BurnedThumb

Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

Poetry

Poetry As Conversation

Back in 2017 I wrote a piece called Speaking Beings, about the film, Paterson, in which I talked about the social, conversational nature of poetry. Since lockdown, this has been hard to achieve, except on-line, and I have clearly missed it. No readings, little writing, even less conversation, and very few submissions – most of which did not go well. I dug myself into a typical poetic ivory tower, and reflected on the inwardness of poetic existence.

Well, sometimes! Clearly, there were external things going on in my life as much as anyone else’s, but as a poet, I might just as well have been at the bottom of a well. Until last week, when two things happened.

The first was reading a couple of poems at a Zoom writers’ group event. It was lovely to be doing it again, but it showed me how big a part of the writing process reading aloud and getting the feedback is. I will never be a performance poet, but the sound and flow of what I write is really important to me, and you don’t get how it works until you have read it aloud and someone has listened. You also don’t realise, until you introduce a poem, how much is implied, rather than stated, or how much context it needs, and that’s a really important part of my reviewing process.

The second was sending my nearly-finished manuscript to two friends to read it for me. Both are working hard at their own projects just now, so this was fairly cheeky, but they are people whose judgement I value enormously, and it was the best thing I could have done. The level of engagement was beyond the missed commas (many of those) and clumsy expressions (also more than I would have liked), but criticism that made me ask myself why I had written these poems, what I was trying to achieve, and connect technique with meaning, as well as effect. It was a wonderful experience, I can’t recommend it too highly!

Poetry as dialogue has always seemed to me important as a way of being in the world, but it is also an important part of the composition process. If you are the sort of poet who doesn’t read other poets for fear of being influenced, or if you go from amassing a heap of poems to trying to get a book out (especially if you want to self-publish), your work is almost inevitably half-finished, and you are selling yourself short.

So this blog post goes out as a special thankyou to Rothbury Writers Group, Helen Boden, and John Bolland, for getting me out of the well, and beyond them, to all the writers groups, events organisers, festivals, competitions and magazine editors who have been part of my life as a writer. You make my work what it is.

February 10, 2021
The Well of the Moon

This was taken at New Grange, looking over the Boyne Valley, where Finn got his wisdom. The famous story, which you’ll find referred to on the poetry page is about cooking the salmon of wisdom and is all about how destiny will get the good stuff to the right person, but there is another story, referred to in Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men, and nowhere else, as far as I can see, about how Finn went to the Well of the Moon, which was guarded by the daughters of Beag, son of Boan (the goddess of the Boyne river) to get the sort of wisdom poets need. They wouldn’t give him any water, but when he tried to take some, one of them emptied a bottle of it over him —

The result (allegedly) is a pair of poems which are frequently anthologised, on the subject of summer and winter. I like Lady Gregory’s translation, because it includes the line: ‘the talking of rushes has begun’. The whole landscape seems alive, waterfalls calling out, seas asleep or awake, plants talking to each other, horses and people alert and active. These poems make the point that poetry is a matter of attention to all the beings of the world, listening trying to understand and communicate.

Which is a long way of getting to a bit of news that I sneaked out on Twitter last week. Thanks to the phenomenal organisation of Sheila Wakefield, battling through the havoc created by the pandemic, Red Squirrel Press have given the next collection a publication date – in May – and, after a lot of swithering, dithering and distraction, I have a final title: The Well of the Moon. This is also the title of a sequence of five poems, including Burnedthumb, which are the heart and pivot of the book. Because of the Burnedthumb motif, there are a few rather free translations or perhaps, responses to translations, in it, from Old English, Old Norse, and Latin. Honestly, I didn’t realise how much of this I had done, and why it was so important to my work.

