Week 9: Oct 22: Scots Poetry / Poetry in Scots A language is a dialect
with an army and a navy.
Please read my introduction to the Introduction to Scottish Poetry. Poems ~ Secondary ~ General Schedule ~ Back to Week 8 ~ On to Week 10
Core Reading: Poems: Handed out in class: Three poets of the first half of the 20th century, illustrating three approaches to the use of Scots (see my intro to Scottish poetry for context, particularly for MacDiarmid. You will probably find MacDiarmid pretty hard going, so you may want to start with Soutar, then speak your way through Garioch. Another you should be able to sound out phonetically is Finlay, then maybe Vettese and Jamie. Crawford’s poems vary in their difficulty. Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978): The Watergaw, The Eemis Stane, Scunner, Empty Vessel, excerpts from A Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle William Soutar (1898-1943): Hungry Mauchs, The Makar Robert Garioch (1909-1981): Heard in the Gardens (name pronounced Geary) Another
poet of the same generation, who registers his sense of homeland, history,
and difference in
Norman MacCaig (1910-1996): Two Thieves, Notations of 10 Summer Minutes, Small Loch Three more legends: an English-language poet whose work is a lifetime of meditation on language; a poet of endless play and invention who writes in both English and Scots and in both verse and concrete forms; and some early vernacular poems from a concrete poet best known for his engagement with neo-classicism, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, landscape & seascape. W.S. Graham (1918-1986): Baldy Bane, Constructed Space, The Beast in the Space, Note to the Difficult One Edwin Morgan (b.1920): The First Men on Mercury, Dialeck Piece, Archives, Opening the Cage, Canedolia (We'll read his Glasgow poems next week.) Ian Hamilton Finlay (b.1925): from Glasgow Beasts An a Burd. (I’ll bring prints of some of Finlay’s concrete work to class.) Some younger poets who write in both English and Scots: Kenneth
White (b.1936): The House at the Head of the Tide
Robert Crawford (b.1959): Scotland, A Scottish Assembly, Alba Einstein, Fur Thi Muse o Synthesis, Ghetto-Blastir, Prayer, Simultaneous Translation, Chevalier, Wha’s Like Us?, Radio Scottish Democracy Kathleen Jamie (b.1962): Lucky Bag, Arraheids, Den of the Old Men, Xiahe, The Way We Live, Meadowsweet, The Graduates, On the Design of the New Scottish Parliament Building COURSE WEB SITE: Instuctor’s “Introduction to Scottish Poetry” BOUND COPY SHOP READER: Robert Crawford: “Home,” Identifying Poets pp 158-175. This is the concluding chapter of a book-long argument regarding poets of the 20th century who “identify” their work in and speak from a particular cultural and geographical location. The first sentence refers to the poets he has discussed at length prior to this chapter. READER:
A.J. Aitken, “A History of Scots.” Concise Scots Dictionary (This is not
in the bound set of readings. It was copied separately and stapled to Brathwaite’s
“ConVERSations.”) This will answer some of your basic questions about what
Scots is -- and probably raise some new ones.
Additional Reading: Web:
Poems
and Songs of Robert Burns. Harvard Classics, Harvard UP, editions of
1909-1914.
Interview with Edwin Morgan: <http://angel-exhaust.offworld.org/html/issue-9-10/EdwinMorgan.html> Reserve Desk: Douglas Dunn, ed: Faber Book of 20th Century Scottish Poetry. Both the anthology and the introduction are excellent. Robert Crawford: Identifying Poets Daniel
O'ROurke, ed: Dream State: The New Scottish Poets
Poems ~ Secondary ~ General Schedule ~ Back to Week 8 ~ On to Week 10 |
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