(This piece, commissioned and -- expertly -- edited by Julian May, was broadcast on Dec 3rd on BBC Radio 3's slot The Essay: Under The Influence, alongside pieces by Alison Brackenbury and Michael Symmons Roberts, among others. This is the unedited version, without the texts for the Morgan poems, two of which were broadcast in the form of archive recordings by Morgan himself. I've indicated where the text can be found in his Collected Poems, and will fill it in later, when I get a chance. The texts of my two poems are edited for performance.)

The genealogy of poets, who considers themselves influenced by whom, is always a fraught subject. I know myself to be the only child of many parents, but the one whose poetry has meant most as I try to develop as a writer is Scotland’s laureate or makar, Edwin Morgan. 

Morgan was born in Glasgow in 1920. After serving in the Medical Corps during World War Two, he returned to Glasgow University, eventually teaching English Literature. He knew the marvellous poet W.S. Graham from the 40s, but didn’t come fully into his own voice until reading the Beats. He helped to transform Glasgow into the literary capital of Scotland – a mantle it surely claimed from Edinburgh in the 70s when he, his contemporaries and successors began to dominate Scottish writing. He retired from teaching in 1980, and has recently embarked on a late career as dramatist and librettist.

Throughout his writing life he has made it his mission to celebrate, especially our social and technological progress, and to record loss stoically rather than to bewail it. His poetry, though responsive to local sectarian division and to global conflict, to much destruction and questionable renewal, has always hymned the human capacity for love, resolve and invention.

His work embodies a vivid throng of characteristics: amplitude, restlessness, compassion, energy. He demonstrates an engagement with language in its ephemeral, as well as classical, forms, being much drawn to its battered, colloquial beauties. He is receptive to the spell-making of arcane vocabularies, with an ear for the memorable phrase lurking in jargon. He looks eagerly overseas for both subject and solidarity, allowing other literatures to rejuvenate him through the hard graft of translation. Among his poetry’s many avatars, perhaps the figure of Cinquevalli comes closest to describing its creator’s nature:

Cinquevalli is falling, falling.
The shining trapeze kicks and flirts free,
solo performer at last.
The sawdust puffs up with a thump,
settles on a tangle of broken limbs.
St Petersburg screams and leans.
His pulse flickers with the gas-jets. He lives.

Cinquevalli has a therapy.
In his hospital bed, in his hospital chair
he holds a ball, lightly, lets it roll round his hand,
or grips it tight, gauging its weight and resistance,
begins to balance it, to feel its life attached to his
by will and knowledge, invisible strings
that only he can see. He throws it
from hand to hand, always different,
always the same, always
different, always the
same.
His muscles learn to think, his arms grow very strong.

Cinquevalli in sepia
looks at me from an old postcard: bundle of enigmas.
Half faun, half military man; almond eyes, curly hair,
conventional moustache; tights, and a tunic loaded
with embroideries, tassels, chains, fringes; hand on hip
with a large signet-ring winking at the camera
but a bull neck and shoulders and a cannon-ball
at his elbow as he stands by the posing pedestal;
half reluctant, half truculent,
half handsome, half absurd,
but let me see you forget him: not to be done.

Cinquevalli is a juggler.
In a thousand theatres, in every continent,
he is the best, the greatest. After eight years perfecting
he can balance one billiard ball on another billiard ball
on top of a cue on top of a third billiard ball
in a wine glass held in his mouth. To those
who say the balls are waxed, or flattened,
he patiently explains the trick will only work
because the spheres are absolutely true.
There is no deception in him. He is true.

(See CP (Carcanet, 1990), pp. 432-4)

He writes big books, full of diverse verses, some making high cultural gestures, like a piece in ottava rima about Byron surviving Missolonghi, others exploring a rougher, confrontational music, like the aggressive encounters of ‘Glasgow Green’. Some readers and reviewers, not all of them from England, have felt abashed by the the scale of his Scotocentric imagination, though Morgan is the most approachable of poets; being Scottish for him manifests itself in a love of language, engagement with history and joy in fine detail, the small print of being alive.

I first encountered his work as an adolescent in the anthology Worlds, where he was ranged alongside Norman MacCaig, Heaney, Hughes, Thom Gunn, Adrian Mitchell and Charles Causley. It was a generous book, full of sharp black and white photos and even sharper pronouncements by the poets. It made them, and Morgan in particular, seem unstuffy, curious, and engaged.

He observed there that, although he himself was clearly bookish, his background was not: ‘There is a poetry before poetry…the imagination of someone who is going to write poetry can be stirred in all sorts of preparatory ways.’ I liked and wanted to emulate that quiet confidence. In it I began to realise the importance of receptivity to what Heaney would later call ‘the music of what happens’.