The Latin one is a hymn to St Felix by a poet called Paulinus of Nola, whom I found in The Wandering Scholars, by Helen Waddell. He was a bishop of Nola (354-431) whom Waddell mentions as a pupil of the poet Ausonius (310-395), in connection with poems Ausonius wrote to him, lamenting the fact that Paulinus didn’t visit. This struck a chord with me, because no-one is visiting anyone just now, and as it turns out that it is the feast of St Felix today, I found myself writing this:

For Distant Friends

Written on 14^th January 2021

It is the feast of Felix, and though the snow
makes roads a penance, I am working
on a springtime poem from a long dead man
in Italy. He serves a shrine to Felix, ransoms slaves,
sends loving poems to his teacher, missing him.
The teacher comments, ‘He answered many things,
but did not say that he would come’.
My friends, I can’t come either. More
than winter weather, bad roads, the fall of empires
keeps us apart, but like Paulinus, I send you
poems of love, of memory, of debts I owe you,
hope for better times, a promise to keep you
close to my heart, although I cannot come.

waterfall at Glendalough

January 14, 2021
The Season of the Witch

This is the title of a song by Donovan – you can hear it here. But it’s also an appropriate title for what’s happened here in the Haggard. Lockdown has given me more chance to read, and though its fair to say a lot of it has been thoughtless escapist reading, there has been a lot of reading that was truly excellent, thought-provoking, joyful or inspiring. For poetry there was Seán Hewitt, Rebecca Sharp, Natalie Diaz and David Morley, but there has also been prose from Alice Tarbuck, Rebecca Tamás, Elizabeth Jane Burnett and William Least-Heat Moon.

While I’ve been thinking about the burned thumb legends, Finn and the salmon, Sigurd and the dragon’s heart and the cauldron of Ceridwen for the next collection, it occurred to me how much of today’s writing concerns by crossing the barriers between us and the other creatures we share the world with. There is a lot of shamanic writing about, and a lot of witches.
There was a time when witches on the internet were gentle wise earth-mother people, much into self-care and spirituality, the sort I had in mind in my poem in Haggards:

She haunts you, that possible self,
a wise earth mother, whose pots
run over with good food, medicine,
dyes for hand spun wool, or soap.
There’s comfort in that channelled woman
who knows her place, seductive
as Circe, but nurturing, her power
contained in that small scented realm.
There’s glamour there, the lure
of home, an art-nouveau dream
of flowing skirts, long hair,
a voice of power, though gentle,
glimpsed firesides, the feel of magic
in the dim cave of your house,
archetypal,
Dreaming of Herb Gardens

You can still find many of them at the Earth Pathways Diary, (where, however, they are very much less quietist than you might think). They were peaceful, misunderstood but anti-intellectual and a little bit anarchic, no threat to anyone really, and wasn’t it a shame that so many were burned?

These witches are not at all like that. A lot of the witch-writing is not only heavy-duty intellectual, but academic, and it is no longer a gentle faerie aesthetic side-line to mainstream culture, but is seriously engaged in creativity, environmental activism, feminism and politics.

Alice Tarbuck

Alice Tarbuck’s A Spell in the Wild looks at first sight to be a book of the familiar sort, with its recipes, its lyrical nature writing and its reminiscences. It is a most endearing and engaging read, but it deftly tucks a lot of something much more subversive and interesting under its ‘broad-brimmed fetching black hat’. Tarbuck is very clear about the fallacy of romantic connections with beautiful or wild spaces as a prerequisite for magical connection. Witchcraft for Tarbuck is not an aesthetic nor an escape from uncomfortable reality. She writes graphically about the squalor of the urban settings most people have access to, finding as much connection to the weeds growing in cracks in tarmac and gulls scavenging among the litter as among woods and fields and mountains.

