Bright Discontinuities: Peter Manson and Contemporary Scottish Poetry

Critical responses to Peter Manson’s work often refer to him as a Scottish or Glasgow-based poet. In a review of Manson’s 2017 pamphlet Factitious Airs, Alice Tarbuck proposes that one of the key things differentiating Manson from his avant-garde contemporaries is his attentiveness to place and particularly “to Scottish speech rhythms and cultural ideas.” Nonetheless, most critical writing on Manson has sought to read his work primarily in terms of international movements in experimental poetics. This article therefore considers Manson’s relationship with and place within contemporary Scottish poetry, asking what connections can be made between his writing and that of his geographical peers. Manson has, notably, written very sympathetically about Tom Leonard’s work. Another potential point of contact would be Object Permanence, which, like Poor. Old. Tired. Horse thirty years before, brought writers from Scotland into contact with new currents in international poetry (and vice versa). In Manson’s work as a translator of Mallarme there is also a connection with the modern(ist) Scottish tradition of poetic translation exemplified by Edwin Morgan. Situating Manson’s work in the landscape of contemporary Scottish poetry, this article asks to what extent this offers a potentially fruitful context within which to read his work – going on to explore what the implications of such a reading might be.

bring it into contact with innovative literary movements from around the world.
Trocchi's Merlin is another interesting post-war point of comparison, though unlike P.O.T.H. and The Voice of Scotland it was not edited in Scotland. Nor, one might add, was it primarily intended -in clear contrast to these other magazines and, arguably, Object Permanence as well -to bring a specifically Scottish avant garde into contact with its international peers. As with these notable Scottish precursors, Object Permanence published a broad spectrum of material -ranging from the relatively conventional (at least as far as experimental poetry goes) to the startlingly unfamiliar.
In his recent study Avant-Folk: Small Press Poetry Networks from 1950 to the Present, Ross Hair argues that Hamilton Finlay's efforts to publish and promote international experimentalism are symptomatic of the "disaffection and frustrations" which he and his early collaborators experienced in relation to their own literary culture. 3 Admittedly, the relationship between publishing and creative work is by no means straightforward -it would be overly simplistic to suggest that the impulse behind any poet-publisher's writing is coterminous with that which motivates their editorial work on behalf of other writers. Nonetheless, as Hair explores in relation to Finlay's editorial practice, there is often a deep underlying continuity between the formal, conceptual and theoretical concerns which animate creative writing and the kinds of work which poets who publish their contemporaries will seek to promote.
For writers like Finlay in the nineteen fifties and sixties, or Manson and Purves in the nineties, who feel to some extent at odds with or against the grain of their immediate literary context, the production and circulation of magazines and other small publications can provide a vital lifeline for creative work -bringing such poet-editors into contact with like-minded individuals and new ideas, as well as actively contributing to the potential realignment of the local context against which these figures initially reacted.
It could be argued that Object Permanence was, like many of the most interesting Though referring to Manson here as a British poet, Burt also considers the Scottish situation qua Scottish, acknowledging that much of the politico-cultural complexity of contemporary Britain is likely to be lost on American readers, "since Scotland and Wales and indeed the England north of the Watford gap, in the American popular imagination, are not distinguished clearly from the Home Counties, except when distant Celtic traditions come in." 5 Cognisant of these cultural complications, Burt goes on to argue that the "best overtly nationalist poetry in English from contemporary Scotland flaunts just the qualities -continuities with speech and with earlier poems, dependence on listeners, attention to syntax and so on" that readers might find in "such English poets as [Alison] Brackenbury and [David] Constantine: it is just that the continuities and the listeners invoked are marked as Scottish." 6 Referring specifically to Jen Hadfield and Robert Crawford, Burt suggests that these writers, who write with a determined sense of local identity, are more similar to their English peers (qua English) than nationalist criticism might like to accept. There is, of course, also the distant Celtic tradition -and its real-life counterpart, contemporary poetry in Gaelic (and, though it is not a Celtic language, Scots). Acknowledging the truth in Burt's critique -Scottish poets, particularly the award-winning ones, do participate in and benefit from a pan-British literary culture -there is also poetry from Scotland which, while not overtly or even necessarily nationalistic, is nonetheless affected by and reflective of its place of composition to a degree which does, one might argue, separate it significantly from other Anglophone poetries. There are persuasive grounds for including Manson's work in this category.
