Home and Away

Tomorrow night, I'm on home turf to launch The Ambulance Box in Linlithgow's Black Bitch Inn*. I'm expecting a smaller crowd than at the SPL, but looking forward to it just as much. The event kicks off at 8 pm. There's a bar and I'll be reading two 15-minute sets, though I've yet to decide what. Anyone is welcome.

On Thursday 9 April, I'll be at the Italian Cultural Institute in Edinburgh to celebrate the publication of 5PX2: Five Italian Poets and Five Scottish Poets. Details of the event are at the first link in this paragraph.

*The black bitch is the emblem of Linlithgow -- it's one of those faithful hound stories -- and, indeed, natives of the town, regardless of sex, are known as "black bitches". That's right: Scotland's current First Minister is a black bitch.

Beefing up the Future

I'd been exercised by the second half of this all day, and then I see that not only has Rob Mackenzie blogged about it already, but Roddy Lumsden has replied in the comments section.

Briefly, Roddy is baffled by the sparse number of established Scottish poets in my generation: those born in the 1970s and 1980s. He's not the only person to feel the dearth: Bill Herbert explores it briefly in the endorsement he did for The Ambulance Box (which you can read in full at the link) and Donny O'Rourke alluded to it when he spoke to Rob and me at Mirrorball. Heck, I've felt it over the past decade, when I think about it. And during my time at Edinburgh uni, when Roddy was on the cusp of publishing his first collection, there were precious few other Scots involved in student poetry. I come across none of them now in the poetry world.

Perhaps what we need(ed) is more good poets teaching, not in the academic creative writing courses, but in open access, informal or evening class-style courses. More of what Roddy does in London (please move back here, Mr Lumsden!) and what others have been doing through Mirrorball's mentoring scheme, the like of which doesn't exist elsewhere in the central belt, to my knowledge. More to bust us out of our wee lonesome bubbles.

There's no Poetry School up here. Looks like the furthest north they've got is Newcastle. Try searching their courses on "Scotland" (which is an option) and you get:

No courses match your search criteria. Try searching again with fewer stipulations.

Thanks. Does the existence of the option mean they're thinking of breaking into Scotland? I suppose the georgaphy is less of an issue now with internet courses becoming available, but I guess not everybody will teach or take those. Maybe we just need to get on and do something about it up here ourselves. What and how I'm not sure. Suggestions, anyone?

Knucker Launch

Jane McKie's Knucker Press launches what looks like an interesting new pamphlet tonight: Way Out by Victoria Macrae. Here's what the press's website has to say about it:

In early 2008 Victoria Macrae spent 65 days, 19 hours and 37 minutes as an in-patient in Ward 6 of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. During this period the view from her window became very important to her: "I needed to see the outside world and connect somehow to the outdoors. I began noticing the way the light hit the architecture at different times of the day; the way the windows opposite would move in the gales and reflect sunlight temporarily into my room. The effects of the changing sky and weather, and the importance of finding beauty in something that would not be seen as traditionally beautiful, was an important part of my recovery". She created a unique visual record of that time with the camera on her mobile phone. 'Way Out' is a beautiful and affecting folded concertina pamphlet with a selection of Victoria's full colour photos and word poems.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it to the launch, but I'll definitely be keeping my eye on the Knucker publications.

LBF on Facebook

Linlithgow Book Festival now has a Facebook presence. With the full programme listed there, it's a great way for Facebookers to keep up to date with what's happening with West Lothian's literary festival.

100 Favourite Scottish Football Poems

One of the questions that one always faces with an anthology is what is its rationale, its purpose and aim? Like its team mates 100 Favourite Scottish Poems and 100 Favourite Scottish Poems to Read Aloud, 100 Favourite Scottish Football Poems, edited by Alistair Findlay, hints at a kind of democratising of the canon in its title and cover design, which is reminiscent of the earlier edition of The Nation's Favourite Poems in typeface and layout. However, although the 20 of the 100 Favourite Scottish Poems (which, presumably, nobody would ever dream of reading aloud) were chosen through a Radio Scotland listener poll, the other 200 are, as far as I can tell, chosen by single editors.

