David Kinloch

DK interviewed by Marco Fazzini

This interview was conducted by post in 2004. It was supposed to be included in a volume of interviews with contemporary Scottish poets but the interviewer managed to misplace the text at a crucial point in the publication process and I, in turn, was unable to locate the questions Marco sent me. Until now, that is. So here it is, for what it's worth...I have revised some of the responses slightly as a few references to post 2004 events will indicate.

Q: Did your parents encourage your interests in writing or did they react against your literary and creative leanings?

A: They were very supportive from the beginning. My parents were both highly creative and talented people so this wasn't really an issue. My father died when I was 25. My mother, now that she has retired from teaching infants, has enjoyed a new lease of life as a painter. But it was always understood -and I agreed at the time- that I would pursue my creative interests in the context of an academic career as soon as it became clear that I had abilities in that direction. I think they would have been concerned had I chosen to try to make a career as a writer per se but they would have supported my decision.

Q: What do you remember of your university years at Glasgow and Oxford? Was there any writer or friend who encouraged your writing? Did you choose a particular poetical work to inspire your work?

A Glasgow and Oxford were inevitably very different experiences. My feelings about my time as an undergraduate at Glasgow are very mixed. I remember it as a time of intense, focused study. I had the opportunity to concentrate on the books I wanted to spend time with and I spent an inordinate amount of time doing just that. I was a very intense, mixed up young man, quite unable to deal with my sexuality and painfully shy with other people. As a result I became a hermit. The only times I ventured beyond the library was to visit Alasdair Gray who was Writer- in- Residence in 1979. I showed him countless extremely bad poems and short stories and he helped me to structure and pair down my material. Paradoxically I was able to communicate with Alasdair because I realised he was probably madder and more conflicted than I was. Occasionally he organised readings from people like Liz Lochhead, James Kelman and Tom Leonard. At the time I don't really think I had a very good grasp of who these people were. I was so immersed in English and French Literature that I hadn't much of a clue what was going on in Scottish Literature. The exception to this was Douglas Dunn's poetry which I read carefully and admired. But this was before Dunn's move back to Scotland and, odd as this might seem, I didn't really think of him as Scottish. Ironically I had to wait until I got to Oxford before becoming interested in the matter of Scotland. I must explain that this lack of interest in Scottish Literature was partly a result of my secondary school education which contained no trace of anything Scottish except an annual recitation of 'Tam o' Shanter' by our Maths teacher during a Maths lesson. The fact that my own grandfather had been a Scottish poet (William Jeffrey) doesn't seem to have sunk in much beyond the initial impetus it gave me to start writing poetry. The poets I read thoroughly at Glasgow were Eliot, Auden and the Metaphysicals. In particular, I loved the poetry of Andrew Marvell. Edwin Morgan lectured on both Eliot and Auden but, again, I was relatively unaware of Morgan's own importance at the time.

Oxford represented escape to some extent. I went to Balliol College and spent my first year staying at the Graduate Centre called Holywell Manor. This was, and is, a wonderful place that brings together students from all the Commonwealth Countries. I spent most of that first year making up for the time I didn't spend socialising in Glasgow! I was part of a small band of Glasgow Scots that included Robert Crawford who had been a year senior to me at Glasgow. Robert and I started to swop poems almost immediately. I liked his and he hated mine, mostly! He was probably quite right and there is no doubt that Robert helped me to focus on the craft of poetry. He introduced me to W.N.Herbert, suggested I should try writing in Scots and after a while we agreed to try editing a poetry magazine together. We approached an American friend, Henry Hart, and the first issue of our magazine Verse was published in 1984. My Oxford experience was broken by two important events: the death of my father from cancer in 1984 and a year spent as a Lecteur at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. My father's death was a traumatic experience. Although I loved him we had an occasionally awkward relationship and I felt a mixture of grief and release at his passing. In Paris I fell in love with another young man for the first time. I was, however, not really able to cope with either of these experiences which chased me into the arms of the Catholic Church in 1985. This was a mistake and I know that I hurt a close friend in the process. What I needed to do was 'come out' and acknowledge my homosexuality but I was unable to do this until a second stay in Paris much later in 1988. During this time in Oxford I started to read more Scottish and American authors, including Hugh MacDiarmid. What helped to focus me on Scotland and made me want to return to teach at a Scottish University was a certain condescension on the part of some Oxford dons. I wouldn't go so far as to call it 'racist' but I was sometimes made to feel that I wasn't 'part of the club'.

