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PoetryCon StAnza 2022

My daughter refers to StAnza as my PoetryCon. As in Convention, like ComicCon which features so often in the Big Bang theory. There’s not so much cosplay, though somebody did once enter the Slam wearing a powdered periwig, (my daughter begs to differ – ‘You ALL dress like poets’, she says) no film stars and very little merch except books, but she is right. Though she says it’s more nuanced than that. She is a comic artist herself, and says that StAnza is not so much like the big Cons, where readers go to see the re-enactments of their favourite comics, more like one called Thought Bubble, which is where comic artists go to hear their favourite artists talk about how to write or draw comics, and engage with the function comics perform in the wider worlds of art and society. As well as displays and panels, book signings and sales, there are outreach events within local communities, and a strong grass roots presence.

This describes the much-loved atmosphere of StAnza as we have come to know it. I have been to other festivals, and I do get the impression that they are places people drop into for the highlight events, and the big names, and then maybe tack on something attractive that is happening in the day or two they are there. That is not how StAnza works. For years I have been trying to write a StAnza-based parody of Christy Moore’s Lisdoonvarna because I can’t think of anything else that comes quite so close:

Everybody needs a break
Climb a mountain or jump in a lake ——

We go there and they come here.
Some jet off to … Frijiliana,
But I always go to Lisdoonvarna.

We go to St Andrews. We go for the whole thing. We book tickets recklessly and we go to everything we can until we fall over. You can see people dashing between venues to get from one event to the next, and the B&Bs and pizza places and coffee shops are full of poets all the time. The Byre Theatre is a hub,

Ramble in for a pint of stout,
you’d never know who’d be hangin’ about!

Well, you get tea and scones, during the day, or coffee and shortbread, though there is usually a lot of alchohol drunk later – and you get the gossip. This year, after a two year hiatus, it was like a dam bursting. We had a LOT of catching up to do!

Of course the big names are there. I’ve seen Jackie Kay, Don Paterson, Caroline Forche, Mark Doty, Gillian Clarke, Moya Cannon, Seamus Heaney and John Burnside. I’ve seen poets from all over the world. I’ve seen poetry films, comics, installations, performance poetry, music. The big name poets don’t just perform, they hold workshops and round tables, panel discussions and protests. They do sign books, but you can also find them hanging about in the Byre. There are plenty of book sales – Innes Bookshop during StAnza is the only place you can see poetry bookshelves raided and empty like a late night bakery stall, and the Poets Market is a valuable lifeline and showcase for small presses and pamphleteers.

But there is also a strong grassroots presence. The independent Scottish presses are there. The developments in newer poetry are represented and showcased alongside the familiar and established trends. Fledgling presses have the opportunity to test themselves against the heavyweights, and poets who might have found themselves at a distance from livelier centres get a chance to hear what’s going on and contribute. We compare notes, and collaborate, develop new projects and make new connections. When I came to Scotland there was what we called a ‘Scottish cringe’ – a feeling that Scottish culture was provincial, nostalgic, undeveloped – and that you needed to attract the attention of London to make an impact. I honestly think that has gone now, and events like StAnza, with its emphasis on encouraging Scottish, Gaelic and Shetlandic alongside English, and its confident opening of doors to a multi-cultural perspective, has had a lot to do with it. A tall tree needs deep and wide-spreading roots, and here is where we grew them. One performance poet said of StAnza, ‘You took us seriously when we didn’t know how to take ourselves seriously’.

If I felt that this dimension was lacking this year, I’d have to make a few qualifications. Clearly covid took a flamethrower to most of our assumptions and habits. Long-term planning after last year’s wonderfully light-footed and ingenious digital version couldn’t really start while new variants and changes of regulations were happening all the time, and applying for funding in such a challenging environment must have been a nightmare. You couldn’t predict how many people would be able to come, or feel confident in sharing spaces, especially as a lot of us aren’t exactly spring chickens, and travel was difficult and unpredictable even before the Ukraine situation happened. Also – and this took me by surprise – we had looked forward to being back among our tribe so much and we were so excited to be there, that the experience became intense and overwhelming. We weren’t used to being around so many people. We weren’t used to travelling. We lost things, forgot to pack things, locked our keys in our hotel rooms (just me? I don’t think so!). We got tired and emotional. My daughter used to talk about ‘con drama’ – a cocktail of too many people, too many events, not enough food and less sleep – and we all felt it. Some of us started cutting events earlier than usual, some went home early, a few of us got ill and had to stay in bed instead of getting into the things we’d come for. It wasn’t the same.