So, if we don't have a popular poll, what do we have? One man's take on how poetry has addressed an endlessly popular subject, perhaps. Findlay instinctively sides with the crowd, which, he says is "really only another name for 'the people'." Perhaps it was an awareness of the disjunct between his role as sole arbiter of what's in and what's out and the requirements of his Marxism that led him to the rather odd decision to number not the pages but only the poems and state that they are "in an order of reading proposed by the editor", which is to state the obvious, really.

But what you really want to know about is the poems. Readers of this blog will know that I'm no football fanatic, though I confess I'm not entirely averse to watching the odd Aberdeen or Scotland game and have been known to kick a ball about. All of which makes me pretty reasonably well-placed to judge the book as an anthology of poems without becoming misty-eyed about the footballing aspect or writing it off in anti-football disgust.

If you're looking for a golden treasury, go to Palgrave. For my taste, there are a few too many paeans to great footballers and I find many of them dull poems. One notable exception in that genre is Matthew Fitt's wonderful "Jim Leighton", a poem that, certainly read aloud (as it is on The Jewel Box), would curely make the hardest footiephobe concede that there must be beauty and heroism in the game.

But don't just turn over to the black and white film on the other channel. There is a lot more to this book than the footballing hall of fame in verse. If it contains a good handful of poems that will interest only the enthusiast, it also contains at least as much that's well worth the general reader's attention. Football runs deep, deep in the Scottish psyche and male Scottish society, and the real strength of Findlay's anthology is that it presents us with a portrait of that deep place in a more profound and, certainly, more entertaining way than any academic study could.

Every aspect of football's appeal is here: the highs and lows, the tribalism and sectarianism, the communal experience and the shared memories, the inextricable link between the sport and Scottish tribal identities. The book shows how far back this goes: the earliest poem is a quatrain from 1580, and one of the most pleasurable discoveries for me--there were plenty, I assure you--was the exerpt from "The Christmass Bawing of Monimusk, 1739", proof that the divines of Scotland have never been Calvinist dourness through and through.

Sectarianism, is of course, unavoidable. Findlay does an admirable job in this regard. "The Fields of Athenry" and "The Sash My Father Wore" sit side by side in the book--could you do otherwise?--and there's plenty sharp, funny and poignant commentary on the sectarian question from several of the poets. Dennis O'Donnell captures so much of the ambivalence, threat and fear in his "Fid. Def." (another poem that stood out for me), while Robert Crawford's "Identity League" sums up the nation's carnaptious obsessions with typical Crawfordian wit and invention.

It's interesting that, although the book includes a good deal by many of our leading poets, it's often far from their best work and that many of the most interesting and effective poems in Findlay's choice are not those by the biggest names. Perhaps there's something in football that raises the game of the lesser writers and maybe the bulk of the greats, MacDiarmid not least, have missed what's most poetic about it. There are also a few odd choices in Findlays list, poems that are shoehorned into either the rubric of "Scottish" or "football", but he does a good job of defending them in his spiky introduction.

Despite this, depsite its slight uncertainties about canon building and democracy, and despite overdoing the eulogies from a general reader's point of view, this book is a lively, entertaining and emotionally informative anthology of poetry. If you want to understand Scotland today, you need to read this kind of stuff, not just the academic and semi-academic analyses of where we are and how we got here. Findlay has done us a service in collecting it between these covers.

Reasoning Rhyme: Lightness that Drew Me: Rhyme in Gaelic

One question that arises for the new terminology is whether it can cover rhyme practice in languages other than English adequately. It ought to be able to, as it's based on phonetic/phonemic correspondence rather than any single tradition of what does or doesn't constitute a rhyme. In this post, I start to test it out against Scottish Gaelic rhyme practice.

In Gaelic poetry, rhyme is traditionally considered to focus on vowel sounds, with no reference to the coda consonants of the rhyme syllables. Because stress is on the first syllable of a word in Gaelic, the rhyme vowel in end rhyme often falls on the penultimate syllable of the line. However, this isn't feminine rhyme, as the final syllable doesn't participate in the rhyme correspondence. Final-syllable rhymes are nonetheless perfectly possible (there are plenty monosyllables in the language), and it's also common to find internal rhyme, in which a vowel sound rhymes with a stressed vowel at a given point in a preceding or following line. It's also worth noting that vowels do not necesarily have to be identical, but closely related: /e/ and /E/ can rhyme, for example.

