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Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

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A Few Updates

I have a new computer, which is very lovely in many ways, but I am struggling to find the photos I uploaded yesterday, so until I learn the file management system on this beast, there will have to be old photos. This is one of my library, which was set up last year. Although it has a lot of books in it, it is mostly used for a chill out space for those of us who need a break from the chatter when we’re all together, and for crafting. Sometimes I feel rather uncomfortable about having so much space and access to books, when some people, especially the younger generation, find themselves struggling with access to resources to support their writing, so I’d like to find a way to share this. If you are a writer who needs to borrow or consult books that I have, let me know and we’ll see what can be done.

This is a bit of a distraction from my main intention which was to remind everyone about the poetry event at the Little biggar Festival on 28th October. The Facebook posting reads:

Biggar-based publisher Red Squirrel Press invites you to an afternoon of Red Squirrel Press poets and friends in aid of MacDiarmid’s Brownsbank, held in Biggar & Upper Clyde Museum on 28th October.

Featuring some of the best-known names in poetry, WN (Bill) Herbert, Dundee Makar and Professor of Poetry, Sean O’Brien, multi award- winning poet and Emeritus Professor, Colin Will, writer, musician, former Scottish Poetry Library and StAnza International Poetry Festival Chair, award winning Biggar-based poet Lindsay Macgregor, Andrew Forster, poet and literature development worker and was previously Literature Development Officer for Dumfries and Galloway. Elizabeth Rimmer widely-published poet, reviewer and editor, author of four collections from Red Squirrel Press and editor of the eco-poetry discussion website Ceasing Never.

Tickets available from https://www.biggarlittlefestival.com/literature/red-squirrel

There is another upcoming reading in Stirling on 4th November as part of Paperboats Day for Nature, but I will post more about this later when further details are available.

Also, I am sorry to announce that I am going to stop sending out my newsletter. I used Mailchimp, but as the parent company has announced its intention to scrape content in order to train AI, the potential for copyright infringements eems too high to be worth it. I’m looking for alternative ways of keeping in touch, as there are some subscribers who don’t follow me elsewhere on social media, but in the meantime, I can be found on BlueSky, (mostly poetry) Mastodon (mostly politics and environmental stuff) and Instagram (herbs, cooking and gardening). That’s a lot, and I’ll probably refine it as the platforms develop, but that’s where I am just now.

October 20, 2023
Becoming Botanicals

Anthology, due out in June

becoming-Botanicals is an exciting new publication featuring contributions from over 50 international artists, researchers, and practitioners who are passionate about rekindling and re-examining our human relationship with plants. Artworks, essays, poems, and provocations sit side-by-side in this multi-disciplinary kaleidoscope of botanical ponderings in the form an Herbal Encyclopaedia. —-
The book features 46 entries from over 50 international artists, researchers and practitioners spanning 6 continents–beautifully fusing academia, scientific and ecological research, art, and creative practice.
Objet-A Creative Studio.

Last September there was a call-out for submissions to this anthology, a joint project between academics at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow, and The University of Wisconsin-Madison. As you can imagine, this is just my sort of thing, and I submitted some of my herb poems. The Herb for Nightmares, about thyme, was accepted, and it will feature in this lovely book will be out in June of this year.

In fact there was a lot of good quality response to the call-out, and the publishers soon found that the project needed to be bigger than they first expected. Publisher Josh Armstrong writes:

When we first began the project, we imagined that we would print a small pamphlet with a few essays. With the overwhelmingly positive response from our call-out we decided that we should create a more full digital publication to feature more entries than we could in print. BUT–then we thought that we should follow our ambitions and the positivity of the contributors and have decided to publish all 46 entries that we selected; thats about 140 pages!
Josh Armstrong, editor

In order to deal with this expanded project, Objet-A Creativity have set up a fundraiser at Indie-go-go. The perks look very interesting! So, if you find this subject interesting, please have a look at their page, and consider pre-ordering some of the products available.

March 18, 2019
StAnza 19

The StAnza banner at the Poets’ Market on Saturday

This year’s StAnza was one of the very best (I always say that, don’t I?), no, really, it was. There was the usual mix of good things – excellent poetry, meeting up with friends, the warm welcome, rotten weather, but this time StAnza felt very special. I don’t think I did quite as much as usual, but there was time and space to think, and write and generally focus on poetry. This year, I got to think about editing, as two poets I have edited were reading. This is John Bolland whose first collection Fallen Stock, was launched in the Innes Bookshop on Saturday.

