Don Paterson: Playing the beautiful game

This week, the Scottish poet and guitarist Don Paterson won the Whitbread Poetry Award. Christina Patterson talks to him about football, faith and the tough arts of verse

Don Paterson was watching telly in a bedsit in Tottenham when he had an experience that changed his life. Suddenly, a pale face loomed out at him. The poet Tony Harrison was reading his work in a resonant, Yorkshire voice. Paterson was transfixed. "I thought 'I'm having some of this'," he confesses, "so I spent a year reading poetry. I was just mad for it and had a growing sense that this is what I want to do."

It was a surprising decision for a working-class boy from Dundee who had failed his Highers and left school at 16. But it was a decision that - spectacularly - paid off. Don Paterson has since won all the major poetry prizes including, in the past few days, the poetry category of this year's Whitbread awards for his new collection Landing Light (Faber, £12.99). He is regarded by many, in that phrase beloved of blurb writers, as the leading poet of his generation.

In an interview 10 years ago, Paterson said he wrote poetry "to impress women". He winces at the memory. "It sounds like something I would have said at the time," he mutters darkly. "Yes, that fits, actually - given the male insecurities. These things are complicated. You do different things for every conceivable motive that you possess."

But he did, he admits, start writing because of one woman. He "had something to say to her, and this was the best way of saying it". Where other 20-year olds might have knocked off a chunk of chopped-up prose masquerading as free verse, Paterson decided to write a "long verse letter" in couplets. For three months he worked on it, staying up half the night and reading up, obsessively, on the craft. He even read the dictionary, literally starting at A and working his way doggedly through to Z. "I didn't want to make the same mistakes I'd made as a musician," he explains, "because I'd had no formal training as a musician and regretted it. I still regret it. I'm still trying to make up for stuff there."

Paterson has worked as a musician for 20 years. It added to the buzz when his first collection, Nil Nil, came out in 1993, winning the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and a rapturous range of reviews. Paul Muldoon, king of the clever-clever poets, found it "one of the best first books of poems I've read for ages". Tom Paulin praised Paterson's gift for making "the English language buzz". The Scottish poet Douglas Dunn hailed it as "witty, intellectually nimble and eclectic". It was, perhaps, no coincedence that the quoted accolades are all from men. The title said it all.

Here was a poet who loved football, drink, sex and trains. Here, in fact, was a lad, a lad who burst onto the poetry scene just as it was being hailed as the new rock'n'roll.

It is now 10 years since the New Generation promotion in which 20 poets were hurled into the limelight and dressed in Paul Smith ski pants for a photoshoot in Vogue. There was one here, too, in the Poetry Café at Covent Garden, where we're sitting, sipping our tea: a choreographed group of poets, staring out from behind the swirly P in the window, looking moody, poetic and, in some cases, just pissed off. The general message was that poetry was no longer the preserve of middle-aged Oxbridge men. It was funky. It was edgy. It was, like, cool. And Paterson, a working-class, beer-drinking Dundonian, was a PR dream. He wrote wry, witty, dripping-with-irony pieces for the papers about life in the poetry fast line. What does he think of it all now?

"It didn't really make much difference in the long run," he declares, with a slight grimace."I think the people who came through and found themselves a readership would have done anyway. As a cultural exercise," he adds, warming to his theme, "it was a waste of time because it misrepresented the context - as if it was a much easier thing than it was."

It would be hard to accuse Paterson of writing poetry that was "easy". "Nil Nil" was not, in fact, a poem about football and the title, of the poem and the collection, did not, of course, say it all. You don't expect someone to read the dictionary and then write poems that everyone can understand.

"Nil Nil" is the last poem in an extremely challenging collection, in which the central game is not football, but the text. The poem begins with an epigraph from François Aussemain's Pensées and ends with a direct address to the reader: "In short, this is where you get off, reader;/ I'll continue alone, on foot, in the failing light,/ following the trail as it steadily fades/ into road-repairs, birdsong, the weather, nirvana,/ the plot thinning down to a point so refined/ not even angels could dance on it. Goodbye." It is trademark Paterson, combining metafictional self-consciousness with a lyrical talent that is, at times, breathtaking. It is no more about football than Eats, Shoots & Leaves is about pandas. Was Paterson irritated by the laddish label?

