Alistair Findlay

I would describe myself now as a cultural Marxist, as MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean, Hamish Henderson and Angus Calder were in their own distinct ways. I joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in the early 1980s, signed up by the then Secretary of the Leith Branch of the CPGB, one Dick Gaughan. I joined in reaction to Michael Foot standing up in the Commons and committing Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition to supporting Mrs Thatcher sending the Task-force to the Falklands, an act so misjudged and inimical to the socialist heritage of the Labour Party and the wider labour movement that I still almost throw-up thinking about it. I think that my work is primarily language based, although much of its content refers to popular culture set within radical critiques of Scotland’s bourgeois society, history and culture. My first book, ‘Shale Voices’ (Luath, 1999, 2010), is a social and cultural history of the shale mining communities of West Lothian between 1850s-1960s, the locus of the world’s first oil industry and the forerunner to BP, Grangemouth. However, its central innovation was the setting out of oral testimony like lines of poetry, designed to capture the dynamics of speech. I therefore have found myself drawn to the language usage of ‘specialist speakers’ whom I have come into contact with through the culture of my upbringing, politics, and work – all of whom I have written poetry about – shale-miners, communists, footballers, social workers. These are in a certain sense intimate ‘labour histories’ which draw upon the trade terms and occupational vocabularies, ideologies and mind-sets of their users as they go about the daily business of earning their living and living their lives. I am currently working on a new collection of poems about Scottish art history and museumology ‘speak’ which shares these preoccupations, although the subject matter on the surface is a complete contrast to previous work, though perhaps swapping ‘high’ cultural themes for ‘low’ cultural ones, so-called.