The Poetry of Alexander Hutchison
Sandy Hutchison (1943-2015)
When Alexander (Sandy) Hutchison died in 2015 there was an understandable outpouring of grief and affection for a Scottish poet who — despite his long career — was only just beginning to become more widely known. Friends and colleagues have been working over the past few years to gather his work together to try to establish his reputation more firmly. In anticipation of those future publications I republish here an essay I wrote back in 2007 for Duncan Glen’s little magazine Zed2O.
‘Let it speak in you’: The Poetry of Alexander Hutchison
In a rather acerbic review published in Stride Magazine of Don’t Start Me Talking: Interviews with Contemporary Poets (Salt, Cambridge, 2006), Rupert Loydell takes issue with the editors’ choice of interviewees. ‘Who is Alexander Hutchison?’ is one of the questions he asks as he lists poets whose participation he feels may be questionable. This question will be answered more substantially in the autumn of 2007 when Salt will publish Scales Dog a selection from the three main collections Hutchison has published since the early 70s. In this context, then, it’s true that the interview with Hutchison may strike some as slightly premature. Although, in another, it is long overdue. There is no doubt in my mind that when the Salt selection appears, readers of innovative poetry will recognise – at last – the presence in their midst of an interesting Scottish experimentalist, someone who has been quietly producing just below the radar funny, quirky, verbally adventurous poems for over thirty years. The time lapse between the appearance of Hutchison’s main collections is partly responsible for his lack of impact on the wider British poetry scene(s), as is his residence in Canada for part of that time, as well, perhaps, as the man’s natural modesty. The recent publication of his third substantial collection, Carbon Atom (Link-Light, Glasgow, 2006), and the prospect of substantial republication of earlier volumes is a good excuse to try to characterise the variousness of Hutchison’s talent.
His first principal collection, Deep-Tap Tree (University of Massachusetts Press, 1978) was written during the 1970s while Hutchison was living and working on Vancouver Island. It is, as he describes it himself in the Salt interview, ‘northern, Scottish and metaphysical’. When pushed by his interviewer, Andrew Duncan, he adds the adjectives ‘exorbitant’, ‘singular’, ‘satirical, romantic, unfashionable’. It is all of these things and in an oblique, elusive and allusive manner. It is quite a young man’s book to the extent that it seems to work towards life out of a deep love of literature. Here the rhapsodic Modernism of David Jones is countered by a harnessing of more astringent measures and tones. Hutchison mentions Robinson Jeffers; other figures and influences on the horizon are W.S.Graham, Eliot and the Norse Sagas. Medieval motifs and accoutrements lace many of the poems together strengthening the interwoven character of the volume as a whole.
Key to what Hutchison is about in this and subsequent collections is the issue of sound. He has one of the most acute ears in the business. In the Salt interview, he agrees with Basil Bunting’s ‘insistence that emotion is aroused by the sound of words’ and evidence of Hutchison’s musical mastery is everywhere in evidence. Take as early proof the modulation of vowel sounds in a line from ‘Climacteric’ in Deep-Tap Tree: ‘Drawn down in a trough of queer air’. Critical explanation of how Hutchison achieves his effects here would involve reference to the way the alliterative and assonantal qualities of the words juxtaposed mix with the rhythm of the line. When critical close reading of this kind is indulged, however, the result can be to imply a degree of conscious calculation on the part of the poet that was probably never there. Perhaps he is indeed the savant engineer of his own acoustic effects and of course he is to some extent, the extent that has to do with the larger ‘making’ of the poem as a whole. But at the intimate level of the line’s first coming into being, when the ear locks into, lies along the grain of each word’s aural properties, weighing up how they will sound, how they will bear the texture, weight, sound, of their chosen neighbours, this is largely an instinctive thing and if you don’t have it, as Hutchison says, ‘you might as well pack it in’. Hutchison has it in spades. Here is the final stanza from ‘Buchartie-Boo’ which is in his second collection, The Moon Calf (Edinburgh, Galliard, 1990):
By ingle-neuk
each word cut snug
sits plumb; slow breath
indrawn, the under-
croodle sounds like
roosting pigeons.
This is worthy of the hair-breadth/breath judgements of a Creeley and Black Mountain has certainly had its part to play in the fine tuning of Hutchison’s ear. Note too, though, how that control of the stanza’s articulation combines with the way he plays a touch of verbal exoticism (‘under-/croodle’?) off against those homely pigeons. This is typical of Hutchison’s style: the impulse towards the strange, the gaudy suddenly caught up with and undercut, often humourously, by the domestic, the mundane. On reflection, of course, ‘under-croodle’ is probably familiar and not at all ‘gaudy’ to the Aberdeenshire-born author but it will strike its diverse readers otherwise.
