GEORGE GUNN
About George Gunn
George Gunn was born in Thurso, Caithness, where in 1996 he returned to live and work with the Grey Coast Theatre Company, of which he is the Artistic Director. He is well-known for his stage plays, and has had several collections of poems published, the last being The Atlantic Forest (Two Ravens Press, 2008). In 2003 he received a Royal Literary Fund award, and in 2006 a Scottish Arts Council Writer’s Bursary.
Praise for George Gunn
‘The Atlantic Forest is lean and magical – there is a Gulf Stream of allusion that runs through this book, carrying us from Rackwick to Brazil, from Kildonan to Fallujah. Gunn does what every fine writer must do: he reminds us we are a part of this frail, cold, vicious, beautiful world; that all we need do to enjoy it fully is open our eyes to its majesty and its tragedies.’
John Glenday
'Spare, lean language honed on brittle, sometimes brutal stalks of feeling ... There is a salty, windswept goodness at this collection's "conflicting heart". Scotland on Sunday
'George Gunn has never shied away from risk. His way with words lives somewhere between Dylan Thomas and the Viking Sagas. This latest volume, The Atlantic Forest, comes rooted in his own native Caithness background, but sails out, as the title suggests, into many landfalls, some real, others mythic. His first line walks into a Valkyrie of rain and many such lyrical flourishes thread through the book. George Gunn's poetry has always sustained a radical questioning outlook ... traversing history, current international conflicts and the state of Scottish theatre.'
Aonghas Macneacail, The Herald
An interview with George Gunn
When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?
I have always written so there was no definite “first” anything although I remember writing a story when I was at primary school – I had a terrible formal education but a thorough and deep informal one (which is on-going) – it was about a dragon attacking the school. Mrs Docherty, the teacher – who hated me and all bright bairns – was so terrified of it she gave it the top mark. The problem with my schooling was that I could read and write before I went, so when you learned to read through having The Iliad and The Odyssey read to you and then reading it yourself, Dick and Dora and Fluff the Cat didn’t really hold much interest. I enjoyed reading the Bible, especially the Old Testament and especially the bits we were not supposed to read, for example – what happened to Noah after the Flood! Because of the barbarous nature of my primary school teacher I was off ill a lot so I learned to love Stevenson and Dickens – our house was full of books – and the Arthur Mee encyclopaedias that my Uncle George More bought for my brother and me. When I was a wee boy I read everything I could get my hands on.
In fact my Uncle George was a great influence on me. He was my mother’s brother and he had been the Head of English at George Watson’s in Edinburgh – he wrote himself but he never showed me any of it - and he personally knew Grieve, Macaig, Garioch and Sydney Goodsir Smith who was a good friend. When I would go down to Edinburgh I would go round to his Warrender Park Terrace flat and he would give me Brecht, Pasternak and others to read. He had a degree in classics from Edinburgh and could speak several languages. He encouraged me in everything. He was also a founder member of The Traverse and got me interested in the theatre. In many ways he was a typical Wicker. It was at The Traverse that I came across the playwright George Byatt, whose work and theories have also influenced me.
The other great influence on me – not as a writer so much but as a catalyst towards activity– was David Morrison the Wick Librarian, poet in his own right and editor of Scotia Review. My first poems were published in Scotia. David was a great supporter of local poets and through his Poetry, Folk and Jazz festivals of the seventies and eighties I got to meet all the great modern Scottish poets like Sorley Maclean, Edwin Morgan and Norman Macaig and others and I got to read in public with them which was fantastic for me as a young unknown. It was in Wick I first met Joy Hendry who through Chapman and over the years has became a great friend (still is) and my publisher. Through Joy I met Hamish Henderson who, probably more than any single person, has both inspired me and taught me so much about literature, politics and art. So it’s a continuing thread of experience and influence I have been fortunate enough to be exposed to – what Hamish called “the carrying stream”.
I have a great love for Scottish literature because I think it very accomplished in world terms and powerful and I am proud of that and that I am part of it, if only a small part. The tradition of dichotomy is strong in Scottish Literature – Stevenson obviously – so I have two main influences and they are becoming more defined as I grow older and develop as a writer. What truly excited me when I was developing was the poetry of Lorca and Neruda, in translation to begin with and then I struggled with the Spanish. Also the Americans – Hart Crane at first and then Berryman and Lowell and Lowell has been a constant reference ever since. Also I have always adored the Russians of the generation of Ahkmatova, Tsvetayeva, Mandelstam and Pasternak. There are others, of course, but these give you an idea of what was buzzing about, of the voices beyond the croft parks.
But the croft parks (the other half) are vital, so I think the two poets who register with me the deepest represent the two sides of my culture and they are Rob Donn Mackay of Strathnaver, the Gaelic poet of the 18th century and George Mackay Brown of 20th century Orkney. One Celt and one Norse, although strands of both cultures flowed in both of them. I could say much more about them but not here – I am putting together a book of essays so I will discuss them fully there. But they speak to me from the native part of my sensibility: I recognise them as brothers in runes.
Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind The Atlantic Forest in particular? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas you were trying to convey?
The Atlantic Forest is part of the on-going quest for truth. Impossible, obviously, but involuntary and obsessional none the less. Or, it is “the interrogation of silence,” as George Mackay Brown put it.
