In the bathroom with Norman MacCaig

I seem to hang around with poets in the bathroom.

I follow Carol Ann Duffy's principle of keeping poetry handy to read in those spare moments. And I am probably one of only a handful of people living who can claim to have washed Hugh MacDiarmid's bathroom floor when the cistern flooded.

Hugh MacDiarmid's bathroom sink in Brownsbank Cottage

Today I had an encounter with the poet Norman MacCaig a Scottish poet of whom I am very fond. He was a friend of many including Seamus Heaney. And I like the way he opens up a landscape and shows me how, by drawing its lines, we can see its shapes, patterns and pathways all the better. Something I would aspire to. Plus he used to hang out at nice pubs in Edinburgh such as Milnes Bar with other poets: always a good idea.

Coming across his Collected poems, I used them as a kind of divination tool and I Ching.

The outcome was good. Section 3 of the poem No end, no beginning written in 1968.

When you, in your unimaginable self,
suddenly were there, shut boxes opened

and worlds flew out coloured like pictures books
and full of heavy lethargies and gay dances:

when I met a tree, my old familiar, I knew
this was the first time I was meeting it;

and the birds in it singing - for the first time
I could crack the code of their jargon.

And the boredom and the loneliness
in the lit rooms of monotonous streets became

terrible and pitiful - you made me a member
of the secret society of humanity.

The future that had been failing muscles,
sagging flesh, cindering eyes -

all mine, all only mine - swarmed in the air
and spread its new meaning back

into every yesterday. Flux, revolution
emerged into sense, into their own

explanations. I could understand them,
not wholly, but I could understand them

as I could know, not wholly the meaning
of your still hand, quiet look, a way of walking

that takes you from the first garden to the future
where the apple hangs, still, on its dangerous tree.

Norman MacCaig

The only problem with this poetic dark art is that this poem literally has no end and no beginning. I don't want to know for the moment. I am only going to live in the present.

*****

You can find more on Hugh MacDiarmid's sink here http://www.poetandgeek.net/2014/06/hugh-macdiarmid-sink.html. And more on Norman MacCaig at his Scottish Poetry Library page here http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/norman-maccaig.

Hugh MacDiarmid's sink

It would be - wouldn't it.

There is also a copy of Chairman Mao's little red book to peruse when you are in the bathroom.

More on Brownsbank Cottage where you can see where the Scottish poet lived and worked; not to mention where Allan Ginsberg dropped in for coffee, here http://www.biggarmuseumtrust.co.uk/home/brownsbank-cottage.

They need some money to make this place more accessible to visitors so if you are rich and want to do something useful please give them some.

Hugh MacDiarmid live

Wake up with MacDiarmid or just listen all day...enjoying this resource on PennSound so much this morning (which has lots of other goodies too). What better way to enhance your weekend.

PennSound is an ongoing project at the University of Pennsylvania, committed to producing new audio recordings and preserving existing audio archives.

 

You can listen to the whole of British leftish poetry and more here http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/MacDiarmid.php.

How drunk is the ancient mariner?

The opening of A drunk man looks at a thistle Hugh MacDiarmid's 1926 poem

I amna fou' sae muckle as tired - deid dune.

It's gey and hard wark coupin' gless for gless

Wi' Cruivie and Gilsanquhar and the like,

And I'm no' juist as bauld as aince I wes.

invites the reader to expect a poem in the tradition of Scots drinking stories. It is a witty playful start - the speaker is worn out by lifting the glass to keep up with his drinking companions and he is not as bold as he once was. This reader thought of Robert Burns' 1791 Tam o' Shanter - another drinker whose pleasure is offset by the subconscious knowledge of the long Scots miles between himself and home and his surly spouse...

When chapman billies leave the street,

And drouthy neibors, neibors, meet;

As market days are wearing late,

And folk begin to tak the gate,

While we sit bousing at the nappy,

An' getting fou and unco happy,

We think na on the lang Scots miles,

The mosses, waters, slaps and stiles,

That lie between us and our hame,

Where sits our sulky, sullen dame,

Gathering her brows like gathering storm,

Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.

