BUTLIN, Ron

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Nationality: Scottish. Born: Edinburgh, 17 November 1949. Education: Dumfries Academy, 1960–66; University of Edinburgh, 1970–77, M.A. 1975, Dip. Ed. 1977. Career: Has worked as a footman, model, computer operator, security guard, laborer, and city messenger. Writer-in-residence, University of Edinburgh, 1982, 1985, and for Midlothian Region, 1989–90; Scottish/Canadian Exchange Writing fellow, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, 1984–85, University of Stirling, 1993, and University of St. Andrews, 1998–99; Craigmillar Literacy Trust Instep Project, 1997–98. Awards: Scottish Arts Council bursary, 1977, 1987, and Book award, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1994, 1999. Agent: Mic Cheetham, 11–12 Dover Street, London W1X 3PH, England. Address: 7 West Newington Place, Edinburgh EH9 1QT, Scotland.

Publications

Poetry

Stretto. Edinburgh, Outlet Design Service, 1976.

Creatures Tamed by Cruelty. Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh Student Board, 1979.

Ragtime in Unfamiliar Bars. London, Secker and Warburg, 1985.

Histories of Desire. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1995.

Play

Blending In, adaptation of a play by Vinaver (produced Edinburgh, 1989).

Radio Play: Blending In, 1990.

Novels

The Sound of My Voice. Edinburgh, Canongate, 1987.

Night Visits. N.p., Scottish Cultural Press, 1997.

Short Stories

The Tilting Room. Edinburgh, Canongate, 1983.

Other

Editor, Mauritian Voices. N.p., Flambard Press, 1996.

Editor, When We Jump We Jump High! N.p., Craigmiller Literacy Trust, 1998.

Translator, with Kate Chevalier, The Exquisite Instrument: Imitations from the Chinese. Edinburgh, Salamander Press, 1982.

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Critical Studies: "Metaphors for the Fall and Afterwards" by Colin Nicholson, in The Weekend Scotsman (Edinburgh), 15 June 1985; "Loneliness and Resurrection" by Andrew Sparrow, in The Student (Edinburgh), 17 April 1986; "Ron Butlin's Writing" by Nicholson, in Cencrastus (Edinburgh), 24, autumn 1986; "Lost Classic" by Irvine Welsh, in New York Village Voice Literary Supplement (New York City), spring 1997; "Ron Around" by Nicholab Royle, in Time Out (London), 2 September 1998.

Ron Butlin comments:

My work is my way of trying to get to grips with what is going on around me and inside me. It is my attempt to see and—hopefully—to feel, clearly. The demands that the craft of poetry makes upon me, that intimacy with the sound and weight of words, sharpen my sensitivity, I hope—and my eyesight! There are no "messages" in my work—if there is any message, it is all around us all the time, and, for me, trying to write poetry is my way of trying to read what is already written here.

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An autobiographical myth informs Ron Butlin's poetry, and a convenient entry to his work is through the group of poems that closes his volume Ragtime in Unfamiliar Bars. Three of these poems, "The Colour of My Mother's Eyes," "Poem for My Father," and "My Grandfather Dreams Twice of Flanders," are incorporated from Butlin's first collection, Creatures Tamed by Cruelty, and together with three other poems written at different times over several years—"Inheritance," "Claiming My Inheritance," and "My Inheritance"—they allow us access to recurrent themes. In "Inheritance" an older self consoles his younger counterpart about the sense of loss caused by the crushing of birds' eggs in childhood. The poem ends with

      This is your inheritance:
   your fist clenched on yolk and broken shell,
   on fragments of an unfamiliar tense

and shows the child's entry into compromised and compromising time. To extend this theme, when "Claiming my Inheritance" ends, the sense of unease, "as if the present tense were happening too soon," is sharpened:

   The older I become the more
   I am aware of exile, of longing for—
   I clench my fist on nothing and hold on.