Q: Speaking about translation Valry affirms: 'The poet is a peculiar type of translator, who translates ordinary speech, modified by emotion, into "language of the gods" and his inner labour consists less of seeking words for his ideas than seeking ideas for his words and paramount rhythms.' Do you accept this idea that a poem can be originated first in a sound or a rhythm or in a larger formal intuition rather than in some urgent message to be expressed?

A: Valéry is one of the most 'musical' poets of the French language so his remarks about translation are understandable from this point of view. I agree up to a point. This is why I listen especially to Marvell, W.S. Graham, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Geoffrey Hill, Hart Crane, James Schuyler, Barry McSweeney, Douglas Dunn, Drew Milne and John Burnside to give just a few examples. They have marvellous ears! And although these are poets who do have ideas and messages to communicate, it's as verbal musicians that I value them most. I also like some of the improvisations of LANGUAGE poetries, poetries which try to answer W.S.Graham's searching question: 'What is the language using us for?' Some of MacDiarmid's great early lyrics originated in the seduction of a single word culled from the dictionary and some of the more successful passages in his, still controversial, late work, stem from his ability to recognise and capitalise on strong rhythmical pulses embedded in found material. I acknowledge, also, your use of the formula 'a larger formal intuition'. I like creating extended poetic sequences and here the excitement derives at least as much from the mixing and matching of different verbal and poetic textures and forms as from the notion that the 'subject' or 'idea' demands extended development. You have to be careful though. Even the most 'difficult' and 'abstruse' poems contain words that 'mean'. That meaning may be plural and ambiguous but even the most sublime 'Nonsense' poems communicate ideas and messages. The great poems for me are the ones that begin in a note, a timbre or pitch, a phrase that invites, seduces, romances, abolishes, restores idea and sense. They are the ones in which the ideas seem to flow out of the words -not necessarily in an easy linear fashion- out of the music and then back into it so that at the end of the poem you are not immediately aware that you have been listening to 'language or 'ideas' but to a strange mixture of the two. This is a very important issue, often overlooked by academic critics who treat poetry simply as 'discourse'. Poetry for me is first and foremost music: rhythm, pulse, deft echo.

Q: Would you speak about a period of gestation in which the poem is being pre-determined?

A The poem that gets published is only the tip of an iceberg. The process reminds me of the way a dog turns and turns in its litter before settling! It is a peculiar mixture of physical, emotional and intellectual enticement and discomfort. The French writer, Joseph Joubert (1754-1824) who I wrote a book about, spent his entire life gestating a book of aphorisms he never published. For me there are four distinct phases: the 'envelope phase' during which you scribble a phrase or an idea on the back of an envelope or a bus ticket, the 'notebook stage' in which you work through initial ideas, try out some 'lines', get distracted by dinner or the telly, the 'blank sheet' phase which is as terrifying as Mallarmé thought it was ('le vide papier que la blancheur défend'), during which you make a first stab at the 'whole' poem and then finally the 'revision stage' which can seem almost endless. And for all this work and terror most of us only ever see about £20 a poem if we're lucky!!

Q: Would you comment on the following observation made by Wallace Stevens in his 'Adagio':

        After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that
        essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

A: It depends a bit on how you interpret the word 'redemption'. There is the sense of 'buying back' or 'compensating' for something lost. In the Christian context (although Stevens does not capitalise his 'god') redemption is about acknowledging and making up for sin, a notion I no longer believe in. Can I, do I attempt to 'redeem' my life, Life itself, through poetry? Is it what enables me to give my life value and structure? I have no definite answer to these questions. There is no doubt that I use poetry at times to 'make sense', to give verbal structure to certain experiences. I also use it to transform those experiences imaginatively. If they are negative, I can transform them to some degree into something beautiful and positive (Les Fleurs du Mal). But I'm also suspicious of taking too 'sacral' an attitude to poetry. Poems are objects made out of language, some are better made than others, some are totally disposable. They're the odd bits of putty or expanding polyfilla that shore up your tottering day to day existence! Ask me this question again when I'm eighty, if I make it that far!

