Poetry in the Days of Pestilence

Poetry in the time of pestilence. This is my last day at school before I retreat into a life of monkish contemplation. I have a few projects to do with the Holywood Trust (I'm writing a small history) and my school writing group anthology but I have also decided to try and video a poem a day and post it on the blog, for my own and others entertainment maybe. I think I'll gibber for a minute insanely then read a poem I like a lot then a new poem of mine? Those whom I have bored rigid recently will know of my 50 scots poems project on the theme of 'What if?' I may read some of them but in the meantime here's my Scottish Enlightenment Night Out poem. Keep safe folks, see you soon.


Whit if Thaur Wis a Scottish Enlightenment Nicht Oot


It a stairtit in the Rat an Monkey
whan Tam Reid telt Davy Hume
tae hae sim common sense
an he went daft
cos auld Davy theenks
since a knowledge is empirical,
its possible, no likely mind ye,
no to have ony.
Adam said if thaur wis an example
o someyin hivin nae common sense
Tam wis it- look at yon fucking stupit
hat he wis wearin
in this blowsy weather,
like an auld pair odf drawers
crossit wi a fucking tea cosy.
Dugald pipes up tryin
tae breeng saucht
but they a shout him doon.
Naebody fuckin remembers
a fuckin word ye scrieve
quoth Jim Hutton,
yer anely weel kent cos o us,
am seek o ye hingin aboot wi us onyweys
this is a Select Club,
next hing we'll hae wummen in it
and they stapit fir a meenit tae laugh at that
thocht, but then stairt again
an then they a get chucked oot o the pub
an stairt rollin heester gowdie doon the road
kickin fuck oot o each ither
till the French Revolution.

 

 

 

 

Poetry at the Vic Beer Garden

Unlike many other poets who cross the road when they see me coming, the makar Stuart Paterson

has been a long and warm companion on many a seasonal and unseasonal day and is always keen for a chat usually over a drink. The other day, we ventured to a little known oasis in Drumsleet, the beautiful, well appointed and lush beer garden of the Victoria Arms. There we exchanged news about our recent poetry successes. Stuart is just back from a triumphant tour of South Africa, where he made many important contacts with isXhosa poets, some details of which can be found here:

https://www.dgwgo.com/featured-author/local-writer-stuart-paterson-african-tour/

He is of course one of the best writers of Scots poetry there is and was also excited to reveal great news of a new book, and many new opportunities lying ahead in the year to come. I was happy also to talk, among other things,  about my upcoming tour of the Blash o God, a multi media collaboration with a French based artist focused on the Buchanites which is due to appear in three cities and the Wigtown Book Festival.     https://www.photokennel.com/the-poetry-connection

 All in all we shared the multiplicity of rich poetry projects and achievements that you might expect from two poets at the very top of their game.

What an afternoon! I think we had eight quid between us.

Walking Quietly

I'm afraid this blog, rich source of wisdom though it is, fell foul of the easy lures of Facebook. I am less enamoured of pussbook now so am inclined to meander back here in my dotage, back to tales of Theosyphilis Neill- yes still bringing in the contraband thistlemilk by barge down the Nith every Sunday morning- Macduff and the rest.


I have retired from being a pedagogue though have been drawn back by episodic penury. I am still writing to some effect, but this effect is not so far visible in my wallet.  Two books have come and gone, https://www.waterstones.com/book/not-actually-being-in-dumfries/hugh-mcmillan/9781910745106 and https://www.waterstones.com/book/mcmillans-galloway/hugh-mcmillan/9781910745182  Others are on the stocks, more talk of them soon.


Currently I am writing some poems about Original Nations in America. There has always been a rumour, backed up it must be said by DNA evidence, that a great grandparent was of this stock: a very exciting prospect. I have always walked quietly in Capenoch Wood, for instance, another sure sign. Researching Bufallo Bill's Wild West Show and its visits to Scotland, I came upon the tale of Crazy Dancer, one of the Sioux Ghost Dancers who was sprung from incarceration to tour with Bufallo Bill and re-enact the destruction of his own people on  daily basis. He spent some time in Barlinnie having been arrested in a pub. here's a poem about it: The picture is from Buffalo Bills visit to Dumfries.

Ghost  Dancing

in the Gallowgate 1892

 

After one whisky too many
Crazy Dancer
thumped a minder
over the head with a doorstop

but before that had reached

an understanding
beyond the need for words
with Donald from Sligachan

whose leg was shot off

in Egypt with the Seaforths.
They both lived in
the hem of their histories

ragged at the edges

telling stories for beer
over and over
in the insistent poetry of tongues

as though the fevered act

of repetition might
reel back time
and the landscapes
black with ghosts.