The international avant garde, primarily its British/English and American manifestations, is undoubtedly an important context for Manson's writing -and one which does separate him quite strikingly from well-known Scottish contemporaries such as, for instance, Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson. However, as Alice Tarbuck points out in a 2017 review of Manson's pamphlet Factitious Airs, he is also differentiated from many of his "Cambridge-school-esque experimental" peers by a number of qualities, among them "his attention to place, particularly to Scottish speech rhythms and cultural ideas." 7 The other qualities to which Tarbuck draws attention are Manson's trust of the reader and the striking beauty which she finds in much of his work. These qualities could, perhaps, be linked to the poetry's grounding in a particular place and speech community -and here one might refer to Burt's assertion that much important recent UK poetry has been explicitly concerned with identifying and embodying cultural and linguistic continuities, presumably in the face of the disruptions and discontinuities of an increasingly globalised world. This would seem to question the specificity of an appeal to a specific culture, resisting the idea that there is anything particularly unique about Scottish poetry -valuable as the writing itself may be. There are, needless to say, complementary accounts which might be offered of the complex interrelationship between poetry, culture and place -and accounts of culture in Scotland, including poetry, which have sought to valorise the very discontinuities which have led some critics (notably T. S. Eliot) to question the existence of Scottish literature as such.
As Tarbuck suggests, there is a potentially productive tension between an account of Manson's achievement which would focus on his formal and conceptual links with avant garde movements globally, and one which would dwell more attentively on this poet's rootedness in Glasgow and Scotland. These accounts need not be mutually exclusive. Indeed, trying to understand how Manson's work bridges the gap between Scottish poetry and international experimentalism might well help point the way towards a better appreciation of both. As such, this essay will consider a number of points at which Manson can be seen as entering into creative or critical dialogue with what might hesitantly be referred to as the Scottish tradition.
Situating Manson in his Scottish context might offer insights into what is so distinctive about this poet who has combined a radical openness to the new forms offered by the international avant garde with a hefted attentiveness to the particularities of his native place. Foregrounding the Scottish dimension of his work, such a reading might prompt a wider reassessment of Manson's writing, emphasising the importance of the local in relation to the global. It might also point towards a reassessment of the Scottish poetic landscape more broadly, whereby the experimental and the innovative tendencies would be brought into somewhat sharper focus than has generally been the case.
To describe Manson as a Scottish poet is on one level merely to state the obvious. Here is a Glaswegian poet, a familiar face at poetry events in his native city and -as the recent conference on his work and the publication of this special issue highlight -increasingly a touchstone figure for younger writers and researchers with an interest in experimental culture in Scotland. Nevertheless, on another level to so describe this writer -much of whose practice might seem to be directly antipathetic towards reductive national signifiers -could be seen as risking an unhelpful essentialism, limiting rather than enhancing the meaningfulness of Manson's work. To argue, as this essay does, that reading Manson not just in terms of innovative poetics internationally, but also in terms of the broadly understood inheritance of a specifically Scottish tradition is a potentially productive critical manoeuvre requires a certain amount of considered contextualisation. It is therefore important to clarify what aspects of the Scottish literary context and inheritance are of particular relevance to Manson. In this respect it may be useful to engage directly here with some of the key debates in modern Scottish literary historiography, which have been central in shaping the great variety of contemporary responses to the conundrum of what exactly constitutes Scottish poetry. What, precisely, is a Scottish poet and what, if any, is the significance of a national label to the work of such a writer?
In 1919, just under a century ago, T. S. Eliot posed the infamous question -was there a Scottish literature? 8 His answer -that there was in the late medieval period something which might have merited this title, but that the Scottish tradition has since merged with the English to the extent that it currently comprises little more than a provincial adjunct to it -has, most critics would now agree, been refuted by subsequent literary history. This essay will return to adjuncts, provincial and otherwise, in due course. It is, moreover, beyond its scope to provide a comprehensive overview of Scottish poetry in the wake of Eliot's essay. Suffice it to say that as well as asserting the non-existence of an independent Scottish literary tradition as such, in his 1919 essay Eliot proposed that to claim that a collection of texts amounts to a literature presupposes the presence of a single shared language -which across the United Kingdom as a whole is clearly English. As Scotland is unequally divided between Scots, English and Gaelic it is too linguistically fragmented to support a coherent literature.

