DOUGLAS DUNN (1942-). 1) Collect information on Dunn’s life. Where does he come from? Where does he live now? What’s his social and educational background?

DOUGLAS DUNN

(1942-)

1) Collect information on Dunn’s life. Where does he come from? Where does he live now? What’s his social and educational background?

Life

Poet, critic. Born 1942 in Inchinnan, Renfrewshire, near Glasgow. Educated at Renfrew High School and at the Scottish School of Librarianship. After working in Glasgow and Akron, Ohio, he attended the University of Hull

between 1966-69 and worked in the university library when Philip Larkin was Librarian there.

In 1971 he began his freelance career and became a reviewer for the TLS, the New Yorker and the Encounter. With his wife he spent a few months in southern France in 1972 and considered settling down there, but they returned to Hull where he became a Fellow in Creative Writing.

1981: his first wife Lesley Balfour Dunn, dies. He leaves Hull for a short period and accepts an appointment at Dundee University, where he becomes Writer in Residence in 1981-82, but returns to Hull to compose Elegies in memory of Lesley.

He moves to Tayport, Scotland in 1984, and marries his second wife, Lesley Bathgate, next year.

In 1991 as Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews. He has received several literary awards and in 2001 The Year’s Afternoon was shortlisted for the Forward Prize.

Professor Emeritus of St Andrews University.

Poetry

Terry Street (1969) shows the early influence of Philip Larkin in its documentary portraying of an urban slum area in Hull

The Happier Life (1972) extends documentary poetry to include wider existential and social issues

Love or Nothing (1974) confirms his growing interest in Scottish subject matters

Barbarians (1979) is his first decisively Scottish book and is concerned with the exclusion of lower social layers from ‘Culture’

St Kilda’s Parliament (1981) is related to the Devolution Referendum movement and Scotland’s affirmation of its cultural identity

Europa’s Lover (1982) is a long poem on the survival of cultural diversity in Europe

Elegies (1985) was written in memory of his first wife who had died of cancer in 1981

Selected Poems 1964-1983 (1986)

Poetry (cont.)

Northlight (1988) marks his return to Scotland and celebrates the history and landscape of North-East Fife

Andromache (1990) is a translation of Jean Racine’s work Dante’s Drum-kit (1993) records his disenchantment with political

poetry but nevertheless contains some poems written against Westminster’s policy on Scotland

The Year’s Afternoon (2001) reflects on the ordinary pleasures of a solitary way of life in a Horatian manner, and was published almost simultaneously with The Donkey’s Ears: Politovsky’s Letters Home (2001), which tells the story of E.S. Politovsky, the Flag Engineer of the Russian fleet in the Russo-Japanese war.

Editor / Criticism

A Choice of Byron’s Verse (1974) Two Decades of Irish Writing (1974) The Poetry of Scotland (1979) A Rumoured City: New Poets from Hull (1982) Poll Tax: The Fiscal Fake (1990) is a political pamphlet against

the Thatcher government The Essential Browning (1990) Scotland: An Anthology (1991) is a celebration of Scotland’s

cultural diversity The Faber Book of Twentieth-century Scottish Poetry (1992) is a

definitive anthology of contemporary Scottish poetry in three languages

The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories (1995).

Britishness, Englishness and Scottishness Born in Scotland, near Glasgow Lived in Hull for about two decades, considered

settling in the US and France but on both occasions went back to England for various reasons

After death of first wife left England and settled in Scotland, lives in North-East Fife

Early poetry reflects on life in Hull and general social problems but there’s a growing interest in his Scottish roots and Scottish landscapes and Scottish politics.

Britishness, Englishness and Scottishness (cont.) Interview: ‘A Different Drummer’, Poetry

Review 89.3 (1999), pp. 27-34. Britishness and British national identity Peaceful nature of Scottish nationalist

movement Issue of language Nationality and inferiorism

Britishness, Englishness and Scottishness (cont.)

Is “Britishness” an appropriate paradigm in reading contemporary Scottish writing, or has it ever been one?

… I have to admit that a “British” national identity may well be in question but due … to the puzzlement of English people at the rise of a post-imperial multi-racial society, the erosion inflicted by the Provisional I.R.A., Ulster Loyalists, and other terrorist factions in Ireland with their adjunct activities on the mainland, the so-called National Party in England with its fascist and Nazi affiliations, and far less to the convictions of the Scottish National Party. Scottish Nationalism is distinguished in Europe for its democratic principles and procedures. It hasn’t killed anyone while no one as far as I know has died for its cause in this century unless through stress, overwork, or disappointment. What I’m saying is that the nationalism with which I’m familiar is benign, and not to be confused with nationalisms elsewhere or their lethal activities.

