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
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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
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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.)
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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
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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
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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.)
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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 nonEnglish 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
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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
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[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
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[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
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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 workingclass 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
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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.
Remembering Lunch
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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 footprints
Litter 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
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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
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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
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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
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BBC Writing Scotland:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/arts/writingscotland/writers/douglas_dunn
/