Arts in Dumfries in Rude Health

The Arts in Dumfries are in Rude Health as Twelve People  Follow a Man in a Horse's Head and Four Girls with Pink Faces hold Smoke Sticks as a Machine Lifts a Cow

Not for the first time 

the town is being reanimated,

filled with colour, music and ritual.

Ignore the blank expressions 

and the cries of What the Fuck,

we are empowering the people

and what risks we take! 

It harks back to the time

the Vikings sailed here 

trading beads and origami herons. 

Our links with this proud race

are perpetuated in

a vegetarian stovie recipe,

our sense of destiny,

and the ruthless way we fill

in our funding applications. 

And so the months passed....

Two new books folks. When I recover the knowledge of the ancients I shall put them up for sale to the right of this page.

I'm not going to attempt to summarise what's happened since December 2015 though highlights might creep out. Talking of creeps I am regaled this morning with pictures of the folically unchallenged Neil Oliver, sneering at the case for Scottish independence in an unashamedly adolescent manner. I wrote a section about Neil in 'McMillan's Galloway' which was far too kind but I reproduce it here, by way of a cheeky advert for the book.

  Examining one of the panels of the ancient Knockhill Cross, it is clear that the figure near the Archangel Gabriel depicted with long hair and a microphone, is Neil Oliver, the historian with the best hair on television, even more beautiful than Walter Scott's Helen of Kirkconnell:

O Helen fair! beyond compare,
A ringlet of thy flowing hair,
I'll wear it still for evermair
Until the day I die.

Neil is an ex-pupil of my old school Dumfries Academy where, so we are told by his agent, ‘his love of history was born’. As well as having hair, Neil is a great walker and has starred on TV tramping coastal paths round many countries that have a coast, like Scotland, Ireland and now Australia. My coastal walking is not as good as Neil’s, and in fact only consists of a 22 mile hike done in the dead of night while completely drunk in Mull after my glasses had been buried in a landslide, but even that small experience has filled me with admiration for Neil’s achievements as well as those of the TV crew who will have to trek the 35,846 kilometres round the variable coastline of Australia with heavy equipment and products to maintain Neil’s hair in its good condition. Going at the pace they were in the programme I saw , they should be finished when Neil is 107 years old, in the year 2074, the year which is, coincidentally, the 250th anniversary of the publication of Mactaggart’s Gallovidian Encyclopedia. What an achievement that will be.

Of course walking long distances without thought to fatigue is a well-established tradition in Dumfries and Galloway. The old Well Path from Durisdeer in Nithsdale north is thought to be the pilgrimage route that linked the south, ultimately Whithorn, with Edinburgh, Dunfermline and other royal centres. It’s also where ‘men of pairts’ would think nothing of walking to university in Edinburgh or St Andrews from their homes. Alexander Murray for instance walked to Edinburgh from Minigaff to become eventually Professor of Oriental Languages in St Andrews. Joseph Thomson, the famous explorer, was famous for his pedestrian activities. His brother noted in 1882:

On the hottest day of summer he walked from Gatelawbridge to the top of Criffel and back, a distance of 55 miles … indulging cheerfully in a dance on his return.

And  not a hair out of place.

Book of the Year

http://www.heraldscotland.com/books-poetry/comment-debate/books-of-the-year-2014-x.25928684

Nice to get wee bit of recognition. Andrew Greig chooses Other Creatures as one of his books of the Year.

Blooms

Blooms on la Mur de la Memòria

colour running onto stucco and stone

like sun or bursting veins. 

Last time I saw the catalan flag

was in George Square

the night our hot Scottish summer

died. We don't want blood,

just our hearts desire,

says a drunk, or was it me?

"El desig del cor, 

guerra no, persones si,

es la via catalania, la via escocia."

Commission over

80,000 words completed folks and handed in. Thank God. Next step another full collection of poems and a novel about Michael Scott, wizard. Watch this space.

Afterword

I take off my specs

and the sea breaks to pieces

of brilliant glass,

each an electric pulse,

each a prism for the sun.

Cracking open a can of Estrella,

I take up my pen like Byron in Sintra,

or Ovid in Constanta, 

happy with the heat, the fish oil,

and the homage of innumerable fans

back home in the sleet.

Why do I think of the Solway then,

that miserable excuse for a sea,

with its rocks nudging out of the silt

like knees in a bath?

Stone upon stone I ignite a light

of a different sort, in memory,

pale on the gorse, hot in the heart.

Shannon the Sheep Shearer

On the way to Australia, I only have to go a few hundred miles at 35,000 feet to meet part of the Galloway diaspora, Shannon from Springholm on her way to train and work as a sheep shearer in New Zealand. She tells me with pride she was part of the ten "sheep shearing sheilas" who raised £14,000 pounds in a charity shearing event held in Newton Stewart in 2013, money that went to the local community hospital and the Royal Educational Trust. "800 sheep" she said, "and there were another 400 in reserve. It was gey tough, but we did it. It's something I could be guid at." 