Q: Are you afraid to be misinterpreted or that your poems can be mismanaged by the critics?

A: Not 'afraid' no. I'm afraid of not being read at all. The biggest challenge that faces most poets is getting a decent hearing, of simply getting published and decently distributed. Then, you have to fight for attention among all the other cultural forms, nearly every one of which is watched, listened to, participated in by thousands more than those who pay even the slightest attention to poetry. Only then does the issue of the 'critic' possibly kick in. I say possibly because even then there is no guarantee that the critics will deem you worthy of their 'misinterpretation'. In fact I would rather be misinterpreted by a bad critic than not interpreted at all. This might sound perverse but the fact is that because Literature and now Creative Writing have become part of the Education Industry probably more people read the critics to get a quick fix on who they should 'read' than actually read poets themselves. How many academics actually read, I mean really really READ poets? Very few in my experience and I earn my living as an academic. That's the pessimistic bit. Where there is initial misinterpretation or 'mismanagement' however, I am confident that eventually the 'good' critic will come along. Not always from the best of motives. He or she might be writing a thesis and simply have to disagree with the critics who got it 'wrong' in the first place. But I have a healthy respect for good critics and little time for those who dismiss them haughtily. A first rate critic of poetry is worth any number of mediocre poets. Providing they avoid too much academic jargon they can be beacons for poets and poetry. Some of the highest criticism and philosophy is in its own way fine poetry: I'm thinking here of some of Derrida's work and much of Barthes. I think it's wrong also to assume that being the victim of critical 'misinterpretation' is always a bad thing for a poet. It can be initially frustrating, deadening even, but once you've rallied it might conceivably be stimulating. It might galvanise you to more poems where you try to explore what sent the critic off on the 'wrong' track. The creative imagination can be wonderfully perverse at times. Nor, indeed, are poets themselves exempt from the follies of misinterpretation. Harold Bloom has a remark to the effect that most great poems are the product of creative misreadings of earlier poems. All poets are also critics because they are readers. The main thing though is just to get the poem out there into an arena where debate takes place.

Q: The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer in his essay 'On the Contribution of Poetry to the Search for Truth', says: 'The word of the poet is autonomous in the sense that it is self-fulfilling...To speak of truth in poetry is to ask how the poetic word finds fulfilment precisely by refusing external verification of any kind.' Would you agree with this statement or would you rather accept the Platonic objection to the truthfulness of poetry: 'Poets often lie'?

A: To answer this question properly would take an entire book! All good poems propose a kind of imaginative truth. That is to say that even when poems 'lie' blatantly in their fictions, if those lies are true to the imaginative world of the poem -- and this may be as much a question of form, of verbal music as of 'content'-- then they offer a kind of 'truth' that people may find value in. The poem is a world, certainly, with it's own rules. Where I might -- and my mind isn't made up about this-- distance myself a bit from Gadamer is in his or the translator's use of the word 'refuse' which could smack of a certain aesthetic condescension or idealism. I can imagine 'the poetic word' deriving some satisfaction in also discovering 'external verification' of or for its truths. It may be I am misunderstanding Gadamer here and I would have to look at the context of his statement to be sure though.

Q: Can you tell me how you came to terms with the task of translating Eugenio de Andrade into Scots?

