If anyone out there is still indulging in that somewhat pointless debate of a few years ago as to whether poetry - à la Lachlan Young - was the new rock’n’roll, Kevin MacNeil can confirm that it is; but you have to go to Colombia. The Lewis-born poet, currently based in Portree, Skye, as Iain Crichton Smith writing fellow with Highland Council, recently returned from the ten-day International Poetry Festival at Medellin, in a country more associated with drugs-fuelled shootings and kidnappings than international literary celebrations.
"They absolutely love poetry, so much so I was reading to audiences of 10,000," says MacNeil. "They treat poets like rock stars or film stars. They would give me flowers, bracelets, even the rings off their fingers; after one reading I was signing autographs for two hours." MacNeil can’t help pondering the irony of poetry receiving such acclaim in Colombia, with its unhappy reputation, while in Scotland, with "a literary tradition equal to any in the world", poetry and literature in general remain relatively under-valued.
Slightly less demonstrative behaviour no doubt greeted last week’s Inverness launch of his latest volume, Be Wise Be Otherwise, although with an enthusiastic cover puff by former Monty Python star and TV traveller Michael Palin, it is off to an auspicious start. MacNeil’s work, says Palin, "has a freshness that sharpens and invigorates".
MacNeil’s first book of poetry, Love and Zen in the Outer Hebrides, won the prestigous Tivoli Europa Giovani International Poetry Prize last year. It is an engaging collection of Gaelic and Hebrideanaccented English poems imbued with Zen-Buddhist and other eclectic influences. However, the 28-year-old poet delights in steering clear of the predictable, so those expecting a recognisable sequel may be disappointed; it was, he says, the very thought of "Son of Love and Zen" that prompted him to come up with something very different.
The compact Be Wise Be Otherwise he sums up as "a book of minimalist maxims".
His publisher at Canongate has described it enthusiastically as "the antithesis of The Little Book of Calm", and while it does indeed have something of those ubiquitous pocket books of New Age homilies, Be Wise veers gleefully from the slightly cosy "Encourage the use of mistletoe", through the wordplay of "Exaggerate your understatements" and "Will power is free, free will is power", to the subversive surrealist glee of "Start a stop-watch craze. Wear an egg-timer on your wrist".
Perhaps the terse one-liner "Don’t be a zen-ophobic" sums up the book, agrees MacNeil, a self-confessed lover of the sly pun. "That phrase contains both a pun and a very serious point."
"One of the reasons I wrote Be Wise was to encourage people to question our sense of identity and of what a book really is. Whereas I do like to think of myself as a calm person, I love the idea of subversively incorporating art, in whatever form, into people’s lives and that’s very much what this book is about."
So far as incorporating art into people’s lives is concerned, MacNeil can hardly stand accused of not doing his bit. While his writing residency with Highland Council has him covering a "patch" about the size of Belgium, extra-curricular activities include two separate collaborations with artists. One is with Doug Robertson, for sculptures to be installed on Skye incorporating his text, the other with Edinburgh-based Irish illustrator Brigid Collins, which may see them swapping roles, the artist writing, the writer creating visual art.
Back on the minimally printed page, and with that touch of zen, there is what MacNeil refers to as "the big haiku project" - he’s editing a collection of haikus by Highland writers. Meanwhile, MacNeil should feature on television in the autumn, having landed what he calls the "extreme and bizarre honour" of playing a young "Sorley-esque" figure in a drama-documentary about the late Sorley MacLean.
Then there’s his occasional band, Tomorrowscope, a sort of west-Highland bardic blast of everything ranging from blues to trip-hop: "You could look at us as a band with a singer who can’t sing and reads poetry instead," he chuckles. So perhaps poetry as the new rock’n’roll is not so far from the mark after all. "We’re open to offers. We’ve lots of ideas and are very pro-active, but at the same time we’re extremely lazy."
Lazy, however, is not a word one readily associates with MacNeil, who is also currently writing the introduction for a major collection, to be published by Birlin, of the short stories of Iain Crichton Smith, the acclaimed idiosyncratic and much-loved Lewis writer who died in 1998 and in whose name the Highland Council writing residency was established. Smith was a "crucial source of inspiration" for MacNeil: "His writing style didn’t influence me the way that oriental, European, even American writers did. It was the fact that this wonderfully gifted yet humble person should write some of the greatest literature, not only of 20th century Scotland, but in literature, full stop."
He describes himself as having been "indescribably proud" to have been offered the inaugural IC Smith writing fellowship. "Every time I do something in that capacity, whether workshops or more off-beat projects such as Be Wise or Tomorrowscope, I ask myself whether I’m doing something of which Iain might have felt even fractionally as proud as I am."
• Be Wise Be Otherwise is published by Canongate at £4.99.
Tuesday, 10 July 2001
TheScotsman.co.uk
Scotland's National Newspaper online
This article at the thescotsman.co.uk
Love and Zen in the Outer Hebrides
A Little Borderless Village/Baile Beag Gun Chrìochan
