Blog feedDeadlines
January 15th, 2009We’ve had a family bereavement – unexpected, and shocking for many reasons – my wee sister. I mention it because I can’t not. Everything else is minor in the face of finality.
New Year began with toothache, an abscess, rearing as they do when my dentist is unavailable for several days. That time of year I usually work uninterrupted by anything other than celebratory phone calls. My sister went into hospital on Sunday 4th with back pain – a fractured vertebra – contracted pneumonia and died on Sunday 11th. How baldly I state that week – shunted back and forth between two hospitals, that life – a tragedy of secrecy, that end – a mess of organ collapse. I was with her, is all I can say.
My usual response to deadlines is to ignore them till the last minute, and then meet them – usually. If I have a year, I write nothing for 6 months. If I have a month, I write in the last week. What happens, or what I hope happens, is my brain gets to work without me consciously directing it, and when I finally sit down, the work will be there – drawn out like a fish from a deep pool – whole, almost. Often I’m actually working on other things, because I work constantly. When I can, pre-writing time is spent gardening, and not thinking. Sometimes, I even dust. The beginning announces itself, a phrase surfaces that wants written down, and then I’m doing the piece without intending – fishing it out. If I must work without that ‘dream’ time beforehand, I believe what’s produced will be dull and uninspired.
Burns – I’m enjoying James’s comments – used music that impinges its tune if you let it. That way lies grief. He could marry content to song so neither overwhelms, both equally strong and convincing, as if those were the only words for that music – and they are. To borrow the tune would be to write a poor imitation.
I am likely to also write in Scots yet perhaps the exact opposite might be the way to make a new poem that is mine and not an echo – to write in English with its constraint, clipped consonants, quiet vowels rather than the rough, rolling richness of my native tongue. Perhaps I should also control the alliteration.
I take Janet’s points about not producing a mere echo of Burns. To borrow the tune can indeed lead to the writing of a poor imitation. Burns’s voice is such a powerful one that it’s quite easy to be sucked in to his way of phrasing and thinking, and become an imitator. It’s the curse of the Burns cult, and the thing that MacDiarmid and others railed against: not so much that Burns was an over-rated poet (although MacDiarmid believed he was) but that his example spawned a host of third-rate imitators, who wrote almost entirely in cliches on couthy subjects on no importance. If you wanted to be a Scottish poet, all you had to do was write Burns pastiche. So, aye, just because Burns wrote in Scots isn’t a good enough reason in itself to write in Scots. But there are plenty of others.