Norman MacCaig: Maker of images
1. A poetry short and sharp
“Do you know any of the poets?”
When asked that rare and lovely question, you should quote Shakespeare, Milton or Yeats.
But the lines that creep into my mind are Norman MacCaig’s:
To stub an oar on a rock where none should be,
To hear it rise with a slounge out of the sea
Is a thing that happened once (too often) to me.
The lines make up the opening stanza of “Basking shark,” which describes how the poet once met a room-sized shark on “a sea tin-tacked with rain.” Norman MacCaig was a Scot, and though a man of Edinburgh he spent his summers in the Highlands, where he was a great rower of boats. The lines capture his surprise, rather than his pleasure, at this encounter with nature. He thought about the kind of monster that nature had created — huge, voracious, mindless — and then he thought of man.
So who’s the monster?
It’s a short poem, 15 lines. The images are so sharp that I am taken away from the furnace of a Texas summer to the chill of a sea loch. On a lunch break, I’m pried loose from the cares of business to consider a question about human nature.
Such are the pleasures of MacCaig.
2. Ordinary things
The pleasures are of different kinds, but the foremost is the pleasure of seeing ordinary things from a new perspective. In “Praise of a boat” MacCaig invites us to consider the quiet, anonymous boat that made an appearance in the poem about the enormous shark. The boat, which runs on the strength of MacCaig’s arms, hardly belongs on the roll of fabled ships.
The poet lists its qualities, good and bad: it’s a slayer of salmon and a coffin for haddock, but it’s boxy and, in certain maneuvers, clumsy.
It prances on the spot in its watery stable.
It butts the running tide with a bull’s head.
It skims downwind, planing like a shearwater.
In crossrips it’s awkward as a piano.
It’s a good, solid boat, but its courage is questionable:
Though it once met a basking shark with a bump
And sailed for a while looking over its shoulder.
In reading MacCaig, you hear a voice that loves ordinary things, flawed things, rather than ideals. In “Praise of a thornbush” the poet examines and then addresses a little rose bush.
The ideal shape of a circle
means nothing to you: you’re all
armpits and elbows …
You are
An encyclopedia of angles. …
After listing its shortcomings, the poet offers this:
When the salt gales drag through you
You whip them with flowers.
It’s a perspective as fresh as the wind. This little bush is not an ideal. It’s a real thing, a living thing adapted to a harsh environment. If rosebushes can be heroic, this one is.
3. How he wrote
Any life lived under the call of the Muses asserts its own order, its own rules. From such is made an individual aesthetic. The preference of one aesthetic over another is largely a matter of taste.
MacCaig lived the kind of life a poet should live — or so it seems to me.
The facts of his life — that he was a conscientious objector during World War II and that he supported himself and his family as a teacher in an elementary school — are not decisive. Far more interesting to those interested in his art was how he wrote a poem.
Picture him popping into a pub, armed with a single sheet of paper. He went through the pub doors with no theme in mind, no idea. He said he felt like writing a poem in the same way he felt hunger or thirst. He would sit with a blank mind and a blank sheet of paper and wait for something to come up. Something always did: a memory of a place, person or event, usually accompanied by a “wee phrase.”
“A small phrase, quite unimportant. Any old phrase will do. This starts it off and the poem trickles down the page until its finished.”
He was asked how long it took to write a poem. MacCaig, an unrepentant smoker, replied: “Two fags, unless it’s a wee one. Then it’s one fag.”
That’s quick writing, writing measured in smokes, not in pints. MacCaig felt the need to write as an urge, and he got on with it. No whining about grand themes or writer’s block.
MacCaig wrote often, enjoying the process of making something, like a craftsman takes pleasure in making a cabinet.
He wrote short poems because he liked to read short poems. He didn’t have time to read long poems and doubted many people did.
Also, because of the way he lived and wrote, the business of producing a book was relatively simple. He wrote on individual sheets of paper. Each poem would be given a serial number and dated by month and year. Every so often MacCaig would sort through his sheaf of papers, looking for poems he liked. When he had enough for a book, he published one.
4. Strong image
MacCaig wrote many kinds of poems, two of which appeal especially to me. The first is built around a strong image, so strong you’re tempted to say the image is the poem. In “No nominalist,” the poet decides not to name any of the wonderful creatures in the garden for fear of angering the friendly archangel. If he said a moonshiny thing, he says,
fish will curl in the glass wall
of any wave going by: you’ll smile
at their bright commas.
I lived by the Gulf of Mexico, saw its waves every day, and for years could not see a wave without thinking of the fish, curled like a comma, that might be inside. The image was magical.
The magic we see in nature is not that any one thing exists but that the whole world exists. The image of that one fish in the wave suggests endless possibilities. It stands for the whole cosmos, the whole Garden of Eden.
The Imagists, a group of American poets during the Great Depression, talked about this aesthetic: a single sharp image can sometimes suggest our connection to things we hardly notice.
In “A writer” MacCaig tells how poverty, ill health and bad luck didn’t silence a poet. Instead, he wrote even more originally,
just as a stoned crow
invents ways of flying
it never thought of before.
Sometimes these images gather in small flocks, forming postcards of rural Scotland. In “Sheep dipping, Achemeloich,” MacCaig tells how John chucks the lead ewe in.
The others bleat and plunge —
If she must do it, what else is there to do?