Meg Bateman's beautiful short poem "Aotramachd" neatly demonstrates the rhyme on the penultimate vowel sounds:

Aotramachd
B’ e d’aotromachd a rinn mo thàladh,
aotromachd do chainnte ’s do ghàire,
aotromachd do lethchinn nam làmhan,
d’aotrmachd lurach ùr mhàlda:
agus ’s e aotromachd do phòige
a tha a’ cur trasg air mo bheòil-sa,
is ’s e aotromachd do ghlaic mum chuairt-sa
a leigeas seachad leis an t-sruth mi.

Lightness
It was your lightness that drew me,
the lightness of your talk and your laughter,
the lightness of your cheek in my hands,
your sweet gentle modest lightness:
and it is the lightness of your kiss
that is starving my mouth,
and the lightness of your embrace
that will let me go adrift.

There's so much going on in this densely wrought lyric, with its rich mix of semantic, grammatical and phonological parallelism, but the feature I want to focus on is the end rhyme scheme. According to the Gaelic criteria outlined above, the poem rhymes AAAABBCC. The A rhyme is on à (thàladh:ghàire:làmhan:mhàlda), the B on ò (phòige:bheòil-sa) and the C on u (chuairt-sa:t-sruth mi). The first four lines--those that rhyme on à--are concerned with what drew the speaker to the object of her desire; they unpack the attractive lightness of the first line. In the subsequent four lines, as the lightness repels instead of attracts and the lovers drift apart, the rhyme scheme changes and fractures into two couplets.

It will not have escaped the astute reader's notice that the scheme of "Aotramachd" is more or less nuclear rhyme. In fact, analysed in these terms, we can break it down further into a clear A1A1A2A2BBCC structure. Before we do that, a quick note on Gaelic phonology is necessary.

Gaelic understanding recognises two classes of vowels and consonants: the broad and the slender. Slender vowels are i and e in the orthography, which represent the high front vowels /i/, /e/ and /E/; the rest are broad vowels. The slender vowels are sounds that, across languages, cause palatalisation of consonants*. And that's what the slender consonants are: palatalised versions of the basic, broad consonants (except that, in some dialects, the /rj/** is pronounced as a [T] or [D]). This means that what might be a secondary articulation for a consonant English is a significant difference in Gaelic, significant enough to create a separate class. I'm sure I needn't point out the importance of that for the possibilities in rhyme.

The A1 rhyme thàladh:ghàire transcribes roughly as /hAl6G:GArj@/. The rhyming vowels are identical. In the codas***, we have /l/ and /r/, which linguists class together under the term liquids. The correspondence of /h/ and the voiced velar fricative /G/ is less obvious but, if we take into account the morphophonemics--the interface of grammar and phonology--we get a clearer relationship. In their unmodified form, the rhyme fellows are tàladh and gàire, so their first sounds are /t/ and /g/ respectively: two non-nasal stops. However, because they follow the possessive adjectives mo (my) and do (the singular and familiar form of your) in the poem, they are lenited. That is to say, the stops weaken to fricatives. In the change from the velar stop /g/ to the velar fricative /G/, the place of articulation stays the same. However, in Gaelic, the voiceless coronal stop /t/ always lenites to the voiceless glottal fricative /h/. Not a close correspondence phonetically or even necessarily phonemically, but a clear morphophonemic correspondence.

I don't even need to transcribe the A2 rhyme for it to be obvious that it's a texbook example of segmental swapping: làmhan:mhàlda. However, perhaps a comment on dialect is appropriate here. In all dialects of Gaelic, the grapheme mh represents /v/ when it occurs at the beginning of a word. The word-medial mh in làmhan would be realised as /v/ in some dialects but, in others, it would be a /w/. Happily for my analysis, a recording of Meg Bateman reading the poem is on hand in The Jewel Box: it reveals her pronunciation to be /lAv@n/. Even if it was a /w/, it would still share the labial place of articulation with /v/, so it would be a case of featural swapping rather than segmental.

The B rhyme, phòige:bheòil-sa, transcribes as /fO:kj@:vjO:ljsa/. As is clear from the orthography and transcription, the place and manner features of the onsets are identical; the only major difference is in voicing. The codas might seem less closely related, but the /kj/ is a palatalised velar stop, which brings the blade of the tongue into a position much closer to that for /lj/ than in an unpalatalised /k/ so, in Gaelic terms, both codas are slender consonants. Interestingly, in the second rhyme fellow, the onset consonant /vj/ is palatalised. There's a lot going on in this apparently simple rhyme.

