Professor Alan Gillis Inaugural Lecture Recording of Professor Alan Gillis's Inaugural Lecture View media transcript So I think we're about to find out just what it is about Alan's poetry, which has attracted such praise, such a plaudits from so many sources, including Van Morrison. So I hope you'll all join me in welcoming to the stage, Professor Alan Gilles. Hello there. And thank you very much, Alex. Thank you very much all for coming night. It's called all night, and it's the end of a long semester, so it's usually it's a relief to see somebody came out, so thank you for being here. I'm going to start with the first poem with the first book, which is a long time ago and I. The ulster way is a continuous pathway set around the edges of Northern Ireland. More than 600 miles invented to get people outdoors out into the fresh air. I was a typical thing if you're driving along a road, you'll see a sign for the ulster way, and I'll be pointing directly to a hedge or a ditch or off the edge of a cliff. You think. This is a poem about being scared of cos and it's called the ulster way. This is not about burns or hedges. There will be no gourse. You will not notice the ceaseless photosynthesis or the dead trees, thousand fingers. The trunks in humanity writhing with texture as you will not be passing into farmland. Nor will you be set upon by cattle Engle buried, haunting and hunting with their eyes. Their shocking opals, graving you, hoovering, and scooping you, full of a witness that seeves you through the abattoir hill scape. The Runnels slaber through dark grass, sweating for the night that will purple to a love bitten bruise. All this is in your head. If you walk, don't walk away in silence, under the stars ice fires of violence to the waters darken strand. For this is not about horizons or their curving limitations. This is not about the rhythm of a song line. There are other paths to follow. Everything is about you. Now, listen. C heers. So most of the day job, as you know, involves talking about poetry. I hope you don't mind have chosen not to do that tonight, but just rather talk about poems. Going to read a few of the damn things. But a a few thoughts are probably in order. Sometimes I am asked if and I, being a critic of poetry helps the writing of poetry. And I always say, I don't know. Py. I suspect it helps enormously in certain respects. I assume the critic part of my brain and the poetry part of my brain do meet up at night when I'm asleep and hatch plans and have a gossip. But I try to ensure their congress remains sort of submerged. For all the wonders of poetry expertise in the academy, and for all that I do work hard to try and contribute a small part to that. The truth is when it comes to writing a poem, you never really know what you're doing. No, you know, not the workshop shop stage, but the bit before that when you sit down to a blank page. More specifically, if you do sit down and you write a poem and you think you do know what you're doing, it's very, very unlikely that you'll write anything decent. I don't really know why that is, but that's the way it works. So one is always trying to understand and learn and develop ideas. But with poetry, in my experience, some of the oldest cliches just can't be beaten. My two favourite crust the truisms about poetry, both come from Northern Ireland, bandied about by my elders back in the day. The first came from John Hewett who claimed, if you write poetry, it's your own fault. The second came from Michael Longley who said, If I knew where poems came from, I'd go there. It is a large part of being a poet that sometimes the poems don't come. The same n, I'm going to read some new stuff, mixed in with some old stuff. But the new stuff is fresh enough that I'm still amazed that it exists at all. The truth is, I had a really stinking run for several years, not that long ago. We're trying to write a poem Samed like wading through treacle. At one stage, trying to get things cooking, I booked myself a writing trip, as you do to Northern Ireland for a use of a caravan. But when I got there, I felt the rot more keenly than ever. I just couldn't write a line to save myself. I realised it was probably trying too hard and overcomplicating things. So I tried an exercise where I thought I'd just write about something plain and normal and something that was in front of me. I happened to have a p of tomatoes out of the fridge. So my eyes fell in that and said, that's what we're going to do. We're going to forget everything else, and just write a poem about a tomato. The long days, The long nights. I sat and looked at the tomato and tried to have tomato we feelings and took notes and it was really useless and a colossal waste of time. I ended up feeling a complete idiot, stupid poetry, stupid ******* tomatoes. I drove up to the ferry to come home, very much think of the whole writing poetry, part of my life was completely finished. But on the boat, I went out to the deck to look miserably out to sea. When a very strange looking blue came up to me and started chatting away. As sometimes happens, when you're in transit, the guy basically spilled his life story within 2 minutes. He lived in Belfast, but had been raised in Glasgow. As fondest childhood memories were hanging out with his grandfather in an allotment. His grandfather died during the pandemic, and the guy was on his way over to sort of sort out the allotment, as it were. That so happens that the Grands pride and joy or tomatoes, which he grew every year in a greenhouse. And the bloke started talking unprompted at length and with great passion A tomatoes. He said that since his granddad had died, he couldn't look at the tomato without becoming overwhelmed with something like joy and grief simultaneously. And when we parted ways. After about just a few minutes, you know, he shouted out to me across the deck. A big man grabbed life by the tomatoes. So it was clear to me that I had been visited by the Muse. In the shape of Billy from Govin it was a gift that I had been offered. And this is a poem called the Tomato. Sorry. I juicy tomato grows red, but not quite red as tomato ketch up. Off the vine, is it dead or just beginning to die. It's a big, ripe juicy tomato, anyhow, Sculcus, and uneven scarlet with olive hints, tinged yellows. It's watery pulp, seeded liquid, swollen in filmy skin. The way it catches light, it looks like light gleams from within. Tomatoes were tastier at yours, where I tied along through allotment rows to the sun gilt of your greenhouse windows, each year from nothing to squelchs s bites of tomatoe Wow. Now, you're gone. I see 1 million jars of tomato sauce on shelves, vats of ooze, dismal dinner bowls, mouth slp stains. Here is plenty with rot in it. A shovel leans against the unlatched door, drones of green fly in the late sun. And back among the greenhouse rows where you want sign to your grove eyes. Las, shall I go with you to the meadows? And here it comes again that tingle in the tongue for a taste of another salt tied, sour, vibrant, juice burst red sunrise. It is fantastic with male. Dusk falls on the allotments. Sing for your life. Sing for a tomato. Way before coming over to live here, one of the main images I would have associated with Edinburgh, as I'm sure most people do, with the two, you know, iconic bridges, the firth And the Newer third bridge still takes a bit of getting used to. A couple of summers ago. Just to get out of the city on a nice day. Rose and I drove to Fife, to go out for a spin, get some fish and chips. And n route to Fife, whatever head space I was in, I was really taken ab by how impressive. I felt