"Even now I get calls from people at the radio saying we're doing a wee feature and we know you love football," he sighs. "I wrote one poem that mentions football! These were the things I was thinking about at the time. And I was massively detained by sex and football... There's no point in saying I didn't invite it." Paterson no longer follows football. His team, Dundee United, has "been in the doldrums for so long". But he is still, he confesses, caught up in "the other side of the laddish thing, poetry as a game".

The shade of Borges, that prophet of postmodernism, flickers through his work, most prominently in a recurring sequence about the Alexandrian library. "It's probably run its course," he announces with a wry smile, "all that heteronymic stuff that I was doing. You get fed up with it. People get fed up with you doing it... I think it's on the way out. But you have to work your way out of these phases, you can't insist."

It was partly because of the "hellish vicious circle of self-description" that Paterson decided to turn his hand to translation and the liberating challenge of a voice that was not his own. He describes the poems in The Eyes, his "versions" of the work of the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, as "something like piano transcriptions of guitar music". Whatever they are in relation to the originals, as poems they are, quite simply, stunning. Shorn of any predeliction for postmodern tricksiness, they are subtle, profoundly meditative lyrics about God, memory and what Paterson calls, in his "Afterword" to the collection, the "via negativa". Yes, this is a poet who likes God as well as football.

It is no surprise that Paterson's God is a creature of complexity whose predominant trait is absence. Following a "mildly Calvinist" childhood and an adolescence of rare evangelical fervour, he suffered, in his late teens, a traumatic loss of faith. God died, but the search for him did not. In poetry he found a vehicle "to frame the right questions", a way of returning things "to some more infinite and mysterious state". He also found Buddhism. It is, he says, "the best way of putting these things", but "very difficult to honour in your life".

Landing Light is an extraordinary fusion of postmodern playfulness and the continuing, elusive quest for the transcendent. Here, once again, are the unreliable narrators, the intellectual labyrinths, the mythic references as metaphors for life, sex and death. Here, too, is a new staking out of territory somewhere between the domestic and the mythic, a territory which clearly reflects Paterson's own preoccupations as the father of twin boys. Dante features prominently, as in the beautiful poem to his son,"Waking with Russell": "I was mezzo del cammin/ and the true path was as lost to me as ever/ when you cut in front and lit it as you ran".

What marks Paterson out from many of his contemporaries is not just his ferocious intelligence but a moral seriousness that is particularly rare in poetry. It is, no doubt, in part the legacy of a Calvinist background, but it is clearly also the product of an unusually restless mind. At a dinner party recently, Paterson shocked his fellow diners by announcing that "poetry should be a moral project". It was, he says, "an 'I'll get my coat' moment. You know," he sighs, "that making that kind of unilateral assertion on matters moral is going to be seen as hubristic - you're getting on your high horse and getting ideas above your station". It is an impulse, against the grain of the culture, that has fuelled his next project, a book of aphorisms: "There are two legitimate things to do and between the two there's a really interesting flux, which is about asking questions, which poetry does supremely well, but also about positing some kind of possible solution... We've lost the other side of it, which is the art of assertion - which has gone, it has literally gone."

If Don Paterson is keen on assertion, there is one assertion he is reluctant to make and that, astonishingly, is that he is a poet. "I see the whole thing as a process," he declares with a flash of his piercing, blue eyes. "The poems are a process, and it terminates with publication. Thereafter, you might choose to take some parental responsibilities to the work, but no, you're not a poet. I don't buy that.

"I'm still embarrassed to say I'm a poet," says the Whitbread Poetry Award-winner, with a rueful smile. "I say I'm a writer and sometimes I say I work for the Inland Revenue, which kills the conversation. To say you're a poet is even worse."

Biography

Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. After leaving school at 16 to become a musician, he moved to London when he was 20 and started writing poetry. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 1990 and first prize, for his poem "A Private Bottling", in the Arvon Foundation International Poetry Prize in 1993. He has won most of the major poetry prizes: the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection for Nil Nil (1993); the TS Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for his second book, God's Gift to Women (1997) and this year's Whitbread Poetry Award for his most recent collection, Landing Light (Faber, £12.99), which has also been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. His other books include The Eyes (1999), his "versions" of the Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875-1939), plays for stage and radio and, as an editor 101 Sonnets: from Shakespeare to Heaney (1999). An accomplished jazz guitarist, Don Paterson works solo and with the jazz-folk ensemble, Lammas. He is poetry editor at Picador and teaches creative writing at St Andrews University. He lives in Kirriemuir with his partner, Annie, three step-children and twin sons.