Goldman, Jane Et Al - Why I Choose Poetry

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Why I Choose Poetry (What’s Nation Got to
Do with It? What’s Gender Got to Do with
It?): A Collective Poetry-Essay by 21 Poets
Encountered in Scotland (2016–19)
J A N E G OLDMA N
Introductory Note
The piece speaks quite well for itself. There is a questionnaire, setting out my
rationale, and asking three interrelated questions on poetry, gender, and nation,
followed by twenty-one responses. The questionnaire was individually issued to
about fifty poets “from” or based in a number of different countries who have
contributed to Scotland’s thriving poetry scenes in the last few years, as witnessed
by me personally. It does not pretend to be an impartial or comprehensive survey.
Twenty-one poets responded, not necessarily in consultation with each other;
consultation between respondents was neither encouraged nor discouraged. It is
a collective work in the sense that my invitation and the individual responses have
been collated in chronological order of receipt to form a multivocal document or
round table. Poets writing in Gaelic and dialect were included, but sadly there were
no responses in Gaelic. Taking as axiomatic the motility of subjects in process, in
perpetual renewal through signification, as Julia Kristeva has it,1 my questionnaire
addresses poetry and its performance first, not wishing to presume or fix identity
1 Julia Kristeva, “The Subject categories prior to response. Arguably, the only identity category applied to my list
in Process.” The Tel Quel
Reader, edited by Patrick
of prospective respondents was that of “poet,” but song comes before singer in my
ffrench and Roland François mind. As my invitation below makes clear, identity markers of nation and gender are
Lack, Routledge, 1998, precisely what the questionnaire seeks to probe and trouble in relation to poetry.
pp. 133–178.
Of the poets who did not respond with a questionnaire return, only a very few did
1 Contemporary Women's Writing

© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. For
permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
not reply at all and a few emailed me to say they were too busy or preoccupied
with other projects and unable to meet the deadline, but nevertheless wishing the
project well. One or two others worried at first they had been erroneously sent the
questionnaire, fearing they might be trespassing on national or gender grounds, and
some demurring even when reassured.
My desire was to share something of the richness of poetry experienced by me
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and fellow poets, poetry readers, and poetry audience members in the last few
years in Scotland (at live, in-person events), in order to give a lived material context
and continuum to questions of poetry, gender, and nation in relation to this Special
Issue’s focus on (and taking stock of) contemporary Scottish Women’s Poetry, and
to probe and test the limits of its terms. My proposed methodology was in part
inspired by the famous night-mindedness questionnaire addressed to British and
American writers by the poet and editor Eugene Jolas in 1938 for the international
avant-garde magazine transition, “Inquiry Into The Spirit And Language Of Night.” He
published fourteen responses, all by men (including Sherwood Anderson, Kenneth
Burke, Malcolm Cowley, T.S. Eliot, Michael Gold, Ernest Hemingway, and Archibald
MacLeish). His three questions were:
1. What was your most recent characteristic dream (or day-dream, waking–
sleeping hallucination, phantasma)?
2. Have you observed any ancestral myths or symbols in your collective
unconscious?
3. Have you ever felt the need for a new language to express the experiences
of your night mind?
EUGENE JOLAS (transition 27,
Spring 1938, 233)
“The replies to the inquiry,” says Jolas “[…] speak for themselves” (243). His
questions and list of respondents evidence a tacit white, patriarchal confidence in
the given gender and nationality of his contemporary writers (all masculine and
British or American) as appropriate authorities on a universal collective unconscious
and Jung’s notion of the “archaic man” as “still part of our psyche” (244). Around
eighty years later, all of such givens are precisely what this present questionnaire on
contemporary poetry challenges. Jolas’s respondents are certainly not in agreement
with each other or with Jolas. All of them, including the poets, replied to Jolas in
prose, sometimes wittily, often in brief, occasionally at length, but predominantly in
the language of information or critical discourse – as if poetry (and more broadly
literature) is not the appropriate mode of response to pressing contemporary
concerns. Even so, what emerges from this extraordinary poll of contemporary
writers is a kind of poetry. It certainly provides an inspirational methodology as well
as a truly fascinating collective record of insights by writers, poets, and critics into
the politics of the “night-mind” in 1938, a period one respondent, Michael Gold,
terms “this night-hell of a world of fascism and war” (236).

JANE GOLDMAN • A Collective Poetry-Essay
Please now turn to the opening letter of invitation in “WHY I CHOOSE
POETRY” to read my three questions and my rationale for asking them in 2019.
These twenty-one responding poets have replied in a breath-taking range of
forms: poetry, prose, hybrid, procedural, lyric, and concrete. Collected together
these returns take on the form of a round table of sorts, a collective poem-essay
perhaps – but why not more simply call it poetry? Brief biographies of (and by) the

respondents and myself appear at the end. How wonderful it would be to gather
all of us together in the flesh in a venue in Scotland to read out the following
words, composed when live poetry events in all kinds of local spaces (along with
international travel), were still taken largely for granted. Meanwhile, let me record
here my deepest gratitude to J.L. Williams, CAConrad, Kathrine Sowerby, Dorothy
Alexander, Tessa Berring, Gerrie Fellows, Maria Sledmere, Janette Ayachi, Lynn
Davidson, Alan Riach, Nuala Watt, Nicky Melville, Rhian Williams, Alice Tarbuck,
Colin Herd, Lila Matsumoto, Nat Raha, Iain Morrison, Harry Josephine Giles, Callie
Gardner, and Eileen Myles. Haste ye back!
Jane Goldman, Edinburgh, August 1, 2020
University of Glasgow, UK
jane.goldman@glasgow.ac.uk


Contemporary Women's Writing
4
Queen Anthophobia
Queen Elizabeth I of England (1533–1603) suffered from anthophobia, especially of a

fear of roses, which has no technical name.
Dictionary.com

The lush petals the pinked red blushing petals
Pushing up and around me petals over all I own the petals the flickering
fumbling petals
Over all I am and all I own the rendering petals the baring down and
beating petals
The flustered fluttering flames of petals
These petals I hush and rub these petals I tear and teethe the petals o
the petals
Caved-in I choose the petals I conquer the petals I dignify the petals
I grimacing order the upstart petals I revoke the petals I banish the
thieving peasant petals I forever exile the petals I declare an apocalypse of
strafe on the waltzing petals
I envy the petals the petals strewn at my laced and dainty feet the bowing
scraping petals the simpering petals I disdain the tittering behind the fan
petals the machinations at court petals the slender blade in the back
through robes of ermine petals these petals are the nation’s petals
The pearling petals the polished ivory petals the lacquered cosseted
muscled torsos of petals
The rubbing petals the gripped between knees petals the stink of petals
Fusty roiling sexing guttural petals
The fortune killing dockets of petals the sweating dreams of petals o petals
O these my disgusting petals these syntaxed formulaic ampersands
of petals
The whitewashed chapel tabernacles exhumed with petals the burning
bush of petals the tongues of petals the sacrificed shaved head bag of
coppers bathed and crucified charred at the stake fire dove bursting from
the third eye never to be forgotten fucked up martyred mother of petals
o whitewashed petals
The boys rubbing purplish nipples with velutinous petals the girl-boy petals
The vulvic submarine petals the chocking on fistfuls of petals the royal
petals the raving
ripping of silks in the night on slippery mountains of petals
The crevices lined for thousands of years with crimson petals the buried
rotting sensual pure perfume of petals the charnel house breached by
hordes of ravening petals the bestial petals

