If I were to tell you
How we watched from balconies
Those silent, white-helmeted
Troops baby-stepping as in a cortege behind
White tanks snaking forth reluctantly,
That big, bad city as quiet
As the restless ocean,
Dogs barking to the sound of transistor radios
With their salsa defiant,
The down-and-outs flitting like moths
Through the street-lights
To shake unseen with their children
In darkened doorways;
How the next day a bomb
Across the road
Blew out the windows of our penthouse,
Kerchiefed sicarios running out of a workshop
To the beat of the rat-tat-tat of pistol fire,
Four bodies, covered, later
Stopping the traffic; how the glazier, descendant
Of some German sect-colony, would
Have brightened Hitler’s dreams
With his sapphire eyes and hair
As bold as the sun of Constantine,
It would be meaningless.

All that effort
on a effortlessly, carelessly clashing
set of hunted down like your
aunties did in the co-op clothes they probably wore
too; but now to a club and found
two pills in some guy’s tight
jeans pocket or mouth and the projected
circling shape-lights are falling
like neon, dripping and
calcifying, high-watt cream creating a fragmented
shell of sparking sunspots on a strobe flash-frozen statuesque
flesh, staring to the gods, wanting all the time for those tubes of
perfect colour to fall and swallow us.

Swallow all those leather encased, cotton-encased,
polyester limited edition
Ts-encased everyones, into our darkness
gulp down feet in 3 for 5 pound retro H&M socks,
and too tight 10 quid boxers chafing cocks.

Swallow our mam’s belt, a father’s now fashionably
unfashionably William Morris-esque
wallpaper ties on all those in tune with it guys, their hands
under the table and now even further
in between your thighs.
The girl with the half shaved beautiful bony
head is swimming in the dance floor’s static.
Some boy is dripping saliva down her chin,
watching each pixellated strobe flicker with his eyes wide open,
illuminating on the girls in stained soaked tights
as sores grow on rubbing thigh-tops,
heels trickle blood and tendons ache. You glance
up and smile into under her heap of sodden mascara
watch lipstickless lips, terrified perhaps or not really there,
ready to unload stomach through smiling teeth at that camera,
and the floor is slippy, the table is sticky,
and your hair is sweaty and you bet me,
watching eyes mostly closed
as he wanders the floor making
no hints again, bet me that
the glass-collector is up for some.

Sit on his knee and powder
your nose so it doesn’t matter that
you think you’re fat,
go to the toilet and nose your powder,
until you wake up cold and damp on the couch.
Were you there all night. It was class
but.

[This piece has been adapted through performance.]

She sits there each evening rolling cigarettes and watching her friend or lover repeatedly selling his one copy of the Big Issue. She has a small shopping trolley, it is that sort of shopping trolley which they usually set aside for pensioners, a standard wire basket on wheeled stilts, and in it is sitting a car baby-seat and in the car baby-seat is sitting a baby. You never see any of them during the day, but you see them every night. The shopping trolley and the baby isn’t always there, but it is there more often than not. The baby never makes a sound, and is always either asleep or smiling. She’s rolling cigarettes and passing them when lit to her friend or lover, he selling his one copy of the Big Issue yet again. He has a badge. They sit and stand beside the cash machine, and smile gaps at people who worriedly glance their way as they enter their number, and glance for a second, or perhaps a third time, while they wait for their cash.

The couple had a fight once, she shouted “fuck off”, he glared, people noticed. It was over as she put a skinny cigarette out on the inside of her arm, the cold white smooth skin near the crook of the elbow quickly swallowed the tiny ember, no-one noticed. They did not have a private life, but they had an inner life, they did not hide anything, but still they were hidden. As people come out of the shop they either stop them, or they don’t stop them.

They stop the man in a suit carrying the Guardian, they do not stop the man in a suit carrying the Times, they do not stop the student with naan bread and brussels paté, they stop the students carrying crates of beer, they stop the man with a wrapped bottle of gin and tonic water in a plastic bag, they don’t stop the skinny girl with tins of soup, they don’t stop the bearded man with a bottle of whisky, they stop the kids with bags of sweets, they stop the shop staff coming out unwrapping cigarettes, they stop the laughing couples, they do not stop the quiet couples, they stop girls in trainers, they stop more people when it is cold and dry, they stop less people when it is warm and wet. The woman sits on the wall, and the man stands by the curb half into the road, as you approach you watch people mirror you in a slalom from the opposite direction. You notice the friend or lover selling his big issue, so does those approaching from the other direction and, sidestepping they nearly collide with the mother and child, and swerve again. The couple swerve, bouncing off the boundaries of their route, whenever they leave.