It’s not so much a question of “Britishness” or “Britishism” as of the English language. Scotland admits to three languages – English, Scots and Gaelic. The first of these is a lingua franca, but with a Scottish accent (although sometimes with an English accent), and it is the language in which I write and speak (with a Scottish accent), although I have a facility to speak in Scots if I feel like it or the social context invites me to do so. I have never been embarrassed by this fact, which I acknowledge, simply, as a fact. But “Britishness” fails to offer a paradigm to a reading of contemporary Scottish writing. Why? – I believe the reason to be a matter of class politics among Scotland’s writers and readers as much as nationalism.

‘Barbarians’

Do you perceive the existence of a broader European context for the “barbarian” poetry written in the British Isles?

I think I coined the term “barbarians” in a poetic context in the mid-1970s when I wrote the first part of my collection Barbarians. Tony Harrison was in the same district of thought and feeling at the time, and Seamus Heaney also (perhaps even a little earlier). I used the term to mean the oppositional or socially and politically hostile aspect of contemporary poetic sensibility, which was shared chiefly by poets of a working-class and/or non-English origin in the British Isles.

‘Barbarians’ (cont.)

My notion of “barbarians” came straight from the Greek, though. “Bar-bar” in Greek was meant to imitate the uncouth sounds of the languages of those who weren’t Greek and were, allegedly, uncultured. The relationship between English and Scottish literature wasn’t a priority. At the time, I was living in Hull, in East Yorkshire, and although the poems are aware of my Scottish background and concerns, I was more conscious of the offence of class-based politics and systems organised around the apparent psychological need for demeaning and humiliation on the grounds of birth, nationality, and accent.

‘Barbarians’ (cont.)

Is it necessary to define who the “barbarians” are? Isn’t it the dynamic of the relationship that can be artistically more productive?

“Barbarians” … are those who have otherwise been excluded from High Culture, but who, by the later part of the twentieth century in the North-West European Archipelago, come to possess it, very much to the embarrassment of those who assume that they have inherited and own the language and its poetic possibilities. …

You seem to indicate a tension between “High Culture” and the concerns of “the people”, and I would agree. I want to be a poet of High Culture but at the same time I don’t want to be disloyal to my native parish, my home, my most immediate people, children, friends.

Terry Street poems

Men of Terry Street

Images of urban life Photographic technique Images of people: the noises they make; they

become mythical figures in their absences but also uncomfortable to look at

Verb tenses: present tense, no trace of history

Images of nature are missing

2) ‘On Roofs of Terry Street’: Collect information on Terry Street. What stage in Dunn’s life is told about in the poem? What is the genre of the poem? What poetic style is the closets equivalent to the writing style as exhibited in the poem? (Pay attention to the tense of verbs.) What is the environment like? What characters are there in the poem? Define: quotidian. What is the role of the commonplace?

On Roofs of Terry Street

[Péter Kántor’s translation] Urban landscape, slum area in Hull, destroyed since Imagism Photographic poetry: Present tense verbs only, no voices

represented No first person in the poem, the lyrical self is outside the poem,

the self is an outsider in that place The lyrical self has no history in that environment, no sense of

personal history Interested in finding the general in their lives The elevation of the commonplace; spiritual democracy.

3) ‘A Removal from Terry Street’: Who is the speaker? What is his relation to the other characters? What kind of dialectics are observable in the poem? What do the belongings of this family tell about their ‘culture’? What’s their aspiration? What does the last line mean?

A Removal from Terry Street

[youtube video] [Péter Kántor’s translation] Speaker: the poet’s self Characters: neighbours in Terry Street Dialectic: us and them, cultural difference, economic or social

difference Irony: ‘the usual stuff’, their belongings reveal their culture

(popular culture) Emotional impact: the detail of the father pushing a lawnmower

and the incongruity of that object in a place with no grass, glimmer of hope or aspiration

Conclusion: blessing or claiming kinship with those people, the possession of a patch of lawn reflecting social status; iambic pentameter

4) ‘The Come-on’: Define: ‘scholarship boy’. Collect icons and symbols in the poem. What do they symbolize? Who is the first person singular? Who is the second person singular? Who are ‘them’? What is the aim and aspiration of the speaker the likes of the speaker? What kind of strategy is proposed?