I was reading this in Dundee, a town with no discernible literary tradition, in which very little seemed to be happening. I was a smart-alec singleton, whose family had risen from the working class to the lower middle, who got into university and through my first degree with what seemed like suspiciously little disciplined effort.

The little I knew about what sort of writer I was appeared initially to be informed by the subject of my doctorate, Hugh MacDiarmid. But, as I began to publish, it became clear my imagination was more aligned to Morgan’s. Like him, I thought centrifugally, moving out from a particular city to a small country to a continent and beyond. Like him I was fixated both on the resonant kick of words and how they were reconfigured by formal patterns. And like him my cultural context seemed full of beautiful but unacknowledged voices.

The Lament for Billy Mackenzie

The stranger in our city’s voice is dead

so keep all Dundee silent for a day,

sheathe all your spoons within their mourning cases,

fling all your florins in devalued Tay:

let every mirror hold his fourteen faces,

            our strangest voice is dead.

Our angel of the ragcart and the river,

the patron saint of tinkies, whose gold lips

could loose euphoric shrieks that split our hips –

but now he’s fallen out with song forever.

...

Praise to that voice, which spans the octaves as

the roadbridge spans the river’s range of tides

and snell winds, bullies of Siberia.

It holds the spheres together as they gride

and squeal, that mile-wide voice, in theory our

            town’s diapase, ya bass.

His gypsy holler was holy jabber-code,

our Bowie of Baldovan Terrace: hark

to Billy, Bacharach of Baxter Park.

He was the Shirley Bassey of Bonnybank Road.

...

Lament now for the father who must touch

a cheekbone in the barn at Auchterhouse,

who knows it in the darkness and knows why

it is so cold. Duveted in overdose,

a photo album, dumbed at thirty nine –

            lament for that numb touch.

Lament the kind of silence in that shed,

the absence of all further variation

on that one breathing theme thieved from creation:

lament MacKenzie’s lovely son is dead...

I had blundered into college: hoping to learn how to write poetry, it took me ten years to recover from an Oxford education. I then blundered into academe, happening onto the burgeoning discipline of creative writing without grasping its vocational consequences. I blundered into an exile in Newcastle I never thought would be as durable and nourishing as it continues to be.

Morgan, by contrast, seems always to have known about his craft, his vocation, his sexuality and his city, and to have fashioned for himself a life which, though his poetry betrays great lonelinesses, was always redeemed by a sense of centred literary purpose.

He has always been a master of the gestures of form, whether writing shocking sonnets, or teasing the reader’s brain with new varieties of genre – concrete poems, off-concrete poems, colour poems (and a few off-colour ones), computer poems, emergent poems, and, of course, sound poems.

[Loch Ness Monster’s Song. See CP, p.248]

That capacity to straddle the divide between the so-called traditional and the allegedly experimental is another of the lessons taught by this quietest of dominies. It isn’t, as I once thought, that there are two poetic camps, mainstream and experimental, and you have to declare for one of them – strophe or antistrophe, rather than the whole poem. I’ve encountered this entrenched position in England, America, Russia, and always feel alienated, shot by both sides.

What Morgan’s work implies is the imagination acknowledges no such divide, instead, many poets simply have the unpoetic desire to be right – and a more understandable need to belong, whether to an orthodoxy or an unorthodoxy. The original poet, however, only belongs to the work, to the next poem and the next.

I think his example grounds me, in a way Hugh MacDiarmid or many of the other poets to whom I claimed allegiance as a younger poet, did not. As I began to mature as a writer, to wish to interact with society other than through the jeremiad – I began to be haunted by an image of these poets, and of myself, as a species of giant baby.

The more MacDiarmid, for instance, clamoured for ‘The Kind of Poetry He Wanted’, as a late poem has it, the more he claimed to have achieved a Mature Art, the less clear I was as to what precisely such a thing could ever be.

Morgan has never opposed that type of grand statement, indeed he argued eloquently that it should be criticised responsibly, but the poetry of his maturity effortlessly digests and renews that which is verbally vibrant and ideationally daring about his peers and predecessors, dispensing with all the poisoned prejudice and bonny prince chauvinism.

His perspective, crucially, refuses to be partisan: he never excludes, in order to correct or castigate, any aspect of what it is to be human, and he never loses sight of our position in an unhuman, not inhumane, universe.

He effectively told me this in an interview back when I was the fledgling editor of a very tiny magazine, Gairfish, in the mid-eighties. It only took me the twenty years to grasp what he meant: variousness is, in itself, a resistance to dogma.

[In the 60s] I learned, really learned for the first time, however much I may have thought I believed it intellectually, that you can write poems about anything. You really can! The world, history, society, everything in it, pleads to become a voice, voices!