This idea was subsequently taken up and adapted by Edwin Muir in his critical work
Scott and Scotland, which rejected the possibility of creating a modernist poetic in Scots and by so doing precipitated a permanent rift with MacDiarmid. 9 It is, perhaps surprisingly, not generally noted by scholars of modern Scottish literature that in certain respects Eliot's own poetic oeuvre would also tend to refute his line of reasoning in the 1919 essay -given that it includes several texts composed in French and, particularly in The Waste Land, numerous quotations from other languages. Counterintuitive as the proposition might initially seem, both to Scottish literary scholars and students of experimental writing from around the English-speaking world, it is possible to read certain texts by Peter Manson in terms of the critical inheritance of these early twentieth-century attempts to define and demarcate the territory of Scottish literature. Moreover, Eliot and Muir's prioritisation of cultural and linguistic continuity -and MacDiarmid's insight that a modernist poetics of fragmentation and collage might make a virtue out of the historical discontinuities of Scottish language and culture -remain relevant to twenty-first-century Scottish writing. After all, in Burt's 2009 intervention, one finds a well-known American poet critic coming to essentially the same conclusion as Eliot in 1919: that Scottish poetry is valuable but, unless one resorts to essentialism, often less distinctive than nationalism might like to admit. This is a persuasive argument -and a reminder that it is perhaps one of the key challenges for scholars of contemporary Scottish literature to find ways of engaging with their subject which respond to the national in a nuanced and non-essential manner.
Aside from the general importance of these theoretical debates around language, modernity and identity for any critic trying to come to terms with the textual landscapes of recent Scottish literature, there are ways in which they are of quite specific relevance to Manson's poetry, especially when seen in relation to its Scottish context.
For instance, English in Mallarmé is, formally speaking, a work which sets out to explore the extent to which one language can be seen as being latent in another. 10 Manson's procedure here is to systematically work through Mallarmé Finding fairly straightforward equivalences for what is going on in the French source text, in his Mallarmé translations Manson eschews regular rhyme and a fixed metrical scheme, achieving something like the ivresse belle of Salut -a rhythmic pitch and toss which nonetheless bears its Scottish-sounding benison of sense in a demonstrably upright fashion. Describing his practice as having been to produce "unashamedly semantic translations of a poet whose best writing seems designed to put a semantic translator to shame", Manson also states in his afterword to The Poems in Verse that translating Mallarmé was for him a way "of slowing [my] reading down as far as I possibly could." 12 In this commitment to as close a semantic rendering of a source poem as possible, there is a significant connection to be made with Edwin Morgan's own practice as perhaps the major Glaswegian translator of poetry.
Reflecting on his activities as a translator, Morgan wrote in 1976 that despite "the forceful exemplars of Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, and Christopher Logue, I have persistently refused myself their freedom of approach, and have tried to work within a sense of close and deep obligation to the other poet." 13 There are nonetheless, one might argue, potentially many ways of expressing a close and deep obligation to another poet -and many aspects of poems whose effect or function could be persuasively described as semantic. Given that translation is an inevitably hermeneutic, interpretative act, the 'literal' meaning of any text is apt to remain fluid, subjective and to some extent contextual. The "unashamedly semantic" approach which

Miraculously I am nutted
Awake by the bust of Sir Walter Scott. 24 Referencing Poussin, this poem might be read as a pointed reminder that its author is, despite first impressions to the contrary, very much a part of the culture memorialised and curated, represented or even misrepresented within the National Library of Scotland, which on its website identifies itself as the pre-eminent repository for the nation's "knowledge, history and culture. an Undigest, where sentences pile up on one another with little apparent logical or causal connection beyond their having been set down in that order by Manson in the course of the book's composition. 27 In Scott's collection, an uneaten oatcake from the battle of Culloden takes its place beside Mary Queen of Scots' crucifix -but very little connects these objects beyond their imputed connection to the national fable for which Abbotsford is a frame. As with Adjunct, the formal juxtaposition is to a great extent the point: out of discontinuity a kind of continuity emerges.