But then, how could it be? Things were inevitably going to change, and if we felt understandably disappointed, we need to think of new possibilities. But I would like to think we could appreciate what we had without being simply obstructive. This year had some real gems of highlights. My favourites were poetry from Vahni Capildeo, Hannah Lowe and JL Williams, discussions about Modernism and TS Eliot from Paul Muldoon and Sandeep Parmer, the lecture about the discussion of migration and human rights in poetry by Mona Arshi. Other people loved Robin Robertson’s reading, William Letford’s verse novel work in progress and the discussion of erasure poety and narrative by Alice Hiller and Gail McConnell. We had the extra curricular delights of gulls, the beach, pastries at the poetry breakfasts, fish suppers and reunion pizzas with people you only see at StAnza. We hung out in the Byre as usual, much to the bafflement of the staff who kept warning us the bar was closed. It was lovely.

Feedback questionnaires are going to be online this year, so we missed Annie’s ‘fill in your phones and turn off your questionnaires’, and I will have to think very carefully about how I raise some of the issues on my mind. I know the hard-working and invariably courteous and helpful StAnza staff and volunteers pulled off their usual marvel, and I want to give them my unqualified thanks and appreciation.

We will definitely be back next year, with our blank notebooks and empty suitcases for all the new poetry. Floreat StAnza!

March 14, 2022
Snow

I was not expecting this today. Just enough for a frosting, and now with a bright clear sky giving us more light than we seem to have had for weeks. This is the haggard behind the house, open ground that was turned over back in the summer, and then left. I hope it goes on being left. There is ivy on those hawthorns, which were thick with berries in the autumn, and mugwort and plantain and bistort growing through the heavy clods of turned earth. I am interested to see what else will grow if it goes on being neglected, but I have the feeling that it will be grassed and planted with the trees the developer seems to favour – flowering cherry, lime, whitebeam. Not that these are too bad – they all have wildlife-friendly blossom and the whitebeam has berries, but I bet the grass will be mowed within an inch of its life.

This garden is wider than our previous one, but less deep, so the birds on the feeder are closer to us, and they give our garden life and character that it otherwise would miss. House sparrows and tree sparrows seem to live alongside each other harmoniously, and we aren’t too bothered by the rampaging city pigeons we used to see, though we do have a few wood pigeons, as you can see here.

The goldfinch shows the scale! We have a few chaffinches too, and occasional dunnocks and robins, and coal tits, great tits and blue tits. Once there was a small flock of long-tailed tits clinging to the fatballs, clustering like barnacles on a ship’s hull, and giving their soft sweet contact calls, as if they were pensioners on a day out: ‘are you there? Are you keeping up? have we lost Annie? no, there she is’.

There are starlings too, but I miss the blackbirds and thrushes. When the berries were first ripe they came in over a weekend, but they seem to have moved on for the most part. I hear them on the woody path, or in the park, but not here. I’ve heard wrens too, but they are shy and secretive, and I’m not surprised. We have a lot of cats on this estate.

The big miss is the geese. Winter does not seem like winter without the blanket of cloud, quilted with the skeins of pink-foots and greylags going over, the aimless swirls of them going to roost, the dedicated squadrons coming south in Octoberr, going north in March. I am looking for different markers for the slow opening of the lengthening day here, and yesterday I found them. The first long, tenderly pink rhubarb

and the marmalade oranges. About now, my mother-in-law used to ring around all her daughters asking ‘Have you made your marmalade yet?’ and we would discuss recipes and the quality of oranges and the price of sugar. I miss this a lot. She made it in great quantities every year, much of it given to family and friends or sold at a church fete. I don’t make nearly so much, because I’m the only one in our house who likes it, but nothing else tastes so good as homemade marmalade, so here it is

I have taken few photos of the Place of the Fire so far, kept close to the house by weather, strangeness, and a bad knee, but as I learn the rhythms of this new place, I am discovering the places with things to tell me, and learning when to take my camera out.

