Poetry's curious relationship with power is seen in stone voices
This week, lines from three of our National Makar's works were unveiled on the wall – from Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay and Kathleen Jamie.
The method is beautiful. Words are carved into geologically specific types of Scottish stone – Achnaba Schist from Lochgilphead for Liz; Ailsa Craig granite from Ayrshire for Jackie; Dalbeattie granite from Dumfriesshire for Kathleen. Stone voices indeed, as Neal Ascherson once put it.
These new rocks disturb another kind of ancient continuity. For the first 10 years of the wall, as chosen by an all-male panel, there were no female writers (the worker-poet Mary Brooksbank was included in 2009, along with Norman MacCaig).
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Rennie Mackintosh, RLS, Gray, Henderson, MacCaig, Morgan, two from Burns, three from MacDiarmid … Many of the quotes are undeniably inspirational (I hold close to me MacDiarmid's 'Scotland small?
Our multiform, our infinite Scotland small?' and Fletcher of Saltoun's 'If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation').
But no Muriel Spark, Janice Galloway, Nan Shepherd, Naomi Mitchison? There is now at least some rectification of the sexism of the original list.
The new verses fit into the wall's predominant theme, which is to hymn a progressive Scottish national identity. Lochhead provides a clear injunction to the country's politicians within (and the citizens without): 'this our one small country… our one, wondrous,spinning, dear green place. What shall we build of it, together in this our one small time and space?'
Kay's lines – 'Where do you come from? 'Here,' I said, 'Here. These parts''– is short and sharp about those who cannot conjugate her broad Scots speech and her black skin.
Jamie's contribution initially seems a little psychedelic (which I welcome): 'Be brave: by the weird-song in the dark you'll find your way'.
Until you realise that this was one of the weekly poems she composed through the referendum year of 2014. 'Weird-song in the dark' seems all too descriptive of the goal of indy right now.
So if this is largely 'patriotic verse' – and it would be a pluralistic Parliament wall that had anything else – it's our love of a complex and surprising, rather than purist and monolithic nation that's being articulated here.
It looks like there are scores of other potential poetic gaps in the Canongate Wall. Let's see what treasures will be selected under the conditions of a future Scotland.
Poetry and power, as I survey the landscape locally and globally, have a curious relationship.
The great modern Scottish poet Don Paterson, in his impressive (and funny) 2017 book The Poem, reminds us that poetry has the deepest roots.
It stems from the need of pre-literate humans to share information – emotive stories as well as hard facts – about what might aid their survival, via intensely memorable forms of speech and language.
However, while prose evokes, says Paterson – it specifies the item required – poetry invokes, 'calling down its subject from above'.
This is a magical-seeming process in which 'audience and artist collude', both agreeing to 'create the poem, through the investment of an excess of imaginative energy'. Look around the interwebs, and this is the role that poetry is still being given, when it's discussed in the public sphere.
Charley Locke in The New York Times earlier this year wrote about 'the morning ritual that helps me resist the algorithm'. Which is that, upon waking, she doesn't reach for her phone, but tries to memorise a poem with pen and paper.
This poem-ingestion has 'made me better at noticing', says Locke. 'The particularity of a poem, rolling around in the back of my head, reminds me how to look for repetition and snags elsewhere, to hear both text and subtext.
'I think I'm more perceptive, a better observer of both art and the people I love … In my idle mind, instead of defaulting to whatever demands my attention, I move toward a precise, generous beauty,' Locke concludes.
Poetry as an 'excess investment of imaginative energy' looms large in the writings of Franco 'Bifo' Berardi. Bifo is a wild-haired Italian radical from the 1970s (who is also a conceptual darling of the contemporary art circuit).
He redefines poetry as 'the error' (in any piece of culture, not just words on a page) 'that leads to the discovery of new continents of meaning … The excess that contains new imaginations and new possibilities'.
Berardi counterposes this 'poetry' to our over-measured, over-surveilled, depression-inducing, tech-dominated present. He urges young folks, diminished by apprehension about their future prospects, to practice it furiously – and replenish themselves.
These poetic activities sound like the spoken-word, 'slam' poetry scene of the early 2000s in Scotland, as described by Jenny Lindsay in the Scottish-themed edition of the current Irish Pages.
Going by the mantra 'if it doesn't exist, create it!', Lindsay recalls that 'we wrote for audiences, not for snooty poets and writers. And the liveness was key, the audience reaction our main critic'.
The 'scene' (as Lindsay describes it) fell prey to culture wars, entertainingly described by poetry maven Colin Waters as 'a punch-up in a phone box'.
Yet Lindsay also profiles how social media, and the marketed self it enables, has also changed – or perhaps incorporated – the pathways of poets.
She notes Rupi Kaur's 4.4 million followers on Instagram, her self-help poems accompanied by evocative line drawings. This produced a first volume that sold two million book copies. Perhaps the algorithms might not be so antipathetic to the poetic voice, after all …
I guess it depends on the poetry – whether, as Ezra Pound once put it, it's 'the news that stays news'.
This week in Glasgow's Kelvin Hall, I was speaking on a panel to commemorate the centenary of a Scot who troublingly exemplifies Berardi's version of the disruptively 'poetic': Alexander Trocchi.
Situationist; writer of manifestos, existential novels, pornography (and poetry); both publisher of Beckett and Neruda, and drug dealer/pimp …Trocchi crashed the doors of the palace of excess, in both constructive and destructive ways.
Read his essay in the Scottish New Saltire journal of 1962, The Invisible Insurrection Of A Million Minds, and it remains spookily relevant to our times.
Think of this in the context of memes and networks: 'We envisage an organisation whose structure and mechanisms are infinitely elastic; we see it as the gradual crystallisation of a regenerative cultural force, a perpetual brainwave, creative intelligence everywhere recognising and affirming its own involvement …
Trocchi describes further this poetic action: 'Without indignation, by a kind of mental ju-jitsu that is ours by virtue of intelligence, of modifying, correcting, polluting, deflecting, corrupting, eroding, outflanking … inspiring what we might call the invisible insurrection.'
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Insurrection out of what, against what, though? I can see the current terrain clearly enough. Levels of trust in politics and business-as-usual are vertiginously low; the very worst could be the beneficiaries of it.
Empowerment at the everyday level has to be paid much, much more than the present lip-service.
All political classes should be on high alert.
Yet the sight of poetry from socialists, feminists, decolonisers, aesthetes and idealists, carved into the stone walls of a (putatively) people's parliament, holds out some tiny prospect for me.
Is national progress still possible in Scotland? Can we still work as if we live 'in the early days of a better nation', as Alasdair Gray's inscription (on Iona marble) puts it? I think the poets, old and new on the Canongate Wall, say 'aye'.
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