The sheep “waterfall uphill” with “outraged cries,” “dribbling saltwater into flowers’ eyes.”
In “Foiled Shepherd” the poet tells of a parrot at Lairg who learned “the language whistled by shepherds and created havoc when the lamb sales were on.” So a flock of sheep was scattered. Just so our flocks of beliefs are scattered.
You can see landscapes in these images.
5. Into the nature of things
MacCaig also wrote another kind of poem, one that inquires about the nature of things. These poems ask what kinds of things exist and what their nature is.
“Night Fishing on the Wilder Pool” is a metaphor on the illusion of self. The poet, fishing at night, sees this:
A long white snake swims upstream
A snake of white and crumbling foam …
And, shattered into bits, becomes
The helpless headlong of all streams.
The snake, like the individual human, appears real but is just a bit of foam carried along on water rushing to the sea. How real, how substantial, is this self?
In “Go-between,” MacCaig asks about the nature of the poet and poetry.
The poet argues with the one of “never-averted face” who has “classical admonitions of the finality of form and about the untresspassable regions beyond it.” The poet promptly goes poaching in that forbidden place and brings back an owl’s hoot, a salmon’s leap and a duck’s grunt.
He pleads for the wild regions, where lunacy of form — or lunacy instead of form — is normal.
Am I bringing
your news to them or their news
to you? Am I evangelising
the duck or you? For how can a man
breathe hymns to the Lord
with one lung and hymns to the devil
with the other?
What’s the nature of poetry? MacCaig suggests it’s something close to religion, close to the realm of spirit.
It’s a notion W.H. Auden, MacCaig’s better-known contemporary, talked about. Auden said the poet goes on a journey and brings back a message from the Voice of the Holy Spirit. He does not bring back a message from the Super-Ego, the voice that tells us what we already know. The authentic voice is always unpredictable. It makes unexpected demands that require change, which is frequently painful.
And here we have the unexpected demand of the duck’s grunt. What is it? Is it sacred? Magic? Spiritual? Or is it just a matter of physics?
The owl’s hoot: Is its beauty something that the poet perceives in nature or does he project it into nature?
These poems that inquire about the nature of things have a haunting quality. How is it that we come to notice certain things?
It takes a sunshaft
to reveal the motes in the air …
What is it within our personalities that makes us suddenly attentive? And what is it to notice beauty?
These poems are suggestive, without any dicta or dogma. Still, to me they sound like scripture, words that, if taken to heart, could be used to steer by.
For years, I worked as a newspaper editor, which meant I had to write and edit while the door to my office remained open, with a constant stream of visitors reporting fires and scandals and complaining that a grandchild’s name was misspelled. Interruptions are a way of life, and an editor who resents them is losing his ability to do the work.
But how, when your own writing has been interrupted, do you keep your temper and keep your perspective? In “A noise of stumbles,” MacCaig argues that interruptions give us a voice. The poem relies on a wonderful metaphor:
Stones in the throat make the hill burn sing.
It’s in the stones in the creek bed that make the brook babble. It’s the obstacles that make water sing. The poet celebrates this noise that occurs naturally, not only in a creek but in the life we share with so many others.
6. Sacred rage and grief
Many other wonders can be found in MacCaig’s poems.
One of the sacred duties of the poet is to express outrage, and his sorrow at the suffering of a horse with a shattered leg is bottomless and his anger at the bureaucratic prolonging of its suffering is murderous.
He confronted death, that “destroyer of wonders,” when his wife died.
In “A difference” the poet, the servant of the Muses, the ancient divinities of memory, muses on memory. Memory of a well doesn’t cure thirst, he notes, and memory of a pebble beach doesn’t hurt your feet. Memory keeps us from trivial hurts or pleasures. But memory of love is different.
In “Praise of a collie” the poet is grieving for the shepherd Polo’chan when, gun in hand, he takes his dog on her last stroll. The poem shows why this dog was loved.
Once, gathering sheep on a showery day,
I remarked how dry she was. Pollo’chan said, ‘Ah,
It would take a very accurate drop to hit Lassie.’
Such banter is a fact of life — a certain kind of rich, full life: Some people appreciate and admire animals. A good dog can inspire people to tell tales about her, to tell how she sailed in a boat, how she was always the first across a burn and how “she flowed through fences like a piece of black wind.”
This is my favorite MacCaig poem. In my mind, it’s a masterpiece.
MacCaig’s poetry is sharp: sharp images, sharp discrimination, sharp intellect. It’s a poetry of sharp thorns in rosebushes and sharp pain at losses. Such are the wonders of MacCaig.
7. A poet of your own
People read poetry for different reasons. I have read Shakespeare, Milton and Keats with pleasure, but I first came to them as a student comes to the canons of literature, trying to get acquainted with what’s there.
That’s an important reason to read — feeling the burden of your own ignorance and doing something about it. I read some of those important poets with real pleasure and found others — Spenser and Eliot — that are just not for me. Your own tastes — however primitive, however little cultivated — are important.
They are features of your character. They are important things to know about yourself.
But there is another reason to read. My student days are decades past. I’ve long been my own man. I can buy my own books and form my own opinions. I can choose for myself the lines of poets that are worth committing to memory.
I read now for pleasure. The great poets who were my teachers are on my bookshelf, but MacCaig is on the table by my chair.
8. Bibliography
Norman MacCaig, Collected Poems, Hogarth Press, 1985