'It's a real honour' to play bookfest's last-ever event says poet Don Paterson
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Scottish poet Don Paterson has been a regular visitor to the Ullapool Book Festival over the years and this weekend, his event with poetry, music and guitarist Graeme Stephen will bring the festival to a close for the last time.
Don is an award-winning poet, is Emeritus Professor of Poetry at St Andrew's University, has also written a critical book examining the art and techniques of rhyme, meter and the language of poetry, called The Poem. He ran Picador’s poetry imprint as its editor for 25 years and has most recently written a memoir about his Dundee childhood called Toy Fights. He left school at 16 to head for London and a career as a jazz guitarist, then began to write his own poems. His first poetry collection, Nil Nil (1993), won the Forward Prize for best first collection. God’s Gift To Women (1997) won the TS Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and Landing Light (2003) won the Whitbread Poetry Award and an unprecedented second TS Eliot Prize. His poem, A Private Bottling, won the Arvon Foundation International Poetry Competition.
Q in your latest collection of poems, The Arctic, so much seems to inspire you – a poem like Snaba – and Repertoire – are memories of your late father, but so many of the big global shifts such as Brexit and the pandemic and the Ukraine situation are there too. Is responding to the world as a poet your job and/or your joy?
A Don: I’m too Scottish to invoke ‘joy’, sadly … But I think it’s my job to respond to whatever moves me most in the world, the things that provoke love or anger or grief, or – yes, I admit – joy. As a poet you have to work on the assumption that what moves you in the act of writing is what affects other folk too. If you try to manipulate your reader, though, they can smell it a mile off. You can only move them by trusting your own feelings in the act of writing, I think.
Q In your critical study The Poem, you mention in your introduction that your book sees you "articulate my own beliefs about language, poetry and the means by which the poem maintains its central role in our cultural and spiritual life". Do you think the digital age with all the weird shifts it has brought to human beings communicating with each other - lots on devices, less face to face maybe – has somehow strengthened the power and impact of poetry? Or is it a different kind of poetry ie spoken and listened to rather than written and read. Does that matter?
A Don: Poetry is undergoing huge changes at the moment – for just the reason you give. Social media and new digital platforms have meant distinct and sometimes very separate audiences forming, for often very different kinds of poetry. We really have different genres now, from spoken word, rap and hiphop and experimental poetry, to the boring old rhyme-y on-the-page stuff that I do; and we might have to stop pretending they’re the same art form soon. They don’t overlap much. But it’s a very energetic time for poetry, certainly. As an old guy, though, I’m always adding ‘So long as we have standards!’
Q From the chapter in The Poem, Lyric, Vowel And Consonant, you say: 'Perhaps poet can be simply defined as 'anyone prepared to cultivate the necessary obsession with writing poems’. Indulged for long enough, we now know that just about any obsessive practice will effect physical change in the corresponding part of the brain, making it in turn easier to indulge and perfect the practice itself?'
I like the idea that we change our brains by practising certain skills and talents. Are there any other physical changes poetry has made to you or maybe with which you respond to the world around you? A supertuned ear? Hypervision to notice detail?
A Don: Ha! I think I probably say somewhere else that I think of ‘poet’ as more as a diagnosis than a calling, really. I really do wish writing poetry made you more sensitive, and gave you incredible hearing, but look at me. I’m just touchy and deaf. It does make you attuned to the weight and texture of language, though, which is probably just a way of saying poetry makes you better at writing poetry. But we get good at nuance, at catching the shades of meaning that often slip through the cracks between words. And it’s in those discriminations that the real truth about the world often lies.
Q I wanted to ask, have you lots of memories of appearing at the Ullapool Book Festival before?
A Don: Yes! Always wonderful. It was the book festival that made me an Ullapool addict, and now we’re up here a couple of times a year. It’s just so beautiful, and such a swingin’ wee town. And the festival always made everyone feel so welcome.
Q You will be playing the last event at the last festival (though luckily the organisers plan to keep occasional book events coming). I think yourself and Graeme Stephen are both part of the event and there will be music and poetry. How do you feel about being part of the last event (and the last festival)?
A Don: It’s a real honour, given all the terrific writers the festival has hosted over the years, and the model the UBF has become for other small book festivals in Scotland and beyond. I’m feeling the pressure a bit, so I’m relieved to have the wonderful Graeme Stephen – Scotland’s greatest guitarist, in my humble opinion – there to cover for me. But I still hope that someone else may take up the reins again in the future, after Joan Michael and her team step down for an extremely well-earned rest.
Don's event at the Ullapool Book Festival on Saturday has sold out.
