A poet from Dundee

W. N. Herbert's poetry straddles the fashionable themes of national identity, bilingualism and cultural multiplicity in a way that is quite a bit more playful and less self-conscious and overbearing than some of our own English poets. Most importantly, his poems do not lose sight of the essentials. 'I was never quite a full-on nationalist,' he tells VIVEK NARAYANAN.

OUR so-called "multi-cultural" age unfortunately seems to require that an artist is introduced, first and foremost, by way of her or his ethnic identity; the fate of W.N. Herbert, recently in India thanks to the British Council, was and will be no different. Herbert himself, it should be said, is not averse to being labelled a bilingual (Scots and English) Scottish poet. He is one. Nevertheless, his work also demonstrates the variety of ways in which the romantic idea of being Scottish and being bilingual - and the romantic idea of being a poet as well - can be completely, exhilaratingly, redefined.

In Chennai, where I had the chance to interview him, there were no kilts on display. Bill Herbert, as a matter of fact, was not looking particularly Scottish in his blue (white-laced) canvas sneakers. His hugely successful readings emphasised, one night, performance and incantatory poems with rich and noisy soundscapes, reminiscent of the Afro-Carribean dub poetry he listened to in his teens and, the next night, controlled, reflective, very "literary", and - some might say - "middle- class" poems, courtesy of the canon. Herbert thinks about how to perform his poetry. He also, however, writes complex, and often experimental, verse which deserves the time and close attention that only a printed page can nurture. Take his fifth, and most recent, fat, full-length collection, published by Bloodaxe. It begins with the remarkable, ambitious "The Laurelude", a poem about 40 pages long, mainstream in its formal structure, written in "very blank verse", which explicitly blurs the distinction between poetry and critical film theory.

It is a curious answer to Wordsworth's "The Prelude", one which finds in its unlikely hero, Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy, "intense simplicity,/this place where the imagination found/whole languages of play ..." Elsewhere in the same collection, one meets a rather different long piece, which works through bizarre sequences of found and mutilated poetry, a crazy, surrealist, carnivalesque engagement (caution, critique and celebration) with the World Wide Web. It is a poem in memory of William Burroughs, the original Mr. Cut-and-Paste. There is an improbable poem like "Letterbomb", as close as one can get to raw polemic, quoting bluntly from history books, which succeeds, in the poet's unwavering hands, through a direct, self-referential, self-ironic engagement with the reader. Bill Herbert will not be pinned down. He is part archaeologist, part futurist. In his great formal, thematic, and linguistic range, he is, to my knowledge, unique among his poet-contemporaries.

Any poet attempting to speak in a plurality of voices is likely to come under fire for spreading her/himself too thin or, worse, for insincerity. Herbert stands his ground because of his prodigious output (five collections, of a hundred-plus pages each, before the age of 41, equals a lot of hard work) but also because he writes in a tradition. For, sure as the poetry is obviously a weird love-child of the post-modern information age, it also draws from centuries-old literature in Scots, and by Scots. Two diametrically opposed sources present themselves: the poetry of the great modernist Hugh MacDiarmid (on whom Herbert completed an Oxford Ph.D. and later a book) and the milieu of McGonagall, who has apparently been called "the world's worst poet". McGonagall was part of an excessive, assaulting Scottish folk poetry, with forms like fly thing (the trading of ritual, poetic insults). Herbert uses him as a mascot for his sometimes rude and risky poetry, enacting what arch-dadaist Tristan Tzara called, with respect and admiration, "the universal installation of the idiot".

MacDicDiarmid, on the other hand, wrote a deeply scholarly verse, one that recovered, from dictionaries, Scots words that were no longer spoken. He deployed them with such vigour that they began to live again. Herbert collides these two worlds. His Scots poetry welds archaic, out-of-use Scots words with street slang remembered, for instance, from his childhood spent largely in the two-room tenements and working-class housing projects of Dundee, and newly imagined words for contemporary situations. He does not strive to be "authentic". To quote his own title to the introduction of Forked Tongue (1994), a book of bilingual verse, "I tell a lie". His poetry shows what is possible, and not what merely is.

Herbert makes use of the unusual opportunity offered by a language like Scots, which is, truth be told, not quite a separate language. Scots has lived for centuries in the shadow of its big brother, English; has gone through periods of near extinction, and exists mainly in a fragmented, non-formalised way. It was easy for the English, after generations of legal and cultural suppression, to celebrate the idealised Scotland of Walter Scott and Robert Burns; Herbert and other contemporary Scottish writers aim, instead, to steer a course between romance and reality. In one poem, he celebrates tourist postcards of Scotland, which remind him of "the familiarity of light/still travelling from extinguished stars" but wishes also for postcards that depict "asbestosis-tinged alcoholics' vomit", "each council flowerbed pointlessly recorded", and "the girl with a knife in her handbag". He has an ode dedicated to Scotty, the supposedly Scottish character from the original "Star Trek" series who, while being played by a Canadian actor with an atrocious accent, ensured that the Scots made it into space before the English.

W. N. Herbert's poetry straddles the fashionable themes of national identity, bilingualism and cultural multiplicity in a way that is quite a bit more playful and less self-conscious and overbearing than some of our own English poets, like Sujata Bhatt. Most importantly, despite all their politics and pop music, all their erudition and epistemology, his poems do not lose sight of the essentials - "I was never quite a full-on nationalist," he told me, "because what was always most important to me in the end was the poetry ..." Which is to say, eventually, the words: their sound, their shape, what each one tastes like. His experiments may have something to say to the discussions of identity and nation in Indian literature that have recently enlivened these pages. They may point a way in the still elusive search for a beautiful (and not just crudely parodic) poem written in Indian English.

In the way that they attempt to incarnate a reality and language that is invisible, or not quite existing, they are, quite literally, Quixotic - impossible, silly, absurd, but still, somehow, stubbornly heroic. In a world stripped of its innocence by postmodernism, where poets are everywhere unread and in retreat - "preachers voluntarily/unlistened-to" - Herbert's work might just be the key to one possible, livable future.

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