Blackwell's Writers at the Fringe and More

Family circumstances mean I'm almost absent from Edinburgh this festival season, but I'll be reading at Blackwell's Writers at the Fringe on Thurs 20th. Rob A Mackenzie is reading there tomorrow night.

There are, of course, numerous literary events going on in Edinburgh this month. I hope that I might manage to hear one of Michael Symmons Roberts two readings at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, but we'll have to see how things work out.

Jenny Bornholdt, Bashabi Fraser & Martin MacIntyre are reading at EIBF on Saturday from 4pm., although I won't make it. However, it should be worth checking out, especially for Martin’s very fine Gaelic poetry.

Stanza 2008: What Andy Did

I jumped into the car first thing yesterday morning and zipped up the road to St Andrew's for my fix of StAnza 2008, listening to The Guardian CD of great 20th century poets on the way to get me in the mood. My first event was the masterclass in translation with Helmut Haberkamm and Fitzgerald Kusz, who both write in the Franconian dialect of German, and, from the Scottish side, Robert Alan Jamieson and Sandy Hutchison. I was irritated with myself that I hadn't managed to do or submit translations of any of the masterclass poems, but it was an extremely worthwhile event for the discussion of dialect writing and translation*. It also gave me the chance to catch up a wee bit with Donal McLaughlin, Jim McGonigal and Chloe Morrish. And I came away with some free back issues of the Berlin-based poetry and fiction periodical lauter niemand and it's English-language adjunct, no man's land.

After a somewhat hurried lunch, I was back in the Town Hall for the French-language translated poets reading. French isn't really one of my languages, but I've complained in the past about translated poets only being during the week when there isn't a hope of my getting to StAnza so, having missed the Frisian and Franconian poets' readings because I was unable to be there on the Saturday, I felt I ought to go to this one. It was a fascinating reading. Neither of the poets--Heather Dohollau and Soleïman Adel Guémar--was actually French. Heather Dohollau is Welsh but has made her home in Brittany and writes in French, translating her own work into English. Soleïman Adel Guémar is Algerian and writes in French but is now living in ... where else? ... Wales!

I have to confess that the exhaustion of the previous day's 1st birthday party was beginning to tell by that point and I didn't get as much out of the reading as I should have done. But I'd certainly look out for their work again. To combat the tiredness, I headed to the Byre for a cuppa before Wholly Communion, a film of a massive reading at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965. To judge by this, poetry--or at least the Beatier end of it--was so much part of the counter culture it could fill an establishment venue like that to the rafters in those heady days. It's a mad, mad film. Some of the camera work made me feel sea-sick (I'm serious; O for a steadycam!), some of the poetry was equally shaky (but some was still good) and some of the audience likewise. (Well, probably most of the audience and writers were under the influence of something. These days, you wouldn't even be able to smoke a cigarette in there, never mind what was probably in the majority of the roll-ups visible on screen.) Adrian Mitchell's "To Whom it May Concern" was one of the best bits of the film and here it is:

After the film, Rob Mackenzie and I had a coffee in the Byre before heading to the pamphlet fair. By the time we got there, it was really winding down, and there wasn't much doing. We browsed what there was and chatted with Jim Carruth and Tessa Ransford, the force behind so much of the promotion of poetry pamphlets in Scotland over the past number of years.

Back at the Byre, I bought myself a ticket for the 5:00pm performance by Belfast poet Gearóid MacLochlainn with guitarist Dave Burnett, on the recommendation of Donal McLaughlin. And I'm glad I did. His billing as a performance poet doesn't tell you the half of it. Readers of this blog will know I'm sceptical of the animal performance poetry, generally thinking the bulk of it is better less spotted and spouted, but MacLochlainn is the real deal. He writes in, across, over and under Irish and English. There's a very strong flavour of the elaborate soundscapes of the great canonical Gaelic poetry and song, such as Duncan Ban MacIntyre to use a notable Scottish example, but it's deeply contemporary in feel and content and--get this--he does it successfully in English too, perhaps not least because he brings this tradition into collision with elements of rap. I was, shall we say, hugely impressed and bought his CD, Rakish Paddy Blues II, my travelling companion on the way home.

