Why I Write Poetry

Ian Humphreys, Ian Humphreys

• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781913437305
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Poesía

What motivates poets in the 21st century? How do they find their voice? What themes and subject matters inspire them? How do they cope with set-backs and deal with success? What keeps them writing? Why I Write Poetry, edited by Ian Humphreys, combines lively and thought-provoking essays, along with individual writing prompts to help you create your own new poetry.

In this book, twenty-five contemporary poets reflect with insight, wit and wisdom on the writing life. Each offers their distinctive take on what inspires and spurs them on to write poetry. The essays shine a light on everything from performance, dialect, the body and paying attention, to bearing witness, finding your wings and joining the journey of poetry, and encompass the practical, personal, and political. Within these pages, you'll discover how a poet's background and values can fundamentally shape and inform their work. New voices sit alongside poets with many collections under their belts and you'll find encouragement, creative provocations, advice and, above all, reasons to write. Read on, learn and enjoy.

With essays by: Romalyn Ante, Khairani Barokka, Hafsah Aneela Bashir, Leo Boix, Vahni Capildeo, Mary Jean Chan, Jo Clement, Sarah Corbett, Jane Commane, Rishi Dastidar, Jonathan Edwards, Rosie Garland, W. N. Herbert, Ian Humphreys, Keith Jarrett, Zaffar Kunial, Rachel Mann, Andrew McMillan, Kim Moore, Pascale Petit, Jacqueline Saphra, Clare Shaw, Daniel Sluman, Jean Sprackland, and Jennifer Wong.

W. N. HERBERT

What Is thi langwij a thi guhtr Using Us For? On Poetry and Dialect

What is it that you’re doing if, like increasing numbers of non-RP (received pronunciation) poets from William Letford to Liz Berry, you write something in your ‘local’ voice? In my case it would be the Dundonian dialect of the Scots language – and I must confess, as soon as I’ve said that, I feel a temptation to sidestep my own question and start arguing instead about what is meant by local, by dialect, by language. That would of course be to trap my foot in my very own mouth.

Consider the question put to the novelist Val McDermid in the wake of the 2021 Scottish elections by Sky News reporter Adam Boulton: “…would you like to see an independent Scotland abandon speaking the sort of English we’re speaking now?” When Val replies first in English then in Scots, there is a moment of stunned silence, before he completely misses her point about functional bilingualism.

That point is it’s not a matter of either/or. We can do both – or if we stick at Gaelic on the old Duolingo, all three. The first great joy of having another way of speaking is the simple fact of plenitude, of being rich in words. But when the use of our ‘other’ speech carries, as here, political significance, and when, as here, the power balance is in favour of a monoculture, how quickly joy is subverted into defensiveness.

Let’s acknowledge, for argument’s sake, that argumentativeness plays some small part. Does it describe fully the motivation of the poet who writes in Scots or another English? No. Why would you want to do that, assuming you aren’t in it for the pie fight, unless there was something expressed in that plenitude which was worth the strangeness-to-others with its potential drop in reader numbers – something, moreover, which was inherently what poetry is all about?

We understand that such affiliations to the local are made under the shadow of the centre, and are therefore partly a resistance to its arguments about universality. That would be one sense in which Tom Leonard wrote in Glaswegian, or Linton Kwesi Johnson writes in Jamaican. So, by using non-standard English, you are always making an implicit statement about locality over centrality, or at least suggesting: here is a centre too.

In discussing the work of Tom Leonard, the poet Theresa Muñoz says: “Leonard’s work … articulates the painful space between individuals and whatever they are alienated from; be it an absence of belonging to a community, or within their own minds and bodies as they struggle to understand their own identity. … Linguistically, formally, in social and historical contexts, Leonard’s exploration and commitment to this theme is a continuous presence in his writing.”

Many of us have been informed, through looks, shrugs, and half-heard comments, or bright, explanatory corrections, that there’s something wrong with the way we speak. The worst part of this is when we do it to ourselves, as individuals, family members, or neighbours, as workmates and teachers and bosses: subdividing ourselves against ourselves, across and within social divides, across and within families, out from and deep within the self.

We eagerly join our ‘superiors’ in pitting accent against accent, background against background, religion against religion, seizing on race, gender, sexual orientation, using class as a fissiparous, vicious, constantly splintering weapon we keep picking up by the blade and not the handle.

‘You’ can never be like ‘us’ in this rigged game in which ‘we’ have to substitute authenticity for property, but then, as we secretly realise, ‘we’ have never really been like ourselves either.

Using Scots, using dialect, is our counter-argument. It says: “You, O Standard English, may be understood pretty much anywhere – and certainly are by us – but there are many like us, all experiencing the unfairness of this word game, and all our localities are stitched together by this realisation, so we are comprehensible not just to our near neighbours, but, through the principle of localised, individual expression, to all such minorities everywhere, and are approachable by them on that principle.”