The continent colonised by petals ships buoyed up by mermaids intoxi-
cated by salty petals the alien breasts of petals the last gulls in a flooded
world dropping shadows of petals the garnered harness of cloistered,
pirated petals the pope’s stone petals
The golden chest of petals tea of steamed and hammered silent petals the
blown glass gamelan of petals

The waterboarded petals the face pressed in the toilet boiling over with
petals o petals
O petaled fear that has no name petal of all that is owned and seeded
petal of sold and soiled merciless bounded consumptive commercial casti-
gated coiling spoiled vagrant prostitute malignant effervescent scintillating
shifting borderless global holed universal fertile shaming belligerent loving
grasping diseased entrenched undulating chastised passionate gagged ex-
aggerated tiding magnificent aching hungry deathless
island of petals of which I am queen
J.L. Williams

CAConrad

7
Because the objects I made were not enough. Because the objects I made did not
tell the whole story. Because the objects I made were difficult to carry. Because the
objects I made were hard to hide. Because the objects I made cost money. Because
the objects I made took up space. Because the objects I made looked like objects
other people had made. Because the objects I made fell apart. There were so many
objects I began to trip over. There were so many objects I couldn’t leave the room.

I made boxes for the objects. I made boxes lined with mirrors. The objects I made
were soft. The objects took too long. Because the objects led to questions I could
not answer. Because the objects broke too easily. The objects didn’t break easily
enough. The objects lost their colour. The objects weren’t even useful. The objects
didn’t feed anyone. The objects didn’t help me sleep at night. The objects told me
I could do anything. Because the objects told me I could do anything, I wrote a list of
the things I could do.
I could leave if I wanted

I could learn a new language
I could get a job
I could open a bank account
I could ask someone to help me
I could pretend I wasn’t homesick
I could write letters
I could keep moving
I could lose my money
I could lose my mind
I could have sex with strangers
I could get a better job
I could visit a spa town
I could become someone else
I could remember I was still myself
I could wish I’d never left
I could go back
If I go back to a town in France, I can describe myself. I speak the language but can’t
describe the haircut of the woman I want to look like. I look like a boy. Jeans, white
shirt from a charity shop. I do handstands often, draw outlines of my body on the
wall, understand when people say they don’t want me there. I don’t want to be
there so I leave and come back because where else would I go. I am trying not to
love someone whose touch is too light, who vomits after sex. Who asks me if my
hair has grown when I phone. This is not nostalgia. It is a point where I recognise
direction. Or lack of it. Longing perhaps for a time when things were unspecified.
The sea is freezing but I swim anyway and I’m not sure any of it matters. From my
position on the outskirts. Should I be larger, I wonder. Larger and louder. I have given
birth three times since I wanted to look like that woman, sat at an angle to the

table, greeting visitors. Hair just so. Wearing a navy jumper not unlike the one I am
wearing, and my hair is not unlike hers, 25 years later. I haven’t thought of her in all
this time.
Kathrine Sowerby

1.
thrill
mind totem
mined
thunk in atom
stun she
then agit
2.
ach
nerve eden
sing
stell ness linn
grieve
sod root integer
3.
hype us ink name
feral wax wired
in hope
origin in redial
woos the natal gag
non non non non
Dorothy Alexander
Low Moment

So yes, I’m going nowhere
I have a vulva and I write poetry
I also have infected eyelids
And a butterfly tattoo
It sums me up and ticks some boxes

I’ve always had a vulva
It has a particular smell
I don’t like looking at it
They say there are perfect ones
And imperfect ones
Something to do with symmetries
Colour as well perhaps
That blur
Of mauve-red-pink-grey-red
I like poetry
It is jokes and despair in one
It is voices rising and falling
On purpose
Naturally it can be beautiful
And, ugh, so moving
It doesn’t take up space
A few words plucked
From out there and in here
Seen things, aped things
Knowledge of underwater
Specimens
Throw in a knot of bandage
Saliva drenched cherries
Could they explode?
Sometimes I choke or sneeze
When I read
I might forget to breathe
I whisper congratulations

To my most tender books
There’s a lot of boredom I think
And a lot of enthusiasm
For cover art and no sex
Silence too, which is sore

I don’t like to think
About poetry too much
Sometimes there’s embodiment
Sometimes invitations
I don’t know if it’s the same
Where you are?
I’m not going anywhere
The mornings catch me out
I dab the edges of my vulva
With some tissue
I take a tiny walk
Around a park
Tessa Berring
There Is Never Here and It Is Large
I write ‘poetry is a Bearded Iris’, because there’s one on the wall of the wine bar, and
beards and flowers are soft and hairy together, which sounds good. I’ve never grown
a beard, but I know a little softness, and I know that a Bearded Iris is never truly red.
I write ‘poetry is a Bearded Iris’, not because of God or cuteness, but because a
flower is useful for filling in the gaps, for avoiding the answers, and setting a scene.
Like, where are you, what were you, that’s not what we mean, and the roses keep
on dying.
I choose to ignore my phone and someone chooses this poem. I live here or I live
there, depending on where I am when they ask, or where you are and who, and
what do you mean by will we or won’t we and don’t ever leave me alone?
There is nothing to wear (no blouses, no trousers, no jackets, no sandals). I’m
not interested in their lip balm or their dimmer switch. I faint at the pharmacist but
I’m glamorous when drunk. It all comes down to luck, they say, whether it’s violets,
larkspur, or vinegar in the jug.

What’s gender got to do with it? Got to do with what? What’s gender got? Which
is it? What? I am round the other side of myself, lying on earth and dandelion leaves.
I am with and without promises. I am pussy cats and emus. What has anybody got?
Warm skin, light, follicles, the damp.
(Kiss, kiss. I want some. I am smooth and fussy, fuzzy and sticky. What have I got?
Come here. I’ve got you. There’s really nothing to it and it hurts like crazy).

They write poetry is a pain. Poetry is a pain in the eye and is wonderful, with or
without lemons. It is tremendous night sweats that they don’t want to talk about. It
is benevolent mould, like frost beneath the stairs.
Someone chooses this poem because blood on the chair and copper coloured
sheets. They want to breathe in, then out, then in, then out, for a while. Rainbow!
We don’t know you. Where have you gone? There are difficult ways out of a country,
says someone, and difficult ways out of a skin.
Let’s write ‘poetry is difficult to wear bras’. Let’s write ‘poetry is having chewed up all
the meat’. I write ‘poetry is count to eight then make maps with confetti’. I write ‘poetry is
start with a fever and violence behind the door’.
The bar has closed. What questions must we answer? First question the what.
‘What’ on earth is happening here? Next question the paper cups, the indigestion,
the who cares how far the shore is from here? Money is not wheels! It can’t move
across a landscape on it’s own.
Ah landscape, and how we bury ourselves inside it. Which landscape do you want
to belong to? Where would you like to be dead, or alive? (A Bearded Iris thrives in
well drained soil, but the plants must be divided regularly).
Things are hard to understand. Like never is, like other ways of feeling are, or like
the climax of a life is. How do you recognise that? Even without clothing I am naked,
says the poet, while history prances, all know-it-all, behind.
Tessa Berring
Why I Choose Poetry
I choose poetry as a way of understanding how I am in the world, what being in this
world feels like from inside this skin, this human in this place. I choose poetry to
place myself in the world.
I choose poetry to ask questions, because poetry has space for questions,
uncertainties, the nudges of language the slippage of one word into another of
one thing into another.
A poem is not a translation of reality. It is not a representation. A poem happens

in the voice in the breath on the page. It is made with sound and the strange
ambiguities of words. The poem makes meaning.
I choose poetry for the music of language. I choose it also for its relationship
with the non-verbal: spaces stumblings hesitations how to articulate what is just
beyond words. The poem has to carry silence with it – the unsayable in there with
the language