January 7, 2022
Last Post Before Christmas

This was not going to be the last post before Christmas. There was going to be something a bit more festive and encouraging next week, with maybe a Christmas tree on it, or the gingerbread house we made with the grandchildren, and this was going to be more meditative and grounded. However, I have been overtaken by events, and I know that I will be too busy to be back here before New Year.

I have been casting up accounts of how the year went, and it’s been quite momentous in several ways, and much has changed since last year. After many years of caring for my daughter, a change in her diagnosis meant a very different outlook and prospects for her, and we have been working through the implications not only for her, but for all of us. Things are more stable now than they have been for a long time, and the house move I’ve been writing about since September was a big part of that.

The house has been a big change. It isn’t only the physical differences, the higher ground, the westerly milder weather, a landscape that is more definitively urban, a new house rather than one over a hundred years old, it’s the community. People here are much more extraverted, decorating houses more lavishly for Halloween and Christmas, more talkative in the street when they are out walking, more demonstrative about things they like or don’t like. It’s a younger community, by and large, and there are more children because it’s a new family centred estate, and many more dogs, because people typically moved in just before lockdown, and they all got dogs, or cats. But the dogs are mostly well-behaved, because you know there would be consequences if they weren’t. I am not at all a dog person, but I find I am considerably calmer around them now than I ever expected to be.

Then there was The Well of the Moon, which came out in June.

There was a time when I didn’t think I could write this book, and a time when I wondered if I could publish it. It had some very personal stuff in it, and some wild experiments. And yet it has had more lovely things said about it than any of my books, and I have sold more copies. It launched at St Mungo’s Mirrorball, which is an enormous privilege, and I had the pleasure of reading from it, not in my home town exactly, but in New Brighton, close enough that two of my siblings were able to be there.

COP 26 was a significant moment. Not as big a turning point as we might have wished, nor producing the results we needed, exactly, but it did demonstrate to the powers slowing us down that most people need more action, bigger changes and deeper understanding, and more of us are taking action to see that it happens, and to make changes in our own lives.

There have been losses this year, the father of one of my children’s oldest friends, William Bonar, the brilliant poet in his own right and wonderful supporter of other poets, and a friend of more than thirty years ago, to whom I dedicated The Well of the Moon. Other people have had more significant bereavements and illness and anxiety has touched us all. We are exhausted, I think, and frustrated at our apparent powerlessness, but we are still here, stronger for the bonds we built over social media, knowing more about who our friends are and what they do for us. Instead of a Christmassy evergreen and starlight poem, I’ll finish with one set on the 14th January, where a poet calls Ausonius is missing his absent friend Paulinus, (caught up the other side of the Roman Empire) in which I am thinking of you all. Thank you for all the friendship, the pictures and messages on social media, and especially all the poetry!

For Distant Friends

It is the feast of Felix, and though the snow

makes roads a penance, I am translating

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.

Happy Christmas!

December 17, 2021
The House that Says Yes

There was a lot to love about the Territory of Rain, and about the house we lived in, and there were many happy times and lovely things that happened there, but we lived in a house that said no. And not now. Not here. Whatever you did, it fought back. This house, in the Place of the Fire, doesn’t have the history or the character, and in terms of square feet of space, it’s actually smaller, which surprised us. But it says yes.

It says yes to room to write, and sew and learn about herbs.

It says yes to books, and quiet spaces to read, and room for lots of chairs for the family when they come over. It says yes to space for guests to sleep over, though our first two visitors were still sharing their room with a lot more boxes than they would like. A lot of other stuff has come easier – thge park, and lovely places to walk, getting access to our doctor’s surgery, and membership of the local library. Some things not so much – public transport is a bit hit and miss, and I’m only just getting back to the point where I can walk to the nearest bus stop.

