(This piece on Edwin Morgan’s Scottish Laureateship was written in November 2005 for a small magazine the name and a copy of which is currently evading me.)

The idea of a poet laureate carries with it some interesting preconceptions. Although it began with Ben Jonson getting a royal backhander, in its official form it was a symbolic result of the Restoration, part of the Court’s way of reaffirming its own authority by harping back to the classical era, equating Charles II with Augustus, and Dryden with Virgil (whom he naturally translated).

Today it has become instead a symbol of atomisation, of the fissiparousness of the modern state: the present Poet Laureate affiliates himself as much with the unions as with the Union, firing off anti-war squibs while micro-laureateships are assigned to cities and community groups. Now this proliferation has crossed the border, and a nascent state-within-a-state has decided it too needs affirming in proper poetese. Hence the appointment of the distinguished Glasgow poet Edwin Morgan as Laureate for Scotland. Or rather Makar, as though the name is a little too, well, English, and requires translation.

Typically, Morgan has disputed both the name and the role. Despite being confined to a nursing home in a terminal battle with cancer, his first gesture was to express gentle disapproval of the title – ‘makar’ or ‘maker’ is a late medieval Scots term for ‘poet’, an indigenous translation from the Greek (the root verb ‘poieein’ means ‘to make’). Morgan prefers to be associated with post-Independence Scotland, rather than its pre-Reformation incarnation, and drove the point home by writing a trenchant call for a Scottish republic:

 …what’s to come, not what has been

Drives us charged and tingling-new

To score our story on the blue.

Which should come as no surprise to the man who appointed him, Scotland’s First Minister, Jack McConnell, but raises a question as to what the function of a laureate is. Clearly the term has some elasticity – a US Laureate serves for a year, and creates their own definition of the job: Billy Collins, for instance, chose to attack Bush’s warmongering while defending his policies on literacy. The UK’s Children’s Laureate, Michael Morpurgo, isn’t a poet, but Dahl’s representative on Earth of the zeitgeist-busting genre of children’s fiction. So what exactly is a laureate for?

We must distinguish between the policy of the appointer, and that of the appointee – McConnell resembles Charles II (if in no other way!) in marking the re-creation of his office with the creation of a cultural equivalent. A certain debasement of the term already creeps in at this point: ‘laureate’ means crowned with laurels, and Dryden and his successors were, figuratively, kings of poets. A mere First Minister can only confirm a pre-eminence: Morgan was already ‘first’ in terms of status and age within Scotland. So that intimate relationship between laureate and monarch, so painstakingly (and sometimes awkwardly) negotiated in the works of Andrew Motion, cannot exist. There will be no odes to the First Minister’s offspring.

When Morgan asserts that ‘we poets are free spirits and we distrust the establishment,’ we have to question the reasoning behind the role. McConnell presumably knew he was appointing a kind of official gadfly, and that the cultural policy of the Scottish Executive would give him plenty ammunition. The financial crisis Scottish Opera has been placed in could only give rise to poems comparing the Culture Minister, Frank McAveety, with T.S.Eliot’s ‘Napoleon of crime’: McAvity the Mystery Cat. We must accept that some types of culture are cheaper than others, and that if McConnell can take the flak from a national opera company and its supporters, he’s hardly going to be troubled by a ‘turbulent’ makar.

But this points to another aspect of the modern laureateship: like the Children’s Laureateship, it is arguably there to promote a genre. In the eyes of the media at least, poetry lags behind more congenial art-forms like film, the novel and theatre. A laureateship functions as a kind of rallying point, and the Scottish appointment could operate in this way.

Although Scottish poetry is currently experiencing a renaissance comparable only to the achievements of Burns, Fergusson, Scott and Hogg, it isn’t as recognised nationally or internationally as Scottish fiction, painting or composition. Partly this is due to an old Scottish policy of ‘divide and be conquered’ – those poets staying in Scotland rarely achieved the profile of those who moved south, while the exiles weren’t always acknowledged there as primarily Scottish figures. Think of Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir, or Norman MacCaig and Douglas Dunn, or even Liz Lochhead and Carol Ann Duffy. As Roddy Lumsden wrote about hitting the high road south:

…I’d heard what Doctor Johnson said, When a man is tired

of London, he is tired of life, but I’d been tired of life

for fourteen years…

If you don’t have the cultural infrastructure to support poetry – the ‘significant’ presses, the decent review space, the dedicated awards – some talent will always filter towards The Place That Does. Of course the Scottish Arts Council made giant leaps forward with their flexible residencies for writers, which allow prolonged interaction with the community, and the Creative Scotland awards. (Is there anyone who owns a biro who hasn’t received one?) Of course the emergence of schools of creative writing in the main universities will have an increasing impact, just as the educational policies of the seventies helped the development of a gifted generation spanning from Lumsden back to Robert Crawford.

