Sunny Dunny

Blog closing

2009-10-01T08:03:00.000+01:00

Having been using a new WordPress blog for some weeks now, I've decided to close this one. I'll be moving all my old posts over at some point, but for now please point your meeces here, to Sunny Dunny's (new) blog.

Le blogue nouveau

2009-09-11T16:14:00.000+01:00

I'm playing with a new WordPress blog now. It's here, but it's very much at the experimental stage, and I want to develop it in the next few weeks. I like the look of it though - lean and clean - and I'm using one of my Dunbar shots as a banner.

Two Iains

2009-09-09T08:32:00.000+01:00

I used to read a lot of science fiction in my youth, and I still have a few favourites - Roger Zelazny (Lord of Light), Brian Aldiss (Non-Stop and others), J G Ballard (The Drowned World, The Crystal World, Drought). These are older works; I haven't read much recent sci-fi. However, during my summer break I picked up my son's copy of Iain M Banks' Consider Phlebas, and I have to confess I'm hooked again. Since coming home I've read two of his 'Culture' novels, and I find them immensely satisfying. He seems to to me to combine big ideas, novel technologies etc, with an in-depth knowledge of human behaviour and motivation, and he has the writing skills to make the books very readable. I'll read more.

I noted with regret the passing of Iain Cuthertson, Scottish actor. I had the pleasure of meeting him in the 1960s, when he did a workshop on directing Shakespeare while I was a student in Glasgow. I've not directed the Bard, but I did make use of some of Iain's incisive comments on directing when I directed amdram productions subsequently. And he struck me as a warm and generous man.

Callander 2009

2009-09-07T08:00:00.000+01:00

Callander's Poetry Weekend went off very successfully, despite the poor weather, and the horrendous journeys some folk had getting there. Daytime sessions on the Saturday were held in the Kirk Hall, and by the beginning of the afternoon set the hall was full. The shop was full on the Sunday too. Sally provided haggis for lunch on the Saturday, to follow the Burns mini-conference, and after the last Sunday session everyone trooped off for a boat trip on Loch Katrine. I was impressed by the quality of the readers, by Sally and Ian's hospitality, and by the warm and friendly atmosphere - a lovely weekend.

Callander Poetry Weekend 2009

2009-09-04T11:44:00.000+01:00

I'm heading off for Callander this afternoon, and I'll be taking part in the events on Saturday and Sunday. It's one of the highlights of my poetry year, and I'm looking forward to meeting up with old friends and hopefully making new ones. The full programme is on the Newsboard page of the Poetry Scotland website. I'm very happy to hear that the Itinerant Poetry Librarian will be there for the weekend. Those of us who follow her blog already know what an interesting life she leads, and it'll be great to meet her at last. You can catch her website here, and her blog here.

My local informant says that it has stopped raining in that area, so the road should be OK for the journey up. I drove through the torrential rain to Carstairs yesterday for a poetry workshop with the State Hospital patients. That's been a regular visit for me for several years now. I first made contact with the Librarian there when I was President of the Scottish Library Association. She mentioned they had/have a book group with an interest in poetry, and I've visited them ever since. Group membership has changed over the years, obviously, but there's still a core of patients keenly interested in poetry - they recently had a return visit from my friend Maureen Sangster. Yesterday I read some poems, and then we got round to discussing a subject that we all have in common - our attitudes to food. It's not a simple subject, since some of them have specific issues with food. They covered a wide range of food-related topics in their own poems and, as always, the experience was mutually enlightening.

The Sotto Voce Slam

2009-09-02T22:25:00.000+01:00

The Sotto Voce Slam was held in the Scottish Poetry Library this evening. Claire Askew was the very worthy winner, with Anne Connolly second and Colin Donati third. I really enjoyed the evening, which was full of contrasts - thematic, stylistic and in reading techniques. I thought Claire's programme was terrific, and the poem about her grandmother was very good indeed.

I placed fourth, which really pleased me for several reasons. First, it's only the third slam I've taken part in; second, I had never read either of the first and second round poems in public before, and third, I was making a deliberate attempt to change my style of writing in these poems. I've become a bit dissatisfied with some of my older work, finding it too linear and too predictable. These poems were attempts to break away, to include non sequiturs and, to me anyway, unusual images and word juxtapositions. I surprised myself when writing them, and although they're still in my 'voice', they feel fresher to me. So although 'The Love Song of the Sensory Homunculus' didn't win the Edwin Morgan competition, I'm glad it went down well tonight. (If you Google 'sensory homunculus' you'll see who the poem was about.) I'll try sending it to mags now.

