Poetry, music, writing and gaming: Don Paterson on the writing life

Paterson will appear at the Stanza poetry festival in St Andrews on March 4.

On writing his latest collection, 40 Sonnets:

"I had written a lot before, and I had thought a lot about the form before. And essentially it was one of the first forms that really emerged in a stable way when poetry came off the tongue and hit the page. It was product of Gutenberg, really, because all it is a square of text on the page - which inevitably has a symmetrical appeal.

"So, if you started from scratch again, and no one had written a sonnet, you'd have a sonnet again by tomorrow tea time. It's a very obvious thing to do. And then you have this little asymmetrical break, which is what humans also do when we are faced with symmetry – we put it in to make it interesting for ourselves. 

"They say the brain craves repetition and variation, and so when we see symmetry we say: no, we need something else. Most sonnets have that, just before two thirds of the way through, something changes. But all the stuff about rhyme  – these are culturally arbitrary things. The rhyme can be important, but it’s not actually important what the rhyme scheme is."

Sonnets as short poems:

"You can see the end of it on the page. As a reader you think: OK, you seem to think you're quite important. So it places a certain expectation on the poem itself, which you can either honour or massively disappoint. So I like that about it. It's not going to give the reader the chance to get bored. But hopefully they will get to the end and think: there’s a lot more in this … and read it again."

On music:

"Music is what I did before I wrote poetry. I went down [from Dundee] to London, and started as a musician. I moved down there specifically there to work with a band called Talisker in the mid 1980s. And then I formed  Lammas with Tim Garland – we’re still in touch with him and he might do something with the new one. We did that for ten years, toured all the time, and did five or six records and that was my living for a time, but gradually the other thing began to take it over. Insidiously …

And especially in jazz, if you are trying to keep up with people who are playing better than you, you need to be playing all the time, and I couldn’t do it."

On poetry and music:

"I always think that as a single organism, if you do any two activities, after a while you are going to find analogies and rhymes between them. If you are doing – I don’t know, origami and hang-gliding – it will be the same thing again. A lot of the analogies that people make between music and poetry are actually quite facile, they’re not true. But at a technical level there are some things, in my mind at least, that are mapped to each other. That means if you learn something in one it is a transferable skill. But to explain it to anyone else … it gets quite technical. 

"There is a normative shift in poetry where sound are sense are much more evenly balanced than they are in other forms of verbal communication. Sound and sense make double-sided signs in poetry, and it helps if you can listen carefully – and I think that’s a skill you can learn from playing."

On form: 

"When you are playing jazz, your instrument, in a way, is the thing is that is preventing you playing like a kazoo, which is what you want to do. You have to go through your instrument to do that. And in a sense it is the same in poetry – but it is different in one crucial regard: in jazz you are trying to play what is in your head. In poetry you are not trying to say what is in your head at all, you are trying to figure out what it is that you want to say - or what you don’t know – and use the mechanism of the poem to do so. Basically things are set up – form, rhyme scheme, argument – as a way of not letting you say what you want to say, in a sense denying you a sense of spontaneity.

"After that initial burst of inspiration – where you get two lines for nothing – you have then to 'make it up', but the last thing you want is to be spontaneous. If you do that you’re going to say the same thing that you always say, or that everyone else thinks. 

"Raymond Chandler said, ‘no art without the resistance of the form’. It’s a challenge. If you push through the form, rather than just try to make the damn rhyme, you are going to have to go into your imagination, your memory, your unconscious, in a way that you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. And then you will be forced to say something different, something better than what you wanted to say. So form in poetry is a kind of investigative, kabbalistic tool for surprising yourself.

Writing a poem: 

"Often the first words are a place to start, but often they are the darlings that you have to murder, boldly. You have to sever the umbilical cord at some point. Most people start with a bit of chaos. And in a way its rubbish … but you know something is in there. There is a ying and a yang, there is a little generative possibility, there is a tension, there is a seed, and then you got to chase that down. You have to translate something that arrived as a wee singularity into something that has a temporal, linear existence. 

"It is the same when you are composing music and you get a line of melody – and there’s something in that single, two bar phrase that implies the whole composition. You know it’s there – and you just have to expand on its inner tensions and relationships."

Poetry writing and work:

"When you are younger, there is an apprenticeship to be served and you have to write every day. When I teach, I make them write. But after that, if you know what you’re doing, you don’t have to so much. Now – it's a matter of waiting to be sufficiently moved by something. But you don’t get any points for adding superfluous pieces of art to the world’s store of them. So I think you are doing your readers a favour by shutting up.

"But poetry is different. You cannot do it all the time. I do believe it is a special case. You shouldn’t do it all the time. It’s not like you’re writing a novel and crunching through your 1000 words a day. Writing a book of poems is, as they say, a ‘painful process’ – and it takes me 18 months to recover. If it didn’t cost you, it was probably not worth doing."

Personal subject matter in poems:

"There are a few things going on. First of all: it’s not all true. But on the other hand, it is. Which is to say that the facts in poems are only there in the service of what you perceive to be the truth. And the facts often have to change to honour that truth. Some facts aren’t very musical, they don’t fit, they are meaningless … so you have to edit them. By the end, you have said something more emotionally true – and therefore hopefully more useful to someone else. But the facts no longer accord very neatly with what actually happened. You have to allow yourself the freedom to lie. But on the other hand, while it’s fine to make stuff up, but you will not feel the same level of emotional urgency. Poetry is often better when it is written out of your own experience."

Sentimentality and avoiding it - in particular reference to his (beautiful) poems about his children:

"I don’t know whether I have avoided it … and then I suddenly didn’t care whether I had. As a father, you don’t have to test the strength of your feelings any more. It’s the one time you don’t have to do that. Which is interesting. Sentimentality is an interesting thing. Robert Frost is my exemplar, and he would also cut as close to sentimentality as he could, because he knew that’s where the real feeling was. That’s a real risk in poetry, to be nearly sentimentality. And sometimes he fell over, and was, and no doubt I have been as well – which is about the only thing I have in common with Frost."

Games and gaming:

"I’m a fearty – I’m the kind of guy who stops at the traffic lights in Grand Theft Auto. So I quite like open world things. Mild peril. Light adventure. But there are some great things. Do you know Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture? Christ it’s an unbelievable game. This is really well written. It’s been described as an episode of The Archers scripted by Lars von Trier.  It’s amazingly atmospheric and it really gets under your skin.

"The worry is the headset thing. The virtual reality that is coming in this year. I fully intend to be an early adopter …  my kids are far more worried about the cultural consequences of it than I am. They are really worried about the detachment from reality – I thought they would be excited about it, but it’s the old geezers like me who are excited. They have less reality to escape from, maybe that’s it. They are very conscious of the fact that their generation is losing more and more hours to that empty attention to the screen, so more and more them are getting quite disciplined about limiting their own exposure, and finding genuine social engagement.

"But anyway – I’m getting a headset."