But the kitchen! I am sure we bought the house because of the beautiful serene colour it was painted – somewhere between sage and olive – but the previous owners had free-standing units, which they took, so for a while we were short of both storage and worktops. Yesterday we fixed that:

Now there is a good solid worktop, slightly lower than the average, to accommodate my shorter than average height, and a larder cupboard which holds all the cooking ingredients I need to get back to my usual baking and preserving. I’m going to make the first batch of bread this afternoon.

The garden is a slightly different prospect – it doesn’t say no, exactly, but it says yes, but, and yes when. There is more usable growing space than I first thought, but the soil is very heavy clay. I have created a working plan, and I will make a few sun maps to see where the light falls – it is much less overshadowed than the old garden, and faces due west, so we are not going to be short of sun for the mediterranean herbs, but the drainage will certainly have to be improved. The garden seems to have its preferences, too. Beside the shed it says chickweed and nettle (good signs, both of them, for fertility and goodness locked in the soil). There is a spot which seems to be saying ‘elecampane’, which I love, but haven’t grown for years, because it’s enormous. And the front lawn definitely says dandelion, which we might have to argue about. On the whole, however, the conversations I have with this new home are almost all good ones. This is a house that says ‘yes’.

October 28, 2021
Putting Out Roots

Okay, it doesn’t all look like this. We are in a newbuild housing estate, with construction only just coming to an end, and it’s as suburban as you can imagine. But go along the path at the side of the house, follow it round, and you come to this. I imagine that when those leylandii get going you won’t even see the farmland, but there’s a path up to a ruined castle, a burn, and some very interesting haggard plants between the corporate landscaping.

First you are called/ oldest of herbs – mugwort, according to the Charm of Nine Herbs. It is growing freely on a wild patch of land between the houses. On one side of the path is scorched earth, as if someone has put weed-killer, and might add lawned spaces, but just now there is mugwort, chickweed, nettle and all sorts of good things.

Kate Unwin of The Moon and the Furrow suggested that the disputed atterlathe which I mentioned here, might be this plant, which I found growing against our fence:

It is called bistort. I’m not quite convinced about the identification – bistort has another Old Englsh name naeddrewort, but it is possible that it was known by several names in different parts of England, or that there were several plants called naeddrewort, or simply that Old English scholars aren’t that great at botany. Bistort does have the anti-inflammatory and alterative properties ascribed to atterlathe, and it is a common herb, very plentiful – and on my back doorstep.

The birds in the Place of the Fire are very different – plenty of crows, jackdaws and magpies, lots of starlings, but very few sparrows. I did hear a wren in the haggard on our second day, but although there are plenty of berries, both birds and bees seem to be much scarcer than they were in Stirling. The shape of the garden is more or less fixed, but I will have to do something to make the planting more wildlife-friendly.

We are almost settled here now, after a fortnight. We have unpacked almost half the boxes, and bought kitchen storage and work-spaces. We are going to build a lot more bookshelves next, which will create a library, and a quiet space for chilling out when all the family is together (I am thinking of Tolkein’s Hall of Fire in Rivendell now). Two of our grandchildren have visited several times, and the other is coming to stay for half-term tomorrow. The Place of the Fire seems to be more open to the wind than the Territory of Rain, but it hasn’t been short of a shower or two since we got here. It is slightly milder and I am just about getting used to the East-West orientation, which means the sun comes up looking directly into my new office.

New poetry has not yet happened here, though I have done some editing and participated in an online reading at Gloucester Poetry Festival. It was enormous fun, though the great Facebook meltdown (and related online disruption) meant we had a very small audience.

Sadly, the great poet (and all-round wonderful person) William Bonar died recently. I was lucky to have the opportunity to go to his funeral last Friday and pay tribute to him, to his gifts as a poet, to his generosity to other writers and to his enormous contribution to the Glasgow poetry group, St Mungo’s Mirrorball. He will be much missed.

It will be a week or two before posts on this blog get back to normal, but ideas are beginning to trickle in, especially round the climate conference next month. I look forward to making you more acquainted with the Place of the Fire over the next few months!