I also handed over the MS of my new collection tonight. I've been wrestling with the sequence of poems in it, and I've finally arrived at an order which makes sense to me.

Busy week

2009-08-31T18:08:00.000+01:00

VoxBox and the Scottish Poetry Library are holding a Sotto Voce Slam on Wednesday evening at the SPL, in association with the Ivor Cutler exhibition and the Noise Abatement Society. I'm looking forward to taking part, and I've chosen poems for the first and second rounds. The judges will be looking for 'exquisite' poems, and I'm not totally sure if that's the right word to describe my poetry.

Thursday I'm doing a poetry workshop at the State Hospital, Carstairs. I always enjoy my visits there - I never know how the patients will respond to poems, but it's great to try out a variety of themes and styles, before I focus in on something they're interested in.

In the evening I'm doing a renga in Dunbar as part of the 'Curiouser and Curiouser' event at the Arts Hub.

At the weekend I'm off to Callander for the Poetry Weekend - details on the Poetry Scotland website.

Pruning the books

2009-08-29T08:16:00.000+01:00

I've been thinking for some time that I should reduce the size of my book collection (currently about 2,000 volumes). For one thing it wouldn't be fair to my family to have to dispose of them if they had to do it in a hurry. For another, the little room which I laughingly call my study is crammed to bursting; books I finish reading are consigned to the loft, and I know in my heart of hearts that I'll not read many of them again. The problem's been brought to a head by our decision to move house. When we retired we assumed we'd need less space, so we downsized. We were wrong. The thing about retirement is that we're both at home for far longer than we were when we were working. We need more living space, not less. Whatever house we move to, there simply won't be room for all of my book cases and the books they contain. Much as I loved being a librarian, I don't want to live in a library.

So I'm wondering how to go about it, and one specific area is my poetry collection. The magazines will be dumped for recycling - few would be interested in taking them, I'm certain. However, I've got around 600 poetry books, of which I might keep 100, and dispose of the rest. I've got some ideas, but I'm wondering if readers have any suggestions?

Publications

2009-08-27T18:01:00.000+01:00

A quick note: I've got a poem in qarrtsiluni today, and two in the latest issue of Poetry Scotland. The PS poems are both about Scottish country dancing actually. It's a little-known fact that Norman MacCaig, as a primary school teacher in Edinburgh, tried to teach Scottish country dancing to the final year pupils at Craiglockhart Primary. In my case, he failed, but I've got vague memories of the experience.

The Book That Changed My Life

2009-08-25T08:26:00.001+01:00

Some time back I submitted a piece to the above part of the Scottish Book Trust's website, then I promptly forgot about it. However, idly browsing this morning I looked at the site, and my story's in it. I talk about Donald M Allen's The New American Poetry, and its effect on me when I bought it in 1961. People often talk about books that influenced them, but this one genuinely changed the direction and shape of my life. I wouldn't have become a writer if I hadn't read this book.

Here's the link:

Connected

2009-08-23T10:16:00.000+01:00

My laptop's usually used as a stand-alone, but this year, for the first time, I took it on holiday and connected up to the interweb thingy from time to time. I mostly used it for keeping up with Facebook, but I also wrote a couple of blog postings, despite the fact that the Blogger page was in German. Rachel wondered if I might be considering joining Bloggers Anonymous, but I don't think I'm that far gone yet. I certainly read some blogs - there are a few I read almost religiously, (although what that religion might be is open to question). I didn't check my emails though, because I wanted to download them to my desktop for archiving when I got home, and it would have felt like work anyway. It wasn't so bad - around 200, and the spam filter dealt with most of the spamaceous ones. Another 50 will go in the 'Deleted non-spam' folder, and I only have around 50 important ones to deal with today. I don't Twitter: tried it once but decided it wasn't for me - who on earth would want to know every time I paint my toenails? But I was and am OK with Facebook.

How long is a poem?

2009-08-18T07:58:00.000+01:00

The previous posting on short poems has, naturally, started me thinking about longer poems, and poem lengths generally. I’ve read a couple of verse novels, and I have to admit, Gentle Reader, that I do not like the form. I mean, what’s wrong with the prose novel? The verse novel seems such an artificial thing to attempt, and I’ve no idea what the writers’ motivations might be.

