetry, because trying to write poetry is like an acquaintance who talks non stop about themselves and never lets you get a word in. Then I go off and play harmonica, take pictures, or try and learn something new.
Question from Kimberley, Liberton High School My best poem is going to be the next one I write. I tell myself that anyway, because it keeps me optimistic and interested. To be interested in something that you believe is worthwhile! What a gift that is!
A morning without having to go anywhere The luxury of it! Just to get up, and make cups of tea (I drink lots of tea), and work on my little laptop, and listen a bit to the radio if I want to. But of course I did have to work... some catch up things to do for the Royal Literary Fund, and am just in the process of finishing off the design and typesetting of an anthology of poems and stories for Renfrewshire Council.
"I've just bought Bembo. It almost sounds like the name of a pet gorilla, doesn't it?" "Maybe we should introduce him to Joanna," she said. Joanna is the name of another font. Now I can hardly look at a sign without thinking: what font is that in? Worked this morning on designing the last two pages of the children's anthology, and by lunchtime I was able to e-mail a PDF of it over to Bernadette MacPherson, who'd asked me for it.
Rainbow makers and light gadgets A misty morning, but later the sun came out and began twirling little bits of coloured rainbow around the room. Up on my window I have a little device called a Rainbow maker. It's a little mirror that reflects sunlight into a sun-powered motor that turns a crystal hanging from it. The crystal is a prism that splits the light back to its various colours. For some reason this process fascinates me, and I've been trying to write a poem about it for years but haven't been able to yet. That what we call 'white light' is actually all the colours of the rainbow mixed together! But when the sun comes out strongly enough, the little motor starts whirring, the crystal starts turning round, and the little bits of broken brilliant light, dozens of them, luminous yellow and green and blue and red, start twirling about on the walls and ceiling of my room. I have another little light gadget with a big name – it's called a solar radiometer. Its other name is a lightmill, 'the smallest solar powered plant in the world'. It's a little bubble of glass on a stand of glass, and inside the bubble are four little black squares on top of a little long tube of glass which fits over and rests on a pin. When the sun comes out and shines on them, these four little black squares start turning, and if the light's really strong they birl around for hours so fast they become a blur. On days when the sun keeps coming out and going in again, this gadget is like a little animal of light. Sometimes at the end of a group of workshops in a school I finish with a quiz about what I've been talking about over the weeks. The quiz has prizes, and I let the winner choose between two or three things. Once, one boy could have chosen a pair of binoculars (a good pair) but instead he chose a lightmill because he was fascinated by it. I like it when anyone – especially a young person – surprises me like this.
This afternoon I worked on another project – it's to do with a piece of former wasteground called 'The Backlands' in the Royston area of Glasgow. I'm working with a drama artist called Mona Keeling for a company called Fablevision, and I have to design, write, take photographs for, and publish a book about the project, all to be ready as a 48 page publication for a big event on October 28. This means it has to be at the printer by, well, about now, and we only began thinking about it in mid-September.
An unexpected meeting in Glasgow Central station Went to the launch of 100 Favourite Scottish Poems tonight, edited by Stewart Conn. Passing through busy Central Station around teatime I bumped briefly into Douglas Dunn, looking a bit harried. He's a professor, but first and foremost a poet. He's usually in St Andrews so I was surprised to see him, but his mother who lives not far outside Glasgow had been taken into hospital again. I sympathised – I've had a bit of experience of hospitals this year.
My father is now 85. One night in April this year I came home and found a robin fluttering up and down against the window glass in my kitchen. (This story connects to my father.) It must have got in through the letterbox that had been held open by a bunch of letters the postman hadn't shoved through properly. It was probably searching for a place to nest. I caught it, and let it go from the front door. I was a bit disturbed, because in the Irish tradition I come from, the superstition is that a bird in the house can mean news of someone you know dying. I turned on the radio and immediately heard announced the death of the poet-artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. An hour later I phoned my folks, and my mother answered, breathlessly, saying my father had fallen over in the house and been taken into hospital. Over the next few days he went into shock and began to have kidney failure. For about a week we thought he might not survive it, but he did. He's a tough old man. He comes from a line of long-lived men. One of his two brothers is still alive and the last time he saw my father he laughed and joked, "I'm going to have to shoot you Brendan if you stay alive much longer."