Morgan is our great poet of voices. He gives words to apples, to starlings, to sputniks, to Mercurians, to a mummy, to his old hero Jack London, and, in the most daring of his late poems, a piece possessed of grave and daring wit, to Gorgo, a cancer cell:

You may not even think I am a tempter,

But I am the insidious one, hissing Listen listen.

Every tumour begins with a single cell

Which divides and divides and is its own boss.

…

The joy of kicking decent cells away,

sucking their precious nutrients, piercing

Membranes that try to keep you from the waves

Of lymph and blood you long to navigate –

Through unimaginable dangers, be robust! –

Until you reach those Islands of the Blest –

…

The distant organs where you plant your flag

and start a colony. Those cells are heroes,

Homer would hymn them, but I do my best!

To consider that these lines were written by an eighty year old poet with terminal prostate cancer demonstrates the degree of integrity and lack of sentiment with which Morgan articulates what has hitherto been unsaid or even unsayable. His remains a considerable imagination in a heightened state of freedom.

I’m not a member of Edwin Morgan’s close circle of friends and supporters, and both temperamentally and professionally I favour distance over declaration, deference over dependence – something else I suspect I learnt from him. As these things are reckoned in the poetry world, I have not been a good son. But in the scale and structuring of my books, the range of language and tones I attempt to deploy, in my particular understanding of Dundonian-ness and indeed Scottishness, I remain indebted to his diction, his directness, and his audacity.

The Glacier

Scrambling among the hobo pebbles, pilgrim quartz,

we were speechless on the glacier’s black back,

surfing its slowest wave, listening to its Xhosa click,

its rhotic grind, its kilometre throat’s distracted rattle.

We’d diceboxed off the Karakoram highway up

a broadening valley between the Uigur villages,

their pease pudding walls, their carved palace doors,

corncobs drying on their roofs like giant pollen.

…

Then finally, parked by the concrete yurts painted

with scenes out of the cartoon past and walking

through the churr of magpies towards the first firs,

the first Swiss-eyed glimpse of gull-shouldered peaks,

breathless in the highland air as though we’d smoked

ourselves down to a quarter of our proper size;

there was a flight of steps up to a blind crest

you had to rest before, during, and at the climbing of –

and then it was before you, the blackberry tongue,

the exhausted shit lolly, the lava-stained granita.

It had something to tell us that we could only learn

by climbing on its dead whale belly and holding out

our mobile phones to record its auriculate melts.

There was a voice down in its rootlessness that knew

the root to all our travelling, the small dripping home

of our incomprehension. All our friends yelled at us,

and while their echoes put the eagles off their glide,

the glacier quietly carried on carrying us away.

(During the Dark Night of the Newsland Doldrums in August, Guardian Blogs phoned me up on holiday in Crete to ask me for a response to Jeremy 'I'm Scottish?' Paxman's assertion that Burns was 'nothing more than a king of sentimental doggerel.' They gave me four hours, then published an edited version here. Compare and contrast with the following.)

There's a marvellous illusion that there are four countries (or three and part of a country) that make up something called the United Kingdom. That each of these has its own significant cultural contribution which interacts in a magical synergy with the others and produces something that even politicians can read if not appreciate or fund adequately.

Even the journalists, according to this tale, ought to be able to read literature -- those who snatch at the tails of politicians in the way the witch Cutty Sark caught at the tail of Tam o' Shanter's mare. Doesn't that Jim Naughtie know all about classical music as well as the long-running opera featuring Westminster's soapy boy sopranos and bumbling, rumbling basses?

Of course the truth is that, for journalists of a political persuasion, there is only one country in the United Kingdom, and that it consists of one city and, conveniently situated in the heart of that, one village. There are always rumours that, somewhere beyond the nations known as Washington and Tuscany, perhaps even north of the fabled Isle of Man Chester, there might be another village called Scotland, from which many centuries ago, the ruling caste of New Labour descended, like a parcel of rogues in search of English gold, conquering the City and making us all wear ghastly smiles instead of just having a conscience as we were used to.

This village, it is believed, did indeed have a local Bard like to our one (for, as even the Scottish philosopher Christopher Lambert admitted, 'there can only be one'), called Burns. And if politicians can travel all that distance, it follows that journalists, like a pox, could accompany them. But surely they'd want to keep very quiet about this fact.

Except journalists are not paid to keep quiet, they are paid to declare things very simply and very loudly, so that other journalists have something to talk about, and politicians can get on with whatever it is they really do in secret.

Journalists, traditionally, dislike poets, rather as dogs dislike cats, or hypocrites like Holy Willie hate honest fornicators like Robert Burns. Poets use language to declare beautiful, astounding statements about what it is to be human. They announce that empathic ability 'to see ourselves as ithers see us' that sages from Confucius to Christ considered vital. They grasp transience, the abruptness of life that 'like the snow falls in the river,/A moment white--then melts forever.' They disdain the authority journalists crave, 'The rank is but the guinea stamp,/The man's the gowd for a' that.' They employ alliteration, rhythm, rhyme and imagery to lodge nuggets of lines inside our minds for centuries, whereas journalists haven't got much past alliteration, and rely on others to supply their images.

