Small is Beautiful!

That's got to have been the best wee festival in the world we had the weekend before last. What a cracker LBF 08 was! Fiona Hyslop, the Scottish Government education secretary and a Lithgae resident, launched the festival and christened our new participants autograph book. She stayed around for Christopher Brookmyre's sell-out event. There was such a fantastic buzz about the hall as the crowd piled in. Brookmyre, whom I'd never heard before, was an entertaining speaker and reader. There was a fantastic buzz as the crowd piled out too. We couldn't have got off to a better start.

The poetry workshop I ran occupied me for the first chunk of the Saturday. It went swimmingly, if I do say so myself. I had four participants, a comfortable number for discussion and reading round. They were a good group--gelled well, very ready to talk about the poems I used as models--and I was impressed with what they produced in the 20 or so minutes they had to write at the end. We chatted on afterwards for a good half hour, so I missed Timothy Neat on Hamish Henderson and the first Saturday event I sat in on was James Kelman's reading. First time I'd seen him too. I'd heard say he wasn't such a great speaker, but I was impressed. He read from Kieron Smith, Boy; I was struck how well he'd seemed to capture not only the language of the boy but the grammar of his thought processes and how he turned them to poetry without losing any authenticity. He was forceful and articulate too in what he said about Scotland, Scottish culture, Scots language and cultural amnesia.

After Kelman, I took a break, getting back to the festival in time to help out for Alex Gray's event. I didn't hear her, as I manned the front desk partly to keep an eye on any early arrivals for the open mike, but her reading seemed to go down well with the audience (which, incidentally, included Rob A Mackenzie).

The open mike was a triumph. We had a good mix of poetry and prose; a good mix of styles. Usually, such events are hit and miss, sometimes terribly hit and miss. This one was hit after hit: good performances all round and lots of strong writing. Rob read, as did Mandy Maxwell (who came all the way up from Newcastle). Mandy's "Michaelangelo Takes a Sickie" was a highlight of the evening. We also had Fiona Lindsay and Gavin Inglis from Edinburgh and a good local, West Lothian contingent: Grace Cleary, Ellie Stewart, Emma Mooney and a man whose name I've forgotten (sorry!). A handful of us ended up in Platform 3 pub for a bit afterwards-- right next to the band!--and I got home about midnight, I think.

Clear skies and sun helped bring the families out for the children's events on the Sunday. Catherine Rayner showed us some gorgeous original drawings and paintings for her books and shared with us the prototype of a new one, about a moose who couldn't fit in the book. Lynne McGeachie enthralled the audience with The Tail o Peter Kinnen, her fine Scots translation of The Tail of Peter Rabbit, drawing out the children's knowledge of Scots and building it subtly.

The festival ended with Alistair Findlay. Readers of this blog will know how highly I think of his The Love Songs of John Knox in particular, so it was a pleasure to introduce him to the shall we say select audience. It's a pity he didn't have a bigger crowd, because he's a superb reader and brought the festival to a close with virr, wit, intelligence and great fun. Still, he had a book-buying audience, which is always a bonus for the writer.

A huge thank you to everyone who participated in making it such a great weekend. See you in 2009!

A busy weekend ahead with this year's Linlithgow Book Festival kicking off on Friday. I'm particularly looking forward to the workshop I'm running and to Alistair Findlay's reading on Sunday. Alistair is one of Scotland's sharpest voices and a hugely entertaining reader. He's an unusually political writer for this era and can be a bitingly funny commentator on our culture and society. Not to be missed, I'd say.

100 Favourite Scottish Football Poems

One of the questions that one always faces with an anthology is what is its rationale, its purpose and aim? Like its team mates 100 Favourite Scottish Poems and 100 Favourite Scottish Poems to Read Aloud, 100 Favourite Scottish Football Poems, edited by Alistair Findlay, hints at a kind of democratising of the canon in its title and cover design, which is reminiscent of the earlier edition of The Nation's Favourite Poems in typeface and layout. However, although the 20 of the 100 Favourite Scottish Poems (which, presumably, nobody would ever dream of reading aloud) were chosen through a Radio Scotland listener poll, the other 200 are, as far as I can tell, chosen by single editors.

So, if we don't have a popular poll, what do we have? One man's take on how poetry has addressed an endlessly popular subject, perhaps. Findlay instinctively sides with the crowd, which, he says is "really only another name for 'the people'." Perhaps it was an awareness of the disjunct between his role as sole arbiter of what's in and what's out and the requirements of his Marxism that led him to the rather odd decision to number not the pages but only the poems and state that they are "in an order of reading proposed by the editor", which is to state the obvious, really.

