Here is an extended excerpt from a conference paper I delivered in 2018 on Kathleen Jamie (leading up to a reading, which was an extemporized “walk-through,” of her lyric essay “Magpie Moth,” with which we began our class.) This excerpt includes mostly background information, and a brief reading of “Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead,” but stops short of a detailed reading of the essay itself. I hope you find it useful. [It’s also currently missing a “Works Cited”: I’ll see about appending one.]
I’m looking to catch something of the mix of craft and contingency, of form and fracture – perhaps a version of what she calls frissure – that informs Kathleen Jamie’s creative practice, a species of writing that inclines lyrically to catch and release the co-creative assemblages that emerge along verges and liminalities, at the collisions of the human and the non-human worlds. I want to contribute briefly today to the expanding critical reception of Jamie’s work; she’s a writer who I am increasingly convinced offers a crucial voice in what I want to characterize as the late—the epigone—figuration of a late humanity in our nascent and contested epoch, the so-called Anthropocene (a term that Jamie herself has so far avoided using). In her prose (gathered in Findings: Essays on the Natural and Unnatural World, 2005, and Sightlines: A Conversation with the Natural World, 2012), early versions of which often appeared as “Diary” entries in the last pages of the London Review of Books, and in her poetry (both her selected Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead, 1994, and more recent collections including The Overhaul, 2012, and The Bonniest Companie, 2014) Jamie traces and troubles a lyric negotiation among various conflicted registers of the human and the non-human, the natural and the unnatural, the organic and the inorganic, the vibrant and the inert, to evolve a practice of what she names, in one instance at least, “sympathetic repair,” an unstable and incomplete reconciliation of self-awareness with reciprocity, of attentiveness and indifference, of withdrawal and enmeshment. I’m re-composing my own essay on this work of gathering and accounting, of noticing and note-taking, of what she calls “findings,” in order to gesture at the recursive temporality of her thinking, to re-trace the scalar slippages in her writing between a local, experiential present and an inscrutable, inhuman, planetary time: the momentary and the momentous. To try to do so means, for me, assembling a certain closeness to her text, an auscultation, with a wide conceptual resonance, an ecology, and I had to figure out a few answerable reading tactics. What I’ve arrived at is to work through in front of you, with you today, a reading of one of her compact lyric essays, “Magpie Moth,” and to contextualize it as best I can by mapping a few of its filiations with her work as a whole. I’m assuming most of you haven’t encountered Jamie’s work before now, and aren’t necessarily familiar with this piece. In a way, that estrangement, that unknowing, actually characterizes much of Jamie’s approach to composition. It’s where she tends to start.
I initially encountered Kathleen Jamie’s poetry when she was one of the international nominees for the third Griffin Poetry prize in 2003. Two poems from her selected, “Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead” and “Fountain,” shook and surprised me. There’s much to say about these two remarkable texts, but I want to start by noting how they frame several of her emerging preoccupations, which could probably be distilled into two overarching tropes: the shoreline and the midden. Crack open a volume of her poems or her essays written after the late 1990s, and you’re unlikely not to find yourself on a beach or amid discarded matter, often both at once. Her preoccupations tend toward the archeological, the bio-medical and the corporeal, the curatorial, the endo-ecological, the ambulatory. We walk shorelines, outwith, gathering broken things, remarking traces of the weathered and the departed, trying to reassemble what we might have been by reading and sifting through remainders. Her approach, however, is neither nostalgic nor elegiac, not really—although touches of regret are sometimes hard to help. Instead, there is something in Jamie of a cold-eyed skepticism, a deliberate unsettling of what she names, in a Scots dialect version—a re-translation—of Hölderlin’s choric ode, “hame.” Many of her essays position her as a tourist in her own homeland, her oikos, a native who doesn’t speak Gaelic, who finds herself denatured—both linguistically and ontologically—in an ostensibly familiar space. I’m starting to map, I think, an instance of what Jahan Ramazani referred to yesterday – in response to a question I’m temporarily proud to say I asked—as the crunchiness, the textural unruliness, of lyric in translation.
In “Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead” Jamie finds herself as a latter-day Benjaminian ragpicker at a municipal garbage tip outside Edinburgh. She voices the poem as plainspoken choral witness, with a colloquial “we” she associates with the “state of the nation poem” she believes she’s writing: folks who have come upon a small mound of posthumously dumped household items from the fortuitously named Mr and Mrs Scotland:
On the civic amenity landfill site,
the coup, the dump beyond the cemetery,
and the thirty-mile-an-hour sign, her stiff
old ladies’ bags, open mouthed, spew
postcards sent from small Scots towns
in 1960: Peebles, Largs, the rock-gardens
of Carnoustie, tinted in the dirt.