We’d like to do our magic in beautiful places: in green fields by clear rivers, in lovely cottages, all stone and roses round the door. But the world is full of municipal buses, and drying greens, and scrubby grass that’s been kicked up by football boots. It’s full of squirrels eating spring bulbs and broken bottles on pavements and uncollected Christmas trees, and dog shit. It’s full of crumbling flats and expensive heating, and friends we love getting fucked over for jobs, or getting ill. It is full of precarity, and worry, fascist governments continents catching fire and the long shadow of global pandemic. P 9.
We bring things into relation with ourselves, to help us practise effectively, but those things can be, well, almost anything. Empty pizza boxes, our child’s crayons, whatever we have to hand —We make magic as best we can, with what we have, acknowledging that everything in the world, from the most beautiful thing to the least, exists in relationship to us. P11
A Spell in the Wild, p 9-11

Her understanding of witchcraft is explicitly inclusive, avoiding some of the pitfalls that plague a lot of pagan groups – nativism, heteronormative assumptions or preoccupation with giftedness. It is grounded very firmly in her urban experience of precarious employment, deprivation, marginalised communities and environmental destruction. It questions the oppressive structures of society and creates agency in a world where we are increasingly directed to become cogs in the machine.

Rebecca Sharp

Rebecca Sharp published a pamphlet called The Beginners recently in which she and sound artist Simon Whetham create images and sounds relating to human occupation and abandonment of landscapes. Opening with the phrase, ‘This is becoming a ritual’, the images and texts establish a process of connecting and learning, leaving and re-learning what it means to live in places that may be new to us, but have an old life of their own.

In an earlier work, Peripheral Visions: Edge Hill Arcana, she uses tarot to unlock creative responses to various locations around the university. As she explains in the accompanying essay it is ‘a creative response that aims to restore ‘individual perception, practice and agency’ while nourishing meaningful experiences of connection: demonstrating the ability of those divinatory objects and systems in the construction of meaning story and place.’ (p54) Divination, she points out, is less prophecy and more imaginative reconstruction of perceived norms – a desire to reclaim individual identity and agency in the world’ (p56).

Rebecca Tamás

Rebecca Tamás goes one giant step further. In The Songs of Hecate: Poetry and the Language of the Occult, an article in The White Review (issue 24 march 2019) she writes:

My particular occult interest is the witch – the witch as an explosively radical female figure, a site of resistance, a way out of silence and silencing. What she has made possible for me is a new relationship with poetic speaking, with the power of the word, and with what that power might make possible for liberatory, feminist thinking.The Songs of Hecate
The Songs of Hecate

In her collection Witch, she does just this, in explosively original poetry. Here the witch comments on the suffragettes:

Again somehow the witch finds it is about eating and not eating
they don’t eat and so they are made to eat
she asks a policeman ‘what is it with this eating thing?’
but he doesn’t know why just that when a woman eats
she is eating for the state
when she watches her friend forced to lie back and be fed
she retches
the feeding is the same as being sick it is the same as not
being fed because it leaves you hungry
ghost meal fattened with air.
WITCH AND THE SUFFRAGETTES

Tamás gleefully embraces all the misogynistic stereotypes thrown at women – witch, hooligan, nag, sex demon – and uses them in a blazing critique of the whole patriarchal hegemony from capitalism to religious orthodoxies, government to academia, right down to the philosophical gate-keeping of assumptions about ‘rationality’. I have been impressed with this book since I read it, but when I went through looking for quotes, I realised I’d forgotten how adventurous it really is. It is hard to find quotes suitable for this blog, though – when the cover describes it as a ‘small bright filthy song’, that isn’t an understatement.
As a Catholic, I have enough rituals and symbols in my life already, and there are a lot of places where I would disagree strenuously with many of the arguments made in these books. But I can’t deny we need such a radical rethink of current orthodoxies, and there is plenty of find common ground. My attention was drawn, when I was writing the ‘valiant women’ section of The Wren in the Ash Tree for Haggards, to the way women activists often act out of an awareness of the connections between campaigning for their own rights to tackling poverty and environmental exploitation.