October 11, 2021
Hearth Moon

How it started:

How it’s going

Someone posted on Facebook today that this full moon is known as the Hearth Moon, which seems like a good moon under which to move to the Place of the Fire! We will be out of here next Monday, and this website will be getting a makeover. The shop will close tomorrow, and reopen on the 7th October (appropriately enough, National Poetry Day), but the website itself will be down for refurbishment from the 26th September to the 2nd October.

I will be at a last event in Stirling on the 26th September, taking part in One Weekend in Stirling. Because it is so close to the date of the move, I absolutely cannot afford to get pinged, so I will be last in, and first out, and will have to miss all the wonderful events on offer, but if you’re in Stirling, give the page a look – there is something for everyone here. And I want to take the opportunity to thank the wonderful people at WriteAngle who organise it, for all the joy they spread, and all the creativity they enable.

This is a farewell to the Territory of Rain, which has sheltered my family and my poetry for almost forty years. However, there’s a Scottish song that sums up how I feel right now:

We’re no awa tae bide awa’.
We’re no’ awa’ tae leave ye.
We’re no’ awa’ tae bide awa’,
We’ll aye come back and see ye!

September 21, 2021
The Place of the Fire

This is from Tappoch Broch near Larbert. The hearthplace is clearly still used every now and then by people camping out, and I found that continuity rather moving when we visited last September. The hearth as a metaphor for home has a long history, so I have chosen it as a reference for the new territory, although we are moving to a modern house with no actual fireplace. I will have to have a firepit outside! Fire struck me as a good reference point, because it is in a coal-mining area with a long tradition of ironworking, and I was already thinking of fire while I was finishing The Well of the Moon.

It is a more hilly place than here, and on higher ground – though nothing spectacular. The territory of rain is at sea level, and the place of the fire is only about a hundred feet above, but it makes a difference. The new house faces east/west rather than north/south, and the garden is more open to the sky, without our tall hedges. I expect I will miss the sparrows! There are plenty of oak and beech and hawthorn trees, some ash, but not, as far as I have seen, many willows – which I will miss – but I don’t think the land is much drier. Maps show several drainage ditches emptying into a network of burns flowing down towards the Clyde. I haven’t yet had too much opportunity to explore, partly because of activity here, but mostly because I’ve had a bad flare-up of my rheumatoid arthritis, which has made it difficult to walk. (It’s getting better now, luckily.) You will see a lot more about it when I do, however, under the Place of the Fire category.

This is also going to be the catchall for my next writing projects. The publication of The Well of the Moon, and the move prompted me to focus more on how I work and what else I might do. There is a whole new look planned for this website, with an extra page for non-fiction. It will cover the process of settling into a new landscape, and the issues it throws up for learning to belong in new communities, but will also cover the research I have done on herbs, poetics and the philosophy behind it all.

It won’t be long now. We have started clearing the old house, which is gradually filling up with cardboard boxes. I’ve packed twenty boxes of books already (including David Morley’s Fury, which is why I haven’t yet posted my review of it!) and there are ten still to do, although Callander Bookshop got an awful lot. The herbs to go have been potted up, the kitchen is next, and the dreary process of informing everybody who needs to know the change of address has started. It’s all beginning to feel real, and a lot more exciting!

September 1, 2021
Moving On

Plants to go

Well, the swifts are leaving, and so are we. There has been much less activity here than usual, because the move that we have been planning for the last year or so is finally happening. It’s all down to the paperwork now, and there will be more news when it is all done. I am hoping to pick up the pace in the autumn when we are finally settled!

In the meantime The Well of the Moon has attracted a lot of very kind attention on social media, and you can find a very lovely review by Tom Kelly on the Burnedthumb Facebook page, if you do Facebook!

August 7, 2021
Gifts from the Garden

This is our last summer in this garden, and it has been especially generous. In spite of the long cold spell, everything seems to have done well. The tulips were magnificent, the witch hazel (which sulked and grew very slowly for about ten years) suddenly put on about a metre of new growth, the roses are outdoing each other in flower production and the chamomile bed has bulked up nicely. I have been trying to grow these martagon lilies for at least twenty years, and now, here they are.