I walked in, and my father, plainly very pleased to see me, announced in a large voice to the entire ward of snoozing and otherwise exhausted patients, who made no response whatever,–"That's my son!" It was as if he thought he'd better claim me before someone else did. He was the only patient who was in his own clothes, instead of wearing pyjamas. He was quite grumbly (this was a good sign) and said, "I get up every morning Ger'd, and I wash myself and shave myself and put my clothes on, and then I sit and wait – and nothing happens." I'm glad to say he's now out of hospital and back home with my mother. I used to think when a younger man that I had nothing at all in common with my father, but of course I do. I have inherited his love of quirky gadgets, and I probably share with him the attempt to be humorous wherever possible. Humour is a creative weapon against circumstances. The older we've both got, the more my father and I have been able to laugh together. My uncle Hugh has this type of humour too, as did my uncle Jim. It tends to the gentle and slightly off-the-wall. There is a video with the three of them together, and my Uncle Hugh is commenting on my father's moustache. "That moustache of yours is needing trimmed, Brendan. There's not one hair on it is the same length as another." Another image of my father: he used to have one of these little magnifying glasses, a loup, and he would sort of 'plug it in' over his left eye and hold it in place somehow with his eyebrow, so he could have both hands free for fiddling with whatever it was he was doing. I tried this when I was young, but I could never quite get the knack of holding it in place in my eye socket. It always fell out. But this is one of my abiding memories of him as a younger man: his close concentration, loup plugged in over his eye, as he pored over some intricate little bit of wiring or mechanism that, somehow or other, he would manage to fix.
A very pleasing event to launch 100 Favourite Scottish Poems, edited by the poet Stewart Conn. I read a poem from it called 'At the Peats', by Alasdair Maclean, a poet who came from crofting stock. It's a dryly humorous piece about tourists and locals, spoken from the point of view of Maclean and his father working at the peats. Here's a wee bit:
Really it's a poem about taking the power of utterance for your own life back from those in power who traditionally held it. It's Maclean speaking in poetry for his father, who is not in a position to whether by dint of circumstance or inclination. It reminds me of going round an exhibition of Glasgow photographs in the Mitchell Library with a writing group with who I was conducting a writing workshop last year. A Glasgow man with a white crewcut got interested in our little group, and asked us what we were doing. One of the women said, "A writer's workshop." "Writer's workshop, eh? We're aw writers!" And, whether we write or not, at one level so we are. Your questions are piling up, so I'm going to try and answer as many as I can. Keep checking in if your question hasn't been answered yet: I'll try to get to it.
Thursday's questions › Is it hard to be a poet?
Question from Cameron, aged 8, Tollcross
Primary School I think this means: is it hard to learn how to write poems? Yes, I think it can be quite hard, but anything that's worth doing is going to be; if it wasn't, it wouldn't be worth doing.
As a child or an adult did anything inspire you to be a good poet? Question from Andrew, aged 8, Tollcross Primary School I think it was the natural world... nature, especially wild birds. As a teenager I was a very keen birdwatcher, and loved finding birds' nests. I have a little book about wild birds coming out before Christmas which will explain why.
Wer u good at football? Question from Ben & Cameron, aged 8 & 9, Cunningsburgh Primary, Shetland I know poets are not supposed to be good at sports. Lots of poets have written about how they were always last to be picked when two captains of sports teams were choosing their side. I'm afraid I have to disappoint you and say I was pretty good at football. I played centre-half, partly because I was tall. I played for the school team. But I also used to support teams depending on whether I liked their names or not, or liked the colour of their strip. So for a while I supported Leeds United (which then had a pure white football strip). And for two days I supported Hamilton Academicals. It was that name, 'Academicals', a kind of tinkly, up and down sound, that did it. For a while I was also very good at keepy-uppy. When I was 14 my record was over a thousand (with both feet).
