An Interview with W.N. Herbert

Originally from Dundee, WN Herbert now works at the University of Newcastle. His latest collection Bad Shaman Blues contains poems in both Scots and English. As ever his eye roves over prety much everything, though this book contains much writing about travel abroad.

Greece, India, China, Russia - the inevitable first question about Bad Shaman Blues is on the number of poems here based around travel. Briefly, what took you to these places?

Timidity. I prefer reading about places to going to them, and reading people or reading about them to talking to them. I don't leave home unless I have to, and yet I courageously accept I have to have some experiences. And money. A few people at the British Council and our several Arts Councils seem to feel I should get out more, teach and talk and read, and so they invite me to places I would otherwise never have the gumption to get to. So I take my timidity there and I am always fascinated and grateful and severely discombobulated – several of the prerequisites for writing.

Travel poems are yet another category people get sneery about in the big generous world of poetry: plebby old tourism can't be as authentic as X's villa in Corsica or Y's six month goat-crunching sojourn in Bolivia. But I like to grind high and low culture together like Sharon Olds playing with her dollies. Many of us in the West experience the world in these dazzled short term relationships, flirty weekends, fourteen night stands, so why shouldn't there be a poetry reflecting that experience?

What I'm really looking for is traces of shelter, the spoor of that nostalgia we build up for absent things – our past, our town's past, the territories glimpsed in books and recreated in the imagination, the mirrors of other towns and other faces in which we see more than ourselves. Nostalgia with its etymological intensity restored: the pain of return – that pain, whether it is of returning or of not returning. True love, basically.

Despite all the travel, the book begins with a series of poems based in the North East of England where you live. Is Newcastle close to being Dundee with a different accent and different pies?

Yes. The pressing need for 'home' and its simultaneous irrecoverability seems to have become a major theme. For me it also stands for the gap between our intellectual perception of the present moment, and our sensuous ability or otherwise to dwell in it. It feels easier for that to nag at you on a moment to moment basis if you don't live in the place where you grew up, but in a place that can be read as its twin. A lot of my work is not about place but about 'displace', as in Madness's 'Don't watch DAT, watch Dis.'

I don't claim to understand the English pie, however, hence my fetishising of Dundee's finest vegetarian treat, the macaroni peh or 'Ï' (One day there will be a pieshop in Dundee with just that Russian letter on its sign, and everyone will realise they aaready ken how to pronounce it.)

This book contains another elegy - this time for the dead poet Andrew Waterhouse. You've previously written stunning elegies for the poet Barry MacSweeney and the singer Billy Mackenzie. Do you ever feel you can't start another?

I've reached the age when deaths start to occur at what seems to be an absurdly exaggerated rate, like that speeded-up carriage in the original Nosferatu. Elegy is a fraught genre within the Scots tradition: the habbie stanza, after all, came from the mock elegy for the piper Habbie Simpson. It's crucial to keep on re-engaging with it so that we don't give in to Caledonian lachrymosity – what MacCaig called our 'exophthalmic adoration' of the past. So mockery is important, but also recovering the steely gaze of Dunbar's 'timor mortis'. Since we must relinquish everything and everyone, you have to try and give a proper account.

No, I never feel I can't start another – I don't understand that 'Will I ever write again?' mentality. I just write, and if it's not any good I forget about it, and if it's got a spark I keep at it. What I don't know is when I'll write another, but unfortunately there's no shortage of subjects.

Your daughter is getting older now and seems a real presence in your work, rather than a toddle-on character. How do you feel about that?

Well, ageing and adolescence are two exactly countering forces, so in practical terms she provides a useful thematic element. In other words, the same way I feel about writing about myself: it's inevitable without becoming confessional. I worry more about how she feels about it? I'm part of the furniture of her life; but I'm furniture that writes things down. Essentially I write about my daughter because I love her to distraction and love is what makes us human and distraction is what poetry is there both to embody and to counter.

I think this relates to what I've been saying: the immediacy of the world before our senses is a sufficient problem. Add on the fact we can remember things, often incorrectly, and away ye go. There's a real issue here to do with how poetry is read: that it contains a type of truth is essential, but assumptions that this emphatically is or emphatically isn't a biographical truth are both troubling. I don't mind readers relentlessly relating everything to your private life (readers are allowed to do whatever they want), but it's limiting. Equally, I'm not very interested in poets who think it's really exciting that they can make things up about their aunties: did they think they were telling the truth the rest of the time? A poem is required to be true in the sense of being in tune with itself: how that relates to the facts can be left to the journalists, who seem unable to discuss anything else.

The bottom line is we're just subject matter, to be jumbled up with other stuff if it makes a better poem. What's nearest to hand isn't necessarily the clearest to see, but that's the challenge: to find the right space, the right moment, for that direct utterance which reaches any reader. I just wish I'd kept a better grip on all the poems I wrote for her, rather than about her. You're never too old for nonsense poems, I hope.

'Rabotnik Fergusson' is one of the longest thing you've written - a part- comic, part-serious reflection on writing in Scots, Scottishness and space. It's quite a testing sequence, especially for a non-Scot - how would you help a reader into it?

By translating all my Scots work into English: 'What He's Been Wittering On About, or, The Doric Code Reveal'd'. Perhaps not an instant best-seller. I don't assume English readers have to read my Scots stuff, which is why there's always a 'complete' book of non-Scots in every collection.

