detective by olarte.ollie under a Creative Commons license

Before we updated the SPL website, we had a section called Lost for Words devoted to poems people only partly remembered, perhaps from childhood, and were hoping to find again. The archive of lost poems stretched into the far distance where we’re sure people spent many happy hours browsing.  The trouble was, although it was wonderful to look over these fragments of poetry, readers didn’t often supply answers to their identity, and the section was becoming a bit of a graveyard for long-lost enquiries.  Instead now,  once a week or so, I shall flag up in a blog the interesting queries that have come in, and throw it open for you, our poetry reading friends, to help track them down.

Over Christmas and at Burns Night, people are reminded of recitations they once heard. This is the time of year when we mostly get old Scots pieces. Many are well known to us, but this month I’ve been stumped by  ‘When I was a laddie I lived with my granny / Many’s the hidin my granny gaed me / She dressed me up in the quality fashion /  and tied my garters below my knee.’ The first two lines are easily found on the web, on web sites dealing with elder abuse, as those lines can be followed by two completely different ones. Beware if you are googling the tying of garters below the knee.
I like the childish cynicism in this one:  ‘“Take two-pence from the dresser / and gang for half a gill / And if you meet your faither / Tell him you've gone for butter.” / “Butter in a bottle Mother?”’

Some of the lost poems come with a bit of history, like the one that came from a newspaper cutting in a very old fly-fishing wallet; it was clearly a favourite of the boatman, who took it to Canada with him when he emigrated in his late 80s. His family had found it, and would like to know a bit more about the poem, and who wrote it. (The poem is ‘To the River Girvan, on stepping over it at its exit from Loch Cornish’, and the first line is ‘Hail, happy Girvan, in these uplands high’.)

Somebody asked the other day how we go about finding poems, and I found it hard to summarise what we do. Each enquiry is different, but generally speaking, if I pronounce myself stumped, you can presume I will have: checked the few editions of Grangers Index to Poetry we have here; looked through our old anthologies; checked up any leads as to authors or titles of books on our own and other catalogues; trawled the internet using verbatim searches and digitised book searches; circulated the lost lines round my colleagues; and stood in the middle of the Library listening intently for the faint bells ringing somewhere inside my head.

Here’s a couple of older unsolved mysteries from the defunct Lost for Words:

About 30 years ago one of our readers had a copy of an American poem about wild geese; it was a concrete poem in that the text was set out in the shape of the sideways V formation that geese form when they fly; there was also a mention of 'the redman'.  We can’t find it, so help is needed here.

We are trying to track down a poem seen in a student publication in Edinburgh in the mid/late 1960s. The title or first line was 'When Christ came down at Macy's'. As it is Christmas, New Yorkers are 'bearing gifts of gold, frankincense and murder'; Christ is stopped from preaching by a policeman, and though He manages to get on TV, He gets ratings lower than other novelty acts. The poem ends: 'Well, I'll be damned / Indeed, said the Sky'. Our enquirer recalls that it was stated the poem was “from Spokane 's Natural” (Natural was an underground newspaper published in Spokane , Washington state between 1967 and 1970).  A challenge!

Lizzie MacGregor, Assistant Librarian

librarian2@scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk

Category: Lost for Words