But the question remains: is the appointment of a Scottish Makar a catalyst that will result in Scottish poetry and Scottish cultural issues being part of informed debate within Britain as a whole – or indeed within Scotland as a hole? I fear not.

We Scots have committed an old familiar crime: peering over the next boy’s elbow and copying what’s written there, right or wrong. We’re going through the Motions. The real impact of the English laureateship has been behind the scenes: Andrew Motion’s work promoting writing in education deserves our praise when his front page verses sometimes do not. The fact that the English press have put him there says more about their eagerness to ridicule those forms which do not immediately render up simple meanings (those forms which do not resemble journalism, basically). Motion must frequently feel that he functions as a scapegoat for English poetry, and the sense of inadequacy it inspires in the culturally insecure, rather than as its laureate. This is not a model Scotland ought to follow.

Which is not to say I disagree with Morgan’s appointment. Edwin Morgan is one of those poets whose reputation slow-burned because he chose to survey the universe from his home city of Glasgow. So I think the Makarship (if that’s the right word) has a valid role in honouring one of our greatest poets. His OBE was eventual acknowledgement from the British establishment that here was a significant writer, and in this sense it is important that Scotland has a means of giving equivalent acknowledgement.

But that’s a one off – Morgan is the last of a generation which included Sorley MacLean, Iain Crichton Smith, George Mackay Brown, Norman MacCaig and W.S. Graham. Any one of those would have made a worthy Makar if the only consideration is to be overdue acknowledgement. Scotland’s poets, however, no longer require pats on the back. They hold posts in publishing houses and universities, they write for major newspapers and learned journals, they perform their work across Britain and indeed across Europe. All they actually require is an increased audience (though they can never rival their novelistic brethren) and an equivalent enthusiasm within that audience to that shown by the fans of Scottish Opera. The moon on a stick, in other words.

The gateway to that increased audience, to that deepened enthusiasm, remains the media and the book trade. A poet inspires hundreds by his or her readings, while a newspaper, a radio programme, reaches hundreds of thousands (let’s not dream of TV). But the media prefers to push only what already sells and push away that which is perceived to threaten its own sales. A volume of poetry moves a reader deeply through years of re-reading, but the bookshop sends it back to the publisher after an increasingly short time, while shovelling out the latest demographically-designed creative caramels. Faced with this, the appointment of laureates suffers from the sin of tokenism.

Just like the media’s incessant ‘Best of…’s – filtering artists through guesswork sieves into digestible tens or twenties – a laureateship effectively stands in for its constituency, rather than standing up for it. There are plenty of poets in Scotland – the place is hoatching with makarettes and makaronis. Many of them are rubbish, some are fantastic. But the way to distinguish between them is to read them and decide for yourself. Poetry is one of the last free territories in a world consumed by consumerism. By all means read Edwin Morgan as he effortlessly evades that process, but don’t be dictated to by a politician into confusing a bureaucratic purview with creative freedom. Morgan is the Makar of the Scottish Imagination, not the Scottish Executive.

(This piece was written in February 2005 for the Blinking Eye website. I was judging their competition, and they asked me for something for the site. Every year for the last three years the writers associated with Newcastle University -- nu writers, for short -- have staged a reading for Holocaust Memorial day in association with the City Council. This year the line-up was myself, Linda France, Cynthia Fuller, Jack Mapanje, Sean O'Brien and Margaret Wilkinson, with extraordinary music from the composer Lewis Watson on solo saxes. A recording will be put together shortly. The event discussed below, the last that the late great Julia Darling took part in, was the first of this ongoing series.) 