Women whose signals were sent
through poetry and politics, songs
and planted forests, women whose voices
cry out for the poor, for democracy,
for the life of women, for the earth.
The Wren in the Ash Tree: There are Lights

In Strangers, Tamás makes this connection more explicit, writing about ‘watermelon people’, green outside, socialist within. I’ll finish with her vision of a world that is really willing to tackle the problems we face.

‘such a radically different world may not be as comfortable as what we in the west currently experience. It might, however, be a world with many more forms of thinking available to us – of joy, of freedom, of pleasure, of community, of self-worth and of love’
Strangers, p23

November 27, 2020
And So Today

And so today, you ask me
What is your life about?
Why are you? What do you mean?
What is your function, what are you for?
And I will have to tell you
about the woodpecker drumming
and the carpet of celandines
below the old railway bridge,
the wrens defending their gardens
in a mad trill of music,
the sourdough bubbling in the kitchen
and the warm smell of soup,
the logbooks stacked beside my chair,
the firelight, a growing poem.

A springtime poem, but this is the mood for today. The world seems to be going to hell in a handcart, and there isn’t anything I can do about it, apart from this. I’m not making any great claim for it, but it isn’t exactly frivolous either. Love grounded in reality is where we need to start from. I’m sending love.

October 6, 2020
Tongues of Fire by Seán Hewitt

Front cover

This book is the one I waited for most anxiously, having read Seán Hewitt’s debut pamphlet Lantern last year. It didn’t disappoint. Right from the opening poem, the quiet, but not at all understated Leaf, you have some idea what you are in for:

For woods are the form of grief
grown from the earth. For they creak.
——
For even in the nighttime of life
it is worth living, just to hold it
Tongues of Fire p. 1

This collection is all about grief, chiefly for the slow death of the poet’s father from cancer, but also the deaths of friends and contemporaries by suicide, and the loss of love. The book is heavy and heartfull with grief, but it is not a sad book. It studies darkness and night, but also light, air and water.

It is essentially a ‘moniage‘ book, a going out into nature to discover wisdom and meaning, and it is full of trees, birds and plants. The poems about wild garlic and St John’s Wort are among my favourites, and I wish I had come across the latter when I did the St John’s wort newsletter! But Oak Glossary

In oak,
essential nouns include soil,
water and time – these are produced
from their elements. Water is a high
and gentle noise of clearest quality
which results from branches dripping
Tongues of Fire p16

and I Sit and Eavesdrop the Trees show the poet entering deeply into the life of other living things, rather than discussing how they figure in our lives. As a gay man in a very Catholic environment, the poet must consciously go ‘outside’ to think about his relationships and sexual identity, and he discovers a place full of secrets, danger and death, but also strength, wisdom and love.

The crux of the book is Hewitt’s ‘versions’ (as opposed to direct translations) of Buile Suibhne, the twelfth century Irish epic about a king who is cursed with madness by a monk, and has to live in the woods among the birds (I can’t find any justification for the assertion that he becomes a bird himself in the translations available to me). Seamus Heaney produced a translation in 1985, and I’ve found it useful to compare the two. Heaney’s Sweeney is a very physical, forceful disruptive man, reacting with violence whenever he is crossed, and rampaging about Ireland

poking his way into hard rocky clefts,
shouldering through ivy bushes
unsettling falls of pebbles in narrow defiles
wading estuaries
breasting summits
trekking through glens.
Sweeney Astray p.10

He winds up in Glen Bolcain, a valley of madmen, where he has to fight for the best of the wild watercress, and he is ‘flailed’ by the thorn bushes where he has to sleep, and battered by falling from branches which don’t bear his weight. He is always on the defensive, getting into fights with people who comment on his plight, and the weight of the poem falls on the loss of the social world he used to inhabit.

Hewitt’s Sweeney is quieter, and more introspective, lonelier and more vulnerable

no matter where I go
my sins follow. First,
the starry frost will fall
at night onto every pool
and me left out in it, straying.