No kind of public speaker speaking no kind of public speech,
I choose poetry because it is as close to silence as speech can come.
What’s nation got to do with this art of ambiguities and slippage? What has the one
made thing to do with the other? Country is a word which seems to include the
physical and cultural space in which I live, a word closer to place. Nation seems less
organic – a construct in which we are defined categorised labelled. But who are we?
And where do I fit in – this I with dual nationality and three countries whose dual-
nationality seems to express something of what I am (though it turns out that one
part of that nationality is not mine at all and could be stripped from me, an erasable
download containing 56 years of my life).
But country – my three countries – has more to do with it, and for me some
of that is about physical place and some is to do with voice. I half grew-up in one
country with one kind of speech, came to another and learned a different shade of
that same language; now I live inside a third version of that language. I understood
from early on that there were different ways of pronouncing the same words, that
there were different names for the same things – vests and singlets, station wagons
and estate cars, that house was a word which might signify quite different forms of
that object, that there were wholly different trees and birds.
And I knew what it was to be a stranger (not unwelcomed but a stranger

nonetheless)
someone from outside an observer a listener a fighter for my corner
a barefoot stander of my ground.
Think nation and all is fragment

broken lines gaps silence
overlaps a collage
my growing up between countries
between voices.
Think place and all is connected
the spacings and openings on the page
not divisions but coherence
the white page like an artist’s empty space
the poem a structure of words and silence
the silence a part of my identity

my lived experience my voicing of selfhood.
I don’t identify with nation (it’s places I love).
Place is more interesting to me than nation.

Body is more interesting to me than gender.

But why do I think that the fragmenting or the collaging of voices is connected to
identity in terms of nation rather than to gender? What’s gender got to do with it?
What I write has always come out of my lived experience (which is a woman’s
experience) but what interests me in that experience has changed. In my thirties I wrote
a sequence of poems about where I stand in relation to nation (a book filled with
women’s voices). I wrote it because I was surrounded by a ferment of thinking about
Scottish identity and because national identity was for me a raw nerve. In my forties
I wrote a sequence of poems about fertility treatment but the book was also about the
language of medical technology and how I, a woman, encounter it. In each case what
I wrote about was a particular experience, not a generalised category of experience.
Don’t most of us want to dismantle category and resist labels? I feel my own writing to
be between categories of form and audience and language (and between nation/country
and if not between gender then between what’s expected of gender).
I feel that there is a space in my experience

which I occupy outwith gender formation
and yet I also feel that the body this female body
is integral to my thought and emotion
that I bring my own particular experience

into a space in which I simply am
whatever gender I may be
whatever nationality appears to describe me.
This is a space in which poetry happens

and this is why I choose poetry.
Gerrie Fellows
It Isn’t the Mist

In the playground, I can’t peel bananas
or speak without a glass vowel crunched
aslant. My parents moved north when I was small

and my nan was like, she’ll marry a man named jock
and never see us again. This just ends and
ends in the word community, tiny thrust of harvest:
the aahs cut fast their clicks
until it was good to speak, with amethyst under my tongue

and heather for birthdays. Someone
comes along to peel back the skin for the softness beneath
and I learn to eat fricatives near this river,
braiding my wilted thistles.
Lately the alkaline grammar has stalled us, motioning
golf course to golf course
as if every line were a shot, I had a nokia in the kirkyard
calling me back to being human. Who ruined
the dunes. What’s poetry
got to do with a ringtone, diss track, absolute magazine.
We sell out for turbines and cheaper milk; modern studies
taught me the work of statistic. I wanted to watch
the jejune stars in june, rhythmic lull of mephedrone whoosh.
No-one even sleeps when the light is specific.
You have an accent
but don’t accent it.
In the restaurant, carrying alasdair’s plate
of salmon I said, what’s the novel got to do
with it all; he replied, just look
at the lazuli in the ceiling.
I stole the lucky paintbrush he left;
I think I made a novel of rainbows
and served a perfected order wrong
before the lift broke
and woke me.
Our forms throbbed
within their borders to abellio
and beyond the blue

track surface of an afternoon; I headed east
through scottish fiction
escaping the tropics of a(y)ir again.
Coasts erode in hashtags, ash clouds
of dissipate 7ths; therein the ornament salt

I lick a piece of glass for this.
Could you pronounce that word again, phase again
switching register, kissing at wind farms
till everything good is precise
as the film, to be continued
in blood beyond baltic cold,
our locals collect their dialup, dialect;
I thought of his blousy instinct
and all that peach in portobello.
Pages we filled with waxen loops that would not melt
but stuck to the breath of the rain;
say lisa or mandy or sam,
say anything halo.
The fate of this surely depends on medicine
and freeing my hair from its blonde
and complicated english locks
as though every one were an asterisk,
gesturing wherever the sun would set.
My gender was all that remained of the weather
applied to a lit contingency. This is red.
I was teasing dreams out of the loom again, womb again;
he said it was something about work
and the nation. Lain upon trampolines
in mothering gardens, we confected better
names for kingdoms, cooler waters
sewing our oats in the sequined morning.
Good air is the ironed blue you might drink
of a sky in happy hardcore, rising.

Twelve brambles blacken our thumbs
for buckfast and sorrow,
idlewilds of our daughters on dailymotion.
What if the dusk was only a postcard.
What if the view contests its order.

Poetry was seafoam hardened to shards
and all you could sing of cost or epoch.
I ate enough tablet to spite the apple,
sugaring a season of juices, pixels
and sourest copy. We sit at peace
and stew in bloat.You are so beautiful
I would not know what to do about it
but I did too; the apricot hour was set to clarity
and the clouds we drew of that frozen may.
Poetry was a latchkey at the end of the crescent.
Know this now, kindling
saltires across your chest: one more plate
smashed out of the story. Our potassium
demands the infinite lyric, sanguine materials
of northern pollen, maiden tweets beyond this.
Maria Sledmere
Would i encourage too much early bravado if i insinuated that poetry chose me,
or rather that neither of us sought each other out at all, and that instead, we half-
ignored one another across the room, pretending not to notice the smuggle under
the table. Each working on our own heist of words; entwined in the zipline escape,
starcrossed, swapping algorithms of breath, aroused.
i hunted for answers in my journals scrawling prose, but never knew poetry was
my one. true. forever. love. until i read poetry properly. Like waking up one day
clairaudient. i studied how to write words with a more visual mindset of murderous
crafting; a chase of smaller doses rather than spill, then edit and clean up, a life’s
messy work engaging with language, deciphering meaning from stain and criminal,
giving height to the human gore of emotions.

