Shore Poets
Gael Turnbull was a member of Shore Poets from 2001 until his death in July 2004.
He was born in Edinburgh, but left the UK aged eleven for Winnipeg, Canada where his father, a Baptist minister, found a church position after periods in Jarrow and Blackpool. His Swedish-American mother’s family lived just across the border in Minnesota. After studying natural sciences at Cambridge, he qualfied as a doctor at the University of Pennsylvania, and spent his working life in practice as a doctor in Canada, the USA and England – Worcestershire and, latterly, Cumbria – before returning to Edinburgh when he retired in 1989.
His poems use a mix of traditional and innovative forms. He was a great admirer of William Carlos Williams, another doctor-poet, who welcomed Turnbull cordially when he paid a visit in 1962, yet Turnbull preferred not to follow his poetic example, at least in terms of form:
‘Williams is perhaps one of the obvious examples of someone writing apparently structureless poems, but it’s very hard to write something of interest that way, because everything has to come from you. The form doesn’t provide anything. It’s the tension between the form and the material that provides the energy.’
He developed new forms such as the randomly-patterned ‘a word and a phrase’ piece, or a sequence based on twenty words chosen at random from the dictionary. Latterly he also made a number of kinetic poems or ‘poem-objects’, presenting poems as moving sculptures, such as the large mobile which floated above the heads of visitors to the Byre Theatre during the 2004 StAnza Poetry Festival in St Andrews. For several years he presented ‘The Edinburgh Poem’ as a busker on the High Street during the Edinburgh Festival, complete with top hat and bell.
He published five main collections of work: A Trampoline (Cape Goliard Press, London 1968); Scantlings (Cape Goliard, 1970); A Gathering of Poems (Anvil, 1984); While Breath Persist (Porcupine’s Quill, Ontario 1992); and For Whose Delight (Mariscat, 1995). He also published many booklets, pamphlets and cards over the course of his career, some with small presses on both sides of the Atlantic, and others that he published himself as ‘Minimal Missives’.
While in the US he founded Migrant Press, which introduced American poets such as Robert Creeley to a British readership, and took Scots such as Ian Hamilton Finlay and Edwin Morgan in the other direction. A Gathering for Gael Turnbull, published by Richard Price’s Vennel Press to celebrate Turnbull’s 70th birthday in 1998, features the three poets mentioned above plus many others from Scotland, England, America and beyond. August Kleinzahler’s tribute concludes:
And something in your posture as well,
erect, slightly magisterial,
the minister’s boy, gentle but severe,
as the simple man came slowly to the boil, bit by bit leaning ever further into the lee of you.
* Laurie Duggan’s reminiscence of Gael in Jacket 25
* A 1963 performance by Gael in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1963 – audio recording hosted by Slought Foundation
Gael Turnbull’s papers and all his American, Canadian, Australian etc. poetry books are going to the National Library of Scotland, where they are to be held as one of their Special Collections.
There are words: Collected Poems is now published by Shearsman Press (2006).
The Poetry Library had an exhibition on Migrant, the magazine co-founded by Gael, running between January and March 2007: The Possibility of Poetry: from Migrant magazine to artists’ books
Lifetimes
A lifetime away. New voices, faces,
tongues in the streets, and I
marvel at what brought them, need
or greed, compulsion, even hope,
all familiar enough, and thus we are
not altogether strangers, belonging
to the same absence, sharing
in what also took me, left me
even from myself sometimes estranged.
When I envy an old friend
who’s never lived anywhere else,
knowing one place that knows him
as its own, he grins, "Don’t be misled.
Though never shifted, didn’t need to.
All done for me. Here’s gone.
Elsewhere’s arrived. What was, isn’t.
What is, won’t be. No one belongs.
We’re all misplaced now."
READING ANOTHER MAN’S autobiography, he wonders how much has been improved by memory, even fabricated, or what significant details just not recorded. If he were to attempt the same account, would the result be more honest or more misleading, deliberate or otherwise?
A few days later he receives a note from his sister -- ‘I thought you might like to have this’ -- enclosing a letter written to her half a century ago. As he reads, he can hardly recognise the young man it reveals: in harmony with himself and the world, even generous to others. Yet his memory of those days is totally different: of someone inarticulate, indecisive and, at the same time, intolerably conceited.
One hundred years on
The Laird, the dominie, the minister
take pride that each are secondary to none
and most years summer’s nearly over
before between the clouds we glimpse the sun.
The makar like the gowk can still be heard
even in rhyme, if not to such concision,
and, having nothing much to celebrate,
claiming whatever honour in derision.
Trees are for cutting down, bawbees for getting,
River and moorlands there for hook and gun
and we contend on principle for principles
as cheerfully as we have ever done.
