A Scottish alternative?

On a lowered beach: Scottish alternatives

An email arrived suggesting an issue of Angel Exhaust about alternative Scottish poetry, to go with the issues we did on similar themes in Wales and Scotland. I have been thinking about this and also about why we didn’t do such an issue 20 years ago. The upshot is that I am going to write a blog about the matter, instead of actually producing a real publication.
The key to why there was no Scottish issue 20 years ago, after some discussions about it, was a conversation with Robin Purves and Peter Manson. I asked them how many shops in Scotland stocked Object Permanence, and the answer was “none”. It was obvious that there was no alternative sector in Scotland. Not only would no shops sell our possible Angel Exhaust, but there was no set of paths along which we could find alternative Scottish poets, so that we would probably go to press having missed significant and important people. A little magazine with no resources has to find downhill paths and this project was clearly an uphill struggle. (Another version would be that Object Permanence was the alternative sector. But they only ever published one Scottish poet.)
The reason why there is no ‘alternative sector’ corresponding to the one we found in England and Wales is mainly that the status of the Scots language is too hot a topic. The whole of Scottish literature is an ‘alternative’ compared to the anglo-american mainstream, yet the difficulties of writing in a dialect which is never used in schools are such that poetry in Scots is persistently sub-literary and reluctant to deal with abstract ideas. The result, over a hundred years now, has been an increase in the status of the language, much more interest by the primary sector of the schools system, a few academic posts, and a cluster of poets writing intelligently in Scots – but not writing something critical and innovative in the terms of Angel Exhaust readers. Like Scottish politics in general, this area is unstable and evolving.
When the email arrived, my reaction was that I knew nothing about Scottish poetry in the past 25 years. That was not a final answer, but it did suggest that we needed a native informant, or several, before such an issue could be assembled.

Clearly there is a sector of innovative poetry in Scotland. But, where John Goodby and Lyndon Davies found 38 ‘alternative’ poets for their Welsh anthology (Edge of Necessary), you obviously couldn't find 76 radical Scottish poets (i.e. for a population double that of Wales). Scotland did not have a counterpart to the deluge of formal innovation that happened in England in the 1970s, and even the second half of the Sixties. The reasons are interesting. And actually, there was an equivalent, if only on a smaller scale. Edwin Morgan, DM Black, Alan Riddell. But, it would be ridiculous to push this sector out of existence.I don’t really get the geographical basis for the poetic pattern, but I think the alternative thing was much weaker in the North of England than elsewhere, and so that it wasn’t “area-saturating” but dispersed and full of holes. Maybe the Modern thing could only capture people who weren’t already committed to something else, such as the nationalist thing or the Language Question.
I have Christopher Whyte’s book Modern Scottish Poetry. I guess I have read it three times... anyway it has classic status. I say this before noting that I jotted down in my copy a list of poets he left out: Joseph Macleod, TS Law, DM Black, WN Herbert, Alexander Hutchison, Walter Perrie, Frank Kuppner, Peter Manson, Peter Davidson. I now have to add Alan Riddell, whose work I encountered later. This list would give an outline for an alternative anthology of Scottish poetry. However, the rule is that little magazines deal with new poetry and preferably with unpublished poetry. A little magazine is inhibited from producing an anthology in which key poems are fifty years old. And the magazine-buying audience has limited interest in that sort of backward look. I should emphasise that Whyte designed a one-volume work with 20 poets, and that his omissions do not imply that he disregarded these other poets.
Some Scottish poetry of the past 20 years is exhibited in the anthologies The Smeddum Test, Aiblins, and Be the First to Like This. The first collects poems in Scots entered for a particular prize. The second is political poetry after the result of the 2014 Independence referendum; the title means “perhaps” and the theme is unused possibilities. The third is more like a generational anthology; a lot of the best poems are people who are not Scottish (but were resident there at the moment of the anthology).

I wrote about the language issue in Scottish poetry but forgot to include that chapter in my seven-volume work on poetry 1960-97. I wrote a draft of volume 1 in 1993 and that included the Scots material… the book eventually came out in 2003 with a new design which omitted that chapter. I then forgot to add it in to any of the other volumes. It is on my website www.pinko.org.