The ‘long poem’ sensu lato, however, has its adherents, and I definitely do see the attraction in writing the pamphlet/chapbook length poem. Not that I’ve written one myself, I have to say. I have written poem sequences though, one of which, the title sequence from Thirteen Ways of Looking At the Highlands, was around 28 pages of typescript. As I envisaged it, it was going to be a sequence of thirteen linked poems, each of which was around two pages long, with a Prologue and an Epilogue to introduce and to summarise. I wrote it on retreat at Moniack Mhor, and I couldn’t have completed it without the isolation and concentration of the retreat. I’ve also written a six-page botanical poem, The Flowers of Scotland, which was an anniversary present to the Botanical Society of Edinburgh, and first published in its newsletter, and later as a poem-card.

But it has to be said that the long poem, or the long poem sequence, isn’t something I regularly set out to write. Most of mine come out under the 40-line length which, as it happens, is also the line length which fits well on many magazine editors’ pages. Not that I write them to fit magazines – it just works out that way. And some editors have larger pages which will take 50 or so lines, or will happily run poems over onto two pages. As far as webzines go, my personal feeling is that you exceed a screenfull at the risk of losing your scroller’s interest. And that too is around the 40-line mark.

Actually, my all-time favourite poem length is the 14-line sonnet. There’s something very satisfying about writing sonnets, rhymed or free - it seems such a natural form.

Wee poems

2009-08-16T07:58:00.000+01:00

I've got a short poem on A Handful of Stones at the moment, and so I thought I'd write something about the appeal of the many forms which come within the definition - if there is a definition.

Some years back Alec Finlay published Atoms of Delight, in his pocketbooks series, and it included a whole selection of different types of work. Haiku were there of course, but so too were two-line poems, one-line poems, and one-word poems (where the title was usually a long and often cryptic clue to the one word which followed). This was a form sometimes used by Ian Hamilton Finlay. The title of the anthology was taken from Neil Gunn, who developed a late interest in short forms (and Zen of course). There are several of my haiku in it, together with a note recalling a conversation I had with Alan Spence about Norman MacCaig's view of 'wee poems'.

Haiku are too well known to need description here, but some shorter forms don't have a formal definition, and some might argue that they aren't strictly 'poems', or not complete poems, merely poetic fragments - Alec's 'atoms'. I can't remember which of Lewis Carroll's characters said something about words meaning what he chose to make them mean, and that's maybe what it boils down to. If a poet says that a two-line fragment is a poem, then that's maybe what it is.

Have a look at A Handful of Stones, and see what you think. I think it's a delightful site, full of small wonders.

Gutter and off

2009-08-06T12:01:00.001+01:00

I've just received my copy of the new Scottish-based magazine Gutter, and a well turned out production it is. Fiction, poetry and reviews grace its pages, and I look forward to making it my holiday reading in the next fortnight. The list of contributors contains a lot of writers I know, but that would be true of almost any Scottish magazine. I'll just say well done to Rob, Shug, Trish, Bill, Jennifer, Cheryl, Stuart, Hazel and everyone else. It's nice to have a new vehicle for writers of quality to be published in, and I hope to join you in future editions.

I'm offski. If I can sneak into an internet cafe while I'm away I might blog, but more likely not.
PS: I've got a 'shortie' coming up in A Handful of Stones soon, and a longer one in qarrtsiluni. I think they'll appear while I'm away.

The Times 60 novels list

2009-08-03T11:40:00.000+01:00

The Times has a list today of the books its literary editor thinks are the best 60 novels of the past 60 years. As with all such lists, it's subjective, but I've had fun going through it, agreeing and disagreeing. I've learned some things too, just from the layout: the 1960s and 1970s were my decades for reading fiction, and I haven't read any of the critically received novels of this decade. Anyway, here's my take on the list. It's in two parts: the ones I've read, and the unread, with my comments.