There is so much ravishing music of this kind available in Hutchison’s work that one is tempted just to go on quoting but I’d like to return, briefly, to two poems in Deep-Tap Tree that offer encapsulations of his art and that allow me to link musical and thematic/structural aspects together. The first is a complete short lyric entitled ‘Undertow’:
As from the park’s enclosure
to eddy beneath the fall
Pair white and fair – plumes –
wafted, circling in froth
Frounced, bucked by a wave-cockle
tug to the clear fast run
Have patience
heart
Have patience
As is often the case in these poems, there is the slight obliquity of the setting out, of the location; the acknowledgement that the feathers, the poem, language itself is in motion from the start, that we can only pick it up, as it were, in mid-flow. With other poets, the feathers would be mere occasion, the starting point for metaphor. Here, however, the initial ‘as’ does not participate in simile but serves to pinpoint time, a moment of observation that is savoured for itself. Only after the stanza break does the gaze turn inwards and the feathers pulled implicitly into the atmosphere – no more than that – of metaphor. Because ‘Undertow’ is in Deep-Tap Tree the feathers, ‘Pair white and fair – plumes’, have both medieval and Mallarmean resonance but the most memorable aspect of the lyric is, once more, in the technical manipulation of line-break and rhythm to mimic hesitation, sudden movement perfectly mapped. The mild exhortation to the human heart that comprises the final verse is all the more touching for having been imprinted – literally, by virtue of the stanza’s typographical layout – by this movement. We behold the heart held in the supplicating embrace, the prayerful handclasp or featherclasp of the third last and final lines.
Deep-Tap Tree is a collection where venery and the myth of Acteon are quite deeply buried but connecting threads between poems. There are various ladies, hunters, stags, many nets or images of ingathering and interweaving as the narrator or song-smith figures himself as the hunter of elusive forms. The tantalising, almost teasing nature of this elusive and allusive method of working is best captured not only in the more general strategic moves of ‘Lyke-Wake’ where images of light permit access to ‘real-life’ landscapes and inscapes woven out of dimly-lit Flemish paintings but also in the exquisitely turned movement of the following stanza where language itself seems to struggle to draw breath, caught again, perhaps, in the eddies of ‘Undertow’:
Let it draw in you loose
Curling in let it breathe sag of water
Fly-bodkin bumping at walls and windows
Let it speak in you let it come through
This reminds me of some of the music Rimbaud penned in the so-called ‘Derniers vers,’ particularly his wonderful poem, ‘Mémoire’, which uses water and light to similar effect and also acknowledges a fondness for medieval motifs. More importantly, perhaps, what this and all the other examples I have quoted raise as a significant issue in Hutchison’s poetry is the relationship of sound, of music to what might be called the more discursive dimensions of poetry. Andrew Duncan approaches this relationship in his interview with Hutchison by asking him about the argument between MacDiarmid and Hamish Henderson. Duncan wishes Henderson had written another book of original poetry and done less collecting of folklore because he (Duncan) is ‘worried about the conservatism of folk-based forms’. Hutchison is quite sharp in response to this, implying his own regard both for the song-based inspiration of folklore and the ‘hieratic’, textual experimentalism of MacDiarmid. Hutchison’s work, seen as a whole, is a negotiation, perhaps even a delightful continuation of that argument, in the forms of poetry itself.
The Moon Calf is, in parts, a more direct book than its predecessor although its inclusion of translations from Latin and French into North-eastern Scots will have made it challenging for some. It is these very translations, however, that are the collection’s high point and are Hutchison’s most substantial contribution to literature in the vernacular. Again, one could quote endlessly for the salacious humour of his versions of Catullus. Here, instead, is a fragment from his translation of Ronsard’s ‘Chacun me dit’:
Aabody says, Sandy, she’s nae ataa
lik fit ye said. A widna ken.
A’m aff ma heid. It’s nithin t’dee wi me.
The terseness of this, the laconism laced with an undertow of panic, is dramatically very effective and the collection as a whole allows Hutchison scope to display considerable reserves of humour. It’s worth pointing out here that there is a strong vein of comic poetry running through all three collections. Often this takes the form of an affection for lists and recipes which juxtapose unlikely items to comic effect. Moon Calf features the excellent ‘Surprise, Surprise’ which rises to the challenge of renewing verse about the haggis. More memorable, perhaps, are ‘Mr Scales Walks His Dog’ from Deep-Tap Tree and redolent of Christopher Smart’s cat obsession or the language-led geniality of ‘An Ounce of Wit to a Pound of Clergy’ in Carbon Atom. The latter is a truly beatific poem, an absolutely unique mixture of ineffable whimsy with the odd stab of the satiric, made up of ‘snaps and scraps of quick allurement’. Although these are largely comic poems none are simple and all have a ‘metaphysical’ edge to them which makes them hard to pin down. ‘Metaphysical’ in Hutchison’s helpful, unclarifying terms is ‘more than the rustle of leaves in a bag’!