The comparison with Duncan Ban is, by the way, not random: one of the pieces MacLochlainn performed was a poem in praise of an Irish travelling piper, Johnny Doran. MacLochlainn's poem emulates the rhythms of Irish "open" pipe music and then slips into those of "closed", dance music (hope I got those terms the right way round!). The distinction sounds not unlike that in Scotland between ceòl mòr (or piobaireachd) and ceòl beag and, of course, Duncan Ban's great poem "Moladh Beinn Dòbhrainn" ("In Praise of Ben Doran") is written in the form and rhythm of a piobaireachd.

Gerry Cambridge mentioned to me that Iain Crichton Smith had translated "Ben Doran" and that the version was in his Collected Poems. I hadn't realised that, despite having the book on my shelf. After a quick look this morning, I'm impressed with the degree to which Smith successfully renders the rhythm, meaning and some of the rhyme (he ignores some of it, presumably because it's just so elaborate it would be nigh on impossible to do in English). Julie Johnstone said she thought one of the films showing on the day's loop was partly about the poem, so I went up to have a look: she was right and, luckily for me, Moladh Da Bheinn (In Praise of Two Mountains) was the last one to show in the loop.

For me, the last event of the day was the Adrian Mitchell and James Fenton reading. Mitchell was a likeable chap with a very loose, relaxed style of presentation but, while I liked some of the poems, much of it did nothing or as near as for me. Probably the best was his slightly updated rendition of "To Whom It May Concern". However, I wish there were more poets as passionately pacifist as he is.

Fenton's work I don't really know at all, I must confess. However, from the extracts of his book on metrics that appeared in The Guardian a good few years back, I do know that he's quite conservative in many of his aesthetic views and that came across in the work he read. At times I found myself wondering whether Modernism had ever happened. That might well be an uncharitable, uninformed view, but it was my reaction. He read some beautiful, powerful, hugely accomplished and intriguing poems--and read them extremely well--but, but ... I don't know, something didn't quite engage me at the level and in the way I really wanted. One of the most interesting and powerful pieces he read was "Jerusalem", certainly worth hearing and reading.

Still, it was an extremely good day, full of good, interesting poetry and conversations with friends and strangers, many of whom I've not mentioned here. That's one of the things I love about StAnza. I overheard somebody say he preferred it to the Edinburgh Book Festival. I know what he means: even people you don't know talk to you, which doesn't happen so much in Charlotte Square. There's a sense of community and everyone seems glad to be part of that community.

*Of course, the term "dialect" is not one I'm comfortable applying to Scots as a whole, but the fact is that, because there is no standardised form of the language, everyone who writes in Scots writes in or out of a particular dialect of Scots, regardless of whether they confine their Scots vocabulary to that dialect.

Reasoning Rhyme: Lightness that Drew Me: Rhyme in Gaelic

One question that arises for the new terminology is whether it can cover rhyme practice in languages other than English adequately. It ought to be able to, as it's based on phonetic/phonemic correspondence rather than any single tradition of what does or doesn't constitute a rhyme. In this post, I start to test it out against Scottish Gaelic rhyme practice.

In Gaelic poetry, rhyme is traditionally considered to focus on vowel sounds, with no reference to the coda consonants of the rhyme syllables. Because stress is on the first syllable of a word in Gaelic, the rhyme vowel in end rhyme often falls on the penultimate syllable of the line. However, this isn't feminine rhyme, as the final syllable doesn't participate in the rhyme correspondence. Final-syllable rhymes are nonetheless perfectly possible (there are plenty monosyllables in the language), and it's also common to find internal rhyme, in which a vowel sound rhymes with a stressed vowel at a given point in a preceding or following line. It's also worth noting that vowels do not necesarily have to be identical, but closely related: /e/ and /E/ can rhyme, for example.

Meg Bateman's beautiful short poem "Aotramachd" neatly demonstrates the rhyme on the penultimate vowel sounds:

Aotramachd
B’ e d’aotromachd a rinn mo thàladh,
aotromachd do chainnte ’s do ghàire,
aotromachd do lethchinn nam làmhan,
d’aotrmachd lurach ùr mhàlda:
agus ’s e aotromachd do phòige
a tha a’ cur trasg air mo bheòil-sa,
is ’s e aotromachd do ghlaic mum chuairt-sa
a leigeas seachad leis an t-sruth mi.

