Poets' Blog

Back at the tail-end of last year, I was asked to write an article for Scotland In Trust, the magazine of the National Trust for Scotland, which owns the Burns Cottage in Alloway and is in the process of turning it into the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum. For various logistical and I guess financial reasons this won’t open till 2010, which is a shame given that this year is the 250th anniversary of Burns’s birth. On the other hand, Burns is for life, not just for 2009, so maybe the opening of the Museum should be seen as taking Scotland’s, and the world’s, relationship with the poet into the future, and not just marking a convenient date. Anyway, the magazine asked me to write a short piece on ‘Why Robert Burns Matters’. I came up with six principal reasons – Language, Literature, Song, Tradition, Idealism and Burns Himself – but the one I put at the top of the leet was LANGUAGE. I did this because Burns’s language, Scots, is still too often put to the back of the queue, or sent out of the room altogether, like a badly-behaved wean. It’s too often considered a bit embarrassing, a bit of a joke. A lot of folk just wish it would go away. It’s ‘bad English’, ’slang’, ‘the language of the gutter’, or it’s old-fashioned or childish – and anyway no one speaks it any more (except of course once a year when they’re reciting Burns’s poems and singing his songs at Burns Suppers).

All of the above is, of course, complete haivers. Despite the best efforts of its enemies, Scots is still alive and kicking in the 21st century. It is rich and resourceful and varied – ranging from the crafted genius of poets like Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Morgan to the brilliant comedy of Still Game, from everyday speech to one of the greatest national song heritages of any nation on earth. Here’s what I wrote for the NTS magazine:

‘Burns spoke and wrote in both Scots and English,but it is his work in Scots that stands out. He turned to Scots at a crucial moment in the language’s history, and in doing so he fused oral and written traditions. Both Burns and Scotland would be hugely diminished without the Scots language, and so would the world: ‘Auld Lang Syne’, after all, is written in Scots.’

I also said, under the heading LITERATURE, that ‘too often Burns is seen as Scotland’s only poet. In fact, he should be seen as one of many accomplished practitioners in what is arguably Scotland’s finest field of artistic achievement, literature. Scottish literature, and poetry in particular, has a rich history stretching over many centuries, and to isolate Burns from that tradition, which he himself fully recognised, is to misrepresent both his achievement and the culture from which he emerged.’

The poem I’m writing in response to ‘Address of Beelzebub’ is in Scots. It’s the least I can do to honour the poet, his language and his culture, which are mine also.

I’ve been playing around with the same meter and rhyming scheme that Burns uses in ‘Address of Beelzebub’. If you’re interested in the technical details, each line of this poem is a tetrameter (pronounced te-TRAM-e-ter), which means it has four ‘feet’ or four beats to each line:

Long LIFE, my LORD, an’ HEALTH be YOURS,

UnSKAITH’D by HUNGer’d HIGHland BOORS!

And you can also see it’s written in rhyming couplets. But somehow this scheme wasn’t working for me, so I’ve tried making the lines longer by adding an extra foot or beat to each (making them into ‘pentameters’). Burns’s poem ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ is written in pentameters:

From SCENES like THESE, old SCOtia’s GRANDeur SPRINGS

That MAKES her LOV’D at HOME, reVER’D aBROAD…

However, none of this has been working for me. I feel if I could just get the right form for the poem, something might emerge quite quickly. This is weird, because usually I have an idea and then find a way to express it. But on this occasion it’s as if I need to find the method first, and then the idea will come. It’s that old dilemma: which comes first, the idea or the word? Can you have ideas without words? Can you have words without ideas? I’m reminded of Tom Leonard’s poem which ends with the line ‘In the beginning was the sound’. Quite. And not a pentameter in sight.

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.