GAS Featured Poet: Jim Ferguson

 

I started to write with serious intent in 1984 during a period of illness and convalescence. Due to a bump on the head I had developed an epilepsy which luckily diminished, and I was able to live free of medication and other restraints from 1990 forward. During this period I lived in Paisley, Scotland. In 1986 I joined a writers’ group that met weekly on Monday evenings in Paisley Central Library. The group was tutored by poet and critic Tom Leonard who was immensely inspirational and from whom I learned a lot about the politics of language. Some of us formed ourselves into a group called Itinerant Poets. We published several pamphlets and did readings throughout central Scotland, mostly in the Paisley/Glasgow area. My closest partners in this endeavour were the poets Graham Fulton and Bobby Christie: we published work by Ronald McNeil, Christine McCammond, Brian Whittingham and Margaret Fulton Cook.

I have always enjoyed writing poetry and prose. My starting point was with poetry and short stories. Over time I began to write longer prose pieces and have written five novels to date, three are unpublished. Two were published in short print runs by small presses: Punk Fiddle (2012) and Neither Oil Nor Water (2017). My first poetry collection, The Art of Catching a Bus and other Poems was published by Ramsey Kanaan’s AK Press in 1994. Since then I have published five other collections, numerous pamphlets and a couple of CDs.

I have contributed poetry, short stories, essays and criticism to academic books, literary anthologies and arts magazines, including: Air, West Coast Magazine, Variant, Nerve, Cutting Teeth, Minted, Common Sense, The Purple Patch, Edinburgh Review, Scottish Child, Rebel Inc, Billy Liar, The Echo Room, The Wide Skirt, Harry’s Hand, Blade, Cerasus, Dog, Dreich, Gutter Magazine, Metachrosis Literary and New Writing Scotland. I also had work in the Clocktower Press publications, Folk and Zoomers edited by Duncan McLean in the early nineteen nineties.

I gained a doctorate from the University of Glasgow for my biographical study of Paisley poet and songwriter Robert Tannahill (1774-1810).  More recently I have been working in collaboration with artist Louise Malone, poet Derek J. Brown, musicians Carol Jamnejad, Brian McFall, and others, as part of The Glasgow Literary Lounge Arts Collective which was formed out of an idea conceived by the late Ruby McCann: under this banner we have hosted many live events and produced loadsa FnB videos. 

I live in the East End of Glasgow and tutor a weekly creative writing group at Glasgow Kelvin College.

Jim Ferguson 11 September 2023. 

This is a list poem

 how the world’s horrors scream at you

and how the middle-classes avoid and ignore them

and how the workers are seduced by soaps

and how the homeless and dispossessed know it

and how the poets drink to oblivion

and how the comedians think their lives serious

and how the novelists write only pulp

and how the insane are mostly in prison

and how the newspapers strive to cover it... ...up

and how the oligarchs conspire to deceive

and how the religions rush to look the other way

and how the tv won’t really show it

and how the footballers don’t know the price of milk

and how the snobs watch the cream curdle

and how the athletes compete for the money

and how the bureaucrats use forms to hide it

and how the internet is too free to tell it

and how the musicians sing nothing but pop

and how the bankers are rewarded for fraud

and how the politicians pretend nothing happened

and how the fiddlers basically fiddle

and how the junkies are mystics in tatters

and how the smokers pay all that tax

and how the gangsters are really all police

and how the police are all really gangsters

and how the teachers are not free to teach

and how the stupid are the first to condemn

and how the pious are sexual oppressors

and how the drunks are poets in disguise

and how the arms dealers blow off your legs

and how the rage at injustice rages no more

and how the universe floats on inside us

and how the spies are always your neighbours

and how the whole fucking thing is mendacious

and how you can’t even trust your own self

and how real success is to merely survive

a little longer

                       than the person

                                                  dying in the bed

                                                                              next to yours  

Our Planet, Our Home

 

the planet Earth is reading old books

as if to know our world better

as if to understand how

hearts come to burst apart

when questions physicists might ask

about light and electricity and radiation

 

and magnetic fields are all related just like

any other family, full of upstarts, wayward sheep,

 

who would have thought, all fingers and thumbs,

in the grey-green light of day, for all of us,

 

a suite of equations reveals some invisible force ─

in night’s dark-matter, in mysterious musical stars

 **

  

so the planet Earth breathes and says

there’s violence in the winds and floods

in solar flares and supernovae,

damaged hearts look out with innocent eyes

 

the earth rotates ─ a massive magnet

falling through space as continents drift

 

hift and buckle    break           apart

cracking the crust of everything

considered real in dreams of permanence ─

folk and fauna flock to higher ground

 

or busily pray to save themselves

naively smiling, children stare

 

terrifyingly terrified at the wall of fire

that speeds unbound toward them

**

Earth holds all the properties of matter in hand

while we’re trying to understand that rock

 

can bend and ice can flow and lava too, from vast

volcanic pimples, some like Arthur’s Seat

 

are now extinct, no pyroclastic or igneous spew

to roll forth over Edinburgh New Town

 

how regally it sits, a planned affair,

when we walk out and take the air

madly trying to calculate the age of the Earth,

before the shock of revelation

 

places the dice in the hands of gravitation,

she is weak but momentum is strong ─

to look abstract science straight in the eye and ask,

is progress fair? (or fare?)

while doubting doubt itself,

the old rich cling to certainty while uncertainty is king