As for testingness, thankfully the world is full of intellectual speed bumps, AKA books, the purpose of which is to prevent us from reaching our end without having taken in the scenery. (It's good if we don't kill anyone either, but books are little help against that degree of selfishness.) Written Scots is a speed bump for Scots and English and non-English readers alike. It says the great literatures don't fall into neat genealogies; it says history and politics are part of every reading experience; it says we are not merely authentic OR inauthentic; it says funny things with weird words. Written Scots is weird, but strangely enough so is the world.

The way into Rabotnik F is straight down Old Scifi Street, turn left at Dante Drive, head on into Midlife Crisis Copse. Don't worry about the literature, at least not at first. There's a story of a dead man who wakes up. He seems to be in Hell, but then it seems as though he's not. The scifi, the robots and the planets as libraries, comes like so much else from Eddie Morgan – I wrote most of it on the back of a printout of his Gilgamesh, which I was reading for the Poetry Book Society. I think the Dante comes from Sean O'Brien, who was translating the Inferno at the time, and brought back memories of ploughing through Carey's Dante because it's the translation Keats had on the Scottish trip. The form(s) come from an idea I had about a verse novel I'm still struggling with – that the old Scots stanzas are like characters in themselves.

Having read all of your books, I can identify mini-genres in your work. In this book, 'The Baths' fits a reflective, observational style I associate with poems like 'Postcards of Scotland' and 'Dirty Drinking'. In poems like these, do you write in situ - was there a notebook tucked into your trunks?

I'm always in situ somehow. Like I said, most of the poems in the last two books are about placement and displacement: if we are not fully here, how we are not fully here? All the poems you refer to stem from a specific setting or gatherings of settings. But what interests me is the slew away from surfaces – rather than developing a subject in a rational manner, 'The Baths' is distending a theme: we think of distance as consecutive series of units – miles or kilometres – but it can also be an accumulation of repeated units: lengths in a swimming pool. That idea of distance is then configured as a regression through time, so the swimmer 'arrives' in the demolished Dundee baths sometime in the late sixties, early seventies. Similarly the figure in 'Dirty Drinking' is attempting to drink himself into an impossible company of the dead, to booze with Rilkean angels. (This is what Scots is for! 'Dirty drinking' is a moral phrase – the one who drinks alone is somehow soiled by it.)

I'm trying to decide whether, if pushed, you'd choose Italy or Russia - two cultures which seem to fascinate you - so which is it to be?

That's like asking me to choose between cetaceans and squid. At the moment squids are in, but Italy and Russia will always be locked in a titanic struggle in the depths of my unconscious. What's being contested is cultural grounding, and so perhaps it would be more properly rephrased as Catholicism and Orthodoxy. I was very fixated on Renaissance art as a teenager, and all my first trips abroad were to Italy. But that led back to the Schism and the pivotal role of Byzantium, and especially the nature of the icon. This all sounds very art historical, but for me it's a visceral engagement, part of the stubborn mystery of place. Once you have loved someone or somewhere, you never stop loving – you may very much want to and persuade yourself you have, but you don't: the heart seems to exist in eternity, however much the mind must live in time, and the icon represents that duality, a physical object apparently embodying an eternal state.

So when, aged eighteen, I first looked at a Milan tobacconist, it felt instantly and irrationally like I could see Dundee in the fifties, and that meant when I looked at portraits by Lotto or Moroni in the Brera I wanted to see over their shoulders, out of those windows and across that landscape, to see the Dundee of the Wedderburns. Later, when I stood in Red Square listening to the Galloway clock, I was again recognising something from the past, or rather my father's past when he was in the Young Communists, and that then influenced the way I looked at the Rublev icons. Slippages like these see you through to the inner rooms of the psyche.

Bad Shaman Blues begins in North Shields, but it ends on a hillside in Crete, dealing with the fact that, after the Fall, a fatally wounded British serviceman was hidden in our ramshackle little house. I'm very interested in how we fail and how we fall: what we fail in and what we fall to.

What's next for you? More travels? Any more projects or books on the go?

Well, my extreme passivity should be apparent by now. Career for me is a verb and not a noun. So my concern is somehow to continue my relationships with those places and people where there is a deeper connection, and let the work arise. India and especially China (those post-colonial and Daoist things we've not had space to cover); the poets I've met in Chennai and Moscow and Beijing and Sofia; the intimate clan of family and the broader tribe of writers, which for me is defined both by region (the North East) and nation (Scotland, of course) – all these act upon me rather than me upon them.

Hopefully I'm heading back to several of those places. I think I can put together some translation work I've done with pals like Polly Clark and Linda France. There should be a book of Bulgarian work soon. There's a few books of essays I'm either contributing to or editing or entirely composing I'd like to see get off the ground. (And then there are the various collaborations with artists and musicians, but that really is another subject.)

I'd like to continue writing poems that occasionally exceed the forty line barrier, and books that ignore the 64 page quota. I'd like to think these might embody what I hear as our rougher northern music: the music of MacSweeney and Bunting as well as MacDiarmid and Morgan. Much as I delight in the triple- blended stuff that has commanded the English ear since Yeats, I engage with craft as an energy rather than as a matter of the perfectible finish. We've heard a lot about the poetry wars between the mainstream and what can appear to be an increasingly sluggish English experimentalism. The Northern and Scottish poetry I admire and would like to aspire to in my own work seems already to have left that tired opposition behind.