the new bridge was. I think we can get very blase about such things far too quickly, and it may not be the biggest bridge in the world, but it is nonetheless enormous. It's a quite awesome feat of engineering and design and a big imposing new base that's now indelibly part of the landscape of this place. So I thought I'd try a poem about it. This is called the Queens fury Bridge. Dwarfed by the construction. I drive towards this big new bridge. Is cathedral of gleam, a vast suspended gesture through the air. Even this approach road is so large scale. I feel I'm driving a miniature to car. Half expecting a gigantic child's hand will loom down to grab and raise my honda up to its batific, laughing megapace in the sky. And each coming glimpse of the bridge brings a lift and expectation of the Firth expansion and Fifes green coast. For these days in the city have left me feeling like one of those gratuitous extended scenes in the box where some guy punches and punches and punches a face to death. Now, I'm finally crossing the bridge. I am high, if not free, above water that looks high I imagine the mind might look if it were visible. A sky coloured brain swell of wave glint and shadow, all ambivalent surface and unseen depth currents. Immense inner convections that could arise if I arised, swallow the coast and crush this bridge. I can't wait to drive by fifes warehouses and housing schemes with tricycles in the lawn, oven chips in the oven, bay windows, looking out to sea waves, purple milk vetch, creeping buttercup, common self heel and oil rigs that straddle dream blue waters. Yet I'm still crossing the bridge as the wind pummels and pummels and pummels. Traffic is fast, yet this feels like a hue. I'm crossing the bridge towards fish and chips in East Nuk. Blind curves in the road, roding shores that leave me failing like the misted salt spawn of waves as they smash and smash and smash upon rocks, sprayed into raw air. Traffic fuming through this glittering metal thrust into the firth that I'm almost across, hoping something might come. Some new thought, better feeling. For the mind is the sea. The mind is mountains, rivers, and the great Earths moving and suspended until it's not. Okay, I've lost my set list already. Let's see. Alright, I'm gonna stick with bridges. Um, L et's see. In Belfast, the last bridge over the waggon, just before its mouth meets Belfast. Lo used to be home to a huge flock of starlings. I don't know if they're still there. But in my memory, there were a regular feature. And you know the way flock of starlings makes it's crazy sort of patterns in the air. It was always mesmerising to see this huge we its wonders. One of the most beautiful things ever, I think. So this poem pictures them at tight in a kind of red pink evening sky. Against the backdrop of the grimy city, somewhere about this time of the year where it's getting dark. If you write poems that are miserable enough, they always stay relevant. No. This is a poem written in 2006 about feeling upset and anxious about the state of the world. I know it was 2006 because this was, in fact, the first poem I wrote as a citizen of Edinburgh. I remember sitting writing it with a lovely view from the eighth floor of what's now called 40 George Square, where I had been newly installed. And there was a gorgeous red pink sort of sky in the evening. But I was feeling overwhelmed by the sense of the broader world around me was going to rack and rain. From the vantage point of 2024, I hear people talking about that time, the naughties as if it was some kind of golden age. But this is what happens. I'll read this now for anyone who's feeling upset and anxious. A the state of the world at the present moment. If anyone in the audience isn't feeling anxious, the state of the world, I'll ask you to please share your medication amongst the rest of us evenly. But otherwise, we've got the starlings. This is called Lag and Weir. The way things are going, there'll be no quick fix. No turning back. The way that flock of starlings squirrels back in itself, then swerves forward, swabbing and scrawling the shell pink buff sky. While I stand in two minds on the bridge, leaning over the fudged river that se its dark way to open harbours and the glistering sea. Like flack from fire, a blizzard of a vacues, that hula hooping sky swarm of starlings swoops and loops the dog rose sky. Well, anyway, I look the writings on the wall. I watch the hurley burd humdrum traffic belch to a stop, fogging, clacking, charring the clotted air, making it clear, things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better. That flickered fluttered hurry scurry of starling sweeps left, then swishes right through the violet sky. Well, I huddle and huff with a dove in one ear, saying, look the other way, a hawk in the other brain, self righteous fury. It's hard not to turn back to a time when one look at you, and I knew things were going to get a whole lot better before they'd get worse. That hue and cry. The hurricanes of starlings swish and swirl their fractals over towers, hotels, hospitals, flyovers, catamarans, city dwellers, passers through who might as well take a leap and try following after that scatter wailing circus of shadows as slowly turn and make their dark way homeward, never slowing, not knowing the way things are going. T. H. These early poems really do feel like they're written by Somebody else entirely, I'll have to say. It's a weird feeling. I got vague memories of the person who wrote them. I've also a sense you wouldn't want to know that guy too well. I do remember I've taken very seriously the idea about writing the ills of the time about Northern Ireland, the troubles and all of that. But also, you really didn't want to be sort defined or dominated by that. So I thought, well, what else have I got experience of? I also wrote lots of poems about being an rsul. There is a poem called, don't you? I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar. That much is true. But even then I knew I'd find myself behind the wheel of a large automobile or in a beautiful house, asking myself, Well, I sweet dreams are made of these, why don't I travel the world in the seven seas to io and dance there in the sand. Just like a river twisting through the dusty land. For though you thought you were my number one, this girl did not want to have a gun for hire. No bright spark who was just dancing in the dark. You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar when I met you. And I believed in miracles. Every step you took I was watching you. I asked for your name, tipped you again and again. And you said, Don't Don't you want me to fetch you a drink that would turn your pink mouth blue. Don't you think this tenth tiny Chaser is ten times bigger than you. Don't you talk about places and people. You will never know. Don't you symbolise femininity by use of the letter, Oh. And I said, Don't you want me, baby. Don't you want me. All right, gonna I'm gonna spring one on M bom here. Um, My mom was the youngest of a great quantity of siblings. So I grew up with lots and lots of aunties. The way that works, many of her siblings were considerably older than herself, and they in turn had lots of children. So when I was small, my mom had loads of nieces, but because they were so much older than me, I called them, you know, my aunties rather than my cousins. So I really did have a huge surplus of seemingly unaccountable aunties. Most of them lived in the country, many in farms, my mom and dad are from County Tyrone. I confess, but I was small. I didn't really like travelling to visit the country relatives and took you