A short time ago I did a reading for Holocaust Memorial Day together with fellow writers based in the School of English at Newcastle University. The other writers were Gillian Allnutt, Julia Darling and Linda France, and music was provided by the composer Bennett Hogg. The event was organised, ordered and practically choreographed by the dramaturg Duska Radoslavjevic-Heaney, who has performed on previous occasions the unlikely feat of getting very different writers to read extremely diverse work in a manner that eschews introductions or individuals, and instead flows according to the demands of the poems. Music in these events punctuates and accompanies in its own parallel language.

I tell you this not as proud contributor or disguised reviewer, but, as ever, as a slightly bewildered commentator on the sometimes weird actions writing poetry seems to impel on its practitioners. It seemed, while we were debating the dos and don’ts of this most difficult of subjects and, again, while we were going through the particular ritual of this kind of reading, that a couple of compelling issues were floating around.

Our theme was ‘survival’ – and this divided us. Some felt it impossible to talk about such large matters as the Holocaust and withdrew, while others felt that we must say something. Some had many poems which touched on the subject. Others, like me, had few, and could think of little meaningful contribution that we could make.

Duska turned all this round in a single workshop where she asked us to think as concretely as possible about the business of surviving. When she had left the Balkans, Yugoslavia was being torn apart into new states along lines that fostered ancient hatreds, and she had only been able to bring a very few things. A make-up case with her grandmother’s short tight jacket in it, a photograph of close relatives, a plant which soon shrivelled but was nonetheless bedded in her native soil. Suddenly we were talking in specifics – about single moments in our own lives when things had changed drastically; about those objects dear to us.

And then I could articulate the problem for me about the whole event. In the aftermath of the tsunami I had encountered poem after poem about this terrible disaster, none of which worked. There is a very natural creative impulse to respond to a great matter, to feel part of the suffering world, to make the compassionate voice count for something. But it was borne in on me how very different that is from the impulse to write a poem.

When we think of the Holocaust or the tsunami or the 9-11 massacre, we are contemplating suffering on a scale so large that it numbs precisely that part of the brain we need to react to anything as poets: the part that connects specifics to specifics, in particular specific experiences to specific words. Although we feel we are taking on the suffering of individual after individual, in fact we are diluting the tragedies of individuals into those large abstract nouns: holocaust, tsunami, massacre. The abstraction becomes our subject and the personal is lost amid the crowds of the dead.

It may be that our dependence on the short lyric is partly to blame – a medium devoted largely to telling one person that you love them (or not) is hardly going to be up to the task of telling thousands of people you never met how sorry you are. Perhaps the catalogue or the list is more useful – Homer or Whitman or Dante were able to sum up the suffering of thousands by such devices. But then, each of them had the genius to place single individuals against those backdrops of thousands. That’s why we remember the moment Hector frightens his own baby son because he approaches him in armour; or the point at which the poet Statius is so overwhelmed by meeting Virgil in Purgatory he forgets they are both dead; or the faces of dead soldiers uncovered by Whitman leading to his great lament:

 …a face nor child, nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;

Young man, I think I know you—I think this face of yours is the face of the Christ himself;

Dead and divine, and brother of all, and here again he lies.

At such moments we realise that writing about abstractions simply erases itself, leaving only the impulse of the writer to be heard. This may be a compassionate impulse, but compassion isn’t a good enough motive for writing a poem, because only a part of us is compassionate, and a poem has to come from the whole self. How do you do that? Well, writing is often about those particulars which make up our selves: moment after moment, encounter after encounter, object after object. And each of those moments, encounters, objects, is speaking to us. And poetry is about tuning into that speech, finding particular words for particular sensations.

We arrived at the small performance area in the Lit & Phil in coats and scarves, carrying bags or suitcases: the sorts of things people might grab up in a hurry (literally in my case, as I had forgotten, and only had my briefcase). We sat behind music stands, as though we were a quartet without instruments. And between the readings, as the music echoed Bach Beethoven, or Balkan jazz and folksongs, we passed among us objects from the cases: a tattered wooden puppet, a toy drummer; basic things like bread, a candle, a knife.

Almost none of the poems were directly about any of those big difficult nouns, and yet many of them seemed to resonate against them, and those resonances accumulated in the way the objects piled up on the table and the notes built in the air. And while this was going on it occurred to me that how the audience was receiving all this was very different from the way I or any of us felt about it. By this I don’t mean that our intentions weren’t coming over to the audience. Quite the contrary.