Question from Tom, aged 7, Cunningsburgh Primary, Shetland I don't know. I was good at English. I was useless at arithmetic and maths.
What is your favourite thing about writing poems? Question from Hannah & Bronagh, aged 9, Cunningsburgh Primary, Shetland That someone else on the other side of the world, or at some other point in history, might read them in a book and find them interesting or of use in their own life – might think, this person was like me in some way, got up in the mornings, was nervous sometime, had things he or she liked about themselves and things they didn't, and was alive to how strange and amazing it is to be walking round as a body. Because it is.
What was your favourite poem at school? Question from Clare, aged 10, Cunningsburgh Primary, Shetland Poetry passed me by until we had to study it for exams when I was fifteen. I never remember all through my childhood having anyone read or talk to me about poetry. Then at fifteen, at Irvine Royal Academy in Ayrshire, at the back of the English class who were studying Ted Hughes' poem 'Jaguar', in the book the class used I found a section from a long poem called 'Reynard the Fox'. It was by a man called John Masefield. Ted Hughes' poem was about a jaguar trapped in a zoo. John Masefield's poem was about a fox being chased by hounds. The poem made you feel you were there with that fox, in countryside not so different from where I lived, galloping terrified over the fields to get away from the hounds that wanted to rip it to pieces. And you felt the poet was on the fox's side, too. John Masefield isn't much thought of these days. But it is to him and his chased fox that I owe the beginning of my interest in poetry. What is your all time favourite poem? Question from Rebecca, Liberton High School, and from Justin I don't think I have one. I have loads of different poems that I like at different times and for different reasons. There are too many really to mention any in particular.
Question from Jody Loads of them too! But I'll mention just a few of those from the 20th century: Robert Frost, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Francis, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Fernando Pessoa, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ted Hughes, Robinson Jeffers, Edward Thomas, Zbigniew Herbert, Vasco Popa, Thomas Hardy, Edwin Muir, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, James Wright, Theodore Roethke, and lots of others I can't think of at the moment!
If you had the chance to get inside a painting and explore it in a poem, which painting would it be and why? Question from S1 student, Langholm Academy This is a good but also quite a difficult question. To be honest, I'm not sure. I think it might be a painting by one of the impressionists – Degas, Cezanne, Renoir. Or maybe something by Picasso – ah yes, by Picasso, I think, especially some of his delicate coloured drawings that almost look like scribbles done in coloured crayon or in pen and ink. Because I love the sense of life and energy they give! Such light and the grace in these drawings... It's what I like to think I could get into poems.
How much do you like the city? Come and visit Shetland one day. Question from Emma, aged 9, Cunningsburgh Primary, Shetland Oh, I love Shetland, and have been there twice. Alex Cluness, your Arts Officer in Lerwick, invited me up. So, if you want me to visit, just ask him! But I also love the city, too – the busyness, all the people. I am very interested in people altogether. When I was a young man I used to take photographs of birds, wasp's faces, hermit crabs, the pneumatic sucker feet of sea urchins. Now I like to take photographs of people.
Do bloggers always tell the truth? Question from Elspeth and Jeanette, Edinburgh You've found me out. My name is really Jemima Devine Blanchette, and I'm actually typing this from a coffee shop in San Fran. I am a twenty two year old catwalk model, almost six foot tall, and I earn two million dollars a year. I don't get up out of bed in the morning for less than ten thousand dollars a day. I would love to meet a real poet, especially one who writes about birds and used to live in a caravan, but he seemed such an unlikely figure that I've just had to invent him. How clever of you to get to the bottom of my little game!