The berries are doing well too. For the first time I got enough blackcurrants to make a pot of jam, and the branches of the redcurrants are bending with the weight of berries. I’m not sure what to do with them – there is only so much redcurrant jelly two people can use, and though they combine very well with other fruit – especially raspberries, I’m running out of ideas. Possibly the blackbirds will solve that problem for me! The gooseberries did very well too, but the sawfly caterpillars found them, and the bushes are looking pretty stark just now.

I have started a pot pourri pot in a cafetiere – just the thing to keep the layers of petals pressed down. You layer partially dried rose petals, aromatic leaves, lavender and anything else fragrant – I have lemon balm, scented geranium leaves and verbena, and I will add lavender bog myrtle leaves and costmary as I go – with sea salt and a few drops of brandy, press down hard and leave to mature for several weeks. When we get to the new house, I will break up the petal-cake, mix it with some properly dried rose petals for glamour, and some spices, and it should make the new house smell like home.

I have also finally achieved two things the herbals all tell you to do, and which I have always found impossible up to now. One is to make furniture polish scented with sweet cicely. Apparently the trick is to crush the green seeds and leave them in a mix of beeswax and turpentine gently melted together (very gently – turpentine is inflammable. The book suggests leaving it in the sun, but the sun in my garden wasn’t hot enough) until the scent is imparted to the liquid. I strained the seeds out afterwards, which wasn’t easy, because the mixture sets while you’re looking at it, and the result is excellent.

The other is furniture polish from horsetails. Horsetails have been the bane of my life, and I was dying to find some use to make of them. The trick is to leave a LOT of horsetails to soak in water for several hours, and then simmer the mix for 15 minutes. This is anti-social. It smells vile. The strained liquid, however, is a very fine silica solution, and it does indeed polish pewter very well without scratching, leaving a lovely pearly glow. Credit for finally making these remedies work goes to Herbs About the House by Philippa Back, published in 1977 by Darton Longman and Todd. It’s long out of print but actually available on Amazon.

I have taken cuttings, potted on seedlings and divisions of my favourite plants, and I’m saving seeds as they come. Glasgow doesn’t seem to run to big gardens, and what they do have seems to consist of astroturf and patio entertaining spaces, but I am laying my plans. The half-a-hundred herbs will find their places in the new garden!

July 5, 2021
Day of Recollection

It is more than a year ago that we locked down in Scotland, and it has been a year whose impact is too big to reduce to a comment. We have been brave, kind, patient, grieving, anxious, hopeful, disappointed. So many of us have lost so much. So many of us have had to do the year largely alone. Some of us realised that our lives had been like that for years, without anyone noticing. Some of us have realised that things could be different if there was good will enough. Most of us are tired. This is my poem for times like these.

Stand in the Light
Stand in the light.
Allow the wild things to creep
out of the shadows.
Welcome them all, the wet
bedraggled things, the ones
all spit and claws, the one
who weeps and hangs its head,
the one who stares, and says ‘Make me.’
Stand in the light. They are yours,
washed and unwashed alike.

Stand in the light, and sing.
Raise your voice as if
there was no fear of darkness.
Listen and you will hear
other voices, other songs,
rough and sweet and dauntless,
blues and canto jondo,
pibroch, nanha, tanakh.
Stand in the light and sing. Their pain
is yours. Allow it to hurt.

Stand in the light. Be still.
Light is what we need. Let it glow,
let it shine into the furthest dark
to find the lost forgotten hopes
and warm them to new life.
Allow it to grow and touch the ruined
homes and hearts and show us
what’s to mend. Stand in the light.
Be still. Become the light.

I will take the moment of silence at mid-day to think of you all – those I haven’t seen in so long, those I will never see again. But then – let’s come together and sing. Not necessarily literally – there’s a song that got into my head when I had my allotment, and I used to dig my potatoes to its rhythm:

All God’s children got a place in the choir.
Some sing low and some sing higher,
Some sing out loud on the telephone wire,
Some just clap their hands
Or paws, or anything they got.

Let’s stand in the light.

March 23, 2021

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