The Circumflex

Shuttlebus – Fairmont St. Andrews hotel to St. Andrews Cathedral (ruin).  On the in-car muzak – The Corries ‘sing’ Rise and Follow Charlie with the energy and pep of two geriatric convicts filing through a giant redwood with a blunt two-man saw.  For the toorists I suspect.  Eventually the boys (now long gone from the Scottish cultural scene) cannot sustain this lyrical abrasive any longer and switch to a dirge like Scots Wa’ Hae in ¼ time and a key of F-flat.  Hail Caledonia.
Given my current wrestling with Scots as language in Line of Sight I was particularly interested in Scots writing as presented at the recent StAnZa festival.  Trouble was, there didn’t seem to be a lot of it in evidence and what there was stalked by self-translation.
Poems in Scots – Janet Paisley and William Hershaw – St. Johns Undercroft.  Recognising that the event paralleled the 100 Poets Gathering (so all the poets were being in the century), did the audience really have to have such a mothballed air – a good 30 years older than the average festival goes and with a tendency to mutter through the performances.  The event began with a spirited sermon on Scot’s status as a language in its own right – hellfire and damnation on anyone daring to hint that it was only a dialect.  Jamieson’s dictionary provided – it was asserted – proof incontrovertible of the language’s majority as a free-standing tongue.  The MC – a very engaging guy who never introduced himself- also implied that Tagore might have used the word ‘jissom’ – which I found implausible – though his point was well made – the more used language lacks the aforesaid – is worn smooth and threadbare by over-use and consensus making – the power is in the minor languages, the languages still fresh, raw, beautiful – seams not yet mined out.  General support – so far so good!
And  - leaving aside my reservations on the poetic standing of dramatic monologues – Hershaw and especially Janet Paisley’s verse in Scots was powerful, flavourful, muscular,  ruddy and hale.  Janet Paisley’s commissioned Verse of Welcome to Edinburgh was a rich pudding of a poem (clootie dumpling) – over-generous with the big ticket Scots words – clamjamfrey and such – but a clever clebration of the language and its generosity.  Imagine our dismay (therefore) when translation was repeatedly offered and foisted upon us by both poets.  We can’t have it both ways!  This was an audience that came to hear Scots and these were poems written first and foremost in Scots – as an act of identification/separation and as a means to access the ‘jissum’ in new/old forms.  Why then bowdlerise and parody the music and muscle of these texts by rolling them flat (and that was exactly the effect!) – deflating them and rolling them flat into RP English – the new esperanto – the international exchange protocol – completely comprehensible and permutated into dullness. 
Interestingly, Robert Alan Jamieson – a Shetlander – exhibited the same feartness – translating an excellent Shetlandic verse – Kennin – into English for his audience.  Perhaps this is a moment of ‘politeness’ for the foreigners among us.  But I think not.  I think, beyond the music and the voice, we worry that we are not understood – lack faith in our insular convictions – but it’s alright – I can do it in English if I need to.  Trouble is – we can’t.  
 

Spent last weekend, somewhat peripatetically, around the 10^th St. Andrews Poetry festival – StAnZa – billed as Scotland’s poetry festival.  Having managed to avoid St. Andrews for the first 49 years of my life I find myself visiting the town twice in a month [In the discourse no-one can hear you scream].
St. Andrew’s, particularly on the weekend, was awash with poets listening to one another poetising. 
I understand Germaine Greer announced some time ago that poetry was dead as a literary form citing, as evidence, that more persons were registered as poets (for tax purposes) in the US than the print run of the biggest selling poetry books.  The idea that the number of writers exceeds the number of readers is indicative of the death of a literary form (of expression) rather than it’s burgeoning health is puzzling.  Though I’ve always been a great admirer of Gee-Gee, I do wonder whether she feels people aren’t taking enough time out to pay attention to her. 
Poetry is obviously NOT a spectator sport – it is, it would seem, a game of turns.  This aspect of the sub-culture was particularly evident at the excellent but strange 100 Poets Gathering on the Sunday, 100 poets, 3 minutes (ish) each – strutting – in some cases literally – their stuff.  An wonderful taster session for the poetically ignorant – an opportunity to put faces to names and (given the poetic fish-tank that was St. Andrews for that weekend) names to faces.
StAnZa also seemed to be taking the opportunity to expose the benighted Scot’s to international influence – hence what seemed a puzzling shortage of Scots poets at the events.  The big name Scots seemed absent –  Burnside, Jamie, Leonard, Patterson, Robertson – Jackie Kay in conversation but shining most in short story and monologue. 
There was a lot of monologue in evidence – protean voices – the spoken word as poem (i.e. tidied into verse) and therefore allowed to jerk through quaint demotic bergamasks in the genteel parlour.  I am not convinced a dramatic monologue is a poem – even if it is constrained to rhyme or speak in 3-second bursts.  I can never figure out if the performer is liberating the oppressed or taking the piss.
Compare and contrast, for example, Jenni Daiches, Daljit Nagra and Jim Carruth.  Jenni Daiches poem cycle ‘Smoke’ is an excellent gentle meditation on the crimes of the 20^th century, focussing on the German extermination camps of the 30s and 40s and the impact of that horror on surviving and succeeding generations.   It is a beautiful dark work that left me with those wonderful splinters of imagery and sound that persist – ‘he cannot feel through fingers wrapped in rags’, a grandmother with a ‘head full of broken glass’.  If I misquote from a week’s remove and one hearing, I am acknowledging the power and persistence of the words – and these are poems.
Narga’s work, in contrast, adopts a monologue form and exploits the freshness and fracture of English spoken (as though by) immigrant Punjabi’s – it celebrates the optimism and joy (jouissance perhaps) of striving, thriving Punjabi’s in a dialect of misunderstanding and slippery re-interpretation.  It is a fresh, young and undaunted voice – and it fails to respect the struggle of its stolen masks – Daljit himself is not struggling with fragmented/ mescegnated language – Daljit is breaking language (breaking it anew) to offer us a vision of comic opera shop-keepers, honeymoon husbands, plump young wives…aw shucks!  I can’t remember a single line.  I remember caricatures.
Daiches would not, I think, claim to be speaking in protean voices – she is writing poetry.  Narga claims an ancestral voice he has, in fact, slipped beyond – he mines his ‘heritage’ for amusements.  And the theme of the unheard, marginal voice was carried over into the introduction of Jim Carruth’s work.
I did not know I knew of Jim Carruth.  I had read one poem once – The man who hugged cows – and liked the poem and misplaced the poet. 

Carruth writes real, deeply felt and understood poems from a point of view – a working rural point of view – not distinctively Scottish in economic or sub-cultural terms but Scottish in its landscape.  Poems like Homecoming and Silence and Tapestry are beautiful, insightful and bitterly political poems celebrating and fiercely advocating a time, place and predicament.  These people, marginal and central of the ‘life of the land’ as they are, are never not celebrated by the words.  (My wife becomes a field is the most erotic poem I’ve read in a long while.)  Having purchased (always a sign of something) 2 of Carruth’s published collections on the way out – Bovine Pastoral and High Auchensale – I thoroughly recommend the man’s voice – but it is not protean – it is authentic and it knows it is poetry.