Rather it seemed to me that all these objects and words and memories and notes were being separated from us and given away. That when you write a poem, this is in a sense what you are doing: you are abandoning something in the hope some one else will pick it up. And in this sense even poems which seem to be intimately about you aren’t really –  they’re about these pieces you’ve gathered together, each one of which will mean something new when you give it away.

Ultimately what we’re doing as writers is trying to find those things which can be given away, or rather those words which can be given away over and over again, every time someone reads that small gathering of particulars. Of course we have to care for them deeply to make it all worthwhile. But equally we have to get them and ourselves into a state where they’re ready to be relinquished.

A great deal of writing fails to become poetry for the reasons I’m suggesting above.

Firstly, because it’s actually about an abstraction when we thought it was about something really important. Abstractions can’t describe experiences, and good motives can’t make up for that. Our virtues don’t know how to talk about our weaknesses. Secondly it fails because when we wrote it we weren’t ready to give it away, so we kept its kernel to ourselves, we didn’t describe precisely enough, or explain the very small amount that needed explaining openly enough, and so there wasn’t enough there for the reader to pick up and make their own.

But because these moments keep crowding in on us (as do the voices from objects all around us), and because a memory can be remade in a poem into something as sturdy as an object, there is always the opportunity to recognise them in words. There’s always another chance to make something good enough to be abandoned.

(This piece was written in November 2004 in response to a request from Beeb2's Culture Show for a take on the NE's literary scene. It didn't take. But it roughs out the idea that there is in the UK a cultural unit between the province -- which we understand to be producing merely provincial, derivative, old-fashioned or local work -- and the countries which make up the UK. According to this argument, London is a region, Northern Ireland is a region, Scotland is composed of several regions -- essentially the east and the west of the country -- and the North East of England is the next significant centre of literary activity to acquire that status.)

The current literary scene in the North-East is booming for a couple of reasons. One is that everything that is happening now is being built on extremely sure foundations. The work of Alan Plater, Tom Hadaway, Basil Bunting and Sid Chaplin established Tyneside as a significant site for regional literature.

The other reason is that, because of the presence of such significant literary figures in the area, Northern Arts as was (now ACE NE), invested in creating a supportive environment for writers that led to a new generation of writers developing in the region, and, crucially, settling here.

Firstly through the Northern Arts Literary Fellowship, and latterly through setting up the Writers Agency New Writing North (who among other things administer the Northern Rock Awards), the Arts Council has long recognised that this is a flagship region for the arts. The presence of figures like Tony Harrison and Sean O’Brien, and the prominence of someone like Julia Darling, is partly due to that investment.

In the work of Sid Chaplin and its influence on contemporary writers, we see how a region’s literary identity is first formed, and then developed to the point where it acquires national significance. The strong presence of contemporary women novelists such as Pat Barker, Penny Sumner, Kitty Fitzgerald and Debbie Taylor, is now being augmented by writers like Val MacDermid moving to the region.

Tom Hadaway’s impact on the establishing of Live Theatre is just one benefit the area is continuing to reap dividends from. New playwrights like Lee Hall, Peter Straughan and Margaret Wilkinson, have all been nurtured in the city. In the work of Sean O’Brien and others, Newcastle has become a centre for the unlikely medium of verse drama, catching the attention of the RSC among others.

The presence of Basil Bunting led not only to the setting up of the Northern Arts Literary Fellowship (the oldest writers’ residency in the country), but was an instrumental factor in Tom and Connie Pickard starting up the Morden Tower – one of the prime sites for the 60s explosion in poetry readings. As a result the region is filled with poets – including Anne Stevenson, Gillian Allnutt, Linda France.

The role of the universities in funding the Literary Fellowship has in recent years been augmented by the develop of a strong Creative Writing course at Newcastle University which draws on the resource of local writers, but also brings national figures like Jackie Kay, Jack Mapanje, Jo Shapcott and Fred D’Aguiar in to teach and perform.

The area has an almost uniquely supportive environment. Writers turn out for each others launches (two hundred attended Julia Darling’s Arc book, Apology for Absence). They collaborate on performances with each others and with musicians (the university has put on a series of such events, some broadcast on The Verb). There is an unusual cross-fertilisation (novelists writing plays, poets writing novels), and a healthy lack of metropolitan paranoia.