Awake early for a radio interview Up at 7.15 am, pulling on my clothes, and down to the kitchen to make a mug of tea before Talk 107, the Edinburgh radio station, phoned at 7.30. Pulled a couple of my books out from the bookcase, to choose a poem to read from. The phone rang on time, and an assistant asked, "Did you ever go to University? They're having a phone-in just now about how so many people are going to University that it's lost all value and the presenters, Alex Bell and Susan Morrison, are saying that it's better to practice a trade or your craft if you're a poet." "No, I didn't go to University," I said. "I'm self-taught." "Oh good." Then I was switched over, and suddenly we were live. I was expecting a couple of flippant and shallow presenters, but they were only surface-flippant. I think one of the questions (I'm writing this at midnight, so 7.30 am this morning seems like another planet) was what Scotland was like in supporting its poets. "It's very good," I said, "I think. Because of schemes like those run by Live Literature Scotland and the Scottish Poetry Library, funded by the Arts Council, if you're a youngster you have a much better chance of encountering a poet or poetry in a school than when I was growing up. What might make it even better would be a scheme to have a poet in residence in every primary school across Scotland, say for a couple of months. I think that could make a real difference educationally. And I still think there's a sense within Scottish culture of the importance of poetry. If you're a poet in Scotland you're still almost expected to behave unlike other people. I think that's a throwback to Burns and it's a romantic model that still exists, a bit, in the public perception." "Did you go to University?" "No." "So would you advise young people interested in writing to just forget about university and practice the craft?" "I think a poet should practice the craft in any case, but I'd be the last person to give advice about further education to anyone." "Do you have a funny or a quirky poem you could read to us?" "It's a choice between a Shore Crab talking like a Glasgow hardman, or an old crofter whose main regret in life was that he hadn't got married, and who used to get drunk and go out on his tractor looking for women." "The old crofter, please." I read my poem 'The Drunken Lyricist', a sonnet. It is about an old crofter called Tom Mackay whom I've written about elsewhere, especially in my first book of poems, The Shell House. I got quite close to him when I spent a couple of summers on Papa Westray, where he lived. He stayed in a hovel down on the shore. It was a caravan with breeze blocks built all round it. "Oh, that's a sad poem," Susan Morrison said. She's right, though most folk who hear it seem mainly to see the funny side of it. "I hope he found his woman in the end?" "He didn't, I'm afraid," I said. "He died in his bed in 1997, and a friend sent me a clipping written by the former Herald journalist Jim Hewitson about how he'd been found by another islander, and how his best friend and drinking partner had been lost at sea within hours of Tom dying – so neither knew of the death of the other." And that was my five minutes of fame.
The interview was for Britain's National Poetry Day, on which various prizes are announced in London for poets. (In the USA they have National Poetry Month.) I should say I feel relatively indifferent to prizes. I remember mentioning the whole business of prizes for poetry to the poet-critic Robert Nye in a letter, and his replying that the trick was to be writing so unfashionably that the idea of anyone giving you a prize for your work was impossible. Therefore it wasn't something that you even thought about or considered. It meant that you could think independently of the poetry world, which is really a small, relatively ingrown subculture, tending towards a coterie. I like the thought of writing beyond current poetic fashion. I remember interviewing Wendy Cope over ten years ago, and in the course of our interview she talked about the 'unwritten rules' regarding current styles in poetry. It had never occurred to me that there was such a thing. I was naive enough to think, and I still think this, that what a poet should do was to write as authentically as possible about things that mattered to him or her and never bother about rules, written or otherwise. He or she should try to be genuine, whether their genuineness took the form of always speaking in their 'own' voice or in writing poems in other voices, whether it tried to be deeply serious always or enjoyed playing games with the reader. Here is the opening stanza of a Patrick Kavanagh poem (I quote from memory): Every old man I see Why is that so good? At least, I think it is. It's not clever, especially; it doesn't have any ingenious metaphors; it doesn't impress you with its linguistic virtuosity. I think, at least if you agree with me that it is good, it is because you feel its sheer force as human utterance. There is utterly no pretence in it. Poetry is like a free space where this type of thing is still possible. Compared to that, the whole idea of 'prizes' seems, really, a bit beyond the point, an irrelevant tinkle.
