Writer who have influenced me

Like so many other writers, I had an ordinary up-bringing. I was the eldest of three; my dad was an accountant for a small firm, my mum worked in solicitors’ offices. We had a semi- in a big scheme at the edge of Edinburgh. I went to a large comprehensive school. From its windows I could gaze at the lovely lines of the Pentland Hills. A short bus-ride away was Edinburgh city centre. Edinburgh, I have to say, is not an ordinary town. Its grandeur, its history, and its annual Festival brought me worlds beyond my own. To have been raised there was an enormous asset and privilege.

It’s a curious assumption, that writers are ‘influenced’ only by other writers, of the same gender and culture.

It doesn’t work that way. I read little as a teenager, and in my early career two models were held out – Sylvia Plath, for the Woman side and Hugh MacDiarmid for the Scottish.  I didn’t like either and it’s hard now to imagine two worse ‘parents’ for a young writer. I remember being introduced to the work of Rilke, especially the Duino Elegies; and Elizabeth Bishop. I loved Rilke for his heights and range, Bishop for her care and cool exactitude. The Scots writers, now dead, whom one could actually meet in Edinburgh, were Norman McCaig and occasionally  Sorley MacLean. I love George Mackay Brown, nowadays. We weren’t taught the canonical writers at School, and that annoys me now.  We should have been, Keats especially, but someone in an office somewhere thought they were ‘irrelevant’ to the likes of us, and the fashion was to disparage the English, male and dead.

 ‘Influence’ is a bogey. Somehow, you find your way... you read, in my case patchily and badly, and you learn. You make discoveries, as much by intuition as accident. Personally,  I don’t think poetry is there to be ‘consumed’ and I don’t quite trust people who claim to read lots of it.  Me, I circle round poetry, warily, and read but a little at a time, because a good poem ought to be potent and altering, like a perfume or a drug.