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The National
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
Poetry's curious relationship with power is seen in stone voices
This week, lines from three of our National Makar's works were unveiled on the wall – from Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay and Kathleen Jamie. The method is beautiful. Words are carved into geologically specific types of Scottish stone – Achnaba Schist from Lochgilphead for Liz; Ailsa Craig granite from Ayrshire for Jackie; Dalbeattie granite from Dumfriesshire for Kathleen. Stone voices indeed, as Neal Ascherson once put it. These new rocks disturb another kind of ancient continuity. For the first 10 years of the wall, as chosen by an all-male panel, there were no female writers (the worker-poet Mary Brooksbank was included in 2009, along with Norman MacCaig). READ MORE: Jeremy Corbyn says police 'picked on him' as Gaza protest case dropped Rennie Mackintosh, RLS, Gray, Henderson, MacCaig, Morgan, two from Burns, three from MacDiarmid … Many of the quotes are undeniably inspirational (I hold close to me MacDiarmid's 'Scotland small? Our multiform, our infinite Scotland small?' and Fletcher of Saltoun's 'If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation'). But no Muriel Spark, Janice Galloway, Nan Shepherd, Naomi Mitchison? There is now at least some rectification of the sexism of the original list. The new verses fit into the wall's predominant theme, which is to hymn a progressive Scottish national identity. Lochhead provides a clear injunction to the country's politicians within (and the citizens without): 'this our one small country… our one, wondrous,spinning, dear green place. What shall we build of it, together in this our one small time and space?' Kay's lines – 'Where do you come from? 'Here,' I said, 'Here. These parts''– is short and sharp about those who cannot conjugate her broad Scots speech and her black skin. Jamie's contribution initially seems a little psychedelic (which I welcome): 'Be brave: by the weird-song in the dark you'll find your way'. Until you realise that this was one of the weekly poems she composed through the referendum year of 2014. 'Weird-song in the dark' seems all too descriptive of the goal of indy right now. So if this is largely 'patriotic verse' – and it would be a pluralistic Parliament wall that had anything else – it's our love of a complex and surprising, rather than purist and monolithic nation that's being articulated here. It looks like there are scores of other potential poetic gaps in the Canongate Wall. Let's see what treasures will be selected under the conditions of a future Scotland. Poetry and power, as I survey the landscape locally and globally, have a curious relationship. The great modern Scottish poet Don Paterson, in his impressive (and funny) 2017 book The Poem, reminds us that poetry has the deepest roots. It stems from the need of pre-literate humans to share information – emotive stories as well as hard facts – about what might aid their survival, via intensely memorable forms of speech and language. However, while prose evokes, says Paterson – it specifies the item required – poetry invokes, 'calling down its subject from above'. This is a magical-seeming process in which 'audience and artist collude', both agreeing to 'create the poem, through the investment of an excess of imaginative energy'. Look around the interwebs, and this is the role that poetry is still being given, when it's discussed in the public sphere. Charley Locke in The New York Times earlier this year wrote about 'the morning ritual that helps me resist the algorithm'. Which is that, upon waking, she doesn't reach for her phone, but tries to memorise a poem with pen and paper. This poem-ingestion has 'made me better at noticing', says Locke. 'The particularity of a poem, rolling around in the back of my head, reminds me how to look for repetition and snags elsewhere, to hear both text and subtext. 'I think I'm more perceptive, a better observer of both art and the people I love … In my idle mind, instead of defaulting to whatever demands my attention, I move toward a precise, generous beauty,' Locke concludes. Poetry as an 'excess investment of imaginative energy' looms large in the writings of Franco 'Bifo' Berardi. Bifo is a wild-haired Italian radical from the 1970s (who is also a conceptual darling of the contemporary art circuit). He redefines poetry as 'the error' (in any piece of culture, not just words on a page) 'that leads to the discovery of new continents of meaning … The excess that contains new imaginations and new possibilities'. Berardi counterposes this 'poetry' to our over-measured, over-surveilled, depression-inducing, tech-dominated present. He urges young folks, diminished by apprehension about their future prospects, to practice it furiously – and replenish themselves. These poetic activities sound like the spoken-word, 'slam' poetry scene of the early 2000s in Scotland, as described by Jenny Lindsay in the Scottish-themed edition of the current Irish Pages. Going by the mantra 'if it doesn't exist, create it!', Lindsay recalls that 'we wrote for audiences, not for snooty poets and writers. And the liveness was key, the audience reaction our main critic'. The 'scene' (as Lindsay describes it) fell prey to culture wars, entertainingly described by poetry maven Colin Waters as 'a punch-up in a phone box'. Yet Lindsay also profiles how social media, and the marketed self it enables, has also changed – or perhaps incorporated – the pathways of poets. She notes Rupi Kaur's 4.4 million followers on Instagram, her self-help poems accompanied by evocative line drawings. This produced a first volume that sold two million