Poets introducing poets! The Scotland-Canada exchange
January 2007 : Feature
Stephen Scobie introducing Ian Hamilton Finlay
“Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.”
—ihf, “Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening.”
I first met Ian in 1967. I’d written him a letter requesting a meeting and an interview, for a research project on contemporary Scottish poetry. His answer, welcoming me with his customary openness and generosity, was dated “Jumy 3rd.” Rather than excusing the typo, he wrote: “It must be some sort of summer elephant.” For forty years thereafter, he never ceased to show me things as rare, as beautiful, as whimsical, or as sublime as summer elephants.
Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) was one of the great artists of his age, despite (or because of) the fact that he was never completely of his age. He stood in often solitary opposition to many of its major currents. He was a devout Classicist in an age of Romanticism. He used post-modernist techniques in profoundly pre-modernist ways. In a pacifist age, he embraced the iconography of war; the most peaceful of men, he was capable of the most refined and civilized anger. His imagery embraced wee Fife fishing boats and Pacific aircraft carriers with equal warmth. He fought constant battles with local authorities, Arts Councils, and all aspects of cultural orthodoxy. He was a 20th century avant-garde artist with roots deeply seated in the 18th century (or the Greek pre-Socratic philosophers—the rough track up to his garden at Stonypath bore the literal but profound admonition “The way up and the way down is one and the same”).
July 2006 : Feature
Steven Heighton introducing Robin Robertson
Misquoting Cromwell while reading Robin Robertson
My father told me this one.
In April 1653 Oliver Cromwell—officially England’s “Lord Protector”, unofficially a military dictator, additionally a war criminal given to thanking God for his mercy but disinclined to show much of his own—dissolved the last vestige of Parliament, known as the Rump, with the following speech: “You have sat here too long for all the good you have done. In the name of God, now go.” And the Rump dissolved. Cromwell had thirty musketeers with him, of course, and a reputation for savagery; he might have said anything and dissolved the Rump. Told a joke, if he knew one. Issued his order in Basque. But (my father said to me, repeating that one-breath speech) what is it about those twenty words that makes them so damn effective? (When I was a boy, he liked to be teaching me things all the time. Especially when driving me places.)
I scratched my nose. I can’t remember, now, if I came up with any sort of response.
Certainly the Lord Protector’s speech had been short. Had the Rump dissolved in sheer gratitude? That was an age of interminable speeches, wasn’t it?
Twenty words, my father said, and twenty syllables. Count them.
I did.
You see?
They’re all one syllable, I said.
Right! he exclaimed—one two three!—smacking his free hand on the dashboard, dust rising with each smack. Through the windows a span of amber prairie under lucid blue sky: the Trans-Canada Highway, westbound lane, the Rockies still tucked under the horizon.
Each syllable, he said, bang, bang, like the slam of a judge’s gavel after he gives sentence. Or—or like a musket shot from each of those soldiers he brought in with him. Cromwell.
I thought there were thirty soldiers, I said.
Thirty, twenty—the point is there’s no arguing with it. It’s strong speech. People think they can make what they say impressive by using a lot of big words. Words with Latin roots, Greek roots. Jargon. Argot. Polyunsaturated syllables. It’s those hard little fist-shaped Saxon words that really grab you by the lobes.
April 2006 : Feature
Aislinn Hunter introducing John Burnside
I first discovered John Burnside’s poetry the way most poets discover other writers: in the form of a slim volume sitting on a crammed bookshelf in a good bookstore. First of all I liked the title of the book (The Light Trap) and the look of the font. I also liked the author’s name: it seemed warm and somehow familial. I pulled the book out, opened it up and read a few lines. There it was: a sense of travel, of being Elsewhere, of seeing another world as no one, save John Burnside, has ever seen it. Who in Canada would write, as Burnside does in Common Knowledge, of “The classes of jamjars. Subtleties of string”? Of “tubers locked in bottles, sprouting wings”? No one I knew of. But more than that, more than the specifics of language and place, Burnside was good: a good philosopher and a good technician; a rigorous examiner of the common and the ephemeral; of the seemingly insignificant and the large.
Scotland-Canada
- Recent Columns:
- by Country:
- by Month:
- April 2007 (1)
- January 2007 (1)
- October 2006 (1)
- August 2006 (1)
- July 2006 (1)
- May 2006 (1)
- April 2006 (2)
- more
-
Great Scots Archives
- Recently:
- by Month:
- April 2007 (1)
- January 2007 (1)
Great Scots is powered by Movable Type 3.2
arcpoetry.ca
- Log Entries:
- How Poems Work:
- Transpoetry:
- Great Scots:
Arc: Canada’s National Poetry Magazine
is published by the Arc Poetry Society
with help from our sponsors.