I’ve put off starting a bit. Partly because of the academic year starting at the same time as Writers & Readers week in Wellington and partly because I just didn’t know where to start with such a big project. Lynn Davidson suggested a method of starting – to do a close reading of some poems by Robert Crawford. So I did, I’m glad.
I found a copy of his first collection A Scottish Assembly at the Vic library and I already had a copy of Spirit Machines and his Selected Works as Kindle editions.
There seem to be two important themes running through Crawford’s work – 1. Scottish nationalism (language & politics) and 2. Technology & Science. Both of these things pop up time and time again in his work and often in the same poem, as if they can’t be separated. I started with the first poem in the first collection. The opening poem of A Scottish Assembly is ‘Opera’:
Throw all your stagey chandeliers in wheelbarrows and
move them north
To celebrate my mother’s sewing machine
And her beneath an eighty-watt bulb, pedalling
Iambs on an antique metal footplate
Powering the needle through its regular lines,
Doing her work. To me as a young boy
That was her typewriter. I’d watch
Her hands and feet in unison, or read
Between her calves the wrought-iron letters:
SINGER. Mass- produced polished wood and metal,
It was a powerful instrument. I stared
Hard at its brilliant needle’s eye that purred
And shone at night: and then each morning after
I went to work at school, wearing her songs.
Immediately Crawford sets up a political division between North and South, High Art and Low, Rich and Poor. Instead of doing her creative work under a chandelier his mother sits under an eighty-watt bulb. As well as comparing her creative work to that of an opera singer he compares it to his later work as a writer. The sewing machine pedals Iambs, regular lines, it was her typewriter with wrought-iron letters.
I like this, the mentions of domestic technology as used by a woman. I like that he connects the creative process of sewing to words, through writing and singing.
Crawford would have been about 40 when he wrote this collection – about my age. I like that this is the first poem of the collection, it begins with a beginning – childhood – and sets up both his driving themes instantly. He’s very political, nationalistic.
The whole poem is made up of only 4 sentences; 3 long and one short in the middle. The long sentences run like a sewing machine, the short is almost staccato like a typewriter.
There’s no rhyme or regular form to this piece but it does have repeating sounds of R, W, T & Th, which echo the sounds of the machines mentioned. I’d love to hear this poem read with a Scottish accent!
The title is clever, by calling it Opera he doesn’t have to explain the first line’s ‘stagey chandeliers’ and it also infers that his mother’s work was an opera of sorts and just as important as any stagey opera.
After reading this I started wondering why technology is so important to him and why it is intertwined with his ideas of nationalism. I was hoping to find some similarities with how technology seems important to New Zealand, that we are both early adapters and, to some extent, underdogs.
Perhaps they feel remote like we do, perhaps it was about boosting jobs? From Wikipedia:
“Scotland was one of the industrial powerhouses of Europe from the time of the Industrial Revolution onwards, being a world leader in manufacturing industries, at the time, which today has left a legacy in the diversity of goods and services which the Scottish economy produces, from textiles, whisky and shortbread to aero engines, buses, computer software, ships, avionics and microelectronics… heavy industry declined in the latter part of the 20th century leading to a remarkable shift in the economy of Scotland towards a technology and service sector based economy. The 1980s saw an economic boom in the Silicon Glen corridor between Glasgow and Edinburgh, with many large technology firms relocating to Scotland. Today the industry employs over 41,000 people. Scottish-based companies have strengths in information systems, defence, electronics, instrumentation and semi-conductors.”
So that explained a lot, Crawford’s technology is all about social and political change, well-grounded in people and nationalism. I never realised the importance of technology in their history. I guess the American modernists were in a similar position in that progress in science and technology was considered hugely important and patriotic at the time, it was tied up with the wider national identity and emotions. A Scottish Assembly was published in 1990.
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