The bigger the task, and the more unlikely success appears, the more chance there is that someone, somewhere has committed the quest to verse.
Changing perceptions of the Lanarkshire new town may not be a venture on the scale of those chronicled in The Odyssey, Le Morte d’Arthur or even the
Canterbury Tales.
But the challenge is arguably a noble and difficult one. Cumbernauld is a past winner of the Plook on the Plinth award, presented each year by architecture magazine Prospect. It has been fending off critics of its 1960s architecture ever since, and the latest art installation is part of the counterblast that is the Cumbernauld Positive Image Project.
Jim Carruth of Johnstone is to pen a lyric to the town, presumably depicting the fight of its dignitaries and citizens to rebut critics who claim all it has to offer is a town centre branded – in its entirety – as the worst building in Britain by Channel 4’s series Demolition in 2005, as well as the memory of a promotional advert with an annoying catchphrase. Carruth can look to some worthy forebears for inspiration. Cumbernauld is far from the first town to be an unlikely recipient of an ode. We’ll draw a veil over the way John Betjeman skewered another new town with his quill: “Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough” indeed. We should instead turn to Scotland’s alternative poet laureate, William McGonagall, who wrote in praise of many places, but perhaps none better than Montrose. Carruth could adopt his opening lines: “Beautiful town of Montrose, I
will now commence my lay/And
I will write in praise of thee without dismay …”
Carruth could learn, too, from the way some poets seem daunted by the challenge. So the poems become about something else: John Hegley’s Glasgow is more about a troubled friendship with a sideswipe at sectarianism, than the city itself. Likewise Philip Larkin’s Sunny Prestatyn becomes a reflection on the difference between dream and reality and the degradation of beauty.
Some places defeat even those indelibly associated with them.
W H Auden allegedly once asked Philip Larkin: ‘Do you like living in Hull?’ to which Larkin was said to have responded, morosely: “I don’t suppose I’m unhappier there than I should be anywhere else.”
More hopeful is Ian McMillan, bard of Barnsley, who was commissioned to work with mums in nearby Bradford. Together they came up with an optimistic: “There may be rainy days ahead/When I just don’t want to get out of bed …”
But it is another Scottish poem that provides the best model, albeit from an Englishman. Gerard Manley Hopkins probably wrote Inversnaid while working as a minister in Glasgow. He doesn’t defend or minimise the faults of the Highland burn he has taken as his subject, inquiring instead: “What would the world be, once bereft/Of wet and wildness?”
Carruth might ask the same of the statue on which his poem will be imprinted. Where would the statue, Broadwood Stadium and, indeed, the rest of us be, without Cumbernauld?
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