i sensed my abandon to be groomed by a country or nation from an early
age, i was born into a country different to my parents, confettied across various
landscapes, as to be a good poet is to be a universalist, to steep in fluidity, bask
in flames.
We cannot entertain to say that the stigma of separation through nation or

gender would cause anything but conflict, setting two opposing forces into a battle,

a flock like birds in the sky cracking their wings backwards against the frontline, just
to fit into the picture, following the pattern of flight, to then dissipate into a solitary
trajectory.
To be a good poet is to surrender a sense of belonging because where do we

belong but everywhere and all each only for a moment or fragment in time on
a quantum nebulous scale of things. And we must dip our nibs into the inkpot of
Coleridge, of Woolf, wetting our androgynous mind, rooted in the fertile soil of
cross-pollination, tapping the feminine and masculine vein to get to the real grit and
jawbone ache of the meat and meaning of life.
Where is home but the omnipresent; on both sides of a hymen, gestating then
birthed, to not belong anywhere, to feel hyphenated or displaced, or, in my case,
l’étranger, comfortably alien. These porous faculties, dreams of belonging, all starseed
and still to be returned – if home is where i came from, home is where i return –
birthplace death place point of final destination space, is a likely reach to the start.
For now, i have left parts of myself in cities, if i wait on certain staircases, i will greet
one of my ghosts.
i am woman born from woman. i never spoke the same language as the woman
who birthed my father. Biology says his gene selected my gender. But I believe
genetic coding is spirit guided, the traces of history we retain within ourselves,
internalizing the misogyny of our time, women bleed far too often enough already.
The trick is to resist blame.
You see i have been all those shaman women before me pioneering with purpose,
over and over, yes, without our improbable suffering, we would never have had our
chance to show our brilliance in revolt. But the right to vote won is wrong; the right
instead to choose whether we want to vote, or not.
Just as religion is a choice, and i have never have voted on order or manifesto,
remain wholly ignorant of political ease or unrest, and with this i set aside the
nation in me for another time as i am nationless but no less than any nation. i am all
woman and no country: i am sandstone, dust, mineral.
My father, and the patriarchy at large, forbid me to use a language to describe

my femininity, dispossessed me of my body, robbed me of my tongue for epochs.
With this attempt to snip the world in me, i fought for a voice, beyond this prison,
beneath this familiar trained comatose.

i fought for a lifetime dedicated to finding the right words to describe how i feel,
setting up camp in this living vessel, positioning the torch on the divinity of humans
who dance their life spiral beyond the simple trip from the maternity ward to the
crematorium. The medusa always laughing over my shoulder as i haunt bookstores.
And i chose poetry because i could separate the clouds for myself with words,
and poetry chose me because it could see that my creative mind needed a way to

balloon the tessellated capacities of the heart.
If we see our gifts as programmed, our psyche computed, then it is possible to

hack the brain for ideas, it is possible to override despair. And equally possible to
overload the server.
You see i am no accident of shattered symmetries, a roulette of near misses, and

midnight allergies from my ancestors, but because i am woman i am wild and free,
i am mother nature, i am biological mother, two more women born from me, i am
encircled by women, a tribe mounting passages of time stronger than any lioness,
any alchemy; see how our muscles flex, see how we sing, collectively.
i have always loved women more than men, do we choose or are we chosen. i
swallowed Cixous for breakfast. i am post structuralist; post modern, post totem,
post office, driven away from my sexuality by male bias. What else can i do but write
the self; i let life speak, i send myself out there, not a representative, and i send it out
there with all the fervour it has been endowed with.
Let’s refine the truths we tell ourselves, poets are mystics, poets are misfits. i
am iridium ink in a room of my own, steel nibbed, blotted, always longing. Only
a woman can stand the tragedy and frustration this intense and make art in
the meantime. Only a woman can embody true mystique. There is no ultrascan
for our secrets, medicinal or educational. We whisper amongst ourselves, rest
upon trees and the apocalyptic lilac of seasons, tip our ear to the ocean through
our shells.
Mostly i am word cinder under laboratory love and a classroom

microscope:
first i am gristle of female root, then i am poet,
and when this circuit of blood and breath runs dry,
my named decay and dna storm will feed the holy map,
and then i will be country.
Janette Ayachi

To get here
I drove through the Kaimanawas (which is the old forest,

survivor of brutal winters/ or the wild horses streaming over tussock/
or the mountain range)
And which translates as treasure or eat the wild

or heart-eater or breath-eater
Which are the slippages of poetry
impossible to know if I’m there, and I’m not there

until, suddenly, I am
making small revisions to home, like rivers do
with their movement.
It’s a cold morning and the earth is black

with sulphur yellow vents blowing hot steam and
I walk into high mist

Aotearoa
Scotland
This and Here
The infield
tadpoles in the concrete trough
your vowels at my table

in my mouth
I have been participating
in the word – Scotland –
we have been moving through each other
like fish and light and water through water.
Sitting beside my Scottish grandfather

cross-legged in the Tinakori Hills
above Wellington city where his son,
my father, is playing accordion for the Polish club –
he has been practising the minor chords
all day. We are waiting for him to finish.

We are waiting to go home. My grandad
my nana, my sisters, my brother and my mother,
in our stolen-wealth country that is
regularly left off maps.
Which made my father happy. He’d never been to Scotland

and never wanted to go back. Which made my mother
lonely for a country her mother
never went to, but called home.
Like my father
– my old friend from the battleground – I’m happy
to be from unacknowledged country, lets
hold our pain invisible against our chest, lets hold
our parents’ pain there too – it’s
just another lump of dirt, he’d say.

But here I am, and here it is,
and the ragged comforts of form and beauty still hold.
I drove through the Kaimanawas to get here.

To dip my hand in the icy water of the trough,
wanting the bunched slippery orbs of becoming
to brush my fingers. To hear
their plip plip sounds
those little flicker-in-water sounds that translate as
heart-eater or breath-eater
or eat the wild
which are the slippages of
wild vowels at my table
of poetry
in my mouth
Lynn Davidson

1. WHY I CHOOSE POETRY
Precision. Poetry is what can’t be said in any other way. Economy: words in your
mind and mortal memory, paper (trees) and ink (pigments, dyes, carbon, iron gall,
solvents, molecular, crystalline, or what’s on the screen, transmission), books, old
and new, sight and sound, deep sources, quickness snapped up, unconsidered trifles,

lasting ballast, application (communication), darker down reflection, smell and taste,
things are more themselves in words (MacNeice), written revolt against all that is
accepted (MacDiarmid), to be nobody (Dickinson), or a frog or a toad (MacCaig),
but make the journey, cross the loch (Jamie), an assertion of authority, there, in the
place of least. Gentleness, touch, in all the corrugations and the coigns, the islets
of Langerhans, the oval window, labyrinths, pitch perfections. Come let us kiss and
part. And do it again.Voice, tone, form of address, pictures, imagery, so no exclusion
from painting, music, portraits, landscapes, string quartets. No end to what is not
man-made but humanly-created, and no end too to what is made by other things
than human beings. Keep climbing. Find out. No end to these ontological heroics,
lyric, epic, ballads, all forms else. Elseness. The final rule of law.You give your word.
I pledge you: first and last crusta. To not be in earnest.
2.WHAT’S NATION GOT TO DO WITH IT?
Power. Empowerment. Education: what’s provided, what’s obscured, what’s available,

what people have access to, get access to, make use of, or else don’t know about are
distracted from, redirected, swamped, belittled, denigrated, denied. What’s negotiated
between wherever you are and whatever authorities decide, so, choice, between
citizenship or subjection, and if you can choose which, you either choose one, in
all its multiplicity, give-and-take, plurality, conversation, or you give it away (or have
it taken from you), and are silenced, in a place where suppression, the politics of it,
becomes repression, the psychology of it. Colours. More flags. Polytheism(s). Politics,
but not just that: militarism. Social, but not just that: it’s on the nerves, in the nerves,
and therefore, poetry, what the words can do. Muscles, sinews, deeper than memory.
Somewhere out of sight. Morality, too. Which means it’s also opposition: you choose
because it puts you in the open, and you can’t retreat once you’re seen, so better to
choose what place to take yourself to, to move into, occupy, move from, use, leverage.
Languages, given or lent, learned, forgotten, recovered. I choose, to approve and
endorse, or disapprove, and change course, to keep the conversation going, to keep
the possibilities open, to get the news of warring clans. Regeneration. Renaissance.