1949
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
Chillingly brilliant

1953
Casino Royale
Ian Fleming
A good read, but surely not one of the best books of the period

1954
Lord of the Flies
William Golding
A wonderful and thought-provoking work

1961
Catch 22
Joseph Heller
Stunned me at the time, still does. The film proved it was unfilmable.

1964
Funeral in Berlin
Len Deighton
Good, but not special

1965
Dune
Frank Herbert
Excellent sci-fi at its best

1968
2001
Arthur C. Clarke
More futurology than sci-fi, but I enjoyed it

1969
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
John Fowles
Another brilliant book

1972
Watership Down
Richard Adams
Good at the time, but verging on the naff now

1974
Fear of Flying
Erica Jong
Sexy but shallow

1976
Even Cowgirls get the Blues
Tom Robbins
Even shallower

1978
The World According to Garp
John Irving
A monstrously good novel

1979
Smiley’s People
John le Carré
Meticulously evocative of the seedy world of espionage

1980
Earthly Powers
Anthony Burgess
Another monster, by a master

1981
Lanark
Alasdair Gray
Ditto

1985
Love in The Time of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Didn’t really enjoy it. I was recovering from surgery when I read it

1993
Trainspotting
Irvine Welsh
Entertaining and ghastly

1995
Northern Lights
Philip Pullman
One of my all-time favourite novels

1996
Angela's Ashes
Frank McCourt
Worthy

1997
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
J. K. Rowling
Surely not the best book?

1998
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami
Quirky and enjoyable, but it took me a while to read it

And now some of the unread:
1951
The Catcher in the Rye
J. D. Salinger
I felt no desire to read this one, and still don't

1955
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
Tried other Nabokov, found them unreadable

1957
Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak
Found it dull

1958
Our Man in Havana
Graham Greene
The Power and the Glory is a better Greene book

1960
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
Same as with Salinger

1967
Towards the End of the Morning
Michael Frayn
Have directed a Frayn play, but not read this novel

1973
Crash
J. G. Ballard
Very much prefer The Crystal World, and The Drowned World

1977
A Scanner Darkly
Philip K. Dick
Prefer Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

1988
Mother London
Michael Moorcock
Liked some of his sci-fi

1989
Sexing the Cherry
Jeannette Winterson
Prefer Oranges are not the only fruit

1994
How Late it Was, How Late
James Kelman
Can’t stand this style of writing

2002
Atonement
Ian McEwan
Couldn’t finish this, or any other McEwan

War Poetry

2009-08-01T16:18:00.000+01:00

My friend Donnie McNeill sent me a poem yesterday for Poetry Scotland's 'Open Mouse' page, and I was pleased to post it. It's about death in Afghanistan. We have a mutual friend who used to live in Edinburgh - Suzanne Steele - who's now an official Canadian war artist currently in Afghanistan with their troops, and she has also posted the poem on her War Poet blog. The blog is a 'must read' one for me, with some memorable reflections on her life with the troops. I salute her courage, and I hope and trust that she'll come back safely.

Like many other poets, I've read the poetry of the First World War, and my recent trip to the Somme brought it into sharp focus for me. Finding the names of so many of my relatives made it a very personal pilgrimage, and I couldn't help but write a poem about the experience. The poem's 'in submission' just now, so I won't post it. It's not about the conflict itself, or the fighting, just my reactions to the things I experienced and thought about. It couldn't be otherwise. There's a Canadian connection there too, as one of my relatives had emigrated to Canada, but came back to fight with the Canadian battalion, and died in the battle.

As one who has travelled a lot in Europe, Russia and Japan, I've seen the aftershocks of war often enough, in people and places, but the experience of living through war is something I can only read about and imagine. I've written poems about the Normandy landings, because I've visited the area several times, and I know what happened there. Encountering the Terezin/ Theresienstadt concentration camp in the Czech Republic made me despair at the inadequacy of poetry to confront the monstrous reality of what went on there. That's why the poem has the title 'Where Poetry Fails'. It needed a higher art than mine to express it, but all I had was my art, so it had to do.

Tutti Frutti on the way

2009-07-29T13:02:00.000+01:00

I loved this programme when it came out in 1987 (yes, it really was that long ago), and I've never understood why the BBC didn't release it on video a long time ago. However, I've just heard that it's about to be released on DVD on 3rd August. Needless to say I'll be ordering it.

The performances by Robbie Coltrane, Emma Thompson, Richard Wilson, Katy Murphy as 'Miss Toner' etc were first class (as I remember), and it was a masterly and realistic rendering of the life of a rather seedy band trying to engineer a revival. As one who was in a band in the early 1960s but wasn't tempted to recreate crappy gigs, backstage 'dressing rooms' and drinking too much to convince myself my playing was good, I just loved reliving it all. That's how it was, I seem to remember.