Journalists, especially, like buzz-words, but have little capacity with which to retain them, so that when literary critics call an entire literary era 'Sentimental,' a highly complex term that draws on writers as diverse as Laurence Sterne and Henry MacKenzie, they are apt to use the term without checking it out.

Above all, they like to believe they are of the people, speaking on behalf of the people, and as the people authentically speak. When an author spends the last decade of his life researching folk songs, gathering and adapting lyrics together with traditional tunes, and does so for almost no money despite his own poverty, journalists tend to get confused.

What should they call it when a poet uses a genuine poetry of the people as a springboard for their own work, which ranges from sentiment to passion, from vulgarity to the final gestures of grief, from Duncan Macleerie's fiddle, ('It’s a’ strung wi hair, an a hole in the middle/An ay when he plays on’t, his wife leuks sae cheary,') to the turning from all lovers: 'Ye are na Mary Morrison.' Ah yes. Sentiment.

It's a pity they don't allow themselves better acquaintance with a writer with the range of sensibility of Burns, in whose work they might find a pax scotorum from all the petty spites, insecurities of origin and intellectual impatience of their trade. As Burns says, 'it wad frae mony a blunder free [them]/ And foolish notion.'

(Later that same day, Newsnight phoned me up in an anthropophagous delirium -- ie reporting on news that their own news-team was generating -- asking me to produce a poem in response to the Great Jeremy to be broadcast that evening. I was being massaged at the time by a Chinese gentleman with very powerful digits (highly recommended for the holidaymaker since one tends to be lying on a sunlounger anyway), but I bent my brows to the task and completed the following just in time to discover that some actual news had apparently occurred somewhere in the cosmos. Naturally this meant my work was no longer required. As it is very unlikely to appear anywhere again in all eternity, here it is.)

A pox on Paxman, rot his socks,

and micht his Markies’ pants faa doon,

wha wad wi Burns attempt tae box

as tho he werr some rhymin Broon.

Thae wha tae politicians hark

hae lugs bunged up wi lies or lang:

they’d tak a Tory poodle’s bark

fur oor rebellious lintie’s sang.

Thi sentiment that damns aa kirks

nor gees a fig fur ony judges

is shairper nor thi critic’s dirk

this eedjit jabs in Labour’s drudges.

Let Paxo girn in London gravy

and beat up sic a freith o blethers

he’d tak a manhole fur a mavie –

Burns kent his unca-guid forefaithers…

Over the last five years I’ve been asked to work on various projects focussed on Hadrian’s Wall, something that doesn’t feel entirely inappropriate to a (loosely speaking) Pict, one of those the Wall was ostensibly designed to keep out. A pilfering Pict, in a sense, since I live in the Old High Light, a guiding lighthouse on the Tyne estuary, built in the eighteenth century most likely using stone ‘borrowed’ from Tynemouth Priory, which itself was probably built using stone ‘on loan’ from the Wall. (Our ancestors were so much better than us at recycling.)  

As a transplanted Scot, someone who occasionally thinks of himself melodramatically as in ‘exile’ (but who is more likely conveniently positioned, half way between Dundee and London), I’m fascinated by the possible symbolic meanings of the Wall. Firstly it marks an attempt at a limit, the line at which empire ends in a purely administrative sense. That cultural moment was being reflected elsewhere – the Great Wall of China continued to be constructed throughout the Wall’s lifetime – and, like that giant divider, it’s punctuated by regular gateways, mileforts.  Rather than being a barrier, it is the line of exchange and communication with what lies beyond; it’s as much about commerce and culture as militaristic control – and therefore it represents that moment at which the concept of the border was inadvertently invented.  

My work as a poet, which I think of as obsessed with place, is probably more properly described as obsessed with border places and their equivalents in conceptual space. So it’s significant if only to me that I live a little beyond Segedunum or Wallsend, and directly opposite Arbeium or South Shields, i.e. only just outside the bounds of empire. Civis romanus non sum. Prope.  

The border as a governing metaphor lets us think of the proliferation of intellectual layers, the liminal laminae we build up into a notion of identity. Romans and Picts can be readily re-read as English and Scots, while to compare Britons with the British is to reflect upon our own dead, our living and, in the form of Roman remarks about ‘Brittunculi’ (or ‘nasty little Brits’), our prejudices. The space between such identities also alerts us to the spaces within and across languages, which in our case occurs in that gap between accents and dialects separating Carlisle from Gretna, Longtown from Langholm, Alnwick from (although it’s technically in England) Berwick.

