Seditious: A three part series on poems at The Story Boat

Angus Calder’s “Ye are na Mary Morrison!” (pub. 2003) is one of the poems I’ll be reciting at The Story Boat  at the Alter Schlachthof in Hamburg on Fri., 27^th January. First the poem; then I’ll be discussing why it matters –

  

         “Ye are na Mary Morrison!”                                                not

There wis a kinda plainness                                                                           was

(and, tae be frank, plookiness) tae Mary.                                                      to, spottiness

She stood short and square

like the dream of a nation

in which truths wid happen – not scary,                                                      would

not altogether ruled by vainness –

and very definitely there.

I appreciated the whiff of her knickers

wafting towards me above the heather

eftir we’d done the business thegither.                                                         after, together

Her fingernails were strong, but nae vicious.                                               no

There wis a tang of parsley in her hair.                                                         was

When she peed and flushed it wis like an avalanche,                                   was

and somehow her every utterance was seditious.

(Published in Chapman Magazine, Nr. 102-3, Edinburgh: 2003.)

Who’s this Mary & which seditious things may she be saying to us? And why should a reader in Germany – or, tae be frank, anywhere outside Scotland – bother with a poem that they may mistakenly take to be written in dialect?

A mistake, because this here isn’t a dialect, but rather a text written in Scottish English, with some Scots included. A lexis accessible to any reader who’s familiar with Standard English and who’s ready to stretch out a little into the pleasurable unknown;  I’ve attached a gloss down the right-hand margin in any case.

            Calder wrote in Scottish English and in Scots for two vital reasons. Firstly it was the language he went on hearing throughout his life (c. 1948 – 2008), particularly when back home in Edinbra, on the buses, on the streets and in the pubs. Secondly he had an acute historical awareness – exemplified in his book length studies on colonialism & his work as the co-editor of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature in the 80s – that writing in minority, endangered languages was a welcome duty, an act of sedition in itself.

            Which the poem is full of, from the hissing, sibilant “ss” sound in “plainness” in the first line, right through to the susurrus  in “seditious”. In the susurration – the whispering & rustling “s” sounds running through the poem – plainness / plookiness / short /scary / viscious / utterance / seditious – to name but a few words in which these sound occur – we hear the voice of the poem consistently enjoying saying that which is not meant to be said, just like the snake talking to Eve in the Garden of Eden. You’re not meant to start a love poem by talking with unsentimental honesty about the beloved’s limitations – about her “plainness, and, to be frank, plookiness”. If those who new Calder can be sure that the poem is partly about an actual lover that Calder had, I wonder how this lover took to being described as plain & plooky in public. Yet if this poem is about one of Calder’s actual lovers, it’s also about another real man’s relationship perception of another real woman, and here again, Calder is enjoying the transgression in his unique take on this relationship.

 The clue to this other couple comes from the title, Ye are na Mary Morrison! On first reading, this title sticks out like a sore plook; the “na” in it is anachronistic, not recognisable as part of the late 20^th C. Scots and Scottish English that Calder uses in the poem itself, or at least not from the limited Edinbra / east of Scotland context as I knew it. I first thought it could only be a scrap of language picked up in a school playground, two girls fighting as part of a game, one girl claiming the right to pretend to be an older girl of some reputation, Mary Morrison, the other girl refuting that right with scorn: “Ye are na Mary Morrison!” Sadly, the facts that the internet offer so nakedly dismiss this fancy: “Ye are na Mary Morrison.” is a line taken from the song Mary Morison written by Robert Burns in 1784-85. (The full text of which plus decent critique is available here. Joann Gilmartin’s singing of the song makes me want to hear more Burns sung live, & to facilitate in this happening.)