But what you really want to know about is the poems. Readers of this blog will know that I'm no football fanatic, though I confess I'm not entirely averse to watching the odd Aberdeen or Scotland game and have been known to kick a ball about. All of which makes me pretty reasonably well-placed to judge the book as an anthology of poems without becoming misty-eyed about the footballing aspect or writing it off in anti-football disgust.

If you're looking for a golden treasury, go to Palgrave. For my taste, there are a few too many paeans to great footballers and I find many of them dull poems. One notable exception in that genre is Matthew Fitt's wonderful "Jim Leighton", a poem that, certainly read aloud (as it is on The Jewel Box), would curely make the hardest footiephobe concede that there must be beauty and heroism in the game.

But don't just turn over to the black and white film on the other channel. There is a lot more to this book than the footballing hall of fame in verse. If it contains a good handful of poems that will interest only the enthusiast, it also contains at least as much that's well worth the general reader's attention. Football runs deep, deep in the Scottish psyche and male Scottish society, and the real strength of Findlay's anthology is that it presents us with a portrait of that deep place in a more profound and, certainly, more entertaining way than any academic study could.

Every aspect of football's appeal is here: the highs and lows, the tribalism and sectarianism, the communal experience and the shared memories, the inextricable link between the sport and Scottish tribal identities. The book shows how far back this goes: the earliest poem is a quatrain from 1580, and one of the most pleasurable discoveries for me--there were plenty, I assure you--was the exerpt from "The Christmass Bawing of Monimusk, 1739", proof that the divines of Scotland have never been Calvinist dourness through and through.

Sectarianism, is of course, unavoidable. Findlay does an admirable job in this regard. "The Fields of Athenry" and "The Sash My Father Wore" sit side by side in the book--could you do otherwise?--and there's plenty sharp, funny and poignant commentary on the sectarian question from several of the poets. Dennis O'Donnell captures so much of the ambivalence, threat and fear in his "Fid. Def." (another poem that stood out for me), while Robert Crawford's "Identity League" sums up the nation's carnaptious obsessions with typical Crawfordian wit and invention.

It's interesting that, although the book includes a good deal by many of our leading poets, it's often far from their best work and that many of the most interesting and effective poems in Findlay's choice are not those by the biggest names. Perhaps there's something in football that raises the game of the lesser writers and maybe the bulk of the greats, MacDiarmid not least, have missed what's most poetic about it. There are also a few odd choices in Findlays list, poems that are shoehorned into either the rubric of "Scottish" or "football", but he does a good job of defending them in his spiky introduction.

Despite this, depsite its slight uncertainties about canon building and democracy, and despite overdoing the eulogies from a general reader's point of view, this book is a lively, entertaining and emotionally informative anthology of poetry. If you want to understand Scotland today, you need to read this kind of stuff, not just the academic and semi-academic analyses of where we are and how we got here. Findlay has done us a service in collecting it between these covers.

Fitbaw Crazy

Alistair Findlay, notable not least for The Love Songs of John Knox, has just edited an anthology entitled 100 Favourite Scottish Football Poems. More of that in due course but, meanwhile, here here is some related light entertainment, courtesy of the Tartan Army on its way to do its gentlemanly battle with the Ukraine. Proof that ordinary Scots and poetry are not oil and water:

Singing from a Strange Hymn Sheet

Just finished reading Alistair Findlay's The Love Songs of John Knox, a sophisticated but hugely entertaining collection. It's not often a book of poems has me chuckling aloud to myself almost every page. Even rarer is the collection I pass round colleagues at my day job to watch them chuckle and giggle aloud.

Findlay takes us for a surreal and manic spin through the Scottish Reformation and 21st century Scotland. In numerous poems, Knox lands in various 21st century settings--appearing on Newsnight (not, you note, Newsnicht) and This is Your Life, watching Celtic play Porto or visiting the seamier side of Livingston. He also writes to various figures (including Calvin, Elizabeth I of England and Lenin) and addresses the poet. Some poems cover the Reformation ground alone, albeit usually with the same revved-up style. And there are plenty other voices besides Knox's: "the poet", Knox's two wives and his daughter, Lenin's (yes, he writes back), Mary Queen of Scots' ladies in waiting, even a 16th century police report as well as the various voices of parodies and pastiches.

For the most part, the writing is a very conversational style of free verse, but a few poems (the Eliot and Milton parodies in particular) opt for a more formal tone. The language throughout veers between 16th century Scots, 21st century Scots and standard English not only across poems but within individual pieces, stanzas and even lines. Some phrases and lines come directly from Knox or his contemporaries. Indeed, some of the pieces consist solely of such lines, which feels a bit like channel surfing on a short-wave radio into the past. One poem, "God and Revolution--Knox and Lenin's Lines to the Faithful" juxtaposes phrases from the two gentlmen named.