3.WHAT’S GENDER GOT TO DO WITH IT?
Perception. Understanding, knowledge, even wisdom, what I don’t know I’d like to
learn or hear about, categories shifting, transient things, even as they are beyond our
choosing (youth, maturity, age, if you’re lucky) and if you can choose, then speak of
it, or speak of anything, indeed: not only your experience but your judgement needs

to be heard, clearly and patiently. Listening. Trying for an understanding otherwise.
Balancing. Seeing. Tasting. Scent and spoor. An understanding shared. To be included,
to be excluded from, to recognise. The effort, always towards changing, differences,
movement, and loss, the impossible, always acknowledged: the desire – the reach
beyond the self and some kind of quest for order, the ungraspable, that can be
caught but never captured. Women, men, growth, both into and out from, children,
old folk, care, love, all transgressions, all transforms, what’s given, what’s made, what’s
there to be made of, partake of, to be invited by. Directions of the gaze, the exercise
of needs, desires, fissiparous wants, the fleeting, the deep, the lasting, and the
unsustainable too. Colour and shape, texture and taste, skin, water, hair, nails, eyes
to look into and out from. Thoughtfulness and sensuality. Moral balance. Imbalance.
Outrageousness. What cannot be controlled, predicted, reformed retrospectively.
That from which we learn. Wow.
Alan Riach
Why do I choose poetry? And what has gender got to do with it? Below is a prose
poem considering my experience of being a pregnant (disabled) woman. Much of
my poetry to date has focused on the representation of disability, especially partial
sight. I chose poetry partly because I was a socially isolated disabled teenager. I read
a lot. I discovered that I loved the adventurous language of poetry. Poetry was a
means to think in new ways through the unexpected linguistic turns in a developing
poem. But I came to believe that the experiences of people with disability had been
insufficiently imagined – perhaps distorted in – poetry. That was my focus. Gender
was present but muted.
Then I became pregnant. I believed people would react badly – or at least oddly
– to a disabled pregnant woman. All my life (some) strangers had reacted negatively
to my obviously disabled body. This happened much less while I was pregnant. I had a
de facto holiday from the social awkwardness surrounding disability. People reacted
to me primarily as a pregnant woman. The social discourse surrounding (wanted)
pregnancy is much more positive than that surrounding disability. The poem
explores the tension between these two discourses.

Pregnant and Squint
I had a holiday from awkwardness. “Can you have sex?” was solved. Most people
have been or known a doubled self like us. Briefly my conditions were disabled.
Test to term I never had to console a passer-by spooked by my movement.
People knew what to say. “When are you due?” “Do you know what you’re having?”

“Yes, a break”,
We were disconcertingly well. Nothing Abnormal Detected said midwives’
scribbles. Just before childbirth, everyone’s disabled. For me, same old, same old.
I had cohabited with fatigue for years; my balance was dreadful; I already leaked.
Suddenly I had twice the rights on buses. I could be the belly, if I liked, or the girl
balanced on a semi-circle. I qualified for both the reserved seats.
I liked the quaint but truthful phrase ‘with child’.
The government forced me to list what I couldn’t do. I had to excise you from
my answers. Whilst I described the most disastrous days, the falls, the fits, the faff,
the time I collapsed while trying to use a tampon, my oddly capable body made your
kidneys.
Nuala Watt

1.
I choose poetry as it allows me to do this of a morning:
beautiful morning
it’s nice

walking back
in the morning
in summer
it’s light
and there are birds
singing
much better
than in the dark
2.


26
3.
1. WHY I CHOOSE POETRY
2. WHAT’S NATION GOT TO DO WITH IT?
3. WHAT’S GENDER GOT TO DO WITH IT?
A Response.

[Rhian Williams, Independent Scholar.]
[Not where I am, but where I might be.]

I choose poetry as it dissolves the liberal notion of the body as a co-
herent and self-defined entity under the auspices of the rational mind.
[‘One reason for the perpetual disappearance and reappearance of the
Poetess is that she is not the content of her own generic representation:
not a speaker, not an “I,” not a consciousness, not a subjectivity, not a
2 Virginia Jackson & voice, not a persona, not a self.’]2
Yopie Prins.
I choose poetry as a locus for marking historical shifts at the level of the
individual body, which means the collective body.
[Responsive weeping.]
I choose poetry for the feel of knowledge as plastic, shaped by form, a
3 In reading Isobel Armstrong. type of embodiment, that which is living.3
[Nation as civic contract, a garland of oak leaves and acorns.]
I choose poetry as a structural principle, presenting the world differently.
[Gender is call and response.]
I choose poetry as an intervention in the material conditions of history
– and the poetic staging of suffering may inculcate communal feeling, an
ethical response to the pain of others.
4 Audre Lorde. [Feelings are not ‘unavoidable adjuncts’.]4
I choose poetry for our present conditions. Species > gender. Earth,
water, air > nation.
5 Theodor Adorno. [‘A philosophical sundial.’]5
I choose poetry as a figuration, in front of which ‘it is difficult to speak
6 Matthew Arnold. temperately’.6
7 Henri Meschonnic, [‘the poem is the moment of a listening.’]7
translated by David
Novell-Smith. I choose poetry as a bridge to the future.
Breath. Touch. Pulse.
Rhian Williams

Why I Choose Poetry:
Because it fragments, because it dis-eases, because it folds up and in because it

swells and stands because it needs and rejects mouths because it needs and rejects
clarity, fluency, constructions of gender-grammar-form because it is an envelope,
because it fits in between the cracks of other work, because it is full of savage egos
and warm open hands, because it is both sex and its convent opposite, because it is

both space and very small, a cathedral carved inside a walnut, an intricate fistful of
ordinary earth. Because it demands looking and tasting, smelling and waiting, because
it gives nothing and asks nothing, gives everything and bounces you off it like a vast
mirror. Because it is a lifelong process and nothing has to close, not parentheses not
sentences not thought, because the whole thing is an endless shout down a tunnel
or whisper down an ear canal or swim along a real canal or trip down a flume or a
stationary accretion of time on top of self.
What’s nation got to do with it?
I do not speak to nation, but it speaks for, and by and out with me. It speaks well
and poorly, it speaks old and new, it says things I want to hear and things I don’t,
and when I speak of it I say things it would rather I didn’t, and things it likes. I have
tried to wear my nation lightly, but it is a privilege to do that, and its prosperity and
position have direct roots in the oppression and dehumanisation of other nations
and peoples.
What’s gender got to do with it?
I am looking at a replica of the Willendorf Venus. I love her. She fits in my palm.
She is everybody’s mother, all the way back. She looks like me. She doesn’t look like
me. She is and is not me, she is and is not a mothering thing. She is and is not a clay
language. And I’m not any good with gender. Mine is entangled and bodily and, I think,
not at all what I ordered. Were I given the tools to alter it, who knows. Instead,
I altar it, sit the Venus where I can see her. Gender envelops, even when you do not
mean it to, and it is difficult – physically, sexually, politically – to slip in and out of it,
to express it. All women who are women are women, regardless of how they came
to be, if they are, if they feel it to be them. Because I was born into it, like a seal into
its skin, I wish to selkie, skin-shed. I wish to shimmer in and out of it. I wish to know
the words to speak to it. Because the words are only tenuous, I speak them into
boxes. I think a lot about weapons. I think a lot about softness. I think a lot about
laws. And poetry lets me break them all, open them up, see what sits inside.
Alice Tarbuck

