Thanks to everyone who responded to my poem.
This sonnet which, as Tim kindly pointed out, has just appeared in my new book, Madame Fi Fi’s Farewell, was written about eight years ago.
I got a phone call at 5a.m. from an American friend who had been drinking red wine and was full of lavish praise for some poems I had sent him. He was -- we have lost touch -- then a young man in love with the Romantics and could declaim reams of French poetry in the original, and Dylan Thomas at his orotund worst, at the drop of a syllable. He wrote letters in a wonderful copperplate hand, using dip pens, in an eighteenth century tone and affected a disdain for contemporaneity. He still seemed to cherish a romantic view of a Scotland full of kilts, shortbread, bonnie lassies and stout-hearted twinkling Burnsian fellows, though a few visits had partly disabused him of that notion.
He picked out for special praise -- at around 5.30a.m -- his phone call lasted two and a half hours -- a poem of mine called ‘Morning Song’ , a lyrical chirrup to a woman which took as its donnée two lines in translation by the Gaelic poet Anthony Raftery, “If a hundred clerks were gathered together/They could not write down a third of her ways.” They are lines I still enjoy for their wholesome straightforwardness.
My own considerably lesser poem, written around 15 years ago, in the throes of new love, contained lines of dubious merit such as “drawers opened in the silence of morning” -- what kind of “drawers” in context was not entirely clear -- not to mention a phrase such as “her salt-sweet gates”. This inflaming coinage was a phrase my friend quoted with especial relish -- he was, I recall, serious -- and which now makes me shudder and laugh in equal measure. I’m distant enough from the poem to be quite affectionate about its awfulness.
For a while, in the mid-nineties, before self-preservation overtook daring, I thought of including a feature in The Dark Horse called something like “Notable lines from recent Scottish poetry” for which my own examples above, as evidence of my impartiality, would have been prime candidates. Others were lines by fellow Scottish poets -- these examples are genuine -- in some of which a man writing about the “history” of his wife’s breasts said of them that, in her adolescence, they “exploded/to the size of grapefruits”; by the end of the poem, post-natally, they have become empty milk pails banging on her chest; or there are these immortal lines, “The summer night is big as a cucumber;/It levitates over Thurso Street.” What finally prevented me was that both these examples had first been published in what was then Scotland’s most senior poetry magazine; the editor would have felt I was getting at her.
‘Singing Bird’ came out of a kind of affectionate exasperation at my friend’s wrong-headed, if well-meaning, praise of what Geoffrey Hill would call my “atrocities of the tongue”, coupled with my distrust of the notion of the specialness of the artist, as distinct from others. Without denying the serendipities of art and ‘inspiration’ and the possibility of greatness, I like the idea my old friend George Mackay Brown had of the poet as a sort of verbal carpenter, and the practice of poetry as a daily thing no more exalted, nor unimportant, than brushing one’s teeth or baking a loaf.
I believe it is problematic artistically for a poet to be too self-aware when writing. Sometimes, as Philip Hobsbaum has pointed out, poets write better than they know, and one often only discovers this after coming back to a poem which one thought only average at the time of composition -- average, that is, for one’s own output -- only to find it better than one remembered. The danger of self-awareness, in part, too, is the subject of my poem. As Joe Kennedy has written, imagining the poet as a sort of golden goose, if you want to lay well, “don’t look.”
‘Singing Bird’ was first published in the British magazine The Spectator; its poetry editor was then P.J. Kavanagh.
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