Scottish Poetry

This thesis examines the themes of nostalgia, memory, and displacement in the 1990s work of Scottish poets Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay, and Kathleen Jamie. Each of these poets has emigrated from Scotland-Duffy and Kay permanently, Jamie temporarily-and consequently they associate Scotland with the past and childhood and express displacement from a sense of cultural belonging. Their poetry presents Scotland dually, juxtaposing idealized, clichéd memories and traditions with the physical reality of Scotland's geographical space and material artifacts. They negotiate the double estrangement of female Scottishness, partially due to their shared experience of maturing during the rise of feminism and the movement towards devolution culminating in the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. Their poems test the capacity of language(s), including English and Scots, to embody the intense experience of both personal and national nostalgias. Duffy, who moved to England in childhood, portrays Scotland-and the notion of "home" itself-as intangible, dreamlike, and lost. Kay's genrebending, autobiographically-generated work painfully grasps for biological, cultural, and national origins, and emphasizes the Othering power of racism. Jamie's writing inquires whether Scottish culture should submit to nostalgia and hoard its relics, or cut tethers and dispose of outdated customs, traditions, and objects. Drawing from poetry collections as well as novels, essays, and memoirs, this thesis undertakes a comprehensive analysis of these writers' meditations on Scotland as "home" and provides a timely study of Scottish cultural identity given the current movement for Scottish national independence. v Preface As children, many of us have a firm and rooted sense of "home." It is our house, our family, our sense of comfort. But the inevitable process of leaving this place and progressing through the world estranges us from this sense of belonging. Emigrating away, be it twelve minutes or twelve thousand miles, often provokes in us nostalgia and a sense of conflicted identity. This narrative is simple and virtually universal. However, for many, the concept of home is complicated by political crises and deeper issues of exile. What happens when one's childhood home is not safe, or never existed as one physical space? What happens when one is forced from her land, rejected by her government; or, conversely, compelled to remain in that place for longer than she desires? What happens when a person is not recognized as a legitimate native of her country? The concepts of home and identity are intimately connected: the act of claiming a place as one's home carries with it cultural, political, and historical baggage that one must either assume or reject. The poets I discuss in this thesis all have contentious relationships with their homes due to emigration, estrangement, frustration, and love. They defend their identities as Scottish women while critiquing that nation's culture, politics, and social norms, and illustrating the complexities of their claim to Scotland as a country of origin. Reading their work, one feels the pain of displacement and the sting of nostalgia coexisting with pride, joy, and curiosity around the very idea of home. I came to this thesis through a similar experience of displacement, origin-searching, and exploration. In my junior year at Bates, I studied for a term in Edinburgh, Scotland. In the four months I spent there, I grew fascinated with Scottish culture; or rather, the multiplicity of its vi cultures. Shortbread and whisky, haggis and heroin, tartan galore, legendary loch monsters, and William Wallace (or a blue-faced Mel Gibson): it is a nation that has been romanticized to a caricature, and I as an outsider was trying to find the genuine within it. Like Kathleen Jamie, I was a traveler exploring, shaping, and claiming my personal identity as it butted up against a foreign culture; I was suddenly the Other and found myself needing to articulate my identity as an American citizen. For me, this meant trying to explain the 2012 Sandy Hook shootings to my friends from Scotland, where the police do not carry firearms, and attempting to rationalize U.S. foreign policy that I often wasn't comfortable with myself. Upon returning to the United States, I experienced contradictory sensations of nostalgia. I found myself distractedly saying "I want to go home" and then not knowing where I meant: my childhood house in Pennsylvania? my dorm room in Lewiston, Maine? or the flat I'd come to adore in Edinburgh? This multi-directional homesickness attuned me to how nostalgia is not a longing for one physical place; rather, it is the desire to return to that existential sense of comfort Carol Ann Duffy so beautifully describes in her poems. She masterfully articulates the sense of nostalgia for a state which can never be returned to and is inarticulable because it exists only as an emotion, a longing. We pine for a sense of first understanding, a sense of comfort, of being found. Several months before I left for Scotland, my parents revealed to me that my biological history was more complicated than I had assumed. Like Jackie Kay, I began to question the complexities of nature and nurture which have shaped me, and I am still in the process (I expect it never ends) of wondering at how much of myself is constructed by genetics and how much exists because of my loving parents' care and environmental factors. I will likely never fully know the facts of my biological history, but, as Kay keenly observes, only the spark of vii imagination is needed to conjure one's personal past, inaccurate and idealistic as that conjuring that may be. Our origin stories are shaped as much by our memories and imaginations as they are by biology, events, and environment. In writing this thesis, I fully acknowledge my status as an American scholar. I am still, in many ways, a tourist in Scotland's culture, history, and literature, and I do not pretend to have any native knowledge of her people, language, or customs. But the notions expressed in her poetry are deeply familiar to me, as they express a sense of estrangement, alienation, and hunger for true home. Studying the writing of Duffy, Kay, and Jamie reminds us that the desire for home is perhaps the deepest and most universal of human sentiments, even while it is colored by regional cultures and has caused some of the most intense wars in history. The desire for a distinct and unique home has led to the current independence movement in Scotland, which will culminate in the September 2014 referendum. It is an exciting time to be studying Scottish poetry concerning identity and origin, and I have made every attempt in this thesis to do justice to the powerful emotions, arguments, and claims which shape these poets' work.

