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Virtual poets › NPD poet blog 2006 › Gerry Cambridge
Monday
› Living in a caravan
› Being poor
› Living close to nature: encounters with swallows
and voles
› Winter gales and my cat Oonagh
› Walking, not driving, and looking out of windows
› The importance of words and their meanings
› Monday's questions
Living in a caravan
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.
Being poor
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?
› If you were going to write a
poem about energy how would you go about it?
› Is poetry not a bit soft?
› Does a blank piece of paper
frighten you?
Is there a common strand running
through your poems?
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?
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:
An apple packed with old sunshine
A lit up town at night from a hill
The world record high-jump
Black chunks down a deep damp mine
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.
Is poetry not a bit soft?
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?
Oh
no. It makes me think of a little rectangle of snow, and everyone loves
to walk over fresh snow. It makes me think of what lovely scratches and
flourishes and scribbles and doodles I can make on it, because one of
the first things to remember is that writing a poem is a messy business.
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
love writing with old fountain pens, and some of them have got wonderful
nibs. I've got one called a Waterman 52V Red Ripple, made in the 1930s,
that I bought in 1999 in a shop in New York called The Fountain Pen
Hospital - the biggest pen shop in the world! I'm quite sure this pen
could write poems by itself if I just told it to: there's something
magical about it. I always like to handwrite poems, and I'm fascinated
by handwriting and graphology, the art of handwriting analysis.
 
Tuesday
› The end of a long day
› Science at Edinburgh
› The poetry reading
› My most popular children's poem
› Travelling at the speed of light
› Tuesday's questions
The end of a long day
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.
Science at Edinburgh
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:
'The coelom which forms the body cavity develops by pouching of the
embryonic endoderm as the mesodermal blocks are formed, in a way typical
of deuterstome morphogenesis.'
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.
The poetry reading
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.
For
example, 'Shore Crab' is certainly my most popular poem among children,
ever, but it was written to accompany a picture of a Shore Crab, who I
decided would sound like a Glasgow hard man, for my book Nothing But
Heather! I'm glad that children like it, but had I set out to write
it for children beforehand it would have made me self-conscious and produced
something very different and, I think, contrived.
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.
Afterwards, discussing how
amazed I was that no one seemed to know the answer to this straightforward
question about the sun's light, my friend, another poet, said, "But
it's not really important to know that, is it?" I always thought
that it was...
Tuesday's questions
› Does poems have to ryme?
› How would you make poetry visible
everywhere so that people would be confronted by a poem wherever they
went, every day?
› Does poetry always have to be
about sad things, or can it also be about looking up?
› Why is poetry important to you?
› What is your favourite biscuit?
› What do poets keep under their
pillows at night?
Does poems have to ryme?
Poems no more have to ryme
Than bells to lose their chime
Or slugs to lose their slime
Although it's not a crime
To make, some of the time,
A poem that puts two words together that
have, young William, an echoing sort of sound.
How would you make
poetry visible everywhere so that people would be confronted by a poem
wherever they went, every day?
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?
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?
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?
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?
I suppose, everything that everyone else does:
the wish for love
the wish not to be afraid
the wish to be creative
the wish for friends
the wish for energy
the wish for passion, the wish
for a long life in a leafgreen world.
Wednesday
› Gazing at autumn stars
› Judging physics posters
› Editing little magazines
› Busy days
› Wednesday's questions
Gazing at
autumn stars
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.
Judging physics posters
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.
Editing little magazines
 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
it can take a long time to consider poems. The excellent ones and the
awful ones are the easiest. But in between are a whole range of possibles,
often intriguing, that you have to sit with for weeks at a time, trying
to find out if any of them are more intelligent than you are and if it's
going to take your slower brain a while to catch up with it. I've begun
responding to everything now by e-mail if possible, but poets who send
return envelopes don't always make it easy. Some of them just send a stamp,
and expect you to supply the envelope and write their address. Or there
is the poetry submission which is sent in a massive brown envelope, containing
40 A4 sheets, and is enclosed with a return envelope the size of a small
postcard. Or there are poetry submissions which don't contain any return
postage at all. Unless there is something very promising in the work,
or some other compelling reason, I don't reply to these any more as I
used to. The strange thing is, you never hear from these writers again.