So let’s oppose the tendency to tendentiousness with a mode the users of alternatives to English often avail themselves of: not taking ourselves (too) seriously. The deadpan and deeply surreal Scottish comedian Chic Murray performed a parody of a Scots poem which captures this (transcribed here from a recording):

Ae day when the ecks and slaggets dog

and loo that fleg when ickets beg

O greg and slag when of its doo

will rise and waw the grigget.

O gravet grun when ickets beg

and loo the seg when ickets tek

O gravet nicket icket bag and aye!

and slew the fleggan neck …

He’s halfway through the next line when the audience’s howls of laughter make him pause, mock-affronted. He tries to resume, but claims to have lost his place while (apparently) impersonating an owl:

Ae day when lags and lickets end

and waw the pu o hogget – HOO!

oh whit was that? OHOO! OHOO! –

ah lickets dae when ickets deck – OHOO! –

He races anxiously through the whole thing again, thus emphasising both its almost complete lack of sense and its entirely coherent structure.

Thinking about how this idea of incomprehensibility is symbolised by the Lallans-heavy Scottish poem – indeed how perfectly that marries two assumed obscurities: that of the language with that of poetry itself – I’m reminded of the strange contiguity of Chic’s family home, on Bank Street, Greenock, to 1 Hope Street, the (almost optimistic) birthplace of W. S. Graham, key poet of the limitations of language.

This closeness of the closies almost embodies G. Gregory Smith’s famous definition of the Caledonian Antiszyzygy: “the absolute propriety of a gargoyle’s grinning at the elbow of a kneeling saint”. And Chic’s marvellous play on a poem, tongue-twisting Scots and nonsense, is as knowing as Graham’s own dismissal of the “plastic” Scots of his day – he claimed to have overheard an argument among Hugh MacDiarmid’s followers that the word “telephone” should be replaced with “farspeak”.

Both are, satirically, part of the internal debate over how Scots are Scots allowed to be. In response to that debate, it seems to me that we gain two things through expressing ourselves in oor ain tongues, whatever they may be.

Firstly we access intimacy, a closeness that you feel not only to your centre but to the language that approaches it – there must be an aspect of the familial, of the language of lovers, in that relation between words and place. This is the intimacy won in Liz Berry’s ‘Oh Sweethearts’:

We’m side-by-side on the grass,

me barefeet in the water,

bowing our heads, gentle

as osses at the water trough.

This intimacy is not limited to speakers of said tongue: every year, without knowing what half the words mean, millions of revellers greet the New Year with ‘Auld Lang Syne’ precisely because that closeness survives. As Micawber puts it in David Copperfield, “‘I am not exactly aware … what gowans may be, but I have no doubt that Copperfield and myself would frequently have taken a pull at them, if it had been feasible.’”

Secondly, as Micawber intimates, we experience a bracing strangeness in the very fibre of intimacy, because it is being rendered strange to you by that overarching standard. This means you must be awake to use your own language, keenly aware of its procedures in order to access the gowans or other minute particulars by its use.

Your centre, then, is always ec-centric, and the ‘real’ centre of things is rendered, by this awareness, an ex-centre, clinging to a power over your imagination it has – nearly – lost. And because this centre has been made strange unto you, by age or experience, education or migration, economics or social pressure, you use this language in the hope it will allow you to go home.

Hame may be right before you but slightly displaced, or in the past, even somewhat idealised, but you’re used to being told such desires are nostalgic, sentimental, whimsical, inauthentic, unrealistic, limiting, or even coorse. In fact, you’ve long been aware that there seems to be a special vocabulary for belittling the sort of thing you do, as though that were, somehow, part of the exercising of power that maintains the standard.

This phenomenon is one the United Kingdom has long been in denial about, perhaps because it undermines simplistic notions as to what that unity means. It is diglossia, the situation where there are two versions of the same language, one theoretically ‘high’ status, and the other supposedly ‘low’, but both acknowledged as co-existing, as in what was defined in Greek as Katharévo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Also Available from Nine Arches Press
• Contents
• IAN HUMPHREYS
• ROMALYN ANTE
• MARY JEAN CHAN
• ANDREW McMILLAN
• JEAN SPRACKLAND
• W. N. HERBERT
• LEO BOIX
• KIM MOORE
• KEITH JARRETT
• ROSIE GARLAND
• ZAFFAR KUNIAL
• DANIEL SLUMAN
• JANE COMMANE
• VAHNI CAPILDEO
• SARAH CORBETT
• JO CLEMENT
• JACQUELINE SAPHRA
• KHAIRANI BAROKKA
• JENNIFER WONG
• RACHEL MANN
• HAFSAH ANEELA BASHIR
• CLARE SHAW
• RISHI DASTIDAR
• JONATHAN EDWARDS
• PASCALE PETIT
• Further Reading
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements and Works Cited
• About the editor and this book