Lightness
It was your lightness that drew me,
the lightness of your talk and your laughter,
the lightness of your cheek in my hands,
your sweet gentle modest lightness:
and it is the lightness of your kiss
that is starving my mouth,
and the lightness of your embrace
that will let me go adrift.

There's so much going on in this densely wrought lyric, with its rich mix of semantic, grammatical and phonological parallelism, but the feature I want to focus on is the end rhyme scheme. According to the Gaelic criteria outlined above, the poem rhymes AAAABBCC. The A rhyme is on à (thàladh:ghàire:làmhan:mhàlda), the B on ò (phòige:bheòil-sa) and the C on u (chuairt-sa:t-sruth mi). The first four lines--those that rhyme on à--are concerned with what drew the speaker to the object of her desire; they unpack the attractive lightness of the first line. In the subsequent four lines, as the lightness repels instead of attracts and the lovers drift apart, the rhyme scheme changes and fractures into two couplets.

It will not have escaped the astute reader's notice that the scheme of "Aotramachd" is more or less nuclear rhyme. In fact, analysed in these terms, we can break it down further into a clear A1A1A2A2BBCC structure. Before we do that, a quick note on Gaelic phonology is necessary.

Gaelic understanding recognises two classes of vowels and consonants: the broad and the slender. Slender vowels are i and e in the orthography, which represent the high front vowels /i/, /e/ and /E/; the rest are broad vowels. The slender vowels are sounds that, across languages, cause palatalisation of consonants*. And that's what the slender consonants are: palatalised versions of the basic, broad consonants (except that, in some dialects, the /rj/** is pronounced as a [T] or [D]). This means that what might be a secondary articulation for a consonant English is a significant difference in Gaelic, significant enough to create a separate class. I'm sure I needn't point out the importance of that for the possibilities in rhyme.

The A1 rhyme thàladh:ghàire transcribes roughly as /hAl6G:GArj@/. The rhyming vowels are identical. In the codas***, we have /l/ and /r/, which linguists class together under the term liquids. The correspondence of /h/ and the voiced velar fricative /G/ is less obvious but, if we take into account the morphophonemics--the interface of grammar and phonology--we get a clearer relationship. In their unmodified form, the rhyme fellows are tàladh and gàire, so their first sounds are /t/ and /g/ respectively: two non-nasal stops. However, because they follow the possessive adjectives mo (my) and do (the singular and familiar form of your) in the poem, they are lenited. That is to say, the stops weaken to fricatives. In the change from the velar stop /g/ to the velar fricative /G/, the place of articulation stays the same. However, in Gaelic, the voiceless coronal stop /t/ always lenites to the voiceless glottal fricative /h/. Not a close correspondence phonetically or even necessarily phonemically, but a clear morphophonemic correspondence.

I don't even need to transcribe the A2 rhyme for it to be obvious that it's a texbook example of segmental swapping: làmhan:mhàlda. However, perhaps a comment on dialect is appropriate here. In all dialects of Gaelic, the grapheme mh represents /v/ when it occurs at the beginning of a word. The word-medial mh in làmhan would be realised as /v/ in some dialects but, in others, it would be a /w/. Happily for my analysis, a recording of Meg Bateman reading the poem is on hand in The Jewel Box: it reveals her pronunciation to be /lAv@n/. Even if it was a /w/, it would still share the labial place of articulation with /v/, so it would be a case of featural swapping rather than segmental.

The B rhyme, phòige:bheòil-sa, transcribes as /fO:kj@:vjO:ljsa/. As is clear from the orthography and transcription, the place and manner features of the onsets are identical; the only major difference is in voicing. The codas might seem less closely related, but the /kj/ is a palatalised velar stop, which brings the blade of the tongue into a position much closer to that for /lj/ than in an unpalatalised /k/ so, in Gaelic terms, both codas are slender consonants. Interestingly, in the second rhyme fellow, the onset consonant /vj/ is palatalised. There's a lot going on in this apparently simple rhyme.

Finally, there's the C rhyme, chuairt-sa:t-sruth mi. It transcribes as /xuartjsa:tru:#mi/. Again, there's some segmental swapping going on here, with a /rtj/coda becoming a /tr/ onset. The second rhyme fellow has an empty coda. We could borrow the /m/ from mi, which would involve the sonority and the stop features of the /m/ breaking into the /r/ (sonority) and /t/ (stop) from the coda in chuairt.