Finally, there's the C rhyme, chuairt-sa:t-sruth mi. It transcribes as /xuartjsa:tru:#mi/. Again, there's some segmental swapping going on here, with a /rtj/coda becoming a /tr/ onset. The second rhyme fellow has an empty coda. We could borrow the /m/ from mi, which would involve the sonority and the stop features of the /m/ breaking into the /r/ (sonority) and /t/ (stop) from the coda in chuairt.

There's much much more I could say about the poem, but this analysis indicates two things: that rhyme in Gaelic can, in fact, go beyond the vowel and that the new terminology is well placed to describe a non-English rhyme tradition. I might, in future posts, test it against older Gaelic poetry, but this will do for starters!

*Note that the presence of a vowel in the spelling doesn't necessarily mean it's pronounced. Like English, Gaelic has plenty of digraphs (two-letter symbols that represent one sound). However, the orthography often indicates historical pronunciation and the presence of slender vowels around a consonant always means that that consonant is slender.

**I use the /j/to indicate palatisation. Hence, /rj/ is a palatalised form of /r/.

***In these words and several others in the poem, what I'm treating as codas would probably be better described as the onsets of the second syllable. Therefore, as there are clear relationships, we can say that they are borrowed from the second syllables, which doesn't really participate in the rhyme scheme, as is shown by the varying vowel sounds and the variation between syllables with and without codas.

Fitbaw Crazy

Alistair Findlay, notable not least for The Love Songs of John Knox, has just edited an anthology entitled 100 Favourite Scottish Football Poems. More of that in due course but, meanwhile, here here is some related light entertainment, courtesy of the Tartan Army on its way to do its gentlemanly battle with the Ukraine. Proof that ordinary Scots and poetry are not oil and water:

Mr Mackenzie's Manuscript

If you've been following my and Rob A Mackenzie's posts about our manuscript swap, you'll probably be waiting for the more detailed comments I promised on Rob's poems*, so here they finally are.

There's a lot of very good stuff in Rob's MS, with a few really fine poems. Think of Rob A Mackenzie, and you're likely to think of surreal, ironic, witty narrative poems. Many of the strongest and most distinctive pieces in the manuscript are just such. They are fresh and contemporary and their level of irony is just right: never arch, too knowing or clever-clever but playful, even though the material is serious.

These poems support Rob's statement that his writing follows "the softer side of the New York School and ... European surrealism". Nonetheless, his voice also sounds distinctly Scottish to me. It's not particularly a matter of vocabulary, as there's almost no Scots in his MS**. Nor is it necessarily a matter of geographical or cultural references. The Scottish flavour comes, I think, from the way Rob deploys his wit and irony, mixed often with genuine passion and commitment. I'd go so far as to say that it feels quite Glaswegian, a subtle reflection of the best parts of that city's distinctive character and humour mingled with the European and transatlantic influences.

Here we have that good old Scottish internationalism again, which also puts me in mind of Edwin Morgan, whom Rob has cited. I can hear echoes of Morgan's voice in the mixture of international influence, Glasgow exuberance and formal variety but Rob's voice is still very much his own.

All in all, Rob's work is a highly entertaining, stimulating read. He has decided to keep writing for a few more months before sending an MS out. To judge by the present selection, he's going from strength to strength, so I'm sure those few months will bring some excellent poems into being. I'm looking forward eagerly to putting his first collection on my bookshelf (and, of course, to taking it down). Meanwhile, if you haven't already bought a copy of The Clown of Natural Sorrow, what are you waiting for?

*You can read his comment on my MS here.

**The confectionary and culinary terms "soor plooms" and "bridie" are the only instances I can think of.

Blues that Stays News

I can't help but think that last night's Shore Poets event could have shown some of Thursday night's slammers a thing or two about how imaginative and contentful something that might be described as a performance poem can be. Nowhere was that more the case than in the closing set, from the night's main reader, WN Herbert.

Bill Herbert would be a hard man to beat in a slam. He has always been a poet of many guises, a writer with a flair and versatility few can match. Ballads, sonnets or blues; rhymed or unrhymed poetry; metred or free verse; lyric or narrative; surreal or realist; tender, witty, erudite or scatalogical--this man can do it all with equal aplomb and intelligence. And he does it in Scots, English and all the fluid gradations between the two sibling languages.

