Come and listen to our Voices at poetry reading in Glasgow

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along … Auden describes the indifference of the world going on around the legendary Icarus, the young man whose father gave him wings to fly, but who flew too close to the Sun, so that the wax holding the wings together melted and he fell straight down into the sea.

It might be a “dreadful martyrdom” but nevertheless, the world goes on untidily: “The dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse / Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”

I’ve always been puzzled by that “torturer’s horse”. It’s not in Breughel’s painting, which Auden then goes on to refer to, memorably: In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

All this is all very well, I thought, rereading it. It’s still a definition of comic bathos to see the little legs in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting, and a few sodden feathers floating nearby. And the ship sails on and the ploughman does his work. But is it true? Is it true anymore?

If you read the poem and look at the painting metaphorically, there’s a very different interpretation to think about, these days. I wrote my own poem to try to work out for myself what’s different about such things in the 21st century. Here it is, After The Torturer’s Horse: Well, that was then. Old Daedalus had made the wings.

They worked. The boy flew. But he wanted to fly higher.

Grow! He said. Grow the economy! Higher!

But he spread the wax till all the passing people Got stuck in its stickiness. There were the fools, who said, This is the way: we simply couldn’t do it for ourselves.

There were the cowards, who said, it scares me, best Just do as we’re told. There were the bastards, who knew What would come and feathered their own nests, regardless.

So now when the foolish child flies up too close to the sun, Nobody carries on, unseeing or uncaring. Everyone’s Caught up in the disaster. Anyone can see. And all old folk Can do, is point it out, or else work in the vast denial industry, The media. Folk do not go on as before. We follow the torturer’s horse.

More generally, there’s good precedent for poems responding to works of art, not least those of the great Australian poet Les Murray and the Irish Paul Durcan. I remember Les telling me he didn’t want to write poems specifically “for” or “in dialogue with” the paintings in the Australian National Gallery but he would select various poems or passages from poems he’d already written that seemed to him apt and reflective of particular paintings.

The imagined “dialogues” that followed from this are a treasury, a kind of gallery of reciprocation between words and images.

Paul’s book is much more made up of focused, individual responses to the Irish National collection and, as such, sometimes quizzical, comic, a bit quirky or at least idiosyncratic, but equally enquiring, revealing, illuminating. Both books are great fun: Murray’s The Full Dress and Durcan’s Crazy About Women.

(Image: Alan Riach)

When I was invited to edit an anthology of poems to paintings in the Hunterian Collection at Glasgow University, I had different priorities of my own. I did the first book some years ago: The Hunterian Poems (2015). That was followed by the second: Poems To Objects From The Hunterian Museum (2017), each with facing-page illustrations.

Now we’ve produced the third volume in that series, Hunter’s Voices. It departs from the first two by focusing less on specific objects and paintings and more on a series of themes, ideas and questions, an extended and multi-faceted enquiry into the Hunterian Collection as a whole – what it is, where it came from, what it cost, who pays the price, what its value is, how it helps, what it means, and what its future might be.

Considering these themes with reference to any particular object, objects, painting, paintings, artist and artists, was the invitation I sent to a range of poets whose work I especially like and admire.

There were two criteria that apply also to the works of art and literature that I go back to, in whose company I find certain kinds of truth: you learn from them, and they give pleasure.

I asked the poets to compose with the priority of enquiry and judgement prompted by the themes and questions, and to let that come through in their writing. It was impossible to be completely prescriptive and I saw no point in narrowing the prompt further to begin with, but the more I thought about it, certain aspects of the project became clear, to embody what was once said of Edwin Morgan, that he possessed “the intrinsic optimism of curiosity”. I hope this book follows that priority.

The criteria I set myself for the poems were the same as those for the previous two volumes: 1) There had to be poems in Gaelic, Scots and English, the three principle languages in which Scottish literature has been composed for millennia. 2) There had to be good representation of women as well as men. 3) There had to be a range of poetic forms.

There were a few stipulations about length – an epic was not what I wanted and two lines might not be long enough (though it could be). I was imagining a poem on one or two or maximum three pages, so there’s room for succinctness but there’s also space to follow an argument through. Poets almost always know what the scale of the poem will be when they’re under way with it.

My notes for the “Themes and Ideas” were simply suggestions. I asked the poets who responded to feel free to make use of them or not. Poets always go in whatever directions they want to take, or that their poems take them in. Imagination is always at work in their forms of address, in whatever imagery comes into play, in the structures of the poems, and in their tones of voice or angles of approach. I couldn’t have predicted these, even had I wished to.

Here are a few of the central themes of the book. There’s the very idea of “The Collector”, William Hunter himself (1718-83), his life, what “collecting” meant for him or means more generally.

And there’s the theme of colonialism, or imperialist theft, if you want to put it that way.

And how does that relate to the acquisition of knowledge? How is knowledge constructed, gained, built, even upon material and goods that may have been tainted by appropriation?

Such materials may have been lost or destroyed, or kept safe in a museum for future generations to use in the accumulation of knowledge. What might that knowledge be used for in the longer term? For whose gain or benefit? And in the shorter term?

Then we might consider the full inherited files of history – Celtic, Roman, Norse, Anglophone, Global – differentiated by language, geography, history, above all, by power. What have we inherited across seas and oceans, earthly continents and archipelagos?

And from outer space? We have learned from both meteorites and fossils, but what have we learned? The personal, familial and close, and the interstellar space or inter-cosmic space around us all bring us face-to-face with elemental realities: air, fire, water, earth.

Overall, there are questions to do with the museum and the library and the art gallery as institutions in themselves, with their own histories, for better and worse. What is a museum for? Who is it for? What does it really “contain”? How can we best make use of it? How do we make sense of it? How might it make people act?