A: I heard Andrade read when I was a graduate student at Oxford and was immensely impressed. I instantly recognised a deeply sensual imagination that springs from and transforms the body of the world. When I think about Heidegger's concept of 'dasein', of 'being in the world', Andrade is one of the poets I think of first. In Andrade the erotic comes across as an utterly natural, compelling force. It has the smell and taste of earth about it and that is something I wanted in my own poetry. In one respect, therefore, there was a sense in which Andrade seemed intimately familiar to me when I first read him. But there was also something strange connected to this elemental quality I've just mentioned. For this reason I turned to Scots rather than English. I had bought Alexis Levitin's very fine book of translations into English, Memory of Another River but because my knowledge of Romance languages is sufficiently good to allow me to grasp something of the flavour of the original Portuguese I was able to sense that perhaps these English versions inadvertently 'civilised' or 'softened' what I can only describe as a sometimes abrupt or wersh 'otherness'. I have to be careful here because this kind of argument can lead one into clichés about the 'earthiness' of Scots. Scots can be a sophisticated, urbane instrument but it can also cope very well with sudden changes of register and mood as well as render the primitive, guttural urges of desire. I've talked at more length elsewhere about my own ambiguous relationship to Scots, a language that I find both strange -because I was not brought up speaking any dialect of it- and familiar -because I hear it spoken around me in the form of Glaswegian Scots. It echoes my own personal emotional experience of growing up gay in Scotland, in a fairly macho masculine culture, of belonging but not quite belonging. For all these reasons, Andrade went more 'naturally' for me into Scots and although I approached them as translations I intended from the very first to 'incorporate' them into the long sequence of prose and verse poems of my own called 'Dustie-Fute'. My intention was that the 'otherness' of this Scots Andrade would signify the foreigness of the gay Orpheus who sings his way through that sequence.

Q: Do you think your translations can be considered as versions or interpretations of the original poems or would you rather say that you tried to be as faithful as possible to the poet's ideas and verbal inventions?

A: I've tried to indicate some of the reasons I incorporated my Andrade translations into my own sequence of 'original' poems and I suppose this was the experience that led me into thinking in a more sustained way about the relationship between translation and 'original' composition to the point that I have argued against the artificial division of a poet's work into two different categories: the poet as 'creator' and the poet as 'translator'. This stems from a Romantic understanding of the poet as some kind of minor linguistic deity who creates out of nothing. I'm tempted to suggest that it's bad Romanticism because, as Antoine Berman has shown in his study of the German Romantics, some of them had a very high conception of the translator's function even going so far as to assert that a translation can 'improve' upon an 'original' work. Latterly, Jacques Derrida's work has problematised the whole notion of an 'original' anything. When you get into this area, therefore, the issue of being more or less 'faithful' becomes more complex. The old certainties have gone. You're more free to experiment perhaps. I would say that even the most apparently 'faithful' translations are 'versions', are 'interpretations'. Because every translation involves choice and choice is interpretation. It's all a matter of degree. You could argue too that some of my poems about other writers and poets are kinds of 'translation' in so far as they offer a 'version', -a misinterpretation even!- of those authors' work. So it seems my 'translations' often pretend to be 'original' or occur in an 'original' context while my 'poems' are in fact 'translations'. Perverse, aint it?

Q: Your poems often contain many references to other poets' work, even though you sometimes seem to prefer a kind of ironical rewriting of those poets' achievements. I remember an observation made by Renato Poggioli, in an essay published in 1959, where he follows Andr Gide's concept of 'disponibilit' and he states: 'At any rate what moves the genuine translator is not a mimetic urge, but an elective affinity: the attraction of a content so appealing that he can identify it with a content of his own, thus enabling him to control the latter through a form which, though not inborn, is at least congenial to him.' ('The Added Artificer', in Reuben Brower, ed., On Translation, p.141). Do you believe in what Goethe called 'elective affinity'?

A: Yes. I think my answer to your question about Andrade is fairly conclusive in this respect. But I would distinguish between those writers and artists I feel a genuine 'elective affinity' with -such as Andrade, Rimbaud or Derek Jarman- and others whom I find interesting and useful, points on a compass that I feel Scotland should consult from time to time: Lorca, Whitman, Hervé Guibert, Apollinaire, Frank O'Hara. Sometimes I'm more interested by the 'idea' of a particular kind of writer or body of work than by the actual work itself and this is where we get into the area of 'creative misinterpretation' I was speaking about earlier.