Mr and Mrs Scotland, here is the hand you were dealt: . . .
Notably, the landfill—a site of the biodegradation and chthonic re-assimilation of household remains, of garbage—lies beyond the graveyard, beyond human memorial, and yet it also serves as the liminal space between preservation and dissolution, as Jamie builds a poem from a litany of what are either artifacts, bearing tactile traces of their owners, or lifeless and abjected crap, as she scrounges and appropriates other people’s barely decipherable material archives. They become vibrant and resonant—mouths spewing signs—only because she nudges for example the limited semiosis of a surname into a representative personhood, a citizenry. It’s notable that many of the objects she discovers are graphic: postcards, letters, a Dictionary for Mothers, a labeled repair-kit, embossed joiners tools. Place-names and notes are local, and regionally mythopoeic. The poem, as it lists each item, accretes trashed language into an assemblage of what might pass for allegiance, but it’s a gathering that the poem’s collective voice doesn’t know how to re-articulate, what to do with, what to preserve:
Do we take them? Before the bulldozer comes
to make more room, to shove aside
his shaving brush, her button tin.
Do we save this toolbox, these old-fashioned views
addressed, after all, to Mr and Mrs Scotland?
Should we reach and take them? And then?
The poem operates as a displaced and broken container, a contingent salvage, a misdirected summoning. Clipped tetrameters stabilize and then dissolve into the poem’s unfixed metric. In the end, anything saved or “repaired” will only be thrown into a kitchen junk drawer, to find its way, posthumously for the speakers, to the landfill once again. But it’s worth remarking that this is not a situation of despair, despite a lingering taint of existential dread. Jamie’s poem, however unfinished and however epigone, still reconstructs a texture of dissonant fragments, of detritus, into a kind of ugly beauty.
She enacts a latecomer’s archeology here, or perhaps reverses the work of the dig. You might compare Seamus Heaney’s “Digging,” where the coalescing of patrilineal filiation comes from an imaginary descent into turf, into the flesh of peat; Heaney’s pen is bluntly declarative. Jamie, by contrast, refuses a fantasy of earth in favour of a fraught genealogy of largely female-coded scraps, or rather, of a gendered admixture. (Compare Jordan Abel?) Her mode is not declarative but interrogative. The archeology becomes a digging through rather than a digging up. At a telling moment in “The Woman in the Field,” an essay in which she recounts her summer job as a teenager at an archeological site, Jamie links the inhumation of a Neolithic body with her own nascent work with trowel and pen (when she writes one of her first poems), and the ascription of meaning to uncovered objects through poetry, encountering how “the weight and heft of a word [she’s thinking of the Gaelic term ‘cist’], the play of sounds, the sense of carefully revealing something authentic, an artifact which didn’t always display ‘meaning,’ but which was a true expression of – what? – a self, a consciousness.” A reflexive question interrupts and unsettles the ascription of meaning: authenticity and “true expression” don’t quite overcome the material heft, the texture, of trowel, of scrape, of undoing.
This interruptive gesture is closely linked both to the midden and to the shoreline. In “Findings,” in which describes an abortive voyage to St Kilda, Jamie finds herself weathering a storm on a cove on Ceann Ear. She comes upon various layers of flotsam on the beach, much of it waste plastic, and eventually settles on a broken doll’s head as a souvenir, a relic that provokes an unlikely reflection on deep time and mortality, enacting another instance of her curatorial ragpicking:
But we pick and choose, and I wondered if it’s still possible to value that which endures, if durability is still a virtue, when we have invented plastic, and the doll’s head with her tufts of hair and rolling eyes may well persist after our own have cleaned back down to bone. (Findings 54)
The doll is at once human simulacrum, an extruded metaphor, and inhuman provocation, a fabricated—that is, poietic—plasticity troubling the distinction between what might and might not be “natural.” The wondering that Jamie describes situates her self-consciously in a vacillating interrogative, an unknowing. Moreover, that unknowing – notice her attention to the “eyes” of the doll – produces a disturbing noesis, implicated in a late and partial phenomenology, a close perception of our own visual imperceptiveness. Scale becomes an issue again: cosmic atemporailty, “durability,” sets itself against the details of decay and frissure – the airless clean of the epochal and the unruly dirt of the local, the small, the thing. Jamie’s inviting us to look again, to look not just differently but differentially.
“Magpie Moth,” as a prose-poem, insists on this renovation of attention, of witness; the consciousness that Jamie maps, as she attends on her own encounter with a moth, effectively leans into the cracks and gaps—both tactile and ocular—that inhuman contact opens. I want to walk us through her essay, both because you likely haven’t read it and because this kind of walk might be an appropriate and viable approach to her writing.
[. . .]