The Wall allows us to contemplate all the dichotomies we live with. Temporally, a border exists between between our perception of the contemporary, our present moment, and the historic, that space beyond all our short term engagements, and we must decide on what terms we are going to acknowledge this. Spatially, any border implies we must locate our 'home' on one or another side of it, and this distinction leads inexorably to others -- ‘home’ as an aspect of 'self' requires us to distinguish between the inside and the outside of our skin, which in turn leads us to the border between mind and body. It’s arguable that the first border humans constructed was that which divides us from the animals, a division we’d like to think exists in some emphatic way between instinct and intellect, a border which permits morality at the cost of creating sin. Are any of us entirely at home in our history, our morality, our skin? Thinking of the Wall leads us to a consideration of the subtle but significant ways in which we might differ from ourselves.

Perception, in intellectual, sensory and emotional terms, is of course one of the poet’s perpetual issues. What we see, hear and think, and what we do not, is of paramount importance to a type of writing that threatens to aestheticise both the sensual and the conceptual, whether one is talking about our immediate environment or an entire world-view. Why do we often seem to live such partially-anaesthetised lives? Can a political bigotry or racial prejudice be linked to our impoverished set of perceptual tools? Is such a conclusion over-simplistic or, worse, sophistry? Why have such states of affairs come about, how permanent are they, and how might they change or be changed?  

All borders are charged with the capacity for change in these terms, they are verb-like and verbalised spaces, where we cross from one state into another, where, as the Greek root of ‘metaphor’ implies, we carry something over. I often think of that little moment when I cross the ‘real’ border an hour further north in a train or car; or when my plane finally touches down in a much-anticipated and/or nervously-dreaded foreign space, as though the whole flight has been a kind of border zone; or that duration of the chimes at midnight, which, as the poet Ian McMillan has remarked, is not quite one day nor the next. They seem cognate with abstracted moments or those undefined places where we experience abstraction – airports, stations, malls, offices, libraries, galleries and (in my case, regrettably) churches – nowheres where we enlarge the self however temporarily by escaping from it.  

Each of my three projects on or related to Hadrian’s Wall reflects these perceptual crises or discoveries. Whether I was taking a group of kids from the primary schools nearest to Segedunum and Arbeia on writing trips to the camps; leading a day-long renga (a series of communally-composed haiku) in the Centurion’s house at Arbeia; or producing a stainless steel strip of text that linked the Romans at Vindolanda to Charles the First’s Newcastle printing press and the text messages sent by Geordies on their way to a match at St James – each project contained a number of perceptual jolts or repositionings of the mindset.  

At Arbeia I was working with primary school children, including many from a long-established immigrant community, whose school was located on the vicus or the civilian settlement that sprang up beside many Roman camps. Their multi-cultural experience would have been reflected in that very camp as well as along the Wall, as Arbeia was manned by Tigris and Euphrates boatmen taking supplies from the ships up to Wallsend, while the Wall itself had Germans, Moroccans, Romanians, among others, serving along it. At both Arbeia and Segedunum, children visited reconstructions of Roman buildings – a section of wall, a fort gate, a bathhouse, a Centurion’s house. All of these had been built during their lifetime, so they had to take the conceptual leap of seeing each new build as an historical artefact. Their experience both paralleled and contrasted with the experience of local communities in the Roman period, so they could and did relate those communities’ shock of the new through their writing exercises to their own experience.  

The renga was a cross-cultural experience in itself. We sprawled about in the chilly, high-walled dining room, sipping green tea (the water boiled thanks to an unobtrusive but anachronistic plug) and composing in a syllabic form which is already a conceptual translation of the character-based Japanese haiku, a form which itself reflected the manner in which Chinese poets wrote at the time of their own Wall’s construction. When we went outside to sun ourselves, we saw the great funnels of Scandinavian liners slide by in an echo of less friendly Viking visitors, and the tankers standing offshore, apparently lying on the horizon in a manner that fascinated L.S. Lowry when he sketched the mouth of the Tyne from South Shields, punning on the length of the ship with his own image of a man lying along a wall, his cigarette turning into a mast.  

Every concept we thought to settle on, right down to the couches on which we lay to compose, as though writing could mimic a Roman feast, kept metamorphosing into another concept, another field of reference, in an endless, smooth succession, in just the way the Wall snakes across different landscapes, and between different cultures.  

The ‘Hidden Rivers’ project, where I worked with artists Carol Sommers and Sue Downing to place a line of text above the course of the old Skinner Burn, made explicit the parallels between the technology of communication in different eras. Messages between Roman forts made on sliver-thin strips of wood and the pre-Civil War pronouncements of a king absenting himself from his own capital (Newcastle’s first printed words) were set in the same format as the text messages of football fans. Of course we thought we understood that, technologically, each culture was at its own cutting edge, but the artwork shuffled our perspective, presenting all three texts in our temporarily contemporary idiom.  