Getting back to normal, whatever that is

2009-07-26T20:58:00.000+01:00

The new hard disk and motherboard are working well, and the additional memory has speeded things up considerably. I'm left with a few problems though. It looks like my old system failed to write some of my photos to disk properly, so I've lost some. It's a small proportion, but annoying. The other thing is I forgot to back up my accounting files - or I've forgotten where I backed them up to, so I'm having to rebuild my accounts manually for the last and present financial years. It'll take me a couple of days. Fortunately I had done a pencilled reckoning of my I & E for the tax return, so that won't hold me back.

On the plus side, and it's a nice plus, I have a poem up on a handful of stones today (and another two to come). It's a nice site for those very short poems, complete in themselves, which are hard to place in conventional magazines. They're what Norman MacCaig used to call 'wee poems'. It's a site I enjoy reading, so I'm very glad to be there.

The other plus is that yesterday I received the first of the cards I've been working on with Alec Finlay. Nest boxes, each labelled with cryptic clues, have been placed in Springburn Park, Glasgow, the St Andrews Botanic Garden, and Edinburgh's George Square garden (plus one at Kings Buildings). My contribution was to write walks between the nest boxes in the gardens, giving additional facts about the trees, but not naming them. The cards look great, and it's one of the more unusual commissions I've had, but that's part of the joy of working with Alec.

Computing woes

2009-07-23T23:09:00.002+01:00

I've been having a lot of computer crashes for some time now, and I decided to bite the bullet and get a hard drive wipe and reinstall. The crashes weren't 'blue screen of death' ones, they were worse - the thing went straight to black and restarted, or tried to. I couldn't even restart in safe mode. So I backed up my files and took the ailing PC into my local repairman. He phoned me today to say that the hard drive is clapped out, and so is the motherboard. He'll fit new ones for me, and I should have it back soon, but in the meantime I'm working with my trusty laptop. It doesn't spell as well as the old desktop, and it doesn't duplicate my software completely, for copyright reasons - I'm a law-biding citizen of Sunny Dunny after all. So while I can do word processing, publishing work and basic image editing, I can't do website editing, accounting and some of the other tasks I do on the desktop. Needless to say backlogs are building up.

One weird thing is that although the laptop doesn't have a spam filter on email, the spam volume is way lower than it was before. Are the spammers on holiday?

Vetting writers

2009-07-18T13:58:00.003+01:00

There's controversy going the rounds at the moment over authors and illustrators visiting schools in England being required to register on a child protection database. Some, such as Michael Morpurgo and Philip Pullman object to the new requirement. I don't think we in Scotland are going to go down that route, but it did get me thinking about the subject. I work with children quite often in schools and other settings (museums, gardens etc), and I'm required to have a 'Disclosure Scotland' certificate to do this work. It means that the Scottish Criminal Records Bureau have done a search on me, and are satisfied that I pose no risk to children. I could have told them that, but it's an external verification, if you like. The certificate comes in two flavours, Standard and Enhanced, and mine is the latter, but to be honest I can't remember the difference.

The big name authors say that they give talks to classes of 30 or so, and maybe assemblies of a couple of hundred at a time, and that there's always at least one teacher present at all times. My visits are usually writing workshops, and although there's always a teacher in attendance, I'm often working on a one-to-one basis with individual pupils. I can see the need for writers in my situation to be vetted, and I don't object to it at all. It's a professional overhead, along with the need to have public liability insurance as a tutor.

I've learned the do's and don'ts by experience, not being a trained teacher, and I've often thought that writers' organisations, like the Scottish Book Trust here, should offer basic training in classroom interactions with children and teachers. It would help all sides to get more out of the experience.

Any thoughts?

Five Live reading

2009-07-16T21:34:00.002+01:00

Five Calder Wood Press poets are reading at Edinburgh's Word Power bookshop on Wednesday 22nd July, 6.30 - 7.30pm. It's free and the more the merrier.

The line-up features what I think is a lovely contrast of voices, styles and subjects. In alphabetical order:

Irene Brown is originally from Glasgow and lives in Edinburgh. Her CWP chapbook - Glass Slippers - had a great launch in Edinburgh's Duo Boots shoe shop earlier this year.
Anne Connolly, originally from Northern Ireland, now also living in Edinburgh. Her book - Downside Up - was well received in 2008, and she's a delightful reader.
Jo Gibson's one of my original Dunbar friends. She's a co-founder of the Dunbar Writers' Group, and her poetry is deft and original. The Heart is Always Full came out at the end of 2007 and its first printing sold out at her launch.
Mary Johnston lives in Bonnyrigg, but was born and brought up in Aberdeenshire. Her poetry features the rich and musical Doric tongue. She was joint runner-up in this year's Callum Macdonald Memorial Award, for her previous booklet. The new one from CWP is Fa dis she think she is?, and comes with a CD of Mary reading her poems.
Jayne Wilding's book - Sky blue notebook from the Pyrenees - was the other joint runner-up in the CMMA this year. It contains her reflective poems based on her experience of living in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. Jayne lives in St Monans, Fife.