And the library: What is it, really? What is it for? Who is it for? What does it contain? How do we make use of it? What does it mean when libraries are closed down?

Every era has its own systems and technologies of knowledge. In Shakespeare’s time, there were about 2000 books in print, whereas now in the early 21st century, there are more than 15 million available online.

How to select?

If censorship these days means flooding all channels of communication with more and more information, most of it irrelevant and misleading, effectively an accumulation of decoys to fool people, then it follows that knowing what to ignore is a crucial skill.

Knowing how to disqualify falsehood is still the priority. The word “library” is a metaphor as well as a historical reality. Let me show you what I mean. Here’s a little jeu d’esprit of my own, In Praise Of Libraries: Part One Archives of anarchy.

Blissful bibliographies.

Catalogued chaos.

Delightful dimensions.

Endless eternities extending, extending.

Filled shelves, filled corridors.

Goodness at desks and in dimness.

High lights and headphones Indexed immensities.

Jolly japes abundant.

Kaleidoscopes of knowledge.

Labyrinths of energy.

Multitudinous voices awaiting release.

Notetakers notemakers notables noteworthies.

Other than things you’d predict or expect.

Pantries of retrievable pleasure.

Quite nice, quite interesting, quite freaky, quite frankly.

Rays of sunshine, walls of sunshine, and wood.

Storehouses of serendipity.

Teeming, humming, whispered.

Undreamt of dreams, realisable means.

Virtues of scholarship, variorum editions.

We are nothing without librarians.

Xylophones of book spines, Xanthippe’s antidote.

Yearning’s appeasement, yolk yellow’s nourishment.

Zabulus fallen and resting: these places where “all is not lost”.

Part Two (with spaces for future additions) Architrave, architrave: aids and abutments.

Beholders beholden: beauty beneath. Bezonian books.

Cobbles and cobblers, uncobbled, curious.

Dimness undimmed, delights in the daylight.

Excellent energy, ever and on.

Formidable forces, all full of fun.

General wisdom, goddesses green.

High ceilings, deep holdings.

Isles “full of noises” unheard, alive.

Janissaries, ranking for battle.

Knights of the Temple of the quick.

Ladies of the war on ignorance.

M N O P Q R Stupidity swamped, To be read, to be heard, overheard, read again.

Under milk wood, under which king?

Valour, virtue, volcanic verities.

Welcoming, warm, the wise inescapable.

Xylographic xenoliths, exertions of xylotomy.

Y Zones of zippy, zestful zig-zags.

Spaces are left in Part Two for M, N, O, P, Q, R and Y simply because I thought I might leave these for you to play with, see what you make of them yourselves. Good luck!

There are many more themes in the new Hunter’s Voices book but I’ll just mention those we’ll be addressing in the event tomorrow. After the welcomes and a general introduction to the book, and acknowledgement of our brilliant publisher, Stewed Rhubarb Press and the fantastic book designer Duncan Lockerbie (who has done a tremendous job in print layout and colour co-ordination, working with high-quality paper and a dangerous variety of poets demanding different kinds of page layout), we’ll get to the poems and the images they’re responding to. With this event, I’ll highlight just a few.

Joan Eardley’s painting, The Cornfield, is our frontispiece, a magnificently colourful statement about land, human cultivation and natural wilderness, all on the one canvas. The sense it gives of an ecological reality underneath and beyond all human acquisition underlies the whole collection.

The poets Lynn Davidson and Jane Goldman reflect upon the remarkable portrait by Alison Watt, Head of a Young Woman, which depicts a wonderfully complex, clearly individuated character, both strong and vulnerable. What the picturable achieves, the verbal and lexical might elaborate upon, but the visual retains different kinds of strength, and ambiguities.

We go then to Marcas Mac an Tuairneir’s Gaelic reflections upon “Bascart” (or in English, “Cinnabar” along with an image of a Cinnabar specimen from Slovenia.

Fragments of meteorites are also found in the Hunterian Collection: are these perhaps the oldest things within it? My own poem on a bold, colourist-style landscape painting by John Cunningham, Wet Haystack, follows, and set against that visually resplendent, although temperamentally ambiguous work, Jane Goldman insists that we do not look away from one of the most difficult things in the whole collection, the Gravid Uterus, with her poem There’s A Hole In The News The Size Of Poetry.

The sometimes painful and hard realisations that the museum’s collection presents are the subjects of the later poems, Samuel Reilly’s consideration of the priorities of collecting particularly African art and artefacts, in his poem E.1 or Queen Mother, while I’ll read Bashabi Fraser’s meditative The Statue Of James Watt, and we’ll come back to ecology and the Ancient woods of Caledon, in The Forest Floor accompanied by a striking image of David Young Cameron’s stunning painting, Affrick.

There’s much more to be said about the great poets who have contributed to this book and the themes their fine poems roam through and address, and the astonishing diversity of material the Hunterian Collection brings into our purview.

This is the merest foretaste. Come along tomorrow evening and see for yourself. Peculiar objects, wonderful paintings, some serious questions, some joyful engagements! Be entertained – but be challenged as well!

Alan Riach invites you to an extraordinary event at Topping’s bookshop, 2 Blenheim Place, Edinburgh EH7 5JH, tomorrow – the launch of a book of poems and images from the Hunterian Collection at Glasgow University, Hunter’s Voices. Doors open 7pm, event starts around 7.30pm. 

The link to book tickets is at:  www.toppingbooks.co.uk/events/edinburgh/hunterian-gallery-
poetry-launch-hunters-voices-with-alan-riach-2024/