away from, you know, your mates and from the TV and football and all of that stuff. You have to sit and listen to dreary old people talk. But Away all things pass. Thankfully, some of my aunties are still with us, but others have moved on, and that world of farmhouse kitchens and so forth is sadly gone. This is a wee poem called the aunties. Cured attock infested the kitchen where I'd sit at the edge of my ants with their thistle hair, whatn bread, and breath of Benson and hedges, listening to atrocities in a shortwave radio, stroke, bomb, gun, cancer, A were the same to them with their litanies of the dead dying and those struggling to care for all still needing to be cared for. Sure, you'll sar the milk wat face. One aunt tease me, and the rest yacked and cackled as the sun crashed through, cutlery sparkled. And the room flashed Da daffodil butter gold, egg, yolk, brilliant. Then one by one, my auntie's left. All right. In my experience, it's quite difficult to write poems about Edinburgh. The place is already so saturated in its own image instead of dripping with heritage industry and all the rest of it. But I've given it a go over time, I'll try a few of these out for you now. I think most people here are citizens of the time. If anybody is, just visiting and hasn't yet seen this. One of the remarkable things about Edinburgh is its fog. I sometimes envelops the place. It really is something. I remember even before living here. I was aware that there's some kind of unreal aspect to this. I was over from Belfast for a gig one night. I was walking back to my hotel in the early hours. A thick Mr. Came down with this immense speed. I was walking through the meadows. There's nobody else around. And it really, really just looked like, you know, a itch effect from a hammer horror film. I thought I'd walked on to the set of, you know, a meat lo video or something. But the best thing was the next morning. I met up with some locals. What about that fog 'cause I'd really never seen a fog like this before. And they said somewhat indignantly. What fog? There's no fog. That was a arr. And you know, the relish and pride in the local term was something I really empathise with, and Har really is a better word than miss. So this is a poem called H ar. See how you feel. Once I saw nothing, but weak pesight on a tattoo of blue, grey, and grey, blue, bleak stone, black stone, bletched sandstone. I saw buildings of flue grey granite loom over paving flags of bulge beneath a sky of cold porridge. The city looked encrypted. Tall buildings were rows of crypts raised high on blunt force. Pitch your head against the surface of Edinburgh and your skull will split. I saw a demented gulls slice of meat fat pizza fall from the air onto a cardboard mattress and stained clump of sleeping bag outside a letting agency on Clark Street. I saw an upcomer posting updates from his run through Hollyood Park with smart filtered panoramic shots of the city captured, Hashtag, this place is great. I saw a local and puff jacket with paper mache skin, knocking her head off a pharmacy door, muttering, **** this. ****, ****, **** you, **** off. Then things turned grim. Streets loomed. The way the mind can cloud and memories vanish as the air thickened to virtual mushroom. A thick har began to doom scroll over the pilts of Arthur's seat to swallow parliament dynamic Earth southside Morden in flumes of virus grey shadow. Some retrogothic filmmaker would have paid 1 million to catch it spectral fingers groping through the meadows. I saw a child pointing, Look at this as the fog rubbed against her flat window while an elderly couple at the window below were deleted by the uncoiling mist. I could hear unseen buses drive as if ferryboats chugging in a cosmic ladle of unspeakable sip, faint lanterns through a fog that seemed unalive. It felt like hard things were feather blown through a Nimbo stratus of dream, banks, firms, startups, statues, blipped in a continuous ether. I saw each building was a vessel, a drift in an ocean of haze. Edinburgh, a ghost fleet of container ships, carriers of counted souls. I could see nothing is out there to separate us from the infinite void of space, not bricks, steel, concrete, but atmosphere. I could see that each room, each layer is a nest of fragile bones, breaths, skin types, needs, body reeks, regrets, cells at the mercy of the air. I could see how truly we share our element with the dead in limbo. How this total cloud blinds all here in a womb of haze rain. The walls like pulsing membranes, where I try to find my way home through the reek and fire in these stones. I stick with Edinburg. Again, for anyone visiting who just arrived in September, you'll be looking forward to sticking around for the festival season in August, I'm sure. It's obviously a big selling point of the city. Personally, I stay completely away. I can't handle cbs people. So this is an old mo poem. It focuses on what I take to be a universal truth of the Edinburgh Festival year by year, at least in my own mind. On the opening day of the festival, it starts to rain, and it inevitably chucks down for weeks constantly until it's all over, and then the sun comes out again. This poem features a cameo appearance from Vincent over here, but when he was 8-years-old. It also it ends with a quotation. Imagine most have recognised the quotation. It's on the LP and the film of the Woodstock Festival from the late 60s. The Saturday night, a big sort of rainstorm came in and nearly wrecked the whole thing. And it's a guy from the Tano shouted out. What's now the quotation of this poem. I think it's one of the great signed bites of the Hippie dream. So if I can find it, this is a poem called August in Edinburgh. Not a cloud in the sky and it's raining. It's the brusquness of things and the drag of things that hurts. The most beautiful woman in the world is in Edinburgh at the festival. She looks me in the eye and says, Please, move. I'm trying to look at the artworks. My doctor says, The heart works, but don't push it. I hear music, long, familiar songs, everywhere I go. Pain is in the mind. Someone tells Leonardo Dicaprio in Shutter Island. Everyone is rushing, but the crowd moves slow. Leonardo can't get his head around it. A man in costume shouts, we've sold out here, holding his hat out for money and rain. The mind is an island, and everyone is beautiful, looking for something new again, but nothing connects and it's cold. My son sticks my phone charger in his ear and says, I've got an electric brain. I've been streaming old LPs, I never thought I'd hear again. Never thinking the old songs would not work, trying not to work the brain, trying not to rise to the bait when that long, familiar voice rises from the damp and dismal crowd once again to say, Hey, if we all think hard enough, maybe we can stop this rain. Thank you very much. Are we okay? Yeah? Yeah. Just 32 more poems a go. So the decorations are up in the shops and malls, tell us Christmas comments so get your credit cards out. This is a poem about an unfortunate moment I had going Christmas shopping with a tremendous hangover one morning. I basically had this sort of outer body thing. I was in a shop and saw, you know, a beautiful, famous actress All and gold come through the crowd towards me as if to embrace. And I thought, you know, I went to hold my hands out and realised it was a video advert for perfume on a flat screen on a wall. Um, So this is a poem very much about not being one of the three wise men. This is called the Migs lead me skulking through the polyvinyl with and foster of high street shops, the tepid white wine swill of another morning sky. Until the fugazi colours perturbing sheen of One Store's video advert on an HD screen, open some inner door within my hangovers arm agon, and I enter a green meadow with Charles thereon. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, corrupt, weary and sore. I still see gold Frankin sense, Mr D. Okay. Nearly finish. Two more. Just before I finish, I'll try something a little bit different. U back in the day. Go back 30 years, I've be going to shoot in Dublin and I realised I decided, I'm going to try this poetry thing for for real. I established a whole load of rules. And it's interesting over time how I've broken every single one of them. But I think this was the last one to be broken. The rule was, don't write tourist poems or poems about foreign travels. Of course, I very much hoped I'd get to travel and see lots of places, but there was something about the, I've been to Paris, and now I'm writing a poem about a b that just ain't possibly bourgeois. So I said, N. But last year, I was lucky enough to spend some time in Japan, in particular I got the chill out for a week in Kyoto. And at the end of the day, what's the point of being a poet spending a week in oto, you don't go write a poem about it. So here we are. I stayed in a lovely hotel. By a river. And when I'm coming and going, there was a bird that was always standing in the river just outside the hotel. This became a nice little sort of homely thing when you're going out and coming back. I thought it was a crane, but threw Googling and photographs, I established later that it was a heroin. So each day, I'd say hi to the heron and felt we had a little bit of a connection. But as time wore on, the heron started to freak me out a bit because it really just stood there in the blazing heat of the day, in the same place, in the river, day in day out, doing absolutely nothing. I was eventually a little bit, come on, do something, get a hobby. Let's go. You know, my little sense of connection became a bit ruffled as it were. This poem has another quotation in it. This one's from a German filmmaker Werner Hertzog. A documentary called Grizzly Man. It's a film as a documentary about a guy making a documentary about Grizzlies. He thought he had a special connection with him until one of them at him. This poem is called the amo River in Kyoto. Along the amogawa, between Sancho Bridge and Schizo Bridge, a heron stands in the streams, million pieces of mirror glinting movement. A stock still hen. Under the motionless sun, that could bake an egg, listening to the plash of river trickle. Standing in the surface shimmer like an inscrutable data centre surrounded by 1 million solar panels. The heron is still. I remember Herzog's words, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I can see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. Yet it stands a heron among reed waver, Pot Puri shadows under Yoshino cherry trees. A light breeze flutters. Traffic awa Bata. Signal noise from Kia Mache. The world is changing in the on flow, and flux of eddy swirls standing motionless, a hen between Sizo Bridge and Sancho Bridge along the amogaa. So good news is. This is the last point. Bad news is. It's a bit of athful. We'll get through it. Thank you very much for coming out. And listening hugely. Appreciate it. I hope it's been all right. We family, friends, colleagues, students past present in the crowd, which is freaking me out a bit, I'll have to say. But I want to say thank you very much to all of you. It's been and a privilege. I know I'm not always a walk in the park, but thanks for putting up on me. Hopefully, there's lots of good times and more poems ahead, but this has been a nice little sort of, you know, mark along the way. When I saw coming up here for a job, one of the things was really keen on was the way in which the meadows is basically part of the compass. This does remain a delight. More and more. Probably with stupendous repetition and predictability. I tend to be writing poems about, you know, going to the common green. One way or another. So I'm going to finish a poem about going for a walk in the park to the meadows, just out the door from here. So thank you to Alex to the school. A, thank you all very much for coming. I've got a dry mouth. There's a poem called Walking Out one morning after Lock dye has been lifted. Darkness everywhere. Night pervades then dies. Now, curb sweepers, bread vans, and early traffic rumble by my window side bed while rain music fizzles in slate roofs as dawn pours inside. And alarm squawks that I must not lie in my listening to telegraph pole birds getting high over elms and ruins, lifting into citrus burst skies like memories of songs, but rise and walk this city with multi million windows for eyes. Versions of the world and time are limmed through screens, overpaying with messages. Data flutters through. Whatever dimension it is, data flutters through. The space within space. As I open my door like a book and walk past steam wands, stretching hot foamed milk and cafes, shuttering shops, skinny mall cats curled under fence posts. The lamppost travelogues of scent, casting spells over all sniffing dogs. Nothing feels real if it's not in the net, yet nothing on the net feels real. Now I brim with yester years, feeling virtual on this thoroughfare, walking into carbon debt, and exhaust broom on compact streets dwarfed on each side by tall grey buildings. So the traffic's like a two lane wide and trail up the deep crack of rhino's back hide. And onto grass, I go over the sluice signs of drain flow, underground culverts into the city's meadows. One thing is for sure. He said, then he died. Then another and another. Such vast scale, my mind miniature. I dreamt I was asked by a smart machine, why it shouldn't pull the plug on human things. And all my consciousness could muster with spaghetti emotional mess. Now, ping pong between position and sense. Onto grass, I go as if the best way of honouring the dead is to make the most of living. Ten gobs, a humongous bruise yellow anger onto a tree lined path. And on the grass, I go to sync with the time zone of earth's slow verbs, dreaming names, faint signals, green whispers, wing singers and sycamores, willows, horn beams. Free park benches where a redheaded businesswoman in an ink blue suit eats a male de Wilshire ham sandwich under clearing heavens, while sad shadows blend with the cherry trees, ginger tinged sunglow. Onto grass, I go, and I've made it to the meadows. You'll know, of course, I write this at my desk in the night. These words already processed by machine. As a cyclist in look at me, cra, torpedoes past, a duffel coated toddler, who's learning new words, links with the living and dead, holding in Titchy hands, a dandelion, whose wind drifted seeds land, their transk parachutes on bitter cress and wild carrot, while a frisbee glides past like a complex experiment on motion and grace. Through the tree leaf railed air comes soft puck tennis sounds. And I can't grasp this slide between phantom and rail. But want to ask, Hey, there, Smart Machine, how do you feel? Hey, trees. What are you laughing at? Two students in beanie hats with tot bags of books, sip from re refilled, hot, Plypropne cups, sunlight in their faces. And yes, I'm in this, whatever it is, this blue lift, this light page, this world plunge, this Thank you very much for listening. Hares. Nov 26 2024 17.15 - 19.15 Professor Alan Gillis Inaugural Lecture Professor Alan Gillis presents his Inaugural Lecture, 'Poetry Reading'. Watch the recording here...