Once again, gluttons for such things, we have:

8pm Wednesday 22th November 2006 at the Lacuna Café, Queen Margaret Union, Glasgow, Scotland

Last week we had some great audience contributions, well done to all those who stood up and read without any preparation. Most gratifying.
As the nights encroach further into our daylight hours, we will remain a bastion of light and warming words. Come along on Wednesday and have your soul soothed by lilting stories of cheating boyfriends, filthy cows, sirens eating live sea-creatures, pornography quotations, soaking wet Glasgow and abandonment. We also talk about love, friendship etc, but that’s so passé!

Hope you can make it, we may have some party games. Keep you poet-ed.
- Tom

School is back with its uniformed rabble,
Cursing and barging like Wellington’s scum
Brought up on drink. Mushrooms spring up
From squelching mud in rings. Shouts and hollering
Swell forth over crisp playing fields and push out the
Soft sound of bat and ball
Like a new birth.
The chink of glasses and laughter
Has a different look to it in the purple screen
Of evening. Television screens flicker from
Flat windows like insincere smiles.

Lights in hallways beckon me
Into other rooms. Smells of food
Are more pertinent than in the sun
And this island of night
Has wrapped itself in its cloaks and lies
In a bed of hide-rugs like Odysseus
Spewed out by the sea and bathed in oil,
Its wily cast of thousands inching their way forward
Like the newly blind. Deaf to the polluted snorts and coughs
Of disjointed trundling trucks, fornicating mothers
Play their games of disappointment in their 4 x 4s.

You were the brightness of my days
Like a galaxy exploding inside me.

Taut, shit-stained leather,
pulled over a carcass
of ill-fitting bones.
What worse design
can there be
than that of the cow?

A cow stares at me cross-eyed,
raises her tail,
and shits on the prone body
of her sister dosing in the grass,
unconcernedly chewing the cud.

Cows are childlike when
it comes to curiosity,
their frogspawn noses
shnuff at anything interesting,
just before their sandstone tongues
taste for edibility.

At the sound of next door’s dog
chasing one of our chickens
they came galloping.
Knees and feet rotating in
so many different directions,
it was a miracle they got anywhere.

When they arrived,
late as usual,
our dog had already beaten the other mutt away,
and so they stood confused,
licking up the feathers
strewn upon the ground.

The snow poured from the sky,
blanketing the city;
softening it’s hard edges.
Even the river was made presentable,
the shopping trolleys and all other jetsam
camouflaged under the eight inches –
a burnt cake hidden by icing.
The trees bowed over our heads,
weighted down with snow,
and in that frozen morning
even the lightest touch on a trunk
unleashed an avalanche
that slithered down our necks
and made us shriek –
not an uncommon sound down by the river Kelvin,
this though was entirely joyful.

This article by Edwin Morgan is taken from Lines Review number 9, August 1955, edited by Sydney Goodsir Smith and published by Callum Macdonald, with kind permission from Tessa Ransford.

It is not too easy to defend an interest in the clarity of poetry. The advocates of clarity are very often muddle-headed; or reactionary, or pusillanimous. A man may like his poetry to be clear only because he cannot conceive that any intellectual effort should be demanded of him in the reading of it. A critic will usually feel justified in attacking the idea of clear poetry because he knows that in fact the Ella Wheeler Wilcoxes of the world tend to be perfectly clear while the Shakespeare and Dantes are frequently difficult and sometimes obscure. The literary historian will ask why there is no first-rate literary criticism of Chaucer or Burns: does this not prove, he will say, that clarity of utterance can give you a big popular reputation without helping at all to settle the question of whether you are really a major poet?