Perhaps the most resonant example of text surviving from the Wall is the single line recorded on one Vindolanda tablet: ‘interea pavidam volitans pinnata per urbem,’ or rather ‘interea pavidam volitans pinnata p’ ubem Seg.’ This fragment is from the Aeneid, and translates approximately as ‘meanwhile, winged Rumour, flying through the trembling city...’ The little sequence ‘p’ ubem Seg.’, combined with an analysis of the handwriting, reveals a great deal about the world from which it came.  

Anthony Birley tells us there are two hands at work here: the first most likely a child copying out a line by Virgil as homework, contracting ‘per’ into ‘p’’ and getting ‘urbem’ wrong; the second probably the tutor writing far more neatly ‘Segn.’ for ‘segnitur’ or ‘slack,’ indicating this was sloppy work.  

The line comes from Book IX, and describes the moment at which news of the death of Euryalus reaches his mother. At this point, the invading Trojans (Virgil’s Roman progenitors) are in a camp under siege by the native Latins. Aeneas is absent, and two men, Nisus and Euryalus, have made a successful sortie, only to be killed as they attempt to return. The parallels between the Trojan camp and the camp at Vindolanda, in terms of the precariousness and vulnerability of the occupying forces and their families, may have occurred to the parents if not the child. Certainly I was reminded of the children I had been teaching from South Shields. And we are all well aware that a mother hearing of the death of her son in combat in a foreign land remains a universal occurrence.  

So this little piece of homework continues to yield meaning, and I was keen to place it at the heart of our renga, performing the traditional Japanese gestures of linking and shifting the terms of our poem. I wish I’d also been able to incorporate the comment, ‘segnitur’ – there is a sense in which all such digging into our pasts, all considering of our borders, constitutes sloppy but necessary work.  

Our culture is deeply grounded in an adversarial mode that sees the media range speakers ‘for’ and ‘against’ any issue regardless of its significance or any middle ground. In Aristotelian terms, we like to think of things as A or not-A, and so borders seem very definitely spaces that separate. But what the Wall reminds me of more is the space that existed for hundreds of years between it and the present border, that territory of the Reivers from both sides called the Debatable Lands. Although what was being debated was mostly who nicked whose cattle, it was most certainly placed between A and not-A, and couldn’t even be defined as a singular ‘Land’.  

As opposed to looking at the points where concepts become clearly distinguishable from each other, I am temperamentally drawn to the blurry or perforated line at which they meet. This applies equally to classic literary oppositions – between fancy and the imagination, or the argument with others versus the argument with the self – and to any opposition where there is an implied hierarchy, like the ‘genuinely’ estranged versus the ‘merely’ exotic, or Scots v. English, poetry v. prose, free verse v. formal verse, page v. performance. I would like to see ‘versus’ demoted to ‘and’ in all these contexts.  

In a border space there has to be communication, whether that is condescension or contact, commerce or infection. It is the space in which identities are challenged and occasionally changed. It is the space in which, sometimes, we discover that we don’t quite know who we are, and it can provide the impetus to explore not just our identity, but the nature of identities. Although the Wall appears to follow a straight line, to follow through its symbolic implications is to trace out a type of ampersand, a hierarchy-challenging ‘and,’ the coils of which return you to your starting point, only to send you off in a new direction entirely.

(This is an account of a weekend trip to Helsinki to launch the Scottish Poetry Library anthology Intimate Expanses (twenty five poems from twenty five years of  writing by twenty five Scottish poets), published here by Carcanet, and there by Like. I'm working on a slightly more detailed account, but here's the version I sent as a report to the organisers. They didn't need this much, but I'm trying to edge towards a position on such matters as the appeal of the so-called exotic, and need to keep digging into what it is that engages me about travel. I have a feeling that old dichotomous assumptions like our (supposedly shallow) response to the exotic versus our (supposedly edgier) engagement with estrangement are like the Romantics distinguishing between fancy and the imagination -- such automatic privileging of one debatable term over another, like the very neatness of the opposition, no longer cuts it. We, or rather I, since no-one else is bothered, need to think again.)

Whenever I am asked to go on a trip somewhere just because I am a writer, I always feel immensely privileged. This is partly because I get so excited about the small details, at least as much as about the bigger picture. I’m interested in our struggle to achieve or regain that larger perspective, and our motives in wanting to do so. As the bag I brought home from Like (our Finnish publisher) advises, ‘Tervemenoa, Sankarimatkailija!’ (‘Go forth, brave traveller!’ though there may be a sardonic undertone ‘and get lost…’)

Getting lost in Finnishness is a distinct temptation, especially when you are confronted by so much culture, conveniently initiated by the encyclopedia and poetry anthology placed in your hotel room, but rapidly augmented by visits to Sibelius’ snug but silent lakeside home, two galleries of light-obsessed Finnish art, and the wonderful spectacle of the central railway station, its thickset statuary holding globes of yet more light against the winter gloom.