The growth of Calder Wood Press continues to astonish me. I had no idea it would develop this way when I started it, and I am so pleased with the way it's going.

What's retirement?

2009-07-14T15:57:00.004+01:00

Back in the mists of time; let's call it the late 1990s, I was seconded from my career as a librarian and parachuted in to the dizzying heights of senior management. One of my first tasks was to take over the management side of negotiations with the trade unions over the annual pay settlement. Another was to drive forward discussions with the Scottish Office (later Scottish Government) on a restructuring of our administration. A third was to implement a policy of 'age 60 retirement'. This was to bring our quango into line with policy of the Scottish Office at that time. All of these things took effort and commitment, but I succeeded. Indeed I went a further two steps up the greasy pole of preferment (and then one step back, but that's another story) before the arrow of time birled round to my own 60th birthday in 2002.

Since then, the Scottish Goverment, and indeed the UK one, has gone into reverse over retirement age policy, and there have been noises in Westminster this week suggesting that even the 'default retirement age' of 65 will be revisited next year. So, coming up as I do upon a birthday next week, what do I think about it?

Well, I moved pretty smoothly from one career into another in 2002. Being a freelance writer, tutor and publisher suits me, plus I've done an awful lot of voluntary work as well. I work very hard at the things I do, but I like being able to choose when and how I do them. I would never want to go back to an 8:30 to 5 job again, but I'm glad that people of my age and beyond will hopefully have the opportunity to do so if they want to. Retirement should be a time to do something different, or to carry on doing the same thing, whichever you prefer. I started work at 18, and my degrees were earned part-time, while I was working full-time, so retirement, for me, came after 42 years of working.

I don't think my capacity for work diminished much between 60 and 65, but I've definitely noticed some slowdown since then. And there's an attitude thing as well. I'm less patient with those who persistently re-invent the wheel. I have little or no inclination to learn new tricks, like web design software. Upskilling sounds tiresome, and of dubious long-term benefit.

The writing's changing too, and I'm glad of that. I'd be very bored with myself if I didn't find new inspirations, and different ways of expressing myself. And I've got the time to do it.

Plants and Poetry

2009-07-11T09:14:00.003+01:00

From 1976 to 2000 I lived in Mid Calder, West Lothian, very close to Calder Wood, from which my press is named. The wood was part of the Almondell and Calder Wood Country Park. The Calder Wood part was left natural and only lightly managed, and I loved that. It was full of wildlife and wildflowers - the bluebells were fantastic. Almondell was the Park headquarters, with a visitor centre, the Ranger Service staff, walks, a barbecue area, footbridges over the Almond, toilets and other facilities. I got to know many of the Rangers, and in the latter years I worked with some of them, leading walks on plants and poetry, showing people the old shale mines in the wood, and many other activities.

Where's this leading? Well, last night I was at a friend's birthday party in Winchburgh, and she told me that Kirsty, one of my Ranger Service friends, was going to be there. Kirsty arrived, and we had a great catch-up - I hadn't seen her for ten years. One of the walks we did together in 1998 focused on plant names, plant lore and plant uses. We led a group of adults and children round the park, looking and talking, and then we sat in the picnic area and wrote poems about the things we'd seen and heard about. My own poem, which I punningly titled 'Kirsty's Walk', was later published in my second collection - Seven Senses - in 2000, and Kirsty hasn't seen it. So this is for her:

Kirsty’s Walk

Jane hangs on tight, as she pendulums
on the pegs of the climbing log,
in the field squared with sitting-coats
against the wet grass.

At the base of the lime tree
a barrel of twigs protects;
staves of winter fodder
against the season’s hunger.

Chestnuts spread green gloves,
seeking applause for the magnificence
of their show-off candelabras
against the green curtain.

Toadflax tapestries the old wall
above the coupling jewelled beetles,
and campion’s double tongues speak out
against a distant barking.