A brief account of a translation experiment of the Scottish poet, historian, and fraud John Pinkerton presented in the context of the reception of Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski and his poetry in 18th century Scotland.
The file is the original paper presented at the conference in 2012. It was later published as “Neo-Latin Poetry in 18th Century Scotland - John Pinkerton Translates Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski”, in: Korzeniowska, Aniela and Izabela Szymańska (eds.) Scotland in Europe / Europe in Scotland: Links – Dialogues - Analogies. Warszawa: Semper, 2013, pp. 143-153. and the book is available at:
https://semper.istore.pl/pl,product,20162236,scotland,in,europe,europe,in,scotland.html

Lila Matsumoto was born in Japan in 1984 and raised in the U.S.A from 1990 onwards. Between 2007 and 2016 she lived in Scotland – Aberdeen (2007-09), Edinburgh (2009-2015), and Glasgow (2015-16) – developing her practice as a poet, editor and mixed-media collaborator during this time. Matsumoto’s work is often characterized by a lightness and openness of tone which belies a commitment to formal innovation, and a mode of deep epistemological enquiry which often seems to seek out the spaces between existing symbolic and semantic categories: in her words, to “resist fast knowing”. This interview, conducted via email during December 2017, initially focuses on Matsumoto’s first collection Urn & Drum (2018), before moving on to consider the importance of objects and captions to her work, the tension it generates between intimacy of tone and opacity of content, and the thematic significance of women and women’s labor to her writing. Also discussed are Matsumoto’s role as editor of the little magazines Scree and FRONT HORSE, her past and current collaborations with artists, sculptors and musicians, and her thoughts on geographically -specific and gender -specific definitions of her work.

This thesis examines the themes of nostalgia, memory, and displacement in the 1990s work of Scottish poets Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay, and Kathleen Jamie. Each of these poets has emigrated from Scotland—Duffy and Kay permanently, Jamie temporarily—and consequently they associate Scotland with the past and childhood and express displacement from a sense of cultural belonging. Their poetry presents Scotland dually, juxtaposing idealized, clichéd memories and traditions with the physical reality of Scotland’s geographical space and material artifacts. They negotiate the double estrangement of female Scottishness, partially due to their shared experience of maturing during the rise of feminism and the movement towards devolution culminating in the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. Their poems test the capacity of language(s), including English and Scots, to embody the intense experience of both personal and national nostalgias. Duffy, who moved to England in childhood, portrays Scotland—and the notion of “home” itself—as intangible, dreamlike, and lost. Kay’s genrebending, autobiographically-generated work painfully grasps for biological, cultural, and national origins, and emphasizes the Othering power of racism. Jamie’s writing inquires whether Scottish culture should submit to nostalgia and hoard its relics, or cut tethers and dispose of outdated customs, traditions, and objects. Drawing from poetry collections as well as novels, essays, and memoirs, this thesis undertakes a comprehensive analysis of these writers’ meditations on Scotland as “home” and provides a timely study of Scottish cultural identity given the current movement for Scottish national independence.

A range of leading international scholars provide the reader with a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the extraordinary richness and diversity of Scotland’s poetry. Addressing Languages and Chronologies, Poetic Forms, and Topics and Themes, this International Companion covers the entire subject from from the early Middle Ages to the modern day, and explores the connections, influences and interrelations between English, Gaelic, Latin, Old Norse and Scots verse.

