WRITING in Latin, the Scottish poet Arthur Johnstone (c1579-1641), has a series of pre-Union poems in praise of Scottish cities, taking them each in turn.
I quoted my English-language versions of the ones on Edinburgh and Glasgow last week. Here are a few more:
Stirling
Who could speak of Stirling fairly, nursery of kings,
Who built their fortress strong upon its height,
Security of stone in clean air sings,
On high, with towers of strength
and light.
The Forth flows by, the battlements and towers,
The plenitude of farmlands, country’s wealth surrounds –
As Rome has its authority, so we here have ours,
Arches oversee the richness of our grounds.
Winding and meandering in arcs
The waterways are bright in affirmation!
Through all our fields and forests, farms and parks,
The glory of resources of our nation.
In conflict in defence and confrontation,
This unconquered castle stands
to please –
That is valued in our epic celebration,
For to empires such as Rome’s,
this place said, Cease!
Moving north-east from Stirling to the coast, we come to one of Scotland’s most theologically-minded historical locations, the city – shall we say, the small city – of St Andrews. We need to remember this is St Andrews in the 17th century.
A lot has changed since then, not all of it for the better.
St Andrews
It focuses God’s neighbourhood,
is Heaven’s local playground,
As that cathedral there looks out
to sea –
Across the world and far beyond
its sound
Or provenance, it marks a spirit, means what it’s worth, to be.
Church designers of all ages throw their old trowels down:
Worshippers, Ephesians, Tarpeians, Culdees, all
Recognise with quiet frown:
Their design was fabrication, small,
Compared to what they saw through East Neuk light.
When our Archbishop turned his volume up, stood pat,
In Scotland’s happy parliament, the walls of greatest height
Came down, and that was that.
But you seduce and exercise attraction
To poets, teachers, tutors, trainee lab rats, scientists of life,
Literary experts, artists of all kinds: you give satisfaction
Endlessly, to learning, here on the edge of Fife.
The skraich of day steels nails of dawn and distant thunders rumble,
Before the rising fish-hauled dawn, breaking the dark horizon.
A student blinks,
Walks out, coughing in frost, hungover, stiff-boned weary,
tries to stumble
Over, to swing a club or two on the golf course, to open clear eyes
on the links.
And does. Light fills his mind.
All the gods of Ancient Greece
Who danced in the sunshine of Attica, dance here, without exception,
Here in St Andrews: not in the soporific heavy air of the Med,
But here where the cold, sharp focus of vision narrows to cleanse the perception,
And you feel them, both inside and outside. Deep breaths now. You heard what I said.
Finally, Johnstone’s salutation to Dundee, that salt-encrusted city where the water creeps in everywhere, even to the edges of the V&A museum on the waterside. Johnstone’s sequence of city-poems given here – Glasgow, Edinburgh, Stirling, St Andrews, Dundee – bring out the contrasts between their identities and between pre-Union Scotland and now. We’ll go on in a moment to see them in a broader context.
Dundee
Old salt, old seaman, here
on the wind-blown Tay
Your admiral’s eye surveys the Firth and stretches its gaze as the water goes out
And covers the bones of Vikings, who gave all their flesh to the fishes, they say.
Happier fish we have here. Pyramids and buildings built to demonstrate, at length,
Big clout and power are not worth tuppence to us.
The waterways reflected now,
In architecture, people’s eyes and movements, nimbleness and strength
Are better suited to the world’s realities, and so much longer, endure.
Young men braver, councillors persuasive, both more smooth and rocky, in their haecceity,
Than any you’ll find anywhere, from Lerwick south to Rome, and pure
As they are various, inhabiting this Dundee: the designated present from the Deity.
Let’s travel now, in time as well as across geographies. Let’s join the great Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca in Wall Street (he visited
New York in 1929):
Looking out from the Tower of the Chrysler Building,
watching the Wall Street Crash
When I see them all, I see
Young black men lifting out
the spittoons,
Swimming in spit, swilling with spit,
Young men trembling in fear,
that escalates
To terror, and they pale
and their skin
Turns white and their armpits soak and stink
And their shirts stick to them, shivering,
As the executives shout down to them, scorn them,
Scare them so utterly, terrorise and terrify
Each one of them, all self-esteem pouring out of their flesh.
And young women drowning in oil
That covers their bodies,
that glosses
Their curving bodies, their limbs,
That will drown them.
Thousands and thousands of women and men,
Working with hammers, working with violins,
With the clouds of whatever their work is,
Surrounding them, and they can’t see what’s there,
Where they’re walking, bungling, crashing into walls,
Cracking their brows and splitting their foreheads,
Bashing their brains on the whitewashed walls,
the closed doors,
Screaming in front of the buildings, shouting despair
In the agony shot down upon them,
Of fire, the burning, driving
them crazy,
Of snow, the freezing, driving
them crazy,
The poison in filth in their skulls, shit in their heads,
Shit in their nostrils, shit squeezing out of their tear-ducts,
Filling their eyes, bulging out of their ears,
Screaming as if all the nights
of the world
Were concentrates filling their brains, black nights,
Stinking, blinding, poisoning, sharpening
Screams though their voices, thousands and thousands
Of voices, breaking your heart just to hear them all,
Screaming. Then all the city trembles. This city.
New York. Then all the world over, all small village cities,
Paris, Madrid, and London, all trembling,
But this mother-city, this city of cities, all trembling,
Like little girls, trembling.