Hewitt focusses on the friendships Sweeney forms first with the madman Fer Caille whom he meets in Britain, and with whom he agrees to protect each other until Fer Caille’s death, and then with the monk Moling, through whom he is healed, and who mourns his death. People have often seen this poem as a clash between an oppressive Christianity, and a more pagan pantheism, but in this version, Hewitt seems to create an reconciliation between the two worldviews, without necessarily giving ascendancy to either.

I find this elsewhere in the book, particularly in the final section – Tree of Jesse and the title poem Tongues of Fire, which is a reflection on the fungus clavariiforme (you can see it on the cover), which he finds in the woods, and also on the Pentecostal tongues of flame. In spite of the close attention to Biblical motifs, it is not exactly clear who or what he asks

for correlation – that when all is done,
and we are laid down in the earth, we might
listen, and hear love spoken back to us.
Tongues of Fire p.69

My own reflections on our relationship to the earth and the question of moniage in particular, will be a long time brewing, but start here. This is a stunning book.

September 25, 2020
Living La Vida Lockdown -The Burnedthumb Ring

I expect a lot of us have made random purchases during the lockdown. I know one family who bought a tap floor for dance practice, and a lot of people who got seriously obsessed with Animal Crossing. Then there are customised facemasks and wish-listed box sets, plus all the things we bought to help out the small independent producers or because supermarkets couldn’t supply our usual stuff – I probably won’t go back to supermarket bread flour, or big brand soap and shampoo even when this is over. My purchase, which I would never have bought without the weirdness we are living in, is the Burnedthumb ring.

If you’ve been around since I started this blog, you’ll know how important the legend of the salmon of wisdom, and how Fionn mac Cumhaill burned his thumb cooking it, and accidentally became able to understand the languages of all living beings, is to my poetry. This poem is from The Territory of Rain, published in 2015

Land Speaks
Land speaks to the seed
of rock and sand and water
in the language of rush and heather,
deep-rooted trees and scavenging gorse.

Land speaks to the builders of nests
of wind and rain in the scour of river banks,
the burn’s swift rush of water in the creeks
the deep moss-cushions, the sway
of tall firs and the lie of wind blows.

Land speaks to the crawlers
of frost and sun, soft going and dry,
in the bleached grass, and cracked seed-case,
the rise of small flies to the swallow’s beak.

Land speaks to the trees
of growth and blossom and failing
in the depth of pine needles on the forest floor
the decay of last year’s leaves, and the green dust
of new seedlings on the wet mulch.

Land speaks to the buzzard
of running voles, and rabbits nibbling
the soft stems of clover and primrose flowers.

Land speaks to the bat
in lengthening days, warm nights
of insects swarming, circling over the grass.

Land speaks of summer and winter
in the language of warbler and waxwing,
in rose and ivy flower, mist and lightning,
tree-rings, lichens and weathering stone.

and the central image of The Wren in the Ash Tree is the ‘web of speaking beings’ that is the earth and everything in it. I have been revisting it as I write the big scary poems that I need to form the heart of the next collection, and when I browsed Instagram (at a particularly low point!) and found this ring, with its shape inspired by the tail fin of a salmon, I frankly couldn’t resist it. And then, in a moment of pure serendipity, I discovered the concept of Deep Mapping in a soon to be published pamphlet by Rebecca Sharp and Simon Whetham (watch this space), which has brought so much thinking into focus, and has set me back on the right track.

Thank goodness for random purchases!

May 27, 2020
Virtual Launch: There Will Be Dancing by Kemal Houghton

In the unusual circumstances posed by the corona virus, formal launches of Poetry have been cancelled – at least for now. So I would like to welcome you to the virtual launch of publications by Red Squirrel Press.

Electric Minstrel

Plugged-in and tunes selected,
the electric minstrel fills the air
with a beat they will know
and a voice that must coax.
Some may glance her way
in the lull of conversations,
but she is the salt of the diners;
the liquid of the glass.
Her mother was a jukebox,
her father played the fiddle.
Long ago there was someone
playing a lute while people, as always,
shouted over the racket.