Colonoscopy
I don’t know any answers

aero bars enduro
shifter sounds like cycling

or gymnastics let’s go with
weight lifting I call a lot of
ambulances me and ripped
jeans, the word pals.
In the middle seat people’s
elbows touch my middle.
I want a colonoscopy
is it possible to book one
for pleasure
a fantasy where I meet a guy called
Something Oscopi
and I take his name
we get married like we’re living
in the 19th Century because
that’s traditional
and my name becomes
Colin Oscopi
Beats headphones
was Meryl Streep in Rendition
what’s the name of the one
with Helen Mirren about drones?
I define my sexuality like if I
could choose to be Luigi Galvani
or Lucia Galvani or a frog
I’d choose to be the frog
and I’d date frogs
my frog muscles twitching
everyone I know is writing Scottish
Poetry

with bioelectrical charge
a variation on the great prick tale
make me write a poem
make me write an essay
yeah just try to make me

someone once told me
that if you halve tomatoes
and squeeze them a little
and rub them all over your body
that it
has some benefit
for me
or for the tomatoes
or whoever eats the tomatoes
I’m croaking from the pulpit
how much would that cost
all seedy
and heavier-than-air
Colin Herd
Scotland my chosen country 2007–2016. I came to study Scottish litera-

ture, unheralded in my previous homes Japan and the U.S. I chose poetry
in Scotland not via verses of Robert Burns, Hugh MacDiarmid, the two
Edwins Muir and Morgan, but via prose of Willa Muir, Nan Shepherd and
Jessie Kesson. These writers said not Epic but optic and turned tuning
pegs to a new key Notice. 2009 I was living in rural Aberdeenshire, picking
strawberries for cash, arms fingers turning pink and rashy. New key is
gorse, ling, a herd of horses invisibly following in the dark. After work
I park my bicycle in a hedge behind my cottage.
slowly
slowly the sky
the briar hedge and four dwarf
shrubs bruise black
shirts on the drying line harden
into nightshape
Lila Matsumoto

noscotia: towards a poetic(s) for decolonial nonation building
written in Edinburgh, Scotland, June 2019, acknowledging
that Nova Scotia is Mi’kmaw traditional territory.
in this era that demands the openness of these solid/ar/ities

against the domi/nations that gave them through

dispossession, coercion, theft, plunder, a lega
-cy of what determines the worth of these bodies.
, who works
, & loses, & lives, & goes on living, & is contained, surveilled, de
-pressed & dis/possessed, in what century, which now,
w/ what relation to what global, in what relation(s) to the white, the masc
-uline, the feminine, the f or m or the scottish or the british or the

european – the
grounds on which these lay, have taken and laid, stripped, & contaminated, to exist.
what perpetuations, what histories & herstories & hirstories,8
& movements & clearances & dispossessions, that are the conditions
of possibility for this nation that exists now, that has existed, that may
exist, that exists through our fabrications,
8 “h/story / hirstory. noun: though we – & this we, of the Other, of the brown & black, of shades of
an alternative spelling of possibility, of
history, some trans and
queer folks spell the word
with a ‘/’ or with a ‘r’ as a collaboration & undercommoning,
form of empowerment to
move away from the ‘his’ a negation, corruption & sabotage,
in the ‘traditional’ spelling
of history.” edited by Flo a we that is open that you can act in means to join – live
Brooks, Outskirts, Makina
Books, 2017, p. 54.
between
the inhabitation & the dreaming, the curséd material & the imaginative,
acting the
later to unmake the(se) former(s); we are always finding
new forms, new genders, new lines & bodies, demanding
& assembling our collectivities, our autonomy, even if they are also ancient,

extinguished, resurrected & reincarnated. our genders, our fleshes, are
inventions &
collections & becomings & beings & actions in, through
and against the im/positions of the whitecisableistsanistheterosexist

norms, the

cultures & colonisations that have forged them.
we are always re/fusing, &
under/stand y/our nation, that legal fiction, that geo/logic entity,
the en/titled, the titan, the empyre,
that which is done, which demands order, that which is dungavel,
that which we are under, under which we (are) disappear(ed), under

which we know
the radi/cal imagi/nation, the calling, creolising, decolonising, a nonation

building
, an unmaking, a nonation that is open, to humans & to all life, to hirstory

& the truths
of its history. this does not come easy, “We oppose [this] to the massive
assertions
of the thought of the conquest”,9 to act, to dream, to feel, to know against

527 years,
498 years of y/our assertions, colonisations
& capitalisations, sensations & proclamations. we know the work of this,
how it feels to labour against the conq/uest, the assertions, the
9 Edouard Glissant, gendering, it is the work of our res/istance

“Creolisation and the
Americas.” Caribbean . a poetics in living, a poetic alive,
Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 1,
March 2011, pp 11–20, 18.
, de/ranging, re/sensing, re/sociating
in relation, in move/ment, insurgent
Nat Raha

1) Why I choose poetry
poetren gendernation
My smart boyfriend today told me that they didn’t believe gender could be changed
because gender wasn’t innate.
Gender was cute. My group of me told me that I couldn’t choose nation

because votes couldn’t be transferrable in the abstract ether of a both-ways
construct. It’s an abstraction, delightful distraction,
infraction, in fact infarction.
My national poet told me that the best impressions were done of her in Ireland
by Zosia
interchangeable or a mix or a mixed her up for a conunion, not a
confusion but a refusion, a refusal, a rebuttal of Sherry
my smart therapist, I gave her a poem when we finished my sessions, and she
rejected it. I had had it framed, but she was right to spot it was ambiguous, which a
thank you gift should
never be.
2) What’s Nation got to do with it?
My remote, rational trans-national girlfriend told me that once she had been the
highest marker in her European rubik’s qualification school. Smart. I leave her and
the rest of my college collegiate, book-learning cohort behind
to follow in my selection of five priorities, of race, gender, necessity, frankness and
greying gay galliards to a strathspey sands stranded reel. Revel, reveal, stay banded, a
staycation imbrication
3) What’s Gender got to do with it?
of women in a nation.There was no grander national, than the gender national.