Not until Ragtime's final poem, "My Inheritance," does "every tense/become a plaything we can share." And while the speaker is still left at one point to "cling & to my despair," developments within the structure of the poem directly affect the nature of this despair. The tenth anniversary of his father's death leads him to recall the absence of Odysseus, leaving his son Telemachus idle and his wife Penelope weaving and unweaving her tapestry for the same length of time. A mythic frame of reference enables Butlin to situate, distance, and so explore more fully his sense of origination, identity, and relationship. Within these extended parameters, a life becomes available for interpretation in different ways.

His collections show Butlin precariously but insistently coming to terms with his poetic self's corruption. In this perspective his writing has been sweated out of a personal experience that generates a painful iconography of loss and turmoil. A metaphoric fall from grace achieves biographical endorsement in a move from the country to the city. Although Butlin was born in Edinburgh, before his first birthday he was living in the village of Hightae on the coastal fringe of the southern uplands of Scotland. He grew up there until he left home at the age of sixteen and headed for London, a classic journey of separation, exile, and alienation for which the metaphor of the fall seems appropriate.

If that is the case, then in one aspect the poetry forges a paradigm of regeneration, since it is characterized as much by its altruistic expression of a world of sensuous pleasure—Butlin is also a love poet of grace and felicity—as it is by the private stress of his emotions. His first collection takes its title from a poem called "I Shall Show You Glittering Stones," which demonstrates an ability to generate public resonance from personal intensities:

   I shall tell you that the sky
               is the underbelly of a crouched animal,
   I shall tell you that it tunnelled once
               upon a time into the daylight,
   and that it stayed there
               tense and afraid:
   —then we will become whatever our embrace
   can liken to ourselves
 
 
   and to that creature as it turns upon us.

Animal warmth and feral wariness form an uneasy dialectic, prefiguring the struggle of experience into expression that threatens the making even in the process of being made. A determining continuity of image in the writing is a father figure of usually destabilizing, often threatening dimensions. "Time and again his dead hand reaches for mine," according to "Poem for My Father," and in "Two Landscapes: Father and Son," we read,

   My father becomes a forest without birdsong
   where sometimes the wind keens in the high branches:
   but down here where I am
   it is sunless and silent
   until he dies.

The figure haunts a life of writing, jeopardizing a secure sense of self, and in the reconstruction of that self through verbal artifact, a use of poetic inscription in a process of self-definition, history and personality interact. In this text, as the written reconstruction proceeds, and against the ruin that threatens his stable voice, he shores fragments from wherever they may be found. In its precise image of evanescence, sunlight playing to its own reflection through a phantasm of mist, the second part of "Two Landscapes" conjures the chimera of solution-dissolution-resolution that is a repeated concern in these poems: an insubstantiality endlessly caught and released in the moment of imagistic configuration.

Then, at a time that formed a watershed in his work, Butlin returned to the native strains of a Scots voice and inaugurated a different reintegration, a more radical relocation. In "The Wonnerful Warld O John Milton," Butlin's strategy is to mock with a jester's irreverence and to goad with the provocations of an Elizabethan fool. Autobiographical pressures and literary-historical precedent coincide, with Milton becoming the father to be circumscribed, the voice to be dumbfounded, as a Scots volubility mouths its dissent and utters its now mischievous, now philosophical opposition. The poem "Ootlins," in its sympathetic identification with the outcasts of Eden, already prepares us for a radically alternative moral promise, and in these tensions a distinctive voice makes itself felt:

   I canna conceive Milton's view o things withoot distress,
   fer ony man become a prince o his ain darkness
   wad blindly mak Paradise just fer hissel
   an mak each warld Milton's Hell.

Further evidence of Butlin's tactical deployment of writing as the self's conspectus comes in his collection of poems from the Chinese, The Exquisite Instrument, where he is able to examine an emotional world of loss and separation that is his existentially at the same time as it is subordinated within and distanced through the frame of an adopted empire of feeling. Freed from the encumbrance of immediacy, a greater clarity of utterance situates painful or desolate images within the medium of sympathetic sensibilities: "for these silent harmonies replace the clamour/and din of men's unhappiness." As the title poem implies, language suitably orchestrated promises self-transcendence:

   —But when this exquisite instrument is tuned,
   then I shall play howsoever I please
   upon its fifty strings.

—Colin Nicholson