Professor Alan Gillis Inaugural Lecture Recording of Professor Alan Gillis's Inaugural Lecture View media transcript So I think we're about to find out just what it is about Alan's poetry, which has attracted such praise, such a plaudits from so many sources, including Van Morrison. So I hope you'll all join me in welcoming to the stage, Professor Alan Gilles. Hello there. And thank you very much, Alex. Thank you very much all for coming night. It's called all night, and it's the end of a long semester, so it's usually it's a relief to see somebody came out, so thank you for being here. I'm going to start with the first poem with the first book, which is a long time ago and I. The ulster way is a continuous pathway set around the edges of Northern Ireland. More than 600 miles invented to get people outdoors out into the fresh air. I was a typical thing if you're driving along a road, you'll see a sign for the ulster way, and I'll be pointing directly to a hedge or a ditch or off the edge of a cliff. You think. This is a poem about being scared of cos and it's called the ulster way. This is not about burns or hedges. There will be no gourse. You will not notice the ceaseless photosynthesis or the dead trees, thousand fingers. The trunks in humanity writhing with texture as you will not be passing into farmland. Nor will you be set upon by cattle Engle buried, haunting and hunting with their eyes. Their shocking opals, graving you, hoovering, and scooping you, full of a witness that seeves you through the abattoir hill scape. The Runnels slaber through dark grass, sweating for the night that will purple to a love bitten bruise. All this is in your head. If you walk, don't walk away in silence, under the stars ice fires of violence to the waters darken strand. For this is not about horizons or their curving limitations. This is not about the rhythm of a song line. There are other paths to follow. Everything is about you. Now, listen. C heers. So most of the day job, as you know, involves talking about poetry. I hope you don't mind have chosen not to do that tonight, but just rather talk about poems. Going to read a few of the damn things. But a a few thoughts are probably in order. Sometimes I am asked if and I, being a critic of poetry helps the writing of poetry. And I always say, I don't know. Py. I suspect it helps enormously in certain respects. I assume the critic part of my brain and the poetry part of my brain do meet up at night when I'm asleep and hatch plans and have a gossip. But I try to ensure their congress remains sort of submerged. For all the wonders of poetry expertise in the academy, and for all that I do work hard to try and contribute a small part to that. The truth is when it comes to writing a poem, you never really know what you're doing. No, you know, not the workshop shop stage, but the bit before that when you sit down to a blank page. More specifically, if you do sit down and you write a poem and you think you do know what you're doing, it's very, very unlikely that you'll write anything decent. I don't really know why that is, but that's the way it works. So one is always trying to understand and learn and develop ideas. But with poetry, in my experience, some of the oldest cliches just can't be beaten. My two favourite crust the truisms about poetry, both come from Northern Ireland, bandied about by my elders back in the day. The first came from John Hewett who claimed, if you write poetry, it's your own fault. The second came from Michael Longley who said, If I knew where poems came from, I'd go there. It is a large part of being a poet that sometimes the poems don't come. The same n, I'm going to read some new stuff, mixed in with some old stuff. But the new stuff is fresh enough that I'm still amazed that it exists at all. The truth is, I had a really stinking run for several years, not that long ago. We're trying to write a poem Samed like wading through treacle. At one stage, trying to get things cooking, I booked myself a writing trip, as you do to Northern Ireland for a use of a caravan. But when I got there, I felt the rot more keenly than ever. I just couldn't write a line to save myself. I realised it was probably trying too hard and overcomplicating things. So I tried an exercise where I thought I'd just write about something plain and normal and something that was in front of me. I happened to have a p of tomatoes out of the fridge. So my eyes fell in that and said, that's what we're going to do. We're going to forget everything else, and just write a poem about a tomato. The long days, The long nights. I sat and looked at the tomato and tried to have tomato we feelings and took notes and it was really useless and a colossal waste of time. I ended up feeling a complete idiot, stupid poetry, stupid ******* tomatoes. I drove up to the ferry to come home, very much think of the whole writing poetry, part of my life was completely finished. But on the boat, I went out to the deck to look miserably out to sea. When a very strange looking blue came up to me and started chatting away. As sometimes happens, when you're in transit, the guy basically spilled his life story within 2 minutes. He lived in Belfast, but had been raised in Glasgow. As fondest childhood memories were hanging out with his grandfather in an allotment. His grandfather died during the pandemic, and the guy was on his way over to sort of sort out the allotment, as it were. That so happens that the Grands pride and joy or tomatoes, which he grew every year in a greenhouse. And the bloke started talking unprompted at length and with great passion A tomatoes. He said that since his granddad had died, he couldn't look at the tomato without becoming overwhelmed with something like joy and grief simultaneously. And when we parted ways. After about just a few minutes, you know, he shouted out to me across the deck. A big man grabbed life by the tomatoes. So it was clear to me that I had been visited by the Muse. In the shape of Billy from Govin it was a gift that I had been offered. And this is a poem called the Tomato. Sorry. I juicy tomato grows red, but not quite red as tomato ketch up. Off the vine, is it dead or just beginning to die. It's a big, ripe juicy tomato, anyhow, Sculcus, and uneven scarlet with olive hints, tinged yellows. It's watery pulp, seeded liquid, swollen in filmy skin. The way it catches light, it looks like light gleams from within. Tomatoes were tastier at yours, where I tied along through allotment rows to the sun gilt of your greenhouse windows, each year from nothing to squelchs s bites of tomatoe Wow. Now, you're gone. I see 1 million jars of tomato sauce on shelves, vats of ooze, dismal dinner bowls, mouth slp stains. Here is plenty with rot in it. A shovel leans against the unlatched door, drones of green fly in the late sun. And back among the greenhouse rows where you want sign to your grove eyes. Las, shall I go with you to the meadows? And here it comes again that tingle in the tongue for a taste of another salt tied, sour, vibrant, juice burst red sunrise. It is fantastic with male. Dusk falls on the allotments. Sing for your life. Sing for a tomato. Way before coming over to live here, one of the main images I would have associated with Edinburgh, as I'm sure most people do, with the two, you know, iconic bridges, the firth And the Newer third bridge still takes a bit of getting used to. A couple of summers ago. Just to get out of the city on a nice day. Rose and I drove to Fife, to go out for a spin, get some fish and chips. And n route to Fife, whatever head space I was in, I was really taken ab by how impressive. I felt the new bridge was. I think we can get very blase about such things far too quickly, and