Katie Ailes

Yesterday the Scottish Poetry Library released its annual list of the Best Scottish Poems of 2015, a selection curated this year by novelist and poet Ken MacLeod. It is a fine list containing a variety of excellent pieces, and my hearty congratulations go out to each poet named there. In no way in what follows do I mean to question the merit of these excellent poems, or MacLeod’s judgment in choosing them. However, upon reading through the selections this year I was disappointed to see that not a single performance-based poem was selected, and reading MacLeod’s essay accompanying his selections it became clear that only text-based, print-published poems were considered in the pool for selection. This frustrated me because I feel that this selection method passes over the rich offerings in performance-based poetry produced over the last year in Scotland, and reflects a blind spot towards one of Scotland’s richest literary traditions. In this post I will address why this is frustrating to me and encourage that the pool might be widened in future years.

A wee disclaimer: I’m writing this with the utmost love for the SPL. It’s my favourite haven in Edinburgh and I think the folks there do wonderful work encouraging and supporting poets and lovers of poetry. I also think the SPL usually works very hard to publicise and support all sorts of poetry across Scotland, so this seems more a rare instance of oversight for them than symptomatic of bad programming (more on all the great work they do later).

As SPL Director Robyn Marsack writes in her introduction to this year’s list, this selection “is in no sense a competition but a personal choice.” MacLeod is responsible for the selection, and it is based on his tastes and should not be considered objective or final (when is judging art, ever?). My issue is not with his selections—they’re fantastic—but with the limited range of the pool from which he was choosing. A selection bearing the title “Best Scottish Poems of 2015” implies a wide ranging pool of poems from which to select: all Scottish poems produced in 2015, assumedly. Marsack claims that the function of the list is to offer “readers in Scotland and abroad a way of sampling the range and achievement of our poets, their languages, forms, concerns”; however, the list’s range was limited by the fact that all of the poems are text-based poems, none of which were primarily published in live or audio format.

MacLeod refers in his Editor’s Introduction to picking up the books and pamphlets from which he made his selection—all of which were new poetry books published in 2015—from a trolley compiled by the SPL librarians. He also cites the SPL’s “oft-restocked shelves and the marvellous archives of poetry magazines from Scotland, and the ever-thickening folder of photocopies of poems published outwith Scotland.” All of these are great places to find poetry—but they’re not the only places.

MacLeod was only drawing from print-based poetry sources: his pool was limited to poems which can fit on a trolley. A trolley cannot hold a a crowded pub full of poets performing work which has never been written down. Neither can it hold a poetry video combining poetry with music and visual art, nor an innovative hour-long solo spoken word Fringe show. Simply speaking, MacLeod’s parameters of only judging work which is based in print automatically eliminated the possibility of his considering the wide range of aural- and/or performance-based poetry which existed in Scotland in 2015. It sure won’t fit on a trolley, but from my perspective that doesn’t mean it should have been omitted from consideration.

 

This list would be better titled “Best Text-Based Scottish Poems of 2015,” since the text of the work was the selection criteria. (I suppose in a sense it is sub-titled this way: Marsack clarifies that it is a list of “twenty of the best poems by Scottish authors to appear in books, pamphlets and literary magazines during 2015” (emphasis mine)). I wonder: was there any encouragement for MacLeod to go out into the ‘field’ and to listen to live poetry and include what he heard in his selection pool?

I understand, of course, that this might pose a logistical challenge. How is MacLeod to know which poems were composed or first performed in 2015? Because performance poems are ephemeral (communicative events rather than static printed poems) they tend to change over time—there is no single publication date, and thus it becomes difficult to gauge the origin point of a poem. I also appreciate the time and monetary commitment to scouring the nation’s open mics and live poetry nights; one must spend a fair bit of time attending shows throughout the year and travelling to see performances outwith Scotland’s Central Belt in order to gain a comprehensive sense of what constitutes the ‘best’ performance poems in Scotland that year.

However, the difficulty of the endeavour does not mean, I think, that one shouldn’t at least try. The lack of any mention of performance-based work in McLeod’s essay was frustrating; he doesn’t explain or apologise for its omission. One wonders if he would even consider this lack of performance poetry to be an omission.

 

Communities of performance poets and what they sometimes term ‘the academy’ (roughly, cultural institutions and universities) have always been at odds. The performance poetry community tends to nourish a chip on its shoulder and often relishes the idea that it is condescended to by this elusive ‘academy.’ This can be a major aspect of the branding of contemporary performance poetry movements: this notion they are closer to reality, more authentic and accessible, whereas ‘the academy’ is a bunch of old rich white dudes who ignore them. Much of the time, I think that this complaint is overstated (academia is not just a bunch of old rich white dudes anymore). But sometimes it is rooted in a real sense among performance poets that their work is ignored—perhaps not willfully or intentionally, but still passed over—by figures within the mainstream academic/institutional literary culture. And in this omission from the Best Scottish Poems of 2015 list, I can see some evidence for that mindset. As someone who self-identifies as a performance poet and an academic and someone who volunteers for institutions like the SPL, I hate to see anything which could drive the wedge between these communities any deeper.

This leads to another question: one of categorisation and genre. Perhaps the omission of performance-based poems from this list is due to MacLeod not considering performance-based poems to be in the same category as text-based poems; perhaps he considers them to be apples to text-based poetry’s oranges, so the notion of including both on the same list just didn’t come up. Personally, I believe that the so-called ‘page/stage divide’ is ridiculous and the aurality should be important to all poetry, so the more we try to divide poetry into these categories the more we hurt it; however, it is possible that this notion of a dividing line factored into MacLeod’s decision. Or, of course, I may be totally off the mark with this entire post: MacLeod may have cast his net widely and considered many performance-based pieces, and simply not deemed any worthy of selection. Which, in a personally selected list, would be entirely his right.

I should say again: the selections on his list are excellent, and I hold no animosity towards any poet chosen. And while the selection seems to have been made on the basis of the poems’ texts (rather than on videos or audio recordings of their performances), there are many poets on that list who are excellent performers of their own work, and some who might self-identify as performance poets, whose work when performed live includes physical/oral components which substantially enhance the audience’s interpretation of the work. It is also encouraging to see that several of the poems have been published on the website not only in text form, but accompanied by an audio recording of the poet performing the piece. This reflects a consideration for the aural aspect of the poem which I think is hugely important.

 

 

I would hope that next year, the pool of poems being considered for this list be widened to include more performance-based work. As mentioned earlier, I understand the logistical challenges that this provides: the question of how one can find and judge these ephemeral poems without going out to live poetry events every other night is a valid one. And the question of how to compare performance-based and text-based poems when determining which should be included in the list is pretty thorny. I don’t wish to understate the complexity of these questions; rather, I would hope that this post starts a conversation about how those concerns might be addressed in the interest of a more comprehensive selection process next year.

To wrap up: without targeting the SPL or MacLeod, I would ask that all literary institutions think more broadly and consider the changing landscape of the poetry world today when making up the pools from which to award honours, or determine curricula, etc. Definitions of what a poem is have changed radically over the past century, and they will only continue to evolve. Performance-based poetry is one of those evolutions (or reversions to past oral traditions!) which has stuck and is wielding enormous influence on the larger field of poetry today: to ignore it is to miss out on a great opportunity to showcase some tremendously exciting work.