Bill's set last night leant heavily towards the more performancy end of his writing, especially with his early poem "Talking Water Blues" and the title poem from his most recent collection, "Bad Shaman Blues". Both push the blues into unexpected places. Don't think of Auden's use of the form. Or, if you do, think of it crossed with MacDiarmid and dropping acid like chocolate buttons. "Cognitive freefall" is how I once heard him describe his writing technique. That's maybe not a bad description of the imaginative riot at the heart of the work, but it belies the degree of effortless craft in the poems.

June's Shore poet was Angela McSeveney. Angela is a much less showy writer than Bill Herbert, but her performance was no less assured or sparky than his. She delivered the night's most memorable piece--a vivid, hugely entertaining poem about slaughtering beetroot, which she dedicated to Hamish Whyte who had just celebrated a significant birthday. Her set was packed with gems of her clear, honed, crystalline writing.

The opener this month was Dorothy Baird, whose new collection is just coming out with Two Ravens Press. A good, assured set. I particularly liked "The Cry of the Night Child" and the poem of hers built on the conceit that dawn is the only word for the dawn in English. She spoilt the conceit slightly by saying "dawn is the only word for the sunrise in English", but the poem was good nonetheless.

The music was from three lassies from the Edinburgh Youth Gaitherin, a traditional music project. Ailsa, Becky and Mairi (I didn't get their surnames) must be in their early 20s at most but are already accomplished traditional singers and treated us to three excellent sets of Scots, English and Irish songs.

Usually, the Shore Poets season finishes in June. However, this year, we have a special event in July for our Orkney exchange. The shame is that, although I'm going to Orkney on the exchange in October, I won't make it to next month's reading because I'll be heading off to this Arvon course. Normal Shore Poets service resumes in September, when Polly Clark will be the headliner.

What is Mainstream?

I've been musing a little about the usefulness or otherwise of the term "mainstream" in relation to Scottish poetry. I think it's fair to say that, in UK terms, Hugh MacDiarmid would not be regarded as mainstream. His non-mainstream status is emphasised by the fact that he turns up in the marvellous PENNsound archive, which focuses on the more experimental/avant-garde end of American poetry, and the fact that Eliot Weinberger considers his work in an admiring essay in Karmic Traces. And yet MacDiarmid is a hugely significant figure in 20th century Scottish poetry by anyone's standards. This surely makes him mainstream in a Scottish context, which perhaps emphasises his contention that Scottish literature is a separate tradition to the so-called English literature canon and market.

An analogous situation obtains with Gael Turnbull. Gael's role in injecting postwar modernist American poetry and poetics into the British scene was highly significant. He was an unceasing experimenter and his work sits comfortably with Shearsman Books, who published his Jacket tribute also fitted easily into the much more mainstream arena of Shore Poets, of which he was a valued (and is a much missed) member. Is Gael's work mainstream or experimental? Why should I (or anyone else) care? It's full of inventiveness, wit, insight, beauty, energy, playfulness and seriousness. It's simply worth reading.

Does this mean that, in Scotland, we have less of a distinction between the mainstream/accessible and the experimental/difficult? I'd like to think so, but I'm not convinced. After all, the poetry scene in which I'm involved is pretty much the main stream. But then, where do writers such as Frank Kuppner, David Kinloch or Price sit in relation to this supposed dichotomy? They have all appeared and/or are appearing on the bill at Shore Poets and other mainstream poetry readings, but they certainly don't row down the main current of the main stream, as indicated by the fact that Kinloch and Price both appear in the Archive of the Now.

Listening Pleasure

I discovered some more rich seams of poetry recordings on the web this week. First off, there's the Internet Poetry Archive, an American site not to be confused with Britain's Poetry Archive. The Internet Poetry Archive very small, with recordings from only seven poets so far, but some significant names. I was pleased to find some recordings of Robert Pinsky, whom I've read but never heard. I clicked on his wonderful poem "Shirt" and was surprised to hear how slowly he reads it, as the structure and rhythm had always struck me as quite strong and driving.

By contrast, PENNsound is a vast respository of online audio and video. The authors represented are a mixture of prose writers and poets. It looks like most are American, but there are some significant exceptions: imagine my surprise and delight to find Hugh MacDiarmid there! It's the man himself reading, among other things the entirety of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (in four sound files).