Her job is to entertain,
distract and take away the silence.
She is in every town, every encampment,
wherever people have knotted together.
She drives through the rain, as she always has,
down mud-spattered lanes
with carts or whatever could be carried
on groaning backs. And this road is no place
for the squeamish. Many have fallen; Buddy Holly,
Johnny Kidd, Eddie Cochran are just a few.

Yet she will battle above the rows,
the women who teeter towards a fight
and the drunken laughter. She
will get their attention.
Now someone is singing in the corner,
bodies unwittingly move to the beat.
They have learned to accept her voice
and there will be dancing.

Every Drop

I am the drip that wears the stone,
darkly I fill the upland wastes,
then trickle the hillside where I
crash and fall. I am the roar
at the valley’s heart where I sing
my song as I dash to be free.

I am the green upon the lawn,
the juice that feeds the forest pine,
each little sip the sparrow takes,
each cup of tea, each cask of wine.

Trapped underground, I have distilled
the years where I’ve been the maker
of caverns and spires. Caught out by
the cold at the roof of the world
or at the Earth’s poles where I turn
so solid I can crush the rocks.

Your great ships may cruise me, careless
you’ve abused me as you clutter
the oceans with pain. But I am
the one drop inside your collar
who’ll shudder a chill down your spine.

Tougher than Belfast steel, I am
heavier than the air you breathe;
I am the force that can sweep you
away. I will rise and fill up
these fields, drown your crops and livestock;
this planet has always been mine.

From the stiffness in the plant’s stem,
the liquid in the blood, I float
all the things you do and I am
always
the better part of you.

Offa’s Dyke Path: In Mist

The pace of life slows to a step
along each rugged or muddied
path. We slide in the wetness, feel
the fall of the earth beneath us.

All sense of place is muddled here
in the fog of the hills. Valleys
are lost, even the route ahead
is consumed by the fallen cloud.

Company is sparse. Huddled shapes
mist past: walkers, wild ponies, but
mostly sheep. Few words are spoken,
just the duplicitous skylark
singing us away from her nest.

Through faith we follow the way down,
markers mostly point the right way,
though some need interpretation.
Guidebooks and GPS all help.

We enter each new town the way
people have done throughout the years;
strange pilgrims in search of shelter.

Kemal Houghton lives on the Wirral. He is Chair of the Chester Poets, a co-presenter at First Thursday in Heswall and of Poetry Roundup on the internet station Vintage Radio. He is on the planning group for the Wirral Poetry Festival and has run numerous workshops for both the festival and other community groups. He has a diverse body of work which has appeared in Chester Poets’ Anthologies since 1981, Poetry Scotland, Poetry Cornwall, The Jabberwocky Green Book, and on-line on Three Drops of the Cauldron. A retired social worker, Kemal now chairs the charity and not for profit organisation, Wirral Independent Living & Learning who provide support to people with learning disabilities. In his ‘spare time’ he enjoys hill walking and completed the 189 miles from Chepstow to Prestatyn along the Offa’s Dyke Path in 2018.

This is Kemal’s first pamphlet on Red Squirrel Press and sets out with A Sense of Purpose to explore, not just people and places, but attitudes to and our relationship with the world we live in. Amongst the many ideas collected over the years, be assured ─ There Will Be Dancing.

“There is a reassuring solidity in these poems, which encompass themes of time passing, evanescence and journeying on foot. Yet conversely there is also a disconcerting sense of the poet observing life from a very distant vantage point. A worthy first collection.” Gill McEvoy

You can buy copies of this book from the Red Squirrel Press website, or signed copies from Kemal’s site when it goes live. And later this year, we hope to have live launches, with the usual wine and (potentially) squirrel cookies!