Although originally folk and fairy tales belonged to female storytellers who had composed these tales, their hold on the stories was gradually lost due to the rising interest of writers like Perrault and the Grimms in these tales. While putting these narratives down, male authors never simply wrote these tales down as they heard them but adapted them in a certain way to promote their patriarchal ideologies through these texts. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, postmodern writers, relying on intertextuality and the fantastic challenged the ancient lore, subsequently rewriting and questioning the reliability of these so-called "original" tales. Particularly female authors writing in the postmodern tradition challenged the central by replacing it with the peripheral, through their employment of such techniques as irony, satire, parody and pastiche. Among these writers, Scottish poetess Liz Lochhead stands out with her attempt to recover the "absent" voices in fairy tales. Rewriting the fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers from a female perspective in The Grimm Sisters (1981), Lochhead via her poems subverts the role of the traditionally silent part attributed to women, while voicing the concerns of women as storytellers , mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, stepmothers , hags and the "other" women. In this regard, the aim of this article is to discuss the role of postmodern techniques and the fantastic in enabling Lochhead to subvert the conventional roles ascribed to women in her The Grimm Sisters and rewrite the contemporary feminine experience as it is perceived and experienced by women per se.

In the 2014 Scottish independence referendum campaigns, writers played a key role in articulating binding myths of Scottishness and visions of Scotland’s future. This dissertation surveys a range of poems written for the referendum—the majority of which are pro-independence—to gauge which myths and narratives of Scottishness were promoted, twisted, or discarded in artistic engagements with the independence debate. It questions which narratives proved salient to pro-independence writers and considers how these historical narratives and statements of identity are contextualised within traditional concepts of Scottishness as well as how they deviate from those concepts. It sketches first how some poets hearkened back to long-standing myths of Scottishness in order to characterise contemporary Scotland as fundamentally egalitarian. It then investigates how some poets fixated on past injustices and aligned Scottishness with the victim position, and concludes with a discussion of those poets who rejected both of these traditional concepts of Scottishness and past-fixation to encourage a fresh start for the nation. Its compare poems with these themes and identifies the roots of these themes in Scottish literature and criticism, as well as weighing their effectiveness as pieces of political propaganda. In sum, the body of pro-independence poetry written for the referendum indicates a Scottish culture simultaneously clinging to traditional concepts of the nation and also keen to reject stereotypes and cultural dependencies in favour of a fresh start.

Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, edited by Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, viii+250 p. ISBN 0-521-83283-7. In E-rea, 2005. En ligne : https://www.up.univ-mrs.fr/e-rea/3_2/3_2_Reviews/CR_Tholoniat.htm.

Nations can be the object of intense emotions, and while some are notoriously blinding and destructive, others “involve cognitive appraisals” and thus can be “of great help in getting people to think larger thoughts and recommit themselves to a larger common good”. Poetry can play a powerful and positive role in articulating the thoughts and feelings of a nation. It can direct hearts and minds towards principles of equality, justice and democracy, so that the nation becomes the catalyst for global change.

As is illustrated in a number of contemporary British poems, it is safe to assume that the reflections of science and technology in contemporary poetry are abundant. Influenced by the Space Race that had been going on between the US and the USSR and fascinated with "the shiny technological outcome," Scottish poet Edwin Morgan wrote science fiction poems which present optimistic scenarios for the future of humanity. Putting people in extraordinary, if not impossible, circumstances, Morgan envisions a future where, despite the horrifying results of the catastrophes that had occurred on Earth, humans are shown as the ideal species to adapt to change. Forced to abandon Earth, humanity is excited about discovering new frontiers. Humanity's positive attitude towards mutability reflects Morgan's views, which regard evolution as a natural step. Determined to carry forward no matter what their dire circumstances compel them to, humanity shows a strong stamina. Space exploration, alien encounters, teleportation, dematerialisation and rematerialisation are central to most of Morgan's science fiction poetry. Particularly, his science-fiction poems, namely "For the International Poetry Incarnation," "The First Men on Mercury," "In Sobieski's Shield" and "Memories of Earth," in which encounters with the third kind occur reflect Morgan's tendency to break down the distinctions between the human and non-human world. Thus, in an age when travelling to space is no longer a dream but a reality, Morgan's poetry, unlike many post-apocalyptic science-fiction works of the twenty-first century, welcomes change quite positively. Contrary to miscellaneous post-apocalyptic scenarios regarding the future, which look back on the past quite wistfully and melancholically, Morgan's science-fiction poetry presents an optimistic attitude towards mutability that eagerly and curiously awaits whatever the future has in store for humanity. In this sense, this article will argue that Morgan's science-fiction poetry has an unwavering faith in progress, which by challenging the anthropocentric worldview introduces an alternate way to see things at the same time, besides underlining the adaptability of humankind into any environment despite the negative experiences they have underwent.