While MacDiarmid is represented by a handful of files, some writers, such as Robert Creeley, have piles. I can see I'll be going back to PENNsound again and again and again. (Anybody know of some cheap storage?!)

Some Freshly Refreshed Websites

1
My recent visits to the HappenStance site have revealed that a lot has been going on behind the front page. The publications and chapbook reviews sections have been completely overhauled, with a very swish look and a good deal of new features.

2
The website of Chapman, the grande dame of Scotland's literary magazines, had been out of date for such a length that I'd given up looking at it a long time ago. Imagine my surprise to find a completely new website when I wandered over in that direction a few days ago. Not only that, but it looks gey youthful, unlike the previous, rather stale version.

3
More than you needed to know, the dream blog of my colleague Diarmid Mogg, which I mentioned before, has flitted to TypePad and looks superb. It's also easier to navigate than the old version.

Scheduled Acts of Criticism

1

I recommend a listen to this week's edition of "Poets and the Nation". It's a good, intelligent piece of broadcasting about how cultural change in Scotland has been reflected in poetry through the ages. It bounces about time a bit more than last week's, which is one thing in its favour.

2

Radio 3 is celebrating the Auden centenary this week. It started with "Six Unexpected Days", a feature on Auden and the landscape of the Northern Pennines, and continues this week with the first run of a new series "The Essay", a 15-minute feature broadcast at 11pm Monday to Thursday. Last night's essayist was Dana Gioia on Auden as example. Tonight's is Kate Clanchy on the early political poetry.

Random(ish) Thoughts on Translation

In the preface to Antonio Machado: Selected Poems, the translator Alan S Trueblood (what a gift of a name!) writes:

"One cannot hold today that a poet's voice in translation should sound as if he had been writing in English all along. ... Some aura of foreignness, individually and culturally marked, should survive re-creation."

By slight contrast, Rob Mackenzie, concludes the first of his reflections on translating Quasimodo by saying:

"Each translation must stand as a poem. The translator can only hope against hope that he has communicated something of what was in the original writer’s mind."

These statements could be taken as describing two separate approaches to the art of translating poetry. Trueblood's emphasis strikes me as bearing the mark of literary or academic translation as an act in itself, in that it is separated from any other creative work. By this I don't mean to deny that such translation is a creative act, because such a denial would be absurdly naive. I simply mean that the literary/academic translator's primary motivation is not necessarily to make a poem really work in the target language.

On the other hand, Rob's concern seems that of a poet: to create a poem in English that really works but still carries something of the imagery and impact of the original. This endeavour cannot be separated from the translating poet's work on their own poetry, because something of their voice will most likely leak into their translations and, if the translating is carried out attentively, something of the translated poet's voice might well inf(l)ect the translator's own writing. The effectiveness of this can be seen in Ted Hughes's translations of Yehuda Amichai.

Perhaps this is where the notional difference between a translation and a version (see this post) comes into play. If so, does that mean that the creation of a version is the proper concern of a poet and the creation of a translation the proper concern of a professional translator? It's not a thought I accept, since it seems an unhelpful narrowing of the fields. Still, it might throw some light on why some people feel uneasy about so-called versions.

The two approaches, of course, both carry undeniable benefits and disbenefits. In my handful of translations from Rilke into Scots (there's one here) or English, I think I've taken what I've described as the poet's approach. This is partly because of the failure of translations I'd come across to show the reader anything much of what drew me to Rilke.

Perhaps the poet's approach is, in the long run, personally less rewarding than the academic translation because it's pretty much doomed to failure. Eliot Weinberger says in "Translation", the second of his "3 Notes on Poetry" (published in Outside Stories):

"A translation that sounds like a poem in English is usually a bad translation.

"A translation that strives for the accuracy of a bilingual dictionary is always a bad translation.

"A translation must sound like a translation written in living English".

By contrast, it strikes me that nobody would accept a translated novel that did not read as a good novel. Basically, a good translation is a tall order for a translator taking either approach.

On reflection, it surprises me that translation has not been given greater prominence in Scottish literature. After all, as a three-voiced country, we're always translating between ourselves, let alone from other cultures. Perhaps we need to find a vocal and visible way of celebrating our translators.