So Calder’s poem takes the key line from Burns’ song as it’s starting point. In this line of the song the poem’s narrator is sat at a fine dance, the fiddle’s “trembling string” stirring up gaiety amongst the fair looking-guests assembled, but he’s looking at all these bonnie ladies & thinking of his true love, saying inwardly to all of them, “ye are na Mary Morison.” In writing a poem with this title which goes on to give Calder’s imagination of how Mary actually could be, he’s subverting the cult of good-looking, sexual physicality that all Robert Burns’ work is steeped in. No writer’s portraits – aside, perhaps, from the portraits of Goethe – have been so fetishised as Burns’ have been, with always the same image or two to be found on ten-thousand tea towels & pieces of kitsch, pseudo-modern art in ten-thousand Scottish tourist traps. There can be no doubt from the evidence of the portraits that Burns was a handsome man. But to derive from that – as Scots do – that the sex Burns had was a frivolous, light-hearted thing with women whose beauty matched his own is to suppress the sexual desperation that comes through Burns’ work: that of a man intensly into “doing the business” and ideologically committed to it, living in a society where rigid class division & the iron-hand of a calvanistic church prevented him enacting many of his sexual-romantic visions. Burns’ sex must often have been a matter of taking what he could get, a matter of plainness, plookiness even, lice, gonorrhoea, damp & diry bedclothes.

            Calder gives us the Mary Morison beyond where Burns’ song stops, filling in the naturalistic, novelistic detail which is utterly absent in the song. His major sedition – agitating against the Scottish residing elements of the UK state, who, for almost two hundred years were happy to see Burns kept wearing the strait-jacket of a depoliticised romantic – is built on a number of minor seditions, of breaches of public order. Which other public intellectual - & that’s who Calder was in Edinbra, albeit in quite small circles – will write a poem in which it’s ambiguous whether it is he, or Burns, or both, who, “appreciated the whiff of her knickers” after scratchy, itchy, open-air sex on the heather? A tad embarrassing, isn’t it? – Where’s the cleverness, the get-out clause, the irony? Where else is the closeness in sound & sense between “sedition” and “seduction”, between “seditious” and “seductive”, more evident than in this poem? Despite, or maybe even because, of this Mary’s plainness & plookiness, she manages to seduce the reader, taking them into her fantastic, revolutionary world, where every thing she says – her every utterance – was seditious. What, every one?  Pass the milk. Are you taking that book back to Davie. I’m off out. All said in a seditious fashion? Glorious. Makes me want to meet Mary & makes me regret that I never experienced Angus Calder live. Who knew that knowledge of your cultural tradition is essential, in order to agitate against authorities who house themselves, parasitical, on the backs of traditions. 

A question of belief.

     A huge practical problem of political debate is that especially unpleasant facts used to illuminate a particular subject will often be rejected outright; those you are talking to will refuse to believe you. So it was when the conversation turned last week, in the course of one of my group conversation English lessons, to the topic of how Hamburg treats its asylum seekers. Our SPD government has just announced its reneging on a previous promise, and will continue to farm 180 of its asylum seekers out to the back of beyond in Mecklenburg, rather than house them within the bounds of its own state. (See article in die Taz from 30.1.2011.) (Go here for the free tool to translate German websites into English).

    And what then? There, out there in the sticks, the kids have no school - although Hamburg state law stipulates that all children of asylum seekers must attend school, in the same way as German kids. This was the point that some participants in my lessons simply would not believe. And after the disbelief, comes the defence: being in a refugee camp anywhere in the world is a horrible experience. Many older Germans who make this statement are talking from the heart: they may have experienced life in a refugee camp in Hamburg as a child, after coming as part of the movement of displaced persons after WW2. After that there were later refugee camps in Hamburg to house the influx of refugees - often fleeing with few possessions - from East Germany in the 1950s. Might personal experience of life as a refugee - however brief - increase ones sympathy for refugees in your state today? Why should it - distancing yourself from them by denying the details of their daily lives must be the most efficient way of dealing with the unpleasantness. Better to belief that a journalist in a renowned newspaper got a key fact of her article wrong, perhaps willfully.

     Which perhaps prooves that politics is not about facts, but rather about belief-systems which contradict each other so strongly, that in the clash of steel on steel it's near impossible to hear what the other side is shouting. You're back with James I of the UK, not wanting to hear the Catholic's say, but rather wanting to drive a Protestant wedge, in the form of Ulster & the Ulster Scots, between the Catholic south of Ireland & the Catholics in Scotland's western Isles. For James I, for those who choose to be interested in asylum-seekers and for those who cling hard to the rock of disinterest, the facts were & are a side-show: talking politics is a question of belief.

Your own work, that's the prize

Concerned that my last post may be misinterpreted as sour grapes about my city’s latest laurel-crowned translators, I write here to clarify; Ingo, Susanne & Ursel unquestionably “deserve” their prizes; who’d doubt their work was the best? My punch was not aimed at prize-winners but rather at prize-giving & prize givers.