Another key poem in Hutchison’s output here would be ‘Helix’ and the gyre-like shapes of its sometimes quite gnomic utterances. More immediately seductive, however, and illustrative of another vein entirely is the very beautiful ‘Inchcolm’ which is a kind of prayer for the speaker’s daughter and includes these lines of perfectly modulated natural observation:
This morning I saw
on the waters of the firth a diving
bird I never saw before, turning a nimble
loop to enter the wave, and the wonder
of green light filtering down.
This may seem simple but it takes a lot of time and much experience to master the directness of an idiom like this. Were this stanza rewritten as prose and given to a class of students for them to recompose into verse, you may be sure that most if not all would have broken the second line on the word ‘turning’ and there would have been much mutual congratulation at a skill learnt. Why Hutchison doesn’t do this is part of the magic of his art in this instance.
One of the features of all three collections is the frequency with which one comes across phrases, lines which may be read as condensed ars poeticae. This may, of course, simply be a tic of the anxious reviewer seeking corroboration in the absence of much in the way of other critical comment. But it may equally be evidence of the self-reflexive nature of much of this poetry, its proclaimed desire to acknowledge and define its own aesthetic. In other hands this could become irritating but Hutchison is so continually inventive and so free from the sin of taking himself or his concerns too seriously that it is invariably helpful and stimulating. Thus ‘In Fire the Voice Goes Further’ (Deep-Tap Tree) which is, after all, a poem about voice, about poetry itself, we have ‘percept and concept/in lawful enactment/song-tangled’. And from the same collection in ‘At the Breaking of the Stag’ there is ‘short shrift for surfeit’, ‘a game played close/to the bone.’ The Moon Calf offers ‘new testament/flinty then fluvial’, ‘saltires and salvoes/for uncluttered art’ while much of Carbon Atom follows the exhortations of ‘An Ounce of Wit to a Pound of Clergy’ to ‘Let all things fused/transparent, opaque/enjoy diversity.’ In the Salt interview Hutchison closes by remarking that the ‘melismatic or the unadorned’ is ‘another important spectrum to be reckoned with’ and what keeps these poems sprightly and continually working in your mind once you have read them, or better still, heard them read aloud, is the way virtually every poem plays joyfully between those two poles.
Carbon Atom contains significant poems of all the types I have touched on so far. There is a nice line in what I would call ‘nearly limericks’, limericks that are not quite as disposable as the usual type, a rather Kuppneresque ‘Mind the Gap’, discreet praise poems for MacDiarmid, MacCaig, Mackay Brown and Morgan as well as quite a number of poems that incorporate and rework found material in diverse ways. Two poems in particular stand out for me and both are connected although not explicitly so. The first is ‘Incantation’ which is an un-ironic and moving pastiche of the style of Carmina Gadelica and begins with a couplet from that famous compendium of translated and adapted Gaelic songs and prayers. There is a sense in which a poem like this shouldn’t work but its borrowing of form, tone, accent is so honestly and straightforwardly handled that it moves the reader past the side-issue of its postmodernity and reconnects us to the humane, anonymous music of the song-smith at its base. And it is the humanity of this poem that links it to what I take to be the main occasion of the collection as a whole: the extended elegy for his friend the poet, Gael Turnbull, ‘Epistle from Pevkos’.
This is a poem that shuttles interestingly between verse, prose-poetry and prose. It is as mercurial in its form as the author’s own aesthetic and perhaps that, also, of the addressee. It is a peculiar mixture: at once elegy and collection of holiday snaps and as such it testifies, perhaps, to a contemporary fragmentation of subjectivity, featuring a slightly bewildered, middle-aged tourist unsure whether to celebrate the joyful ‘thereness’ of all that he sees blazing in the sun or mourn his dead friend. The attempt is to do both simultaneously of course. What makes it work is the poet’s discretion, his very gradual incorporation of the loved, missed friend into the sights, sounds, musings of his holiday until, paradoxically, he becomes the ground or bass note that sounds beneath cliché and quirkiness, lifting both men into a sphere of shared regard and pity for humanity which comes movingly to the fore towards the end of the poem. It is a considerable achievement.
Taken as a whole, reading Alexander Hutchison’s poetry is like coming across fragments of a Psalter or song-book or of North-eastern folk ditties –elegant, humourous and deft by turns– all clasped within the ragged covers of a rumbustious, medieval recipe book for everything. His work is extremely varied and he is an experimenter in rather than with language. His relationship with language is never instrumental in other words. One has the sense that language is in him and he is in language as the stanza quoted earlier from ‘Lyke-wake’ implies: ‘Let it speak in you’, he writes. Continually there is a deflection away from self and personality and into language. Humour turns so often on the turns of language and Hutchison is above all a humourous poet. This aspect of Hutchison’s work came to the fore at the launch of Carbon Atom which he did not recite or read. Rather these poems were performed and sung in a speaking voice that convinced me I was in the presence of a powerful orchestrator of voices and sounds, the voices and sounds of language itself.