I'll leave you with another thought from Weinberger's essay:

"Translation theory, however beautiful, is useless for translating. There are the laws of thermodynamics, and there is cooking."

"Poets and The Nation"

Radio Scotland is airing a three-part series on Scottish poetry called "Poets and The Nation" on Mondays from 11:30 to 12:00. You can listen online from the features page (I assume each programme is available for the standard seven days after broadcast). The first instalment, which was broadcast Monday this week, explored how Scottish poets have engaged with the land and landscape. The half-hour format inevitably makes for a pretty sketchy, whistle-stop exploration of the entire history of even a particular aspect of Scottish poetry in Gaelic, Scots and English, but it's heartening to find a reasonably serious series about poetry on the radio.

Poems on Pillows: the Renga

After the horror of the photoshoot, we settled down to writing, with Ken first recording an introduction to the renga for the BBC Radio Scotland arts show Radio Cafe. Elspeth had to shuffle off for a live studio interview with them at lunchtime, but Richard and I were left voiceless on the airwaves.

Participating in a renga seems to attune the writing mind well to the sharp focus of the haiku style. It probably helped that the morning was glorious and there was plenty fodder for imagery in the view from the hotel room (I think it's the one at the top of this page) and even in the room itself. The four of us generally took quite different approaches to the strictures of the schema, which made for a stimulating day. Several stanzas that didn't make it into the renga were the equal of any that did.

Word is that, aside from the excerpts on the postcard, the whole renga will be published on the websites of the Scottish Poetry Library and Ten Hill Place. I'll post a link when that happens. It also might be displayed somewhere in the hotel, but you'll have to stay there to be able to see that!

Stanza 2007

The programme for StAnza 2007 is now available. It's the 10th StAnza, and the line-up is a good 'un. I'm particularly interested in hearing Jorie Graham, but I'm disappointed that the Eric Gregory Award showcase reading is at a time utterly inaccessible for me. However, I'm appearing in The Gathering: 100 poets reading a poem each to celebrate the anniversary.

Poetry Association of Scotland: Spring 2007

The Spring programme for the Poetry Association of Scotland came through the door this morning. The blurb for my reading with Gerrie Fellows on 7 February proclaims us:

"Two poets who describe the modern world with an ironic yet lyrical voice."

Other events in the season include a reading by Robert Crawford, Douglas Dunn lecturing on Edwin Muir and a photographic exploration of the Poetry Path near Kirkby Stephen.

Best Scottish Poems 2006

The Scottish Poetry Library's third annual online choice of Scottish poems published in the past 12 months or so--Best Scottish Poems 2006--went live on St Andrew's Day. As ever, it's a highly inpidual choice by this year's editor, Janice Galloway, as you can see if you compare it with the 2005 choice by Richard Price or the 2004 one by Hamish Whyte, who is represented in the 2006 gathering.

Galloway's gleanings include a poem a piece by Shore Poets Diana Hendry and Christine De Luca. Christine's poem is a moving but light elegy for Gael Turnbull, capturing so much of a very fine and sorely missed poet.

There's also a piece by Chloe Morrish, whom I met at the Responding to Rilke reading. It's a moving poem about her father and her younger brother, who died of a neurological disease aged 11. Poems about loss and grief are hard to do well, but this one quitely captures the mix of love, sadness, regret and happiness that such remembering entails.

The Poets were in the Counting House

On Saturday night, the Shore Poets celebrated Stewart Conn's 70th birthday at the Counting House in Edinburgh. The evening, which was open to the public and more or less sold out with various bodies from the poetry world, involved readings from a number of poets whom Stewart admires and counts among his friends, including Anne Stevenson, Anna Crowe, Andrew Greig, Tom Pow and James Robertson and several Shore poets.

It's hard to believe that Stewart (the Shore Poets' honourary president of several years' standing) is as old as 70; his zest for life would be enviable in a man of any age. The celebrations were a fitting reflection of that joie de vivre and Stewart's fundamentally warm, generous character.

The Shore Poets have marked the occasion not only with the birthday bash, but with a pamphlet, There's a Poem to be made. The pamphlet, available in a numbered limited edition of 300, contains poems from Saturday's participants, Shore poets past and present, and a few other fine contempoary Scottish poets. It's not mentioned on the Shore Poets website yet, but I'm sure it will be soon.