Q: What are your ideas about poetry? Do you think that when we look for consolation or redemption in art we must be sceptical about its value?

A: At the risk of sounding philistine I'd say I try not to have too many 'ideas about poetry'! I'm much more concerned with ideas about and for poems. Where is the next one going to come from? What's the best way to go about it? And again I'm not sure if I can really relate much to the business of looking for 'consolation' or 'redemption' in art. I may have misunderstood your question here...But I'm not a priest! I suppose it's really only in contexts like this -a questionnaire or an interview- that poets are forced to step back and examine what they do. That can be healthy, periodically. But it shouldn't obsess them. I have no taste for vatic utterances about poetry. That's very French and in this respect at least I'm quite Anglo-Saxon!

Q: Presenting an anthology of Scottish poetry in Italian translation in 1992, I said that in Scotland it is 'the passion for sensuality, for an agnostic link between man and nature to enable the reader to enjoy a new sacrality, a sacrality relieved from institutional and ceremonial conventions'. Do you agree with this statement?

A: I think my answer to your question about Andrade suggests a certain measure of agreement with you here. I am reluctant to fully endorse a view of poetry as a kind of substitute religion though. Poetry for me is also a craft, a game, an entertainment with language. It is a way of thinking about the world and a working through and with the materiality of language.

Q: Do you consider yourself a Scottish or a British poet writing in the United Kingdom?

A: These kinds of classification are for the critic and perhaps not for the poet. Scotland and its literary and cultural traditions have mattered to me, as have European, English and American ones. Increasingly though I find the obsession with 'identity', with the need to label and categorise writers in these ways tiresome and superficial.

Q: What do you think Scottish literary identity is today?

A: I think you can only speak about Scottish literary identities, in the plural. I hope that Scottish writers are not simply engaged in a search for their identity though. There are much more interesting things to write about. Frankly I find the question a bit irritating!

Q: What is your impression of the New Scotland? Do you see any change for literature, and poetry in particular?

A: My initial reaction is to laugh hollowly at the phrase the 'New Scotland'. The euphoria felt by many at Devolution melted away almost immediately in the face of the Executive's incompetence in dealing with several important issues. I was particularly shocked -in retrospect this was no doubt naïve- at its pusillanimity in dealing with the abolition of 'Section 28' in Scotland, a piece of homophobic, Thatcherite legislation which forbade the 'promotion of homosexuality' (ridiculous phrase!) by local councils. Remarkably this furore about homosexuality took centre-stage almost immediately after Devolution. The clause was abolished but it said quite a lot about Scotland's continuing difficulty with issues relating to gender and sexuality. The business with 'gay adoption' is similar although perhaps society as a whole (minus some of the Churches) is being a bit more adult this time round. We'll see. The 'New Scotland' is, in this respect, still an Old Scotland, if one that is trying, sometimes painfully, to change. My own poetry has obviously been concerned with this and I expect it will continue to chart that evolution in some form or other although there is a sense in which I feel I've 'done' (with) this sort of thing and it's time to move on.

Q: Would you like to summarise your feeling about the relationship between politics and aesthetics in the younger generations of Scottish poets?

A: I think my answer to your question about the 'New Scotland' is all I can really usefully say about this. I wouldn't dream of trying to speak for other poets of my generation beyond saying that I sense a certain disaffection from the 'world of politics' and that this is quite common among the younger generations. It's not confined to poets. It depends really how you define 'politics'. At the risk of seeming completely banal, it is true that every poem is 'political' to the extent that it engages or does not engage with the 'polis'. (And I don't mean the 'fuzz'!) The huge argument that goes on in MacDiarmid's poetry between politics and aesthetics would be unimaginable among younger generations of Scottish poets. Although having said that, there are obviously deliberately playful echoes of it in the work of some poets: W.N. Herbert maybe, Robert Crawford's early poetry, some of Don Paterson's stances.

Q: If you should think about your poetical production would you find a single character which distinguishes your writing?

A: I think my writing is quite various, quite diverse in character. If I've got to choose a single characteristic I'd go for its spirit of curiosity.