The Scotsman Sessions #376: Hugh McMillan

The Scotsman

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00:00 Hello, my name is Hugh Macmillan and I like writing poems about Scottish history, shining

00:13 wee lights on parts of Scottish history that people maybe don't know too much about and

00:17 sometimes I also like speculating what might have happened in Scottish history. This one's

00:23 about the daughter of King James II, Margaret of Scotland, Margaret de Causse, who married

00:30 the Dauphin of France, who was to become Louis XI, a very powerful king. He hated her because

00:36 she was part of a wedding arrangement by his father that he didn't particularly like. The

00:41 whole arrangement was to do with the dowry of Scottish troops, of course, and she was

00:47 ridiculed in the French court. She wrote poetry. He tore it all up when she died. She died

00:53 still a teenager before he became king. So it's called Margaret de Causse. Margaret

01:01 Stuart wrote poetry every evening. She was loved for it by a few, but to most of the

01:07 courtiers she was the butt of jokes. They laughed at her clothes, her diet, her manners,

01:13 but most of all her desire to write, as if a teenager from the savage north could of

01:18 noble fancies and the skill and wit to pen them. Her husband hated her, married her for

01:25 her dowry of Scottish troops, tore her verses up when she died. He was a successful king,

01:31 in other words, a brutal thug with libraries of books written about him. But she's remembered

01:37 in the vague and beautiful ways that matter to some, in scraps and stories that might

01:42 be dreams. They say the master writer, Alain Chartier, France's finest, had a vision where

01:49 she graced him with a poet's kiss. This is a kind of subverting the traditional story

01:57 here of how St. Columba converted the Scots to Christianity through a Pictish princess

02:03 called Eithne. In my version, in this book called Whittith, which postulates of certain

02:08 things that happened in Scottish history, in my version Columba gets strangled by Eithne

02:14 and they stick to being pagans. It says if Columba had been chowkit by Eithne,

02:20 Braw dae in the cruisnaeth, the leaves drap in ciller and goud in the waters,

02:27 girds fae the goddess Anan, was birthae blood and veins, crate o' fish and fruit, and leash

02:33 craters o' the wood. I had a dream last night, I was in a prison o' words, words say glitty,

02:40 I couldnae sclim out, they were saft and slestery and easy to say these words, the kind wee

02:46 lassies aft here, hot from the mouths o' liars and thieves. Yon man glazy in his white goon

02:53 with hairs, learn the words he says, but I had a gift, and wit the finish o' things.

03:00 Nae convent for me, I will pit my strang horns round his weasley thrapple and chowk his life

03:06 out, send him tae his wheel-raid gaud, keep my einn.

03:12 I'll finish off by reading a poem I wrote during Covid actually, when I was sort of

03:21 wondering about how to position words in a poem and began to think, did they actually

03:28 matter what order they were in? Positioning three words in a poem.

03:32 While the broadband is being strung by all the air guitarists, I am sitting among the

03:38 flowers considering the positioning of three words in a poem. I'm positioning three words

03:44 in a poem while blackbirds leave questions in the air and Brian the cat next door turns

03:50 blank eyes to the cloudless sky. The positioning of three words in a poem is not hard work

03:56 or work at all really, it's like imagining three drops of water on a leaf, any order

04:02 would do, or any leaf. I think positioning three words in a poem on this day pretending

04:08 to be summer is like a renaissance painting, the hermit crouched over his gnomic text while

04:14 through the window behind the whole world writhes in a dazzle of war or plague. Or in

04:20 fact maybe it is like opening the mind with three perfectly milled keys so I see the argolid

04:26 or anguri, the light in the sea smoking between the pines and that somehow enters the poem

04:32 too and infuses each word I am positioning with a different meaning. So a new poem builds

04:38 up marvellously around them like scaffolding in the sun and that poem speaks as all do

04:43 of love. I'm confident that these three very ordinary words I am positioning in this poem

04:49 are now sacred words in the order I imagined them or any other and I will leave them here

04:55 on the grass for now in this circle of light. Thank you very much.

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