And all knocking over
All the small bottles of oil, cracking the glass,
The noise drowning out all the music there is,
And because, and because, for we know why it is:
Because, and because, we demand – it is not
That we say should be given, but because,
As we say, we demand, daily bread,
Because it is ours by our right, and the blue flowers of alder
Are blossoming now, are there, all in bloom, and are ours,
And that all of the harvest is ours, and the harvest,
Again and again, the harvest of tenderness,
Humanly tender, is ours, by all human right, our right, and because,
We demand that all Earth’s will shall be done
And the fruits of the Earth shall be given to all,
To whom they belong, to everyone, each of them,
To all of the children, the women and men,
To whom the fruits of the Earth all belong: they belong to us all,
To us all. And they must now be given to all.
That sense of the city as a place of avalanching details is a recurring nexus of imagery. It occurs in a poem I wrote about 20 years ago in Mexico:
Mexico Poem:
Tijuana
Brass
Bienvenidos a Tijuana
(Auntie Anna’s Famous Brothel for US Marines from San Diego)
Tijuana waxworks. Quiet in the lobby. The woman at the counter has no change
for a $20 bill. Back to the street. First, off Revolucion, the Sierra all around,
now pink and hazed bronze; you can pick up a trace of the silence from
the snow up there. The beat, though, is all along here: dance, silver, leather
whips? / you like whips? and hand-cuffs? sombreros all a-glitter in the evening sun,
the storefronts and the balconies all selling, and you’ve seen it all before, it’s all
been done before, oh, so many times! how many times? The faces aged into
acceptance, weathered into humour and ways to get through,
the big mustachios, the shiny silver buckles, the cigars, the cars as big as helicopters,
the buses from before the Revolution, the filth and sell, the poor, and you walk
across the bridge across the Tijuana river, a thin band running straight
from the Sierra, one long silver line in its concrete channel, and all along the bridge
and the stairs up to it, and the stairs down from it, the children are there,
one every few yards, old women too, battering it out on crazy drums
in tune with something somewhere, like Gaelic singers singing psalms
in Lewis, an old man plays a lively tune on a harmonica with his one
right hand, he has no other one, or legs, his flinty flushing eyes
are speaking, looking up, the kids cry out with Abba’s pace and emphasis,
‘Man-ay, Man-ay, Man-ay – da daa – na na na na naah!’
El Mariachi songs, the brass of it all, like the waxworks I will
not get into now, having too much money to afford the entrance fee.
The Mexican flag hangs and runs out like water rippling in a huge diagonal,
an oblique oblong in the long slanting light of December, 4.25pm, that
Pacific border light, no cloud, the dust and snow from the distance,
the feel of trafficking, now all around you, the sweet sugary smell
from the deepfried pastry, the meat frying for tortillas and the sour smell
of burning sweetcorn leaves by the vendors by the Cathedral in whose darkness
the grotto is a shrine to which a crowd of people raise their eyes
from scattered places in the pews, and a man on the corner
of Revolooshyoan
is shouting into a microphone: ‘No pasaran! No pasaran!’
And down in the empty concrete valley by the river, another man is walking
absolutely alone, under the footbridge, on towards the impossible mountains,
as if not one thing in the world could yet prevent him. Solitude in sandals,
grey suit, the jacket flapping open in the breeze.
He does not look around.
Not even for a moment.
What gives him such authority, direction? Hope?
Tijuana in Mexico offers one kind of inundation. But perhaps the city which most overwhelms any visitor is London. Edwin Morgan has a three-poem sequence in his 1973 book, From Glasgow to Saturn, entitled “London”.
It begins with ‘St James’s Park’ and ends with ‘The Post Office Tower’ but the central poem, around which the sequence revolves, and one might say around which London revolves (especially the London of the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s), is this one, ‘Soho’. It speaks for itself:
Soho
dutch straps mr universe jock caps 1001 night genuine rechy
fully tested adolescence & box 5/- only Velazquez
kalpa baggers naturist bargain guide original sex carpet
sutra hill transvestism before marriage more inside
kama books fanny goods family nudes free each purch
planning our own Petronius
durex opedia
history of the genet established insertion imported
lubricated health best of the flowers
human hygienic capital rod no obligatio
lash purgated quatrefoil masochism
unex punishment trusses George ryley scott soft yet firm
5 capital practices for men 7/6 each
life of thin skin witchcraft variants
technique of hirschf strap psycho many lands nus
homosex encyclo erotica the set nothing like the sun
30/- psycholo oriental rubber burton leather boys
author of amazing years of diaphragm
desire and pursuit of the marquis de sutra au cinema
health & wrestling jours de sodom unbeatable
william burroughs shakespeare complete dead fingers
cacti and succulent flagellation havelock and after
handy pathia sexu ellis ready reckoner
rhythm method works Quentin per crisp cent
ten tom jones tablets belt recommended
our lady of the litesome
wuthering heights full protection
boxing & vaseline fully illustrated hosiery
ABZ of unrepeatable tropic of enemas
who’s afraid of virginia goldfinger
do no guide to london heller orgies book of the f
20,000 leagues under angus wilson yoga fetishism agency
traps omar khayyam a week’s supply for pocket torture photogr
chinese medical cooking in 80 days lo duca come in and browse
trial of oscar mickey fleming
birth-cont catch-22 hyde miller
no mean city of night prophylactic burgess anomalies
johnson & johnson john o’hara john calder judo spillane karate
transparent KY water soluble cookbook
an unhurried view of impotence rock plants and alpines
oxford book of english prostitution
youth requisites sterilised plain white
slightly washable shop soiled down the ages
But to wash London
would take a sea.
To want to wash it
history.
Now bury this poem in one
of the vaults
of our civilization, and let the Venusian
computers come down, and searching for life
crack our ghastly code
Bury it, bury it! Who cares?
We shall never know.
We’ve buried worse, with mouths to feed.
And so… And so… And so…
Polish the window, bury the poem, and go.