They never write in asking about the fate of their typescripts. They are
probably thinking about how ignorant you are to ignore them.
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.
Busy days
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 awake.
Or should I let them be my alarm call?
Wednesday's
questions
› How many poets does it take
to change a light bulb?
› Do you write a poem on whatever
you see or does it take time for you to write a poem?
› Have you ever written a poem
that you did not alter after the moment of writing it?
› Why do poets and cats go together?
› Do you ever get bored of writing
poetry?
› What is your best poem?
How many poets does
it take to change a light bulb?
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?
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?
Yes, when I was about twenty, and it began like this:
I walk through withered leaves
That rustle underfoot,
Feel again that joy
Whose fiery flames can shoot
An arrow of passion
Through my brain...
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?
 Possibly because a cat is like poetry, and doesn't come to you just because
you want it to.
Trying
to write a poem, in fact, can be very like trying to persuade a reluctant
cat to come towards you so you can pick it up. Be too aggressive, and
the cat/poem will retreat. I think too that genuine poems don't hugely
care what we think of them. They only care that we acknowledge they exist.
If we like them, that's a bonus. A poem can be quite aloof in that way,
and in this it has something in common with a cat.
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?
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.
What is your best poem?
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!
Thursday
› A morning without having to go anywhere
› Rainbow makers and light gadgets
› Making a book
› An unexpected meeting in Glasgow Central Station
› Words about my father
› A poetry book launch
› Thursday's questions
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
RenfrewshireCouncil.
I
love book design and typesetting - an extension of my interest in
poems and words, I think. This summer I have spent a small fortune on
design books, and on books about typography, which is the art of using
typefaces well. Many of these typefaces have long histories, and go
back to mediaeval times. I used to typeset my poetry magazine The
Dark Horse in Sabon, but I've just started setting it in Bembo,
for a change. I said to a friend of mine, who loves typefaces, a while
ago:
"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.
Making a book
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.
Words about my father
 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."
One
of the reasons he has lived so long - he has diabetes - is
because my mother looks after him amazingly well. My father has been
a lot frailer since he fell over in the spring, but it seems to have
made him realise how short time is and he gets more emotional more easily.
You might not think that at 85 you could still be developing, but I'm
seeing different parts of his personality since his fall. Recently he
had to go into hospital again briefly, but wasn't as ill as the first
time. They put him in a ward with eight beds, and all the other patients
were old men.
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 poetry book launch
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:
They prod us with their cameras
making us aware of what we do,
and once we appeared in The Scottish Field
in a photograph so clear
you could count the midges.
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?
› As a child or an adult did
anything inspire you to be a good poet?
› Wer u good at football?
› Wer u clever?
› What is your favourite thing
about writing poems?
› What was your favourite poem
at school?
› What is your all time favourite
poem?
› Who are your favourite poets?
› If you had the chance to get
inside a painting and explore it in a poem, which painting would it be
an why?
› How much do you like the
city? come and visit Shetland one day.
› Do bloggers always tell the
truth?
Is it hard to be a
poet?
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?
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?
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).
Wer u clever?
I don't know. I was good at English. I was useless at arithmetic and
maths.
What is your favourite
thing about writing poems?
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?
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?
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.
Who are your favourite
poets?
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?
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.
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?
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!
Friday
› Awake early for a radio interview
› Poetry's unwritten rules
› Designing another book
› Getting messages
› An unusual week
› Robert Bringhurst's typography book
› Friday's questions
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.
Poetry's unwritten rules
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
Reminds me of my father
When he had fallen in love with death,
One time when leaves were gathered.