it may not be the biggest bridge in the world, but it is nonetheless enormous. It's a quite awesome feat of engineering and design and a big imposing new base that's now indelibly part of the landscape of this place. So I thought I'd try a poem about it. This is called the Queens fury Bridge. Dwarfed by the construction. I drive towards this big new bridge. Is cathedral of gleam, a vast suspended gesture through the air. Even this approach road is so large scale. I feel I'm driving a miniature to car. Half expecting a gigantic child's hand will loom down to grab and raise my honda up to its batific, laughing megapace in the sky. And each coming glimpse of the bridge brings a lift and expectation of the Firth expansion and Fifes green coast. For these days in the city have left me feeling like one of those gratuitous extended scenes in the box where some guy punches and punches and punches a face to death. Now, I'm finally crossing the bridge. I am high, if not free, above water that looks high I imagine the mind might look if it were visible. A sky coloured brain swell of wave glint and shadow, all ambivalent surface and unseen depth currents. Immense inner convections that could arise if I arised, swallow the coast and crush this bridge. I can't wait to drive by fifes warehouses and housing schemes with tricycles in the lawn, oven chips in the oven, bay windows, looking out to sea waves, purple milk vetch, creeping buttercup, common self heel and oil rigs that straddle dream blue waters. Yet I'm still crossing the bridge as the wind pummels and pummels and pummels. Traffic is fast, yet this feels like a hue. I'm crossing the bridge towards fish and chips in East Nuk. Blind curves in the road, roding shores that leave me failing like the misted salt spawn of waves as they smash and smash and smash upon rocks, sprayed into raw air. Traffic fuming through this glittering metal thrust into the firth that I'm almost across, hoping something might come. Some new thought, better feeling. For the mind is the sea. The mind is mountains, rivers, and the great Earths moving and suspended until it's not. Okay, I've lost my set list already. Let's see. Alright, I'm gonna stick with bridges. Um, L et's see. In Belfast, the last bridge over the waggon, just before its mouth meets Belfast. Lo used to be home to a huge flock of starlings. I don't know if they're still there. But in my memory, there were a regular feature. And you know the way flock of starlings makes it's crazy sort of patterns in the air. It was always mesmerising to see this huge we its wonders. One of the most beautiful things ever, I think. So this poem pictures them at tight in a kind of red pink evening sky. Against the backdrop of the grimy city, somewhere about this time of the year where it's getting dark. If you write poems that are miserable enough, they always stay relevant. No. This is a poem written in 2006 about feeling upset and anxious about the state of the world. I know it was 2006 because this was, in fact, the first poem I wrote as a citizen of Edinburgh. I remember sitting writing it with a lovely view from the eighth floor of what's now called 40 George Square, where I had been newly installed. And there was a gorgeous red pink sort of sky in the evening. But I was feeling overwhelmed by the sense of the broader world around me was going to rack and rain. From the vantage point of 2024, I hear people talking about that time, the naughties as if it was some kind of golden age. But this is what happens. I'll read this now for anyone who's feeling upset and anxious. A the state of the world at the present moment. If anyone in the audience isn't feeling anxious, the state of the world, I'll ask you to please share your medication amongst the rest of us evenly. But otherwise, we've got the starlings. This is called Lag and Weir. The way things are going, there'll be no quick fix. No turning back. The way that flock of starlings squirrels back in itself, then swerves forward, swabbing and scrawling the shell pink buff sky. While I stand in two minds on the bridge, leaning over the fudged river that se its dark way to open harbours and the glistering sea. Like flack from fire, a blizzard of a vacues, that hula hooping sky swarm of starlings swoops and loops the dog rose sky. Well, anyway, I look the writings on the wall. I watch the hurley burd humdrum traffic belch to a stop, fogging, clacking, charring the clotted air, making it clear, things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better. That flickered fluttered hurry scurry of starling sweeps left, then swishes right through the violet sky. Well, I huddle and huff with a dove in one ear, saying, look the other way, a hawk in the other brain, self righteous fury. It's hard not to turn back to a time when one look at you, and I knew things were going to get a whole lot better before they'd get worse. That hue and cry. The hurricanes of starlings swish and swirl their fractals over towers, hotels, hospitals, flyovers, catamarans, city dwellers, passers through who might as well take a leap and try following after that scatter wailing circus of shadows as slowly turn and make their dark way homeward, never slowing, not knowing the way things are going. T. H. These early poems really do feel like they're written by Somebody else entirely, I'll have to say. It's a weird feeling. I got vague memories of the person who wrote them. I've also a sense you wouldn't want to know that guy too well. I do remember I've taken very seriously the idea about writing the ills of the time about Northern Ireland, the troubles and all of that. But also, you really didn't want to be sort defined or dominated by that. So I thought, well, what else have I got experience of? I also wrote lots of poems about being an rsul. There is a poem called, don't you? I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar. That much is true. But even then I knew I'd find myself behind the wheel of a large automobile or in a beautiful house, asking myself, Well, I sweet dreams are made of these, why don't I travel the world in the seven seas to io and dance there in the sand. Just like a river twisting through the dusty land. For though you thought you were my number one, this girl did not want to have a gun for hire. No bright spark who was just dancing in the dark. You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar when I met you. And I believed in miracles. Every step you took I was watching you. I asked for your name, tipped you again and again. And you said, Don't Don't you want me to fetch you a drink that would turn your pink mouth blue. Don't you think this tenth tiny Chaser is ten times bigger than you. Don't you talk about places and people. You will never know. Don't you symbolise femininity by use of the letter, Oh. And I said, Don't you want me, baby. Don't you want me. All right, gonna I'm gonna spring one on M bom here. Um, My mom was the youngest of a great quantity of siblings. So I grew up with lots and lots of aunties. The way that works, many of her siblings were considerably older than herself, and they in turn had lots of children. So when I was small, my mom had loads of nieces, but because they were so much older than me, I called them, you know, my aunties rather than my cousins. So I really did have a huge surplus of seemingly unaccountable aunties. Most of them lived in the country, many in farms, my mom and dad are from County Tyrone. I confess, but I was small. I didn't really like travelling to visit the country relatives and took you away from, you know, your mates and from the TV and football and all of that stuff. You