Whyte is quite critical of Sydney Goodsir Smith. There is an issue with authenticity which Goodsir Smith’s theatrical and highly coloured diction raises, not just for Whyte. The objection to English rule is that it distorts what is naturally there, in dependencies like Scotland. Something similar applies, in a more abstract realm of critique, to domination of the Scottish broadcast and print media by anglo-american commodified output. This shifts emphasis to unaltered Scottish reality, linguistic or otherwise, which is altered for the worse by processes overlaid on it. A return to the natural is success. This implies that literary processes, producing unnatural and enriched language, are a failure and to be rejected. However, if people are used to discussing adult topics in English and only mundane and domestic topics in Scots, it is unnatural to discuss serious topics in Scots. After the Reformation, Scottish priests normally preached in English, because of the prestige of the King James Bible and, before that, of reformed theologians in England. It is likely that even in the 17th century the middle class were speaking English, albeit with the well-known local accent or burr. So serious poetry in Scots is artificial and not at all naturalistic. Goodsir Smith’s diction is quite unrealistic, but it is broad enough to sweep the problem of realism aside. He worked as a theatre critic and this helps to explain his exaggerated but also expressive diction. Whyte dislikes this but we have also to ask whether linguistic naturalism allows poetry to exist at all. Nationalism bases itself on the imagination of a state of affairs which does not exist, and which is only accessible to idealistic speculation. It is credible that only exalted and non-democratic language can convey nationalist ideals. Goodsir Smith is not only involving unexplored possibilities but actually writing in a way which is unexplored and unheard-of.
As Whyte points out, the middle class in Scotland have for a long time spoken English, and Goodsir Smith’s family origins make it certain that he never spoke Scots when growing up. His exercise in writing poetry in Scots is artificial. But, this is a double-barrelled gun. If you apply rigorous naturalism, not only can you not discuss ideas in Scots, but also you cannot allow middle-class poets to write in Scots. I think we have now got the nub, of why “alternative” poetry has not done well in Scotland. Naturalistic writing in Scots is too formulaic and predictable, and artificial language meets with widespread hostility for not being authentic and for indulging in foreign practices.
The prevalence of English in Scotland is a reflection of the hegemony of the South in the last 400 years, and this is not much moderated by the related influence of American (since at least the late 18th century). This is true but it does not instantly tell us of beneficial effects from rejecting all the ideas of the last 400 years which were mediated by books written in English.

I have spent much time in the past ten years attempting to learn Scots Gaelic and, more recently, Irish Gaelic too. The collapse of the land-owning superstratum which had patronised high-grade poetry led, in both countries, to the decline of poetry into something much simpler, a folk practice with notable similarities to folk song. (The land was still owned in big estates by great families but there were large-scale shifts of ownership and the new dominant tier had limited interest in Gaelic, of either kind.) Literary Gaelic after 1750 is quite rare, and so a learner is likely to get involved in things like folk-tales. In fact, my interest in that part of the world has involved me in an interest in folk literature and so an unconscious acceptance that it is possible to have an intellectual interest in the voice of the people.
There are some similarities between the Gaelic trajectory and that of poetry in Scots and in Welsh. Having said that, I can see that it would take a book to explain exactly what the similarities and differences were. Things work differently in different societies. Hoping not to get called out on this, I want to suggest that literary and educated poetry can act as a depressant on folk and oral activity, that England has an unusually crushed and depressed tier of folklore (as collectors found in the 19th century), and that the vigour of recorded folklore in both Gaelic dialects is a thing of wonder.
This is a basis for talking about the importance of folklore in Scotland, although my feeling is that the respect for folk-song and dance, and so on) has produced crucial weaknesses in Scottish poetry, leading poets away from modernity and towards a diction which is compatible with folk-songs but not with abstract ideas. It has been a kind of warm cloud which disguises from people the fact that a poem or a volume is actually crap and sub-literary.

Note on the language problem
The decline of Scots was sociologically led, and as the upper classes of society began to speak English the semantic domains which were normal in Scots began to wither and contract. Drummond of Hawthornden may have been the first poet to write in English, but there is evidence that texts were being written in English already before the union of the two countries under one king in 1603. Over hundreds of years, Scots became a sociologically and cognitively incomplete language. It did not express the full life of society. We have to emphasise the power of sociology over speech behaviour, and of normal speech behavior over poetry; someone who sets out unilaterally to repeal the unconscious legislation of a society may end up being acknowledged as a genius, and may write poetry which is embarrassing, incongruous, off-pitch, and in the end unnatural.