Helsinki has a distinctive stratigraphy of those resonances which nourish the traveller whether brave or lost: historical, architectural, linguistic and culinary -- reindeer carpaccio, anyone? How about some reassuring herring? Then there’s the surrounding landscape of orange and dark green forest, barely seeming to emerge from the Baltic, but bursting with outcrops of glaciated rock, and punctuated by lakes. That interplay of cold water, cooling light and the occasional freezing wind – I felt strangely at home.

The Book Fair was an occasion to meet publishers, translators, arts administrators, journalists, and of course fellow writers both from the UK and Finland; to read and chat, to catch up and be introduced to how things are done in this country which seems both like and strikingly unlike Scotland. Sweden and Swedish impinge on its life and its literature in a not entirely unfamiliar manner, while its relative remoteness gives it a usefully independent perspective on matters European.

I was intrigued to find out from my publishers that books are twice as expensive in Finland as in Britain, and to hear from fellow poet Joni Pyysal how divorced his contemporaries feel from issues of form. And I enjoyed hearing a real medley of Baltic writers in the Kivi House (though translations weren’t always available). 

One of the simple pleasures of the trip was wandering the city with Meg Bateman and Robyn Marsack, catching up with each other while taking in a haul of new sights – the contrast between the pale-wood and white-walled austerity of the Lutheran Cathedral and the intoxicating closeness of oklad and ikon and Church Slavonic in its Orthodox counterpart, perched on a rock overlooking the choppy harbours.

Little details snag on the memory: a CCTV camera nesting inside the metal sculpture of a gull;  ghostly white lemons in a still life by the eighteenth century painter Nils Schillmark; the toothpaste-coloured neon of the central post office. Such a range of richnesses meant I found this visit creatively exciting, both a privilege and a delight.

(The following is a piece I've written for Unique Mother Tongue, a project for poets organised by the wonderful Chinese poet Yang Lian. It may or may not appear in this form on the UMT website (see 'links') but here it is in any case. This blog is not intended to proceed in a linear fashion, either through time or through topics. Anyone who visited my previous website will recognise that I seem to be unable to proceed as the crow flies.)

When I was in Xinjiang recently (the westernmost province of China), I felt on the receiving end of a continuous series of culture shocks. Not only was I in China, a vast, complex country I am almost completely unfamiliar with, I was in a region of China which is hardly Chinese – most of the population in the area around the city of Kashgar are Uigur, a Turkic, Muslim people. Further, the ancient resonances of travelling along the Silk Road were clashing with another, more recent, sphere of reference, in that I found myself being bounced down the Karakoram Highway – something my contemporary, the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie, had written about almost twenty years before.

Add to this the fact that I was in the company of very disparate group of writers including Chinese poets and journalists, European translators, American writers and academics and an Iranian poet. Add to this that we were in an extraordinary landscape of gaunt mountains streaked with several different shades of mineral deposit (seven colour mountains, as they’re known), high shallow lakes perfectly reflecting further, impossibly high, snow-covered peaks; and that I had, in abrupt succession, ridden a camel round Lake Karakul, eaten yak or possibly dzo (a demi-yak, crossed with a cow), and danced with a number of beautiful women – and that the yak and the women were encountered inside a giant banqueting yurt – and you could say I was experiencing bamboozlement – especially as most of this was taking place around three to four thousand metres above sea level, where the air is rare enough to make dancing a pleasurable chore.

Then, while I merrily sang what I could remember of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ for the considerable amusement of my hosts, I and the poets Yang Lian and Zhai Yongming were bussed up a valley that opened out and out, the scored orange and russet hills giving way to vertical walls of cliff in which great openings marked mines, while the valley floor was dotted with mud brick communities harvesting corn and drying it in ochre heaps on their flat roofs. The road was bumpy to the point of disintegrating into the accompanying river, and the skull-capped men and black-scarfed women stared at our sturdy Japanese minibus as though it couldn’t really be there.

Eventually we arrived at the head of the valley where, through a girdle of pines and what appeared to be a welcoming party of magpies, we could see a great throne of peaks sitting draped in snow, and a narrow path meandering towards it. Walking was difficult at this height: you had to pace yourself and pace conversation too, so you would exchange a couple of words with someone, who would either fall back or stride on while one of you regained your breath, and another walker or group of walkers hoved into view.

I discovered from Yongming that the churring magpies are always seen as lucky birds in China (xi que means ‘happy bird’), and began to realise that, as we climbed into the firs, we seemed to be leaving all previous landscapes behind. This was oddly Alpine, vaguely familiar, like a gigantic version of a Highland glen: it felt like a number of places were combining or co-existing in this remote valley. Then, after a flight of particularly exhausting steps up to a blind summit, I saw the glacier.