There's much much more I could say about the poem, but this analysis indicates two things: that rhyme in Gaelic can, in fact, go beyond the vowel and that the new terminology is well placed to describe a non-English rhyme tradition. I might, in future posts, test it against older Gaelic poetry, but this will do for starters!

*Note that the presence of a vowel in the spelling doesn't necessarily mean it's pronounced. Like English, Gaelic has plenty of digraphs (two-letter symbols that represent one sound). However, the orthography often indicates historical pronunciation and the presence of slender vowels around a consonant always means that that consonant is slender.

**I use the /j/to indicate palatisation. Hence, /rj/ is a palatalised form of /r/.

***In these words and several others in the poem, what I'm treating as codas would probably be better described as the onsets of the second syllable. Therefore, as there are clear relationships, we can say that they are borrowed from the second syllables, which doesn't really participate in the rhyme scheme, as is shown by the varying vowel sounds and the variation between syllables with and without codas.

Mark Ogle Memorial Poem

Besides the usual fine fare at Shore Poets this Sunday, with Jacob Polley, Diana Hendry and Debbie Cannon, there'll be something extra special: acclaimed Gaelic poet and novelist Angus Peter Campbell will launch the Mark Ogle Memorial Poem.

Angus Peter will read Mark Ogle’s poem “English Rain” and “Our Rain”, the poem he has written as a response.

Mark Ogle (1948–1999) was one of the earliest members of Shore Poets and one of the first to read at the group’s original venue, the Shore Gallery in Leith. A poet of great depth and sensitivity, his reading so impressed the founders that they invited him to become the third Shore Poet.

Always closely involved in the running of the group, Mark played a considerable part in organising the appearances of Norman MacCaig and Edwin Morgan at the 369 Gallery. Mark continued this level of involvement even once the group had been expanded and gave many memorable readings at all Shore Poets venues.

It was with particular sadness that group members heard of his final illness and subsequent death, at the early age of 50, in February 1999. A Memory of Fields—a selection of his poems edited by Brian Johnstone and Hugh Dailly of Shore Poets, in consultation with Mark’s wife Deborah Nelken, with an introduction by Stewart Conn—was published by Akros in 2000.

In 2007, Mark's family and Shore Poets decided to commission a poem annually as a memorial to him. The commission is offered to the poet among the previous year’s Shore Poets readers whom we feel is most in tune with Mark’s sensibilities.

The poet is asked to respond to a poem of Mark’s, chosen by his family, and receives a fee of £500, plus a year’s possession of the Mark Ogle Memorial Poem trophy. The fee and trophy are presented and the poems read at the Shore Poets event in February, the month in which Mark died.

Somhairle MacGill-Eain Air-loidhne

(This post is in Gaelic* then English)

Tha mi dìreach air làrach-lìn ùr mu bheatha is bhàrdachd Somhairle MacGill-Eain lorg a-mach. Tha mòran ann: dàin, eachdraidh-beatha, dealbhan, clàran is bhideo, is mapaichean. Chan eil facal Beurla ann idir ach anns na earrannan bhideo anns a’ bheil Iain Mac a’ Ghobhainn neo Somhairle fhèin a’ bruidhinn mu a bheatha is Seamus Heaney a’ bruidhinn mu a bhàrdachd. Ann an bhideo eile, tha Aoghnas Pàdraig Caimbeul a’ bruidhinn mu a bhuaidh is tha tri earrannan bhideo ann anns a’ bheil Somhairle a leughadh dàn leat. Is e làrach-lìn fhèin math a th’ann.

I have just discovered a new website dedicated to the life and work of the great 20th century Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean. It is full of stuff: poems, biographical information, photos, recordings and video, and maps. There isn't a word of English on the site, apart from in the video exerpts in which Iain Chrichton Smith and Sorley himself speak about his life and Seamus Heaney speaks about his poetry. In another video, Angus Peter Campbell speaks (in Gaelic with subtitles) about his influence and there are three excerpts in which Sorley reads a poem of his. It's a tremendous site.

