Information Scotland

The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland

February 2008 Volume 6(1)

Endpiece

Poetic places

Colin Will on encouraging the spread of poetry, and gathering inspiration to create it.

I’m still basking in the warmth of being appointed Poet Partner to Moray Libraries (Elgin). This is a scheme funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation in association with the host libraries and run by the Scottish Poetry Library. The SPL has 13 outreach collections in Scotland, from Shetland to Dumfries and Galloway. My job will be to visit libraries, schools, museums, art centres, reading groups and community organisations, making use of the outreach collection and other sources to encourage the reading and enjoyment of poetry. This fits so well with what I like doing anyway that it seems like a marriage made in heaven.

Other new Poet Partners include Pam Beasant in Orkney and Raman Mundair in Beasrden. SPL’s website has an online Reading Room which provides backup resources and reading ideas for groups and individuals.

SPL also provides training for librarians, and a librarians’ e-zine Poetry Issues. The last time I was in Elgin was to lead a schools workshop on Plants and Poetry, and to take part in an evening poetry reading with my friend Valerie Gillies, currently Edinburgh’s Makar. What impressed me very much about that trip was the response of pupils and audience respectively. The thing that made the difference was the obvious enthusiasm for poetry shown by the teachers and librarians I encountered. There are already strong foundations for the partnership in Elgin, and I’m delighted to have been asked to work with them over the next two years.

Poetry and place
A sense of place is a feature of much of my poetry. I love going places, seeing things, meeting people. My recent trip last November to China and Tibet is already proving enormously inspirational. I’ve got a haibun on climbing the Great Wall, a haiku sequence already published in an American e-zine, and a poem on the Terracotta Warriors accepted by a magazine. A poem sequence on the Qinghai (pronounced Ching high) and Tibet section is well under way. Even while I was in Tibet, I knew I wanted to call the sequence The Floorshow At the Mad Yak Café. Others so far completed are: Credo, concerning the Kumbum Monastery in Qinghai and my own Buddhist reaction to it, Iron Road to Lhasa, about our wonderful 28-hour train journey (which reached an altitude of 5076m), and Bardo Thodol Updated, about Tibetan death customs. Bardo Thodol is often miscalled the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which it isn’t. It’s actually prayers said over the dying or dead to ease the way into rebirth.

I’ve also written Kora, about the Barkhor district of Lhasa – a combination of market and pilgrimage circuit – and the wonderful Jokhang Temple. Still to be written are poems about the Potala and greater Lhasa, and one on the Sera Monastery will follow. I may also write one on the Norbulingka, the Dalai Lama’s Summer Palace in Lhasa, where we saw His Holiness’ Western style bathroom and his huge 1950s radio set. These poems are semi-narrative in nature, and fairly long; probably double-page spreads in most poetry magazines. The trouble is that I’m not sure which magazines might be interested in publishing them. How do I get them published?

And what about the other parts of China I visited? Poems about Beijing, Xi’an, Xining, Shanghai and Souzhou may very well follow in future. They are likely to be written in a variety of forms and styles to reflect different subjects. We’ll see. There’s a small gallery of China and Tibet photos on my website.

Self-censorship
One of the features of being in a senior position in StAnza: Scotland’s Poetry Festival is that I have to be extremely careful about what I say in public concerning living poets. Once they’re safely dead they’re fair game; I can slag off ex-poets with impunity. But it’s inevitable that I prefer some poets to others, and there a few whose work I really don’t appreciate at all. But I can’t write about them here or elsewhere.

I’ve developed strategies for not discussing the ones I don’t like. When I say ‘strategies’ I mean lies. “I don’t believe I’ve read so-and-so,” is a fairly frequent porky, as is, “You know, some day I must get down to reading more of old wossname.” Of course, if the poets are not domiciled in the UK, or there seems no chance of St Andrews being graced with their presence, I might squeak out a semi-apologetic, “I’ve never really understood that type of poem.” That excuse might even be true; there are genres of poetry that I genuinely don’t understand. That may be down to the fact that I trained in science rather than literature; it may be the lack of a particular life experience, or it could be due to innate stupidity.

So if you meet me at a poetry event or elsewhere and you want to discuss a favourite living poet that I can’t stand, please don’t connect me to a polygraph. Be prepared for fibs, evasions, and damn fine acting.
Colin Will e: colin.will@zen.co.uk

Information Scotland Vol. 6(1) February 2008

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Last updated: 16-Jul-2008