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.
Designing another book
 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.
I've
designed it in three parts: past, present, and future, with some wonderful
interviews Mona Keeling and I did with long-term residents of the area,
plus artwork and words by local children. It has to be ready for late
on Sunday because I'm busy all day next Monday and Tuesday at Edinburgh
University, and Wednesday will be too late, but it's almost there. At
the launch, during a Festival held in the Backlands on 28 October, I'm
doing my first ever harmonica workshop for youngsters - Martyn Robertson,
Fablevision's Creative Director, is buying in a load of harmonicas in
the keys of 'C' and 'A'. What sweet harmonies will be heard on that day!
Getting messages
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.
An unusual week
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…
Friday's
questions
› Do you miss the caravan?
› Have you ever written about
the sea, its movement, its creatures, and its landmarks?
› Can you make a reasonable living
as a poet?
› How would you encourage reluctant
writers/readers to read, and write their own poetry?
› Is it possible for a virtual
poet to be a virtuous poet at the same time?
Do you miss the caravan?
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.
Have you ever written
about the sea, its movement, its creatures, and its landmarks?
 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.
But
here's a little poem about a sea creature, and a photograph of it too.
It's called 'Gem Anemone', with 'Anemone' pronounced AN-EM-O-NEE. These
are small anemones, perhaps only a centimetre or so across, that you can
find in rock pools. I found this one at Barassie in Ayrshire, and took
its photograph in a small marine aquarium. It's not a great poem by any
means, but I still quite like it for its movement across the line ends,
and I hope it does capture something of the delicacy of this tiny creature,
swaying in the currents underwater.
Gem Anemone
Under the sea
by day and night
the gem anemone,
which needs no light,
no bigger across than a fingernail,
stickily
captures the plankton.
While, in our peculiar air,
we multifariously
live, eat, sleep,
the gem anemone
attached to its constant rock
down there,
sways
in the tides
like a dancer,
mortal as us,
to its unheard music which can have no end.
Can you make a reasonable
living as a poet?
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.
How would you encourage reluctant writers/readers
to read, and write their own poetry?
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?
Entirely possible, though I don't think a poet should bother about being
virtuous or otherwise.
Saturday
› A final blog
› In praise of a laptop
› In praise of bookcases
› A school workshop
› A couple of school stories
› An unusual week
› An image to take away
› But back to my workshop...
› Saturday's questions
A final blog
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.
In praise of a laptop
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?
In praise of bookcases
 Hallelluia
for them! - and to be able to have all your books up on their shelves
instead of, as in my caravan days, stacked all over the floor in unmanageable
heaps. Someday I will rescue my hundreds of books stored in my folks'
loft and, when I have room, get them out on shelves where they belong
and where I can take them down to read whenever I want. Funny how you've
got a mental map of books in which you've read this or that interesting
fact, or good poem, like your own internal spirit-country. For now, the
five or six hundred books I do have room for are enough.
A school workshop
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.
A couple of school stories
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.
An unusual week
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.
An image to take away
 This
is a photograph I took to put on the cover of a booklet,
Building a New Path, I was doing in the early spring. In a way,
it's about lots of the things I try to explore - it's about perception,
really. I asked the teacher in one of my workshops if I could take some
big close ups of children's eyes. This is the eye of a 10 year old boy.
After I took the photograph, I noticed that, because he had been looking
out of the window as he shouldn't have been, you could see on his eye
not only the reflection of the window but also of the blue sky beyond
it, and the skyscrapers. Ah, the world out there with all its possibilities!
Some day I'll write a poem to go with this image because I find it strangely
beautiful and also slightly eerie.
But back to my workshop…
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 now, a last couple of your questions to round off the week...
Saturday's
questions
› Is it easier to write poems
with a beard or without a beard?
› When did you know that you were
a poet?
Is it easier to write
poems with a beard or without a beard?
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).
When did you know
that you were a poet?
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.
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