It all makes for a wonderfully distruptive linguistic texture. Easily readable for most Scots, I reckon, as Findlay is careful with his archaisms. And not unreflective of how many of us speak, aside from the 16th century rhetoric. If it's a speech-based poetic, it's a rich and complex one, capable of subtleties and textures a more resolutely street-based approach might miss.

This book could easily reach out to people who don't usually read poetry. Sure, they'd miss the smattering of literary jokes, but there's much else besides to admire and enjoy. It's also pretty essential reading, given how central to the nature of Scotland are the events, obsessions and figures it deals with.

Knox often gets the blame for just about everything that's identified as being wrong with the Scottish psyche, particularly the male version. Yes, Scotland has changed immeasurably since Knox (where hasn't?), but, every now and then, the disturbing sense arises that Knox's rhetoric is not as alien to today's Scottish society as it ought to be. Findlay simply lets that sense arise without making too much of it, which is part of the book's strength.

Nonetheless, don't think for a minute that Findlay's Knox is the soor ploom beloved of much Scottish social comment. Findlay is a Marxist, which gives him obvious respect for Knox the revolutionary. That's crucial to the success of his endeavour, because his Knox emerges as a far more complex character than the dour Calvinist we're usually subjected to. Neither traditional secular Knox-bashing, hardline Calvinist Knox-worship nor mainstream Protestant Knox-ambivalence could have yeilded the gloriously anarchic reading of Scottish history and society that this collection offers.

If the sequence has a significant weakness, it's that Findlay slips into summarising Reformation history too much. When he combines this with wit, comedy and surrealism--as he very often does--it's part of the pleasure. But, in the odd poem where those are lacking, the considerable virr and smeddum that characterise the sequence dissipate and we're left with rather thin brose. Findlay should have trusted his readers more and left out those pieces. More to the point, his editors should have cut them.

The question some might ask is whether this book will translate to a non-Scottish audience. It probably won't, which is a shame in that it could be a good one for introducing people to certain aspects of Scottish society and culture. It's not just a matter of language, because the work assumes a fair amount of background knowledge, as does all good, rooted poetry. But, on the other hand, we need to talk to and about ourselves as much as any nation. It's a crucial part of understanding ourselves, understanding where we've come from and where we're headed. Whether or not anybody else understands what we're saying, seldom has it been this much fun.

The Knoxian Shore

Richard Dawson, musician of the month, provided a fine complement to the poetry, as on his previous Shore Poets appearances. In fact, to Richard goes the best rhyme of the evening: gregarious:areas. If I remember rightly, the lines were: "my pocketbook guide says they [bullfinches] are naturally gregarious; and found in cemeteries and heavily wooded areas."

First poet was Rob Mackenzie. I particularly enjoyed his more surreal, quirkier poems, such as "Advice to the Lion-Tamer on becoming a Poetry Critic" and "Scotlands". You can read his assessment of the evening here.

My set was almost exclusively unpublished poems, with the exception of "Wandelvakanties dicht bij huis" and "Sketchbook of a Trip to the Hebrides", although perhaps we could also count "Waukrife", which is about to be published in Lallans. I was slightly apprehensive about the two newest poems I read, partly because they were longer pieces. Moreover, one of them is in Scots with a fair bit of German thrown in--much too much to gloss--and the other is quite intense and concentrated. But both went down well.

We were fortunate that Alistair Findlay could bring forward his reading by a whole year to replace Kate Clanchy, who was suffering with bronchitis. Fortunate in more ways than one, because his reading was hugely entertaining. He read from Sex, Death and Football as well as from his new book, The Love Songs of John Knox. The latter poems dissected aspects of the Knox myth and today's Scotland but were saturated in a wonderful surreal, postmodern wit. Sophisticated and imaginative stuff. Very Scottish. I bought the book and might blog on it a bit once I've had a proper read.

Change to Sunday's Line-up

Just got word that Kate Clanchy has had to cancel for Sunday due to bronchitis. Fortunately, we have managed to secure a last-minute replacement: Alastair Finlay, writer of Sex, Death and Football* and, more recently, The Love Songs of John Knox, both from Luath.

The rest of the line-up and other arrangements remain as advertised. It should make for a lively, interesting and varied night--with, I expect, a fair bit of demotic Scots from Alastair Finlay. Just a bit of a pity it's turned out all male.

*A book I enjoyed very much, somewhat to my surprise given the title. I haven't read the John Knox book.