Given the relative neglect of Manson's poetry and poetics by critics seeking to engage with contemporary Scottish writing, it is perhaps salutary to consider that Scott -who can be seen as a synecdoche for the canon as a whole in Et in Arcadia Ego -is himself now increasingly regarded as a rather neglected figure: a household name, the echoes of whose life and work remain ubiquitous in Scottish culture, but whose writings themselves are largely ignored by most contemporary readers. The meaning of the classical trope behind Et in Arcadia Ego is that, here too, death and oblivion are realities. Ann Rigney, in her 2012 study The Afterlives of Walter Scott, refers to the character of Old Mortality, in the novel of the same name, travelling around the country re-inscribing the eroded monuments to the Covenanters who fought and died for their extreme religious beliefs in the seventeenth century. She writes of this figure that "erosion and illegibility also affect literary works and not just moss-covered gravestones. So can they too be re-inscribed? And what is at stake in making them legible again?" 28 As Rigney shows, Scott has in the course of the twentieth and early twenty first centuries become increasingly illegible to a great manyperhaps even the majority -of readers. The decline of his once immense readership is, she argues, not merely indicative of changing tastes, but also of a broader shift in the way people conceptualise their collective identity -with works of literature like the Waverley novels no longer providing a focal point around which a whole society and its sense of common values might be seen to cohere. 29 The oeuvre of a poet like Manson, whose works run (indeed, embrace) the risk of illegibility and incomprehension, presents a very different, more contemporary model of what writing can be than Scott, the now neglected early nineteenth-century master -though both writers can, as Et in Arcadia shows, exist in overlapping literary contexts. Rigney's question -what precisely is at stake when modern-day readers attempt to re-inscribe a work like Old Mortality in terms of contemporary critical discourses? -is also of relevance to a critique of Manson's work which seeks to inscribe or re-inscribe it within broader debates around poetry and identity in Scotland. Many Another text from Between Cup and Lip scrambles Keats' sonnet, 'If by dull rhymes our English must be chained', reimagining the Romantic poet's opening line to read: "Because through bright discontinuities your Scots must not be released". 30 Transfiguring Keats, Manson's unrhymed fourteen-line poem proceeds dialectically, by a process of opposition. Dull rhymes are answered by bright discontinuities, our English by your Scots (though the poem makes no actual use of Lallans per se).
Here the English poem's rhetorically resigned subjunctive becomes -or is perhaps unmasked as -an imperative injunction to use conventional poetics and the standard language. Though most accounts of Manson's poetry as political literature would probably focus on the way his writing materially interferes with the rhetorical means by which people are persuaded and ultimately influenced through language, this poem serves as a reminder that there is also a side of his writing which is not uninvolved in debates around place, identity and indeed the UK constitution as it impacts Scotland (though this last is less obviously a feature of his work than it is for most prominent Scottish poets of his generation).
Described by Robert Potts in The Guardian as "certainly the most entertain- reads of a manatee called Hugh and meets with the statement "Used to like radiolarian more than foraminifera when I was a kid." This seems to be a fairly direct -and potentially critical -reference to MacDiarmid's poem 'On the Ocean Floor', perhaps the best-known modern Scottish poem about protozoa, in which the poet remarks with typical self-assurance that as he feels his own genius waxing stronger, he is more and more aware of "the lightless depths" below -"as one who hears their tiny shells incessantly raining|On the ocean floor as the foraminifera die." 37 References to Philip Hobsbaum comprise a comparable leitmotif throughout Adjunct, starting on page eight when an "Expansive gesture with both hands catches Philip Hobsbaum on the lower arm." 38 Later on one learns that "Happiness is Philip Hobsbaum." 39  Indeed, Manson has repeatedly emphasised how important the example of Leonard in particular has been to him -as an experimental poet whose practice is firmly rooted in Glasgow and its language. Reviewing Leonard's access to the silence for Poetry Review in 2004, Manson observed that in his view I don't think it's possible to overstate the importance of Intimate Voices: no book of poetry in the past fifty years has done more to articulate the experience of working, thinking and simply being in the languages of workingclass Scotland […] Leonard's early poems, mostly in Glasgow speech, speak so precisely and with such a fierce, analytical wit that they transcend their status as poems and become part of the shared apparatus we use to think with. I don't know any other contemporary poetry of which that is so true. 41 And in an interview with Tim Allen, published in 2006, Manson reflects on how important Leonard was for him as a young poet in Glasgow in the early nineteen nineties, often frustrated by the apparent limitations of the Scottish literary scene: Very early on, I went to visit Tom Leonard, who was the writer in residence at Glasgow University, and Tom really got what I was trying to do (got the humour of it too, which people often miss!) and was able to point me at a lot of writers and artists who became important to me later. 42 One of Manson's key touchstones, Leonard is a major poet from Scotland who always remained highly critical of cultural and political nationalism, as expressed in the work of MacDiarmid and his Scottish Renaissance associates. Focussing on the language of place and class, rather than nation, his work offers Manson (and many other readers) an exemplary alternative to often relatively conservative Renaissance narratives of cultural renewal. Beyond the political and cultural implications of Leonard's writings since the late nineteen sixties, he is also a poet whose support for radical formal experimentation has been consistently unswerving.
