What is Mainstream?

I've been musing a little about the usefulness or otherwise of the term "mainstream" in relation to Scottish poetry. I think it's fair to say that, in UK terms, Hugh MacDiarmid would not be regarded as mainstream. His non-mainstream status is emphasised by the fact that he turns up in the marvellous PENNsound archive, which focuses on the more experimental/avant-garde end of American poetry, and the fact that Eliot Weinberger considers his work in an admiring essay in Karmic Traces. And yet MacDiarmid is a hugely significant figure in 20th century Scottish poetry by anyone's standards. This surely makes him mainstream in a Scottish context, which perhaps emphasises his contention that Scottish literature is a separate tradition to the so-called English literature canon and market.

An analogous situation obtains with Gael Turnbull. Gael's role in injecting postwar modernist American poetry and poetics into the British scene was highly significant. He was an unceasing experimenter and his work sits comfortably with Shearsman Books, who published his Jacket tribute also fitted easily into the much more mainstream arena of Shore Poets, of which he was a valued (and is a much missed) member. Is Gael's work mainstream or experimental? Why should I (or anyone else) care? It's full of inventiveness, wit, insight, beauty, energy, playfulness and seriousness. It's simply worth reading.

Does this mean that, in Scotland, we have less of a distinction between the mainstream/accessible and the experimental/difficult? I'd like to think so, but I'm not convinced. After all, the poetry scene in which I'm involved is pretty much the main stream. But then, where do writers such as Frank Kuppner, David Kinloch or Price sit in relation to this supposed dichotomy? They have all appeared and/or are appearing on the bill at Shore Poets and other mainstream poetry readings, but they certainly don't row down the main current of the main stream, as indicated by the fact that Kinloch and Price both appear in the Archive of the Now.

Best Scottish Poems 2006

The Scottish Poetry Library's third annual online choice of Scottish poems published in the past 12 months or so--Best Scottish Poems 2006--went live on St Andrew's Day. As ever, it's a highly inpidual choice by this year's editor, Janice Galloway, as you can see if you compare it with the 2005 choice by Richard Price or the 2004 one by Hamish Whyte, who is represented in the 2006 gathering.

Galloway's gleanings include a poem a piece by Shore Poets Diana Hendry and Christine De Luca. Christine's poem is a moving but light elegy for Gael Turnbull, capturing so much of a very fine and sorely missed poet.

There's also a piece by Chloe Morrish, whom I met at the Responding to Rilke reading. It's a moving poem about her father and her younger brother, who died of a neurological disease aged 11. Poems about loss and grief are hard to do well, but this one quitely captures the mix of love, sadness, regret and happiness that such remembering entails.

There Were Words

Tuesday night saw the launch of There are words, the collected poems of Gael Turnbull, who died in 2004. Gael was a doctor, morris dancer, Liberal Democrat activist and endlessly inventive poet, though I knew of only the first and last of those aspects to his life while he was with us.

Gael's publishing life was lived in small presses and numerous pamphlets, so it was easy for a comparative neophyte like me to miss the significant volume of his work and the role that he had played in bringing American moderist poetry to a UK audience through his own publishing activities. A correspondent of, among others, William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting and Robert Creeley, he was no peripheral figure. Roy Fisher says on the back-cover blurb for There are words:

I heard that Charles Tomlinson's first response to the news of Gael Turnbull's
sudden death was, "I owe everything to Gael!" Those words could have been mine.

Not that Gael, modest almost to a fault, would accept any such talk. I remember his response when Allan Crosbie mentioned to him that he had recently heard how influential a role he had played: Gael simply smiled and said quietly, "Oh, you shouldn't believe everything you hear about me."

Well, whatever you have or haven't heard about Gael Turnbull, you can read him in There are words. It's a handsomely bound, substantial volume. Nice paper, too. One could perhaps wish for slightly better type here and there, but that's quibbling. You hear the man himself reading online at Shore Poets a few years ago and reading from his own and others' work in 1963, but it's most wonderful to hear the weight and lightness of his voice through the pages of the book.