Duncan Glen: Poet, publisher, editor, designer, and excavator of Scottish literature

Duncan Glen had a distinguished academic career in creative design, retiring in 1986 as Emeritus Professor of Visual Communication from Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham. But he was also a uniquely important poet, a pioneering critic and a crucial publisher and editor committed to the enablement of others, with an open, inquisitive eye for poetry from around the world.

In Glen's disposition, the example of the poet Hugh MacDiarmid was central, although Glen's character – resolutely gentle, flinty in matters of principle but flexible, wry and generous, had little of MacDiarmid's habitual contentiousness. Glen met him in 1962, confirming his opinion that MacDiarmid was a poet whose work from the 1920s on matched that of W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

But Glen was no mere hagiographer as he followed MacDiarmid's directions to read widely in the massively under-researched archives of Scottish literature, back through Walter Scott, Robert Burns, Robert Fergusson and Allan Ramsay, to David Lyndsay, Gawin Douglas, William Dunbar and Robert Henryson, and further, into the distinctive Scottish traditions of fiction, drama and philosophy.

Few writers gain the distinction of producing a book that has the force of a revelation for a generation, but Glen achieved this with Hugh MacDiarmid and the Scottish Renaissance, published in 1964. Long before computerised libraries, armed only with card-indexes, pencils and steely commitment, Glen excavated MacDiarmid's writing life, the trajectory of a great poet's career. He went further. He helped excavate a national literature, reflecting it through the prism of a contemporary, dynamic, poetic sensibility. The bibliography alone spurred a generation of researchers and helped open up the study of the subject of Scottish literature incalculably.

Glen was born in 1933 in Cambuslang, Lanarkshire, the son of a local steelworks manager, and educated at West Coats School, Rutherglen Academy, Heriot-Watt College, Edinburgh, and Edinburgh College of Art. He was apprenticed as a compositor in Glasgow and Kirkcaldy, Fife, where he learned the art of printing and became, as he described himself, "a haunter of dance halls" and given to long walks. He married Margaret Eadie, daughter of the stationmaster at Markinch, Fife, in 1957. They were to have a son Ian, a daughter Alison, and two grandchildren.

After his National Service in the RAF, Glen worked in London and Glasgow, teaching design from 1960 to 1963 at Watford College of Technology, Hertfordshire and working as an editor at the Glasgow publishers Robert Gibson and Sons. In 1965, he was appointed Lecturer in Graphic Design at Harris College, Preston Polytechnic, Lancashire, then at Trent Polytechnic, in Nottingham, where he was Head of Visual Communication, becoming responsible for new Art and Design degree courses. From 1982 to 1986 he was Professor of Visual Communication at the polytechnic (which would later become Nottingham Trent University). He was also elected Fellow of the Chartered Society of Designers.

From 1965 to 1983, Glen edited 51 issues of the literary magazine Akros, including almost all of the senior and rising generations of Scottish poets of that period, and with valuable special issues devoted to translation, individual authors and with regular contributions of critical essays and reviews. After he closed Akros down, he started up a more fugitive journal, Zed 2 0, which he smartly designed and filled with surprises. Distribution was largely to people who knew about it. By this time, it was less a matter of getting the message out than keeping the practitioners in touch.

His scholarly work continued, including the book-length bibliography The Poetry of the Scots (1991) and co-editing an anthology of translations by Scottish poets, European Poetry in Scotland (1989). After returning to Scotland in 1987, first to Edinburgh, then back to Kirkcaldy, he began work as a local historian, co-editing an anthology of writing from Fife, Fringe of Gold.

Glen found a special welcome in the Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh, whose newsletter he designed and edited from 1988 to 2007. Reviving his own imprint, Akros, he produced new books of essays on Scottish literature, as well as Scottish Literature: a new history from 1299 to 1999 (1999) and numerous chapbook publications of individual poets.

He kept a standard of quality production but departed from regular design or colour in each chapbook and I am eternally grateful for the deep red cover and resonant blue inside card with which he surrounded my own From the Vision of Hell: an extract of Dante in 1998. He was given awards for services to literature by the Scottish Arts Council and an honorary doctorate from the University of Paisley in 2000.

Glen's crowning achievement was his own Collected Poems (2006), which gathered together work published over four decades, and was shortlisted for a Saltire Award. He was a completely distinctive poet, well-read in the American poets of the Beat and Black Mountain schools, writing a conversational long line in the language we call Scots.

He acknowledged an affinity with Walt Whitman, not as stentorian prophet, but rather as loafer, an observant eye, a quiet man given to a multitude of perspectives. Linguistically he was in a direct line with Burns and Henryson, but formally he was more closely in tune with William Carlos Williams, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the loose-shouldered versification of Ed Dorn or the informality of Tom Raworth.

His poems drift and dally attractively, often low-voltage but sometimes achieving an intensity of restrained charge, as in the elegy for his father, or the good-humoured recognition of personal limitation that informs "The Hert o Scotland". In this poem, he ruefully says that while he would wish to write grandly of Scotland, he knows no Gaelic and there are innumerable parts of the country he's never been to. A gentle satire on nationalist exceptionalism, the poem nevertheless registers an affirming desire to see national identity on a human scale. His immediate predecessor in the Scots tradition was Sydney Goodsir Smith, but where Smith was flamboyant and lavish, Glen was self-deprecating, shrewd, quizzical and reflective. Both were unfailingly warm-hearted.

Glen was also judicious and unsentimental. He could spot a fake a mile off. He knew who was merely out to make a name and who needed his support as publisher. He was characteristically enabling.

Alan Riach

Duncan Munro Glen, poet, literary historian and critic, editor and designer: born Cambuslang, Lanarkshire 11 January 1933; Lecturer in Typographic Design, Watford College of Technology 1960-63; editor, Robert Gibson and Sons (Publishers), Glasgow 1963-65; Lecturer in Graphic Design, Preston Polytechnic, Lancashire 1965-78; Head of Department of Visual Communications, Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham 1978-82, Professor of Visual Communication 1982-86 (Emeritus); married 1957 Margaret Eadie (one son, one daughter); died Kirkcaldy, Fife 20 September 2008.