Obviously it would be ridiculous to suggest that all poetry should be as clear as some of the best poems have been (e.g. ‘Testament of Cresseid‘, Wordsworth’s ‘Michael,’ Pushkin’s ‘Yevgeny Onegin’). No one is going to give up Dylan Thomas or Boris Pasternak or Hart Crane just because lips are pursed by Lord Dunsany or Zhdanov or Albert Ralph Korn. Equally, one will admit that poetry may become too clear, as is perhaps the fault in Burn’s ‘Court of Equity,’ Wordsworth’s ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill,’ Randall Jarrell’s ‘Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,’ or Jean Genet’s ‘Le Condamé à Mort.’ Yet when all this is said, it remains true that the last half-century has fostered certain trends of belief about poetry which are dangerously near the assumption I would principally challenge: that the more ambiguous or complexly layered the meaning of a poem, the better that poem is. Metaphysical and Symbolist poets have exerted on the most contemporary readers and critics the sort of influence that has sooner or later to be combated by something less titillating, less deckle-edged, less inviting to analysis and the semi-aesthetic ratioination of our Burkes, Blackmurs, and Brookses. The critical atmosphere which has allowed intelligent persons to suspect that Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’ may be the best poem ever written has, it seems to me, many questions to answer. ‘The Windhover’ is undoubtedly a fine poem, but are we justified in this initial assumption that its value can only be enhanced, and not shaken, by the ambiguities that are quite inherent in its ‘interpretation’? Eliot’s ‘A Cooking Egg’ is even more notorious, if less important; is this egg merely a hard nut to crack, or was it cracked in the cooking? And what about Empson? And Wallace Stevens? They cannot be put in a nutshell. Can poetry?

A poem is an attempt to bring something into the light. Its object is some kind of illumination, first for the poet as he writes it and then for his readers or hearers. What is illuminated may be the tiniest facet of personal experience (Browning’s ‘Parting at Morning’) or the universe (Lucretius’s ‘De Rerum Natura‘). All we ask is that the illumination be genuine; we want to see what it is that the poet is setting before us, and we want to relate it to our own knowledge and experience. We are ready to have both our knowledge and our experience expanded by the poet, though we reserve the human right to check the truth and the usefulness of his information and also to judge the value of the experience he presents by whatever standards are available to us. These reservations may not be exercised, if the first impact of the poem is so startling as to anaesthetize intelligence or virtue, or if the reader is merely seeking a special kind of psychological (and even physical) stimulus which only poetry can give. In both instances, it is poets themselves who are most liable to read poetry in this sort of way, and they will commonly put up with a great deal of what the ordinary reader would call obscurity, because to poets obscurity can give as much pleasure as clarity. I have no doubt that Shakespeare was fascinated by the devious and knarry Chapman, though as a critic he would not have been devious in sometimes rapping Chapman’s knarry knuckles. This is where the ordinary reader and the critic have on occasion to join forces against the poet, since the poet has a tendency to be rather anarchic once he is outside the world of his own poetry. Any poem that begins ‘Polyphiloprogenitive’ is a bait on which will rush to be hooked, but those who do not love words quite so much will perhaps hang back and reconnoitre. A continual state of tension may be said to exist therefore between the poet and the public in the matter of communication and comprehensibility. The important thing is not to try to decide who is right, but to look broadly at the whole circumstances of the time and to see where the weight must be laid to restore balance. Doing this, one sees that there is a need for more clarity.

My fable is extravagant, but I think it is clear. Experimentation, strangeness and shock, wit and allusion, the analytic and polysemantic – all are valuable, but can be taken too far and can become too doctrinal. The ‘modern experiment,’ as such, was brought to an end by the Second World War, but the wit, the allusiveness, and the analytic turn of mind still remain. In America, the experimentation has resulted in a poetry of very rich and flexible technical accomplishment but almost devoid of warmth, of urgency, and of song. English poetry, in its main post-war movement, has made concessions of clarity in an insolent sort of way: a clarity in camera. The hard, dry, tough, intermittently witty Davie-Wain-Gunn grid system hums with messages for the sophisticated, the cynical, and the very literate. These are the metrists; but there is probably more hope in the loose and shambling visits of James Kirkup to the observatory, the operating theatre, and the kitchen sink.