I did get to see a lot of good poets – Menna Elfyn was the standout one for me, and John Burnside, whose work I used to love, and then not so much, seemed back on form with some excellent new work, and a speech that, while it wasn’t full of new ideas to many of us, made a rousing and unequivocal assertion of the right and power of poetry to deal with politics. There was a lot about translation, which fascinates me, though I never do as much as I think I am going to, and poets from many different countries – Colombia, Catalonia, the US, Hungary. And poetry in many different forms – plenty of performance, links with music and film, and art.

The artist Nichola Martin had an exhibition in the foyer of the Byre of still life works with literature, which included this one, featuring (right at the bottom) Haggards.

Please go to her website, for a much better picture of this!

Upstairs in the Byre, artist Lindsay Turk and poet Jon Plunkett held an exhibition of artwork responding to poetry. I had the pleasure of editing this book, and Lindsay’s artwork sets it off beautifully. At the Poets’ Market on Saturday, sales of this book were brisk, and the entire first print run sold out. A new imprint is being rushed out even as you read this!

Lindsay Turk’s cover picture for Jon Plunkett’s A Melody of Sorts

I have been to other festivals, but you quickly realise that not every festival is like StAnza! It isn’t just the vision, and the wide-ranging scope if the events, but it’s the meticulous organisation. Hosting so many events in such a short space of time, accommodating so many poets – and making sure they get where they were supposed to be at the right time is an enormous achievement, but thanks to the staff of the Byre, all the cheerful volunteers and the Herculean efforts and enthusiasm of Eleanor Livingstone and Annie Rutherford, it all flows like clockwork, and there is always an atmosphere of friendly calm and willingness to help. No detail seems to escape them and they remember everybody’s name, which would defeat me. We could not be grateful enough for the work they do!

March 12, 2019
February Happenings

When you see these flowers in bloom you know that spring can’t be far off. I’ve ordered my seeds, but not sowed any yet, nor written any new poetry, but there are some special circumstances. So far February has been a very busy month, with book editing, a trip to London to see the Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts exhibition in the British Library (I’ve seen the Beowulf manuscript! I’ve seen a letter written by the scholar and bishop Alcuin to Charlemagne!), a trip to Liverpool with most of my family to celebrate my sister’s sixtieth birthday, and my daughter having a major operation, and living with us while she recovers.

I have been trying out the paces of the new camera. It can do a lot – it can practically talk to me – but it can’t do close ups so well. I’m going to need a macro lens for the flowers, and maybe a long range one for birds – this is getting expensive! but it is worth it for the way it makes me see things in more detail and in their proper context.

I’m hoping to translate this into new and rather different poems. I’ve been reading Vahni Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear, and it is like fireworks going off in my brain – the connections between words, lines, subjects and responses are not sequential but sensual, mostly visual, like mind maps. There are plays on sounds and language and visual as well as semantic connections, and you could almost read them in any direction. I am fairly sure that I couldn’t do anything like that – I get lost too easily. But after reading those poems my brain was ready for what happened next.

I am in the middle of reading Leechcraft by S Pollington, alternately impressed by the depths of his scholarship and startled by the limits of his actual experience. His identifications of plants refer to many learned sources, but I’m not sure he has ever seen any of them in his life, and he doesn’t seem aware of the many vernacular healing traditions recorded in Europe. But then I came across an exhaustive analysis of the many uses of the word ‘laec’ which became ‘leech’ and was later sometimes used as a synonym for ‘doctor’.

Pollington says that this was not the way the word was used in Old English, and quotes many sources where the word is used to mean ‘healing’, ‘exercise of skill’, ‘play’ or ‘a rite of sacrificial offering’. I once heard Patrick Stewart use the word ‘laiking’ for being variously ‘truanting from school’, ‘on holiday’ and ‘out of work’, and when I pushed this, something fell into place. ‘Laec’ is the important stuff you do when you aren’t ‘working’ – what my Church used to call ‘servile’ work’ – all the life admin, busywork, earning a living, mundane day to day stuff. ‘Laec’ is ‘recreation’ spelled re-creation as the self-help books do, holiday spelled ‘holy day’ as they used to do in the Middle Ages, the difference between ‘relieving symptoms’ and ‘healing’. It’s no wonder that industrialists and politicians like to confuse it with idleness and amusement, because it’s the stuff that can’t be bought and sold, and no-one else can do it for you.

This provided the link between my random musings about colour, craft, tradition and memory, the sense of self and the bond with community. I’m off on a poetic journey, but before I go, I’ll leave you with another spring-time picture from my garden.

February 18, 2019

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