I think as a writer you are always trying expand and refine your range and style. The central metaphor is of the boy on the headland looking out from his particular locality to the world, to the other side of the Atlantic, the other side of the mirror – that dichotomy thing again. But I find much of contemporary poetry to be rootless and with no real cultural launching pad or anchor, so that in my work I want to create a world that is rooted – in the way the Sutherland of Rob Donn and the Stromness of George Mackay Brown work as sources – in a particular place (Caithness and the North Highlands) but to show, if I can, that to explore that locus provides a focus for the rest of the world. I want to give the impression that the poet who wrote these verses is at the centre of his society, not on the periphery. I am afraid I have no real patience with the idea that the writer must be on the edge of things, constantly crippled by angst – this strikes me to be a very 19th century middle class, rather quaint English notion. When I was a child growing up in Dunnet, come ceilidh time everybody was expected to do something – play the fiddle or the accordion, sing, or recite a poem, so I became known for that.
I also believe that poetry can address the goldfinch as well as the Gold Standard and that as a poet you have a duty to your own tribe to speak out. So I see The Atlantic Forest as a very public document. Having said that, I am also attempting to bring out the music of the language because I feel that poets have a responsibility on one hand to protect the language and on the other to contribute to it, so that the individual reader can add to their stock of available reality, so that the vocabulary of the community is enhanced. It’s about being in what Wordsworth described as the “active universe”. I suppose it’s the nurturing of creative growth which is, after all, a celebration of life. I want to embrace what Hamish Henderson exclaimed, himself embracing Heine’s “Freedom becomes people”, to the effect that, “Poetry becomes people”.
How do you go about creating your voice on the page?
I am great believer in the importance of the relationship between the voice and the ear in relation to poetic composition. Scotland is still essentially an oral culture – and strangely the internet fits easily into this – so that when it comes to writing the page is not the final destination, indeed I would say it is only a kind of permanent temporary. Of course my job is to write poems. Is one conscious of one’s own voice? To be fair, it’s not something I worry about. You have to trust your instinct. There is no intellectual process – in many ways it is the opposite of that – but if you look at the work of Burns, for instance, what you see is a brilliant mixture of subjectivity and objectivity, of passion and reason, of spontaneity and control. The “voice” of Burns comes through because it is authentic, it is honest and it is consistent. He also had a sense of purpose. Burns realised he had a cultural job to do. He knew very well what he was doing. He did not abandon poetry for song, yet the collection of over 350 songs includes some of the greatest lyrics ever written. The task is to get the lyric to address the political and external world as well as the psychological and internal world. All too often our society prefers to compartmentalise experience: love, hate, life, death, revolution, that sort of thing. Basically, what I am attempting is to throw all that overboard and develop a poetic which can accommodate all of it in a single poem, verse, line. Sophocles was wrestling with this very same thing 2,500 years ago. The struggle goes on. You can see this dynamic tension at work in the new poems from Robert Alan Jamieson in Nort Atlantik Drift.
Having said all that, I do write and re-write and re-write until the poem looks right, sounds right. After all, poetry is a craft.
How and when do you write?
I try to write every day. Running a theatre company and the various other commitments I have doesn’t make that easy. But writing is my life, so it is the most crucial thing. Even if I’m travelling – and I travel a lot – I write in my journal. It’s a compulsion. I get ill if I cannot write, if I am stopped from working. When I’m rehearsing a play I’m constantly re-writing, usually on my feet!
At home I get up early which, for me, is important. I’m very ritualistic as most writers are – particular pencils, note books, that sort of thing – and I need routine, otherwise nothing happens. Also, in the 25 or so years I’ve been doing this for a living, I have learned to appreciate deadlines. I guess we all seek solace in structure but without it there would be no chaos and it is the organising of chaos which is the tough honey’d joy of creating. Each writer does it differently. But be warned, it can kill you.
What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?
The thing I enjoy most is re-reading. But I’m always reading. By my bed right now, for example, is the usual Herodotus and a brilliant new translation by Edith Grossman of Cervantes' Don Quixote. Also I am working on George Mackay Brown so I have re-read The Interrogation of Silence, a study of his work by Rowena and Brian Murray, plus I have recently enjoyed Maggie Fergusson’s life of GMB and also his Collected Poems are always nearby. I recommend all of those to everyone.
I’ve mentioned already the poetry of the Shetland Shelley, Robert Alan Jamieson. His work is a delight and he is one of the few poets who understands inter-active media which I also find illuminating. I look forward hungrily to each new book, but alas he is not published enough – but now, hopefully, Luath, his new publisher, can do something about that.
I’m afraid I’m not much for novels as I really can’t see the point of them! If that sounds a bit perverse what I mean is that if you have a story to tell why not tell it in a public forum? That, obviously, is the playwright in me. Despite that I have re-read recently Sun Circle, Butcher’s Broom (which I have dramatised bits of) and The Silver Darlings by Neil Gunn. I know he is not everyone’s cup of tea but I think these three novels form the centrifugal core of his work and they refresh me every time I read them. He has a very distinctive prose style which is very muscular and far from being fey, as his critics decry him.
I hear novelists on the radio all the time talking about their work in terms of a “career”. That I cannot understand. When I read the novels the prose is usually dead, or it reads like a film treatment, which is no doubt the intention. I do, however, admire the work of Bess Ross, she has great integrity, a bit like E. Annie Proux whose mad stories I like, but mainly my meagre shelves are fiction-free zones – lots of poetry, drama, history, mythology. There is a brilliant book by Mary Beith called Healing Threads which is a study of traditional Highland medicine. I would recommend that to everyone. It should be on the NHS. Also I would recommend the first volume of Timothy Neat’s biography of Hamish Henderson, The Making of the Poet. This is both a scholarly work and an act of love and reclamation. Volume two should be out next year. If any one is interested at all in Twentieth Century Scottish life and letters, then this is for them.
I also am a newspaper addict. Perhaps it’s because I write for one – only the local one but it keeps me grounded.
I would also like to recommend that people read the sky.