have to sit and listen to dreary old people talk. But Away all things pass. Thankfully, some of my aunties are still with us, but others have moved on, and that world of farmhouse kitchens and so forth is sadly gone. This is a wee poem called the aunties. Cured attock infested the kitchen where I'd sit at the edge of my ants with their thistle hair, whatn bread, and breath of Benson and hedges, listening to atrocities in a shortwave radio, stroke, bomb, gun, cancer, A were the same to them with their litanies of the dead dying and those struggling to care for all still needing to be cared for. Sure, you'll sar the milk wat face. One aunt tease me, and the rest yacked and cackled as the sun crashed through, cutlery sparkled. And the room flashed Da daffodil butter gold, egg, yolk, brilliant. Then one by one, my auntie's left. All right. In my experience, it's quite difficult to write poems about Edinburgh. The place is already so saturated in its own image instead of dripping with heritage industry and all the rest of it. But I've given it a go over time, I'll try a few of these out for you now. I think most people here are citizens of the time. If anybody is, just visiting and hasn't yet seen this. One of the remarkable things about Edinburgh is its fog. I sometimes envelops the place. It really is something. I remember even before living here. I was aware that there's some kind of unreal aspect to this. I was over from Belfast for a gig one night. I was walking back to my hotel in the early hours. A thick Mr. Came down with this immense speed. I was walking through the meadows. There's nobody else around. And it really, really just looked like, you know, a itch effect from a hammer horror film. I thought I'd walked on to the set of, you know, a meat lo video or something. But the best thing was the next morning. I met up with some locals. What about that fog 'cause I'd really never seen a fog like this before. And they said somewhat indignantly. What fog? There's no fog. That was a arr. And you know, the relish and pride in the local term was something I really empathise with, and Har really is a better word than miss. So this is a poem called H ar. See how you feel. Once I saw nothing, but weak pesight on a tattoo of blue, grey, and grey, blue, bleak stone, black stone, bletched sandstone. I saw buildings of flue grey granite loom over paving flags of bulge beneath a sky of cold porridge. The city looked encrypted. Tall buildings were rows of crypts raised high on blunt force. Pitch your head against the surface of Edinburgh and your skull will split. I saw a demented gulls slice of meat fat pizza fall from the air onto a cardboard mattress and stained clump of sleeping bag outside a letting agency on Clark Street. I saw an upcomer posting updates from his run through Hollyood Park with smart filtered panoramic shots of the city captured, Hashtag, this place is great. I saw a local and puff jacket with paper mache skin, knocking her head off a pharmacy door, muttering, **** this. ****, ****, **** you, **** off. Then things turned grim. Streets loomed. The way the mind can cloud and memories vanish as the air thickened to virtual mushroom. A thick har began to doom scroll over the pilts of Arthur's seat to swallow parliament dynamic Earth southside Morden in flumes of virus grey shadow. Some retrogothic filmmaker would have paid 1 million to catch it spectral fingers groping through the meadows. I saw a child pointing, Look at this as the fog rubbed against her flat window while an elderly couple at the window below were deleted by the uncoiling mist. I could hear unseen buses drive as if ferryboats chugging in a cosmic ladle of unspeakable sip, faint lanterns through a fog that seemed unalive. It felt like hard things were feather blown through a Nimbo stratus of dream, banks, firms, startups, statues, blipped in a continuous ether. I saw each building was a vessel, a drift in an ocean of haze. Edinburgh, a ghost fleet of container ships, carriers of counted souls. I could see nothing is out there to separate us from the infinite void of space, not bricks, steel, concrete, but atmosphere. I could see that each room, each layer is a nest of fragile bones, breaths, skin types, needs, body reeks, regrets, cells at the mercy of the air. I could see how truly we share our element with the dead in limbo. How this total cloud blinds all here in a womb of haze rain. The walls like pulsing membranes, where I try to find my way home through the reek and fire in these stones. I stick with Edinburg. Again, for anyone visiting who just arrived in September, you'll be looking forward to sticking around for the festival season in August, I'm sure. It's obviously a big selling point of the city. Personally, I stay completely away. I can't handle cbs people. So this is an old mo poem. It focuses on what I take to be a universal truth of the Edinburgh Festival year by year, at least in my own mind. On the opening day of the festival, it starts to rain, and it inevitably chucks down for weeks constantly until it's all over, and then the sun comes out again. This poem features a cameo appearance from Vincent over here, but when he was 8-years-old. It also it ends with a quotation. Imagine most have recognised the quotation. It's on the LP and the film of the Woodstock Festival from the late 60s. The Saturday night, a big sort of rainstorm came in and nearly wrecked the whole thing. And it's a guy from the Tano shouted out. What's now the quotation of this poem. I think it's one of the great signed bites of the Hippie dream. So if I can find it, this is a poem called August in Edinburgh. Not a cloud in the sky and it's raining. It's the brusquness of things and the drag of things that hurts. The most beautiful woman in the world is in Edinburgh at the festival. She looks me in the eye and says, Please, move. I'm trying to look at the artworks. My doctor says, The heart works, but don't push it. I hear music, long, familiar songs, everywhere I go. Pain is in the mind. Someone tells Leonardo Dicaprio in Shutter Island. Everyone is rushing, but the crowd moves slow. Leonardo can't get his head around it. A man in costume shouts, we've sold out here, holding his hat out for money and rain. The mind is an island, and everyone is beautiful, looking for something new again, but nothing connects and it's cold. My son sticks my phone charger in his ear and says, I've got an electric brain. I've been streaming old LPs, I never thought I'd hear again. Never thinking the old songs would not work, trying not to work the brain, trying not to rise to the bait when that long, familiar voice rises from the damp and dismal crowd once again to say, Hey, if we all think hard enough, maybe we can stop this rain. Thank you very much. Are we okay? Yeah? Yeah. Just 32 more poems a go. So the decorations are up in the shops and malls, tell us Christmas comments so get your credit cards out. This is a poem about an unfortunate moment I had going Christmas shopping with a tremendous hangover one morning. I basically had this sort of outer body thing. I was in a shop and saw, you know, a beautiful, famous actress All and gold come through the crowd towards me as if to embrace. And I thought, you know, I went to hold my hands out and realised it was a video advert for perfume on a flat screen on a wall. Um, So this is a poem very much about not being one of the three wise men. This is called the Migs lead me skulking through the polyvinyl with and foster of high street shops, the tepid white wine swill of another morning sky. Until the fugazi colours perturbing sheen of One Store's video advert on an HD screen, open some inner door within my hangovers arm agon, and I enter a green meadow with Charles thereon. