Episode Transcript

Dundee Poets 

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

If you know your poets, and even if you don't, you will probably recognise those words immediately as being those of William McGonagall who, for many, is the only Dundee poet they could name. But Dundee has been home and inspiration to many poets over the last 600 years.

Many Scottish cities have a Makar – a kind of local Poet Laureate. Dundee’s is W N Herbert, described as a "prolific and fluent" in both English and Scots, always taking an ironic and humorous view of his varied subjects. Herbert has published ten collections of poetry since the early 1990s including 1996's Cabaret McGonagall which was shortlisted for the prestigious Forward Prize. Subsequent collections include Forked Tongue, The Laurelude and Omnesia. In 1983, he launched the magazine The Gairfish, with one themed issue likening Dundee’s creative energies to 'Duende' (an anagram of Dundee, of course), referring to the Spanish word for an intangible energy or vibration.

Over the last five decades Dundee University has turned to many noted poets to fill the role of Writer-in-Residence, including Sean O’Brien and, more recently, John Burnside. Although Burnside may have hopped over the Tay to become professor of Creative Writing at St Andrews University, his relationship with the city remains, and his 2013 collection of short stories, Something Like Happy (published by Jonathan Cape), contains 'Slut's Hair', a piece of prose that draws you inside a Dundee tenement, playing out a bleak domestic scene shot through with dusty, everyday magic.

Burnside is firmly in the front rank of UK poets, and alongside him is Dundee's Don Paterson. Born in Dundee in 1963, Paterson is well known as a poet, writer and accomplished jazz musician. He left school to pursue a career as a musician in London where eventually his collection Nil Nil was published in 1993 by Faber and Faber. He has gone on to publish a further eight collections, as well as plays, radio dramas and criticism. Paterson has won many awards including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Forward Poetry Prize and the TS Eliot Prize - the only poet to do so twice! Paterson received an OBE in 2008 and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2010.

Other contemporary poets hailing from or active in Dundee at present include John Glenday and Tracey Herd. In addition, the University has recognised the work of several poets by conferring Honorary Graduate status on them, including Carol Ann Duffy, the UK's current Poet Laureate.

The University’s contribution to sustaining and nurturing poetry in the last 50 years include the production of three editions of Seagate, a snapshot of Dundee poetry. The first Seagate appeared in 1975, Seagate II following a decade later, with a long gap until Seagate III revived the idea in 2016. In addition, Dundee University Press published Whaleback City in 2013, a summation of six centuries of poetry about the city of Dundee, reaching back into old Scots and focusing on the Victorian era, the 20^th century Scots revival and finishing in the 21^st century.

However, it always comes back to McGonagall - not just the best-known Dundee poet but arguably the most famous Dundonian of all. William Topaz McGonagall, who was born in 1825, is often referred to as the worst poet in British literary history. As a young man, McGonagall moved from Edinburgh to Dundee and apprenticed as a handloom weaver, following in his father's footsteps. In 1846, he married Jean King and they went on to have five sons and two daughters.

McGonagall initially showed an interest in acting when he paid a theatre company to play the part of Macbeth. However, in true McGonagall style, he refused to die on stage, believing Macduff was attempting to upstage him.

By the 1870s, McGonagall and his family were struggling financially. However, it was during one of the most difficult periods of his life that he became inspired to write. He wrote later that he, "seemed to feel a strange kind of feeling stealing over [him], and remained so for about five minutes. A flame, as Lord Byron said, seemed to kindle up [his] entire frame, along with a strong desire to write poetry." Over his writing career, McGonagall wrote approximately 200 pieces on subjects as diverse as the Tay whale, temperance and the Tay Bridge disaster. All his work betrayed his unique style – long, rambling, repetitive, clumsy rhythms and terrible rhymes – but, as anyone who has read them will concur, all possessed of a peculiar charm and wit, despite appearing to be the work of a complete amateur.

 In 1883 he wrote a poem to mark the inauguration of the University College, Dundee, which opened with:

Good people of Dundee, your voices raise,

And to Miss Baxter give great praise;

Rejoice and sing and dance with glee,

Because she has founded a college in Bonnie Dundee.

This extract perhaps exemplifies why his work so often serves as a caution, both to readers and to aspiring poets.  Inexplicably, he died penniless in 1902 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh.   

Let us leave the last word to one of McGonagall's fellow poets. In 2003 the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney visited Dundee to give a lecture in which he described the University of Dundee as 'having its head in the clouds and its feet firmly on the ground'.  It falls again to a poet to offer the perfect summary of where Dundee University has been and where it is going in the next 50 years.