MARK O GOODWIN
About Mark O Goodwin
Mark O. Goodwin was born in Devon in 1960 and studied at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, and City University, in the Department of Arts Policy and Management. After a brief spell doing a variety of jobs in London, he left to live in Scotland. He has lived for fourteen years on the Isle of Skye, where he worked for the Arts Centre An Tuireann, and was appointed as the gallery’s Literature Development Officer shortly before its closure.
Praise for The Two Sides of the Pass
‘Leabhar àlainn a tha seo, far a bheil conaltradh eadar dà bhàrd, dà chànan agus fillidhean de dh’eachdraidh is eòlas, gar treòrachadh – le fialaidheachd mac-meanmna, agus mion-aire air tuairisgeul is tachartas – gu slighe tro mhòr-thìrean is millennia agus thar bhealaichean, le cùram, sonas agus brìgh, a’ toirt nan sgìre beò, an cruth is coimhearsnachd, ann an snìomh eagarach de dhearcnachd is cuimhne. Gun dàn ann nach eil beò le fonn is faireachadh, tha saidhbhreas àraid paisgte anns na duilleagan torrach seo.’
‘This is a beautiful book, where a dialogue between two poets, two languages and layers of history and experience, draw us – with imaginative generosity, and close attention to impression or event – on a journey across continents, millennia, through passes, with care, warmth and substance, energising their terrain, its topography and people, in a subtle twining of observation and memory. Every poem is alive with music and feeling: a singular richness adorns these fertile pages.’
Aonghas Macneacail
‘Two sides of the pass, two languages, two poetic sensibilities – and one uniquely appealing poetry collection. Bridging the symbolic pass are Gaeldom’s most under-appreciated bard, the excellent Maoilios Caimbeul, and his near-neighbour, the keen-eyed relative newcomer, Mark O. Goodwin. Between them they give harmonic voice to a rich and multifaceted world. Their masterfully composed landscape will feel like a place of homecoming to native and stranger alike. You’ll find yourself wandering through these poems alive to fresh ideas like the narrator of the verbal tour de force that is ‘Skye/An t-Eilean Sgitheanach’, ultimately responding to the vital miracle and sheer contingency of life’s own poetic dialogue with the words ‘tapadh leat’ – ‘thank you’. It’s a long time since the islands gave us such an accessible and life-enriching collection.’ Kevin MacNeil
'Eòghann Mac Colla has made a key contribution to developing contemporary Gaelic visual art. His contribution to The Two Sides of the Pass is to be welcomed.’ Murdo Macdonald, Professor of History of Scottish Art, University of Dundee
An interview with Mark O Goodwin
When did
you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so?
I used to fill diaries with brown felt tip pen when I was at school. The diaries
were tiny, with thin, lined pages where the felt tip would bleed through the
page. So the entries had to be concise to get everything in; and the handwriting
was very small, it had to be almost illegible too, in case of discovery. Later
I dispensed with the diaries in favour of scraps of paper and scrawled notes
in books. It is the paper to hand which is trusted with the confidences, the
observations. I think this prompted my interest in the edges of things, the
permeability of ideas, cultures. Or the way words overlap and change their
meaning. The one thing is covered over with another thing and there is a change:
take a look at the art work of Jürgen Brodwolf with his trees covered
in bandages, his tube figures from squeezed paint tubes, and a piece I remember
of a collection of burnt school chairs. Come to think of it, the same kind
of thing happens with the imitations and retellings in Middle English literature.
Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?
Seumas O’Kelly’s The Weaver’s Grave for showing me the way from the graveyard. All the Anglo-Welsh poets I went to see in a pub in Aberystwth after the formal readings. Those readings included people like Harri Webb and Robert Minhinnick with his first collection Native Ground. The steep climb back up the Penglais Road, with the stars in the sky and the poems in the head.
Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind this work in particular? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas you were trying to convey?
Well, Maoilios, of course, and his poems, some of which I read in An Tuil. I was also struck by the sadness I found in the landscape on my first visits to Skye and tried to find out more about why I was registering this. Years ago I had listened to Gaelic psalms and songs on recordings from the School of Scottish Studies, and it was the memory of this and the chance of seeing Sorley Maclean at the South Bank Poetry Festival, London, in 1994 that got me to think again about poetry. More about reading it more intensively than writing it at first. And then the idea came about to write something to try and understand the place I was now calling home, but wasn’t home, and all the anxieties that came with this, of intrusion, being out of place. Of trying to settle in. That is partly why there are references to other poets in the book, mingling with the poems we were writing and exchanging. I would not have attempted any of this if it had not been for Maoilios’ generosity, inquisitiveness, and sheer playfulness.
The drawings for the book – how did they come about?
Maoilios asked Eòghann what he thought about the idea of doing some drawings for the book when he was Artist in Residence at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig during 2008. He spent a memorable afternoon with us looking at a map of North Skye and making a detailed list of all the places we had mentioned in the poems, or places which had a special significance for us. His drawings added another dimension to the book. I guess literature and art have often been mutual companions in the discussion about how a landscape is lived.
Did the fact that your poems were being translated at the same time that they were written affect your work?
No, I don’t think so. What I mean is, I wrote from my experience without being troubled too much by the difficulties I might cause Maoilios. He got the full force of an incomer’s version of events! But for the purposes of the book this was positive because I was not inhibited in the way I was writing the poems. Maoilios never asked me to change anything just to make it easier to translate into Gaelic. Occasionally, we would phone each other up and talk about what was going on in the poem. I know, in the end some of the poems caused endless difficulties.
How do you go about creating your voice on the page?
Certain cadences become familiar friends (like the inversions and elongated cadences of some Anglo-Welsh poetry and prose) but I can never rely on these. I spent ages listening to recordings of Allen Ginsberg reading the lines of his poem America before I wrote one word of the Skye poem. There are two versions I know of, one a transcription of an early reading which is garrulous in style and one a more refined, worked over version. I then had to work out how to use this in the way I wanted, and to try and fit the Gaelic phrases into the rhythm. In the end it is the poem’s voice that I hope is left on the page, to be heard in any way the listener/reader chooses.
How and when do you write?
Making notes is fun. I can make lots of these. Writing is often a late night activity and revisions are endless. Quite a lot of time is spent searching for those notes or scraps of paper I have left somewhere.
What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?
I have been trying to read Boccaccio’s Decameron for months but only six days have passed. Other books keep intervening, the most recent being Ali Smith’s the first person and other stories. There is some great material on Ubu web. For literary interactive media stuff I have Born magazine bookmarked. Lots of poetry, Salzman Simic, Sorescu, and I have a file of stuff on poets, bits of biography, more scraps, copies of Syrian, Persian poetry. Snippets of interviews and a pile of cuttings that I will have to sort out – one day. And then there are novels and books like Alastair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. And catalogues and art books. Sometimes it is good just to get out of the house and look at the leaves and flowers. You don’t have to pick them up, just read what’s there.
