For an upcoming project, my poetry group has decided to look at forgotten poets from Dundee and bring them back to the forefront once more.
As part of our research, we were invited up to the central library to look at archived copies of The People’s Journal. This was in print from 1858 to 1986, and the editions we looked at were all issued towards to the beginning of that period.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t inspired by any of the poets. I was much more interested in reading the articles and creating poetry from those, but that wasn’t the intention of the exercise.
I eventually found one I could work with, although from a book rather than a newspaper. Someone called David Tasker had written a poetic account of a sawmill fire in 1863 titled A Conflagration in the City. I was able to find just one reference to the poet online. The piece reminded me of a furniture store that burned down last November.
I took the approach of using as many of the original words as possible but including more up-to-date imagery. We would have limited space in our publication so I made this poem significantly shorter than the source material. My favourite part was discovering a wordy quote from a witness of the 2022 fire that sounded like it could have been written by a Victorian poet. I was sure to cut this down slightly and squeeze it in:
“I am on the other side of the Tay so quite far away, but can comfortably say I have not seen a fire of its scale in all my time here.”
The last 150 years have marked a shift in how poetry is presented on the page. Before the 20th century, new lines were universally started with a capital letter, whereas that only happens today when a new sentence begins. One of the poetry group pointed out that this distracted from the enjambment. Although I agreed with this sentiment, I felt it important to retain the style of the original for greater effect.
Based on feedback from the rest of the group, my piece is not quite finalised yet, but I’m making good progress.
Gavin Cameron 