In Scotland, we have sometimes been criticized for ‘letting the modern movement pass us by.’ We should listen to such critisism if it means that we are unaware of what is going on in the international world of poetry, but that has hardly been the case. Quite apart from the ‘Apocalyptic’ interests of Norman MacCaig and J.F. Hendry, or the influence of Joyce and Dylan Thomas on W.S. Graham, it is obvious enough that A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle and Under the Eildon Tree are ‘modern’ poems in overall conception. The significant differences between the general English (or American) and the general Scottish point of view seem to e (i) greater Scottish suspicion of imagery that is highly Metaphysical or Symbolist (in MacCaig and Muir we have the special Scottish versions of these qualities), and (ii) greater Scottish dislike of lifting both feet from the ground (we have no Scottish equivalent of the form of The Waste Land or The Cantos, with its use of broken sentences and its substitution of juxtaposition for sequentiality).

The Scottish attitude to ’clarity’ is in general more sympathetic than the English, and it may run dangerously near ‘simplicity’ and the kailyard. It is good for it, therefore, to be tempered by intellect. Clear does not imply simple, though the one may help the other. Hugh MacDiarmid’s remarkable poem on the guinea worm (‘To my Friend Miss Ruth Pitter,’ in The Voice of Scotland, January 1955) describes in technical detail a complex and little-known natural process (the birth of these parasitic worms inside the human body) and goes on to draw a comparison between this and the creative activity of the poet; the poem is a bristler, and scarcely ‘simple,’ but its meaning is beautifully lucid. In a different way, a poem may be clear even when it has at its heart a human experience that is not easy to describe – if the author feels that it is important that it should be clear. ‘The Transparent Prisoner’ by Burns Singer, a poem about the mind and faith of a prisoner of war (broadcast by the B.B.C. and printed in The Listener, 28 October 1954), conveys successfully both the physical environment – the guns, the desert, the sweat, the prison hut, the coal-mine – and the sudden vision of clear-sighted acceptance that floods the prisoner at the rock face:

And a third kind of clarity may appear in the work of a poet who is not all devoted to this quality; gaining in poignance from the contrast. W.S. Graham’s ‘Letter VI’ (in The Nightfishing, Faber, 1955) is a particularly attractive quiet land-interlude between sea-roar and sea-roar. The poet and the girl have met on the moor in April:

A sweet clearness became.
The Clyde sleeved in the firth
Reached and dazzled me.
I moved and caught the sweet
Courtesy of your mouth.
My breath to your breath.

A poem may also be looked on as an instrument of knowledge though this is an unfashionable idea. In such poetry, it may be easier to be lucid than to be poetic, and the writer must often decide which is for him the most important thing. A poem with as many stark unirradiated facts in it as Hugh MacDiarmid’s In Memoriam James Joyce is hard to ‘lift’ emotionally, yet for all that we may feel it to be nearer the central poetic necessities of our time than verse which is successfully lyrical but feeble and aimless in respect of its subject-matter. Similarly, one should not despise the communicative and ‘edificatory’ value of mere contemporaneity: the use, as poetic counters, of ordinary contemporary facts, things, ideas, and names. In a period of rapid and violent change it becomes very difficult to disentangle what we still call the ‘eternal’ or the ‘universal’ from the fleeting and the modish, and for this reason most poets have not made or have given up the attempt. This, I am convinced, is a serious defection. Whatever may have been true in the past, I am quite certain that our own period needs poetry which reflects it, and reflects it clearly. Looking to the left and to the right, I see Thurso Berwick and James Urquhart holding up their reflecting-glasses; I don’t see the same picture, but what matters perhaps is that I see unmistakable references to the Dniepro, the Bolsheviks, the world of passports and warships (in Fowrsom Reel, Caledonial Press, 1949), and to ecclesiastical cartels, flying saucers, and ‘that knock-on-the-door-at-three-in-the-morning’ (in The Yellow Door, MacLellan, 1954) – even if we agree with Mr. Urquhart about his ‘cacophonous crotchety rhyme’

There is still place for the pleasures of fantasy, and let us not always be pellucid when we are playful:

Scroggam, my dearie, ruffum!

But let us examine the pleasures of clarity, as Burns and Dunbar did, and Lyndsay, and the ballad-writers. To be happy, poets must be of use; to be of use they must be enjoyed; to be enjoyed they must be understood; to be understood they must say something; to say something they must have something to say; to have something to say they must be men as well as poets; to be men they must care about happiness, in themselves, in their families, and in the world. If there are poets who do not need to be happy, or of use, or enjoyed, or understood, they may nevertheless write poetry. All I say in this article is that it would be good for us if we had more of the former kind.