March 20, 2020
Virtual Launch: Heft by David J Costello

In the unusual circumstances posed by the corona virus, formal launches of Poetry have been cancelled – at least for now. So I would like to welcome you to the virtual launch of publications by Red Squirrel Press. The first is Heft by David J Costello.

Heft

Altitude affects them.
Fixes contours in their flesh.
They learn the valleys from their mother’s milk,
assimilate the paths’ worn ink, the brutal rock,
the hoarse voice of the heather.
Every lamb is impregnated with its map.

Each day the shepherd and his dogs
corral them on the lower slopes
but their internal compass
tugs them back into their heritage of rock,
the heather’s cackle,
and the milky-white cartography of snow.

Visiting Time

He found her name
amongst the unused words
his mouth forgot it knew

and like a moth
discovering a flame
he caught the flicker
of her face inside it’s frame

and for the briefest time
became aware
of all the loss and loneliness
that kept him there

until his tears erased her to a blur
and cleansed his grief.
Her visits seemed so very brief.

Moth

Drawing the curtains dislodged it.
Now it bothers me at night.
The whirr of its wings.
Its little thermals bristling
the stubble on my face.
The way it nuzzles into dreams.

I see it with my eyes closed.
Its floury wings dibble
powdery clouds all over the place
and now it speaks to me as well.
I never catch its question
but I recognise the voice.

Your last words when you fell asleep
and I got up and drew the curtains back.

David J. Costello lives in Wallasey, England. He has been widely published and anthologised. David has won prizes in a number of competitions including both the Welsh International Poetry Competition and the Troubadour International Poetry Competition. His latest pamphlet, No Need For Candles, was published by Red Squirrel Press in 2018. David’s first full collection Heft is published by Red Squirrel Press in 2020.

You can buy copies of this book from the Red Squirrel Press website, or signed copies from David’s site at https://www.davidjcostellopoetry.com/ . And later this year, we hope to have live launches, with the usual wine and (potentially) squirrel cookies!

March 20, 2020
StAnza 2020

Eleanor Livingstone and Annie Rutherford, the power behind StAnza

Thank you StAnza, that’s a wrap. I am going to write the poetry version of this blog for InterlitQ later this month, full of thoughts about the complex multi-layered nature of identity and how poetry can open up the two-dimensional focus we can get from news, social media and television, assumptions about women’s poetry, diversity and neurodiversity, and a lot more wonderful stuff, but this blog is about the other thing – the experience of StAnza.

This year was a very good StAnza for me. I was in a very comfortable B&B on the other side of town, where I could see trees from my window and hear blackbirds and mallards on the river more than seagulls. It was quiet there, and I didn’t have to deal with the beer festival. There were fish suppers and fruit scones, and plenty of bookshops to browse in, and I went to more events than I think I’ve ever got to before.

I bought more books than I’ve ever bought before too, and even at that I didn’t get Jay Bernard’s or Caroline Forche’s – which I can see I will have to remedy as soon as I can. The poetry was as good as you would be led to believe by the brochure, and the Byre now sells ice cream in the intervals of the Centre Stage events, so boxes ticked there.

But the big thing that StAnza does is something I don’t think you get so much elsewhere. It doesn’t feel like a series of separate events, so much as one long poetry party. Poets don’t come, do their gig and disappear, they come to a lot of things, and hang about and chat in the Byre and the coffee shops. Because the Byre is not just the auditorium, it is genuinely a hub where you meet everyone (it’s a bit like Lisdoonvarna for that). And people come back every year, so you can look around the audience and see loads of people you know and find out what people are writing and who is being published this year, and projects are set up, connections made and faces you know from Facebook become actual people.

For a poet, if you don’t work in academia or publishing, there was also something else you don’t get everywhere. It was really important to spend several days with people for whom poetry is not a marginal activity, not private or sentimental or eccentric, but a subject of enormous range and importance, worthy of proper professional attention to technique and subject matter. It is important to see how poets take on the important issues of the world, and how practice in the arts relates to other aspects of life. And beyond that, it was very good to see women talking about their work, and claiming the right to take it seriously and to have it taken seriously, in the way men do, and women often seem to apologise for.