Shannon worked in her fathers business installing stoves. "I had work, aye, I was lucky, but I'm looking for something else." "Adventure?" I ask. She nods. "Something different, onyways." 

Shannon can't contain her glee at flying off into the blue. She has somewhere to stay and work arranged after a few months of travelling but everything's up for grabs. "I'm going to make it up as I go along" she says, finally. It's a up for grabs", and she gives a deep long chuckle.

Welcome

Welcome to the World, Sexy Book

Oooo-er Madam

Well these Canadians know how to do a poetry reading! I have absolutely no erotic poetry to read so feel free to send me any dirty ditties before I go to Edmonton.

Galloway Tales continue on my other blog http://thegreatgallowaytalehunt.blogspot.co.uk

Auchencairn, and Scotland, as it Should Be

Dick Hattaraik and Billy Marshall

are drinking at the bar.

It's blue and carved from a boat

and they are sharing some porky scratchings

smuggled over last night from Holland.

On the bay, the Black Pearl, no Prince,

rocks at anchor, carronades trained

steadily up the Dumfries road. 

Outside, in a blaze of grass and yellow vetch,

some of Billy's eighty six children

play with an exciseman's hat,

while the exciseman himself

sits blushing, winding yarn for the daughter

whose beauty like Helen of Troy's

is renowned from coast to coast.

It is June, the start of a brilliant summer,

they are breathing the air of Galloway

and it is rich in love and brandy and revolution.

Boundaries shimmer, shift like haze.

It's mathematically possible, in fact, 

for Burns to come in

and put the icing on the cake.

Should I speak? 

Tell my tales of a bit of baccy 

smuggled in euro lorries, 

the angry letters I've written to the Standard,

my hidden fear that in an independent Scotland

my pension might suffer?

Maybe not.

Mid-Term Report

I am pausing for breath soon, off to Alberta to read at the Edmonton Poetry Fest then to Australia in May after the launch of my wee book from Mariscat. I'm about 50,000 words in but have much still to do, though this is the kind of project you could do for the rest of your life. This week I've been talking about camels, Lawrence of Arabia, Bram Stoker and the A75. Why? You'll need to buy the book! Ive designated the end of July as the finish of the project, or at least the handing in of a MS.

Some Meanings

Pockle or Pauchle:

Unfairly gain an advantage by underhand methods. For instance you will often hear that England pauchled the 1966 World Cup because not only were they at home, they also contrived to play all their games at Wembley Stadium. Also in the final they were given a goal when any idiot could see the ball did not cross the line. And they scored their final goal when the opposing team were filing off the park. So if you multiply the German score by two (because England were playing West Germany, only half of the country) and subtract the illegal goals, it's clear that if England had not pauchled, they would have lost 4-2.

Shelpit: 

Thin and cowed, like a dog that has been badly fed and treated. This term is often applied in private to small children you don't like the look of, because it is inpolite to say it out loud. People often say bonny when admiring babies and liken them to their mothers however mawkit these mothers might be but they never say shelpit when they don't like them. People can still be extremely rude, however, when viewing babies as in the old lady who upon surveying a child in a pram was heard to say "what a Bonny baby he's like none o ye". See Nathan for further misunderstandings with newly borns.

A Conversation about Davie Coulthard in Dalbeattie

"Davie Coulthard gave us a lift up the road"

"Davie Coulthard that drives?"

"Aye, he gave us a lift up the road I said"

"Aye he's good at driving"

"Aye"

"I saw him driving in what's it called, Monaco"

"Never knew he'd been there"

"Oh aye, no just there, Singapore"

"Singapore?"

"Aye"

"Davie Coulthard?"

"Aye"

"You sure?"

"Aye"

"Davie Coulthard the butcher?"

Geofantasapsychiatry

The longer I do this the more I realise that I don't have to go to Dumfries and Galloway but that Dumfries and Galloway comes to me, in all shapes and forms, in day to day reality and dreams. You can't move and function anywhere without some kind of interaction with people and place and where that happens it's sometimes a cause to write. However the process goes beyond that to a kind of magic or at the very least a succession of leading coincidences. Or has this obsession and sleep deprivation finally taken its toll?

Recently I got a parcel of William Macilvanney novels I hadn't read. As I set out yesterday I absent mindedly stuffed one in my bag. I had planned to have a wee search for Dirk Hatterick's cave, on the coast just past Auchenlarie. No car, but juggling with buses, a finely honed art form of which I think I am, by now, one of the world's finest exponents. I had a wee lunch in Gatehouse in the hotel opposite the Bakehouse, then caught the bus. It was a nice day on the coast, if a little overcast, and when I got off I wandered about on the shore. The road was invisible, and there was only silence and the Solway glittering and clouds running wool white overhead. After a while I sat down and for the sheer hell of it gave a loud howl, frightening the family I hadn't spotted that was walking along the shingle kicking a ball for their dog.