Meritocracy of matriarchs.The plesiosaurus footprints tell us up and down beaches,
carry on which the mountain, which the mounted rescue.The grander notional which
accepted us throughout a contest did see in a femininity, where that territory was
mapped out, of reach, of mind, and where I can see that my feeds land on blotchy bits
that are strong enough to support me, or the others, and maybe I get off those parts
to make more room and less pressure down upon those surfaces which held weaker
surface tension. But no, they seem to support. Drain the swamp. No, suck down a bit of
the water, even if it means drinking it. Oh but it tastes lovely. A swamp kiss of residue,
like Colin’s.
The Norloch is underneath the gallery I work in. Jane came and read about witches
there. Jane was one of 6 of 12 women reading in the gallery, about witches and ‘female
experience’, which I wish I hadn’t just written, and yet it was, if female experience

includes drowning by sentence. Admitting, the difficult content, into the talk isn’t my
specialism. I do it in dance. My smart nation. I do it in dancing around. I do think there’s
something about the way I inhabit a position that isn’t trans, that isn’t non-binary, that
isn’t full time feminine, or maybe that it is, based on the reactions of the male part of
myself to me. Or of others, or of the others I internalised.Who else is vocal inside me
apart from the internalised? Water corridors.

I noticed a landing tactic I used, when I read something uncomfortable about men,
that I pretended it wasn’t about me. For the way I am, in my audience, oh this book
isn’t for me, but I’ll write a bog-standard one that sucked around leeching it.
Consensus is a building project left for me. I was horrified when I read recently
an excoriation of identity politics in the Tory press and agreed with some of it. Was
that press me out? Brained. Bandied. But it can’t be more than tempting to want the
hard stuff to be wrong and leave the grievance in somebody else’s bosom.
Bottom rises to the poems. If I green one or many of my concerns, concerneds,
those who have addressed a concern to me, and dilly them into a verse, the drilling
smoothies smoothes, ruses, sooth ez, strews the water out with crop, curtail, pare,
nail, nails, pales the pain felt and clarifies gels Rae Armantrout in commending Emily
Dickinson’s practice of putting two words together that had never mended together
before. Colour and never would they again be matched. Strike into a new set of
assessments by you or about you. Don’t give them the way, though they might site
flares in you, feminine in the spaces between You Poems.You’re a Woman poems,
they like to do that.You’re sentient fempath.You can tie something into the flags to
wave yourself, remind you where to collect thoughts on the way back hom.
I once told Jane to take L out from one of her poems. But it was too late because
L had been told the news and had leave to stay in the poem country. A and C
newsed up to me that race is biological, identity complicated. I got the two mixed
up with poetry and I wasn’t writer than I deserved to be. Several of my gender and
queer friends have told me later that they were poets, or I’ve seen it right down
somewhere. I want to get it rite, so that there’s no share in it, while I keep talking
to soap about my achievements, which seems to give them pleasure, even though
I want myself to stop, and mention a pause to appreciate them. It’s a problem for me
since probably even before I was asked by one of the mentors in my youth business
course to take a walk from our group when I kept buttressing in on our team pitch
to marketplacers on the company we had come up with, BrillBoil, and I wasn’t
letting Chetna speak. That was embarrassing. I could google her or look her up on
social media right now and tell her she’s brilliant and boy does she remember me
from back that hot summer in Kent, a conference centre in Sunbury 1995, during
that awful heat-wave, and what’s she doing now? Weird one.
i-i do, we complicate things. It’s not as if I wanted to stop opening the space by
taking up space, how many thousand of words of mine are you swatting here?
Iain Morrison

DeToNation
fri 21st june 2019

i.e. the day eftir the Scottish Govrenment annunced durin Pride Week that it wis guttin
its ain proposals tae reform the Gender Recognition Act.
The anely rational response tae formal rejection by yer govrenment is tae commit

yersel hailly tae the ruinage o yer nation.The anely rational response tae formal rejection
by an o yer gender is tae commit yersel hailly tae the crockanition o gender itsel.
Woman? Aye, naw, but. Wittig: “The advent o individual subjecks demands first
destroyin the categories o sex, endin the uiss o thaim, an rejectin aw sciences that yet uise
thae categories as thair fundamentals.” Federici: “Wages fer hoosewark is the demand
that ends wir naitur an stairts wir strauchle, fer juist tae want wages fer hoosewark means
tae refuise that wark as the expression o wir naitur, an syne tae clear refuise the female
role that capital’s invented fer us.” Radicalesbians: “Thegither we maun airt oot, reinforce,
an validate wir authentic sels.Wi that suith sel, wi that consciousness, we stairt a revolution
tae end the imposition o aw coercive identifications, an tae win maximum autonomie in
human expression.” Beuys, A’m the punchline. A tuik ye ower seriously.
Scotland? Nivver. Mey Arthur’s Seat crummle itsel ower Palace an Pairlament
baith. Mey the last saund-eels heeze thaimsels fae the watter tae throttle Aiberdeen
ile magnates in thair sleep. Mey forests o invasive species brust fae the grund o the
glens, climban ilka ben til ivery rich loun’s view is obscured. Mey the leid knot its ain
tongues. An mey anely Scottish birds tak the name “Scottish”, fer thay can belang tae
naither laund nor border.
Poetry? Dinnae gar me lauch. Ma buiks wir bocht bi the First Meenister, thay
displayed ma caw fer police abolition i the Holyrood foyer, thay’ve peyed ma wey
fer sax year. Nae guid it’s duin me. Nae status, nae name, nae gender, nae poems but
alienated labour.
Silence, than. A cairy ma wanhowp tae the black seelence inwith me, whar it’s the
seed o explosions.
Harry Josephine Giles

Callie Gardner

36
1.WHY I CHOOSE POETRY
It’s incomplete and that is its virtue. I love it for its partial nature. It is always singing
and it is never done.
2.WHAT’S NATION GOT TO DO WITH IT?

English is the current language of empire and it is describing its own decline by
the leaders it is choosing. The poet in America speaks wildly from an ever changing
platform of frustration and desire and dishevelment. American history is a disgrace
and an abomination and the poet starts there.
3.WHAT’S GENDER GOT TO DO WITH IT?
I like they because everyone is welcome and they are devils.

Eileen Myles
Notes on Contributors
Dorothy Alexander lives and works in the Scottish Borders. She had the great privilege of being
mentored by Tom Leonard at the University of Glasgow from 2001 to 2006 (MLitt and PhD). https://
www.dorothyalexander.co.uk/.
Janette Ayachi is a Scottish-Algerian poet and writer based in Edinburgh. Her debut poetry collection
Hand Over Mouth Music (Pavilion Press) won the Saltire Poetry Book of the Year Literary Award in 2019.
She has been published widely in various anthologies, collaborates with artists, has been a critic for
The Afternoon Show, written poetry for a BBC Radio 4 documentary, and appeared on BBC television
in the arts series Loop and more recently, The Edinburgh Show. She is currently working on her book
Lonerlust: Postcards of a Passed-On World, a nonfiction narrative about desire and traveling alone searching
connections between landscapes, culture, and human connection.
Tessa Berring is an Edinburgh-based writer. In 2019 her poetry collection Bitten Hair was published by
Blue Diode Press.
CAConrad is the author of nine books of poetry and essays. While Standing in Line for Death (Wave
Books) won a 2018 Lambda Book Award. They also received a 2019 Creative Capital grant as well as a
Pew Fellowship in the Arts Award, the Believer Magazine Book Award, and the Gil Ott Book Award. They
regularly teach at Columbia University in New York City and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Please
view their books, essays, recordings, and the documentary The Book of Conrad (Delinquent Films) online
at http://bit.ly/88CAConrad.
Lynn Davidson’s latest poetry collection Islander is published by Shearsman Books and Victoria
University Press. She has been the recipient of a Hawthornden Fellowship and a Bothy Project Residency.
Lynn is also a member of 12, an Edinburgh-based feminist poetry collective.