Morgan, too, might seem to offer an alternative to MacDiarmid -the former being a Glaswegian poet who translated and experimented with restless energy throughout his long career. In the 2006 interview with Tim Allen, Manson recalls reading a review by Morgan of (another key Scottish precursor) Veronica Forrest-Thomson's Collected Poems "and spending ages trying to track down every name he mentioned." 43 Working with a more defined sense of the Scottish tradition than Leonard, Morgan always maintained that the long view was compatible with absolute modernity. On the 8 th of April 1996 he wrote to Manson, submitting a version of Saint Columba's Altus Prosator to Object Permanence, writing that though his translation of the earliest Scottish poem might seem like a strange choice for an experimental publication, the work could, he feels, "be described as an experimental poem." Arguing that Columba's Latin work should "stand like a dragon at the beginning of our anthologies" 44 Morgan is boldly asserting several things -that Scottish poetry, contra Eliot, is irreducibly multilingual; that it has an ancient tradition; and, crucially, that it has always been experimental. Here one might look back to Thom Gunn's assertion, referred to at the start of this paper -that on Parnassus there is room for more than one poetic and that there are points in the poetic spectrum where the innovative and the traditional shade into one another. A reading of modern poetry from Scotland which sought to foreground work like Manson's -not typically foregrounded by mainstream nationalist criticism -might offer interesting possibilities for prioritising aspects of place and language which a focus on the national in literature has the potential to obscure or devalue. It might also provide an opportunity to develop a more positive alternative to the sometimes antagonistic binary between ' experimental' and 'mainstream' poetics, in Scotland as elsewhere. Moving away from similarly antagonistic attempts -such as MacDiarmid's -to aggressively define Scottish poetry in terms of its difference in relation to English poetry, Manson's writing provides critics with an opportunity to, on the one hand, identify underlying continuities between different poetic styles and movements, and on the other to dwell attentively on the pleasurable discontinuities and exciting dissociations which arise when reading this poet's work.
It seems appropriate to conclude by referring to Manson's own introduction to a reading of 'The Baffle Stage' in Cincinnati from 2012, in which the poet discusses the way in which his work has been informed MacDiarmid's Scots work in quatrains and William Dunbar's fifteenth-century 'Lament for the Makars', as well as Mallarmé. 45 The following year, introducing his reading of the same text at an event with Robert Stage' -it's a very oblique way of saying hello to some poetry from my own country, but I couldn't do it any other way." 46 Given the ubiquity of rhymed iambic quatrains in virtually every strand of Anglophone poetry since the early modern period -and indeed the fact that Dunbar and MacDiarmid, outwith A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, which is primarily written in quatrains, are probably best known for their work in other forms -this apparently casual statement seems significant. It suggests the importance to Manson of these poets in Scots, as well as a concomitant lack of similar self-identification with (which is not the same thing as a lack of affection for) the many English poets who have drawn upon this dominant metrical and rhyming form in their writing. Crucially, here Manson acknowledges his own continuity with a Scottish tradition in poetry going back to the fifteenth century and beyond, while also recognising that he can best register this connection obliquely. This essay has set out to show that there are many places in Manson's oeuvre where he can be seen to do so, and that paying attention to these instances can be of real value in terms of the reader's appreciation of the forces which animate this poet's work, integral as it is to an understanding of the various factors at play in contemporary Scottish innovative writing, as well as experimental literature internationally.