Bold, V. (1997) 'Beyond the empire of the gentle heart': Scottish women poets of the Nineteenth Century. In: Gifford, D. and Macmillan, D. (eds.) A History of Scottish Women's Writing. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh,UK. ISBN 9780748609161

he paper focuses on Scottish features that permeate the work of Kathleen Jamie. Her Scottishness is manifested in poetry, prose, and travel non-fiction. Jamie draws upon the tradition of landscape literature and theories of imagination of the English Romantic poetrs. The article investigates Jamie´s affinity to the Scottish country side as manifested in her lyric poetry and in a series of personal essays in the non-fiction volume Findings. Another theme discussed by the article is Jamie´s choice of language—her use of Scots as compared to the use of standard English. The essay also analyzes Jamie´s exploration of the relationship of poetry and science. The poetic process of imagination is contrasted in her writings with scientific observation. In the final section, Jamie´s interest in her own heritage is explored in texts that juxtapose Scottish culture with the cultures of Pakistan, Tiber, and China.

'Home' and 'nation' are contiguous terms — pointing towards an idea of respectively 'affective' and 'imagined' community — that both imply a common identity, a sense of belonging, cohesiveness and security. If the ideas of home/nation are largely dependent on a community's imagination, then, as recent scholarship has pointed out, poetry in larger measure than other literary expressions plays a key role in the shaping of such collective identities. At the same time, poetry's 'singularities' problematise the construction of a collective identity. This chapter explores how Scottish poetry has not only reflected but also creatively (re)shaped the experience of home/nation, covering a wide range of poems in Gaelic, Scots and English from the Middle Ages to the present, from various different genres, including elegies/poetry of mourning, epic poetry, panegyrics and political satire. It charts different approaches to/perceptions of home/nation, including those of women and diasporic Scots.

'Home' and 'nation' are contiguous terms — pointing towards an idea of respectively 'affective' and 'imagined' community — that both imply a common identity, a sense of belonging, cohesiveness and security. If the ideas of home/nation are largely dependent on a community's imagination, then, as recent scholarship has pointed out, poetry in larger measure than other literary expressions plays a key role in the shaping of such collective identities. At the same time, poetry's 'singularities' problematise the construction of a collective identity. This chapter explores how Scottish poetry has not only reflected but also creatively (re)shaped the experience of home/nation, covering a wide range of poems in Gaelic, Scots and English from the Middle Ages to the present, from various different genres, including elegies/poetry of mourning, epic poetry, panegyrics and political satire. It charts different approaches to/perceptions of home/nation, including those of women and diasporic Scots.

The Story of Johnson and Boswell's connection with the history of slavery and abolition has not descended to us in any clear and coherent form. Indeed the story is only just emerging, fragmentarily and intermittently, in response to recent interest in racial and postcolonial perspectives on cultural history. Against this patchy background, my goal in this paper is to offer a simple and very preliminary account of Johnson and Boswell on the question of slavery, and of the scattered texts and passages in their writings that might usefully be drawn together to form a more coherent picture. Because their lifespans differed significantly and the evolution of their respective views on African slavery followed such different trajectories, I will take them up separately, beginning with Johnson.

For centuries, issues of Empire have been a key factor in Scottish society; and colonial and postcolonial discourse has been a formative influence on Scottish ethnic and national identities. Scottish–Indian connections are an important strand in this transnational fabric. This essay explores how these links are reflected in the work of one particular Scottish-Indian  writer, Bashabi Fraser, who employs both textual and visual media in order to maintain and strengthen awareness of these connections in Scotland’s national memory. Her engagement with (post)colonial knowledge production and knowledge transfer reflects on the ambivalent position of Scots as colonisers in India but to some extent also fellow (‘internally colonised’?) objects of anglo-imperialism. It alos reflects on the history of Indian immigration into Scotland. This historical archive, and the programmatic combination of South Asian and Scottish cultural symbols, is used to celebrate hybrid identities, supporting and expressing a re-rooting of diasporic Asian selves in Scotland. It also aims to transform mainstream images of Scottishness and help create a more strongly multicultural image of this nation for the late 20th and 21st century.