The essential difference is between unambitious, oral type poetry, and ambitious, intellectual poetry which incorporates ideas and the realm of intellectual prose in general. This is what MacDiarmid insisted on. So we have to be careful in identifying what was written under the influence of M. Probably, the “Lallans renaissance” did not start until the 1940s; it had taken that long for a group of young poets, inevitably nationalists, to come along who admired M enough to take on his ideas. Poetry was being written in Scots during the 1920s, but it was banal and quite contemptible with MacD’s ideas. During the 1930s, we find William Jeffery (yes, he was David Kinloch’s grandfather) write intelligently in Scots, but only a few poems. They are collector's items. Instead, it is around 1940 that we see a group of university-educated poets (Douglas Young, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Maurice Lindsay, etc.) take up the idea.
For working-class Scottish children, the gap between the way they speak and the language they have to write school work in or read books in, is wide and confusing. This affects their performance in tests and disadvantages them in the academic struggle – the start of all the other disadvantages. This is undeniable, there is no point denying it. So it has been inevitable that the “alternative”, in Scotland, has been tied up with the language question. There is a second part to this. MacDiarmid's big argument was that the semantic range of Scots had to be extended very radically in order to produce significant literature. Poetry had continued to be written in Scots throughout, but his point was that it had been anti-intellectual, based on popular song, sentimental, and really sub-literary, ever since Drummond of Hawthornden started writing in English, around 1610. MacDiarmid lost his campaign...writing in Scots since 1950 or so has been pervasively in a sub-literary style. The poetry has followed the restriction to limited cognitive domains which the language itself is kept to. The moments when poets other than MacD used Scots in an ambitious, or 20th century, way are few but charged with vital significance. What strikes me, looking at catalogues, is how much of the recent poetry in Scots is directed at children and the school system. It connects with that traumatic moment for seven year olds when they realise that what they speak isn’t English. It favours things like nursery rhymes and folk tales which are mainly oral, are palatable for seven year olds, and are closed off from the world of literature for adults. My impression is that teachers in the primary sector are very keen on this kind of thing, and that the relevant poets spend a lot of time actually in the classroom. They can make a living in that way.

It is clear that MacDiarmid's project failed. Scots is an alternative but it is not producing poetry we can get involved with. The discourse never says that MacD failed, it is a taboo theme. People are not as interested in international importance as in the question of social mobility.
The attempt to reach out to children under 11, to encourage them to do creative writing in their own dialect, is a way of salvaging them for the system in a way which strengthens the system and actually weakens resistance. The proposal is not to have children writing exam answers in Scots, which has never happened. After winning them over, the education system offers them a complete diet of English. This pattern does not lead to a widening of the social scope of the Scots language. Instead, it stays in the playground.
The modern scene sees both poets who are under strain because they speak English but write in Scots, and writers under strain because they speak Scots but write in English.

There is that macaronic poem by Drummond, around 1610:

Nymphae, quae colitis highissima monta Fifaea,
Seu vos Pittenwema tenent, seu Crelia, crofta,
Sive Anstrea domus, ubi nat haddocus in undis,
Codlineusque ingens, et fleucca et sketta pererrant,
Per costam et scopulis Lobster manifootus in udis
Creepat, et in mediis ludit Whitenius undis :
Et vos Skipperii, soliti qui per mare breddum
Valde procul lanchare foris, iterumque redire,
Linquite Skellatas botas, Shippasque picatas,
Whistlantesque simul fechtam memorate bloodaeam,
Fechtam terribilem, quam marvellaverat omnis
Banda Deum, quoque Nympharum Cockelshelearum,
Maia ubi Sheepifeda, et solgoosifera Bassa
Swellant in pelago, cum Sol bootatus Edenum
Postabat radiis madidis et shouribus atris.

A really creative use of language, and satire on the existence of various registers of language. But he wrote almost all his work in English.

Mike Hart used to buy the poetry for Compendium Books in Camden High Street, which was a basic resource. I used to prevent him from working by chatting to him, bad really. On one of those occasions, he told me about the poetry scene in Glasgow around 1967. People had got the idea of pop poetry from the Liverpool thing. So they read their poems in imitation Liverpool accents. Logical.

Charles Lind told me an anecdote about Sydney Goodsir Smith, as theatre critic for The Scotsman, attending a performance while drunk and falling out of a balcony into a lower balcony. Subsequently he lost that job, since the whole theatre had seen this happen. I looked on the internet and found a range of ingenious alternative explanations of this event, none of which I find credible. I don’t really like his poetry, but on reflection I find it has a theatrical quality which is low on authenticity but solves certain problems by being broad and exaggerated, and so just lurches beyond the question of linguistic authenticity.

I have quite a few issue of Lallans, the magazine of the Scots language movement. It used to annoy me by throwing out literary standards. But on re-reading I am more optimistic. There is a splendid poem in shetlandic dialect on MacDiarmid's geological threips:

On a shingly beach at Linga Grieve hed
his wilderness experience: wrat his epic
at owsed da wash o culture, da swittle o ideas.
Only da stons apö da ayre were irreducible.
Da briggistanes o Sodom man a shiggled
tae der very atoms wi da weicht o wirds:
wirds fa dae skröf o sciences, geology
an fae a teet at testaments, a nod at Norn
an odd conglomerate.

Man, I doot if dere’s a raised beach
onywhaar on Whalsa. (Da Nordern Isles were
relatively droonded i da Late Devensian,
no raised. Wis glacio-isostacy a wird too far?)

Christine de Luca declares, in her poem, that there are no raised beaches on Whalsay and MacD wasn't standing on a raised beach at all. Interesting. MacD lived in a house called Sudheim (south home) which was corrupted to ‘Sodom’, not sure I believe that. Anyway, this is Purely Fabulous and justifies the cost of the North Atlantic.