This was a day to concentrate on the Backlands book I mentioned yesterday. It has to be ready for the printer in a few days time. The book is called Imagined Space and is all about transforming a piece of waste ground in central Glasgow into a green space with scope for nature study and outdoor socialising.
If you want messages, as Norman MacCaig would say, go to Safeways. Or, in my case, just around the corner in the main street. After having lived more than twenty years out in the country, at least a half hour walk from the nearest small shop, it still seems amazing to me to just walk round the corner to buy bread and milk and butter and tea. A smirry day with an autumnal feel to it. The good shock of being out in everyday reality.
I realised today that readers of this blog will probably be saying to themselves: but when do you actually write poems? This has been an exceptionally busy week, with very little space in it. Usually I find that I have to sit down and make space, even if it's only an hour in the morning, to write. This is never really long enough and what happens is that you begin to get into something very interesting, then have to go somewhere. No matter how much time I start out with, I always seem to be dashing out the door at the last minute. So I like to have a full day to write if I can get it, or at least a morning and a bit of an afternoon. It's like entering another world, for a while. Often I find that after a day writing a poem, or trying to write one, if I have to interact in public, people keep asking me to repeat myself, because I speak very quietly through having been silent all day. These days, to answer indirectly one of the questions I've seen, I quite like being commissioned to write poems on particular subjects. I think the older you get the harder it is to have the ego you have as a younger person in imagining that your own writing has much importance in the grand scheme of things and, therefore, it's harder to write a poem without some end in mind, though it still happens. So I really like to be asked, or given a subject.
Robert Bringhurst's typography book Arrived today! – or I thought it had, until, opening the jiffy bag on the train – I had brought it with me for a treat – I discovered instead a volume sent by mistake, The Best Tales of Hoffman. Someone, somewhere, is opening up his or her jiffy bag and, I hope, examining disgruntledly the copy of Elements of Typographic Style and wondering where their precious Hoffman has gone. And now, some more of your questions...
› Do you miss the caravan? Question from Lynn Chandhok's writing seminar of high school seniors, New York Only, I suppose, as a sort of romantic idea. I was reasonably happy there for a long time, but I think if I'd stayed in that situation for much longer it would have been bad for my health. I was able to leave because I got a poet-in-residence position in Hugh MacDiarmid's tiny cottage. People would come up and ask me in concerned tones how I was finding it. "Oh, quite luxurious," I'd say.
Question from Matthew, aged 10, Cunningsburgh Primary, Shetland What an interesting question. And I understand why you would ask it from Shetland, where the sea is everywhere. I was going to say no, I hadn't, but actually I have. There are numerous poems about sea-creatures such as Hermit Crabs, Anemones, Blennies, and others, along with photographs of them, in my book 'Nothing but Heather!' And in my next book will be a little poem about a sea urchin, or rather a special part of one, something that has fascinated me for years. The sea urchin's mouthparts when you see its skeleton are a fine structure of bone called 'Aristotle's lantern', because Aristotle first described it.
GEM ANEMONE Under the sea
Can you make a reasonable living as a poet? Question from Rebecca, Trinity Academy Not really. Even a popular poet probably isn't going to sell more than a few thousand copies of a book of poems. A writer, poet or otherwise, gets a 'royalty' of ten percent on every book sold. So if your book sells for £7, as the author you're only going to get seventy pence for each copy that sells. If 2,000 copies sell, that's £1,400, and you couldn't live too long on that. But most books of poetry are going to sell 300-400 copies if the poet is lucky. However, you can make a sort of living from showing other people how to write poems. And I also do a lot of other things too, and link them all together.