book copies. Perhaps the algorithms might not be so antipathetic to the poetic voice, after all … I guess it depends on the poetry – whether, as Ezra Pound once put it, it's 'the news that stays news'. This week in Glasgow's Kelvin Hall, I was speaking on a panel to commemorate the centenary of a Scot who troublingly exemplifies Berardi's version of the disruptively 'poetic': Alexander Trocchi. Situationist; writer of manifestos, existential novels, pornography (and poetry); both publisher of Beckett and Neruda, and drug dealer/pimp …Trocchi crashed the doors of the palace of excess, in both constructive and destructive ways. Read his essay in the Scottish New Saltire journal of 1962, The Invisible Insurrection Of A Million Minds, and it remains spookily relevant to our times. Think of this in the context of memes and networks: 'We envisage an organisation whose structure and mechanisms are infinitely elastic; we see it as the gradual crystallisation of a regenerative cultural force, a perpetual brainwave, creative intelligence everywhere recognising and affirming its own involvement … Trocchi describes further this poetic action: 'Without indignation, by a kind of mental ju-jitsu that is ours by virtue of intelligence, of modifying, correcting, polluting, deflecting, corrupting, eroding, outflanking … inspiring what we might call the invisible insurrection.' READ MORE: Charles Rennie Mackintosh building 'at significant risk' from O2 ABC plan Insurrection out of what, against what, though? I can see the current terrain clearly enough. Levels of trust in politics and business-as-usual are vertiginously low; the very worst could be the beneficiaries of it. Empowerment at the everyday level has to be paid much, much more than the present lip-service. All political classes should be on high alert. Yet the sight of poetry from socialists, feminists, decolonisers, aesthetes and idealists, carved into the stone walls of a (putatively) people's parliament, holds out some tiny prospect for me. Is national progress still possible in Scotland? Can we still work as if we live 'in the early days of a better nation', as Alasdair Gray's inscription (on Iona marble) puts it? I think the poets, old and new on the Canongate Wall, say 'aye'.
Scotsman
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Landmarks - Border Voices: Alexander Moffat, Ruth Nicol, Alan Riach, Hawick Museum ★★★★ Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, various venues, Hawick ★★★★ Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Hawick can seem a long way from anywhere to the driver stuck behind a tractor on the A698. But the importance of the Borders in Scotland's cultural development is strongly argued in Landmarks - Border Voices, the new iteration of the three-way collaboration between artist Alexander Moffat, poet Alan Riach and contemporary landscape painter Ruth Nicol. Central to this show is a trio of figures, Hugh MacDiarmid, who grew up in Langholm and spent his closing years at Brownsbank near Biggar, Hawick-born songwriter and composer Francis George Scott, who taught MacDiarmid at Langholm Academy, and painter William Johnstone, Scott's cousin, who grew up on a farm near Selkirk. All three, together and separately, were important figures in the Scottish cultural renaissance of the 1930s which was intertwined with the stirrings of the movement for Scottish independence. Courtesy of the artist In paintings and poems, Moffat and Riach call them 'the Border Guards': 'three on the line,' Riach writes, 'defending the border', shoring up Scotland's own version of modernism which made its own independent links with the rest of the world. In Moffat's paintings, Border Guards I and II, they seem to merge into (or emerge from) the mountainous landscape, taking their place in the nation's mythology. This is Moffat's wider project, which continues with portraits of MacDiarmid at home in Brownsbank, and with Scott and Norman MacCaig, and in works like his monumental group portrait, Scotland's Voices, bringing together those most associated with the folk revival. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Riach's poems, which accompany the paintings, add more detail: MacDiarmid, living in a cottage with no indoor running water, corresponding with Yevtushenko and Ginsberg. Nicol's paintings add another dimension as she explores in her own way landscapes around Langholm, Hawick, Selkirk and Ancrum. Nicol works in a particular way, painting expressively, then drawing over it using strong, graphic lines. Her work is strongest when she's able to work at scale and explore textures; the largest work here is a huge diptych, Minto Hills and Farmland form Ancrum to Denholm. In other large paintings like From Denholm to Ancrum and Summer - The Roman Road to Brownsbank Farm from Brownsbank Cottage, she describes a patchwork of richly coloured fields and narrow roads, rising to hills in the distance. It's particularly interesting to see two paintings by Johnstone himself: Ploughed Field (c. 1963) and his portrait of MacDiarmid, as fresh and alive as anything here. Working in a style akin to abstract expressionism decades before Jackson Pollock, he is one of the most interesting Scottish artists of the 20th century, who lived and taught in London and in the US, though his visual world was shaped by the landscape of the Borders. A larger exhibition of his work - if any gallery could rise to such a thing - would be well worth seeing. A still from Kamal Aljafari's A Fidai Film | Courtesy of the Alchemy Festival Meanwhile, in early May, the town of Hawick briefly becomes the epicentre of the world of artists' film, as it hosts the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. Now in its 15th iteration, Alchemy, under the direction of Michael Pattison and Rachael Disbury, offers thoughtfully curated programmes of short films, selected features and an impressive group of film-related exhibitions over a long weekend. