DOUGLAS DUNN

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DOUGLAS DUNN

• (1942-)

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(No Transcript)
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• 1) Collect information on Dunns life. Where
  does he come from? Where does he live now? Whats
  his social and educational background?

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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 Years Afternoon
  was shortlisted for the Forward Prize.
• Professor Emeritus of St Andrews University.

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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 Kildas Parliament (1981) is related to the
  Devolution Referendum movement and Scotlands
  affirmation of its cultural identity
• Europas 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)

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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
  Racines work
• Dantes Drum-kit (1993) records his
  disenchantment with political poetry but
  nevertheless contains some poems written against
  Westminsters policy on Scotland
• The Years Afternoon (2001) reflects on the
  ordinary pleasures of a solitary way of life in a
  Horatian manner, and was published almost
  simultaneously with The Donkeys Ears
  Politovskys Letters Home (2001), which tells the
  story of E.S. Politovsky, the Flag Engineer of
  the Russian fleet in the Russo-Japanese war.

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Editor / Criticism

• A Choice of Byrons 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
  Scotlands 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).

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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 theres a growing interest in
  his Scottish roots and Scottish landscapes and
  Scottish politics.

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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

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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 hasnt 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 Im saying is that the
  nationalism with which Im familiar is benign,
  and not to be confused with nationalisms
  elsewhere or their lethal activities.
• Its 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 Scotlands
  writers and readers as much as nationalism.

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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.

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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 werent Greek and were, allegedly,
  uncultured. The relationship between English and
  Scottish literature wasnt 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.

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Barbarians (cont.)

• Is it necessary to define who the barbarians
  are? Isnt 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 dont want to be disloyal
  to my native parish, my home, my most immediate
  people, children, friends.

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Terry Street poems
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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

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• 2) On Roofs of Terry Street Collect
  information on Terry Street. What stage in Dunns
  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?

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On Roofs of Terry Street

• Péter Kántors 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.

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• 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? Whats
  their aspiration? What does the last line mean?

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A Removal from Terry Street

• youtube video
• Péter Kántors translation
• Speaker the poets 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

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• 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?

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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-boys 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
• Theres a relationship between wealth (ownership,
  authority) and culture
• Strategy infiltrate the system and beat them in
  their own game

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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 gentry
• But as a schoolmaster of some reading and
  sensibility
• Circa 1930 and up to his eccentric week-end
  pursuits, noticing,
• Before the flood of specialists, the trace of
  lost peoples
• In a partly eroded mound, marks in the earth, or
  this and that
• Turned over with the aforementioned impermeable
  footwear.

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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 Dunns introvert
  poetic persona.
• Robert Crawford recognises Dunns dominie as a
  sophisticated barbarian, a descendant of
  Burnss man of independent mind.
• Crawford also suggests that Dunns 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
  footprints
• Litter this deserted beach with signs of human
  approach,
• Each squelch of leather on mud complaining, But
  where are you going?

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St Kilda
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St Kilda
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St Kildas Parliament (George W. Wilson, 1879)
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St Kildas 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.

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St Kildas 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 Westminsters policy on Scotland
• Title significance of dates, relates St Kildas
  past to Scotlands 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.

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Further Reading on Dunn on the Internet

• Read my interview with Douglas Dunn, conducted in
  1998, at http//www.c3.hu/scripta/nagyvilag/99/09
  10/18dosa.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/Dun
  nInterview.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/?paut
  h137
• 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/writingscotlan
  d/writers/douglas_dunn/