Poets' Blog

It’s the season we hae oor pooches emptied. But not this year, according to retailers. The national characteristic of thrift returns. For thrift read skint – Scots wha hinnae. Credit has come home too roost. Yet most of us were raised to go without in the absence of cash. The ‘tick’ man was despised – a usurer. Folk in his clutches were pitied, as if they failed somehow. So who was it touted credit as a benefit? The bill always arrives, greater than the original cost we couldn’t afford in the first place.

Young folk can’t buy homes if they already owe the joint equivalent of a mortgage. When government forced our penniless students into debt, financing education on the never-never, I expected the NUS to call a strike. It’s what we would have done. Students have unassailable power to withdraw labour, the only group who need fear no reprisal. Youth has time on its side. What’s a year out? The cost of inactive universities and colleges would rapidly have caused a policy rethink. Sadly, by then, even our students had been robbed of courage.

So, crunch away, I’m inclined to think. Capitalism parts consumers from cash for less and less return. Mechanical goods are meant to break. Deliveries arrive already broken to save the time spent using them for a few weeks first. Service is a cursory word. I spent last winter with no heating despite an expensive 24-hour repair contract. This year it’s the price of electricity. We’re told to switch off, turn it down, wear extra clothing, freeze. If we do, profits will fall and the price rise again to recover them. We’ll pay for it, we say of unexpected good. Guess what, we pay for the bad bits too.

Take rubbish. When rates covered that, bins were metal and lived round the back. Binmen walked round to lift, empty and replace them. Now we have heftier Council Tax, three bins which we wheel to the pavement after sorting to recycle everything, and more waste than ever. It doesn’t add up. It multiplies. Real solutions might include less packaging, paper bags, products made to last. Instead, a new tax is piled on top of the one we already pay for a service we now mostly provide for ourselves. Pay as you throw, and since we can’t eat packaging or burn a fridge, throw folk will, fly-tipping over hedges, land-filling canals and rivers with old furniture and appliances.

Take the combustion engine. It kills, ruins health, snarls up cities, damages our economy, threatens the planet. So politicians create effective public transport, force goods to go by rail, ban our poisonous cars. No, they don’t. They tax – petrol tax, road tax, parking charges, tolls, zone charges. None of which reduce traffic. Even poor folk must still get from A to B, go to work, shop, visit medical and other facilities that aren’t on the doorstep. Taxing a problem only makes it cost more, increasing stress on those least able to pay. Why not solve it instead?

Scots Wha Hae is political. It exhorts us to rise against oppression, to fight and die as free people rather than live as slaves. Obviously, it’s still relevant. But an opposing army is nicely concrete – a bunch of folk you can swing a sharpened stick at. Rampant capitalism is brutally nebulous. Who gets the fruit of our labour, what do they do with it, how does it benefit us and our society?

Culprits cover their tracks. Sleight of hand shoves single mums and sick folk into the firing line. Diversionary tactics target the poor, the weak, the addicts, the immigrants. Legislated intolerance sets those wha hae against those wha hinnae while the real mob shores up an out-of-date barter system whose time is up. The enemy is thoughtlessness, stupidity, lack of compassion, greed. The weapon to wave would be a new form of moral economy.

Maybe if we slip this servile chain of debt that shackles us from birth to grave, we might move forward, be creative, think things through, decide before we set out where we want to end up.

Somewhere in there lurks an inspiring exhortation for now. But how  do I make a poem of that?

Ach weel, hae a guid New Year – we’ll pey fur it the morra.

What was I thinking about? Would I write a poem connected to one by Robert Burns? Yes, I said. Yes is a rather too frequent word in my vocabulary.

Can I wire a plug? Yes. Will I drive to Edinburgh in the middle of a freezing night to buy newly released copies of an obsessive interactive on-line computer game? Yes. How about juggling four imminent deadlines for fiction, non-fiction, poetry, a play, and blogging at the same time? No bother. Could I pop over to Russia to talk off-the-cuff about contemporary Scottish literature to an international academic symposium, oh, and would I throw in a talk on writing film? It’s a dawdle. Would I – well, you get my drift.

A poem though, one poem? What a gorgeous, uncluttered request. If I was ever forced to write in only one form, providing I recovered from the amputation of several creative limbs, it would be poetry. It’s the selfish one, the most indulgent, the form where I needn’t please anybody but myself – mainly because nobody will read it or care but, hey ho, it’s the greatest art form of all. It’s also the most disciplined, the hardest to do well, the most complex, the one that might speak to all humanity throughout time and across cultures, it’s the one that sings – a small spark packing the potential to explode a moment into a world, or a new way of seeing, and best written in a frenzy of creative mania. Maybe.

One poem is quite a challenge. But, as Keats said, and I paraphrase, poetry should come easily or not at all. Burns seemed like an omen. A few years ago I wrote a five part radio series on the Bard. A few months ago, three amazingly talented people consisting of a producer, director and actor asked if they could put that series on stage next year. All I had to do was adapt it. Yes (you guessed) I said. So, coming hard on the heels of that, the Scottish Poetry Library’s request for a poem derived from or inspired by one of Robert Burns’ was a rare moment of connection – fate or serendipity, call it what you will.

All I had to do was say, before writing, which of the Bard’s poems mine would connect to. If you haven’t read much of his work, there is a broad spectrum of interest to choose from. He can be moving, gentle, tender, inspiring, bawdy, humorous, political, fierce, caustic, cynical or spirited. His subjects range from lice to revolution. He exposes and celebrates. So what do I choose?

Scots Wha Hae.

Go figure.

What was I thinking of?