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Alchemy has an egalitarian approach which doesn't hold much truck with premieres, but one of this year's hot tickets was the world premiere of On Weaving, a festival commission by Luke Fowler and Corin Sworn, surely the closest Scotland has to an artists'-film power couple. They focus on High Sunderland, the modernist house designed by Peter Womersley for fashion designer Bernat Klein and his wife Margaret in the hills above Selkirk, now home to architecture and design historians Juliet Kinchin and Paul Stirton. As the 16mm camera captures gorgeous light filtering through its floor-to-ceiling windows, blurring the boundaries of inside and outside, we see Juliet and Paul working, learning Hungarian, setting the table, talking about the Bauhaus. These gentle, free-associative sections are juxtaposed with footage shot in one of Hawick's remaining knitwear factories, all mechanised buzzing and clacking. While part of its work supports films made locally (this year's festival began with a preview of Mark Lyken's Rum an Milk, a feature about Hawick's Common Riding) Alchemy is also determinedly international. Venezuela was a focus this year, with a selection of works by Adrian Vila Guevara and a screening of Margot Benacerraf's 1959 film Araya, about workers in the country's salt mines. Kamal Aljafari's A Fidai Film is a reconstruction of Palestine's film archive after PLO headquarters in Beirut was plundered by the Israel army in 1982. Meditating on the loss of an archive, Aljafari began to collect and stitch together fragments of found film through the lens of what he called 'the camera of the dispossessed'. It's a moving, at times harrowing, watch, written through with anger in its edgy soundtrack and blood red redactions of captioning added by the Israelis. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad In the exhibitions programme, Lawrence Abu Hamdan's The Diary of A Sky reflects on how the airspace above Beirut has been regularly violated by Israeli drones and aircraft. During the pandemic, when skies fell silent around the world, the roar of jets over the city became so commonplace it became part of ordinary life. His film essay reflects on this noise pollution, documents flight hours and tries to sift the truth from the conspiracy theories: all the metaphorical noise about the subject. When relative silence arrived in 2023, he points out, it was only because the same aircraft were now bombing Gaza. Several of the short films capture vividly the sense of another country: Weipeng Huang's Happy New Year contrasts the large-scale state-run celebrations for Chinese New year with the modest festivities of his own family; Jolene Mok offers a fresh vision of her home city of Hong Kong in black and white, and Arjuna Keshvani-Ham's Radicle City offers an impressively nuanced exploration of the colonial legacy in Bangalore through the story of its gardens. Hope Strickland's film, A River Holds A Perfect Memory, shifts between Lancashire and Jamaica, taking a remarkably poignant look at the histories of industrialisation and enslavement. A still from A River Holds a Perfect Memory | Courtesy of the Alchemy Festival Finding ways to relate to or explore one's ancestral homeland, family or cultural history was a recurring theme. Cumha, by Elena Horgan, is a beautiful exploration in words and images of the artist's shifting relationship to the Irish language. In Adura Baba Mi (My Father's Prayer) Juliana Kasumu started off exploring her parents' connection to their native Nigeria through their church, The Celestial Church of Christ, and ended up with a more intimate story than she expected. Jules Leaño's Inheritance is a letter to her Filipina mother exploring the difficulty of putting together the puzzle of the past, particularly across different languages and Lithuanian artist Martyna Ratnik takes a gently surreal approach to a similar theme in She's Waiting for the Sunset. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad In a piece titled for the first words of a dream world, Scottish filmmaker Bobbi Cameron brings together elements of her own Celtic shamanic practice with landscapes from the beautiful Isle of Seil and her experience of caring for her elderly grandparents. Her film was shown at last year's Glasgow International, as was Owain Train McGilvray's Seeing Red, a psychedelic tribute to a now-vanished queer bar in North Wales. Michael Hanna's Once A Blue Always A Red, based on conversations with Merseyside taxi drivers about football, was both telling and funny, as was Beth Fox's 12 Lemons, about being a Deliveroo courier during the pandemic. Isabel Barfod's How Much Air Lungs Can Hold is a thoughtful deep-dive (no pun intended) into Blackness and swimming. Other films linger in the memory: Yuyan Wong's Green Grey Black Brown, about the construction of worlds and the destruction of environments accompanied by a mesmerising slowed-down version of Yes's prog-rock hit, Owner of A Lonely Heart; Crimson D M Lily's trippy Tai a Mynyddeodd, made entirely in Welsh, with Welsh-speaking band Adwaith; Louise Scantlebury's charming sock puppet in Seek Beyond; Olive Jones's See and Don't See, a vulnerable exploration of young single motherhood. From carefully narrated film-poems to the wordless and abstract, digital, analogue and mixed format, from a tale of Algerian mountain spirits to a nine-minute single shot of parrots in flight, Alchemy celebrates film which pushes at edges of content and form - with not a little magic along the way.