The reluctant petals of wood avens
bob to Robert’s fine herb,
and lepers shun the golden daisies
along the path scented with wild garlic
against the sun’s enthusiasm.

We all depend, hang on,
as ivy cleaves to the rough bark
of Douglas’ fir,
while Emily plays on
in her barbecued pleasure,
against the coming of age.

Copyright (c) Colin Will, 2000

China and minorities

2009-07-08T08:42:00.004+01:00

I didn't visit Xinjiang Province on my trip in 2007, but I did visit Qinghai and Tibet, and the parallels are obvious. There are many ethnic minorities in China - 55 is the figure often quoted - and their cultures are as various. Xinjiang's capital, Ürümqi, was a staging post on the Northern Silk Road. To the Southwest is the cold Taklamakan Desert, where red-haired mummies were found some years ago. The indigenous people here are Uighur, of Turkic origin. Indeed, during WWII, the area was named as East Turkestan.

The Southern Silk Road went through Xining in Qinghai Province, where the minority Hui people are descendants of Arab and Persian traders who intermarried with locals. The Hui, like the Uighur, are Moslems. Qinghai is on the Tibetan Plateau, cold in summer and bitterly cold in winter. When we visited in November 2007 the vast and beautiful saltwater lake - Qinghai Hu - was beginning to freeze, and we had snow when we visited the Kumbum Monastery in Ta'er Si.

Tibet itself (Xizang) is, of course, home to the Tibetan people, and is a pilgrimage centre for many other peoples.

The point is that in all three areas, called 'Autonomous Republics' in doublespeak, have ethnic Han Chinese majorities now. Xining and Lhasa are for the most part modern Chinese cities, and Ürümqi probably is too, although I haven't seen it. For ideological and economic reasons, the Chinese government has pursued a policy of encouraging settlement in these regions, and it seems to have been popular. The 'One Child' policy does not apply to ethnic minorities, nor to marriages between such minorities and ethnic Han Chinese. Equally, better educational facilities, financial access and the encouragement of entrepreneurial spirit in 'greater China' have given its people greater business opportunities in the less developed provinces. This fuels resentment among the indigenes, and that won't be helped until education and training in these regions is levelled up. It was obvious to me that a large proportion - probably the majority - of the businesses we saw in Lhasa were Chinese-owned.

So the resentments on both sides are huge, and can't easily be solved, The eggs can't be unscrambled. Separatism on the basis of ethnicity is morally repugnant and impossible in practice. What would help would be greater sensitivity from the Chinese government in understanding the reasons for the build-up of anger, and it then taking steps to improve the long-term prospects for all peoples in these regions. The brutal suppression of protest will not work. China is an astonishing and wonderful nation, and it contains within its borders many different cultures. Until it learns to value diversity, pluralism and dissent it will continue to have difficulties with its minorities.

Writing groups

2009-07-06T11:23:00.003+01:00

It's a cliché, I know, that writing is a solitary activity, but our writing exists in a social context, even if it's just an abstract relationship between writer and anonymous readers. The writing group provides a specific social setting for writing, but not all writers would feel comfortable about belonging to one. That's fine. I've heard it said that writing groups result in a homogenisation of style, technique or outlook, and that may indeed be true of some, but it's certainly not true of all.

Writing groups serve a number of functions:

analysis and criticism of members' work
advice and encouragement
development of skills and techniques
writing practice
social interaction

The first group I joined was Edinburgh's School of Poets, founded more than 25 years ago by Tessa Ransford, and still going strong. It's a 'critical' group, focusing on detailed analysis by small groups of each member's poem. I know my own work benefited from such analysis, but living in Sunny Dunny after retirement, and being so busy with other things, meant that I had to leave the group some years ago.

I helped to found the Dunbar Writers' Group not long after moving to the town. It aims to deliver all of the services listed above, and it's become a focus for writing within the town's thriving artistic community. I don't lead the group now, members chair meetings in rotation, and I'm much happier with that. We joined the umbrella organisation - Tyne & Esk Writers - which looks after the interests of eight writing groups within Midlothian and East Lothian.

One of the Tyne & Esk groups is specifically for poetry, and it has adopted the ethos and some of the methods of work of the School of Poets. It's always nice to meet up once a month in the old (if somewhat fusty-smelling) Council Chambers in North Berwick, and it's an encouragement to write at least one decent poem every month.