Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I PATTERNS AND PATERSON: FORMS, TECHNIQUES, HISTORIES
- Part II POETRY IN ITS PLACE: RESPONSES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
- 6 Scotland, Britain and The Elsewhere of Poetry
- 7 On Spirituality and Transcendence
- 8 Hiding in Full View: Dark Material and Light Writing
- 9 Punching Yourself in the Face: Don Paterson and his Readers
- 10 The Publishing of Poetry
- Select Bibliography
- Index
9 - Punching Yourself in the Face: Don Paterson and his Readers
from Part II - POETRY IN ITS PLACE: RESPONSES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I PATTERNS AND PATERSON: FORMS, TECHNIQUES, HISTORIES
- Part II POETRY IN ITS PLACE: RESPONSES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
- 6 Scotland, Britain and The Elsewhere of Poetry
- 7 On Spirituality and Transcendence
- 8 Hiding in Full View: Dark Material and Light Writing
- 9 Punching Yourself in the Face: Don Paterson and his Readers
- 10 The Publishing of Poetry
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Don Paterson's early poem ‘An Elliptical Stylus’ wears its acted out aggression on its sleeve. It centres on the attempt by the speaker's father to buy a hi-fi needle for a lo-fi player – resulting in a shopkeeper treating the poorly informed dad with amused contempt: ‘We had the guy in stitches: “You can't … / er … you'll have to upgrade your equipment.” ‘ The poem imagines and ventriloquises ‘Fidelities’, an elegiac fragment on the theme of filial piety, one as if written by the poet son of this gramophone snob: ‘I gently lower the sharp nib to the line / and wait for it to pick up the vibration’. Switching back to its roman-font narration style, it comes to a close in what is offered as a more authentically registered fidelity of sound and impact:
We drove back slowly, as if we had a puncture;
my Dad trying not to blink, and that man's laugh
stuck in my head, which is where the story sticks,
and any attempt to cauterize this fable
with something axiomatic on the nature
of articulacy and inheritance,
since he can well afford to make his own
excuses, you your own interpretation.
But if you still insist on resonance –
I'd swing for him, and every other cunt
happy to let my father know his station,
which probably includes yourself. To be blunt. (Nil 21)
‘An Elliptical Stylus’ catches the moment when the other lights in which a beloved father may be viewed make themselves felt. If its italicised section evokes only to dismiss in parody the sensitively adjectival plain style of an upwardly mobile Movement-period poetic (Thom Gunn's ‘High Fidelity’, for instance), its flawed paternal solidarity aligns it with the swear-word-flavoured mode of Tony Harrison's work. Indeed, Paterson's ruling out cauterising ‘this fable / with something axiomatic on the nature / of articulacy and inheritance’ is a pointed divergence from the Harrison school of eloquence. What renders its close so impactful and painful is the response being dramatised as an imagined lashing out at the nearest and only other interested party: its reader.
Yet, the poet being its first reader, may the final line of ‘An Elliptical Stylus’ be understood as also self-referential? Paterson resists such slippage of pronominal reference with firmly marked positions at the start of the first and second stanzas: ‘My uncle’ and ‘My Dad’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Don PatersonContemporary Critical Essays, pp. 131 - 144Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014