I had been imagining something vast and transparent – this was small, about the size of a motorway, though as high as a little hill, and uniformly so for the hundreds of meters it was in view, seeming to extrude from between two slopes higher up the mountainside. And it was black, a dirty black, boulder-strewn, hard to differentiate from the surrounding earth except at its edges, where the ice was apparent, greying and melting away from great rips and hollows like a coal sorbet. You could hear it, an occasional creaking sound as of something old, now and then the displacement of some pebbles from its side or the mountainside it was scouring. And you could walk on it, which Yang Lian and I promptly did.

It was while we were threading our way between the boulders on its back, picking up the flat, fried egg-coloured stones it had been carrying for kilometres, that something occurred to me. I’d been holding my phone like a dope to one of the cavities that our guide threw stones down, trying to catch the ‘voice’ of the glacier over those of all our excited companions, when it finally dawned on me that I really was standing on the mountains’ tongue. The glacier was exactly like the big black panting tongue of this range, and the landscape itself was a compelling amalgam of memory and the unfamiliar, that which was emphatically present and that which was only just inaccessible, in the same way as the ‘voice’ refused to be caught on my phone’s recorder, or was drowned out by people yelling at us to come back to the bus.

This peculiar sensation, what I could only describe as a nostalgia for something I was actually experiencing for the first time, made me think of the concept Yang Lian, myself and others had been exploring since our previous collaboration, Sailors Home: that poetry is our collective and unique mother tongue. Here we were, our shared vocation having led us to this spot, standing on the back of the glacier as if on the back of an extremely slow-moving whale, listening to what it had to say exactly as we listened through each other’s language, through English, Chinese, Farsi, French, German, for some universal note. It seemed to me the glacier was indeed that unique mother tongue, and that the first word it spoke was this peculiar sense of immanence, that the word, as best as I could catch it, was ‘nostalgia’.

I’ve been talking to the composer Naomi Pinnock since March about the idea of writing a piece based on the various terms different languages have for this concept. Nostalgia is from two Greek words: nostos meaning ‘return’, and algos meaning ‘pain’. The Odyssey is just one of a series of epics describing the Nostoi – the return of the Greek heroes after Troy. Nostalgia begins in English as a disease of soldiers – a way of describing the combination of trauma and culture shock experienced by a soldier in the Empire’s wars, dragged from his close community to a part of the world he knows nothing about, and forced to experience the most extreme of emotions in that alien-seeming place. Wards were full of people overwhelmed by a need not just to be anywhere but the battlefield, but the specific need to be at home.

Sparked by a paragraph from Milan Kundera where he lists a series of words different cultures have for nostalgia, a set of international near-synonyms, we realised this was an extremely paradoxical term. Each culture assumed it had a unique relationship with yearning, whether for past or for place; every culture nonetheless possessed just such a term. The idea of nostalgia felt self-contradictory: on one level it appeared to lack emotional maturity, on another it stood for a significant marker of maturity: the need to apprehend one’s own culture. Nostalgia appeared to be the most fundamental emotion not just of societies gripped by crisis – industrial change or diaspora – but also of contemporary culture, kidults yearning for the security of childhoods commemorated by signifiers from TV, cinema, toys, the generations of nostalgia growing shorter and shorter, measured in lustrums rather than decades.

I thought about how frequently a poem gestures towards all such attempts at apprehension, whether the target is a relationship, a community, or a language. Poems reflect our hope of shared understandings, those moments where a look, a touch or a single word is able to sum up and convey the burden of communication; more than that, they celebrate our faith not only that communication is possible, but that it has already taken place, that it will be possible, again and again.

I thought about how I had been listening to poets recite in languages I don’t understand – Emran Salahi’s  free and melodious Farsi, the propulsive rhythms of the Manaschi, the oral poets of the Kirghiz – how I listened for the form of their poems, the rhythms, the rhymes, the tone, even when I could understand nothing. I remembered feeling the shapes of Mikhail Aizenberg’s tight sardonic splinters of poetry when he read in the Mayakovsky Museum eight years ago, despite not understanding a word of Russian. I remember impatiently piggy-backing on his contained, undemonstrative voice, listening for the rhythms of his predecessors.

It seemed to me that it is the poem’s job to convey such shared understandings and embody the supposedly incommunicable, not just in any individual language, but in that cradle of language and form that makes up poetry in every language. That the peculiar sensation we experience when listening to a poem do its proper work is a type of nostalgia, but a nostalgia for that redeemed whole which the poem is in the act of creating, that the poem itself is embodying. This sensation, this realisation, is the unique mother tongue.