Out of embarrassment, I took out the novel, 'A Gift from Nessus', opened it randomly and began to pretend to read. I saw the word 'Dumfries', skipped a few pages, followed the main character, who I later discovered to be a window salesman from Glasgow, on the road south. A few pages later he was in a hotel, 'the Angel' in the middle of Gatehouse. Then, on the foreshore before Creetown "looking through a rock cleft that was open to a bay, where the wind was farming empty acres of dun sky." Of course, at the end of the chapter, he was disturbed by a family "throwing a ball that was being tirelessly retrieved by a dog."

Even if I hadn't just been sold a new set of windows, I would have found this a bit odd. I think I'll invent a new term for all this. Geofantaspsychiatry. There I've done it.

and in his brain,--
Which is as dry as the remainder biscuit
After a voyage,--he hath strange places crammed
With observation, the which he vents 
In mangled forms.

(As you Like it)

And what has that got to do with This book? Well everything really.

Makarred

The great tour of Wigtownshire designed to inform an eager public about the MacTaggart project gets off to an inauspicious start in Wigtown Library where the staff are shocked to see me, there is no audience, and I retire into the local collection to research furiously to overcome my humiliation. I look in a mirror and am shocked to see myself to tell you the truth: it's been a long bus journey without a toilet stop and a large man bound for the Stranraer boat has spent the whole journey telling me how desperate he is to get out of Scotland because it's destroying his liver.

This is not the first time this has happened to me. I was once invited to a reading in Wick when only the janitor came, and, unlike these discreetly embarrassed librarians, he insisted on making things worse by telling me Edwin Morgan had been the the fortnight before and they had been "queued round the block." Worse I suppose, is a story that Tom Pow once told me about a reading in The Edinburgh Festival at the Art College, entitled 'Bards o Gallowa' featuring himself and the great Willie Neill. In spite of extensive publicity no-one turned up at all and the poets were about to leave quietly and in a dignified way, when the organiser said "wait a minute" and pointing to the door of the bar from where extravagant noise and laughter issued, said " I'll see if anyone wants to come for free." After what seemed an eternity he emerged furiously shaking his head, muttering "no, no-one".

Bobby Dalrymple and the Science of Coincidence

Bobby Dalrymple of Newton Stewart, having just shown an approving gaggle of spectators the mark of an adder bite he'd got as a boy on Cairnsmore, moves effortlessly onto a discourse on the science of coincidence.

'Is it not bloody strange' he asks us, rhetorically, 'My Grandfather Bobby was in the KOSB, and was killed in Cape Hellas in Gallipoli on the 4th June 1915, his body was never found, though he's on the memorial there. My youngest brother is going in October to see it, by the way. Anyway, do you know the Turkish man who's got the cafe across the road?' Everybody nods. 'Aye a really good man. Anyway I was telling him all this and - this is completely kosher now, he showed me the proof- his grandfather was killed in exactly the same place on exactly the same day, except fighting on the other side. Is that no incredible now? ' Everybody agrees.

On the Trail of the Wickerman

Summerisle

What has happened here?

Why are the cottages shuttered,

the streets primed for tumbleweed?

Where are the zimmers, 

the folk carrying parcels of fish,

the kids drumming on fences,

the men and women walking back

leaden footed from work?

Only the offices to prevent

rural depopulation are open,

their computer screens flickering

madly behind half closed blinds.

I am waiting for these small villages 

by the sea to regenerate, 

like in some film,

to be born of flame,

and while I do, public art sprouts

above me,

huge and mysterious like alien pods.

The Clatteringshaws Hydro Electric System

The Clatteringshaws Hydro Electric System as described by Keith Downes in the King's Hotel Dalbeattie 21st January 2014

It's f...........incredible, see the loch we ca Loch Ken, it's an artificial loch, ye ken? On an old tidal system, 6 dams, a third o the power o the whole Stewartry comes fae that, ken, it's a f.........great system, I'm proud as f........of it. Built in the 1930s ken. It's incredible. I'd like you to see it. You'd be f.........dancing for joy when you see it, mukker. F.........dancing. Feenished in 1937, yon Tongland, what a great wee power station. See I'm a Stewartry man, born an bred. F........Dumfries . C'mon now Dumfries has stolen New Abbey frae us, f...........Southerness, f.............Creeton's awa. Shocking. It's a f.............land grab by Dumfries, it's a f.............disgrace. A f...............conspiracy pure and simple. I'm makin too much noise am I? Should be shoutin it frae the rooftops. F...............shocking. Pure and simple.