Question from Anna, Broughton High School I don't know that I would encourage them overtly, because that could backfire, but I would be enthusiastic myself about poetry, and about the possibilities of poetry, read out loud from good poems, and hope that something of that might rub off on the more reluctant pupils. Another way is to find out a pupil's particular interest – football, say – and try and find writing that has that as its subject. But of course not everyone is destined to make much of poetry. Such pupils may have to discover their own sort of poetry – whether it be car mechanics or software engineering or gardening or any one of a million other things. I think our education system at the minute is still over-focused on the head at the expense of the body, the practical skills. In the late winter and spring I was involved in a project with a group of S3 pupils, and two or three of the boys were extremely reluctant to write anything, or even engage at all. I think I'd have had to have been a magician to have changed that. After a few school visits, I felt that I was trying to force them into a mould. These boys could be quite disruptive, but it wasn't that they were bad youngsters, just that the whole education system it seemed to me was denying their interests. I got them talking about mechanical things and had no problem keeping them focused. I don't know what the real answer to this question is, but it seems to me a lot of contemporary educational practice is dreamed up by theorists who have no experience of education face to face with unengaged pupils, or if they have, it was so long ago that it's become theoretical.
Is it possible for a virtual poet to be a virtuous poet at the same time? Question from Edith Entirely possible, though I don't think a poet should bother about being virtuous or otherwise.
Well, this is my final blog of the week, and perhaps, who knows, my final blog for eternity. Am writing this near midnight on a Friday evening here in this quiet place, with a little laptop perched on the writing board on my knee. I have just spent a punishing several hours correcting marked up proofs of the children's anthology for Renfrewshire Council I've mentioned in earlier blogs. Proofreading is a great skill, and a lot can depend on it. I remember a poem of Auden's in which the typesetter by mistake printed the line "the poets have names for the sea" as "the ports have names for the sea." When Auden saw this he much preferred the typesetter's version and kept it. W. B. Yeat's phrase, "solider Aristotle", was once misprinted as "soldier Aristotle". Some literary critics took it seriously and worked up reasons for what Yeats intended. And the American poet-critic R. S. Gwynn recently brought to my attention an unfortunate misprint in an Edwin Arlington Robinson sonnet, 'Reuben Bright'. Bright is a butcher whose wife dies tragically and at the end of the poem he buries her, and, with his new knowledge of suffering, tears down the slaughter house. The poem's close should have read, "and tore down the slaughter house." When it was first printed, however, the typesetter inadvertantly, or in a spirit of mischief, added a word, and the closure read, "and tore down to the slaughter house." It does diminish the effect a bit.
I don't think I could have written this blog without a laptop. It wasn't till after I bought it – it's one of the little iBooks with a white casing – that I realised how much I had been resisting working at a desk top computer. I'm often on the move, but with this little gadget I can work all over the place – libraries, coffee shops in the city. Coffee shops! When I was younger, pubs were my thing. Now it seems to be coffee shops. Sometimes I think I am becoming almost sedate, but it is a sedateness that has arisen from a good deal of earlier wildness, and has all the assimilated knowledge of that, which is quite reassuring. My little cat Oonagh, too, is now a sedate old lady (though she is so delicate she still looks like a kitten) but she used to be out in the woods every night, all night. Five or six years ago, at a big poetry conference in Pennsylvania, I was referred to from the podium by Dana Gioia, who is now the head of the National Endowment for the Arts in America, as 'the unruly Scotsman'. I was quite surprised by this. I think he must have been being ironic. For, I thought, if Dana found my civil, calm, dignified and generally quiet demeanour 'unruly' whatever would he make of some of my countrymen?
Into Tannochside Primary this morning, not far from where I live, for a poetry workshop booked by the school through North Lanarkshire Council. I think over the last seven or eight years I must have done hundreds of school visits, so they don't faze me at all. This one was with a P7 class with an excellent teacher, Claire Ferrie, and it was a one-off visit, which basically means neither I nor the children will ever see one another again. The enthusiastic teachers always sit in with the class, and in general I prefer it. A good deal of what I do involves opening up the children's imaginations, so I can't also be a disciplinarian too. I like the teacher to have that role.
