Poets' Blog

Haud me back! Like Janet, how could I resist the chance to write a poem in response to one by Burns? And I seized on his ‘Address of Beelzebub’ because I fancied writing something just as excoriating and bitterly ironic as that great Burnsian blast against injustice, a raging denunciation of some villain or villains of the present day. Who would it be? Donald Trump perhaps, with his plans to change the dunes of the Aberdeenshire coast for ever with two hotels, hundreds of big hooses and wee chalets and a couple of golf courses? Because, let’s face it, we don’t have nearly enough golf courses in Scotland. But then I thought, hmm, credit crunch, maybe Trump will be trumped by the economic haar creeping in and it’ll never happen. Where would the bitter wit of my poem be then? All over my coupon, that’s where.

Well then, how about a poem attacking the eejits who invaded Iraq on our behalf, the Great Bush and the Lesser Blair? But it’s been done countless times, in prose, protest, diatribe and no doubt poem. Hardly a new or daring subject. We all know what fools and knaves they were. And then I started writing Beelzebub’s thoughts on the environment, and had him making acerbic comments about environmentalists and encouraging industrial polluters and the chainsaw-wielding destroyers of the forests. But it didn’t work. I was writing a pastiche of Burns, not a new poem of my own in response to, or inspired by, or even in opposition to what he wrote. You need to go away and give this some more thought, I told myself. But not too much, because there’s a deadline and it’s coming up fast. You need a fresh angle on Beelzebub. And either you need to go to bed and sleep on it or you need to put the heating back on because it’s midnight and it’s cold, outside and in. Beelzebub and central heating? Hmm. Now there was a thought.

Categories: James