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, corrupt, weary and sore. I still see gold Frankin sense, Mr D. Okay. Nearly finish. Two more. Just before I finish, I'll try something a little bit different. U back in the day. Go back 30 years, I've be going to shoot in Dublin and I realised I decided, I'm going to try this poetry thing for for real. I established a whole load of rules. And it's interesting over time how I've broken every single one of them. But I think this was the last one to be broken. The rule was, don't write tourist poems or poems about foreign travels. Of course, I very much hoped I'd get to travel and see lots of places, but there was something about the, I've been to Paris, and now I'm writing a poem about a b that just ain't possibly bourgeois. So I said, N. But last year, I was lucky enough to spend some time in Japan, in particular I got the chill out for a week in Kyoto. And at the end of the day, what's the point of being a poet spending a week in oto, you don't go write a poem about it. So here we are. I stayed in a lovely hotel. By a river. And when I'm coming and going, there was a bird that was always standing in the river just outside the hotel. This became a nice little sort of homely thing when you're going out and coming back. I thought it was a crane, but threw Googling and photographs, I established later that it was a heroin. So each day, I'd say hi to the heron and felt we had a little bit of a connection. But as time wore on, the heron started to freak me out a bit because it really just stood there in the blazing heat of the day, in the same place, in the river, day in day out, doing absolutely nothing. I was eventually a little bit, come on, do something, get a hobby. Let's go. You know, my little sense of connection became a bit ruffled as it were. This poem has another quotation in it. This one's from a German filmmaker Werner Hertzog. A documentary called Grizzly Man. It's a film as a documentary about a guy making a documentary about Grizzlies. He thought he had a special connection with him until one of them at him. This poem is called the amo River in Kyoto. Along the amogawa, between Sancho Bridge and Schizo Bridge, a heron stands in the streams, million pieces of mirror glinting movement. A stock still hen. Under the motionless sun, that could bake an egg, listening to the plash of river trickle. Standing in the surface shimmer like an inscrutable data centre surrounded by 1 million solar panels. The heron is still. I remember Herzog's words, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I can see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. Yet it stands a heron among reed waver, Pot Puri shadows under Yoshino cherry trees. A light breeze flutters. Traffic awa Bata. Signal noise from Kia Mache. The world is changing in the on flow, and flux of eddy swirls standing motionless, a hen between Sizo Bridge and Sancho Bridge along the amogaa. So good news is. This is the last point. Bad news is. It's a bit of athful. We'll get through it. Thank you very much for coming out. And listening hugely. Appreciate it. I hope it's been all right. We family, friends, colleagues, students past present in the crowd, which is freaking me out a bit, I'll have to say. But I want to say thank you very much to all of you. It's been and a privilege. I know I'm not always a walk in the park, but thanks for putting up on me. Hopefully, there's lots of good times and more poems ahead, but this has been a nice little sort of, you know, mark along the way. When I saw coming up here for a job, one of the things was really keen on was the way in which the meadows is basically part of the compass. This does remain a delight. More and more. Probably with stupendous repetition and predictability. I tend to be writing poems about, you know, going to the common green. One way or another. So I'm going to finish a poem about going for a walk in the park to the meadows, just out the door from here. So thank you to Alex to the school. A, thank you all very much for coming. I've got a dry mouth. There's a poem called Walking Out one morning after Lock dye has been lifted. Darkness everywhere. Night pervades then dies. Now, curb sweepers, bread vans, and early traffic rumble by my window side bed while rain music fizzles in slate roofs as dawn pours inside. And alarm squawks that I must not lie in my listening to telegraph pole birds getting high over elms and ruins, lifting into citrus burst skies like memories of songs, but rise and walk this city with multi million windows for eyes. Versions of the world and time are limmed through screens, overpaying with messages. Data flutters through. Whatever dimension it is, data flutters through. The space within space. As I open my door like a book and walk past steam wands, stretching hot foamed milk and cafes, shuttering shops, skinny mall cats curled under fence posts. The lamppost travelogues of scent, casting spells over all sniffing dogs. Nothing feels real if it's not in the net, yet nothing on the net feels real. Now I brim with yester years, feeling virtual on this thoroughfare, walking into carbon debt, and exhaust broom on compact streets dwarfed on each side by tall grey buildings. So the traffic's like a two lane wide and trail up the deep crack of rhino's back hide. And onto grass, I go over the sluice signs of drain flow, underground culverts into the city's meadows. One thing is for sure. He said, then he died. Then another and another. Such vast scale, my mind miniature. I dreamt I was asked by a smart machine, why it shouldn't pull the plug on human things. And all my consciousness could muster with spaghetti emotional mess. Now, ping pong between position and sense. Onto grass, I go as if the best way of honouring the dead is to make the most of living. Ten gobs, a humongous bruise yellow anger onto a tree lined path. And on the grass, I go to sync with the time zone of earth's slow verbs, dreaming names, faint signals, green whispers, wing singers and sycamores, willows, horn beams. Free park benches where a redheaded businesswoman in an ink blue suit eats a male de Wilshire ham sandwich under clearing heavens, while sad shadows blend with the cherry trees, ginger tinged sunglow. Onto grass, I go, and I've made it to the meadows. You'll know, of course, I write this at my desk in the night. These words already processed by machine. As a cyclist in look at me, cra, torpedoes past, a duffel coated toddler, who's learning new words, links with the living and dead, holding in Titchy hands, a dandelion, whose wind drifted seeds land, their transk parachutes on bitter cress and wild carrot, while a frisbee glides past like a complex experiment on motion and grace. Through the tree leaf railed air comes soft puck tennis sounds. And I can't grasp this slide between phantom and rail. But want to ask, Hey, there, Smart Machine, how do you feel? Hey, trees. What are you laughing at? Two students in beanie hats with tot bags of books, sip from re refilled, hot, Plypropne cups, sunlight in their faces. And yes, I'm in this, whatever it is, this blue lift, this light page, this world plunge, this Thank you very much for listening. Hares. Nov 26 2024 17.15 - 19.15 Professor Alan Gillis Inaugural Lecture Professor Alan Gillis presents his Inaugural Lecture, 'Poetry Reading'. Watch the recording here...
Nov 26 2024 17.15 - 19.15 Professor Alan Gillis Inaugural Lecture Professor Alan Gillis presents his Inaugural Lecture, 'Poetry Reading'. Watch the recording here...
