Kevin McKenna meets Kilmarnock's poet in residence Stuart Paterson

Stuart Paterson, the award-winning Scots laureate and BBC Scotland’s former poet-in-residence, has few doubts about what drives the Scots language-haters. “A lot of this stems from pure sexism and outright misogyny,” he says.

“Iona and Lennie are smart, young, female and successful and this also leads to jealousy, but there’s fear and suspicion too, of something that is different and maybe a bit challenging. It’s noticeable how many of the haters are men; how quickly it can descend into something darker and how many have Union Jacks in their profiles.”

Paterson is buzzing about his latest accolade. He’s in the process of becoming the official poet for his beloved Kilmarnock FC after leading a singalong at Holyrood that included the Killie anthem, Paper Roses. “I’d been having a brew with Willie Coffey, MSP for this area, and half-jokingly suggested I deserved to be their poet-in-residence after getting everyone to sing Paper Roses.”

We’re actually meeting, though, to talk about next month’s publication of his new collection “Wheen” and Scotland’s slow re-engagement with its older tongues. “I was so chuffed that this got funding through one of the Scottish Government’s Scottish Publication grants. The book is a really big one for me and really big in reality.

“It’s basically my collected poems from the past 30-odd years, 114 of them. There are 11 sections, including Language, Love, Corona, Commissions and Politics.”

He’s particularly chuffed that there are forewords from James Robertson and cover quotes from such as Liz Lochhead and Des Dillon.

Paterson has devoted his entire adult life to writing in Scots, although he also writes in ‘Standard’ English too. He’s a native of Galloway and currently lives in Kilmarnock and when he speaks he pauses occasionally to explain some Scottish words I half-remember and which are still in use in mainly working-class communities throughout the country.

“Wheen”, meaning “a considerable number” is one of them.

Another is “Squatter” which is used in the title of his recent Children’s Poetry book “A Squatter o Bairnrhymes”.

Many of the words he uses are those which your parents told you to avoid if you wanted “to get ahead”.

When you dropped a consonant or mixed up your vowels you were told to speak properly: “it’s not ‘ither’, it’s ‘other’; don’t use ‘windae’; it must be ‘window’.”

If working-class people had aspirations to ‘improve’ themselves it meant conforming and that meant learning to speak like the people on television. Thus, language was used as a pruning-fork to determine who was made of the right stuff.

“Much of the resentment about people who choose to speak or write in Scots is class-based,” he says. “A homogenous, standardised version of the language has been imposed on us and which is now considered ‘proper’ throughout all sectors of society whether it be academics, government or education.

“This wouldn’t be so bad if there had been respect for the way that real communities spoke. Instead of that though, they’ve been marginalised. Anyone who spoke in Scots or who used Scots words like bairn were considered thick. And if you even dared to write in that way you’d be considered illiterate. It was all a way of undermining mainly working-class communities. If you suppress their way of speaking then you suppress their identity and self-confidence.”

Initial plans for his collection collapsed due to problems with the publisher. That’s when the Ulster Scots Community Network (funded by the Ulster Scots Agency) stepped in. “They’re a really good agency and have loads of integrity. Linguistically, Scotland and Ulster have a great deal in common and it’s to the credit of the Northern Ireland government that they are now putting so much money into the promotion of Ulster-Scots while our government is still lacking a bit in that.”

His career, spanning more than three decades, has been garlanded by awards from Scotland, the UK and beyond, including an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 1992 and a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship from the Scottish Book Trust in 2014.

In 2019, the UN’s International Year of Indigenous Languages, he spent a month lecturing and mentoring in schools and communities in Grahamstown, in South Africa. Those weeks working and playing with poor, African children during which he urged them to write poetry in their native isiXhosa and isiZulu tongues have left an indelible and lifelong mark on him.

“You don’t know what poverty is until you visit a place like that,” he says. “But those children were so eager to learn and were absolutely thrilled at seeing me, a white man, trying to recite poetry in their own tongues. And I also told them that my own tongue, Scots, had also been marginalised and made to feel lesser in my own country.”

One of his proudest moments was when he participated in the first-ever Scots-isiXhosa poetry reading with indigenous Imbongi praise poets. “Whenever children get the opportunity to write or speak in their native tongues without being marked down for it my heart leaps. I’ve had a few awards during my career but nothing gave me greater pride than when a couple of schools in Perthshire told me that their pupils were reading some of my poems from A Squatter o Bairnrhymes.”

In 2020, he was voted Scots Writer of the Year at the national Scots Language Awards. But it was when he was appointed BBC Scotland’s Poet in Residence in 2017 that he first became recognised by most of his fellow Scots. The appointment lasted just four months, but it was an important and ground-breaking initiative by the BBC. “They were brilliant and very supportive of everything I wanted to do. They kind of got immediately why it meant so much to me to promote written and spoken poetry – and not just Scots.”

His public recitation of “Here’s the Weather”, commissioned by the BBC for National Poetry Day was broadcast throughout the UK and went down a storm and even a hoolie:

“Today in London, the weather man speaks

of damp and of cold. In Scotland it’s dreich

with outbreaks of smirr, the occasional hoolie,

advice in the papers to look oot yer woolies,

a sudden dramatic surge and spike

in the sales of three-tiered winterdykes,

the urge to girn and to haiver and blether

carnaptious, forfochen and scunnert by weather,

dance round the double-edged sword of fash,

dinged doon by the elements, loving stramash

and the trauchle of baltic , foonert and droukit

fair molocates fears ye’re a diddy or stupid,

yer puckle concerns on the £ or on Brexit”

He’d love to see the study and writing of Scots made a mandatory subject in Scottish schools. It’s currently on offer as an option up to Standard grade and Paterson has become an external verifier to the SQA to ensure that it’s taught properly.

“Weans never ask about or know much about what they grow up seeing and hearing as part of everyday life,” he says. “Sayings, tellin-affs, songs, blethers, wee poems and shout-ins for your tea were all part of my everyday life as with all weans I knew, communicated and shared in a language that was and still is mine and ours – our first language, Scots. At home, in family, with all relatives and friends, at work,though rarely if ever at school unless in the playground at piece-time.

“I've always written poems in Scots and English and being 'passionate' about poetry is something I've always felt. Languages are words and I've always loved words. It’s my joy and luck in being able to use them to tell stories and express how I and sometimes others feel about all sorts of stuff. Why not in our first language, Scots?

As my mum Mima still says: “Ye ur whit ye ur son, no whit ye urnae.”