Gerrie Fellows has published five collections of poetry, most recently Uncommon Place, and poems
about Scotland and the nature of place (Shearsman, 2019). A New Zealander by birth, she has lived in
Scotland since the early 1980s.
Callie Gardner (they/them) is a poet and critic based in Glasgow. Their book-length poem naturally it
is not. was published by The 87 Press in 2018, and their writing on poetry can be found at secondmoon.
substack.com.
Harry Josephine Giles is a writer and performer from Orkney who lives in Leith; their latest book is

The Games (Out-Spoken Press, 2018). www.harryjosephine.com.
Jane Goldman is Reader in English Literature at Glasgow University and likes anything a word can do.
Her poems have been published in Adjacent Pineapple, Blackbox Manifold, Gutter, Scree, Stand, Tender, Zarf,
and elsewhere. Her first slim volume is Border Thoughts (Leamington Books, 2014), and her new collection
SEKXPHRASTICS is forthcoming with Dostoyevsky Wannabe.
Colin Herd’s collections include too ok (BlazeVox, 2011), Glovebox (Knives, Forks and Spoons, 2013),
Oberwilding – with S J Fowler (Austrian Cultural Forum, 2015), Click and Collect (Boiler House Press,
2017), Swamp Kiss (Red Ceilings Press, 2018), and You Name It (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019). As editor:
the Edwin Morgan Centenary Collection (Speculative Books, 2020), with Ruthie Kennedy Glasgow Cities
(Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020) and Adjacent Pineapple. www.colinherd.com.
Lila Matsumoto’s publications include Urn & Drum (Shearsman, 2018) and Soft Troika (If a Leaf Falls
Press, 2016). She lives in Nottingham and is a member of the bands Cloth and Food People.
nicky melville’s latest book is ABBODIES COLD: SPECTRE (Sad Press); THE IMPERATIVE COMMANDS will
be published with Dostoyevsky Wannabe in 2021. He recently started making demos under the name
Fuck This:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVvRwpoHwx5R5aPAThlEP4w.
Iain Morrison lives in Edinburgh. His first collection I’m a Pretty Circler (Vagabond Voices, 2018) was
nominated for the Saltire Poetry Award. His performance work includes a night of drag queen poetry
at Scottish Poetry Library and a durational reading of Emily Dickinson’s poems developed with Forest
Centre+ and presented at Berlin’s SOUNDOUT! festival.
Eileen Myles came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet, subsequently a novelist, public
talker, and art journalist. A Sagittarius, their twenty books include evolution (poems), Afterglow (a dog
memoir), a 2017 re-issue of Cool for You, I Must Be Living Twice/new and selected poems, and Chelsea Girls.
Eileen is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant,
four Lambda Book Awards, the Shelley Prize from the PSA, and a poetry award from the Foundation for
Contemporary Arts. In 2016, Myles received a Creative Capital grant and the Clark Prize for excellence
in art writing. http://eileenmyles.com/.
Nat Raha is a poet, and queer/trans* activist-scholar, based in Edinburgh. She was a postdoctoral
researcher on the “Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing pre-HIV/AIDS queer sexual cultures” project at
the Edinburgh College of Art. In 2018, she completed her PhD thesis “Queer Capital: Marxism in queer
theory and post-1950 poetics” at the University of Sussex. She is the author of three collections and
numerous pamphlets of poetry – her third book, of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018).
Nat is the coeditor of the Radical Transfeminism zine.
Alan Riach is a poet and Professor of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University. His most recent poetry
collections are Homecoming (2009) and The Winter Book (2017), and, most recently, he has been working
on translations from Gaelic poets, including Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh/Mary MacLeod (c.1615–1707),
Luinneag Mhic Leoid/The Song of Mary MacLeod, and Donnchadh Bàn Mac an t-Saoir/Duncan Ban
MacIntyre (1724–1812), Moladh Ben Dòbhrain, and Praise of Ben Dorain.

Maria Sledmere is a writer and critic living in Glasgow. She is editor at SPAM Press and Dostoyevsky
Wannabe and a member of A+E Collective. Recent publications include nature sounds without nature
sounds (Sad Press), Rainbow Arcadia (Face Press), and infra•structure (Broken Sleep), with Katy Lewis Hood.
Her poem “Ariosos for Lavish Matter” was highly commended in the 2020 Forward Prize, and her work
was included in makar/unmakar (Tapsalteerie, 2019), an anthology of contemporary poets in Scotland.
https://musingsbymaria.wordpress.com/.
Kathrine Sowerby is the author of story and poetry collections The Spit, the Sound and the Nest and

House However (Vagabond Voices). Their new book Tutu will be published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe
in 2021.
Alice Tarbuck is a poet and academic living in Edinburgh. They are the recipient of a Scottish Book
Trust New Writers Award for Poetry & are part of 12, a poetry collective.
Nuala Watt has worked as a tutor at the University of Glasgow. Her poems have appeared in
anthologies, including Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches Press 2017),
The Caught Habits of Language: A Celebration of W.S.Graham for him having reached 100 (Donut Press 2018),
and A Year of Scottish Poems (2018).
Books by JL Williams include Condition of Fire (Shearsman, 2011), Locust and Marlin (Shearsman, 2014),
Our Real Red Selves (Vagabond Poets, 2015), House of the Tragic Poet (If A Leaf Falls Press, 2016), and After
Economy (Shearsman Books, 2017). She is interested in expanding dialogues through writing across
languages, perspectives, and cultures and in multimodal and cross-form work, visual art, dance, opera, and
theater. jlwilliamspoetry.co.uk.
Rhian Williams is a writer and mother who lives in Glasgow.You can find her at rhianwilliamswriting.
com.


Goldman, Jane Et Al - Why I Choose Poetry

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1 Contemporary Women's Writing

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2 Contemporary Women's Writing

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3 Contemporary Women's Writing

JANE GOLDMAN • A Collective Poetry-Essay

Queen Elizabeth I of England (1533–1603) suffered from anthophobia, especially of a

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5 Contemporary Women's Writing

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JANE GOLDMAN • A Collective Poetry-Essay

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I could leave if I wanted

8 Contemporary Women's Writing

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There Is Never Here and It Is Large

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And I knew what it was to be a stranger (not unwelcomed but a stranger

Think nation and all is fragment

the silence a part of my identity

13 Contemporary Women's Writing

I don’t identify with nation (it’s places I love).

Place is more interesting to me than nation.

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I feel that there is a space in my experience

that I bring my own particular experience

This is a space in which poetry happens

It Isn’t the Mist

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We cannot entertain to say that the stigma of separation through nation or

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To be a good poet is to surrender a sense of belonging because where do we

My father, and the patriarchy at large, forbid me to use a language to describe

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If we see our gifts as programmed, our psyche computed, then it is possible to

You see i am no accident of shattered symmetries, a roulette of near misses, and

Mostly i am word cinder under laboratory love and a classroom

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I drove through the Kaimanawas (which is the old forest,

And which translates as treasure or eat the wild

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impossible to know if I’m there, and I’m not there

It’s a cold morning and the earth is black

I walk into high mist

your vowels at my table

Sitting beside my Scottish grandfather