Introduction

It’s difficult to say exactly what’s going on in Scottish poetry right now. But it’s definitely something exciting.
 
When I first moved to Edinburgh from Toronto five years ago, I uncovered only a couple of poetry series and one small press fair. Despite the general reverence for Rabbie Burns (I mean, a national holiday for a poet!) and the significant number of well-known Scottish poets like Tom Leonard, Jackie Kay, Brian McCabe and Carol Ann Duffy (the current British poet laureate), there didn’t seem to be the same ground-level exuberance for poetry that I’ve experienced elsewhere.
 
Now Glasgow and Edinburgh boast so many poetry events and book fairs that I can’t possibly highlight them in this limited space. You trip over poets like you trip over bad bagpipers swindling tourists on the High Street. We have page poets, stage poets, language poets, lyric poets, slam poets, vispoets, sound poets, found poets, conceptual poets. We have a particularly interesting scene of poets fusing text with dance, visual art, film and/or music.
 
Scotland is a small and sparsely populated “country” (I will return to the quotation marks anon), and the current trend in varied and explorative poetics seems antithetic to the number of people here (some paltry 5.2 million) — especially when you still find an inordinate number of bad rhyming poets in a huge place like London.
 
Which takes me back to the quotation marks. Perhaps we can credit this surge in Scottish work to the fact that Scotland is finally coming into itself again. The devolution process — Scotland’s separation from the United Kingdom in terms of certain political powers, marked by gaining its own parliament in 1999 — might result in full independence in the next five years. There will soon be a referendum, and odds are we might be a real country again.
 
As a poet raised by a Scottish father and grandfather (the latter especially queen-loathing) and French Canadian mother, I rather like the idea of independence — though I’m a bit wary of nationalism proper. What defines a nation? Where does colonialism end? But these are big questions. Let’s just say it’s an exciting time to be in Scotland, despite high unemployment, racism, sexism, ableism and homo/transphobia. We are on the cusp of something, and that something might be better than what we have as part of “Great” Britain.
 
We were speaking of poetry. The poets I’ve chosen to feature here are by no means representative of all of Scotland. For example, very few of the works are in Scots and none are in Gaelic. Most of the poets were born or live in Glasgow or Edinburgh. And when asked about the “Scottishness” of their work, most of them pretty much shrugged. Perhaps the (now-defunct) Scottish Arts Council’s efforts to produce officially Scottish™ poetry backfired? It’s hard to stuff a poet into a mold.
 
In this small survey, I offer you seven short examples of some of the people raising the bar of poetry in Scotland. Alison Smith’s British Sign Language performance poetry is a haunting and beautiful depiction of deafness, disability, and lesbian desire. Colin Herd’s versatile and often humorous texts evoke a wee taste of Frank O’Hara, with a distinctly Edinburgh twist. In a tour-de-force sequence, Jim Ferguson searches eloquently for links between nature, feminism, and working-class Scottish men.
 
Lila Matsumoto ensnares her readers with deceptively simple lines; her poems slowly take shape into creatures that seem to breathe on their own. Using everyday texts, Marvo Men perform something between sound poetry and improvised music, drawing on what’s left on the page after it has been read. Nuala Watt centers the disabled poet’s voice, skillfully separating the poetics of blindness and cerebral palsy from the simplistic symbolism of the Canon. And ShellSuit Massacre electrify listeners with their class-conscious found-poetry-techno, augmented by Sacha Kahir’s politically charged video.
 
Worth noting is that many of the people publishing and presenting work in Scotland are migrants — or, like myself, from here yet not from here. Arguably, it’s the mixture of home-grown and migrant poets that’s creating the new excitement in Scottish writing, the flourishing hybrid forms, the experimentation, and — dare I say it — the, um, Scottishness.
 
If you’re interested in accessing more new Scottish poetry, here are a few highlights of many possible recommendations:
 

Publications:

Gutter, Glasgow (Adrian Searle, Colin Begg)
anything anymore anywhere, Edinburgh (Colin Herd)
SCREE, Edinburgh (Lila Matsumoto)
Forest Publications, Edinburgh (Ryan Van Winkle and Forest Editorial Board)

Reading series and literary events:

Words Per Minute, Glasgow (Helen Sedgwick, Kirstin Innes, Kirsty Logan)
Seeds of Thought, Glasgow (Ernest and Tawona Sithole, Tarneem Al Mousawi)
Neu! Reekie!, Edinburgh (Kevin Williamson, Michael Pederson)
Inky Fingers, Edinburgh (Alec Beattie, Mairi Campbell-Jack, Harry Giles, Rachel McCrum, Katherine McMahon, Rose Ritchie and Tracey S. Rosenberg)