The Come-on

Taking on the cause of the culturally dispossessed The political manifesto of a generation: grudge, revenge, revolt,

occupation of a territory From Barbarians: Harrison (The School of Eloquence and

Continuous), Heaney (The Ministry of Fear: ‘The fine lawns of eloqution’), the Scholarship-boy’s revenge: Butler Education Act in the 1950s provided government grants for talented working-class pupils

Garden: metaphor for education, leisure, culture, social status Gate: Biblical symbol Icons of social discrimination: wall, dressing, language There’s a relationship between wealth (ownership, authority) and

culture Strategy: infiltrate the system and beat them in their own game

Remembering Lunch

a long poem using the mask of the ‘dominie’ launches criticism against London literary life from the ‘provinces’ in a

Horatian manner: ‘Manias without charm, cynicism without wit, and integrity/ Lying around so long it has begun to stink’

disenchantment with routine existence in the metropolis: ‘Its sum of parts no longer presents a street of epiphanies’.

a form of modest Epicureanism, represented by long walks along the shore in his ‘estuarial republic’ of the north in ‘contented solitude’, and ‘with a pocketful of bread and cheese,/ My hipflask and the Poésie of Philippe Jaccottet’.

a sense of chronological self-emancipation in the archaising nostalgia:well-dressed in tweeds and serviceable shoes

Although not like an inverted popinjay of the demented gentryBut as a schoolmaster of some reading and sensibilityCirca 1930 and up to his eccentric week-end pursuits, noticing,Before the flood of specialists, the trace of lost peoplesIn a partly eroded mound, marks in the earth, or this and thatTurned over with the aforementioned impermeable footwear.

Remembering Lunch

What is a means of collective self-definition for Heaney in the bog poems, the discovery of ‘the trace of lost peoples’ (or ‘this and that’) becomes an eccentric pastime of Dunn’s introvert poetic persona.

Robert Crawford recognises Dunn’s dominie as a ‘sophisticated barbarian’, a ‘descendant of Burns’s “man of independent mind”’.

Crawford also suggests that Dunn’s ‘ironic self-awareness’ saves the poem from nostalgia - but not from an embarrassed sense of anachronism, of being an émigré in time:

it is a cause for fear to notice that only my footprintsLitter this deserted beach with signs of human approach,Each squelch of leather on mud complaining, But where are you going?

St Kilda

St Kilda

‘St Kilda’s Parliament’ (George W. Wilson, 1879)

St Kilda’s Parliament: 1879-1979 Setting: St Kilda, a group of islands in the Atlantic 110 miles

west of the Scottish mainland, supported a population of about 100 people for centuries. The people survived on a diet based on sea birds and their eggs.

The population dropped to 36 by 1930 and poverty and illness forced them to request to be evacuated to the mainland. By that time they had also became objects of tourist curiosity and their way of life could not be maintained. The island is used now by the Ministry of Defence as a rocket-tracking military station.

Skelda (Norv. ‘shield’) Genre: monologue, speaker: the photographer Situation: a photographer returns to the remote island he had

photographed a hundred years earlier. In the 1930s the islanders had been evacuated. The poems examines the lives of the islanders and our attitudes to them.

St Kilda’s Parliament: 1879-1979 The poem is based on a famous photograph by GW Wilson of the men

of the community, ironic title ‘parliament’. Each morning the islanders met to plan the work for the day and to discuss any matter of communal interest. There was no leader but each adult male had a chance to speak and an equal vote in decisions.

savages, but sense of uncorrupted natural existence, instinctive democracy, implied criticism of Westminster’s policy on Scotland

Title: significance of dates, relates St Kilda’s past to Scotland’s present, parliament is a thing of the past, imagined nostalgically and in an elegiac way, melancholy, surrealism

Contrasts: civilisation and savagery, local and universal, remembering and forgetting, observer and observed, past and present, linguistic difference, spatial difference, temporal distance

Observation, verbs of looking, no voice, ghosts, metonymical extension of the people of St Kilda to the people of Scotland.

Further Reading on Dunn on the Internet Read my interview with Douglas Dunn, conducted in 1998, at:

http://www.c3.hu/scripta/nagyvilag/99/0910/18dosa.html . Read another interview that I conducted with the poet in 2000 at: http://www.inaplo.hu/nv/200206/22.html

’Men of Terry Street’ and other poems in Hungarian translation are available in Nagyvilág at: http://www.inaplo.hu/nv/200206/18.html .

An interview with Gerry Cambridge in The Dark Horse: http://www.star.ac.uk/darkhorse/archive/DunnInterview.pdf

Douglas Dunn at the National Library of Scotland: http://www.nls.uk/writestuff/heads/wee-dunn.html

A short biography at the British Council website:http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth137

Douglas Dunn's homepage at the University of St Andrews:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/academic/english/dunn/home.html

BBC Writing Scotland:http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/arts/writingscotland/writers/douglas_dunn/