Well Ullapool was great – the highlight for me was the boat trip to Isle Martin (pictured) and a two hour session with four great poets, two writing in English and two in Gaelic. It was a very different experience to the Book Festival I’m more used to (in Edinburgh) which is very professional, stage managed and more like a performance than a genuine exchange of ideas.
This was a chance to listen in to ideas and discussion as well as the poems, with conversations flowing on the way over, as we explored the island at half time, and on the cold windy boat trip back to Ullapool once we’d finished.
I thought I’d share some of the fragments that made the greatest impression on me. What connects them together is the sense of creativity I suppose – moving beyond fixed labels and identities, breathing new life into our thinking, shaking off stale arguments and creating something new. Maybe some of them will connect with you.
Not just a glass half full
Perhaps the real question is not whether you are a pessimist or an optimist, but what you do with what you see. You can be a pessimist by nature but still take action to create a better world. Live, work and write as a “possibilist”
The centre of the universe
Wherever you are is the centre of the world. Look, learn, listen, love the place where you are. Make connections in that place, that space, then watch the connections spread outwards. Even in somewhere as remote as Isle Martin we were reminded of this. The rocks running underground, connecting to seams that run across continents. Oceans that connect lands, peoples, voices. The global perspective of migratory birds.
Another nation
Questions of nationality and identity are much to the fore in Scotland at the moment. This is often framed as one or t’other, a black and white choice: Scottish or British. Neither answers the question of who we are or want to be in this 21st century globalised, fragmented world. How about allowing us room to be
citizens of the planet? Or to claim a sense of place – to the Atlantic maybe – and to assert a connection with all the other places and people that are touched by that mighty ocean? Or perhaps give us the chance to vote for a scurrilous poet as the first minister of the imagi-nation…
Which reminds me of the opening question. “What do you need a poet for?”
It’s from Aristophanes – the answer too.
“To save the city, of course.“