But at this point said reader - me - went off on a total tangent and thought about the start of the ancient mariner - all sailors love to drink - and how he grabs the wedding guest and won't let him get on because he is telling him an endless story; becoming in many ways himself the albatross around the wedding guest's neck.

Would Coleridge have known of Burns' work? And the usefulness of giving a poem a mischieviously drunken narrator or protagonist - a fabliau touch - that frees up the subject matter. He after all is more known for Kubla Khan like visions. Well first look at the dates. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote The Ancient Mariner as part of the Lyrical Ballads between 1797 and 1798. Just after Burns's death. Burns (1759 - 1796) was a little older than Coleridge 1772 – 1834 but not much. Burns' had been lauded as a poet a good ten years before that. And his subject matter, language, form and politics all spoke deeply to Coleridge.

Like MacDiarmid, Coleridge is then able to subvert expectations of where a drinking narrator will take you.

Coleridge himself explains:

The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural, and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life...With this view I wrote the 'Ancient Mariner'.

And a final thought on the well-known lines:

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

followed by hallucinations of slimy things may refer not to the mariners dying of thirst so much as them finding themselves without any alcoholic drink - sailors of this period would have a daily ration of a quarter pint of neat rum twice a day. Water stored in casks would have gone bad on long sea journeys - a fact well-known in the previous centuries of sea travel.

Read the poem here http://www.gutenberg.org/files/151/151-h/151-h.htm and more on drunken sailors here http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8859000/8859506.stm.

Clamjamfry

I would like to recommend that poets have a clamjamfy; a celebration and a fine thing. And gather an audience of poets. And let us know about it.

The one in Biggar was a one-off; here in the picture are Douglas Dunn and Gerry Cambridge. Don't be mislead by Dunn's beard; he read with wit, and vitriol discarding age like an old cloak on the floor. And the bill didn't stop there; John Glenday, Vicki Feaver, Helena Nelson (reading her own and Tom Duddy's work), Andrew McCallum, Chris Powici, Alan Riach, Jennifer Copley and Alan Sclater all gathered by Richie McCaffery.

I will review the event more fully in the Eildon Tree.

Poets reading to poets always adds a little oxygen to the atmosphere.

Brownsbank Cottage and the Biggar Poetry Garden

Brownsbank Cottage is the traditional farm labourer's cottage at Candy Mill in South Lanarkshire, Scotland where Christopher Murray Grieve ('Hugh MacDiarmid') lived from 1951 until his death in 1978. MacDiarmid's legacy remains spectacular, often controversial and challenging; some critics say his early lyrics are his finest work, while his epic poem ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ (1926) is one of the great poems of Modernist literature. Many including Allen Ginsberg made a pilgrimage to the cottage to visit the poet and his wife but it needs your help.


The cottage continues to be a centre of literary activity but need support from the international Scottish diaspora and poets.


A writing residency – the Brownsbank Fellowship – in association with the Scottish Arts Council and South Lanarkshire Council, has been held by poetsJames Robertson, Matthew Fitt, Gerry Cambridge, Aonghas MacNeacail, Linda Cracknell, Tom Bryan and Carl MacDougall.  The residency came to an end in December 2010 following local government support cuts.  However, in partnership with Creative Scotland (the successor organisation to the Scottish Arts Council), it is intended to offer the Cottage during the summer months as a funded writers retreat, with a view to it becoming part of the network of artist retreats/residencies envisaged under the Scottish Government's Creative Futures programme. 


If you can help make this happen or offer support in any way, get in touch with the poet Andrew McCallum who is Secretary of the Brownsbank Committee.

You can find out more about Hugh MacDiarmid and Brownsbank Cottage here http://www.brownsbank.org.uk/



Visit the Biggar Poetry Garden virtually here http://biggarpoetrygarden.weebly.com/index.html or if you happen to be in Biggar, you'll find the Poetry Garden at the top end of Biggar High Street. The garden has an open submissions policy for poets and artists. Full contact details are on the website.