*Ma tha duine sam bith airson a' Ghàidhlig agam ceartachadh, b' urrainn dhaibh post-d a chur dhomh. Seo mo sheòladh: light [aig] gotadsl [dot] co [dot] uk

A Further Window on Last Wednesday

As I mentioned in my post on LUPAS one matter touched on in the Q&A at last Wednesday's reading was the poetry-science divide. The divide in reactions to Gerrie Fellow's new work was fascinating in that respect. Norman Kreitman, a PAS stalwart, complimented her on tackling the spiritual impact of technology. "Very few poets have the guts to do that," he declared. Gerrie denied any spiritual intent, but there is a strong emotional thread to the poems for Window for a Small Blue Baby, which might be what he meant.

By contrast, another audience member, who used to be a scientist, said he found Gerrie's approach "cold"--though I must disagree strongly with that--and applauded me for the emotional content of my work. Given my uncertainty about how well I'd read, that was encouraging.

One thing I feel definitely went well in the reading was the mix of languages in my set. For the first time, I read some poems that include Gaelic phrases, as well as my usual mix of Scots and English. Joyce Caplan, who chairs the readings, commented that the use of Gaelic in "Sketchbook of a Trip to the Hebrides" (published in the issue of island magazine mentioned in this post) was, if I remember her choice of words correctly, "enticing".

This practice arises out of a recent desire on my part for a sort of Caledonian linguistic holism in my work. It's too obvious to write poems in Gaelic or English or Scots and Scots already infilrates my otherwise English-language work to varying degrees, so why not employ my slowly growing knowledge of Gaelic in similar ways? I realise it's not "accessible" to do that, but I'm less interested in accessibility than the aesthetic possibilities it opens up for me. Not that I've gone far in exploring them yet.

"Poets and The Nation"

Radio Scotland is airing a three-part series on Scottish poetry called "Poets and The Nation" on Mondays from 11:30 to 12:00. You can listen online from the features page (I assume each programme is available for the standard seven days after broadcast). The first instalment, which was broadcast Monday this week, explored how Scottish poets have engaged with the land and landscape. The half-hour format inevitably makes for a pretty sketchy, whistle-stop exploration of the entire history of even a particular aspect of Scottish poetry in Gaelic, Scots and English, but it's heartening to find a reasonably serious series about poetry on the radio.

Stanza 2007

The programme for StAnza 2007 is now available. It's the 10th StAnza, and the line-up is a good 'un. I'm particularly interested in hearing Jorie Graham, but I'm disappointed that the Eric Gregory Award showcase reading is at a time utterly inaccessible for me. However, I'm appearing in The Gathering: 100 poets reading a poem each to celebrate the anniversary.

A Quieter Fire

Went to hear the fine Gaelic poet, publisher and scholar Derick Thomson (or Ruaraidh MacThomais in Gaelic) read on Wednesday at the usual haunt. The audience was far smaller than that for Sharon Olds. That, I suppose, is predictable, but it's also a poor reflection on the knowledge of the poetry-reading public in Edinburgh.

Gaelic poetry in or after the classical style is difficult to translate well into English, given that its dense sound patternings are lost, leaving a much barer experience, but Thomson writes in a modern free style that works well in English. His poetry is witty, lucid and rich in unexpected turns, such as the idea that people in 2121 will ask why we watched the box in the 20th century "instead of reading Plato", that Princess Diana "still speaks with a Glasgow accent" or that, when the Norsemen went ashore at Ness in Lewis, "they were afraid".

Thomson is a quiet, self-depricating man, which helps to make him an engaging reader. He is somewhat unexpectedly apologetic about reading the oringinal poems (the Gaelic versions), but not at all apologetic about his Scottish nationalism. (Still, perhaps one expects a little Caledonian antisyzygy now and again.) Remarkably, he's 85 and hardly showing his age. Long may he continue in that vein.

Scottish National Diction

The British Council Scotland website has some pages with new Scottish poetry. It's a good selection of poets, if a short one: John Burnside, Matthew Fitt, Ann Frater, Rody Gorman, Alan Jamieson and Jackie Kay. There are poems in Scots, English and Gaelic. Matthew Fitt's "Scottish National Diction" is a smashing poem with more than a hint of Eddie Morgan about it. There's a fantastic Gaelic response, "Errata", from Rody Gorman (the site calls it a translation, but it's not at all). Have a peek at Burnside in Shetlandic! Truly fanstastic, this trilingualism business.

(This is a translation of a post from The Skraich.)