You’ll be told that you need to reward excellence in society by granting honours, usually with a whack of cash attached. If you didn’t do this, it’s implied, excellence would remain plankton-like, swilling about the seas, it’d have no motivation to conjulate into a nice, compact two chapters &  proposal form. We’d have no excellence, no one who wanted to bring things on. We’d be back in the cave.

Is there any evidence to counter this claim? – It’s hardly possible to compare our societies with others, that give few or no prizes – because almost all societies do reward excellence.

The alternative is to hypothesise that prize-giving exists - not because literature or other arts or other areas of life wouldn’t produce wonders without it – but in order to reinforce the status of the prize-givers. As long as even a few people are still interested in what you’re doling out, your place in the pecking order is assured. When the last waverers waver away from you & ignore your prize – and ten applicants is getting close to a blanket ignorance - your podest is pulled away under your feet.

Which may lead prize-givers to take up their own, real work again, their “doing.” Perhaps it is only in our own work that there are prizes to win, which are worth winning. And worthy the winning.

A carve-up or a meritocracy? Hamburg's literary prizes.

Alongside six grants of six thousand Euro each for new German literature, a team at Hamburg's Kulturbehörde headed by Wolfgang Schömel grant three literary translation prizes of € 2500 each year. The literary translation prizes are exclusively for translations into German. I submitted an application including a sample translation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's 1930s modernist masterpiece "A Scot's Quaire", a work largely unknown in the German speaking world. Have a dip here into the novel if you're not familiar with it.

Dr. Schömel informed us per email that there were 194 applicants in total for these nine prices, including the three for translation. Of these only ten were translators. Not to have won a prize which - purely statistically speaking - you've got a one in three chance of winning is quite the opposite of inspiring.

Under "Förderpreis für Übersetzung" I understood something like supporting young talent, a prize to bring unknown translators on their way to their first proper contracts for literary translation. Not a bit of it.
Ingo Herzke, one of the winning translators, has done nearly all the German A. L. Kennedy & Allan Bennet's "The Uncommon Reader"; Susanne Höbel does, among other things, the German versions of the Graham Swift novels. Ursel Allenstein, the final winner, translates from Swedish and Danish and has a row of published translations to her credit.

So these prizes "award achievement" do they? Then you need to have a serious read of poet & satirical artist Tom Leonard's critique of prize-giving inside the literature industry which is spread, magnificently throughout his journals of the last two years.

On filthbook (like this!)

I returned from filthbook the other night with the predictable feelings – vacuously psyched-up, morosely enjoying the illusion of having done something, while knowing full well that a kitsch, peter-pan nowhere land had again managed to rob me of ninety minutes of my life, time which I shall never again recover. I came across my closest friend from my young adulthood –aged twenty-two, I’d broken off the friendship with him completely, an action that had meant a lot to me. There he was, taking a home-made quiche out of the oven, sending out his charming, playful, bashful smile in photos taken thirteen years later. Suppressing the separation-pain and necessity of the break – buzz, buzz, click, click – I click him the pre-formulated filth request – or, to use the official party language, I filth him –  which he filths back, accepted, without message, some days later. So now we’re friends in filth on filthbook & if we meet, by chance, on the street in Edinburgh – him say coming up from one of the Cowgate pubs and me going down that street by the back of the Tron, past where the City Cafe used to be – we’re less likely now to blank each other, though the objective shame flowing under the swapping of Broughton High School news would only be the greater, because of the official link between us in the book.

It makes me think of card-carrying party members in one-party states; of course most of them know and knew in private that being in the pary is the lowest of the sheepish low; but being in the party can get you jobs, get you deals you wouldn’t have got, kid you into a tolerable self-image. Is that a bad-taste comparison? -  however bad-taste filthbook may be, it doesn’t torture or kill you, like the apparatchiks did. I wonder. The middle-aged man sounding of in front of 104 filthy-friends about the coolest piece of 1990s techno he’s currently listening to – isn’t he desensitising a piece of his consciousness for ever, murdering it actually? And who are we, sitting with bags under our eyes, flicking through these posts – bystanders, curious for 0.25 seconds, the vicarious pleasure not worth the skin of scum settling thereby on the soul.

But must finish now. Writing this article, I’ve been neglecting my duties on The Book for far too long.