Frank Kuppner: The Pragmatism of Profundity

Frank Kuppner is a reclusive character in the contemporary writing scene, though in significance he stands alongside Lochhead and Leonard. He first came to be known for his quatrains written in the manner of ancient Chinese poetry but in the present interview he describes a wide range of other considerations that have contrib- uted to the making of his rather eccentric and singularly unconventional writing style. These considerations and circumstances include his experience of being a self-taught poet who did not undergo any formal training in literature at university level; the teaching of creative writing to university students; and his understanding of English and Scottish versions of Modernism. Keywords: Modernism; science; autodidactism; creative writing; Avant-garde; quat- rains

To my best knowledge this is the first conventional interview with Frank Kuppner – “conventional” here meaning an interview based on a form of dialogue in which the person interviewed is not identical with the person who conducts it, as is the case in his other interview, published in Talking Verse (1995). Kuppner was born in 1951 and he established his detached, per- plexing, sometimes very unsettling but on the whole admirably inde- pendent and highly idiosyncratic voice with A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty in 1984. However, it was also then that the vast talents of Edwin Morgan and hit the peak of their reputation, and hid from view the initial phase of Kuppner’s career as a Glasgow poet. Until quite recently, the relevance of his writing to Scottish versions of postmodernism has not been given full critical attention except on the odd occasion (most notably Robert Crawford dedicated a chapter to Kuppner in Identifying Poets, in 1993), and so the unfailing commitment Carcanet Press has shown to publishing Kuppner’s po- etry and prose for about two decades now is all the more praise- worthy. Kuppner’s poetic nonconformity escapes all attempts at classification, so much so that he is described as a “West Coast indi- vidualist” swimming in the “crowded pool” of millennial poetry in Douglas Gifford’s edited volume, (2002). Gifford suggests that the closest analogy is probably ’s fiction, inasmuch as both Gray and Kuppner like to knock the reader’s expectations off balance when approaching well-established concepts such as reality, authority, quantity, extension, perception or identity. While he remains a remarkably unique talent, I think it is possible to

190 Frank Kuppner discover some further, and equally subtle, ties between Kuppner and Glasgow’s Laureate, Edwin Morgan. The works of both writers ex- hibit an exploratory imagination and an eager, sometimes even gro- tesquely scientific, intellect that tends to reach out to uncharted places wherever they be: round the corner in Glasgow or in ancient China, in outer space or in your mind, in history or in one’s own personal memory. Kuppner’s poetry collections include The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women (1987), Everything is Strange (1994) Second Best Moments in Chinese History (1997) and What? Again?: Selected Poems (2000). Two more recent collections were published by Carcanet Press: A God’s Breakfast in 2004 and Arioflotga in 2008. Among his prose books one may find A Very Quiet Street (1989), A Concussed History of (1991), Life on a Dead Planet (1996) and In the Beginning there was Physics (1999). I met him in one of those grand, European-looking cafés of Glasgow’s main street, which he must have carefully selected as the setting of the long conversation we had there, and then he gave me a personal guided tour around central Glasgow. Extracts from this inter- view were first published in Scottish Studies Review 6(1), Spring 2005.