StAnza is a gift to poets, at every level, and we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the Board, all the volunteers – most of whom come back every year too, and the team – especially Eleanor Livingstone and Annie Rutherford, who take care of every detail, who seem to know everyone and remember all the names, who keep calm in the face of every crisis that blows up, from cancelled gigs to venue switches, corona virus to pens for poets to sign their books. Thank you all, and see you next year!

March 9, 2020
The Very Peculiar (and Wonderful) Burns Supper

I was reading on Saturday night at this event. We had readings from Debbie Baker, Laura Fyfe, Anita Govan, Emma Mooney, Ailie Wallace and myself, (I’ve seen all of them before, and thought I knew what to expect, but all of them exceeded expectations, And I will happily sign Anita Govan’s ‘manifesto’, This is Poetry, any day of the week) and there was music from Amy-Lou from Dunfermline. There was also a ‘lingo bingo’ (I won a haggis) and a jumping frog competition, and it was fabulous. There will be photos on Facebook shortly, taken by SweetP Photography, and they will be amazing. Many of the profile pictures I’ve used over the years are from Sweet P.

I’d like to thank the organisers, The Write Angle, Gossip Collective who created the opportunity to access the venue, and The Macrobert Theatre who opened the Workspace for us. You all gave us a wonderful night!

I have been associated with The Write Angle for a few years. It is an arts hub which opens up opportunities for emerging poets, artists and musicians (and even the most tentative of beginners) to practise and showcase their craft, by organising events, which are always free to attend (often donations are welcome, but there is never any pressure) at which people are encouraged, and not merely invited, to show what they can do. And the results are always astonishing.

It’s not always that we hear from undiscovered geniuses who have been hiding their lights under bushels – though it does happen rather more often than you might expect – but that people who didn’t think they could write, or didn’t think they had anything to say, or who didn’t think that making art was for the likes of them, are allowed to try out their own voices. They can rely on an atmosphere which will help them to discover that whatever they have to say finds its resonance with other people, that they will be heard with friendly attention. Some will find that they are unexpectedly amongst friends, or with people who share their experiences. Some will find that telling stories isn’t just gossip, but a way into sharing memories and creating history. Some will find that they’ve said something interesting, but they’d like to find ways of doing it better, and that there are people who will help them without making them feel dumb. Some will find that the rules and restrictions which intimidated them from speaking or writing or drawing don’t always matter. Some will find that there are ways of doing what they’ve been doing for ages that they never expected.

At Write Angle events, I’ve heard story-tellers who would shame the professionals, reflective writers who can discuss current preoccupations in a more immediate way than most journalists, and singers and musicians who will be a force to be reckoned with in a year or two. I’ve seen people trying out new art forms, people wrestling with poetry who never thought that poetry was for them, or people simply realising that the way they speak is the way they are allowed to write. I’ve seen people progress from little sketches of family life to moving portrayals of historical events or searing portraits of abusive relationships. I’ve heard people try their first spoken word performances, who then went on to try a slam. I’ve heard people articulate the kind of experiences you can only share in safe spaces, and find that they are indeed safe and supportive.

A lot of this is down to the organiser (whose name never appears anywhere on the publicity, so I won’t reveal it here). He is passionate about the arts, familiar with almost every event that goes on in the Forth Valley, and brings people together in his own inimitable flamboyant way. His initiative is one that resonates very strongly with me. Art is more than self-expression – though goodness knows, we need more of that, as society becomes more homogenous and more restrictive – it is a way we can begin to think more deeply about the shape and progress of our lives, and a way we can hold conversations with each other and find common ground. And it creates a space for something we are losing more and more – a shared sense of wonder, meaning and purpose. I love this contact with organisations who put their time effort and money where their hearts are.

January 27, 2020

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