Part of this is due to the compact size of the writing community; part of it is due to the successful grafting of new and incoming writers onto the existing root of writers like Sid Chaplin. A good example of this would be the Newcastle writer Andrea Badenoch, who died this year of breast cancer. Her novels took the crime genre and combined it with an unusual fidelity to place, which in her last book, Loving Geordie, produced one of the best examples of the Newcastle novel since Chaplin.

At some point soon, the country is going to wake up to the fact that the North-East has burst the definition ‘regional literature’ wide open, and is producing some of the finest writing in Britain.

(A version of this article appeared in Scotland on Sunday in January 2004. It reflects on the shift in policy on the part of the Scottish Arts Council from giving a series of small awards to giving one large one.)

I woke on Wednesday morning to our usual alarm call: Radio 4 blaring out yet more Blair news – and the result of the Whitbread. So The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time won and Don Paterson’s excellent Landing Light did not. I was just reflecting on how poetry always seems to lose out to prose when the announcer made a curious mistake. She said the Whitbread was the only prize in Britain to combine the categories of poetry, fiction and other prose forms. It isn’t, and I know because I was long-listed for the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year, an award which offered ten grand to fiction, faction and fine poetry alike.  

So what? you might say. The long list? you might add.  A carrot is as close as a rabbit gets to a diamond, you might conclude. (If you were a Captain Beefheart fan, and who isn’t?) But there’s a serious point for Scots being missed among the entirely deserved plaudits going to Mark Haddon’s book. OK, the radio programme hadn’t done its research as well as it could have, but why wasn’t it an obvious fact known UK-wide that Scotland has a significant cross-genre award? It made me worry whether it was an obvious fact known Scotland-wide?  

You see, among my splendid record of near misses (what do you mean, don’t give up the day job?) was a place on the short list for the Saltire Award, yet another Scottish prize that Radio 4 hadn’t heard of which is open to writers across the categories. Or at least, that’s what I thought was happening. My publisher was certainly told I was on the shortlist, but when, suffused with fragile and momentary vanity, I looked for confirmation of this on the net or in a paper, I couldn’t find any.  

Eventually, after the prize was announced (yes, of course I didn’t win it, that’s why I’ve still got the day job), I was sent one clipping from a Scottish newspaper. In other words, it, like the SAC Book of the Year, hadn’t made it one inch across that border, and most likely hadn’t permeated the consciousness of many literate, highly-cultured Scots very far either.

So what? you might say. There’s more important things, you might add. Somebody’s had too much to think, you might conclude. (You’d be taking this Beefheart thing a stage too far.) But my point is simple: we’re doing a fantastic generation of Scottish writers a great disservice by not getting their names out there as Scots. Certainly, Don Paterson, William Dalrymple and James Robertson (winners of the T.S.Eliot, SAC and Saltire prizes respectively), are seen as significant writers. But is their Scottishness even noticed by a UK audience oblivious to our attempts to celebrate their work? Is it seen as relevant to their achievement? Whether it is or it isn’t, surely the topic is worth debating?

I have two conclusions from this: one is that our awards should be publicised across the entire UK as well as within Scotland. Perhaps they already are, in the way one clipping did eventually reach me about the Saltire, but that doesn’t seem good enough. We’re far too timid about saying literature matters, and particularly about saying that our literature matters. Scottish writing is in the healthiest state it has achieved for hundreds of years. It has been flourishing now for fifty years. More than lip service needs to be paid to this fact.

The other conclusion is to do with my obscure specialism, poetry, and that first reaction to the news that Landing Light had lost out to The Curious Incident: poets, like gentlemen, come second. Unless you’re Heaney or Hughes, fergid it. Despite all avowments to the contrary, the press is always going to be swayed by the belief that prose is more important than poetry because it reaches more people and makes more money – so too, apparently, are the judges. Putting poetry up against prose in these combined category awards is usually going to confirm this covert second banana status.

Perhaps we should rethink the major Scottish prizes and then relaunch them to the national press. Perhaps if we separated out the categories the sheer quantity of stars in the Scottish firmament would be slightly more visible. Or perhaps I should keep my mouth shut and my hand held out – as the good Captain says, I may be hungry but I sure ain’t weird.