I've known the occasional teacher use a visit from me as an opportunity to escape the classroom, sometimes for lengthy periods. The first time I ever visited a Secondary School as a writer, in 1997, it was because the teacher, as he told me, had to take his son to the dentist. I was too inexperienced to realise that this was utterly irresponsible of him. I think my sheer level of nervous tension so impressed the S5 class that they didn't try to play up. Another time, in a primary school in Saltcoats, one P6 teacher vanished out of the classroom while I had a big queue before me of youngsters all mad keen to show me their concrete poems, written/drawn on A3 sheets. Out of the corner of my eye, at the nearest table, I noticed one boy standing over another boy, seated, who was struggling with both hands to dislodge a small plastic bucket jammed over his head. The perpetrator of the bucket assault, realising he may have gone too far, grabbed the bucket and tried to yank it back off the boy's head. He succeeded, and the bucket flew up into the air, hit a light, and landed on the table. It was only later that the teacher told me that the children at that table were functionally illiterate, so it wasn't very likely that they'd find a workshop about writing poetry too interesting.
Anyone reading this will get a slightly skewed impression of one of my typical weeks. For one, it has been extraordinarily busy, with several deadlines all happening at once. In an average week, much more time would have been given over to The Dark Horse, my poetry magazine. In the midst of all the other things I do, I find working on it, like writing poems or letters with old pens, somehow reassuring. It's a classic old style literary magazine – it exists only to publish the very best poetry and essays that I can find. It doesn't have any pictures; it's all text. I often think of it as being the 'high literary' side of my activities. And it's probably unique in its 'Scottish-American' focus (though really we publish work from all over Britain, not just from Scotland). And the next issue is going to be a cracker. I'm pleased that after eighteen issues I can still feel enthusiastic about it. I think this is because I've always felt, in some way, it was an extension of my own work as a poet – I've never felt I had to make it 'representative', or have a responsibility to 'literature', or anything at all apart from to print work that I find engaging. And it's great fun liaising with my two American colleagues, Jennifer Goodrich and Marcia Menter. Jennifer deals with the administration of the American side of the magazine, as well as editing the work submitted to her and then forwarding it to me for a final decision, while Marcia recently joined her as our reviews editor, to suss out books we might want to review that are being published in America.
Well, the children seemed to enjoy it. I told them about my living in a caravan for years, and about how I used to go out in the dark to look for owls, and call them down to me. When I was fourteen – I can't remember who introduced me to this – I learned to hoot like a tawny owl, which is the species that makes those long, quavering, slightly eerie calls on frosty winter nights. There's a knack to mimicking it, but it only takes a day or two of trying to learn. Despite all the harmonica playing, all the poems, all the stories, what really makes the children sit up in workshops I do in schools is when I put my hands together unexpectedly and suddenly produce an owl hoot. Invariably, they all want to learn it. And maybe that is one modest achievement from my visits to schools across Scotland – that I have shown innumerable children how to hoot like tawny owls. I'll answer a couple more questions to round off the week in a minute, but before I do, a big thanks to the Scottish Poetry Library for asking me for this blog, and especally to their techno-webwiz, Julie Johnstone, who has done such a classy and tasteful job of the design, a whole lot of work in itself. And now, a last couple of your questions to round off the week...
› Is it easier to write poems
with a beard or without a beard? Is it easier to write poems with a beard or without a beard? Question from George, Bunsgoil Gaidhlig In my case there's something about the bearded condition helps me write poems. I have had my beard since I was 17. I did shave it off once, about eighteen months ago, but what it revealed was so horrendous that I immediately grew it back again. Despite this, I don't agree with the view that a man with a beard is concealing something about himself. A bearded chin is the natural state. It's the shaved chin is the unnatural condition. So I suppose I am a real pogonophile (someone who loves beards).
Question from Lynne To be honest, I don't know if I do know that even now. I like to think it might be so, but you never know. About Gerry Cambridge Gerry Cambridge has worked extensively in Scottish schools. His pamphlet Blue Sky, Green Grass, a collaborative work from his residency with Lawthorn Primary School, won the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award. A special thank you to Gerry Everyone at the Scottish Poetry Library would like to say a very special thank you to Gerry for sharing this blog with us this week. If you would like to send Gerry a comment on the blog, use the ask the poet form to do so. Related links |
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